Adrian Vickers' Indonesia blog

Just finished a workshop here in Yogya on 'alternative history', part of my Australian Research Council project. The workshop was made up of what they have called the 'third generation' of Indonesian historians, some might call it the post-Sartono or Reformasi generation. Abdul Syukur, whose paper included discussion of this category, pointed out that this ‘third generation’ includes a lot of practitioners outside the academy, and we had a good representation of them at the workshop: activists like Hilmar Farid, journalists like Maria Hartiningsih, and other media practitioners and those working on history in the media.

Syukur’s paper was one of the highlights of the workshop, he put the developments in historiography in their context, and made some sharp observations about the state of history. Hilmar Farid challenged the way Indonesian historians have stuck to the categories and frameworks of the New Order, in a very important paper. Bambang Purwanto, despite being hampered by a computer virus, delivered some fascinating insights into the changing nature of land ownership in the lead up to 1965. He produced an important argument about how the various local religious leaders had been reclassifying land to increase their holdings, which is a direct challenge to the conventional view of ‘kaum merah menjarah’. Asvi Warman Adam gave some insights into what it is like to be at the centre of historical controversy, in his account of the recent text-book bannings.

All the papers were exciting, so it is hard to pick out particular ones, although I enjoyed Bonnie Triyana’s lively account of the Purwodadi affair of 1968 and its international ramifications (again hampered by a Trojan Horse), and Razif’s comparative history of railways in Java and Sumatra. Interesting that a number of speakers pointed to Anton Lucas’s book on the Three Regions Affair as a methodologically exemplary work.