Bagoes Wiryomartono - Traditions and Transformations of Habitation in Indonesia: Power, Architecture, and Urbanism

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Figure Inside Cover_View to the cityscape of West Jakarta, Indonesia 2016

This book is about the pertinent practices of power in Indonesia with a focus on habitation. The book explores and unfolds the meanings of the relationship between people and place that constructs, develops, sustains, and conserves their culture and habitation in Southeast Asia; this relationship is regarded as the source and generator of cultural productions in terms of the built environment, artifacts, arts, works, and collective behaviors. One of the foremost sources of power in Indonesia is the patrimonial system of culture and tradition. This system categorically values and highly favors a strong leadership and dominant personality as father figure over a sociopolitically organized system and mechanism.

The study argues that the patrimonial system is the pivotal source and condition of the political tradition of Indonesia. The tradition maintains the patronclient relationship of sociocultural and economic production that characterizes, directs, manages, develops, maintains, and sustains the development of the built environment and populations. The system is considered effective because it resists direct opposition and disagreement. Challenges against the ruling government are considered threats and dangers of the seamless whole of the community as well as a nation-state. Accordingly, unity and integrity are necessary to be thought and perceived as a safe and healthy extended family.

Until today, the patrimonial system is commensurately functioning because the vertical mobility of populations is socioeconomically restricted with high-cost education and an exclusive political career. Traditionally speaking, populations are characterized by the extreme dichotomy between the few dominating elites and massive submissive commoners. The patrimonial ordering system becomes a reasonably organizing framework of the most populous Muslims on the globe. Despite the democratic process of the public election, the system works efficiently in daily practical politics because of its top-down chain of command.

To a certain extent, the patrimonial system does not rely simply on legal formal mechanisms and apparatus but deeply rooted in the spiritual leadership and belief system of people so that the paternalistic leaders of the country are able to bring people together and mobilize the resources toward the unity in diversity. Moreover, the patrimonial system characterizes the countrys lifeworld with the language of hierarchical gestures and social position. In other words, to understand the politics of Indonesia is to comprehend the culture and tradition of the political leadership of the country.

Substantially speaking, the book comprises several case studies concerning the relationship of power and habitation with specific geographic locations, certain sociocultural groups, and historical contexts. The studies are considered interdisciplinary within the framework of environmental humanitiesarts, architecture, urban studiesand social sciencesgeography, cultural anthropology, sociology. In this system, the studies are expected to unfold, dismantle, and disclose relations, functions, constructions, and notions of history, tradition, and cultural production. However, these studies are not intended either to be critical or to be diagnostic. Rather, the studies are projected to be comprehensively divulging and unveiling the aspects of interactive connectivity between the patrimonial culture and socioculturally constructed system of habitation. The cases were carried out from the authors work and life experience and observation in Indonesia with a focus on the various aspects of environmental humanities that shape, develop, and sustain the essence and sense of habitation that includes history, arts, architecture, culture, and urbanism.