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Session Submission Type: Organized Panel
How have genealogical forms inscribed, maintained, or challenged political, social, and religious authority in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia? This panel addresses this question through a series of case studies, including the bilateral kinship practices of creolized Chinese families in the New Order and after, the efforts of twenty-first-century Acehnese Sufis to assemble ad hoc genealogical and mystical lineages, the role of dreams and visions in constructing non-verifiable genealogical authority among the Ḥadrami diaspora in Java, and the disputing of late colonial Sumatran land concessions using Batak genealogies that incorporate collateral relatives and clan alliances.
What brings these cases of genealogical authority together is that genealogical authentication, that is, the affirming of one’s identity or practice through establishing genealogical links to authoritative ancestors, is not their primary mode of signification. Rather than assume that such idioms have overcome their inability to authenticate, we aim to historicize both the grounds of their authority and the regimes of authentication against which they appear to stand.
This leads us to a series of questions at the intersection of anthropology, history, and Asian studies. How might we re-conceptualize genealogical forms as plural kinship and political idioms that incorporate multiple vectors of relationality and authority? How do the region’s matrilineal and bilateral kinship forms and patterns influence genealogical authority more generally in the archipelago? What assumptions regarding genealogical authority in the so-called “world religions” might we need to reconsider? And how might the issues raised by this panel inform on-going conversations regarding genealogical and historical authority in Indonesia?
The Son of the Childless Saint: Oneiric Adoption and Genealogical Authority among Contemporary Indonesian Ḥaḍramīs - Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University
Tawassul as Genealogy: A Non-Authenticating Genealogical Mode in Twenty-First Century Aceh - Daniel Birchok, University of Michigan-Flint
Name-Changing, Religious Conversion, and Genealogy Re-construction among the Chinese in Post-Independence Indonesia - Guo-Quan Seng, National University of Singapore
Genealogy as Historical Right in the Bataklands and its Malayan Diaspora, c.1870-1925 - Faizah Binte Zakaria, Nanyang Technological University