Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections
- 2 Post-imperial Knowledge and Pre-Social Science in Southeast Asia
- 3 From the Education of a Historian to the Study of Minangkabau Local History
- 4 Scholarship, Society, and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95
- 5 From Contemplating Wordsworth's Daffodils to Listening to the Voices of the “Nation”
- 6 Crafting Anthropology in Many Sites of Fieldwork
- 7 A Non-Linear Intellectual Trajectory: My Diverse Engagements of the “Self ” and “Others” in Knowledge Production
- 8 Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity: The Making of a Humanities Scholar in Indonesia, a Personal Reflection
- 9 Between State and Revolution: Autobiographical Notes on Radical Scholarship during the Marcos Dictatorship
- 10 (Un)Learning Human Sciences: The Journey of a Malaysian from the “Look East” Generation
- 11 Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years
- 12 Riding the Postmodern Chaos: A Reflection on Academic Subjectivity in Indonesia
- Index
11 - Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections
- 2 Post-imperial Knowledge and Pre-Social Science in Southeast Asia
- 3 From the Education of a Historian to the Study of Minangkabau Local History
- 4 Scholarship, Society, and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95
- 5 From Contemplating Wordsworth's Daffodils to Listening to the Voices of the “Nation”
- 6 Crafting Anthropology in Many Sites of Fieldwork
- 7 A Non-Linear Intellectual Trajectory: My Diverse Engagements of the “Self ” and “Others” in Knowledge Production
- 8 Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity: The Making of a Humanities Scholar in Indonesia, a Personal Reflection
- 9 Between State and Revolution: Autobiographical Notes on Radical Scholarship during the Marcos Dictatorship
- 10 (Un)Learning Human Sciences: The Journey of a Malaysian from the “Look East” Generation
- 11 Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years
- 12 Riding the Postmodern Chaos: A Reflection on Academic Subjectivity in Indonesia
- Index
Summary
More than twenty years ago, discussing the culture of Indonesian research in North America, Benedict Anderson pointed out that scholars are not only experts in their fields, but they are also members of their particular societies. Anderson indicates the importance of the institutional contexts and sociohistorical conditions within which knowledge is produced. Today, Anderson's point applies as much to American scholars as to us, students of Indonesia who are situated (to a certain degree) in the West, and yet are still part of the cultural order of the place we come from.
Indonesia is a product of both my experience as its national subject and my understanding of it through engaging with knowledge and ideas obtained largely from the Western academy. Yet Indonesia is also a place where we encounter the limits both of our concept and our subjectivity. In this sense, the country is not merely an object of analysis for scientific or theoretical inquiry, but also a place to engage with the question of how we have become who we are. For such an orientation, premises and theories are tools to be used, modified, and transformed. They are important in so far as they help us to engage with the place.
In the end, regardless of where we are from and currently at, through our work, we are involved in the appropriation of theories and the construction of ourselves and the places within which we are (or were once) located. In this mutual framing of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, few experiences are as difficult and as rewarding to reflect on as those from our student years. For it is then that we encountered the material place, the interdisciplinary field, and the institutions that, in my own case, shaped both my subjectivity and Indonesia.
To Enter: Jakarta
I was born in Medan the same year Soeharto came into power. My family moved to Surabaya when I was sixteen. After completing high school I entered an architecture school and, soon after graduation in 1989, went to work in the capital city as a junior designer for a major Japanese construction firm in Jakarta.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian StudiesPerspectives from the Region, pp. 260 - 276Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak InstitutePrint publication year: 2011