Turn and Face the Strange: Indonesia and the Interpretive Turn

• In Event: That ‘70s Area Studies: Indonesia and the Sociological Imagination - Sponosred by the Indonesia and Timor Leste Studies Committee (ITLSC)

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s, Indonesia was a place where researchers came to envision political futures and socio-cultural possibilities. Among these was a wave of works that helped to inaugurate the “interpretive turn” in the social sciences. Focusing on seminal works by Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson, and James Siegel, this paper explores the combination of historical conditions and conjunctures that helped to produce the interpretive turn. Chief among these was an already rich tradition of imaginative work within Dutch colonial social science, which provided a foundation for critical American thinkers to challenge the tenets of modernization theory using a robust concept of culture. Such work was additionally inspired and buttressed by “being there” in Indonesia at a critical postcolonial moment and observing Indonesians’ nationalist imaginings of traditional culture and possible “third world” futures. The strength of the interpretive turn was such that it shaped the development of disciplines and yielded new generations of interpretive Indonesianists. Yet as time wore on, the concept of culture came to be seen as increasingly suspect and incapable of underpinning a robust view of historical alterity. This paper examines the divergent responses of each of the aforementioned thinkers to this development (one defensive, another ambivalent, the third redoubling with a difference), and asks how their responses might help us to think through possibilities for the “sociological imagination” at Indonesia’s current historical juncture.

Author

• Joshua Barker, University of Toronto