Generating Histories in Post-New Order Indonesia

Andrew Conroe
Department of Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

My dissertation project is an examination of the various ways in which generational identity and generational difference have been constructed in late-colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. This presentation will focus upon one facet of my larger project: my fieldwork encounters with the children and grandchildren of former political prisoners in Central Java. Although more than forty years have passed since their parents and grandparents were imprisoned for their (real or alleged) affiliation with the Indonesian Communist Party, many of these individuals have only very recently begun to be told (and to ask) about their family history, in the liberalized political climate that has followed the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998. I ask how this kind of intergenerational dialogue, grounded in a specific suppressed history of violence, may be analyzed in relation to wider Indonesian discourses of generational identity and difference. I also examine the complicated relationship between familial and national histories of violence, and how these histories are made sense of by those who did not witness them directly. In describing the ways in which these children of political prisoners learn of and react to their familial histories, I call attention to the ways in which a language of “human rights” (constructed as atemporal, politically neutral and the opposite of a dangerous form of nostalgia) serves a generation-defining and generation-bridging role. Finally, I discuss the often-ambivalent ways in which these individuals seek to claim a stake in parental and national pasts, and the kind of choice that they see this as representing.

Andrew Conroe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan.

Monday, April 16, 2007
4.45 P.M., Room 102, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

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