Introduction

Indonesia is reported to be one of the most religiously, linguistically, and ethnically diverse regions of the world (e.g. Bertrand, 2003). Such diversity has attracted a lot of scholarly attention, especially from political scientists, historians, anthropologists and area specialists. For example, relationships between Javanese politicians from Jakarta and other Indonesian politicians from the outer islands has been an enduring topic of interest (e.g. Feith, 1962; Ricklefs, 1981; Sakai, 2002). Similarly, much scholarship has gone into relationships between bureaucrats from these geo-political spaces and discourses about those living in the outer islands (e.g. Hoshour, 1997; Lenhart, 1997; Schefold, 1998; Hoey, 2003), inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations (e.g. Bruner, E. M., 1974; Liddle, 1997; Hefner, 2001b; Sakai, 2002; Van Klinken, 2003; Bertrand, 2004), and social relations between Indonesian-Chinese and pribumi, or so called “indigenous Indonesians” (e.g. Coppel, 1983; Chua, 2004; Suryadinata, 2004b; Hoon, 2006; Purdey, 2006).

While many of these studies take into consideration post-structural arguments and social constructivist perspectives (e.g. Van Klinken, 2003; Purdey, 2006), their focus on interview, archival, and survey data usually doesn't allow us to explore how these social relationships form and dissolve though face-to-face talk. Indeed, with the exception of some very brief descriptions of actual inter-ethnic talk by Kartomihardjo (1981: 159, 186–7) and Wolff and Poedjosoedarmo (1982: 66–8), no work has been done on this aspect of diversity in Indonesia. This book attempts to start to fill this gap by investigating how talk figures in mediating social relations in two diverse urban Rukun Tetangga (RT) “ward(s)” of Semarang, Indonesia, referred to henceforth as Ward 8 and Ward 5.

Introduction

While the view of semiotic encounters and semiotic register (SR) formation presented thus far recognizes people's agency, we also need to be mindful of the types of processes that enable and constrain access to and participation in the social practices that figure in semiotic register formation. In doing so, this also further enables our aim of going beyond single-instance descriptions of semiotic encounters by linking such constraints with participants' trajectories of socialization. While not specifically focusing on talk, Bourdieu's (1977, 1984, 1990b, 1991, 1994) work provides a useful starting point.

In line with recent linguistic interpretations of his work (e.g. Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2002; Scheuer, 2003), I understand Bourdieu's argument to imply actors' history of participation in or “trajectory” in different “fields” or social settings endows them with certain tastes, dispositions, and rules for the carrying out of their everyday practices, that is, a habitus. As Bourdieu (1994) argues, a person's habitus is not just a product of their own interactions with others but also a product of the often unseen role played by states and institutions. Consider, for example, the role of government departments in the planning and development of residential areas and the subsequent interactional patterns that evolve from these areas. In this sense, we are looking at another aspect of enregisterment processes, namely how different SRs come to contain within their category of signs different types of geographical spaces, persons/groups of people and activities.

Whereas the main phonological changes between OJ and NJ took place during the EMJ period, it was during the LMJ period that most of the significant grammatical changes took place which transformed Japanese from its premodern to its contemporary shape in both morphology and syntax. The course and precise dating of some changes is difficult to trace through the written sources; they are mainly observable in the sources dating from the end of the period. It may be no coincidence that sweeping changes took place during a period of civil war and great social upheaval and change which also would have resulted in a relaxation of social and linguistic norms.

Verb morphology

Inflected verb forms

Table 12.1 shows the main inflected verb forms at the end of the LMJ period.

Comparing this inflectional paradigm with that of EMJ in 8.1.1 above shows that among the finite forms from the EMJ paradigm the only surviving category is the imperative, which acquired a new variant shape in -i with the vowel base verbs, alternating with the older ending -yo; see 12.3 below for the shapes with all conjugation classes. Other EMJ forms were either lost or reinterpreted, and new forms had appeared. The loss of the exclamatory, conclusive and adnominal verb forms will be discussed in 12.1.2 and the emergence of the nonpast, past, intentional and volitional forms in 12.1.3.

Introduction

While identity, whether this be individual or group, has been one of the enduring topics of discussion within the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Barth, 1969; Gumperz, 1982c; Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985; Gudykunst, 1988), increased levels of migration and talk-based approaches to human interaction have problematized earlier notions of identity (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Baumann, 1996; Hall, 1996; Werbner, 1997; Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998b; Tsuda, 1999; Brettell, 2003; Bucholtz & Hall, 2004a; Wortham, 2006). One common thread in some of this work relates to how identity is discursively constructed in contexts characterized by heterogeneity and transience. This chapter looks at one such context by focusing on face-to-face interactions among the women of Ward 8 during a routine monthly ward meeting. In particular, it explores how these women go about narrating identities and how this relates to perduring signs of identity.

After relating work on semiotic registers to talk and narrative (Section 5.1), I go on to focus on how talk in a female meeting in Ward 8 creates categories of personhood and social relations (Section 5.2). In Section 5.3 I go on to show how such categories become indexed to deviance through further talk about non-present persons. In following this talk, Section 5.4 examines how categories of personhood are linked to behavior while simultaneously constructing expectations for social conduct within this ward.

Introduction

This book has attempted to fill a gap in scholarship relating to inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto been primarily historical in nature and not concerned with talk or the local spaces in which it occurs. In particular, I explored how talk figures in mediating social relations in two wards where diversity was the norm and where distinctions between who are newcomers and who are hosts tended to change regularly. I was especially interested in exploring how systems of expectations about behavior were talked about and learned in these wards. Drawing on the insights of Agha (2007), Wortham (2006) and Wenger (1998), I argued that signs from different spatial-temporal settings not only represented resources to be used to identify non-present others and those doing this social identification, but that they also simultaneously figured in the construction of expectations for social conduct within this ward. For example, I noted that in socially identifying someone's behavior as not appropriate in this ward, participants temporally co-constructed what is considered as normal, appropriate and moral behavior.

The multidisciplinary nature of what constitutes current linguistic anthropology/ethnography (e.g. Errington, 1998b; Duranti, 2003; Rampton, 2006; Bucholtz & Hall, 2008) found me not only using multiple methods but also exploring the relationships between the data gathered using these methods. For example, I used work in the area of semiotics, media and cultural studies, and language socialization to theorize and then explore the interdiscursive links between signs from mass-mediated sources, local conversations, and ethnographic observations.

Introduction

Within the humanities and social sciences the popular mass media, schooling, census bureaus and other institutions have been described as sites where stereotypes about language–identity relationships are developed or reproduced (e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu, 2006 [1998]; Appadurai, 1996; Collins et al., 2000; Hall, 2006 [1980]; Inoue, 2006; Miller, 2004; Meek, 2006). With recourse to work on semiotic registers (SRs) and processes of social identification, this chapter traces the development of such relationships in Indonesia. I do this by looking at how institutional representations of language use formulate SRs linking language use to performable social categories of personhood and relationship. As such, this chapter can be seen as providing an introduction to the broader context of language use in Indonesia. In particular, it provides an introduction to some of the widely circulating signs and the SRs of which they are a part.

More specifically, Section 2.1 draws upon work on the enregisterment of SRs (Agha, 2007) and processes of social identification (Wortham, 2006) to provide a theoretical base that is applicable to this and subsequent chapters. This discussion points to a need to see concepts such as identity and language as not only difficult to separate, but also best viewed as processes with no end point (e.g. Rampton, 1995b; Garrett & Baquedano-Lopez, 2002). Section 2.2 traces one aspect of the enregisterment process, namely the representation of language–ethnicity links in political and public discourses from the late colonial period until the end of the New Order government in 1998.