9 - Entertainment, Domestication and Dispersal: Street Politics as Popular Culture

Summary

‘Clearly, elections are important but perhaps for reasons different from those asserted in formal democratic theory’

(Taylor 1996: 5)

In an afterword to Robert Taylor' The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia (1996), the late political scientist Daniel Lev expressed relief at discovering that ‘culture’ had been entirely ignored in the collection of essays. Lev was obviously dissatisfied with the previous efforts of some of his contemporaries who had analysed elections in Southeast Asia in general— and Indonesian electoral politics in particular—from a ‘culturalist’ standpoint. However, both Lev and those he criticised appeared to recognise only some outdated conception of ‘culture’. In their view, ‘culture’ was something static, unique or essential to a particular society. Presumably Lev and his counterparts were unfamiliar with the growing body of literature in anthropology, gender and cultural studies where culture— as a concept and practice—is critically problematised, instead of being essentialised or avoided. To this day, many political analysts continue to ignore, overlook or underestimate the cultural aspects of electoral processes, leading to a serious gap in the scholarship on elections and their meaning for citizens’ daily lives. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by offering an alternative perspective on elections in Indonesia, highlighting key trends since the downfall of the New Order government in 1998.

My discussion focuses on the street politics of non-elite groups—often conveniently referred to as ‘the masses’—during the election campaign period. The political and electoral dynamics of the post Suharto period have produced a new kind of disempowerment—one that is marked by the dominance over the electorate of the entertainment industry and its values. In addition to the rise of the politics of entertainment, the populace has been seriously fragmented by the heightened political competition among its members. As a result, Indonesia' contemporary masses appear to have voluntarily become dispersed and domesticated. Ironically, this is a situation that the New Order strongly desired but was incapable of achieving. Under Suharto, the masses often engaged in rowdy activities when elections were held, eventually worrying the authoritarian government. The regime' attempts to curtail the actions of unruly male youths during election campaigns largely failed.