The Management of Tradition

chapter 4 The Management of Tradition Introduction One of the most frequent criticisms I heard voiced of ipsi was that its management culture was typical of the New Order, and that some years after the fall of Suharto, there was scant evidence of the organization becoming more demo- cratically inclined. Eddie Nalapraya, it was said, was himself a product of the Suharto era, and it was under his direction that the organization had come of age. There is no doubting the fact that with Eddie Nalapraya at the helm in the 1980s, ipsi entered a golden age in which it reaped the rewards of being close to the heart of dictatorial power in Jakarta. It is then perhaps no surprise that the reign of the former Jakarta intelligence supremo at ipsi shared some paral- lels with that of his former boss, Suharto, and that when Eddie Nalapraya’s twenty-two year rule of ipsi finally came to an end, it did so in a similarly unexpected and Byzantine fashion. As I detailed in Chapter 1, from the outset of the Indonesian republic ipsi was closely associated with the ruling political and military elite. Under Suharto this became a more firmly cemented arrangement with the appointment of Tjokropranolo as the head of the organization in 1973. Tjokropranolo’s appointment closely coincided with the systematic promotion of regional performing arts by the New Order administration in its efforts to cultivate and promote ‘national culture’ (Yampolsky 1995: 707–708). Elements of this policy are evident in Suharto’s address to the ipsi conference in January 1973, in which the New Order watchwords of development (pembangunan) and progress (kemajuan) were recurrent themes in his speech to the gathered members of the congress. It is through progress, Suharto stressed, that it is possible to realize prosperity. Yet it was important that progress should encompass both the exter- nal, physical (lahir) and inner, spiritual (batin) wellbeing of the people. Critical to this task of ensuring the populations wellbeing was the maintenance of the cultural identity of the nation. While national culture and identity were a con- cern of the ‘old order’, under Sukarno the national cultural project had been a far less integralist affair. Regional ‘cultural forms’ were ‘made “modern” merely through their adoption by the modern Indonesian nation’ (Lindsay 2012: 15–16). Under the New Order, ‘culture’ became a more highly politicized arena, and potentially subversive practices were prised free from their anchoring in everyday life to be recast as elements of a ‘traditional’ past (Acciaioli 1985; Hellman © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289352_006 <UN> 112 chapter 4 2013; Pemberton 1994). All of which is evident in the administration of Pencak Silat under ipsi during the period of New Order rule. In this chapter I begin by looking at the cultural framing of Pencak Silat during the New Order period as an aspect of a common cultural heritage underpinning the spiritual well-being of the nation. I show how Pencak Silat was constituted as an object of nationalist culture in line with New Order his- toriographical convention. I take a closer look at the institutional framework of ipsi, and examine both the nature of patrimony within the ipsi bureau- cracy, and the onset of democratization within the organization – a transition that led eventually to the dramatic replacement of Eddie Nalapraya in ways that he himself considered decidedly undemocratic. Through a comparison of ipsi central administration in Jakarta, and the regional office in Cianjur, I show how patrimonialism contributed in part to a hiatus between the centre and periphery within ipsi. I look again at the learning ecology of penca in Cianjur, and suggest that the intersubjective experience of skill acquisition in penca engenders more egalitarian relations between those that practise the art. Accordingly, there is a stark contrast between the bureaucratic character of ipsi as a nationalist organization in Jakarta, and those that practise and administer the art as an aspect of local culture in Cianjur. In West Java, it is customary for penca to be performed as part of the celebrations of life cycle ceremonies such as circumcisions and on other public occasions. I argue that to the extent that penca both grounds and engenders Sundanese ethnicity, it might be thought of as what Retsikas has referred to as ‘embodied difference’ (2007: 206). As such, it can be considered to be qualitatively different to the ‘singular logic of representation’ (Pemberton 1994: 267) that shapes the discur- sive construction of diversity as an aspect of cultural nationalism within ipsi. As an aspect of everyday life penca has personal significance and provides bodily connectivity to a different past than that traced by the nationalist histo- ries idealized and commemorated by ipsi. Cultural Monuments and the New Order At the main entrance to the ipsi headquarters in Jakarta, the Padepokan Pencak Silat Indonesia, stands a fourteen metre high portal (gapura), which frames the approach to the complex from the main road (Fig. 8). However, the main gates that front the entrance to the public highway are kept locked, and only opened for official events.1 One has to enter the complex from a side entrance 1 Errington makes a similar observation about the gates to Taman Mini, the cultural theme park that borders the ipsi headquarters. The main entrance to Taman Mini is also only used <UN>.

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