Special Issue Margins, hubs, and peripheries in a decentralizing Indonesia edited by Zane Goebel (La Trobe University, Melbourne) Deborah Cole (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) Howard Manns (Monash University, Melbourne) © the authors All of these papers were initially presented as part of the symposium, ‘Margins, hubs, and peripheries in a decentralizing Indonesia’, convened by Zane Goebel at the Sociolinguistics of Globalization Conference held at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong on the 3-6 June 2015. April 2016 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 162 Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole Special Issue and Howard Manns (eds.) Contributors Special issue on ‘Margins, hubs, and peripheries in a decentralizing Indonesia’ Jan Blommaert (Tilburg University) Deborah Cole (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) Dwi Noverini Djenar (University of Sydney) Aurora Donzelli (Sarah Lawrence College) Michael Ewing (University of Melbourne) Zane Goebel (La Trobe University) Adam Harr (St. Lawrence University) Yacinta Kurniasih (Monash University) Howard Manns (Monash University) Izak Morin (La Trobe University) Simon Musgrave (Monash University) Lauren Zentz (University of Houston) Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 162 Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole Special Issue and Howard Manns (eds.) Contents Special issue on ‘Margins, hubs, and peripheries in a decentralizing Indonesia’ Introduction Theorizing semiotic complexity: Contact registers and scalar shifters 4 Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole, and Howard Manns Indonesia and Indonesian 17 Howard Manns, Deborah Cole, and Zane Goebel PART I: Youth and resolving core-periphery tensions Localising person reference among Indonesian youth 26 Michael Ewing Adolescent interaction in fiction and peripheralisation of languages 42 Dwi Noverini Djenar Moving languages: Syncretism and shift in Central Java 51 Lauren Zentz Commentary: Indonesia, its youth and ‘light communities’ 67 Jan Blommaert PART II: Nostalgia and (re)centring the local in public spheres Recentering the margins? The politics of local language in a decentralizing Indonesia 70 Adam Harr Transnational neoliberal democracy and the vintage aesthetics of the margins in Post-Suharto political oratory 77 Aurora Donzelli Marginalizing and revaluing Papuan Malay: The impact of politics, policy and technology in Indonesia 101 Izak Morin PART III: (Re)centring and (re)configuring diversity through shifting signs The material force of signs and the reconfigurement of superdiverse identities 112 Deborah Cole On the Internet, no-one knows you’re from Suroboyo: Ethnic identity from the digital margins to the mainstream core 126 Howard Manns and Simon Musgrave Local activism versus recentralization: The case of Javanese in municipal offices in Central Java 137 Yacinta Kurniasih Modelling unitary and fragmented language ideologies on Indonesian television 148 Zane Goebel Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 162 Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole Special Issue and Howard Manns Theorizing semiotic complexity: Contact registers and scalar shifters Zane Goebel Deborah Cole Howard Manns Introduction Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have gone through several cycles of disciplinary boundary maintenance and boundary crossing since the publication of Gumperz’s and Hymes’ (1972) Directions in Sociolinguistics (DIS). As both a boundary forming and boundary crossing project, DIS brought disparate disciplines together to help us understand language in society. Since this work, there has been tremendous growth in most of the disciplines represented in DIS, helping to create and harden new and old boundaries. Along the way there have been a number of renewed boundary crossing efforts as well as many boundary blurring projects, as evidenced in work and synthesis offered by Rampton (1995b; 2006), Duranti (2009), and the collection in Bucholtz and Hall (2008). The study of semiotic complexity is another boundary blurring project that has started to become mainstream (Besnier 2009; Blommaert 2010, 2013, 2015; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Goebel 2010; Heller 2011; Mertz and Parmentier 1985; Van der Aa and Blommaert 2015). We initially define semiotic complexity as the multiple connections between signs used in encounters (whether face-to-face or mass-mediated) and their relationships with other signs and social practices in other times and places. Following Blommaert (2015) we talk about these other times and places as ‘scales’ noting that in any encounter semiotic relations from multiple scales are also in play. Understanding semiotic complexity has required multiple theoretical pieces to keep track of a lot of moving parts. Some of these pieces include: enregisterment (Agha 2007a; Silverstein 2003, 2005); chronotope (Agha 2007b; Bakhtin 1981; Blommaert 2015; Lempert and Perrino 2007); value (Blommaert 2010; Bourdieu 1991; Heller 2011; Heller and Duchêne 2012a); imitation (Bakhtin 1981; Lempert 2014; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Tannen 1989; Urban 2001); heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981; Blackledge and Creese 2014); superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Vertovec 2007); indexical selectivity (Blommaert 2013; Noy 2009; Scollon and Scollon 2003); and scale (Blommaert 2010, 2015; Wortham 2006). What this introduction offers are two meta-constructs that subsume many of these previously established theoretical bits. These constructs are contact registers and scalar shifters. Drawing on Agha (2007), we can initially define contact registers as sign constellations – linguistic and non-linguistic – that emerge through sustained contact between previously established registers. With an intellectual debt to Silverstein (1976), we define scalar shifters as semiotic configurations used to identify scales of participant frameworks with respect to time, space and/or size. Scalar shifters provide a more precise understanding of how people semiotize social order and its relevance to immediate, contextual understanding (cf. Blommaert et al. 2015). Scalar shifters enable interactants and analysts to not only identify how and the degree to which speakers and hearers understand the meaning and function of forms, but also how this understanding is shaped by the wider ‘social order’ across time and space. 4 Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 162 Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole Special Issue and Howard Manns The rich data we present in the papers in this special issue, mined from multiple samples within the same national context and crucially across different scales of time and space within that context, enable us to see all these bits working together at the same time and to see patterns at yet another scale. At a time when we are increasingly aware of the blurred boundaries between languages and the socially constructed nature of named languages (N-languages), this book enables the reconceptualization of contact phenomena. In his discussant commentary of earlier versions of these papers, Agha points out that these papers also demonstrate how, as theoreticians, we can avoid a recurring analytical trap, namely the mistake of thinking that the terms used in discourse about complex semiotic phenomena – ‘global’, ‘local’, ‘centre’, ‘periphery’, ‘diversity’, being some current favourites – can themselves do any real analytical work. It is rather these very labels and their use that we analyse here. In addition, the research presented here contributes to sociolinguistic methodology by demonstrating how a comparative historicizing approach makes possible the identification of connections and tensions in the complexity we observe and analyse. Our empirical focus will be multiple settings in Indonesia where the tension between semiotic sameness and difference is strikingly evident across registers and scales and where the facts of semiotic complexity appear in sharp relief thanks to recent political events that are (re)shaping discourses about centres, peripheries, hubs and margins. Scholars of the humanities and social sciences have, for a long time, been interested in the relationship between centralization and fragmentation and uniformity and diversity (Anderson 1972; Bakhtin 1981). Ben Anderson (1972: 20-21) commenting on power, political life, and history in Javanese aristocratic society notes: … [T]he Javanese view of history was one of cosmological oscillation between periods of concentration of Power and periods of its diffusion. The typical historical sequence is concentration- diffusion-concentration-diffusion without any ultimate resting point. In each period of concentration new centres of Power (dynasties, rulers) are constituted and unity is recreated; in each period of diffusion, Power begins to ebb away from the centre, the reigning dynasty loses its claim to rule, and disorder appears – until the concentrating process begins again. The papers in this special issue document a contemporary ebb of power away from previously established centres and the discursive strategies used by speakers to make sense of and capitalize on current fragmentations or to reestablish new centres of power, sometimes linked to those previously established centres and sometimes in opposition to them. By doing so, this special issue’s authors re- establish their own theoretical centre by unifying many disparate theories for conceptualizing language use and change in society. In focusing on Indonesia, we acknowledge that the nation-state still