A Project of Questions

On the very start of this long going project, I was stumbled upon surface culture of public space in Indonesia. As could be read on the general overview of this project, I was questioning the “diminishing” and privatized public spaces and trying to conceptualized culture reproduction inside a theoretical frame of pop and mass culture within a context of global capitalism. It was then, when I found it somehow missed a connection to a reality of contemporary urban culture in Indonesia and dug more on the reasoning; that I triggered by what Tay Kheng Soon said:
“Re-reading history: the fact that Asia and the West exist in contemporaneous time has led many to assume that the same forces of history apply and thus the validity of the same discourses. While there are some points of universal validity, many perspectives obviously need to be re-framed. But it would appear that this is not obvious after all” ~Tay Kheng Soon~

I started to question the applied historicity, and its implications on urban studies and practice in Southeast Asia. From which it developed to a question on modernity in Southeast Asian cities, which means a question upon Southeast Asian people that forms the urban culture. Therefore, this project becomes an effort to read the transformation tendencies of the people; in regards to the vast diversity in Southeast Asia. Thus it provides a perspectival reading on the origin of Southeast Asian people, its history of culture, and its position in the world.  
As I seen Southeast Asia position, I walked into an exploration on another question about globalization in Southeast Asian cities, as well as globalized capitalism and globalized cities. In this regard, I am in line with Appadurai’s view on a different modernity applied because of history frame which I put for Southeast Asia. In the readings it would appear that I put historicity of people and their culture outside a frame of nation-state.  Yet I consider it as an important context that influenced the historicity.  It was when I started to think that Southeast Asia with its unexhausted diversity has a very specific scale of culture, within specific geographies, histories and languages.
“Globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization… different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently, there is still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories and languages.”
Arjun Appadurai
I see globalization in Southeast Asia as 5000 years old symptoms; when the earliest economic boom happened with openings of land and maritime route around the world. It marked by the deviation of names: ‘Indus’ had become ‘Sindhu’ in Sanskrit tongue – ‘Hindu’ in Persian tongue – while ‘India’, ‘Hindu’, and ‘Indies’ being whispered among Chinese on the Silk Road. Appadurai mentioned it as cultural transaction across large part of the globe, involving long distance journey of commodities – including people as merchants, explorers and travelers.
What happened in Indonesia? Putting a specific scale of postcolonial Indonesia, globalization in Southeast Asia would act as base of understanding the deviated tendency of culture transformation in the urban space. It is only normal that neither the domination of the economy nor the culture (by the Dutch) could in themselves create either the nature or shape of a post-colonial city[1]. A pre-colonial history, from the early tendency of formulating nation-state is more likely to be a tool to measure social and political development in urban life; which then produced urban culture and shapes a contemporary city.
The next question is about domination of culture in Bandung land. In this project I suggested that Riung Mungpulung is a hard cultural form, like what stressed by Appadurai[2]. It is defined as a performative activity which changed a space into place. By doing a reading upon riung mungpulung and transformation of alun-alun, it shows Riung Mungpulung as a locality that defines “alun-alun” as performative space. I use an original terminology, very local to the people inhabited the land. I do so to disrupt a universalization claimed by the nation-state[3], and stressed the specific force of history in the region. Moreover, I redescribe our cultural contemporaneity by being in the “beyond”; exploring “riung mungpulung” as a deep rooted locality that exists today, beyond the so-seen surface culture of consumption and capitalism. Thus at the end, I found my missing link in the phenomena I saw.
Finally, the last question is about what would happen after. This blog is the answer. It is intended to be a place for riung mungpulung. It provides necessary information, and one perspective of understanding; while at the same time seeks for commentaries, feedbacks, inputs and critics. Only then it could be a complete project that becomes a dialectic process of re-read and re-describe our urban culture and urban space contemporaneity; specifically in Bandung-Indonesia, and generally  in Southeast Asia. 

Agnes Stephania Astrapia
Barcelona, 2011  


[1] As suggested by Abidin Kusno, in his work, “Behind the Post-colonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political cultures in Indonesia”, with my emphasis in Dutch colonialization.
[2] ‘Hard cultural forms’ are those that come with a set of links between value, meaning, and embodied practice that are difficult to break and hard to transform. Soft cultural forms, by contrast, are those that permit relatively easy separation of embodied performance from meaning and value, and relatively successful transformation at each level.~Arjun Appadurai~
[3] “Etimologies, moreover, could be used oppositionally to disturb theoretical legitimations and scientific hierarchies, especially those universalizations claimed by a nation-state, and to place instead the formation of concepts and meanings in primitive origins and relative social experience”. ~Christine M. Boyer~

    Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)