Indonesia has figured prominently in analyses of national communities and state power, especially in research about state formation outside direct political rule and institutions. Much of Benedict Anderson's landmark argument that nationalisms spread and are felt at a popular level used historical material from the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia (see Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983]). Similarly, Ann Stoler's influential thesis that colonial rule rested on creating and policing intimate boundaries of race and sex also used archival records from the Indies (see Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002]). Jan Newberry's Back Door Java, an ethnography of contemporary state and class formation through the domestic, provides an important contribution to this scholarly tradition. Newberry argues that the Indonesian state of the late twentieth century relied on and existed through the very arena that seemed most removed from official institutions, that is, the domestic sphere.

Newberry's analysis connects the idea of the domestic with political ideologies about gender and class, specifically through the Indonesian idea of the kampung. Conducted in the dense urban neighborhoods flanking the kraton of Yogyakarta, Newberry's research does not focus on the relationship of the residents with the sultan so much as with the more distant, yet arguably more suffusing, Indonesian state. The idea of the kampung holds powerful valences for Indonesians and Indonesianists alike, primarily because of its elastic ability to hold a wide spectrum of meanings, ranging from positive connotations of authenticity and community to negative connotations of scarcity and provinciality. Newberry traces the idea of the kampung as a bounded, communal space, populated with humble or “small” (wong cilik) people, to Dutch policies that reoriented urban neighborhoods away from ethnic enclaves and toward more broad associations of poverty, commensality, and rusticity. Building on this history, the book traces how the Suharto New Order regime (1965–98) linked kampung life to the creation of a specific kind of Indonesian urban working class.

Newberry uses the material and metaphoric idea of the domestic to frame her argument, weaving together close analysis of kin relations, resource distribution, and neighborhood political organizations. The book is organized into three analytic conceptions of the domestic: house (structure), household (economic unit), and home (affective unit), linking these through the feature of the back door. The door is a marvelous device for Newberry's thesis. On the one hand, the kampung appears to be thoroughly ordered in the methods familiar to scholars of the New Order, in part through entrance to homes via the front door. On the other hand, neighbor and kin ties could not function smoothly without private, quiet access to the domestic sphere via the back door, through which neighbors could avail themselves other with less expectation or shame. Indeed, choosing to not install a back door on a new house was a read as a powerful rejection of sociality. Thus, even as a kampung was envisioned by residents and outsiders as a tightly bounded social space, it was simultaneously opened to state programs that promised to help the very people thought to live in kampungs, programs that then generated new internal boundaries within the neighborhood.

An example of this dynamic is evident in Newberry's analysis of gotong royong, the mutual or communal aid system promoted by state propaganda as a traditional feature of kampung culture. Newberry links the domestic sphere to government programs for gendered citizenship and development, especially Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga, to the creation of the national figure of the full-time housewife, an ideal woman who both tended home and earned supplemental income. Official women's development programs used gotong royong to suggest that distributing economic resources was an expression of a shared cultural past and a path to a brighter national future. Formal gotong royong events such as slametans and arisan (a rotating credit lottery), which importantly could only occur in a home and through which women appeared to be expressing gendered and cultural essences, overlapped with the New Order's emphasis on domesticity as women's role in national development. As Newberry emphasizes, these conceptions of femininity and class were mutually reinforcing, and potentially beneficial for those women (and their male kin) who could perform these roles. However, expectations of domestic generosity, mixed with the limitations of poverty, made the effects uneven, even exclusionary. For those who could not participate easily in the material and status requirements of gotong royong events, entering a host's home could be almost viscerally difficult. Newberry shows how the state's framing of gotong royong as a uniquely kampung tradition allowed it to then be promoted as a solution for precisely the kind of people who live in kampungs (i.e., the poor).

Newberry's book will be of great interest to scholars of Indonesia, but it also should be read by scholars of feminist and political theory. Her research reveals the value of ethnographic depth for analyses of state formation, as it highlights how the New Order state not only generated and distributed abstract ideas about domestic and national life, but brought them together in material forms that generated interpretations about gender and class, egalitarianism, and failure. These strengths also make the book an excellent text with which to teach, for it models the strength of connecting ethnographic detail to analytic precision.