Name-Changing, Religious Conversion, and Genealogy Re-construction among the Chinese in Post-Independence Indonesia

• In Event: 327. Beyond Authentication: Genealogical Authority in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia. Sponsored by the Indonesia and Timor-Leste Studies Committee (ITLSC)

Abstract

The literature on the Southeast Asia-wide phenomenon of Chinese name-changing has focused mainly on the creative retention of Chinese surnames in newly adopted localized (family) names. In post-independence Indonesia, name-changing for the Chinese in the 1960s and 1970s was also occasioned by the Suharto regime’s reclassification of all Chinese religious practices and places of worship as “Buddhist”. My paper examines the relationship between the Chinese patrilineal naming system, religious adaptations (and conversions) and the Chinese Indonesian subject’s fraught imaginations of patrilineal continuity through and after the turbulent years of the Suharto’s rule. Tracing the stories of about ten Chinese families from West, Central and East Java, I argue that the Chinese pursued a wide range of de-sinification strategies during the 1960s and 1970s beyond religious conversion to Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. In a case study of the T family of West Java, I show how a family invented a parallel Bantenese patrilineal descent identity by connecting their Chinese genealogy with the official silsilah of the royal family through mystical Javanese transactions and historical-genealogical research. I argue that these de-sinification moves were part of a larger strategy to demonstrate loyalty to the nation, while seeking patronage from the military state. After the official recognition of Confucianism as the sixth official religion of Indonesia in 2004, efforts to reconstruct Chinese family genealogies have intensified with Chinese, Christian, Islamic, and Javanese names now co-existing in genealogies that seek to subsume religious differences under the name of familial unity.

Author

• Guo-Quan Seng, National University of Singapore