First International Conference of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies

Organized by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore & Rehabilitation and Construction Executing Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR), Banda Aceh, Indonesia

24 27 February 2007

The New Anthropology of Ethnicity and Identity - and Why it Matters for Aceh and Indonesia

John Bowen
Washington University-Saint Louis, USA jbowen@wustl.edu

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

(I) Analytical Issues At times in its history, the social sciences have come dangerously close to reproducing nave 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, Hungarianspeakers, African Americans. These phrases encode assumptions that there exist groups marked by their ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, and race, respectively. Social science writings, even those with a high degree of sophistication, often take up these 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 intellectual laziness): conceptual and normative. It is conceptually handy to speak about groups in this way, because it permits researchers to ask a number of types of questions: comparative (how do Acehnese differ from Javanese?), historical (have Muslims opinions changed over time?), or policy-relevant (how many African American students are enrolled in your university?). It would be cumbersome and perhaps impossible to unpack these phrases. Their use also can be normatively appealing, if the pretense that a group really exists as such satisfies a preference. Identity politics in the United States, for example, depends on the real existence of identity-based groups, such that one now speaks of the African American 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, such as federal funding and political power, turn on this assumptionwitness the opposition to allowing people to write in self-identifications on the census for fear it would lower the numbers of people counted in certain minority categories and dilute the lobbying power of those groups. Similarly, the category of indigenous peoples, which first aggregates individuals into a people and then groups certain of them as indigenous is conceptually 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 uncritical ways, to suggest some analytically more sophisticated approaches to studying cultural categories, and consider the interest of Aceh as a place for studying the issues raised by these approaches. I will refer mainly to works in anthropology and sociology, for it is in these disciplines that the most fruitful recent discussions have taken place, but the same issues 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 19th and early 20th centuries was that people marked themselves off from each other using identity labelsthe Hopi and Navajo each used labels to refer to each other, and speaking of the Samoans or the Tallensi posed no major analytical issues. Anthropologists then assumed that the organizing principles of social life were uniform within the labeled unit and different across units: Hopi social structure was relatively uniform and based on shared principles, and was different from Navajo social structure. The issues of internal variation and boundary crossing were considered secondary issues.

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Anthropologists were taking cues from the people they studies: people use labels to contrast themselves with other peoples, and claim that they are relatively the same and unlike everyone else. Franz Boas had insisted on these points in the 1920s and 30s, and Claude Lvi-Strauss made much of his career around them in the 1960s. But there was no reason why anthropologists should take these local claims of internal sameness at face 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 groups sometimes merged with each other, and that individuals often shifted the labels they used 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 repertoires of identity labels that individuals possess: I can identify myself in terms of any of many types of categories, from race to language, and I probably do so as a function of a specific context and goal. Just as anthropologists had by and large taken local label-using at face value, so social scientists studying modern nation-statesmainly sociologists, political scientists and historianshad largely taken nationalist claims to be socially valid. There was, in their analyses, an English people, and Hungarian and Polish ones, and so forth. These entitiesnations historically working toward statehoodwere the analytical equivalent of cultures. Faulty (or empty, or tautological) though this position might have been, it corresponded to the 19th and early 20th century notion of self-determination. Problems with this approach emerged both because of political changethe gradual disaggregation of Spain being a very recent exampleand because of a growing body of historical work on 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 at themselvesas distinct cultures worthy of preserving cultural autonomy (and eventually international recognition as peoples), and as distinct nations worthy of achieving political autonomy. As new nations emerged in the middle of the 20th century, their leaders tried to use the same language, and spoke, for example, of an Indonesian people. This move ran into difficulty, because these new states had already been analyzed into component cultures by anthropologists (and by administrators of indirect rule colonial systems). How could there 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 this point, 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 nationstates and the differences in historical depth, not because of a basic ontological difference between Europe and Asia. Today it is difficult to argue today that European states of Yugoslavia, Spain, and Belgium were the products of a nation realizing itself as a state, and historical scholarship has 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 Indonesians are less of a people than are people living in Aceh or southern Sumatra. The two are constructed and maintained through distinct social processes, but constructed they are.

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). 3

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Looking at identifications as processes A more successful approach to understanding the social life of these identity categories emerged to a great extent due to work in three areas: social anthropology, social psychology, and colonial history. The Norwegian anthropologist Frederik Barth pointed to a growing body of evidence that many people in the world shifted ethnic identities in response to changing opportunity structures. As people moved from one ecological zone to another, or decided to fit in to a new society, they changed their ethnic self-identification. Ethnicity was not an inherited essence, but a set of categories subject to manipulation. Barths work for awhile created an opposition between those who wished to emphasize the shared nature of these categories 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 these categories to achieve certain ends (sometimes called instrumentalists). But in the end Barths contribution was accepted because it fit into a growing turn toward constructivism in the social sciences, that is, the idea that we develop categories for understanding the world and may change these under certain conditions.2 Much of the support for this more general idea about construction of categories came from work in social psychology, where researchers developed an approach for studying social cognition based on schemas: basically, constructs about others that filter our perceptions and emotions. Much of how we respond to others depends on the specific schemas 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 at once and choose one over another in a specific situation. In studying ethnicity and other cultural 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 about Acehnese: that they are fanatical Muslims, that they contributed in important ways to the Indonesian revolution, that they are clever traders, that they want to leave the Indonesian Republic, and so forth. Which of these schemas becomes foremost in his mind might 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 the ways in which colonial systems of classification hardened, or even produced, the categories that today we think of as ethnic, or religious, or linguistic. Most striking has been the study of how British rulers of India shaped South Asian perceptions of themselves by including on the 19th century censuses categories of religious affiliation: people were listed as a Hindu or Muslim or Jain and so forth. Most people living in British India at the time had not thought of themselves and others in these ways: one might be a follower of this or that teacher, one might worship mainly at this or that temple, but one was not a Hindu, a member of a pan-Indian population, to be distinguished from distinct other populations, such as the Muslims and the Jains.4 This finding was all the more counter-intuitive in that so much of 20th-century Indian history revolves around precisely these broad identifications (although even today constructs
2

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

I have applied this theory to the phenomenon of anti-Americanism in John R. Bowen, AntiAmericanism as Schemas and Diacritics across Indonesia and France, in Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca, 2007), but for a sociological overview of the psychological and sociological literature see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge MA, 2004). Bernard Cohn, "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia," An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987). Draft Copy Not to be Quoted Without Permission from the Author 4

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such as Hindu nationalism downplays the importance of regional identifications). But local 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 elements to this rethinking. First, we can put some of these insights together and think about the ascribing of ethnic categories 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 another context, 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 to emphasize 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. A group is a stable assemblage of people who interact regularly. The Acehnese do not all interact regularly and so are not a group in the sociological sense. This distinction is critical to understanding social life, because it usefully prevents us from taking an ethnic label as always the primary way people identify themselves, and from assuming that residence, origins, lineage, language, and other cultural features such as dress, co-occur naturally. It allows us to look at how people label themselves and others in different contexts. It also allows us to study other behaviors as part of the broad set of identityperformative acts. People may choose languages, or registers, or accents in order to signal 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 a more newspaper style Indonesian versus a more natural style replete with casualspeech particles (loh, dong, etc.). Finally, we also now must consider the macro-level politics of representation, along the lines of the study of censuses mentioned earlier. In Indonesia the starkest case is the Suharto-era effort to repress references to ethnic categories (as suku), discussed in the next section. The politics of representation is international as well, and when international 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 international political and legal framework in which peoples (and especially indigenous ones) have certain 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 the state ideology of the ancient Indian connection, a connection that is promoted through the Buddhist complex at Borobodur and that promises to overcome divisive allegiances to region, religion, or political party. Under Suharto a narrow sort of cultural diversity across regions was acknowledged and indeed promoted. In the 1970s and 1980s, the state television 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 were out 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 so forth. Absent are representations of indigenous political institutions or, most intriguingly, accounts of ethnic differences. But in New Order public contexts one could only speak in terms of the residents of a geographical region. I recall being corrected by a high-level Interior 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 and applicable to nearly any discussion of group identity. I found of particular interest the linguistic contortions necessary to refer to individuals of Chinese background. Often one read the incomplete designating phrase orang keturunan, someone of descent, which everyone could easily completed with Chinese. A second usage was to write about someone who was a citizen, warga negara, which readers understood to refer to Chinese because Chinese, and no other citizens, were merely citizens; legal citizenship was their only relationship to the Indonesian social and political body. (One might compare the French designation, franais de papiers, French by virtue of papers, referring to those people who have citizenship papers but no other claim to French status.) After Suharto these restrictions were considerably loosened, but even more consequential for the social life of categories has been the process of political decentralization. In a series of laws, Parliament has authorized the devolution of some political and economic authority to provinces and districts. Local governments now have greater opportunities to develop policies about resource use or trade, and also to engage in the corruption once reserved for the central government. This legislation came at the same time as a general sense of a crisis in legitimacy, and has given rise to movements for self-governance in many parts of Indonesia. These movements and deliberations include a great deal of local debate and conflict over precisely in what terms claims to self-governance should be made. Our interest in this process 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 groups have made claims to self-governance on grounds that they represented people bound together by a set of norms or values. In some cases these claims referred to Islamic or other religious norms, but in many other cases they referred to norms of adat, a term used to refer to local norms, practices, and values, and usually in explicit opposition either to Islam or to rule by Jakarta. In a legalistic sense, adat can be used to refer to social 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 and resolving disputes. Some adat-based associations began to advance their claims well before 1998. The West Sumatran Adat Assembly, for example, was recognized in 1983 by Jakarta as a legitimate political body. By the late 1980s the Assembly had declared its deliberations to have the force of law. Regional alliances began to emerge, each claiming to represent a specific masyarakat adat, a phrase that literally means "adat community" but is used to mean "people who live according to adat". In the late 1990s an Alliance of Adat Communities in the Archipelago lobbied the national parliament for greater selfDraft Copy Not to be Quoted Without Permission from the Author 6

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determination by such adat communities. One delegate put the alliance's claims in terms close to those used by Will Kymlicka to justify self-determination by indigenous groups: "Long before the state existed, adat communities in the archipelago already had succeeded in creating a way of life; the state must respect the sovereignty of the adat communities".5 The concept of "adat community" has provided a source of legitimacy for groups seeking to act in the name of society against the state. Their claims may amount to a recall petition, as when in West Kalimantan three such organizations, claiming to represent Malays, Dayaks, and Chinese, "the majority of residents" in the province, sent a petition to the regional parliament asking for the dismissal of the Governor. The three groups said they 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 their political legitimacy, on grounds that their society is governed by distinctive social norms of 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 family life, methods of resolving disputes, and rights to resources. For many groups, the importance of highlighting adat has to do with resources and self-government, and in particular: (1) rights to land held in the name of the community as a whole, now brought to bear on agricultural estates and logging companies which had been authorized by the Suharto state; and (2) institutions of dispute resolution, weakened by the state, which might help ease current inter-community tensions. These political self-conceptions and claims do not always involve a general notion of prior residence or even minority status--Javanese organizations claim the importance of adat norms as well. Sometimes they correspond to ethnic groups, sometimes to the population residing in a particular region. In North and East Sumatra, for example, rival groups claiming to represent ethnic Malays in land disputes also tried to include other ethnic groups in the category "Malay adat community." One group referred to the "adat community of Deli", a region defined by a Malay sultanate, and stated that "Anyone, as long 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 struggle as regaining rights to communal land then controlled by a private company, and its selfdefinition around common residence fit that project. Another group defined its wider scope 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 yet had preserved Malay norms. 7 As one might expect, claims to speak for an adat community have led to disputes over legitimacy of representation. More interestingly for our questions, however, is that these disputes often also have concerned the very nature of the social groups being represented. 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 should not be represented as "ethnic minorities," both because on Kalimantan they are the majority, and because it is control of local resources, and not representation in national forums, that is important.8

5 6 7 8

Kompas, March 22, 1999. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995). Kompas, June 14, 2000. Forum Keadilan, June 18, 2000; Kompas, June 13, 2000. Kompas, August 9, 1999. 7

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In the end, "adat", along with ideas of minority, ethnic community and religion, are political resources that can be deployed in public debates about regional autonomy, debates that have become more pressing as, in 2001, districts and province prepared to exercise greater autonomy over internal affairs, and an increasing number of regions petitioned for status as independent districts or provinces. In general, it seems that an expression such as "adat society" was heard in those provinces, such as Riau or West Kalimantan, where indigenous peoples felt themselves displaced or deprived of older resources by immigrants. In some cases Islam has become a rallying cry for regional autonomy 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 and the relationship of people to the environment. Adat as a set of norms provides a different basis for claims to self-governance than do concepts of people, minority, or ethnicity. The use of adat to claim control over regions and resources resembles the way in which regional languages and language histories 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 social foundations of that cause. In general, language plays a less critical role in Indonesian autonomy debates than it does in some other parts of the world--it is less frequently a sign 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 owning the national language, and refusing to speak Indonesian would have relatively little political impact. Although reassertions of linguistic distinctiveness may well arise, state control or exploitation is not generally associated with linguistic imperialism, as it is in India, the Philippines, or Spain. (Aceh is an exception here, as was the former East Timor, 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 economic success of the immigrants, in some cases exacerbated by behavioral differences that grated 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. In the Moluccas, Ambonese fought against Bugis immigrants from South Sulawesi. In the latter case, but not the former, the cleavage was also along religious lines, pitting Ambonese Christians against Sulawesi Muslims. The churches and the mosques of the Maluccas served as rallying points, and the larger national communities joined in, further inflaming the conflict. But in none of these cases did language differences play a major divisive role.

(III) Aceh in the broader context of Sumatra In much of the current politics of categories, then, ethnicity is less emphasized than are regional sets of norms, ways of doing things. But now let us try to gain a more systematic idea of how categories have played out in Aceh, and begin by looking at the variety of ways in which social and cultural difference is coded across Sumatran societies over 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 locallyexpressed ideas about cultural boundaries change. The Acehnese and the Gayo speak about 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 in these regions (including myself) tend to write about them in this way as well, albeit taking note of Pidie vs. Aceh Besar vs. West Aceh differences. (We will return to these issues). 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 most widespread boundary was between Muslims, who were therefore Malays, and nonMuslims, who were Bataks. Although today Karo serves as a label for members of the five 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 divisions according to language or other ethnicity-like characteristic, and this focus on place has remerged in the post-Suharto debates, as noted above.9 The southern Sumatran region presents a strikingly different picture. As one moves slowly 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 those categories inevitable imply, but linguistic clines, lines that mark a gradually changing set of vocabularies. Further complicating this underlying set of variations is the nearuniversal command of Malay by people living in the region, and the fact that dialectial variation exists in Malay as well. Thus, southern Sumatra identities have the following features: 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 southern Sumatra? We would find mutually-intelligible speech gradations radiating outward from Banda Aceh down both coasts and into the highlands. Indeed, something like that may have been the case centuries ago, complicated by an admixture of Mon-Khmer language on the north coast. One reasonable linguistic hypothesis has it that c. 1200 a linguist would have found a situation something like that described in this thought experiment, a range 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 the Acehnese language would have resulted from the Sultanates expansion southward in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The only distinct languages we find today, particularly Gayo and Alas, probably resulted from the movements of these people into the 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 see now 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). The change would have been the result of political expansion and centralization, much as in France 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 political centralization.
Rita Smith Kipp, Dissociated Identities (Michigan, 1993). 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.
9

10

11 Or so I suggest in my Sumatran Politics and Poetics (Yale, 1991), drawing on comparative Austronesian 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, one cannot be long in Aceh without hearing about the varied characteristics of people living in different 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 stronger basis for rural social organization, and that is indeed what we do find all along the northern and western coasts. Variation in social structure in Aceh is in large part a matter of which child, son or daughter, inherits house and land: Pidie and North Aceh contrast on that dimension, for example, making marriages across those two areas either very profitable or disastrous in terms of the inheritance the couple can expect, depending on which spouse comes from which area. In this respect, social variation in Aceh is a lot like that in southern Sumatra, with no strong overall cultural preference for transmission through daughters or sons, but distribution of both inheritance rules across each of the two regions. In that respect, both regions contrast sharply with Batak and Minangkabau regions, where a unilateral inheritance rule (patrilineal and matrilineal, respectively), is elaborated culturally and made a strong central part of ethnic identity. This regional and religious focus to Acehnese identity also makes it possible (or psychologically easier) for non-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 within Indonesia and especially in Aceh itself. We have seen that Indonesians have referred to different kinds of categories in performing self government, characterizing themselves as a region, a people, a linguistic minority, as people following certain norms, or as members of a religious group, among other possible categories. Current decentralization policies 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, and avoid referring to these new units with one blanket term, whether it be national minority, ethnic group or people. Not only are each of these categories inadequate to examine the range of cases, but each may have political consequences. And here we return to Aceh and the disputes and fighting that have continued on and off since independence. 12 Disputes with Jakarta over the status of the militia and the right to control schools and religious affairs led to a rebellion in 1952 under the banner of Darul Islam, which although it ended in 1962 left a residual resentment of Jakarta. The rebellion was supported by many across the province, including the ethnically distinct highlands 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 small scale into the 1980s. It received support due to rising discontent over the governments failure to honor its promises to grant some degree of autonomy to Aceh and the governments failure to return to the province any more than a small share of the enormous profits yielded by natural gas facilities on the northern coast. I remember armed patrols passing through the village where I lived in the mountainous central region of the province during my fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

12

See Anthony Reid, ed., Verandah of violence (Singapore, 2006). 10

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By the late 1980s the repressive tactics of the military and the politically repressive policies of the Suharto regime had further intensified hatred of the central government and support for the rebellion. Whereas the rebellion of the 1950s was under the banner of Islam, this new movement was called the Free Aceh Movement, and claimed to speak for an Acehnese people who never had been legitimately incorporated into Indonesia but rather invaded by the Javanese-Indonesian state. The atrocities committed by the Indonesian military, acting virtually without civilian control by the time of Megawati Sukarnoputris accession to the presidency in 2001, further deepened hatred and 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 early 2007. Now, the Free Aceh Movements calls for self-governance on grounds of pre-colonial autonomy and in the name of a people fit certain international ways of talking about rights and minorities. Indeed, international commentary on the struggle in Aceh sometimes portrayed it as a liberation struggle by the Acehnese people, sometimes described as an indigenous people. Drawing this conclusion would, however, take the movements self-characterization at face value. But as we have seen, Aceh consists of a number of distinct language groups, and, within the majority Acehnese speakers, serious and long-lasting oppositions between regions. The Central, Southeast, and Southern districts are mainly composed of non-Acehnese people, who with some success urged the central government to recognize them as a distinct province, and to help them to develop roads and airports such that they would be able to reach the city of Medan without having to pass through Acehnese-majority districts. Prior to the current war, people in these districts managed to improve their economic and social lives only by leapfrogging over the provincial government and appealing to Jakarta for assistance. Furthermore, the Acehnese-speaking people of West Aceh long have resented the control by elites from two other districts, Pidie and Greater Aceh. The main force of the idea that Aceh consists or should consist of the Acehnese was to underwrite violence by Free Aceh fighters against Javanese migrants. Most of the killings that 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 prominent Acehnese nobility, and the movement claimed its legitimacy from that tie, positioning itself against both Islamic leaders and those who favor continued membership in Indonesia. Ironically, it was the central government that attempted to make Islam its own weapon in the struggle and that gave to the province the right to reshape its legal structure 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 a conflict. In this case referring to the residents of Aceh as an Acehnese people sided with Acehnese nationalists against those other residents of the province who saw and continue 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 become independent, instantly the highland minorities would have become the indigenous peoples and minorities in international language, and the Acehnese, majority and nondominated, 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 placing the province in a large comparative framework, for example that of Sumatra. Not only
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First International Conference of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies 24 27 February 2007

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 may look more Sumatran and less unique than a focus on the historic kingdoms and presentday 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 that individuals everyday ways of speaking about who they are would become more complex as well. In any given social interaction actors might highlight their regional origins within Aceh, their relationship to a long history of Aceh taken as a whole, their religious identification, or their status as Indonesian citizens. Other studies of changes in selfidentifications, such as Kipps (ibid) of the Karo, could be read as starting points for a long term research project. Complicating these possibilities is the presence of three categories of strangers: Javanese, Chinese, and non-Indonesians. Some Javanese villages were targeted for killings in the recent violence, and their recruitment into militias, especially in Central Aceh, needs to be better understood. One hypothesis would be that they were mobilized along ethnic lines but by conflict entrepreneurs acting for political gain (and not necessarily Javanese themselves). Their story is mixed up in stories of electoral conflicts and regional administrative battles, such as that which led to the creation of new highland kabupatens. Non-Indonesians have led reconstruction efforts, and may reorient some Acehnese in their sense of the world to which they belong. Is it defined nationally, religiously, or on grounds of a history of relief aid? Aceh is reopening to the world, and where Acehnese take that opening could be a major story in the social science of nations, states, and the politics of identity.

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