Freek Colombijn and Joost Cote, eds. Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960. Leiden: Brill, 2015, 351p.

Abstract

Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 Freek Colombijn and Joost Cote, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2015, 351p.Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 is a commendable collection of essays that present and the city not as ahistorical ideal-types but as dynamic concepts that changed as colonial cities became postcolonial urban nodes. The diachronic approach goes in tandem with the variations in the authors' chosen urban areas, revealing that even within a single nation-state differences in perceptions of exist. Nonetheless, comparability rather than divergence across space and continuity rather than rupture through time define this work.Freek Colombijn and Joost Cote's introductory essay, Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960, alerts readers to the book's fresh insights about the relationship between technological advancements and modernization, especially in the context of a colonial city. They point to the necessity of considering the degree of novelty of an innovation and the varying responses among the colonized toward them. Of course in early-twentieth-century Indonesia, novelty often refers to the Western character of innovation and the values usually attached to it, such as progress, rationality, and science. Easily juxtaposed against this notion of is the way of life of the colonized, best exemplified by the kampong, the obvious antithesis to modernity (p. 4). Colonizers almost always understood the kampong in terms of what it lacked-whether it was sanitation, order, housing-and consequently regarded Western technology as the necessary remedy. Previous studies on Western colonialism have already argued that such an understanding of technological diffusion provided the justification for social engineering projects that were ostensibly designed to uplift but eventually appropriated by the colonized. This book, however, takes this argument even further by extending the temporal scope so as to include Japanese colonialism, the Revolutionary period, and the early years of the Republic and showing that these drastic political changes were not enough to alter the urban landscape and process that Dutch colonialism set in motion. Not only had bureaucrats of the postcolonial state internalized the dream of modernization (p. 9), but more importantly the reality of social boundaries and inequalities produced by survived the end of colonialism.To understand the logic behind this continuity one has to analyze the responses of the colonized toward technological innovation. The responses varied, but the editors stress the selectivity, rather than passivity, of ordinary city dwellers toward modernity. For Colombijn and Cote, conscious consumption was crucial in how Western-derived persisted into the postcolonial period. The agency of the colonized enabled the counter-colonial process of defining an alternative modernity, one that the subaltern residents of the cities could own. This alternative did not reject the fundamental ingredients of . . . but challenged the assumption of exclusive ownership (p. 11). Save for the introduction, the chapters of the book are divided into three sections based on the type of responses from the colonized: 1) Impositions and Passive Acceptance; 2) Partial Accommodation; and, 3) Selective Appropriation.The three chapters in the first section take a big picture approach, stretching their view across the twentieth century (p. 16) to see how played out in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. Saki Murakami's Call for Doctors! Uneven Medical Provision and the of State Health Care during the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930s-1950s looks at how the Sukarno administration, in its objective to present the republic as the total opposite of Dutch colonial rule, tried to support rural healthcare through more geographically dispersed assignments for doctors. …