Some Southeast Asian Junk

Signing Off from Jakarta

I'm leaving this morning to head back to the states. I'm bittersweet about this. On one hand, I'm so excited to get back to family. On the other hand, though, there's something about Jakarta that gets under my skin, and I will miss it here. It's particularly hard because I don't know when I'll be back here again. I have no firm plans. Hopefully it won't be too long. Here is a final picture that sums up the Jakarta that I know.

Bundaran HI

As my final post, let me offer two points. One, my final meal was very good: roasted duck from Ayam Tulang Lunak Hayam Wuruk. I decided that if Bakmi Gajah Mada doesn't work then at least I will keep up my theme of meals by restaurants named after classical Javanese politicians. (Gajah Mada and Hayam Wuruk)

The second is that I'm very interested in the current state of the American economy. I think though that everyone needs to read this. I bought my dad a copy of Niall Ferguson's recent book not too long ago, and it makes me so furious that such a great historical storyteller could be such a dreadful talking head.

Disappointing Meal Leads to Social Commentary

Last night I had a disappointing meal. My first meal on this trip which really failed to live up to expectations. It was at Bakmi Gajah Mada (GM for short), a noodle restaurant which I had tried before a couple years ago and found to be "meh," but which gets a great review in the book that I use to scope out local good eats, Laksmi Pamuntjak's Jakarta Good Food Guide 2008-2009.

And I mean, it gets a glowing review. Listen to these select quotes:

• Bakmi GM is still on top of the game
• the first destination of a student returning from overseas is not his or her own home, but the nearest Bakmi GM
• everything from their original versions of noodle soup to their more recent creations...are wonderful [sic]
• approaching legendary is the consistently brilliant fried wonton
• the level of consistency is almost supernatural

"Wonderful." "Brilliant." "Supernatural." "Top of the game." This from an author who does not seem given to hyperbole in her other reviews, who rates places that cost US$500 a person and finds basic faults with taste and presentation. So Bakmi GM is "brilliant"? Well OK then! Maybe I went on a bad day the other time. No worries, I'll try it again. I followed Laksmi's directions precisely this time, getting the two dishes that she recommended by name: the fried wonton (pangsit goreng) and chili-fried beef noodles (bakmi daging cah cabe hijau). To drink, fresh pineapple juice.

Panda Express Bakmi GM

OK. First for the good news. The pineapple juice was competent. But I've never had bad fruit juices in Southeast Asia, and I mean ever. Basically they are just fresh fruit in a blender. Hard to mess that up.

Now for the bad news. I mean, look at that. Does those plates look any different than what you'd get at P.F. Chang's? The fried wontons tasted to me just about like the fried wonton skins that you get as a free appetizer at any strip mall Chinese restaurant in the US. The only difference is that these have a tiny bit of bland chicken wrapped in the middle. The sauce was, I kid you not, that same syrupy unidentified red glop that we know in the US as "duck sauce." Duck sauce! I'm almost offended that I had to pay for what I normally consider to be complimentary appetizers. The beef noodles were no better. The noodles themselves were gummy and sticky, not properly fried and mixed with other ingredients. That's a rookie mistake, Asian Noodles 101. The beef was sticky-sweet and liberally enhanced with MSG. The peppers were fine. Did they even try here? Basically the only differences between this and an equivalent dish at P.F. Chang's is that this is cheaper and that they understand the proper ratio of noodle to condiment. (Asian noodles, much like Italian pasta, are to be dressed with their accompaniment like a salad, not drowned in it.)

Now what's going on here? How could Laksmi Pamuntjak--a world traveller, a bonne vivante, a gastronome with three editions of a popular (and pretty expensive) English language food guide under her belt--consider this boring and uninspired food to be brilliant? My working hypothesis is that it's not about taste or presentation, but about modernity.

When you go to Bakmi GM you're not getting authentic or even really "good" food. What you're getting is air-conditioning, waiters in uniforms, consistency, comfort, and an ambience of that middle class lifestyle that has really only been available in Indonesia for about thirty years or so. It's the same impetus that leads many very good restaurants all over Southeast Asia to locate themselves in malls. Bakmi GM is not about the food, it's about representing a certain social position. Sort of the way that McDonald's is in the US, or at least how it was when it first opened and represented the triumph of modernity, mass production, and food science over the varied competencies of local burger joints. Note the emphasize on "consistency" and the idea that it appeals to students who miss home. Maybe a parallel experience is a freshman from Orange County, CA in my Vietnamese class while I was still in graduate school who did her final presentation about the best restaurant in the world: California Pizza Kitchen.

The problem with my hypothesis is that Laksmi P. is no aspiring middle class writer. I've met her. She's serious and far more cosmopolitan than I am. Her other recommendations have been very solid. And it can't really be her audience either, for her book cost US$26 and is entirely in English, which makes it pretty much geared not towards middle class consumers but rather for Jakarta's globe-trotting upper crust. They can absolutely afford much better than this, and they can find much tastier cheap eats at the side of any road. So call me perplexed.

Sensationalism

Alert! Facebook is a Menace, Clerics Say! Muslim Clerics Declare Ban on Facebook!

These are recent headlines from the Jakarta Globe, the newspaper that I get delivered to my hotel room every morning free of charge. I asked for the Jakarta Post, which is a better and more established paper, but there was a snafu, I guess. I have become increasingly frustrated by the sensationalist language that newspapers use in their headlines here.

Why is this sensationalism? Because if you actually read the articles, rather than the headlines, you learn a couple of things. One is that "clerics" mean a limited number of clerics in East Java, not all Indonesian clerics (or even all East Javanese clerics). Second is that "menace" means "a problem for enforcing single-sex educational practices." Third is that "ban" means "declare it to be forbidden to use Facebook for things that are already haram (forbidden)" and "only for schoolchildren in their schools." So Facebook is not a menace, not all clerics agree, and the ban is not a ban. Details details.

I should note that this is not a problem with just the Jakarta Globe or with coverage of Islam. Rather, I think that the Indonesian press does a particularly good job of making news out of nothing, and a bad job out of covering real news. The coverage of the upcoming presidential elections is an illustrative example. Reading the big newspapers here, you'd think that there's some sort of close three-horse race between the tickets. In reality, SBY-Boediono is going to cream the other two. No one seems brave enough to give a clear run-down of the likelihood of each ticket winning, or brave enough to write (outside of the opinion section) about the criticisms of the two other presidential pairings. When Mega-Prabowo declare that economic growth will average 10 percent a year under their five year term, without explaining how in the world they will achieve this, it makes front page news. The response from market watchers is buried in the business section several days later. Guess that type of stuff doesn't sell papers.

I don't think that this is just a problem with Indonesian newspapers--of course American journalism can be sensationalist--but my sense is that even the best newspapers here are not as committed to telling it like it is as I would prefer. So let me respond in kind. TP Declares Indonesian Newspapers A Menace!  TP Refuses to Trust Indonesian Newspapers!

Singapore, Stomach First

People often talk about Singapore as a place where people are obsessed with food. Before yesterday I hadn't been to Singapore in a couple years, so part of me forgot about this. Or at least thought it was a little exaggerated, as lots of places are obsessed with food. Italy, France, and so forth. But seriously, Singapore is obsessed with food in a way that I don't think is comparable to other places. Maybe it's a consequence of the fact that Singapore is so, well, orderly and boring. There's no politics to talk about, no real economic woes to talk about (although Singapore is getting hammered by the crisis in GDP terms, unemployment is still only around 3%), the weather is essentially the same all the time (hot and humid, or not quite as hot but more humid, or raining), the traffic is usually pretty OK by regional standards, there's no really old history (the city was a fishing village until 1800) and so forth. So what else is there to talk about besides what to have for lunch? I think that standard Singaporean day revolves around (1) eating and (2) thinking about where to eat next. There are many, many, many food blogs dedicated to Singaporean food.

This bothers me not in the slightest, of course, because I've seen all the tourist things there are to see in Singapore. Moreover, I love to sample local food, and I had two sets of great tour guides to show me where to go. So what did I do on this trip? I caught up with old friends and ate good food. I focused on South Indian food this trip more than Southern Chinese food, which is Singapore's number one specialty. The problem is often that Chinese food has shellfish in it, so I have to be careful to stick to pork and fish. I can't eat lots of things like chili crab or prawn whatever or really authentic char kway teow. Plus, this one place that we wanted to try for dumplings was closed for renovations so we substituted banana leaf rice for pork-intensive dumplings. I ignored Malay and Peranakan food entirely because, well, it's often so close to Sumatran food and that's normally better here (or in Malaysia itself) anyway. The pics and descriptions are here (they start with my most recent meal in Jakarta, but the Singapore pictures are a few in). Below is the pretty front garden of my friends' place, which is a great and quiet retreat from the disorganized hustle and bustle of downtown Jakarta.

A Leafy Front Garden in Singapore

IndolaysiaPORE

I'm going to Singapore this evening for a quick 24 hours. The reasons are totally personal: to see two sets of old friends and to take a break from noisy/boisterous/crazy Jakarta and enjoy a day of good old law-and-order Singapore. The trip is easy, just a 1:15 flight from Jakarta. Depending on the time of day, it can actually be faster to get from Soekarno-Hatta to Changi (airport to airport, that is) than from central Jakarta to Soekarno-Hatta. I'm taking JetStar Asia, a good low cost airline out of Australia, and the entire trip will come in well below US$100.

So I won't be blogging tomorrow, although I'll report on my trip (and, yes, my meals) on Sunday. For now, here's something I'd like to hear some thoughts from all 2 of my readers about.

People who write on Indonesian Islam often face the accusation that they are partisan or otherwise non-objective in the way that they handle modernist and/or conservative Islamic groups here. I have faced this criticism myself, and it makes me uncomfortable as well as defensive. It normally has one of the following forms. (1) You (foreign researcher) are taking sides in the debate about what is good for Indonesian Islam. (2) You are so seduced by romantic, orientalist version of mystical syncretic Javanese culture and court Islam that you can't treat alternative viewpoints (i.e. a more textual or literal version of Islam) fairly. (3) You are getting all bent out of shape and worried about the possibility of some Islamic threat that isn't really there, so you're turning what are really marginal groups in to bogeymen. Such a criticism is extremely powerful, because if it's true then it means that you as a researcher are not able to separate your beliefs from your work. A big no-no. It's not that your findings are wrong, it's that you are a bad researcher.

The way around this is to insert some sort of caveat into whatever you write that says "I am not making any sort of normative claim about..." or "of course, interpretations of Islam vary, and I do not wish to be construed as claiming that all Indonesians..." or "even a low-probability event is still something that is worth understanding..." Or something like that. Sound familiar?

The thing is, I hate those silly caveats. I don't want to start off every article with defensiveness. It is obvious, at least to me, that we can do research on the different types of Islam and the future of political Islam in Indonesia without making normative judgments about these topics. It also seems reasonable to think that one might want to study how progressive Muslim groups respond to conservative ones, what their beliefs about their opponents are, and that one can do that without judging one to be better than the other. At a certain point, there are some people who are just going to be offended, or who are going to attribute motives that don't exist, no matter what. It's not the job of the researcher to respond to them, it's their job to engage with the research on a substantive level.

Here's an analogy. Let's say I want to study if bananas have more potassium than apples. Do I need to write a paragraph saying that I'm not taking sides in the great "apple-versus-banana-for-breakfast" debate? I guess my objection is to having to respond preemptively to what I view as a type of hypersensitivity about certain topics. This issue isn't just particular to Islam in Indonesia, of course. Imagine the hurdles facing an economist who wants to write on the effect of race on economic outcomes. Or political scientists writing about the Israeli lobby. I want to also say that I'm not arguing that words don't matter or that what is called "political correctness" is bad. Words do matter, I firmly believe this, and I think that we should within reason try to be sensitive to the power that words can have. I see this as something different, not that the choice of words is inappropriate, but that the choice of subject has to be conspicuously framed in a certain way.

So I guess my question is, am I just a big baby? Should I just write the silly caveat and move on? Or is there an argument that we should put our foot down, that we need not be bound by what others might interpret about our motives? If the research is analytically solid and the conclusions drawn from it are properly bounded, shouldn't that be enough?

Seriously, Another Holiday?

Today is another holiday, one that I had not only no reasonable ability to foresee but also which I had never even heard of before. It's Ascension Day, or as they say here, Kenaikan Isa Almasih. Ascension Day. I had to look that one up to make sure I was getting this right, but of course it's not hard to figure out, it celebrates the ascension of Jesus into heaven forty days after Easter. According to Wikipedia, it is celebrated as a public holiday in Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Vanuatu...and the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia.

I'm not in principle opposed to holidays, but I do believe that two in the space of three weeks is too many. This has practical consequences, ranging from the slightly annoying to the truly inconvenient. Slightly annoying: no newspaper this morning, which forces me to read my pleasure book (Infinite Jest) over breakfast, which is only a problem in the sense that I don't have much of it left and I'm trying to save enough to keep myself distracted on the plane rides home. Truly inconvenient: I have an interview way down in the southern outskirts of Jakarta today, in a satellite city known as Depok. Depok is far, far enough that when I go there I prefer to take a train rather than a cab (the cab's just too expensive). But of course, on a public holiday like today the train schedules are totally unpredictable. So that will force me to take a cab anyway. But the real kicker, of course, is that since it's a holiday the traffic will be in all likelihood pretty light, which means that the cab ride might not take nearly as long, and accordingly might not be quite so expensive.

More food pictures are available here. As always, click Next to get to the new ones. Today I bring you gurame goreng, ayam bakar, buntil, es alpukat, and some famous nasi goreng kambing.

Mixed Bag

A Recent Sample of Thoughts

1. *Ahem.* What did I tell you about the problems of lax copyright enforcement? They make it hard for people to know which are the authentic restaurants. The Jakarta Globe has a story that not only touches on the same topics, but also uses many of the same examples that I do.
2. Sometimes I wonder about the logic behind the naming of establishments. It seems like I've seen a number of stores in the past couple of days that have store names that don't seem so germane to the things that they sell. Or I guess I mean, "that's not the first word that comes to mind when I think of how to think of a snappy name to sell that product." Examples: Pro Steak. Groovy Pet Supplies. Hong Kong Family Travel Shop & Fun. Town Hall Cassette and CD. Big Top #1 Interior Design. Ritual Coffee to Go.
3. I saw a law firm yesterday with the following sign: Assiddique and Ass. I know what they mean, and probably you know what they mean, but that sign probably doesn't help much to increase credibility among foreigners.
4. If I were a graduate student in anthropology, looking to do field research in Indonesia, what would I study? I've thought about this topic from time to time. (EDIT: I realize what this means. Not only am I a professional dork, I daydream about being a dork in my spare time.) Here are my ideas.

• The spiritual/cultural meaning underlying the decorations that people put on buses and bajajs (three-wheeled motor carts). (cultural anthropology)
• The consequences of the Western obsession with "organic" and "local" food for farmers in a tourism-focused and export-dependent developing country. (economic anthropology)
• How wealthy neighborhoods organize to provide themselves with physical security after the breakdown of a highly coercive authoritarian regime (political anthropology)
• The strategic use of Islamic messages (rather than Western-inspired ones) by feminists agitating for equal protection and social justice in a patriarchal society. (political anthropology plus religious studies)

Storm Beer (Bali)

The craft brewing craze has arrived in Indonesia. Seriously. I was strolling around one of Jakarta's swanky malls this weekend, pricing bespoke suits (everything's out of my price range), and happened across a fancy grocery store. I always have fun looking at grocery stores in other countries, and so I took a stroll through it. And while there, I noticed a display selling five kinds of specialty beers brewed by a firm called Storm Beer, based out of Bali. So of course I had to get a couple to sample.

Having lived for some time in the Napa Valley of beer, I have pretty high expectations of craft breweries. (I also have a limited tolerance for annoying craft brewing techiques, like brewers that attempt to outdo one another making the "hoppiest" or "strongest" or "darkest" beer in search not of good taste but rather of superlatives. But I digress.) So here are my reviews of three of Storm Beer's selections. I decided to skip two of them (Bronze Ale and Pale Ale) because I tend not to like those styles very much, especially pale ales. The remaining three are the ones that looked most appealing.

Before we get started, let me admit that I have no idea about how to taste and or rate beer. None. So this is just me aping the way that I've seen other beers rated.

Storm Beer Golden Ale
Pours a large head, but is highly carbonated so it evaporates quickly. Cloudy with a golden color. The nose hints of wheat and hops. The initial taste is wheat and yeast, followed by unidentifiable sweetness (not like a honey or sugar sweet, but I can't describe it properly). Dry bitter finish and aftertaste. Overall: for a summer beer there is probably too much flavor here, but it is pretty good and I prefer this to the standard local swill.

Storm Beer Iron Sout
Pours a nice head, also fairly carbonated. Brown/black in color. The nose smells roasty. Taste is surprisingly bitter and thin, less big and chocolatey or malty or roasty as I would prefer in a stout. Bitterness continues though the finish and aftertaste. Again, the word that comes to my mind is "thin." Overall: this is unremarkable as far as stouts go, but it's not a bad beer in general.

Storm Beer Tropical Ale
Another big foamy head, highly carbonated but less than the Golden Ale. Lemony yellow in color, not cloudy but still opaque. A distinctly skunky nose, reminiscent of the lower rungs of the Milwaukee ladder/my sock drawer, but combine that with a whiff of lemon. Confusing taste: starts with lemon, then moves to grassy and herbal flavors. Also a bready/yeasty note which does not combine well with the others. Finishes with more lemon and some light hops. Citrus taste lingers for a bit, and is not unpleasant, but the last bit of the aftertaste is of Icehouse. Whoops. Overall: sock drawer + Icehouse: this is a disappointment. Maybe a slice of real lemon might help. Would not drink again.

Majorities with Minority Mentalities

There is a phrase that's often used to describe Islamic activists in Indonesia, that they are a "majority with a minority mentality." (I think the term comes from FW Wertheim, but I'm not sure if he actually coined the phrase.) Maybe "activists" isn't the word I'm looking for, maybe something more like Muslims with a consciously Muslim identity. Whatever. The point is, it's an evocative phrase that makes a lot of sense. Indonesia is overwhelmingly Muslim in addition to being the world's largest Muslim country, and it's a country where piety is taken very seriously by both Muslims and non-Muslims. There is an argument out there that Indonesian Islam "doesn't count"--it's taken from a misreading of Geertz's The Religion of Java combined with a certain Mecca/Medina-centrism in the Arab world--but I largely dismis this. Nevertheless, despite being a dominant majority, the mentality among many Indonesian Muslims has been similar to that of a minority: that their aspirations are being neglected, that they face systematic discrimination, that they have no proper political (or even, really, social) representation, etc. This was particularly the case under the Sukarno and Soeharto, about whom Wertheim was writing. So this leads to the peculiar outcome of a numerically dominant majority couching its political strategies in the language of an oppressed minority. To give but one example from today's political scene, there is lots of concern by Muslim groups that the presence of Ahmadiyah (a tiny sect that most Muslims consider deviationist) threatens Indonesian Islam, so some action must be taken agains it.

Political scientists are trained to look for patterns and similarities across countries and contexts. And I think that the concept of a majority with a minority mentality actually fits the case of American political Christianity very well. I mean this in the following sense: as a political project, Christianity in the United States relies on the idea that Christians are repressed or under fire in some fashion. This despite the fact that the United States is probably the most pious advanced industrial economy in the world, one in which even hippy-progressive Ithaca has dozens of churches of every denomination. I could go on. But still the rhetoric we hear is that in America Christians and their rights are under assault. I think that this commercial sums it up perfectly.

Hat Tip: DSP

Note the framing of the issue of gay marriage here as not giving rights to a group that has been denied them, but rather taking rights from a group that has always enjoyed them.

The point of this is that I think we see a common strategy here. Numerically dominant groups must couch their demands in terms that make themselves seem small or at risk in order to mobilize their supporters for their cause. I think that this is consistent with what we know about collective action and social movements and the types of conditions that make them most effective. I also wonder if there's a subtle strategy of creating social cleavages (which is what the "us versus them" mentality is) in order to force groups to align on an issue in a way that a minimum winning coalition is formed. Political scientists can call this endogenous cleavage formation. This is a different perspective on how identities are shaped than that of Daniel Posner. He argues that multiple identities exist in any society (religion, race, culture, language, etc.), and the one that is politically salient is the one that allows for a minimum winning coalition to form. I suggest that when one identity is not minimum-winning (as numerically dominant religious majorities are in Indonesia and the United States) then the identity is itself shaped or reconstituted in a way that makes it minimum-winning.

NB: Nothing here should be read as being against either Islam or Christianity. I am concerned here not with religion as an abstract concept, a way of life, or whatever. Rather, I am interested in understanding how groups who wish to use religion to achieve political power do it, or put otherwise, in the choice of strategies among numerically dominant religious groups trying to advance a platform via political means.

A Stroll Around Menteng

Yesterday I took a stroll around Menteng, the prosperous leafy "inurb" of Jakarta which is where I like to stay. It's a nice part of town because it has sidewalks that you can walk a long and tree-lined streets that are pretty and shaded enough to avoid the hottest part of the equatorial sun around here. I walked for about three hours, with a break in the middle for lunch.

I've walked around this area before, so there's not really much new to report about it. But I did get a couple of good pictures, in particular this wordless advertisement for PDI-P:

Sukarno the Orator

Some additional pictures are here. You get to the new pictures by clicking "next."

For dinner I tried a cuisine that to my knowledge I had never tried before: Acehnese. There are a couple of reasons why I'd never had it before. First off, Acehnese food is hard to come by, as there are fewer Acehnese people in Jakarta than there are other ethnic groups. Second off, I'd always heard that it's not much different than other Sumatran foods, in particular Padang-style West Sumatra food. I know now that this isn't really true. Acehnese food blends Sumatran food with lots of Arabic and Gujarati influences, giving it a distinctly different kind of taste marked by notably different spices. Less of the Christmas cookie spices of Java and the eastern islands, and more of the peppery and sour tastes of central Asia. My very tasty dinner at Rumah Makan Meutia in the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood demonstrated this quite well.

Rumah Makan Meutia. Assalamu'alaikum.

I also can confirm that Acehnese food does indeed make use of a special herb that one tends not to associate with cuisine. Its seeds go in the basic spice paste and also gets used in ayam tangkap, a chicken and fried curry-leaves (etc.) dish.

Check out more recent food pictures here, including nasi rames, soto ayam istemewa, es teh tarek, mie Aceh, roti cane, and ayam tangkap. You get to the new pictures by clicking on "next.