Authoritarianism, Democracy, Islamic Movements and Contestations of Islamic Religious Ideas in Indonesia

Since independence, Islamic civil society groups and intellectuals have played a vital role in Indonesian politics. This paper seeks to chart the contestation of Islamic religious ideas in Indonesian politics and society throughout the 20th Century, from the declaration of independence in 1945 up until 2001. This paper discusses the social and political influence of, and relationships between, three major Indonesian Islamic intellectual streams: Modernists, Traditionalists, and neo-Modernists. It describes the intellectual roots of each of these Islamic movements, their relationships with the civil Islamic groups Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), their influence upon Indonesian politics, and their interactions with the state. The paper examines the ways in which mainstream Islamic politics in Indonesia, the world’s largest majority Muslim nation, has been shaped by disagreements between modernists and traditionalists, beginning in the early 1950s. Disagreements resulted in a schism within Masyumi, the dominant Islamic party, that saw the traditionalists affiliated with NU leave to establish a separate NU party. Not only did this prevent Masyumi from coming close to garnering a majority of the votes in the 1955 election, but it also contributed to Masyumi veering into Islamism. This conservative turn coincided with elite contestation to define Indonesia as an Islamic state and was a factor in the party antagonizing President Sukarno to the point that he moved to ban it. The banning of Masyumi came as Sukarno imposed ‘guided democracy’ as a soft-authoritarian alternative to democracy and set in train dynamics that facilitated the emergence of military-backed authoritarianism under Suharto. During the four decades in which democracy was suppressed in Indonesia, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, and associated NGOs, activists, and intellectuals were the backbones of civil society. They provided critical support for the non-sectarian principles at the heart of the Indonesian constitution, known as Pancasila. This found the strongest and clearest articulation in the neo-Modernist movement that emerged in the 1980s and synthesized key elements of traditionalist Islamic scholarship and Modernist reformism. Neo-Modernism, which was articulated by leading Islamic intellectual Nurcholish Madjid and Nahdlatul Ulama Chairman Abdurrahman Wahid, presents an open, inclusive, progressive understanding of Islam that is affirming of social pluralism, comfortable with modernity, and stresses the need for tolerance and harmony in inter-communal relations. Its articulation by Wahid, who later became president of Indonesia, contributed to Indonesia’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The vital contribution of neo-Modernist Islam to democracy and reform in Indonesia serves to refute the notion that Islam is incompatible with democracy and pluralism.

‘A Black Knot’

This chapter develops the tensions inherent in Synge’s early works towards an understanding of his formal innovation, asserting the ‘time pressure’ of his one-act plays as a dimension of his response to modernity. Synge’s drafts for various articles, particularly ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, and an article on social change in Wicklow, combine with his notes on Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory to show a writer deeply conscious of modernization and literature’s responsiveness to modernity. Contributing to and drawing on new work on the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernism, this chapter shows that the structures and plots and Synge’s one-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen are rooted in a battle of temporalities. By comparing the timescales of Synge’s one-act plays to those of his Revivalist contemporaries, this chapter shows that his reading in sociology, philosophy, and evolutionary science, alongside his experiences in the modernizing ‘Congested Districts’ of Ireland, fundamentally affected his literary output. Fractured communal relations are figured as fractures in the time frames of the drama, and the overlapping of temporalities and levels of modernization find their correlatives in the constant and unresolved competition for dominance from any one conception of time. These plays, far from being isolated from the concerns of modernization, or from reverting to a solely romanticized vision of the peasantry, in fact register a sense of formal instability as a result of their fraught and multiple conceptions of time and space.

The Late Ottoman Practice of Violence, 1878–1914

This chapter surveys developments within the late Ottoman state. It begins by exploring communal relations during the period of tanzimat reforms, going on to investigate how the takeover of the Ottoman state by a group of military politicians from Salonika, their attempted centralization and territorialization of the Ottoman state as a response to the Balkan losses, and the European ethnicization of imperial intervention—not yet fully evident in the Arab provinces but certainly becoming clear in the Balkans and the Caucasus—served to shape the consciousness of Arab political elites and formed the backdrop to later expressions of political violence in the Mashriq.

The Trajectories of the Daily Routine of Josvainiai Town in Online Periodicals

Based on the articles in online periodicals, the author aims to investigate and to find out if daily life can be examined in general through the method of analysis of online periodicals and if so, how these periodicals can be useful in carrying out field research. Research into the daily routine is relevant in Lithuania because it can help in revealing the modern life style of the country’s population that consists of the common fields of a person as a social unit and also indicates the trends in these fields. Understanding the daily routine of modern Lithuanian population is valuable in that it promotes a better understanding of current ethnic culture and traditions, evaluation of their change at the turn of the centuries, and defining the changing social and communal relations. Modern Lithuanian cities seem to be obliged to seek progress and increase the level of globalization, while towns are turning into certain ethno-cultural centres where the traditional lifestyle or its relicts are maintained longer. Modern daily life of Lithuanian towns is revealed as more unique and less affected by external influences. Not only can attempts at gaining information on the daily routine of a town by analysis of online periodicals assist in checking its usefulness and reliability; it also enables finding out how the media interacts with individual and communal memory of a town, and the understanding of how publicistic discourse creates and at the same time reflects the daily routine of a certain residential area that is usually invisible and unknown. Analysed in this paper are articles about Josvainiai, a small town in Kėdainiai district, and its daily routine from the period of 2016–2019 selected by specific keywords from www.rinkosaikste.lt, the news website of Kėdainiai district. The aim is to investigate if the daily routine as a research object can in general be knowable in such a platform. The gathered and analysed information shows that certain fields of daily life, such as specific geographic features, community gathering places, relationships of certain persons or groups, and individual aspects of daily life can be relatively accessible in online periodicals, but they cannot substitute the reliable and in-depth data gathered during field research. Since the primary aim of journalistic articles is to inform and to enlighten, they are not intended for a thorough understanding of a particular phenomenon. However, they can be useful as secondary sources supplementing the data about the town and the daily life of its community gathered during field research.

RELASI SOSIAL DALAM PENGELOLAAN LAHAN REHABILITASI TAMAN NASIONAL MERU BETIRI (Studi Kasus Desa Wonoasri Kecamatan Tempurejo Kabupaten Jember)

Forest rehabilitation in Meru Betiri National Park is the main point in environmental sustainability. Forest land rehabilitation activities include breeding ecosystems for security in the forest. The method of determining the research area is done intentionally (purposive method) and the research method uses a qualitative approach. Determination of informants is done by snowball sampling method. The data collection method was carried out by observation, interview and document study and analyzed using the Miles and Huberman analysis method. The results showed that social relations that occur in the management of rehabilitation have 2 forms of domains, namely 1) interpersonal domains that can be seen with communal relations, collegial relations and hirearkis relations. Judging from its power relations are divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships. Symmetrical relationship occurs between rehab land farmers where rehab land farmers have an equal position can be seen from daily relationships and friendly relations in managing rehabilitation land. Asymmetrical relationship that occurs in the rehabilitation of land management occurs between the TNMB and farmers of the rehabilitation land where the TNMB party has the highest authority in the management of rehabilitation land. Keywords : Social Relation, Rehabilitation land, Meru Betiri National Park

‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’: Understanding expressions of care among male prisoners

Typologies of prison life in men’s establishments have tended to emphasize the most desolate features of prison life such as aggression, violence, exploitation, and stark displays of individualism. Without seeking to contradict these positions, we suggest that competing narratives of care are also operating in male establishments in England and Wales. Through combining data from two recent, but separate, semi-ethnographic studies of prison life in two prisons (total n = 43), we present a completely different kind of typology based around Moore and Gillette’s (1990) archetypes of masculinity, called: ‘King’, ‘Warrior’, ‘Magician’, and ‘Lover’. This archetypal framework foregrounds the role of care in prison and the different manifestations of communal relations among prisoners. Building on recent developments in prison sociology that have explored the nexus between imprisonment, interpersonal relations and masculinity (see Crewe, 2014), this article argues that care is a fundamental feature of prison life that takes on a wide range of forms, including: paternal roles, intellectual expertise, information sharing and close physical bonds. This complicates linear depictions of prison life that are emotionally stolid.

Revisiting Gender

This chapter provides an analysis of the work of Rita Segato and María Lugones’s assessment of Segato’s approach to gender and questions of decoloniality. The chapter examines the concepts of “patriarchy” and “gender” from within several critical paradigms among communities of color, including, specifically, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities within Abya Yala (a Puna term for the geographic lands of the Americas). Lugones proposes that terms of analysis such as “patriarchy” and “gender” undermine the complexity of the relations of power constituted in and through coloniality, including specifically the racialization of gendered terms. European women were racialized, but colonized females were not. Retaining the use of gender as a category of analysis thereby leaves decolonial activists and scholars working toward coalitional struggle with indigenous and Afro-descedent communities unable to sufficiently affirm the embodied, erotic, intersubjective, and otherwise distinct modes of communal relations not bound by dimorphic gender categories that continue to exist among these communities. The conclusion of the chapter then traces Lugones’s contributions to decolonial feminism, responding to the concerns she raises in the previous sections.

The Ethical Perils of Personal, Communal Relations: A Language Perspective

Most companies use codes of conduct, ethics training, and regular communication to ensure that employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. In the present research, we focused on the type of language used in codes of conduct and showed that impersonal language (e.g., “employees” or “members”) and personal, communal language (e.g., “we”) lead to different behaviors because they change how people perceive the group or organization of which they are a part. Using multiple methods, including lab- and field-based experiments (total N = 1,443), and a large data set of S&P 500 firms (i.e., publicly traded, large U.S. companies that are part of the S&P 500 stock market index), we robustly demonstrated that personal, communal language (compared with impersonal language) influences perceptions of a group’s warmth, which, in turn, increases levels of dishonesty among its members.