 Abstract | This thesis will examine the more active role played in Java by the urban wong cilik (the underclass; literally, the 'little people') in contesting the state’s authority,
particularly during the later years of the New Order regime, and following its demise in
1998. I will provide examples of social practices employed by the wong cilik in their
everyday lives and in their adaptation to periods of significant social and political
upheaval. These demonstrate the ways in which they are able to contest the state’s efforts
to impose its authority. These practices also develop and employ a variety of subversive
discourses, whose categories and values diverge significantly from the official language
of government. The examination of the relative linguistic, cultural and normative
autonomy of the seemingly powerless underclass reveals an extremely contested political
terrain in which the wong cilik are active rather than passive agents in urban society.
These ideas have developed out of urban field research sited around warungs
(sidewalk food stalls), urban kampongs and in the city streets of the three Javanese cities
of Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Jakarta. These urban social spaces will be shown to be
significant for the underclass because they constitute sites through which they constantly
interact with diverse social groups, thereby sharpening their knowledge of the
contradictions and feelings of otherness manifest between the classes in Java’s large
cities. It will be shown how, in these spaces, the underclass also experience the state’s
attempts at control through various officially sanctioned projects and how the underclass
are able to subvert those projects through expressive means such as songs, poems and
forms of mockery which combine to make the state’s dominant discourses lose much of
their efficacy. |
