One of my earliest impressions when I first arrived in Indonesia was of a sense of casual informality. This, it seemed, was a gloriously laid-back sort of country where people were perfectly at ease in one another’s company and untroubled by crippling social niceties. The average Indonesian scene certainly made a refreshing contrast to a roomful of socially awkward Englishmen, brash Australians or Americans, or conformity-bound Japanese. And on the surface, Indonesian society usually does seem decidedly easy-going. But make no mistake, there are powerful forces at play beneath the surface.
National pride, humor and creativity: when a number of foreign governments issued security warnings about travel to Indonesia in the early 2000s, someone came up with a wry response that has since become a popular tee shirt and bumper sticker.
Of course, in a place this vast and this diverse you won’t get very far trying to identify universal societal norms. A middle class Muslim from a big city in the north of Sumatra is never going to have the same ideas about what makes up normal social behavior as a poor Christian from a remote village in Maluku. But there are a few things that you can generalize about. One is the unavoidable influence of gengsi, and another is the admirable emphasis placed on respect…
You Scratch My Back…
You’ll often hear talk in Indonesia of a concept called gotong-royong. It means something along the lines of “communal effort”, and people sometimes proclaim it the ultimate example of selfless community spirit, part of a supposed Indonesian tradition of folks getting together to get something done for the good of all. All very nice, but those who observe gotong-royong in action find that the truth is a little more complicated.
The classic example of gotong-royong is the way entire villages would traditionally pitch in with donations in cash and kind to allow an individual family to hold a lavish wedding ceremony. But these donations were never meant to be gifts, pure and simple; they came with strings attached. Careful note of who’d given what would be taken on both sides, and a like-for-like repayment would be expected when it was time for another family in the village to hold their own wedding feast. The same sort of careful accounting applied even when the “donations” were only of time or labor. Far from being all about selfless communal action, gotong-royong in its traditional form is really a system designed to bind a community together in a web of debts and credits.
Balinese women get together gotong-royong-style to tackle preparations for a traditional ceremony.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
One of the most powerful social forces in Indonesia is a thing known as gengsi. It gobbles up huge chunks of Indonesian salaries each month; it prompts untold anxieties in the hearts of young and old; and it has manufacturers of new smartphone technology rubbing their hands with glee. Gengsi is usually translated as “face”, or “prestige”. Basically, it amounts to the idea that if you’ve got it, flaunt it—or if you haven’t got it, buy it on credit and flaunt it anyway.
Football and friendship—young fans of the Persebaya soccer team hanging out on the streets of Surabaya.
From East Nusa Tenggara to Jakarta Indonesians are seriously sociable people.
The urge to ostentatiously display your wealth is by no means unique to Indonesia, but it does seem to have a particular potency here. It drives choice of schools and universities. It has an impact on where people choose to shop, eat, and holiday. And it definitely affects domestic architecture. When I first moved to Surabaya, the capital of East Java and Indonesia’s second largest city, I lived in a middle class suburb, close to the most prestigious shopping mall in town. The quiet inner streets of each block were lined with modest bungalows, but the much less peaceful outer lots, facing directly onto the busy traffic, were taken up by some of the most flamboyant private homes I’ve ever seen. Their owners had deliberately chosen to build in these noisier, less private positions because they wanted as many people as possible to see their gargantuan concrete and marble concoctions, complete with Doric columns and statues of Greek goddesses. That’s gengsi in action.
The Rough & the Smooth
The degree of emphasis on “softness” in how you handle yourself and your interactions with others varies from region to region across Indonesia. Generally speaking, the people from Java—and in particular southern Central Java around Yogyakarta and Solo—are renowned as the most halus (“soft”, or “smooth”) in their manners, while looking back in the opposite direction the Javanese tend to regard absolutely everyone else as being unattractively kasar (“coarse”)—especially their unfortunate and much maligned neighbors on the stony island of Madura.
Of course, not everyone can afford to build a Greco-Roman extravaganza at a prime roadside location, but gengsi impacts consumer choices across society, not least when it comes to those two Indonesian essentials: the motorbike and the mobile phone. The pressure to have the latest, most keren (“cool”) model is huge, even if the price tag is way beyond your means, and this is where I think gengsi has its most negative impact. Phones (the Blackberry used to be the phone to have; these days it’s the iPhone) and motorbikes are routinely sold on credit, and there are many millions of people on very modest incomes making monthly payments they can ill afford for something that will no longer be at all keren by the time the debt is paid off.
The funny thing is, if you ask almost any Indonesian about gengsi they will insist that it’s a bad thing. They’ll make a clear distinction between gengsi and the much more positive idea of harga diri—“self-worth”, or “dignity”. And someone who is obviously a slave to gengsi beyond their means will probably be mocked as sok kaya—“pretend rich”. But almost everyone feels its insidious pull, because if you don’t happen to have the latest phone and motorbike there’s always the terrible prospect of being seen as kampungan—literally “villagey”, but meaning something close to “hick” in the American sense or “bumpkin” in Britain, also known as ndeso in Javanese. And whether they’ll admit it or not, most people would much rather risk being judged as sok kaya than kampungan!
ALAY: The Way Too Much Kids
Of all the myriad trends that Indonesia’s seething cities have thrown up in recent years, none has matched the impact of the wacky, cartoonish, and downright ridiculous cultural phenomenon known as Alay. No one really knows where the term originated. Some claim it’s an abbreviation of anak layangan (“kite kid”) after the traditional young kite-flyers of working class neighborhoods, but personally I think it’s more likely to be short for anak lebay, which means something like “way too much, kid”!
So what exactly is an Alayer, and why do those Indonesians who consider themselves sophisticated look down on them? The closest English-language equivalents I’ve ever been able to come up with are “try-hard” and “wannabe”. Imagine some wannabe Paris Hilton and her wannabe gangster-rapper boyfriend from Hicksville, Nowhere—that would be kind of Alay. But Alay culture also has some very specific features, inextricably linked to social media.
Have you ever posed for a selfie in front of a famous tourist attraction, trying to get the cutest 45-degree angle possible while at the same time pouting provocatively