I have always been equally fascinated and uneasy with Surabaya's symbol, a shark and a crocodile circling each other before a presumed mortal combat. The mythic battle is even in the city's name, “sura” meaning shark and “baya” meaning crocodile. While a fascinating spectacle to behold, what if those two apex predators turned against me, the fleshy and tasty mammal observing the fight? Where is my position in this larger struggle? Am I safe? My anxiety about Indonesia's second largest city's iconography is an apt metaphor for Robbie Peters’ study of Dinoyo, a poor urban neighbourhood or kampung. This anthropological investigation shows how its residents survived by negotiating more powerful, often predatory, forces at work in the city, including national political movements, the Indonesian military, organised crime, and the transformative power of global capital. This concise ethnography explores Dinoyo's path through some 65 year of change and upheaval. This East Java port, known as the “City of Heroes” for its role resisting its return to Dutch colonial rule after World War Two, deserves serious academic analysis. Peters’ work is a significant contribution to a better understanding of Indonesia's second largest city.
Surabaya, 1945–2010 contributes to several disciplines, including anthropology, history, and urban studies. Both scholars of Indonesia and Southeast Asia as a whole will find much of value in its ten concise but rich chapters. This is a work of cultural anthropology, but the author places ethnographic analysis in a clear historical context. While primarily drawn from fieldwork during 1998, a tumultuous year that saw the Southeast Asian economic crisis take down President Suharto's 32-year military dictatorship, Peters places Dinoyo in a 65-year long narrative. Such a move does more than write a history of the present as seen in the work of John Pemberton (Pemberton Reference Pemberton1994); it allows an E.P. Thompson-style portrait of the residents of Dinoyo present at their own creation. Peters emphasises how this community crafted its own identity and rituals, ranging from variations on the Javanese slametan (ritual feast) for deaths and marriages to gambling on pigeon racing. By adding history to a Geertzian analysis of ritual (Geertz Reference Geertz1960), the book avoids the trap of seeing such cultural formations as stable and changeless. Indeed, one of this work's strengths is to put a cultural analysis of this kampung in a larger historical narrative that charts how major events have impacted a small Javanese neighbourhood. Specifically, Peters points to the impact of Dutch colonial rule, the anti-colonial war of 1945–1949, the growth of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and other nationalist parties and mass movements after independence, the subsequent destruction of the PKI, the New Order regime's authoritarian developmental policies, the 1998 economic crisis, and the consumer-oriented development funded by international capital in the post-Suharto Reformasi era.
The author skilfully introduces individual Dinoyo residents who define themselves and preserve their sense of community in the face of powerful forces beyond their control. Some of the book's strongest sections discuss profiles of Dinoyo inhabitants and their struggle with the world outside of their kampung. We meet factory workers who gravitated towards the PKI, young men who joined criminal gangs, and women who entered the low end of the city's famous sex industry. Peters also introduces kampung women who cooked for slametan rituals, kiayi (local Islamic scholars) who used their command of local Islamic traditions to treat the mentally ill, and men who raised and raced pigeons. The book is at its best when the author places these individuals in the larger systemic contexts. These figures from the Dinoyo community interact with the larger city, Indonesian nation-state, and international capital in tense and, all too often, violent ways. Peters builds upon previous ethnographies of urban violence in Indonesia (Siegel Reference Siegel1998 and Reference Siegel2005). Peters also adds to the increasingly better-known history of the murder of alleged PKI members and supporters in the 1960s with descriptions of the terror during the Petrus (a Bahasa Indonesia acronym for the “Mysterious Killings”) in the 1980s and the so-called ‘Ninja’ attacks of 1998.
With its emphasis on kampung agency and patterns of resistance, the book can be criticised for identifying too much with its subject, perhaps even being captured by its subject. It is clear that the denizens of Dinoyo are the heroes. The villains are the outsiders, be they colonialists such as the Dutch, the thugs of paramilitaries such as the right-wing Pemuda Pancisila, and foreign supermarket chains such as Carrefour. Indeed, as Peters discusses the development of malls in the 21st century, he condemns the middle class’ air-conditioned colonialism and international capitalism's consumer culture. Linking the state to organised crime, the author documents the role of violent intimidation and arson in Surabaya's recent transformation into a city of massive shopping malls. Meanwhile, the advent of financing plans for imported Japanese motor bicycles spelled an end to the becak (pedi-cab) as a source of employment for the poor and the start of a worrisome cycle of consumer debt. While it would be unfair to accuse Peters of romanticising the humid, cramped, and poor conditions in Dinoyo, his portrait of contemporary economic growth is extremely bleak, with the city starting to resemble the urban social inequalities of Blade Runner's near future dystopia. According to this book, the Indonesian state, alternately neglectful and oppressive, is always a negative and intrusive force. The final section implies that the Densus-88 anti-terrorist unit is starting to resemble Suharto's cynical use of anti-communism, with the kampung poor becoming the real victims once again. That said, the book's only real failing is the lack of decent maps of the city. Unable to understand the hand drawn map in the book (p. 24), this reader had to consult Google Maps to find out exactly where Dinoyo is in Surabaya.
Read in conjunction with the works of Pemberton, Siegel, and Abidin Kusno (Kusno Reference Kusno2000, Reference Kusno2010, and Reference Kusno2013), Peter's portrait of Surabaya's humble Dinoyo kampung is a welcome contribution the study of urban Indonesia.
