the new anthropology of ethnicity in aceh

7/30/2019 The New Anthropology of Ethnicity in Aceh

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First International Conference of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies

Organized byAsia Research Institute, National University of Singapore &

Rehabilitation and Construction Executing Agency for Aceh andNias (BRR), Banda Aceh, Indonesia

24 27 February 2007

The New Anthropology of Ethnicityand Identity - and Why it Matters for

Aceh and Indonesia

John Bowen

Washington University-Saint Louis, USA

[email protected]

Not to be quoted without permission from the author


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First International Conference of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies 24 27 February 2007

Draft Copy Not to be Quoted Without Permission from the Author 2

(I) Analytical Issues

At times in its history, the social sciences have come dangerously close to reproducingnave assumptions about how markers of identity (ethnicity, culture, religion, language)map onto social groups. Everyday ways of speaking about identity include references to

groups as entities: the Acehnese people, Australians, Muslims, Hungarian-speakers, African Americans. These phrases encode assumptions that there existgroups marked by their ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, and race, respectively.Social science writings, even those with a high degree of sophistication, often take upthese phrases as if they denoted, in an unproblematic way, naturally-existing groups of people.

Social scientists use these phrases for two kinds of reasons (other than intellectuallaziness): conceptual and normative. It is conceptually handy to speak about groups inthis way, because it permits researchers to ask a number of types of questions:comparative (how do Acehnese differ from Javanese?), historical (have Muslims opinionschanged over time?), or policy-relevant (how many African American students areenrolled in your university?). It would be cumbersome and perhaps impossible to unpackthese phrases.

Their use also can be normatively appealing, if the pretense that a group really exists assuch satisfies a preference. Identity politics in the United States, for example, dependson the real existence of identity-based groups, such that one now speaks of the AfricanAmerican community or the gay and lesbian community as if there is a community consisting of all people who share some objective attribute. A lot of practical issues, suchas federal funding and political power, turn on this assumptionwitness the opposition toallowing people to write in self-identifications on the census for fear it would lower thenumbers of people counted in certain minority categories and dilute the lobbying powerof those groups. Similarly, the category of indigenous peoples, which first aggregatesindividuals into a people and then groups certain of them as indigenous isconceptually incoherent. In a strict sense only peoples of East Africa are truly indigenous,and there is no scientific reason to place eastern Indonesian peoples but not Javanese

into this category. But the use of the category is politically defensible as tactically useful,and indeed is strongly defended in international circles.

What I wish to do here is to point to the problems of using these phrases in uncriticalways, to suggest some analytically more sophisticated approaches to studying culturalcategories, and consider the interest of Aceh as a place for studying the issues raised bythese approaches. I will refer mainly to works in anthropology and sociology, for it is inthese disciplines that the most fruitful recent discussions have taken place, but the sameissues apply to religious studies, political science, history, and other fields.

Ethnicity and culture in the old days

Anthropology was founded on the study of difference, but difference among what kinds of units? The working assumption in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries was that peoplemarked themselves off from each other using identity labelsthe Hopi and Navajo eachused labels to refer to each other, and speaking of the Samoans or the Tallensi posedno major analytical issues. Anthropologists then assumed that the organizing principlesof social life were uniform within the labeled unit and different across units: Hopi socialstructure was relatively uniform and based on shared principles, and was different fromNavajo social structure. The issues of internal variation and boundary crossing wereconsidered secondary issues.


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Anthropologists were taking cues from the people they studies: people use labels tocontrast themselves with other peoples, and claim that they are relatively the same andunlike everyone else. Franz Boas had insisted on these points in the 1920s and 30s, andClaude Lvi-Strauss made much of his career around them in the 1960s. But there wasno reason why anthropologists should take these local claims of internal sameness atface value. By the 1950s there appeared problems with this approach: we began to see

that there was a great deal of internal variation within these cultures (studies of Southwestern U.S. peoples led the way here). We also began to see that groupssometimes merged with each other, and that individuals often shifted the labels theyused to refer to themselves. These changes did not necessarily change their behaviors,values, or principles of social organization. We also began to take stock of the repertoiresof identity labels that individuals possess: I can identify myself in terms of any of manytypes of categories, from race to language, and I probably do so as a function of aspecific context and goal.

Just as anthropologists had by and large taken local label-using at face value, so socialscientists studying modern nation-statesmainly sociologists, political scientists andhistorianshad largely taken nationalist claims to be socially valid. There was, in theiranalyses, an English people, and Hungarian and Polish ones, and so forth. Theseentitiesnations historically working toward statehoodwere the analytical equivalent of cultures. Faulty (or empty, or tautological) though this position might have been, itcorresponded to the 19 th and early 20 th century notion of self-determination. Problemswith this approach emerged both because of political changethe gradual disaggregationof Spain being a very recent exampleand because of a growing body of historical workon the construction of nation-states. 1

In anthropology and sociology, then, analysts identified with the peoples they studied,and adopted the dominant and politically most appealing ways they looked atthemselvesas distinct cultures worthy of preserving cultural autonomy (and eventuallyinternational recognition as peoples), and as distinct nations worthy of achievingpolitical autonomy.

As new nations emerged in the middle of the 20 th century, their leaders tried to use the

same language, and spoke, for example, of an Indonesian people. This move ran intodifficulty, because these new states had already been analyzed into component culturesby anthropologists (and by administrators of indirect rule colonial systems). How couldthere be both an Indonesian people and at the same time hundreds of distinct peoples,and culturally related peoples in different nation-states (Malaysia, Philippines)? At thispoint, English or Italian peoples seemed more real than did an Indonesian people.But they did so because of the common-sensical assumption about a Europe of nation-states and the differences in historical depth, not because of a basic ontologicaldifference between Europe and Asia.

Today it is difficult to argue today that European states of Yugoslavia, Spain, andBelgium were the products of a nation realizing itself as a state, and historical scholarshiphas shown how such an apparently closer fit as France was itself historically produced out

of disparate regions, languages, and senses of identity. Nor is it clear that Indonesiansare less of a people than are people living in Aceh or southern Sumatra. The two areconstructed and maintained through distinct social processes, but constructed they are.

1 See most famously Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge,1983) and the important case study of France, Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford,1976).


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Looking at identifications as processes

A more successful approach to understanding the social life of these identity categoriesemerged to a great extent due to work in three areas: social anthropology, socialpsychology, and colonial history.

The Norwegian anthropologist Frederik Barth pointed to a growing body of evidence thatmany people in the world shifted ethnic identities in response to changing opportunitystructures. As people moved from one ecological zone to another, or decided to fit in to anew society, they changed their ethnic self-identification. Ethnicity was not an inheritedessence, but a set of categories subject to manipulation. Barths work for awhile createdan opposition between those who wished to emphasize the shared nature of thesecategories and the special role played by inheritance, on the one hand (sometimes called

primordialists), and those who wished to stress the propensity of people to use thesecategories to achieve certain ends (sometimes called instrumentalists). But in the endBarths contribution was accepted because it fit into a growing turn toward constructivismin the social sciences, that is, the idea that we develop categories for understanding theworld and may change these under certain conditions. 2

Much of the support for this more general idea about construction of categories camefrom work in social psychology, where researchers developed an approach for studyingsocial cognition based on schemas: basically, constructs about others that filter ourperceptions and emotions. Much of how we respond to others depends on the specificschemas we draw on in processing features of their identitiesphysical appearance,language, knowledge of where they live, and so forth. We may hold a number of these atonce and choose one over another in a specific situation. In studying ethnicity and othercultural categories, this approach allows us to separate the ethnic category from the

stuff that is attached to it. For example, a Javanese may have certain schemas aboutAcehnese: that they are fanatical Muslims, that they contributed in important ways tothe Indonesian revolution, that they are clever traders, that they want to leave theIndonesian Republic, and so forth. Which of these schemas becomes foremost in his mindmight vary as a function of recent news events, or which Acehnese people he meets,etc. 3

Finally (at least in this brief overview), the study of colonial history has shown us theways in which colonial systems of classification hardened, or even produced, thecategories that today we think of as ethnic, or religious, or linguistic. Most striking hasbeen the study of how British rulers of India shaped South Asian perceptions of themselves by including on the 19 th century censuses categories of religious affiliation:people were listed as a Hindu or Muslim or Jain and so forth. Most people living inBritish India at the time had not thought of themselves and others in these ways: onemight be a follower of this or that teacher, one might worship mainly at this or thattemple, but one was not a Hindu, a member of a pan-Indian population, to bedistinguished from distinct other populations, such as the Muslims and the Jains. 4 Thisfinding was all the more counter-intuitive in that so much of 20 th -century Indian historyrevolves around precisely these broad identifications (although even today constructs

2 Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London, 1969).

3 I have applied this theory to the phenomenon of anti-Americanism in John R. Bowen, Anti-Americanism as Schemas and Diacritics across Indonesia and France, in Peter Katzenstein andRobert Keohane, eds., Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca, 2007), but for a sociologicaloverview of the psychological and sociological literature see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge MA, 2004).

4 Bernard Cohn, "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia," An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987).


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such as Hindu nationalism downplays the importance of regional identifications). Butlocal perceptions of others are much more situational and variable.

A framework of performance

These advances in knowledge allow us to rethink the ways we study all these cultural

categories: ethnicity, language, race, religion, and so forth. There are several elementsto this rethinking.

First, we can put some of these insights together and think about the ascribing of ethniccategories to oneself and to others as performative. I refer to myself as Acehnese or

African American as part of a context-dependent presentation of self. In anothercontext, perhaps while traveling, I might refer to myself as Indonesian or American;in still another, while at home, I might choose from Pidie or from Detroit toemphasize rather specific histories and qualities of my biography. On the macro-level,state officials also perform categories by declaring that their country is made up of these categories and not thoseregions, not ethnic groups, or races, not social classes.

Secondly, in doing so, we consider ethnicity and other cultural categories as categories rather than groups. A category is a construct that we find in our thought and speech. Agroup is a stable assemblage of people who interact regularly. The Acehnese do not allinteract regularly and so are not a group in the sociological sense. This distinction iscritical to understanding social life, because it usefully prevents us from taking an ethniclabel as always the primary way people identify themselves, and from assuming thatresidence, origins, lineage, language, and other cultural features such as dress, co-occurnaturally. It allows us to look at how people label themselves and others in differentcontexts. It also allows us to study other behaviors as part of the broad set of identity-performative acts. People may choose languages, or registers, or accents in order tosignal something about their identities. In the Indonesian context, consider the use of Indonesian versus Javanese, the choice of speech level within Javanese, the use of amore newspaper style Indonesian versus a more natural style replete with casual-speech particles ( loh , dong , etc.).

Finally, we also now must consider the macro-level politics of representation, along thelines of the study of censuses mentioned earlier. In Indonesia the starkest case is theSuharto-era effort to repress references to ethnic categories (as suku ), discussed in thenext section. The politics of representation is international as well, and wheninternational NGOs began to speak of an Acehnese people, and some to consider this

people to be indigenous, they were inserting the Aceh conflicts into an internationalpolitical and legal framework in which peoples (and especially indigenous ones) havecertain rights.

(II) Indonesian Politics of Categories

These examples point toward the ways in which the New Order (1966-1998) made the

control of categories part of its state-building policies. The Indonesian state motto is unity in diversity, a motto whose Sanskrit origin reminds us of the importance in thestate ideology of the ancient Indian connection, a connection that is promoted throughthe Buddhist complex at Borobodur and that promises to overcome divisive allegiances toregion, religion, or political party. Under Suharto a narrow sort of cultural diversity acrossregions was acknowledged and indeed promoted. In the 1970s and 1980s, the statetelevision stations frequently aired dances and songs that were identified by the name of a region. These performances took on a rather boring uniformity, wrested as they wereout of their ritual or ceremonial contexts. Each province boasts a house in the national

miniature garden in Jakarta, the Taman Mini Indah Indonesia. Inside each are tokens of


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culture: wedding outfits on mannequins, farm implements, musical instruments, and soforth. Absent are representations of indigenous political institutions or, most intriguingly,accounts of ethnic differences. But in New Order public contexts one could only speak interms of the residents of a geographical region. I recall being corrected by a high-levelInterior Ministry official when presenting research reports about the Bugis of Rappang.I was supposed to speak of people of South Sulawesi and not mention ethnic names,

lest I be guilty of exacerbating ethnic tensions.The forbidden categories for public discussion were known by the acronym SARA: suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), and antargolongan , literally intergroup andapplicable to nearly any discussion of group identity. I found of particular interest thelinguistic contortions necessary to refer to individuals of Chinese background. Often oneread the incomplete designating phrase orang keturunan , someone of descent, whicheveryone could easily completed with Chinese. A second usage was to write aboutsomeone who was a citizen, warga negara , which readers understood to refer toChinese because Chinese, and no other citizens, were merely citizens; legal citizenshipwas their only relationship to the Indonesian social and political body. (One mightcompare the French designation, franais de papiers, French by virtue of papers,referring to those people who have citizenship papers but no other claim to Frenchstatus.)

After Suharto these restrictions were considerably loosened, but even moreconsequential for the social life of categories has been the process of politicaldecentralization. In a series of laws, Parliament has authorized the devolution of somepolitical and economic authority to provinces and districts. Local governments now havegreater opportunities to develop policies about resource use or trade, and also to engagein the corruption once reserved for the central government.

This legislation came at the same time as a general sense of a crisis in legitimacy, andhas given rise to movements for self-governance in many parts of Indonesia. Thesemovements and deliberations include a great deal of local debate and conflict overprecisely in what terms claims to self-governance should be made. Our interest in thisprocess is that out of these debates have come alternatives to ethnicity or peoples as

the basis for rethinking local forms of social and political self-governance.

Adat, not ethnicity

Starting before, but especially after the fall of Suharto in 1998, individuals and groupshave made claims to self-governance on grounds that they represented people boundtogether by a set of norms or values. In some cases these claims referred to Islamic orother religious norms, but in many other cases they referred to norms of adat , a termused to refer to local norms, practices, and values, and usually in explicit oppositioneither to Islam or to rule by Jakarta. In a legalistic sense, adat can be used to refer tosocial norms as rendered into the law-like codes of adat law. In a superficial sense,adat can be used to refer to the cultural trappings of wedding ceremonies and cuisine.

But more recently, adat has been used to refer to ways of governing resources andresolving disputes.

Some adat-based associations began to advance their claims well before 1998. The WestSumatran Adat Assembly, for example, was recognized in 1983 by Jakarta as alegitimate political body. By the late 1980s the Assembly had declared its deliberations tohave the force of law. Regional alliances began to emerge, each claiming to represent aspecific masyarakat adat , a phrase that literally means "adat community" but is used tomean "people who live according to adat". In the late 1990s an Alliance of AdatCommunities in the Archipelago lobbied the national parliament for greater self-


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determination by such adat communities. One delegate put the alliance's claims in termsclose to those used by Will Kymlicka to justify self-determination by indigenous groups:"Long before the state existed, adat communities in the archipelago already hadsucceeded in creating a way of life; the state must respect the sovereignty of the adatcommunities". 5

The concept of "adat community" has provided a source of legitimacy for groups seekingto act in the name of society against the state. Their claims may amount to a recallpetition, as when in West Kalimantan three such organizations, claiming to representMalays, Dayaks, and Chinese, "the majority of residents" in the province, sent a petitionto the regional parliament asking for the dismissal of the Governor. The three groups saidthey acted in the name of "the people of West Kalimantan" and called their statement a"no-confidence motion", in other words, as if they were a shadow parliament. 6

The claims made by such groups are in terms of specific political ideas about theirpolitical legitimacy, on grounds that their society is governed by distinctive social normsof adat and that these norms predate 1945, the birth year of the Indonesian state."Adat" as used by these groups includes most importantly the norms governing familylife, methods of resolving disputes, and rights to resources. For many groups, theimportance of highlighting adat has to do with resources and self-government, and inparticular: (1) rights to land held in the name of the community as a whole, now broughtto bear on agricultural estates and logging companies which had been authorized by theSuharto state; and (2) institutions of dispute resolution, weakened by the state, whichmight help ease current inter-community tensions.

These political self-conceptions and claims do not always involve a general notion of priorresidence or even minority status--Javanese organizations claim the importance of adatnorms as well. Sometimes they correspond to ethnic groups, sometimes to thepopulation residing in a particular region. In North and East Sumatra, for example, rivalgroups claiming to represent ethnic Malays in land disputes also tried to include otherethnic groups in the category "Malay adat community." One group referred to the "adatcommunity of Deli", a region defined by a Malay sultanate, and stated that "Anyone, aslong as he/she lives on Deli soil, is included in the Deli adat community"; indeed the

group had Javanese, Bataks, and Malays on its rosters. This group saw its major struggleas regaining rights to communal land then controlled by a private company, and its self-definition around common residence fit that project. Another group defined its widerscope in terms of "Malay adat and culture" throughout eastern and northern Sumatra,but also highlighted the fashion in which Malays had married with other groups and yethad preserved Malay norms. 7

As one might expect, claims to speak for an adat community have led to disputes overlegitimacy of representation. More interestingly for our questions, however, is that thesedisputes often also have concerned the very nature of the social groups beingrepresented. For example, in the late 1990s delegates could be proposed to represent

ethnic minorities to the Indonesian national "superparliament" that chose the President.The Dayak Adat Council of West Kalimantan proposed in 1999 that one of its leaders

represent the Dayak minority. But two other Dayak leaders argued that Dayaks shouldnot be represented as "ethnic minorities," both because on Kalimantan they are themajority, and because it is control of local resources, and not representation in nationalforums, that is important. 8

5 Kompas , March 22, 1999. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995).6 Kompas , June 14, 2000.7 Forum Keadilan , June 18, 2000; Kompas , June 13, 2000.8 Kompas , August 9, 1999.


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In the end, "adat", along with ideas of minority, ethnic community and religion, arepolitical resources that can be deployed in public debates about regional autonomy,debates that have become more pressing as, in 2001, districts and province prepared toexercise greater autonomy over internal affairs, and an increasing number of regionspetitioned for status as independent districts or provinces. In general, it seems that anexpression such as "adat society" was heard in those provinces, such as Riau or West

Kalimantan, where indigenous peoples felt themselves displaced or deprived of olderresources by immigrants. In some cases Islam has become a rallying cry for regionalautonomy more than a basis for a theocracy; such is true of Aceh and South Sulawesi.Still elsewhere, in Ambon and Central Kalimantan, adat emerged as a source of indigenous peace-making processes and, more generally, rules governing social life andthe relationship of people to the environment.

Adat as a set of norms provides a different basis for claims to self-governance than doconcepts of people, minority, or ethnicity. The use of adat to claim control overregions and resources resembles the way in which regional languages and languagehistories have been invoked in Spain, France, and elsewhere in Europe as signs of allegiance to a regionalist political cause and as evidence for the cultural and socialfoundations of that cause. In general, language plays a less critical role in Indonesianautonomy debates than it does in some other parts of the world--it is less frequently asign of one's allegiance to either the center or the region. There may be a number of reasons for this difference; two come immediately to mind. First, in most parts of Indonesia, the numerically and politically dominant Javanese are not perceived as owningthe national language, and refusing to speak Indonesian would have relatively littlepolitical impact. Although reassertions of linguistic distinctiveness may well arise, statecontrol or exploitation is not generally associated with linguistic imperialism, as it is inIndia, the Philippines, or Spain. (Aceh is an exception here, as was the former EastTimor, for those who saw Indonesia as a colonizing power.)

Secondly, the major fault lines in recent, violent local conflicts have not been linguistic(and most, Irian Jaya excepted, have not involved Javanese), nor have they been part of a single nationwide cleavage, but rather have pitted a specific, recent group of immigrants against other residents. Hostilities in both Kalimantan and Ambon in the late

1990s and early 2000s had as their underlying causes resentments of the economicsuccess of the immigrants, in some cases exacerbated by behavioral differences thatgrated on the sensibilities of the local population. In Kalimantan, Malays and Chinese

joined forces with Dayaks against Madurese traders; later, Dayaks acted on their own. Inthe Moluccas, Ambonese fought against Bugis immigrants from South Sulawesi. In thelatter case, but not the former, the cleavage was also along religious lines, pittingAmbonese Christians against Sulawesi Muslims. The churches and the mosques of theMaluccas served as rallying points, and the larger national communities joined in, furtherinflaming the conflict. But in none of these cases did language differences play a majordivisive role.

(III) Aceh in the broader context of Sumatra

In much of the current politics of categories, then, ethnicity is less emphasized than areregional sets of norms, ways of doing things. But now let us try to gain a moresystematic idea of how categories have played out in Aceh, and begin by looking at thevariety of ways in which social and cultural difference is coded across Sumatran societiesover the longer term. This variety may help us think in new ways about identity in Aceh.

As one move from north to south in Sumatra, one is struck by the ways in which locally-expressed ideas about cultural boundaries change. The Acehnese and the Gayo speakabout themselves and others as populations localized in distinct regions, and


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characterized by wholly different languages and ways of life. Anthropologists working inthese regions (including myself) tend to write about them in this way as well, albeittaking note of Pidie vs. Aceh Besar vs. West Aceh differences. (We will return to theseissues).

Along the eastern coast, south of Aceh, these boundary ideas change somewhat. It

may be that the current label Karo arose only out of Dutch labeling, and that the mostwidespread boundary was between Muslims, who were therefore Malays, and non-Muslims, who were Bataks. Although today Karo serves as a label for members of thefive major clans, if a person converts to Islam then he is no longer Karo but Malay.Malay identities themselves were sorted out in terms of sultanates, not internal divisionsaccording to language or other ethnicity-like characteristic, and this focus on place hasremerged in the post-Suharto debates, as noted above. 9

The southern Sumatran region presents a strikingly different picture. As one movesslowly from Palembang west to the Ogan and then Besemah (Pasemah) regions,residents speak not about borders but about small gradations of difference in language:people living in those villages over there speak a bit differently from the way we do.Local residents do not use ethnic categories, with the sense of boundaries thosecategories inevitable imply, but linguistic clines, lines that mark a gradually changingset of vocabularies. Further complicating this underlying set of variations is the near-universal command of Malay by people living in the region, and the fact that dialectialvariation exists in Malay as well. Thus, southern Sumatra identities have the followingfeatures: shared Islam, shared capacities in Malay, a place on a village-based map of linguistic variation, and a downplaying of ethnic categories. 10

What if, as a thought experiment, we were to imagine an Aceh that looked like southernSumatra? We would find mutually-intelligible speech gradations radiating outward fromBanda Aceh down both coasts and into the highlands. Indeed, something like that mayhave been the case centuries ago, complicated by an admixture of Mon-Khmer languageon the north coast. One reasonable linguistic hypothesis has it that c. 1200 a linguistwould have found a situation something like that described in this thought experiment, arange of dialects without sharp boundaries, punctuated by city-states (Pasai, Lamiry) and

their claims to political sovereignty. The gradual spread of what we now called theAcehnese language would have resulted from the Sultanates expansion southward in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The only distinct languages we find today,particularly Gayo and Alas, probably resulted from the movements of these people intothe highlands away from coastal conflicts engendered by these, or earlier, processes of expansion. 11

If we accord this hypothesis some credibility, then Aceh changed from a region of multiple and related dialects and languages, perhaps with the clinal properties we seenow in southern Sumatra, to a region dominated by one language along both coasts(stopping before the end of todays provincial boundary on the western coast). Thechange would have been the result of political expansion and centralization, much as inFrance or (to a lesser extent) Italy. The Acehnese would then be first and foremost the

creation of a Sultanate, rather than the pre-existing ethnically uniform basis for politicalcentralization.

9 Rita Smith Kipp, Dissociated Identities (Michigan, 1993).10 I am drawing from my own fieldwork in Enim, Ogan, Besemah, and Palembang, 1981-82. Of course, Javanese and other immigrants to the region invoke ethnic boundary-drawing.

11 Or so I suggest in my Sumatran Politics and Poetics (Yale, 1991), drawing on comparativeAustronesian linguistics. As Lombard relates, we have very little sound evidence on this issue:Denys Lombard, Le Sultanat dAtjh au temps dIskandar Muda, 1607-1636 (Paris, 1967).


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Would such a prehistory have contemporary implications? We would expect that religion,region, and politics, rather than putative shared lineage, race, or other components of

ethnicity, would be the bases for a shared sense of being Acehnese. Indeed, onecannot be long in Aceh without hearing about the varied characteristics of people living indifferent regions, and about racial admixture as the basis for Acehnese uniqueness,whether in the form of stories of Portuguese ancestry of western coastal residents, or the

unpacking of the name ACEH as Arab, Cina, Eropa, Hindia.We also might expect that in Aceh, residence rather than lineage would be the strongerbasis for rural social organization, and that is indeed what we do find all along thenorthern and western coasts. Variation in social structure in Aceh is in large part a matterof which child, son or daughter, inherits house and land: Pidie and North Aceh contraston that dimension, for example, making marriages across those two areas either veryprofitable or disastrous in terms of the inheritance the couple can expect, depending onwhich spouse comes from which area. In this respect, social variation in Aceh is a lot likethat in southern Sumatra, with no strong overall cultural preference for transmissionthrough daughters or sons, but distribution of both inheritance rules across each of thetwo regions. In that respect, both regions contrast sharply with Batak and Minangkabauregions, where a unilateral inheritance rule (patrilineal and matrilineal, respectively), iselaborated culturally and made a strong central part of ethnic identity. This regional andreligious focus to Acehnese identity also makes it possible (or psychologically easier) fornon-Acehnese people, for example Gayo, who live in Jakarta to speak of themselves as

from Aceh. Region primes over race.

(IV) Dangers of Presuming Ethnicity

Now let us insert this analysis of Aceh back into the context of current changes withinIndonesia and especially in Aceh itself. We have seen that Indonesians have referred todifferent kinds of categories in performing self government, characterizing themselvesas a region, a people, a linguistic minority, as people following certain norms, or asmembers of a religious group, among other possible categories. Current decentralizationpolicies in Indonesia will probably lead to a very complex structure that includes various

types of local units with varying degree of power of self-governance.

I wish to enter a plea at this point that we follow the specific claims very closely, andavoid referring to these new units with one blanket term, whether it be nationalminority, ethnic group or people. Not only are each of these categories inadequate toexamine the range of cases, but each may have political consequences. And here wereturn to Aceh and the disputes and fighting that have continued on and off sinceindependence. 12 Disputes with Jakarta over the status of the militia and the right tocontrol schools and religious affairs led to a rebellion in 1952 under the banner of DarulIslam, which although it ended in 1962 left a residual resentment of Jakarta. Therebellion was supported by many across the province, including the ethnically distincthighlands regions (where I conducted fieldwork). It was a rebellion in the name of continued regional autonomy and for the protection of Islam as the religion of its

inhabitants. A second, small rebellion began in 1976 and continued on a relatively smallscale into the 1980s. It received support due to rising discontent over the governmentsfailure to honor its promises to grant some degree of autonomy to Aceh and thegovernments failure to return to the province any more than a small share of theenormous profits yielded by natural gas facilities on the northern coast. I rememberarmed patrols passing through the village where I lived in the mountainous central regionof the province during my fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

12 See Anthony Reid, ed., Verandah of violence (Singapore, 2006).


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By the late 1980s the repressive tactics of the military and the politically repressivepolicies of the Suharto regime had further intensified hatred of the central governmentand support for the rebellion. Whereas the rebellion of the 1950s was under the bannerof Islam, this new movement was called the Free Aceh Movement, and claimed tospeak for an Acehnese people who never had been legitimately incorporated intoIndonesia but rather invaded by the Javanese-Indonesian state. The atrocities

committed by the Indonesian military, acting virtually without civilian control by the timeof Megawati Sukarnoputris accession to the presidency in 2001, further deepened hatredand resentment, leaving the conflict without a clear good solution until the opening of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami made possible a negotiated settlement, still holding in early2007.

Now, the Free Aceh Movements calls for self-governance on grounds of pre-colonialautonomy and in the name of a people fit certain international ways of talking aboutrights and minorities. Indeed, international commentary on the struggle in Acehsometimes portrayed it as a liberation struggle by the Acehnese people, sometimesdescribed as an indigenous people. Drawing this conclusion would, however, take themovements self-characterization at face value. But as we have seen, Aceh consists of anumber of distinct language groups, and, within the majority Acehnese speakers, seriousand long-lasting oppositions between regions. The Central, Southeast, and Southerndistricts are mainly composed of non-Acehnese people, who with some success urged thecentral government to recognize them as a distinct province, and to help them to developroads and airports such that they would be able to reach the city of Medan withouthaving to pass through Acehnese-majority districts. Prior to the current war, people inthese districts managed to improve their economic and social lives only by leapfroggingover the provincial government and appealing to Jakarta for assistance. Furthermore, theAcehnese-speaking people of West Aceh long have resented the control by elites fromtwo other districts, Pidie and Greater Aceh.

The main force of the idea that Aceh consists or should consist of the Acehnese was tounderwrite violence by Free Aceh fighters against Javanese migrants. Most of the killingsthat occurred in the Central Aceh district, where I have worked the longest, were of Javanese migrants. The movement also claimed that the rightful rulers of Aceh were the

precolonial elite. The movements leader, Hasan Di Tiro, descended from prominentAcehnese nobility, and the movement claimed its legitimacy from that tie, positioningitself against both Islamic leaders and those who favor continued membership inIndonesia. Ironically, it was the central government that attempted to make Islam itsown weapon in the struggle and that gave to the province the right to reshape its legalstructure according to sharia. The provincial government then took up the challenge of trying to develop new laws that would reflect Islamic values.

Aceh illustrates the ways in which international categories of minorities and peoples not only fail to capture local histories and meanings, but in fact weigh in on one side of aconflict. In this case referring to the residents of Aceh as an Acehnese people sidedwith Acehnese nationalists against those other residents of the province who saw andcontinue to see their interests as intertwined with the Indonesian state and threatened

by the prospect of an independent Aceh. Of course, if Aceh were to have becomeindependent, instantly the highland minorities would have become the indigenouspeoples and minorities in international language, and the Acehnese, majority and non-dominated, would equally instantly have lost their indigenous status.

(V) Research directions

I have suggested that the study of ethnicity and culture in Aceh can benefit from placingthe province in a large comparative framework, for example that of Sumatra. Not only


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does this framework throw into relief the distinctive features of Aceh, but it also,conversely, suggests that the underlying principles of social organization in Aceh maylook more Sumatran and less unique than a focus on the historic kingdoms and present-day Islamic emphasis might suggest.

These claims suggest several directions of research. If Banda Aceh and perhaps other

cities become sociologically more mixed and cosmopolitan, one would predict thatindividuals everyday ways of speaking about who they are would become more complexas well. In any given social interaction actors might highlight their regional origins withinAceh, their relationship to a long history of Aceh taken as a whole, their religiousidentification, or their status as Indonesian citizens. Other studies of changes in self-identifications, such as Kipps (ibid) of the Karo, could be read as starting points for along term research project.

Complicating these possibilities is the presence of three categories of strangers:Javanese, Chinese, and non-Indonesians. Some Javanese villages were targeted forkillings in the recent violence, and their recruitment into militias, especially in CentralAceh, needs to be better understood. One hypothesis would be that they were mobilizedalong ethnic lines but by conflict entrepreneurs acting for political gain (and notnecessarily Javanese themselves). Their story is mixed up in stories of electoral conflictsand regional administrative battles, such as that which led to the creation of newhighland kabupatens .

Non-Indonesians have led reconstruction efforts, and may reorient some Acehnese intheir sense of the world to which they belong. Is it defined nationally, religiously, or ongrounds of a history of relief aid? Aceh is reopening to the world, and where Acehnesetake that opening could be a major story in the social science of nations, states, and thepolitics of identity.

the new anthropology of ethnicity in aceh

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