On Indonesia in the Satellite Age

Abstract

When the former Dutch East Indies colony was internationally recognized as the independent Republic of Indonesia, there was little to hold the new nation together either geographically or culturally. Cobbling together a sense of common destiny and a national consciousness to unite its distant and disparate elements was one of the great challenges faced by the new nation’s leaders. Their efforts to produce an Indonesian “imagined community” have fascinated Western anthropologists, and the anthropology of Indonesia has been characterized by attention to the cultural politics of the state. Soeharto fancied himself Indonesia’s “Mr. Development,” and economic development was the centerpiece of his New Order regime. It served both as the promise of a glorious future and the justification for repression in the present. It was also an unending opportunity for personal enrichment, especially among those in the president’s inner circle. Soeharto’s grip on power unravelled in a wave of popular dissent in 1998, and since then observers have come to take a more nuanced view of state power, as the discourses of the state were revealed as brittle and contingent, contested from within as well as without. Barker’s (CA 46:703–27) article is located squarely within this anthropological tradition, and his excellent analysis moves it forward in several interesting ways. First, through his analysis of the creation of the “Palapa discourse” by the engineers and technocrats of what he calls the “satellite generation,” he effectively dismantles the notion of the foundational unity of the discourse of development. His analysis focuses on the function of these men (and one woman) as ideological “mediators” who established the political meaning of the Palapa satellite system as a national development project. They started with a vision of Indonesian modernity that had been at the heart of nationalist imaginings at least since the time of the Independence struggle: that an independent Indonesia could achieve technological parity on the global stage of nations and that independence would bring the material benefits of modernity to the masses. They added to this vision the unifying political aspect of the project—television and telephone signals reaching from one end of the archipelago to the other. Equally important, they played to nativist