Coming of Age on the Streets of Java: Coping with Marginality, Stigma and Illness 9783839436080

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note
1 Theorizing Life on the Streets
Street-related Careers
Marginality and Stigma
Affect, Emotion, Emotive, Feeling
The Chapters
2 Fieldwork and Ethnography
Collaborative Action Research
Actor-centered Emotion Talk
Life Stories, Emotive Episodes
and Extended Case Studies
Affective Scholarship
3 ‘City with a Warm Heart’
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Javanese Hierarchies and ‘Javanese Ways’
Society Margins: ‘Jalanan’
Refinement, Balance and Harmony
‘Budi Pekerti‘
4 Becoming Tekyan
The Protagonists
Arriving on the Streets of Yogyakarta
The Atomization of the ‘GIRLI Movement’
Komunitas Bendoro
Komunitas Congklak
Passages and Attuned Feelings of Belonging
5 Being Tekyan
Adventure, Freedom and Style
Masculinities, Patronage and Leadership
Music Work
Tekyan: Resistance, Subversion or ‘Javanese Way’?
6 Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention
Avoidance Fields
Attention Fields
The Mutual Benefits of Empathy
7 Leaving the Streets
Monchi: Coping with HIV-AIDS
Harvey: Go Organic!
Monchi: Marrying a Family
Kris: An Episode of ‘Craziness’
Jim: Confronting Stigma
Monchi: The ‘Rebel Body’
‘Revelation Blues’
8 Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’
Appendix
Data Analysis
List of Acronyms
List of Figures and Images
Glossary
Bibliography

Citation preview

Thomas Stodulka Coming of Age on the Streets of Java

EmotionsKulturen / EmotionCultures | Band / Volume 2

Die Reihe EmotionsKulturen / EmotionCultures versammelt Arbeiten, die sich aktuellen Fragestellungen der Emotionsforschung aus einer innovativen transdisziplinären Perspektive annähern. Im Mittelpunkt stehen vornehmlich empirische Studien aus dem Bereich der Sozial-und Kulturanthropologie, die – in jeweils enger theoretischer und/oder methodischer Verzahnung mit weiteren Disziplinen – Prozesse der sozialen und kulturellen Modellierung von Emotionen und Affekten untersuchen. Zentrale Themenspektren betreffen die Genese emotionaler Ordnungen in ihrem Wechselspiel mit sozio-kulturellen, historischen und politischen Strukturen. Die Reihe spannt dabei den Bogen von der Sozialisation von Emotionen in der Kindheit bis zu deren Transformation im Alter und schließt damit auch konfliktive Rekonfigurationen des Emotionalen vor dem Hintergrund veränderlicher Lebensbedingungen mit ein. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt auf den mit Migrations-, Globalisierungs- und Transnationalisierungsprozessen verbundenen emotionalen und affektiven Dynamiken.

The series EmotionCultures is a collection of works centered around current questions raised in interdisciplinary and innovative research on emotions. At the core are empirical studies from Social and Cultural Anthropology that analyze processes of social and cultural modeling of emotions – always in close theoretical as well as methodological connection to various other disciplines. Key topics concern the generation of emotional codes in interaction with socio-cultural, historical, and political structures. Thus, this series ranges from the socialization of emotions in childhood to their transformation with increasing age. It incorporates reconfigurations of emotions against the backdrop of changing life conditions. Furthermore, a particular focus rests upon the emotional dynamics inherent to processes of migration, globalization, and transnationalization.

Die Reihe wird herausgegeben von/is edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler & Anita von Poser. Editorial Board: Prof. Dr. Helene Basu, Ethnologie, Universität Münster Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Psychiatrie & Philosophie, Universität Heidelberg Prof. Dr. Douglas Hollan, Social Anthropology, UCLA Prof. Dr. Heidi Keller, Psychologie, Universität Osnabrück Prof. Dr. Christian von Scheve, Soziologie, FU Berlin Dr. Maruska Svasek, Social Anthropology, Queens University Belfast

Thomas Jan Stodulka is Junior Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Thomas Stodulka

Coming of Age on the Streets of Java Coping with Marginality, Stigma and Illness

For Vicky and Milos

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Thomas Stodulka, Yogyakarta, 2008 Typeset by Francisco Bragança, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3608-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3608-0

“If adolescents are only plunged into difficulties and distress because of conditions in their social environment, then by all means let us so modify that environment as to reduce this stress and eleminate this strain and anguish of adjustment.” Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1926: 161)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments | 11 Note | 13 1 Theorizing Life on the Streets | 15 Street-related Careers | 18 Marginality and Stigma | 22 Affect, Emotion, Emotive, Feeling | 26 The Chapters | 32 2 Fieldwork and Ethnography | 35 Collaborative Action Research | 35 Actor-centered Emotion Talk | 39 Life Stories, Emotive Episodes and Extended Case Studies | 40 Affective Scholarship | 42

3 ‘City with a Warm Heart’ | 45 Yogyakarta, Indonesia | 45 Javanese Hierarchies and ‘Javanese Ways’ | 54 Society Margins: ‘Jalanan’ | 58 Refinement, Balance and Harmony | 59 ‘Budi Pekerti‘ | 61 4 Becoming Tekyan | 65 The Protagonists | 65 Arriving on the Streets of Yogyakarta | 74 The Atomization of the ‘GIRLI Movement’ | 77 Komunitas Bendoro | 79 Komunitas Congklak | 86 Passages and Attuned Feelings of Belonging | 93

5 Being Tekyan | 97 Adventure, Freedom and Style | 97 Masculinities, Patronage and Leadership | 102 Music Work | 108 Tekyan: Resistance, Subversion or ‘Javanese Way’? | 111 6 Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention | 113 Avoidance Fields | 114 Attention Fields | 121 The Mutual Benefits of Empathy | 160

7 Leaving the Streets | 167 Monchi: Coping with HIV-AIDS | 167 Harvey: Go Organic! | 176 Monchi: Marrying a Family | 179 Kris: An Episode of ‘Craziness’ | 184 Jim: Confronting Stigma | 190 Monchi: The ‘Rebel Body’ | 224 ‘Revelation Blues’ | 235 8 Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’ | 241 Appendix | 251 Data Analysis | 251 List of Acronyms | 257 List of Figures and Images | 259 Glossary | 261

Bibliography | 267

Acknowledgments

The collaboration with friends and colleagues underlying this book has generated a wide array of experiences and insights that have profoundly shaped my coming of age as person and anthropologist. I keep the lessons that I have learned cherished as paramount guidance of navigating through everyday life and work. Fifteen years of activism, research, a lot of laughing and also a few tears have created companionships that are too numerous to list here. I want to apologize in advance to those who cannot be mentioned in person. I want to thank my wife and colleague Victoria Kumala Sakti, who has read (and re-read) the manuscript. Her empathic contribution to the research process and analytical clarity to strengthen arguments was indispensable. A special acknowledgement must go to my father and mother, Jan Stodulka and Roswitha Stodulka, together with her partner, and my brother Stephan, who have been supportive and encouraging through all the years of wandering between Yogyakarta and various places of residence in Europe during both stable and unstable times. Ralf Göres, who has been a priceless friend both ‘in the field’ and ‘at the writing desk’ needs extra mentioning. My deepest respect and gratitude must go to all of the friends in Yogyakarta who let me participate in their lives and continue to share their experiences of their own and their families’ lives after having exited the streets. I hope that our encounters over the years have at least had a slight share of the positive life-changing impact they exerted on me. I would particularly like to express my appreciation of ‘Harvey’, ‘Jempol’, ‘Kris’, ‘Jim’ and my dear friend and the ethnography’s main protagonist ‘Monchi’ and his family. They will always remain a source of inspiration to me. I want to thank Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and her husband Martin Rössler, who have supported me since my undergraduate studies and provided me with both academic and personal advice and patience so that I could explore and develop the paths I have taken. My gratitude extends to Hansjörg Dilger, James Davies and Lenore Manderson, who have set me on the publishing path through their advice and meticulous ‘word surgeries’. I am grateful to my colleagues at the former Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion and the Institute of Social

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and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin for their inspiration and support. In particular, I would like to thank Christian von Scheve, Dominik Mattes, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Jan Slaby, Katja Liebal, Manfred Holodynski, Nasima Selim, Oliver Lubrich, Samia Dinkelaker and many more for their inspiration and advice. I am thankful to the German Academic Exchange Service in Bonn and Jakarta (DAAD), the Institute of Indonesian Sciences in Jakarta (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, LIPI), the immigration office in Yogyakarta and the many more national, regional and local administration officers, who were helpful in providing me with research and residence permits. I am thankful for the assistance and cooperation of the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) administration in Yogyakarta and I am indebted to my counterpart and host at the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Population and Policy Studies, Drs. Pande Made Kutanegara. Judith Schlehe was especially helpful in linking me with UGM Yogyakarta, and I am grateful for her encouragement and advice at the end of my longest period of fieldwork in winter 2007/2008. The VolkswagenFoundation has genereoulsy supported me throughout the last three years. Although I am solely responsible for any shortcomings, this study has prospered from many collaborative projects in Yogyakarta. The eco-social project and vegetarian restaurant Milas has become a second home to me. Without the support, care and friendship of Ebby and Coky, this project would have never manifested. I am indebted to Pagio and Syaheb, who kept our jointly initiated Shelter and Community Health Project for HIV-positive street people, the Rumah Sehat Lestari (RSL), running during the years that I struggled to finish this book and other writings. Assisting in setting up the independent and alternative cinema-café KINOKI between 2005 and 2008 was the peak of my ‘Jogja heydays’. Besides all the vibrant film activists (especially Shalahuddin Siregar), I have to particularly thank the late Elida Tamalagi and Agung Prihartono for keeping me ‘chained’ to Jogja. I am further indebted to the activists, researchers and volunteers of YLPS Humana, PKBI Yogyakarta (in particular Mas Novan, Mas Gama, Mabak Nurul), Vesta (in particular Mas Ucup), Kebaya (in particular Mami Vin), Indriya-nati, Taabah, PUSDEMA of Universitas Sanata Dharma (in particular Roma Baskara and Mas Tri Subagya), and Yanri Subronto from Klinik Edelweiss at Sarjito Hospital Yogyakarta. I am thankful to Laine Berman, Harriot Beazley, Ingvild Solvang and Bambang Ertanto for being such great people and having ‘set the field’ by writing critical essays and ethnographies on ‘street life’ in Yogyakarta during the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, I want to thank Joan Scanlan and Eva Streifeneder for their great assistance in language editing and formatting of previous versions of this book. I am grateful for the assistance of the editors of the EmotionCulture series and Annika Linnemann for her uncomplicated support in turning this manuscript into a book.

Note

The names of street communities, the protagonists, and their friends have been anonymized. Except otherwise requested, the names of doctors, researchers, or activists, who have publicly appeared in terms of their positions have not been changed in order to give them the credit and respect they deserve. To better navigate through the many names that are mentioned in the following chapters, I will present community maps of the komunitas Bendoro and the komunitas Congklak in chapter 4 (see Figures 1 and 2). The appendix comprises of the data analysis framework, a list of images and figures of Indonesian, Javanese and colloquial terms. Local terms and their particular meanings are cited in brackets after their English translation within the text in those cases where it is necessary for a better understanding. In reference to emotion terms that are indicated in their original version in the text, the translated versions of the English terms are reduced to their dominant translations and are put into single quotation marks. Concise definitions are presented in footnotes and in the glossary; central emotion words and concepts are theoretically and ethnographically discussed and illustrated throughout the text. Indonesian and Javanese terms are mentioned in their singular form for better reading purposes. Due to the multidimensionality of the data and the different ways of documentation, I indicate their quality by different forms of size, caption and font. This might hamper the reading fluency, but is important to me in terms of accountability. English and Indonesian terms that refer to socially constructed categories, labels, and attributions are marked by single quotation marks. Again, Indonesian terms are italicized: Tattoos can equally be considered as identity markers, as important communicators of shared ideologies, or as a rejection of being ‘spoilt’ and ‘childish’.

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Or: In everyday social practice and language, labels like ‘gembel’, ‘nakal’, ‘kotor’, ‘preman’ articulated a stigmatizing discourse of ‘immorality’ on behalf of the tekyan.

Indonesian terms that were previously defined either in the text or in the glossary, are italicized without single quotation marks: I want to argue that the tekyans’ practices of cuek can be considered as a form of collective reappraisal of situations.

Double quotation marks indicate direct speech that was recorded by an audiodevice and has been transcribed and translated into English: Gama Triono, head of the local PKBI Yogykarta, explained the following: “I think that that their knowledge about HIV is still limited, that the virus can only infect ‘troubled people’ (orang-orang yang bermasalah), […].”

Or refers to quotes from (translated) documents: Let me quote passages from the report, which we wrote to the head of the hospital’s communicable disease unit: “We experienced an encounter with a doctor who had never entered the room before […].”

Conversations that were not recorded, but documented by memory protocols, are italicized: How often did you change schools?, I asked him once during a long walk along the beach of Parangtritis in late 2006. He smiled at me and took a deep breath before he answered soft-spokenly: Well, I do not really remember. I think four times.

1 Theorizing Life on the Streets

My enthusiasm for so-called ‘street children’ developed as early as I was still a student in Social, Cultural and Visual Anthropology. Triggered by media reports on ‘street children’ in Brazil, Guatemala, Uganda and South Africa, I became eager to learn how the situation was like for ‘street children’ in Indonesia, where my regional interest lay (and still lies). I intended to depict the ‘situation’ of young street-related adolescents by making a documentary about them. Still a student that intended to test his ethnographic skills, I prepared for assumingly demanding six months during my first visit to Yogyakarta in 2001. I tried to imagine how I could ever get close to supposedly glue-sniffing, extremely violent and rude, opportunistic kids that would take advantage of me on every possible occasion. Yet, these assumptions were shattered. None of the stereotypes fit with the boys and young men that I met at an open house for ‘street children’ at Parangtritis beach, some 20 kilometers south of the Javanese court city. What struck me most at that time were the friendliness, the openmindedness and good manners with which the adolescents, who described themselves either as anak Bendoro or as anak Congklak1, approached me. After spending three months at the bamboo hut, where we made handicrafts together that were sold to a local street art gallery and exchanged language skills, which included first insights into their very special bahasa senang (‘happy language’), a group of three asked me to join them to sleep at their community hangout near the Congklak street junction in the North of the city. 21 year-old Monchi, Kris (19 years) and Harvey (25 years) assured me that they would take care of me and that if I didn’t like it there I could leave at any time. Out of curiosity and the feeling of being offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn more about life on the streets in a close-up, I agreed. In retrospect, this decision (presumably based on my desire and longing to establish field rapport and 1 | Anak (Indon.) can mean ‘child’ or ‘beloning/relating to someone or something’. In this context, the terms can mean both ‘Bendoro kid/Congklak kid’ or ‘relating to the Congklak/Bendoro street junctions’.

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immerse myself into the young men’s lives) marked the beginning of a series of events that would keep me attached to them for over fifteen years now. I spent three months with the komunitas Congklak near one of the city’s biggest six-lane street junctions and joined their night sessions of joking and drinking, busking (ngamen) during the day, running away from security officers, and sharing leftover food (hoyen). Sometimes I joined Monchi and the others to hang out (nongkrong) at the Bendoro street junction in the city center near bustling Malioboro Street. As I learned, this was the domain of the anak Bendoro, a community that shared a similar history and ideology with the anak Congklak, and whose members gave shelter to each other in case it was needed. I revisited Yogyakarta again in 2005 for three months. Once there, I was invited to the wedding of Monchi, the emerging key informant and main protagonist of this ethnography. Since he had finally broken ties with his family at the age of 15 in 1995, he asked me to represent his part of the new adjoining families. It was only then as I observed the beaming newlyweds, nearly four years after the beach hut and street junction experiences in 2001, that I slowly realized that the lives of the former ‘street kids’ had changed considerably. Whereas the biggest change in my life was my recently acquired Master’s degree in Anthropology, many of them had become husbands and fathers who attempted to exit the streets. With the wedding transpiring as a mirror, the penny inside my head dropped and I realized that with age and the maturing of bodies, the behavior, the collective rituals on the streets, the identification with particular street-related communities, former alliances, and their futureoriented dreams and desires that I had frozen in my memories over four years had changed and continued to shift. Another very striking occurrence was the slow but steady rise of HIV infections affecting street-related communities. Some of the former visitors of the bamboo hut at the beach had died and others were chronically ill or diagnosed HIV-positive in the years to come. I was not prepared for these rapid changes. Their bodies’ physical decay and the related social suffering affected me deeply. Moreover, I had the impression that the young men actually disapproved of my plans to conduct research and write about them. A few days after then 24 year-old Monchi’s wedding, we had the following conversation: Thomas: What would you think if I lived with you again, but this time for longer? Monchi: Why? T: I would like to know more about you and your community. The last time I enjoyed it very much and I am still very fascinated by your way of life. You made quite an impression on me. M: Yes, that was really a great time. We were still young. And you are a crazy man. But why do you want to stay with us again? You can stay in a better place now.

Theorizing Life on the Streets T: I would like to know more. And I would like other people to know more about how life here really is. We could write a book together. M: Why do you want to write about us? Better stay our friend! You know, I’m not a robot who tells you his stories in order to provide you with a manual on how to use us.

The animosity against researchers did neither really strike nor did it surprise me at that time. During my first stay in Yogyakarta I had heard stories about anthropologists and NGO-workers and how they were selfish and mean and that they had forgotten about them after they published their books or got a steady position at campus or an international NGO. Then, I read the young men’s refusal to cooperate as a strategy to subvert irreconcilable power asymmetries between the researcher and the researched. In retrospect, I understood that their narratives about other ‘bad’ anthropologists (that were ‘so different from me’, the ‘good’ anthropologist) might not have necessarily been based on their severe ethical transgressions; they were a very subtle, but effective technique to discipline and educate their guest in their terms. The young adults knew what I wanted from them: stories, authenticity and a feeling of belonging. Then, I had to find out what I could offer them in order to remain a ‘good’ anthropologist. The times had changed and the adolescents have matured into young men with ‘adult’ problems. The times of chasing girls, experimenting with drugs and making motorbikes and guitars disappear in the one place and appear in another seemed to have passed. Their stories were now circling around marriage trouble, providing for the family, exiting the streets and integrating into neighborhoods, or ways of coping with chronic illnesses. Upon my return to the field another year later in 2006, this time for twenty months, we had to readjust our mutual expectations and imaginations. After mutually exhausting and subtle psychological micro-battles regarding my role as friend, researcher, and activist, I began to understand how the street-related young men positioned me and what they expected from me. They wanted attention; full attention – economically, socially and emotionally. This book describes that the young men’s ways of avoiding harm in some and seeking attention in other situations when navigating the city did not only apply to their encounters with me, the anthropologist-activist. Over the years it became apparent that I was not as exceptional as I thought I was during some phases of fieldwork, but that their practices of encountering me were ultimately related to, what I call, their ‘emotional economies’, a noticeable style of coping with marginality and stigmatization. To put these subtle affective and emotive practices into perspective, I focus on the extended street careers of five male protagonists and their friends, and scrutinize the adversities they encountered with regard to their maturing and rebelling bodies, changing selfascriptions and social role expectancies during their coming of age. I focus on five life stories without omitting significant experiences of their street-related

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cohorts. The protagonists’ transitions from street-related ‘children’ to ‘youth’ to ‘adults’ shall be analyzed with a critical research perspective, which considers bodies’ physical maturation and rebellion as crucial for age-related techniques of coming to terms with marginalized resources and contesting stigmatized social identities. As the chapters proceed, I will emphasize that the coming of age on the streets was not only economically, socially and physically demanding, but also an emotionally arduous process. Moral stigmatization, intersecting marginalities and rebelling bodies in times of illness did not only influence and limit the protagonists’ income generating opportunities, but also affected their selfperception and subjective well-being. My ultimate aim remains to emphasize the protagonists’ resilience and remarkable social and emotive skills in transforming marginality and stigma into vital socio-economic cooperation and affective ties with various actors of their widespread social networks. Since street-related coming of age and/or socialization theories are predominantly rooted within the boundaries of disciplinary rationales I take in a more integrative anthropological perspective. My training as social, cultural and visual anthropologist and my subsequent interdisciplinary exposure (predominantly to psychology, sociology, neuro-anthropology and philosophy) as doctorate student and post-doctoral scholar over the course of the last ten years will color the sections in this chapter, in which I intend to elaborate the theoretical perspective in relation to the situations, events and narratives that I had encountered ‘in the field’.

S TREE T- REL ATED C AREERS The ‘street child’ label is ineffective for practical (policy making) as well as academic purposes. This becomes evident when one considers the label itself and asks: whose interests are served by the labeling of ‘street children’, and whom does this label represent (de Benitez 2011; de Moura 2002; Glauser 1990; Panter-Brick 2002)? Benno Glauser (1990: 143) argued in his groundbreaking contribution Street Children: Deconstructing a Construct almost thirty years ago, “when talking about street children we may do so without having a clear idea about what we are talking and, in addition, we take the risk of mutual misunderstanding”. And yet, the ‘street child’ remains a label that sells from a media perspective and wins potential donors for the appeals of transnational NGOs (Aptekar/Stoecklin 2014; Glauser 1990). Giuseppe Bolotta (2016) and Didier Fassin (2012; 2013) have discussed such global developments in our age of humanitarian reason as a ‘passionate ethos’: “an extreme attention to human suffering produced by the continuous staging, production, and circulation of

Theorizing Life on the Streets

discourses and images concerning grief and pain” (Bolotta 2016). Based on a propagated simplicity of solving ‘street children’s’ problems by donating money to global and local social welfare institutions, the ‘street child’ seems a particularly suitable opportunity for various people along the organizational chain of humanitarian reason (from donors to those who make a living by working with them face-to-face) to ‘do good’ and help relocate the children and adolescents into more adequate places (i.e. asylums, families, extended families, or orphanages). Such simplified problem solving mechanisms often target symptoms but not causes of homelessness, stigmatization and marginalization. ‘Street children’ help to satisfy the urge to ‘do good’ without the need of a deeper involvement in political action or a more profound analysis of underlying social conditions. Anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick describes the concept of the ‘street child’ as a highly manipulated construct, which ultimately represents the needs of welfare agencies and governments. She is convinced that numbers of children on the street are often inflated, essentially produced to justify the agency’s work. She argues that, “At best, these estimates rest upon largely elastic and nebulous definitions of homeless and working children. At worst they are made up.” (2002: 153) The lack of concise definitions does not only provoke welfare agencies’ (intentional or unintentional) exaggerations in order to legitimize their own existence and funding, but on the contrary to the downplaying of the numbers by governments in order to retreat from their social welfare obligations. “In brief, the statistics are problematic: They reflect the particular agendas of organizations that collect them, and they are part of the construction and the management of homelessness as a social issue.” (Panter-Brick 2002: 154) The oversimplification of the ‘street child’ label is not limited to the mass media and the project-oriented agendas of NGOs, but also affects the social and cultural sciences (de Benítez 2011; de Moura 2002). The pressure to publish with all speed and the difficulties to conduct research with street-related persons and communities beyond the brokerage and the open houses of NGOs can result in methodological rapid assessments that create analyses that are strikingly similar to media and NGO-discourses. Referring to theory-building in a more general perspective Henrietta Moore stresses that it is crucial to acknowledge that academic discourses are adopted and subverted by media and other public discourses, but for our work as anthropologists it is equally important to acknowledge the influences of public discourses, global and local folk models on the construction of academic theories (1994: 135). Olga Nieuwenhuys describes the ‘street child’ as a “category of discourse construed around the children of the poor, with a firm rooting, as remarked, in the history of the West” (2001: 552). More provocatively, the ‘street child’ is a social category, arbitrarily applied to urban settings that have hardly more in common than the existence of streets and children. Contrary to de Moura and

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Nieuwenhuys, Panter-Brick describes the anthropological research on ‘street children’ since the late 1990s in more positive words compared to media and social welfare discourses. She assures us, that “several discourses about street children compete for attention. One is journalistic, descriptive and atheoretical, targeted to mass audiences; another is research-focused and aims to promote critical understanding and to influence effective policy development.” (2002: 156) The latter is where I hope this book is heading. Without embellishing the harsh social and spatial environment of streetrelated persons, anthropology has demonstrated that ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’ and also ‘youth’ are best discussed as social and cultural constructions of maturing bodies (Herdt/Leavitt 1998; Korbin/Anderson-Fye 2011; Lancy 2008; LeVine 2011; Manderson/Liamputtong 2002; Worthman 1998). The childhood and adolescence of European contexts as it emerged since the 18th century (Ariès 1973) is a historical, social and cultural phenomenon that has highly influenced the perspectives of globalized upper and middle classes. Lewis Aptekar and Behaile Abebe describe the scientific practice of comparing the lives of ‘street children’ in non-European or non-Northern American contexts with an idealized concept of a globalized middle class as a “contemptuous ethnocentrism” (1997:478). Such ethnocentric perspectives denied children who worked on farms, in manufactories, or on big city streets their own ‘childhood’. They are construed as “a subject defined by a ‘lack’. Not only do children in the global South lack childhood as it is constituted in the North, but their economic savvy disrupts ideas of children as innocents and so they transgress boundaries between constructions of adult and children.” (Aitken 2001: 124) The ‘happy childhood’ concept creates differences that divide the world into hierarchically organized zones of a humanistic and moral evolution, in which the globalized middle classes emerge as moral authorities over ‘Others’ who send their children to work. Accordingly, Aitken asks, whether we are “led to believe that contemporary Western society is much more complex in its moral stance regarding children whereas early modern society, and poor neighbourhoods and parts of the global South today, have a warped or nonexistent notion of childhood?” (2001: 124) Protecting children’s and adolescents’ rights to maturation, education, health and subjective well-being is paramount, but only if the ‘othering’ that remains deeply ingrained in the ‘street child’ label is scrutinized, and local perspectives of those affected are taken into accounts of advocacy, activism and research. To conclude this section on a more constructive note, I shall integrate the lessons learned from previous debates into a definition of street-relatedness as it applies to children, youth, and adults. Owing to de Benítez’ concept of

Theorizing Life on the Streets

‘street-connected children’ (2011), I prefer the term ‘street-related persons’, which I define very broadly as those, who have left their families or primary caretakers either through exclusions, self-conscious decisions, or combinations of both; who use the streets in ways that are considered socially and culturally inadequate when compared to their local peers; who integrate themselves in fluid communities whose members do not only share similar past experiences, but also future-oriented targets and motivations to make a living; who identify themselves with and who share a temporary feeling of belonging to these communities. When differentiating between ‘children’, ‘adolescents’ or ‘youths’, and ‘adults’, I will not exclusively refer to chronological age, but local perspectives on the life course and maturing bodies. This perspective relates to ethnographybased insights that ‘street children’, ‘street youths’ and ‘street adults’ do not necessarily form exclusive age-specific communities. On the contrary, as we shall see in the context of Yogyakarta, people of different ages and life stages lived together in the same street-related communities. The extension of the ‘street career’ concept as derived from pedagogic and applied social work studies proves helpful in the anthropological aspiration to include the lifeworlds of those street-related persons into our analyses that cannot be subsumed under the misleading term ‘street children’. With few exceptions (Brown 2011; Evans 2006; Glauser 1990; Hecht 1998; Lucchini 1993; Panter-Brick 2000; Visano 1990) – which at least mention the importance of a ‘street career’ approach in their outlooks – the temporality of the ‘street children’ phenomenon has rarely been systematically addressed within anthropological studies. As a request for future ethnographies, Ruth Evans urges ethnographers to consider a ‘street career’ approach in their analyses, since it can prevent the anthropologist from snapshot research and instead bring into focus past life stories, contemporary practices and future outcomes of street life (2006: 110; see also Ennew/Swart-Kruger 2003). So far, Evans’ claims remain requests within anthropology as street-related children, adolescents and even more so adults slowly disappeared from ethnographic research and social welfare agendas during the last ten years. A recently published reader on ‘cross-cultural perspectives on street children’ by the two senior scholars Lewis Aptekar and Daniel Stoecklin (2014) and Paula Heinonen’s (2011) ethnography on street children and youth gangs in Ethiopia might hint to a renewed (publishers’) interest in the issue. The North American pedagogue Jeff Karabanow (2004; 2006; 2008) gives an excellent example by applying the concept of the ‘street career’ in his analyses of Canadian and Guatemalan ‘street youths’. Like Evans, the author draws on the notion of ‘careers’, originally espoused by sociologists such as Howard Becker (1963) and Erving Goffman (1963), in an attempt to understand how youths move towards or/and away from street life. By drawing on the

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concepts of the classical US sociology of Anselm Strauss ‘careers’ are perceived as “(1) the course of any experienced phenomenon as it evolves over time [...] and (2) the actions and interactions contributing to its evolution” (1993: 53-4). When analyzing the life courses of street-related persons, it is crucial to consider all actions and interactions that contribute to the development of the ‘career’, not only supposedly deviant social encounters and networks. Although Karabanow’s model is rooted in different local and disciplinary contexts it proves valuable for my analysis of street-related young adults’ life stories in Yogyakarta. The model highlights the agency of street-related persons, and does not approach their lives in a deterministic way that translates negative turning points in life into a deviant ‘street world’ (Karabanow 2006: 51). The author highlights that streetrelated persons do not only dwell in deviant ‘street worlds’, but also relate to the social world around them by constructing and maintaining extensive socioeconomic networks over sometimes many years. The author’s classification of the ‘street career’ into the five stages of pre-entry conditions; contemplation; entering street life; building identity; and exiting or disengagement has also influenced the structure of this ethnography’s alignment of chapters. To integrate pedagogic and social work perspectives that are deeply ingrained in the literature on street-related communities into the anthropological study of the experience of persons with regard to structural violence I consider theoretical discussions of marginality and stigma helpful. Focusing on structural and inter-personal power asymmetries and social inequalities prevents an essentialized outlook on coming of age processes. Moreover, the integration of street-related persons’ emotional experiences vis-à-vis their social encounters also in relation to their rebelling bodies (Scheper-Hughes 1990) and changing social role expectancies over the life course, promises insights into the protagonists’ sense of self-efficacy, coping with stigma and marginality and their motivations to live on and exit the street at a certain point of time.

M ARGINALIT Y AND S TIGMA Marginal living conditions are not considered as fixed states, but possess an innate potential for social change. Societal marginality alludes to social conditions in terms of lacking opportunities, resources and skills compared to ‘mainstream society’. These social inequalities can be related to restricted participation in public decision-making as well as low self-esteem. The discrimination of marginalized people frequently arises from markers like race, gender, sexualities, ethnicity, culture, social class or age. Spatial marginality delineates geographical disadvantages, which include a geographically obstructed accessibility to economic centers, lacking infrastructure or an exclusion from technological advancements (Gurung/Kollmair 2005: 13). In social and human

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geography, spatial marginality is further typified into macro-spatial (between central locations and areas distant from economic activity, i.e. the metropolis – countryside divide), micro-spatial (between geographically closer locations and areas, i.e. urban townships within metropolitan areas), and in situ-spatial marginality (within very small territories, i.e. in areas of urban gentrification where wealthier people move into less prosperous neighborhoods). These concepts are helpful analytical guidance, but seem suspiciously clearcut when applied to anthropological studies of lifeworlds, which focus on complex intersections and frictions of power asymmetries and how they affect and are affected by collectives and individuals (Boellstorff 2005; Chuengsatiansup 2001; Li 1999; Tsing 1993; 2005). Anthropological definitions stress the relational dimensions of marginality as contested asymmetric power relationships between self-claimed or ascribed centers and constructed peripheries. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004) describe margins as a space where power is exercised but where its implementation cannot be ensured (Bubandt 2014). Various authors have insinuated that the stigmatization and marginalization of persons and communities are closely related (Baskara 2014; Boellstorff 2014; Sakti 2014; Stodulka 2014b; Thajib 2014), but a combined theoretical and analytical perspective is yet to transpire. A combined approach might nurture an understanding of the experiential dimensions of how it feels to live at the margins of a system one aspires to, or is expected to belong to (Röttger-Rössler/ Stodulka 2014). A combined perspective focuses on the interplay between the moral and affective dimensions of the street-related young men’s coming of age in a social architecture of exclusion, discrimination and structural violence. This book illustrates that stigma theory contributes to discussions of local moralities and how related discourses influenced street-related children, adolescents and young adults’ ways of dealing with marginal social, cultural and economic resources. It shows how the protagonists’ experiences and practices of dealing with everyday adversities were deeply connected to the interplay between marginalized resources and stigmatized identities. Monchi, for example, tried to get access to the kampung2 after leaving the streets, but his own and his new family’s inscribed stigmatization and marginality made them prone to repeated spatial eviction and social exclusion, or when Jim recovered from AIDS-related illness and was released from hospital, but had nowhere to go to (chapter 7). Discussing marginality in the context of stigmatization 2 | Kampung (Indon.): a closed social community, which is organized along strict social and cultural rules and norms of conduct. Kampung life is strongly ritualized and comprises of various status-related social duties and economic obligations of mutual help (gotong royong). Java’s cities are both geographically and socially structured as mega-clusters of thousands of kampung, which are only interrupted by the commercial units and centers along the cities’ highways or big roads.

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helps to understand why marginal living conditions can stick like a parasitic worm that causes severe fever and pain, when all one actually needed to do is to take an anti-worm pill. The problem with marginality is not the worm, or a lack of knowledge about the pill, but the weak social and physical body, the closed doors and cut-off opportunities of articulation and access that prevents the marginalized from taking and swallowing it. The protagonists did not keep falling back into various forms of drama, disaster and adversity, because they were incapable of coping and contesting their marginal resources. Those who insinuated to their assumed immorality kept pushing them back into vicious stigma-marginality circles. In his seminal book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman defined stigma as an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” (1963: 12). Although the author advised researchers to focus on the relational aspect of stigma3, subsequent approaches defined stigma as a mark in the person. Only during the early 2000s, social psychologists (Crocker/Major/ Steele 1998; Heatherton et al. 2000; Lewis 1998; Major/O’Brien 2005) and social medicine scholars (Corrigan/Watson 2002; Sayce 1998; Yang et al. 2007) have begun to theorize stigma as a social construction, relational to the sociocultural, political, and historical context and its local hierarchies. This relational turn situates stigma in its socio-cultural environment and power asymmetries between stigmatizers, bystanders, and the stigmatized, by actually adopting anthropological marginality frameworks. Accordingly, the medical sociologists Bruce Link and Jo Phelan (2001) argue that a stigma can be identified when particular ‘others’ are distinguished and labeled ‘different’, their ‘difference’ is associated with negative attributes, ‘they’ are separated from ‘us’, and finally ascribed a status loss that results in ‘their’ discrimination. In an extension of this decidedly cognitive perspective, epidemiologist Lawrence Yang and anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (2008) advanced a stigma model that is more sensitive to cultural and moral dimensions. It elaborates how the negative changes in a person’s ascribed moral status result in the deprivation of an essential social position by limiting his or her ability to mobilize social capital when interacting with others. The authors define stigma as a consecutive chain of changes (of a person’s ascribed moral status based on local models of morality), deprivations (of essential social esteem leading to social inequality), and limitations (of social mobility, which includes a high potential for marginalization). Stigma never exclusively 3 | “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself.” (Goffman 1963: 13)

Theorizing Life on the Streets

affects individuals, but stigma-related emotions dissolve into the social and affective network of one’s family and community. Regarding the transition of stigma-related emotions from the stigmatized person to the collective, Veena Das emphasizes that stigma should not be treated as an individual affair, but “as a matter of connected body-selves” (2001). At the interpersonal level, a stigma comprises all social interactive forms of discrimination, distancing, rejection and marginalization. In other words, stigma is contagious in terms of the shared emotions between the stigmatized person, her or his partners, friends, family, and community. Stigma does not only affect the stigmatized person but also those associated with him or her. Depending on the visibility of the stigma, the fear of transmission and contagion can result in hiding behavior and silencing on behalf of the affected and co-affected persons, and their marginalization, isolation and exclusion by opinion-leaders and the wider public. Contesting a stigma is particularly arduous since it deprives persons or whole communities of their social positions as moral beings and most likely triggers rather paralyzing shame-like emotions. Because stigma and marginality are considered as processes and relations between persons, communities and institutions, or any combination thereof, they can be increased, but also contested, negotiated and resisted. These latter practices ultimately aim at improved access to resources, decision-making processes and the amplification of the affected persons’ subjective well-being. I define these social and affective practices as ‘coping’. Compared to other attempts of explaining both similarities and differences between social actors (i.e. personality, temperament, level of education, or family socialization, to name just a few) regarding their emotional and behavioral responses to adversities and emotional distress, the coping concept admits to the person an increased potential of both social agency and affectivity. The central and explicit notions that “coping processes are not inherently good or bad” and that “the adaptive qualities of coping processes need to be evaluated in the specific stressful context in which they occur” (Folkman/Moskowitz 2004:753), make the concept applicable to the anthropological study of local worlds4, and as such can be integrated into anthropological theory (Zaumseil et al. 2014). The combined emphasis on biographic, personal, contextual, 4 | The term ‘local word’ does not refer to spatial or ethno-local scales, but “to a somewhat circumscribed domain within which daily life takes place. This could be a social network, an ethnographer’s village, a neighborhood, a workplace setting, or an interest group” (Yang et al. 2007: 1528). In relation to the concept of ‘culture’, Veena Das clarifies that it is not perceived as a patterned following of habits, but assures us that “it is Kleinman’s thought that the making of moral beings depends upon the way we place ourselves within local worlds and relationships. Local then does not have an exclusively spatial reference – it relates rather to quality of relationships” (2001).

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cognitive and also affective dimensions that shape social actors’ coping styles thus provides a more integrated perspective on the now overused term ‘agency’. Coping and the ways of addressing the other in social interactions is not only a matter of socially positioned cultural actors. Positioning oneself and being positioned by others is deeply political, and hence emoting and affecting. Therefore, I argue that the anthropological analysis of how asymmetrical power relations affect the street-related protagonists’ ways of perceiving and interacting within their local worlds can gain substantially if emotions and related phenomena are not only included in the ethnography as descriptive rhetoric, but are also thoroughly defined as theoretical concepts, as what here follows.

A FFECT, E MOTION , E MOTIVE , F EELING Contemporary emotion research agrees on basic theoretical assumptions regardless of scholarly origin: emotions are defined as those social, cultural and physiological processes that emerge when persons negotiate, engage or interact with someone or something, be that real or imaginary, be it related to the past, present or anticipated future (Dixon 2012; Engelen et al. 2009; Godbold 2015; Izard 2010; 2011; Lindquist/Gendron 2013; Matt 2011; Mesquita/Boiger 2014; Mulligan/Scherer 2012; Russell 2014). Emotions are considered relational phenomena that never exist without ‘the other’. Epistemic dissent does not primarily arise from incompatible theoretical premises (except we intentionally misread each others’ arguments), but mostly results from different scales and units of analysis: does the researcher focus on physiological arousal; individuals’ experiences; or their encounters, communication practices and language patterns; or the transmission and circulation of emotions and emotion words within and between groups and collectives; or the feeling and display rules of collectives and societies; the emotion rhetoric of nation states; the social and cultural force of emotion words articulated in and between cultural and social contexts? Compared to other empirical disciplines, anthropology considers if not combines, these different scales within its practice-oriented ethnographic approach. And yet, despite anthropology’s ideal of holism, ethnographers have to prioritize particular analytical scales because of emotions’ complex and intertwined physiological, embodied, communicative and rhetoric dimensions. This ethnography intends to illustrate that analytical prioritization does not have to go hand in hand with an artificial atomization of the phenomenon of ‘emotion’ itself (Stodulka 2017), or conjoins with an evaporation of analytical clarity where everything and nothing becomes ‘affect’ (Wetherell 2015). I agree with Andrew Beatty’s critical review of anthropological (2014) and also interdisciplinary emotion research (2013) that the analysis of emotions is

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best represented in ethnographic narratives that transcend mere self-reports and experimental snapshots stripped from social and cultural contexts and temporalities in which they emerge. Beatty’s argument that anthropologists can never be sure what persons in cultural contexts other than their own actually feel when they articulate their experiences in local emotion terms or act in a supposedly ‘emotional’ way helps to expose the Eurocentric limitation of universalizing psychological, neuroscientific and biological emotion theories. But an overly skeptical Geertzian rhetoric (Gable 2014) that rejects even the possibility that emotion-related phenomena are related to translocally shared human dimensions and that withdraws to a constructivist particularism obstructs anthropology’s epistemological resourcefulness. I lean towards the stance that with sound theoretical reflection, transparent methodology and careful ethnography, the ethnographer is bestowed with a notable authority 5 on the physiology, embodiment, practice and articulation of emotion-related phenomena. The anthropology of emotion is also, but not exclusively about the languages of emotion. And it is not only a narrative genre either. It is in need of a more robust theory (Good 2012). Affect and emotion is reemerging6 as a research topic within anthropology (Davies 2010; Hage 2010; Milton/Svašek 2005; Reynaud 2014; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013; Sakti 2013; Slama 2010; Spencer 2010; Stodulka/Röttger-Rössler 2014; Svašek/Skrbiš 2007; Thajib 2014; Wilce 2009) after it had been absorbed within theoretical discussions of the self, personhood and subjectivity. However, emotions are rarely a primary theoretical focus of ethnographies and predominantly remain implicit subject matters, a tie-in to burgeoning medical and psychological anthropologies (Castillo 2015; Good 2012; Good/Subandi/ DelVecchio-Good 2007; Hollan/Throop 2011; Kirmayer 2010; Kleinman/Smith 2010; Lemelson/Ng/Supartini 2010; Throop 2010). In other ethnographies, emotion labels that supposedly describe human behavior and talk are often used without further analytical definition. They remain a narrative rhetoric that targets the production of vivid texts. In what terms can we define emotions and related phenomena from an integrated body, practice and language perspective? Affects, feelings and emotions are more than verbally articulated symbols that hint to a deeper social 5 | On anthropological evidence and authority, see Kuipers 2013. 6 | The ‘Culture and Personality School’ of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, whose prominent proponents were Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, or Ruth Benedict, has implicitly focused on ‘emotion’ within the theoretical frameworks of personality structures and cultural patterns. The 1970s and 1980s have produced what are now considered classics of the anthropology of emotion: Jean Briggs’ Never in Anger (1970), Robert Levy’s Tahitians (1973) Michelle Rosaldo’s Knowledge and Passion (1980), or Catherine Lutz’ Unnatural Feelings (1988).

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and cultural meaning. This book illustrates that they can unfold as important embodied non-verbal communication and interaction practices. Besides words and prosodies, particular facial expressions and body postures are socialized by means of cultural transmission, intergenerational and peer negotiation. As biocultural processes (Hinton 1999; Röttger-Rössler/Markowitsch 2009) within and between persons, their bodily displays and verbal articulations are related to local discourses of appropriate and inappropriate experience, expression and conduct (Hochschild 1979; 1983; Röttger-Rössler/Stodulka 2014; von Scheve 2009). They are not mere rhetoric analogies of cultural norms related to the articulation of emotion words. I argue that we need more conceptual clarity not only in relation to the local worlds that we study, but also in terms of disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic communication. I follow linguistic anthropologist Joel Kuipers’ line of argument here, “Conceived as communicative events, authority and evidence are characteristics of not only the activities of the people we study but our own professional interactions as well.” (2013: 410) What complicates the theorizing of emotions and related phenomena, besides their difficult systematic observation, documentation, and lucid translation into ethnographic narratives, is a terminological mystification of emotion and related concepts. There has been little anthropological interest in compelling theories of ‘affect’, ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, or ‘emotive’ from neighboring disciplines. Despite diverse scholarly origins and analytical scales, contrastive definitions of emotion-related phenomena can benefit the ethnographic description and anthropological analysis7 of human experience, behavior and speech. Instead of rejecting concepts due to their ‘alien’ disciplinary backgrounds, their integration can add to the scientific comprehensibility and transparency of ethnographies. Which underlying theories we apply is not a matter of eclectic ‘tool-kitting’, but allies with our field encounters and theoretical preferences. The following definitions are related to my long-term fieldwork with the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak. As living theory they can become effective aids to translate field encounters into a scientific language and an attempt to communicate with other researchers regardless of their disciplinary backgrounds. Although anthropologists (Martin 2013; Skoggard/Waterston 2015; Stewart 2007) start feeding the ‘affective wave’ that spills over from cultural studies (Ahmed 2004), critical theory (Berlant 2008; Blackman 2012; Callard/ Papoulias 2010; Protevi 2009), philosophy (Massumi 2015; Slaby 2016) or human geography (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Thrift 2008), my theoretical perspective inclines to accomplished discussions from social psychology 7 | Tim Ingold (2014) has discussed the overuse of ‘ethnography’ in scientific contexts and elaborated on its difference to anthropology as a discipline.

Theorizing Life on the Streets

and follow Margaret Wetherell’s line of argument, which prioritizes the praxeological approach to affect and related phenomena. The call for attention to the relationality and ambiguity of human experience in the context of shifting discourses and contested power asymmetries is welcomed, because it reminds the anthropologist that affects, emotions and related phenomena are deeply ingrained in the politics of the everyday (instead of mere ‘cultural transmission’). But the innovation behind this line of thought is limited. The relationality and particularity of human experience has been highlighted in the anthropology of emotions of the 1980s and 1990s (Abu-Lughod 1986; Leavitt 1996; Lutz 1988), when the concept of ‘feelings’ was promoted as more liquid and anti-essentializing alternative to ‘emotions’, who were then primarily discussed in terms of six (Ekman et al. 1982), eight (Plutchik 1980) or nine (Tomkins 1984) universal basic human emotions. That human experiences circulate between and not only within individuals has been thoroughly discussed in anthropological debates on the self and personhood of the 1990s (Mageo 1998; Morris 1994; Sökefeld 1999). The synthesis of universalistic (emotion) and particularistic (feeling) schools of thought in the early 2000s has promoted an anthropological understanding that feelings and emotions are both affective and cognitive, both physiological and cultural, both practical and discursive (Röttger-Rössler 2004). From an anthropological perspective it seems odd to celebrate ideas that claim that ‘affect’ (as concept in vogue, but still up to theoretical and empirical probing) is beyond conventional cultural processes of representation, hormonal, rhythmic and connecting bodies with each other, untouched by cognition, and that humans merely receive and transmit instead of harboring them (Thrift 2008), or that “emotion doesn’t in fact have a location” and “is neither inside nor outside, neither a property of subjects nor a property of objects” (Ahmed 2004; quoted from Wetherell 2015: 158). Where are affects and emotion then? If they are phenomena ‘beyond’ the explicable, ‘without location’ in disembodied landscapes of discursive relationality, how can subjects, social actors or persons contest, mould and practice them within their local worlds? How can we diagnose for example the street-related protagonists’ suffering and pain with regard to structural violence, stigmatization and illness, and acknowledge their techniques and practices of coping with these adversities? My anthropological perspective conflates with the social psychology of Wetherell, when she writes, “affect is distributed. It is an in-between, relational phenomenon. Subjects cannot be disentangled from objects, or individuals from their situations. This is why a concept like social practice has such power and persuasive force.” (Wetherell 2015: 158; emphasis in original) That affects are distributed is lucid, but from my point of view the author makes another, more important point: affects, emotions, feelings and other human experiences and discursive formations are best captured, described and discussed with regard

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to social practices in relation to their biographical, social, cultural, economic, and political entanglements within normativizing and contested discourses of their respective local worlds. But before I can do so in relation to the coming of age of this ethnography’s protagonists, I am inclined to define emotions and related phenomena first, instead of listing what they are not. Keeping Wetherell’s focus on social practice in mind, I refer to Deborah Gould, who defines ‘affect’ as “nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body. [...] Affect, then, is the body’s ongoing and relatively amorphous inventory-taking of coming into contact and interacting with the world.” (2009: 19-20) The sociologist continues to explain that affects are considered opaque experiences, “as something that we do not quite have language for, something that we cannot fully grasp, something that escapes us but is nevertheless in play, generated through interaction with the world, and affecting our embodied beings and subsequent actions. I call that bodily, sensory, inarticulate, nonconscious experience affect.” (Gould, ibid.)

Relating to both sociology and social psychology, I define affects as self-aware physiological arousals. Gould continues and defines ‘feelings’ as an overarching analytical term that encompasses both affect and emotion. This seems like an easy way out with regard to the thorny debates on the sociocultural dimension of affect and the affective dimension of social and cultural experience and practice. I understand feelings, affects and emotions as interrelated and mutually constitutive phenomena that need to be analytically disentangled within empirical analyses of human experience, communication and interaction. I contend that feelings are what we subjectively ascribe to self-aware physiological arousals (i.e. affects), when we experience someone or something as pleasant, unpleasant, or something in-between, that we have an idea for but not necessarily the right words. In short, I define feelings as cognitively appraised affects. Both affects and feelings are relational to other bodies, minds, social and cultural environments. They are considered universal human capacities, but their physiological configuration is not necessarily identical between different persons, social or cultural contexts. Although human bodies, minds or brains might share similar universal capacities, the physiological build-up and the situations that induce affects and feelings are related to biographical, social, political, and cultural dimensions. The physiological arousal that relates to ‘love’ for example might not ‘feel’ the same nor are the social events that trigger the affect, or its connotations as pleasant or unpleasant necessarily similar within and across different cultural contexts (Jankowiak 1997; Lau 2012; Röttger-Rössler/Engelen 2006). Affects are not non-conscious, but

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compared to feelings they lack the physiologically aroused persons’ cognitive appraisals. In the original sense of the Latin word afficere (ad-facere; ‘to work on’ or ‘to influence’), affects are changes in the person’s physiology. Feelings are considered as cognized affects, and yet, from a contrastive perspective, they lack the communicative capacities of emotions in the form of intersubjectively constructed, shared and circulated emotion rhetoric. Emotions relate physiological arousals and their cognitive appraisals with their surrounding local worlds in terms of mutually shared intersubjective rhetoric. Moreover, emotions comprise of cultural, or better, intersubjective repertoires that enable persons to express their own and label others’ observable and detectable affects and articulated feelings in intersubjectively shared and understandable emotion words. Relating to their particular pre-experiences, biographies and sociocultural socializations, persons are able to exchange information through impulsive, learned, habitualized and staged emotions by means of words, facial expressions, gestures and body postures. Even presumably staged physiological arousals and cognized affects carry important cultural and social messages in the form of emotions. The analyses of social encounters (particularly in chapter 6) intend to illustrate that orchestrated emotion displays can provoke a wide array of consequences for oneself and related others. Within the daily politics of social life they can make up powerful practices in order to manipulate others for one’s own and related others’ gain (Rebhun 1993; Röttger-Rössler/Stodulka 2014). This social force can be fashioned through the communication of emotion words, facial expressions, and body language. Besides ‘affects’, ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’, the neglected concept of ‘emotives’ promises to further the understanding of the complex physiological, cognitive, linguistic and intersubjective interplay of emotion-related phenomena. In its literal sense of the New Oxford American Dictionary ‘emotives’ are defined as “arousing or able to arouse intense feeling […] The words emotive and emotional share similarities but are not interchangeable. Emotive is used to mean ‘arousing intense feeling,’ while emotional tends to mean ‘characterized by intense feeling.’ Thus an emotive issue is one likely to arouse people, while an emotional response is one that is itself full of arousal. [italics in original]”

William Reddy (1997; 2001) has introduced the ‘emotive’ as a concept into the anthropology of emotion. Although compelling in terms of distinguishing between emotion articulation, display, and affective experience, it has remained widely ignored. Reddy’s ‘emotives’ brought the person’s physiological experience back into the anthropology of emotions. The author considers emotives as predominantly performative utterances, which refer to a person’s inner feelings (langue) and “actually do things to the world” (1997:331) in

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terms of a social parole. In an extension to Reddy, I argue that emotives are not necessarily related to utterers’ affects as self-aware physiological arousals. Emotives can be strategically orchestrated in order to provoke affective arousals and responses in the other. The protagonists’ and interlocutors’ narrative strategies that were imbued with emoting intensity (see chapter 2 and chapter 6) had ultimately shaped my inquiries on how they coped with stigma, illness and marginality from an emotion-related perspective. Hence, the usage of the terms ‘affect’, ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’ or ‘emotive’ throughout the ethnography draws on the outlined theoretical concepts in the context of the anthropological analysis of protagonists’ naratives and practices.

THE C HAP TERS The subsequent Chapter 2 (Fieldwork and Ethnography) provides an overview of the methods of data production, and Chapter 3 (Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Javanese Hierarchies, Javanese Ways) introduces the historical and political context of Yogyakarta, Indonesia and demonstrates that the city’s streets were in many ways considered ‘special’ in the Indonesian context. Moreover, the chapter comprises an anthropological portrayal of the place’s prevailing social structure and local understandings of socially and culturally prescribed norms of adequate social conduct and emotion display from a subaltern perspective. The chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 follow the life story of Monchi. He is the leading figure that guides the reader through his own and others’ coming of age. The other four protagonists, ‘Kris’, ‘Harvey’, ‘Jempol’ and ‘Jim’, along with their cohorts, will complement and enrich Monchi’s life story. I invite the reader to follow the protagonists’ life stories from childhood to young adulthood against the background of a more collective perspective on life in the komunitas Bendoro in the city center and the komunitas Congklak at a street junction of the Northern city highway. Each chapter will be concluded with an analytical summary, which spotlights and summarizes theoretical discussions relevant to the presented extended cases and life stories. More precisely, chapter 4 (Becoming tekyan) introduces the protagonists and focuses on their ‘fragmented home’ stories told in retrospective. It illustrates that the decision to finally turn to the streets and not return home was a long and often painful process, and also describes the protagonists’ arrival on the streets of Yogyakarta and their integration into their respective street-related communities. The trials that had to be mastered and the processes of becoming acknowledged community members will be analyzed from an integrated perspective, which merges concepts from the sociology and anthropology of emotion. Chapter 5 (Being tekyan) focuses on central aspects of the anak Bendoro and anak Congklak’s community identity. The self-attributive term ‘tekyan’ is an acronym of the

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Javanese ‘sithik ning lumayan’, which translates as ‘a little but enough’ and describes the protagonists’ freedom narratives, group hierarchies, performed masculinities, the importance of in-group solidarities and the significance of music as both lifestyle and income generation. Chapter 6 (Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention) emphasizes the protagonists’ distinct coping style. I describe their particular social and emotive skills of empathizing and emotional attunement by introducing the theory of the ‘emotional economy’. This term has been used by anthropologist Johan Lindquist (2009) in his study on the labor migration of young men and women to the Indonesian island of Batam and Candace Clark (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘socio-emotional economy’ into the sociology of emotions. Lindquist highlights the role of emotions in the labor migration (merantau), but does not focus on their role within social interaction and communication. Clark’s model proved analytically valuable, because she understands social actors’ displays of emotions as central economic ‘currencies’ and combines it with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) perspective on economy and social capital. Chapter 7 (Leaving the Streets) focuses on the young adults’ desires and efforts to leave life on the streets behind, and move on. It demonstrates the interplay between the development and ‘rebellion’ of the protagonists’ matured bodies and their changed social role expectancies, social identities and subjective well-being. Next to focusing on HIV-AIDS related suffering, stigma and death of some of the protagonists, I will emphasize that the transitions to young adulthood comprised of healthrelated, physical, emotional, societal and economic challenges that could only be managed once formerly developed coping strategies were transformed and adapted to the new life stage and its challenges. Chapter 8 (Epilogue) encompasses recent developments in the protagonists’ lives with regard to the city’s authoritarian and neoliberal shift to public disciplining and the control of social spaces and relating bodies within them, which manifested most profoundly in the adoption and application of Yogyakarta’s by-law on the ‘homeless’ and ‘beggars’ in 2014 (Perda Gepeng No. 1 2014).

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2 Fieldwork and Ethnography

Fieldwork with street-related adolescents and young adults has to consider their spatial mobilities and extensive fields of social interaction, and at the same time provide the researched, collaborators and researcher himself with enough reasons for such time-intensive, psychologically and physically challenging endeavors. In trying to understand how the protagonists dealt with marginality, stigma and illness, a systematic focus on emotions, which draws on the epistemic reflexivity of research partners and collaborators (Holmes/Marcus 2008; Stodulka 2015a; b) offers gateways to mutual understanding. Long-term involvement with streetrelated communities is a process that requires empathy, the communication of respect and flexibility that allows the ethnographer to participate in their sophisticated lives. As a unique way of observing, witnessing and trying to understand and explain what matters most to the persons and communities I studied with, ethnography might be best described as a “theoretically informed practice” (Comaroff/Comaroff 1992:27), that is personal, intimate, affective on the one hand, and analytical, detached and scientific on the other.

C OLL ABORATIVE A CTION R ESEARCH The term ‘collaborative action research’ goes back to social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who wrote 70 years ago: “The research needed for social practice [...] is a type of action-research, a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice. This by no means implies that the research needed is in any respect less scientific or ‘lower’ than what would be required for pure science in the field of social events. I am inclined to hold the opposite to be true.” (Lewin 1946: 35)

Action research is an open-ended cycle of posing questions, gathering data, reflection and deciding on a course of collective action. These actions are then

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collectively evaluated, before next steps are taken, new problems are identified, and the next circle of research-based action is implemented. The primary target is the enhanced accessibility of the produced knowledge for those persons and communities we study with. Shared feelings of frustration over the prevalent rise of HIV on the streets, particularly after losing the fourth friend from the disease within a period of two months, my colleagues and I established JPKJ (an acronym for Jaringan Peduli Komunitas Jalanan – Support and Care Network for Street Communities) in April 2007. The group consisted of volunteers from various social and professional backgrounds: one outreach street worker, two street-related musicians, four social activists, two local anthropologists, three counselors, a nurse, one member of the Yogyakarta AIDS Commission, one doctor specialized in HIV-AIDS, and myself. We worked out an agenda that drew on the volunteers’ long lasting experience and expertise in their work with street communities and/or HIV-AIDS issues. Our primary concerns were that our network functioned on a voluntary basis and closely collaborated with street-related communities. Within this loosely structured framework, we jointly organized workshops in various designs, either on the streets, in open houses of NGOs, or in squatter communities at the city’s margins. In the face of AIDS-related deaths and severe social suffering, the informal network gained stability without the support of international funding agencies, and finally manifested in a shelter and community-based counseling center for chronically ill street-related persons that same month, called Rumah Sehat Lestari (RSL) – Home for Sustainable Health. Until 2013, RSL had worked on private donations, and the initially mentioned eco-social project that ran the bamboo shelter in 2001 served as its umbrella organization. The network focused on the care and support of HIV-positive street-related friends, facilitated HIV-AIDS prevention workshops, and served as a link between street-related communities, hospitals and the bureaucracies of the local government’s health care apparatus. Furthermore, the RSL team organized monthly open-air film screenings for the children of the shelter’s surrounding kampung near the city center’s riverbanks, and our two-room house was used for extra-curricular tutorials for the kampung community’s children and youth. This collaboration provided insights into the affectivity of key informants and colleagues, not least because we shared frustration and despair when another friend had died, but also small-scale achievements once we managed to provide ill friends with cost free medication and medical treatment. Moreover, the collaboration facilitated access to various research sites and fostered an experience-near understanding of their interconnectedness from the protagonists’ perspectives. When the RSL team became the primary caretaker of hospitalized friends, our tasks also included what was beyond hospital rooms (e.g. the provision of food, clothes, medication, or supportive care).

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We got involved searching for blood donors at the cities’ various campuses, appeasing local bureaucrats in order to provide us with documents that officially undocumented street-related persons required for hospital admission, pounding various NGOs for financial and social support, or trying to find forgotten family members in faraway places. In those cases where our friends had died, the RSL team arranged burial permissions, organized funerals, persuaded local kiai1 to perform last rites, built and maintained graves, and scheduled rituals of remembering the deceased according to local traditions. We conducted focus group discussions (FGDs) with street-related communities that were jointly administered subsequent to the workshops and documented by myself. Workshops, which were held at open houses or shelters, permitted insights into intimate emotions and desires of protagonists from the street-related komunitas Bendoro and komunitas Congklak. Besides sometimes more, sometimes less participatory activities, which helped to create a relaxed atmosphere, the late night conversations after the workshops were not only very pleasant, but turned out as illuminating in better understanding reproductive health, sex and drug practices on the streets. In addition to providing stories, these workshops and conversations were very helpful in creating an atmosphere of mutual trust by taking collective action against the spread of HIV-AIDS and other immediate threats to life. Whereas FGDs elicited insights into health issues, aid-seeking behavior, and the perception of HIV-AIDS and STDs among street-related communities, facilitating voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) fostered my awareness for stigma-related emotions and triggered collective actions to challenge local discourses by means of organizing public discussions and events. On a more conceptual note, we conducted semi-structured interviews in order to better understand local concepts of chronic illness and intervention strategies from the perspectives of NGO activists and doctors. We interviewed six experienced NGO activists focusing on HIV-AIDS and street-related community issues, one local healer, and three doctors from the city’s biggest public hospitals that were also accessible for the poorest strata of Yogyakarta’s population. We recorded the interviews on DV-video and an mp3 audio-recorder with a small microphone. Our questions pointed mainly to the difficulties in working together with people living on the streets, both in health and other issues like legal protection, work opportunities, the policy and sustainability of NGO work, and the role of the national and local government regarding the support of marginalized individuals and collectives. A long-term ‘clipping’ of local newspaper articles and their critical discourse analysis proved effective in understanding social, cultural and political elites’ 1 | Kiai or kyai (Javan.): expert of Islam; sometimes also a leader of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren).

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public articulations on ‘street children’ and the stigma related to HIV-AIDS. In addition, I documented and interpreted public signs, street banners and articulations of religious, political and cultural authorities in relation to the stigmatization of street people and HIV-positive people between 2006 and 2010. Some of these signs and banners will be illustrated in the section on Jim’s chronology of pain, suffering and death (chapter 7). The collaborative approach proved beneficial in various ways: it helped me gain access to many different research sites; negotiate my positionalities as social activist, anthropologist and friend; obtain deeper knowledge on the social dynamics within and between street communities; and acquire data on expert discourses of the city’s stakeholders involved in public health care, governmental and non-governmental support strategies. But in order to learn about the protagonists’ emotional experiences beyond collective and participatory encounters, the study had to be more actorcentered. The narrowing down of my research objective to pursue life stories against the backdrop of a collective representation of how it felt to come of age on the streets implied a systematic focus on face-to-face encounters. Thus, I became temporarily ‘homeless’ for limited periods of time when I spent the nights on cardboards near street intersections, on rice mats in huts of squatter communities, or on the floors of abandoned shops and garages. To avoid misunderstanding, I did not live with the communities permanently. In 2001, I lived at the beach hut mentioned earlier for altogether three months, and slept at the communities’ hangouts around Malioboro Street or the Congklak street junction in between irregular sleepovers in the courtyard of a backpacker hostel. In 2005, I moved to an empty rented house, which only had one mattress and a mosquito net, for three months. The house became an occasional refuge for some of this ethnography’s protagonists. In the 20 months between July 2006 and March 2008, I stayed two months under a bamboo roof in the garden of the already mentioned eco-social project and volunteered both logistically and physically to help rebuild small shops and kiosks and a kindergarten destroyed in a village near the epicenter of a devastating earthquake that hit Yogyakarta and the wider area in late May 2006. I then moved into a rented house at the outskirts of the city together with two local social activists for one year. The house soon served as a temporary shelter for chronically ill friends from the street-related communities. During the last six months I spent my nights mostly in the new homes of some of the protagonists in squatter communities or at other friends’ rented rooms. When I returned to Yogyakarta with my wife in March and April 2009, in September 2009, in October 2010, May and June 2012, we spent the nights at friends’ places and I visited the street junctions and the communities more sporadically. During my last fieldwork period between July 2014 and June 2015, my wife, our toddler boy and I rented a house at the outskirts of the city, which made nightly hangouts

Fieldwork and Ethnography

at the street junctions and in the protagonists’ new homes of various kampung neighborhoods more an exception than the rule.

A CTOR - CENTERED E MOTION T ALK Actor-centered conversations with key informants, which they described as ‘curhat2 sessions’, provided information on past and present turning points in the protagonists’ coming of age. These sessions provided the protagonists’ interpretations of their own and the life stories of others. Such a narrative focus was crucial for a multi-temporal research by means of almost five years of ‘onand-off’ fieldwork over a time span of 14 years. Protagonists would recount (missed) past events of ‘social dramas’ through curhat narratives. Such an actorcentered narrative approach needs to reflect on and put the intersubjectivity of ethnographic data into perspective (Stodulka 2015a): Linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs and psychologist Lisa Capps write, “the content and direction that narrative framings take are contingent upon the narrative input of other interlocutors, who provide, elicit, refute and draw inferences from facets of the unfolding account. In these exchanges, narrative becomes an interactional achievement and interlocutors become co-authors.” (2001:2-3) In contrast to the refined psychoanalysis-influenced techniques of personcentered ethnography (Hollan 1997), my interviews were less appointed, more situational and multiply contingent. The technique of open narrative interviewing had to be adjusted to the research setting, where the use of audiorecorders and the setting up of interview situations were difficult due to the lack of concept and space. Curhat differed from the joking, teasing, and mocking performed in collective gatherings. Collective street talk was presented as ‘easy’ (gampang), ‘cool’ (keren), and ‘fun’ (asyik). Its aim was to create a relaxed atmosphere, make persons comfortable and integrate them into shifting circles of loose conversation. Curhat sessions were more confessional. The level of trust that had been established as well as my involvement with some of the young men’s key concerns through the RSL collective, fostered personal emotion talks3 that

2 | Curhat is a widely used acronym for curahan hati (Indon.): to confide and to open one’s heart to someone. See also Slama, 2010. 3 | With regard to mutual skepticism towards formalized interview settings, audiotaping and in-situ note taking, the discomfort evoked by it and the spontaneity and unpredictability of situations on and off the streets, I ‘recorded’ the conversations by means of memory protocols. These were composed in German, English and Indonesian in prolonged sessions of documenting whenever I was off the streets and – at a later

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were otherwise perceived as awkward and inappropriate (see Röttger-Rössler 2004: 286).

L IFE S TORIES , E MOTIVE E PISODES AND E XTENDED C ASE S TUDIES James Peacock and Dorothy Holland write that Franz Boas “distrusted life history as a research technique because he felt informants were wont to lie and to exaggerate and researchers could scarcely help but bias the informant’s story” (1993:367). Although I do not share Franz Boas’ skepticism with regard to interlocutors’ narratives, life story epistemology needs positional scrutiny similar to the ‘curhat sessions’. The authors classify anthropological, sociological and psychological life story epistemologies as either ‘life-focused approaches’, which define self-narratives as mirrors of reality or ‘story-focused approaches’, which are more interested in the structure of the story. The first perceive the person as source and object of narration (i.e. the narration mirrors the narrator’s reality), the latter argue that it is the narration, which defines and constructs the person (i.e. the narration is the narrator’s reality). The authors propose an integrative perspective, which understands narrated life stories as (1) a formulation of collectively shared beliefs and values (‘cultural dimension’), (2) a product of social encounters and an attempt to foster mutual understanding between listener and teller (‘hermeneutic dimension’), (3) symbolic devices deeply affecting identity construction (‘psychocultural dimension’) and (4) instruments that create and maintain social relationships and collective identities (‘psychosocial dimension’). This ethnography takes account of these four dimensions and comprehends life stories as actor-centered narratives on the protagonists’ perspectives on their own and others’ coming of age-related pleasures and adversities. The ‘curhat sessions’ narratives are not considered isolated or fixed entities but vary with respect to the listener and the task of the social encounter in which the story is told. To understand the curhat narratives as important techniques of coping with stigma and marginality, creating and maintaining social and economic security networks, a fifth (emotive) dimension is needed. Life stories can be told for various reasons: as reflection and personal meaning-making; as emotional relief; a way to impress the interlocutor; gain respect; evoke appreciation; enhance social esteem; or strategy and tactic to emote particular affects and emotions in the other and motivate him or her to take action. This intersubjective, or better, inter-affective dimension of narratives and encounters will be addressed stage – out of the hospitals again in my refuge of the rented house in the outskirts of Yogyakarta, a rented hostel room, or a secluded corner of a friend’s room.

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in the final section of this chapter with regard to the interpretation, analysis and representation of ethnographic data. Next to curhat sessions and life story narratives, it was crucial to systematically focus on emotions and related phenomena, which were at stake in the protagonists’ social encounters. Regarding the observation of emotions, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler writes that emotional phenomena resonate in every social encounter, but become particularly observable in those situations, where interactants are either exposed to extraordinary adversities and/or where emotions serve as central social communicators between interacting parties (2004: 196). Relating to this theoretical reflection, I focused on presumably emotive episodes from two perspectives: first, I observed encounters of the street-related protagonists with various out-group actors, like for example street vendors, tourists, girlfriends, doctors, nurses, or NGO activists. I had sensitized myself to and documented the ways others were addressed linguistically, how the young men used their bodies and gestures, and in what terms they talked about these encounters both with their friends and also with myself in the aftermath. Secondly, by taking my own affects as they were related to my interactions and conversations with the protagonists and their emotive techniques seriously as ethnographic data, my involvement was not a methodical drawback any longer, but it could transpire as method and epistemological insight into situations in which emotions and emotives worked as central means of affecting their counterpart (Stodulka 2014a; 2015a;b). I will attend to this relational and affectively aware methodology from an abstract point of view in the next section and relate to it again more concisely in the analytical summary of chapter 6, when the emotive skills of the anak Bendoro and anak Congklak are discussed as part of their ‘emotional economies’. The combination of long-term fieldwork with a systematic focus on life stories and emotive episodes generated extended case studies (Gluckman 1961; Lindquist 2009; Mitchell 1982; Rössler 2003; van Velsen 1967), whose particular significance “[...] is that since it traces the events in which the same set of main actors in the case study are involved over a relatively long period [...]. The extended case study enables the analyst to trace how events chain on to one another and how therefore events are necessarily linked to one another through time.” (Mitchell 1982; quoted from Evens/Handelman 2006:28-29; emphasis in original) The delicate terrain of studying social suffering caused by stigma and marginality involves discussions of the researcher’s ethics. I am inclined to integrate these important discussions into the representation of field encounters themselves instead of theorizing on ethical predicaments in an apologetic paper-ethics ‘absolution’. This allows me to briefly discuss the ontology of this study’s ethnographic data in terms of its production, analysis and interpretation in the final section of this chapter, before moving on to what is at stake for the

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protagonists and theoretical and me .....pavements to what this book is actually about.

A FFECTIVE S CHOL ARSHIP 4 Ethnography as text is a narrative genre. Corresponding to the researcher’s training, preference and writing skills it is situated somewhere along the continuum of literature and science. When describing interpretive maneuvers between data production and the ‘writing up’ of monographs, anthropologists refer to hermeneutic circles or software-based grounded theory method analysis and coding for the lack of better language for their complex practices. Genuine anthropological inquietude and epistemological resourcefulness has sustainably contributed to theories on fieldwork and ethnography, the ethics and the representation of the ‘Other’, but the ‘black-boxing’ of what they do ‘after the field’, and before they work on the structuring of narrative arguments seems underexplored and leads to suspicion towards anthropological knowledge production and research results (Parry 2015; Stoller 2015). This ‘analytical gap’ might be related to the fact that ethnographic data production does not end at the moment when anthropologists decide to step out of whatever they have defined as their field (Hsu 2010), but that ongoing communication with host communities both through online and other communication, the reading of academic papers, published ethnographies, discussions during conferences and workshops, hall-way talks on department floors, beer gardens and cafés, keep shaping our perspectives until the moment we click the mouse button and send the final version of the last of numerous preliminary manuscript drafts that were commented upon by friends and colleagues to publishers. What might be difficult to imagine for scholars from other social science disciplines is that writing ethnography is different from writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. Coming up with a good and readable story that is based on scientific fieldwork and influenced by shifting academic trends, styles and turns over the years while writing is a tough job. One of the crucial questions of fieldwork and ethnography remains how anthropologists, whose primary data collection ‘tools’ are their senses, minds and bodies, can work along their biases and involvements to such an extent that they can scientifically account for the talk, behavior and experience of those they live and study with and remain ethically primal (Scheper-Hughes 1995) at the same time. Ethics, methods, the researcher’s personality, professional and personal experience, as well as training and motivation, her senses, positionalities and 4 | I borrow this term from Nasima Selim, who has first introduced it into a collaborative writing project.

Fieldwork and Ethnography

subjectivities have to be brought into account when producing, analyzing and representing ethnographic knowledge (Davies 1999; Dilger/Huschke/Mattes 2015; Ingold 2014; Stoller 2015). The following quote from the author of a widely circulated fieldwork manual illustrates the anthropologist’s dilemma: “People tend to record as data what makes sense to and intrigues them. Selectivity cannot be eliminated, but it is important to be aware of how it affects data collection, and hence, the usefulness and credibility of research results. To develop such awareness, people collecting data should be aware of the effects of both tacit and formative theory. These are the sources of selectivity (and bias) because they create something analogous to a filter that admits relevant data and screens out what does not seem interesting – even if, with hindsight, it could have been useful.” (Le Compte 2004:146)

This is reflexive rhetoric at its best – but how does one do this before, during, and after fieldwork and before, during and after writing up drafts? There is something uncanny in the demand to limit and control researchers’ subjectivities for the sake of an acknowledged ‘traditional empiricism’ that ultimately targets ‘objective data’. Anthropology-related ethnography works in a different direction. Instead of separating tacit from formative theory, or isolating bias from truth, anthropologists work through, not against their subjectivities and related affects, feelings and emotions (Davies/Spencer 2010; Hsu 2010; Jackson 1989; Stodulka 2015a) until they puzzle out what matters to those they study with. Although at times challenging to get hold of, their data production and analyses follow particular context- and training-related paths of systematic reasoning. My path works along the ethnographer’s affects, feelings and emotions. I intend to illustrate that the lucid documentation of the ethnographer’s affects, taking them seriously as relational scientific data and juxtaposing them to more detached (i.e. ‘traditional’) data sets is a way of not only acknowledging tacit knowledge, but working through it in scientific terms. The exclusion of the field researchers’ bodies, affects and senses for the sake of their radical cognitivization (besides introductions and method chapters, researchers are supposed to be ‘all brain’ and ‘reason’ without paying too much attention to the affectivity within their reason and the reason within their affectivity) is epistemologically suspicious. If affects, feelings and emotions are defined as relational processes generated, regulated, displayed or articulated in actual or imagined local5 encounters, the silencing of researchers’ affects, as valid methodical and epistemic paths to producing knowledge about ‘Others’ 5 | The term ‘local encounters’ does not refer to spatial or ethno-local scales. “Local then does not have an exclusively spatial reference – it relates rather to quality of relationships” (Das 2001).

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is a scientific distortion. Because fieldworkers are always (sometimes more, sometimes less) part of (either directly or indirectly) situations, interviews, conversations, social encounters (and even field experiments) that they observe it is careless not to pay more attention to them (Kleinman/ Copp 1993; Stodulka 2014a; 2015a;b). I have integrated my affects as relational data into the analysis of the protagonists’ emotive practices and used them in formulating the theory of ‘emotional economies’ (see final discussion in chapter 6). To make my data vulnerable, I have placed the analytical framework underlying this monograph, which combined established modes of data analysis (Katz 2001; LeCompte/ Schensul 1999) with an affectively aware and relational methodology that puts the researchers’ affects into perspective and in relation to the local worlds that I lived in and studied, in the appendix. The interested reader is invited to scrutinize and criticize my analyses and narratives of the following chapters in relation to analytical shortcomings. Why increase (instead of minimize) the anthropologist’s vulnerability beyond the critical reading of his ethnographic text? Regarding the representation of others’ lifeworlds, the demand to share anthropological authority by enduing key informants and interlocutors with a voice has been seen as an achievement of reflexive, dialogical and multi-vocal ethnographies (Behar 1996; Clifford/Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; Crapanzano 1980; Tedlock/Mannheim 1995). But the explicit focus on the literary representation of ethnographic data has long muted a more systematic discussion of researchers’ methods of analysis and interpretation. Even thirty years after the ‘literary turn’, the transparent performativity of the text still prevails over ethnographers’ communication of their fieldwork and post-fieldwork practices beyond the presented monograph. Readers can only assume, how ethnographies are related to the anthropological fieldwork that had supposedly instigated them. The modes of documenting and analyzing relationships and encounters of informants and ethnographers, and the affective dimensions underlying these, are still by and large mystified (Crapanzano 2010; Davies 2010; De Neve/ Unnithan-Kumar 2006; Hastrup/Hervik 1994; O’Hare 2007; Spencer 2010).

3 ‘City with a Warm Heart’

Explaining the protagonists’ experiences of intersecting marginalisation and moral stigmatization cannot be done without discussing the history of the ‘local worlds’ in which these experiences unfolded. This chapter aims to contextualize the protagonists’ experiences, and ways of coping with everyday adversities. It is important to understand the protagonists’ subsequent stories from chapters 4 to 8 by not only embedding them to the sociopolitical, economic and cultural dynamics of the urban and social scapes of Yogyakarta, but also against the backdrop of larger dynamics at the national level. Moreover, the socalled ‘Javanese ways’ described in the second part of this chapter were crucial in the emergence of second president Suharto’s New Order agenda of creating a national consciousness. Ideologies like budi perkerti (ethics, moral guidance), rukun (harmony) and tentram (equanimity), which are explained below, as well as particular emphasis on social conduct that is in accord with ‘Javanese hierarchies’ were reproduced and institutionalized in a way that advanced the regime’s patriarchal, authoritative style and development-driven aims. These ideologies and prevailing social values are discussed here in a way that emphasizes the social interaction and emotion display rules the protagonists found themselves in.

YOGYAK ARTA , I NDONESIA With a population of 250 million inhabitants, the Republic of Indonesia is the world’s most populous archipelago, which, as a nation, is only outnumbered by China, India and the United States of America. Despite the ongoing process of decentralization and direct local elections in the nation’s 34 provinces since 1998, the island of Java has remained Indonesia’s political and economic center, and home to around 130 million people. The island itself, and particularly the

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metropolitan district (JABOTABEK)1 around the capital Jakarta with its 28 million inhabitants, is among the world’s most densely populated areas. Dispersed across its more than 17,000 islands, of which only around 6,000 are inhabited, Indonesia is comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups and languages. The Javanese are the largest ethnic group and make up forty percent of the archipelago’s population. After the nation’s declaration of independence on the 17th of August 1945, the introduction of the lingua franca Bahasa Indonesia2 as national language and the declaration of the young nation’s Pancasila ideology targeted the development of a shared national identity. Indonesia’s national motto, ‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’, which translates as ‘Unity in Diversity’ from Old Javanese, highlights the country’s ethnic diversity and religious pluralism. Around ninety percent of the population is registered as Muslims, making Indonesia the world’s most populous Muslim country. As a secular nation, though, political elites stress religious tolerance among believers of different faiths, but this attitude has significantly changed during the last years, at least in some parts of the archipelago. Religiously, ethnically, and socio-politically motivated atrocities have seriously clouded the Indonesian ideal of archipelagic harmony. The Pancasila ideology, which was introduced by Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, is deeply ingrained into the Indonesian constitution and the everyday lives of Indonesian citizens by means of public monuments and decrees. The ideology is taught from the onset of pupils’ schooling in national school curricula and consists of five founding principles, namely: nationalism (kebangsaan), humanism (kemanusiaan), rule of the people (kerakyatan), social justice (keadilan sosial) and belief in one God (ketuhanan yang maha Esa). In its translation to everyday life, the philosophy of mutual help and cooperation in achieving a collective goal (gotong royong) is highly emphasized. Bendedict Anderson (1982), John Pemberton (1994), David Bourchier and Vedi Hadiz remind us that the Pancasila is not an innocent ideology, because “[...] in the late 1970s and early 1980s [...] the government launched a major campaign to indoctrinate Indonesians with the state ideology of Pancasila. Invented by Sukarno in 1 | JABO(de)TABEK is an Indonesian acronym for Jakarta, Bogor, (Depok), Tangerang, and Bekasi. This acronym refers to the urban areas surrounding the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. 2 | Bahasa Indonesia is an extension of classic Malay, a lingua franca, which originated in Sumatra and was spoken for centuries on the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago. Compared to its classic version, Bahasa Indonesia is a more dynamic language and also comprises of terms, which stem from Javanese (Basa Jawa), Indo-Aryan Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese languages, Dutch, English and is continuously expanded by neologisms and acronyms.

‘City with a Warm Hear t’

1945 as a formula to unite the new nation, Pancasila was invested with almost sacred status by the ideologies of the New Order. Soeharto himself became increasingly obsessed with the Pancasila, and in the early 1980s pushed to have all political parties and mass organisations acknowledge it as their ‘azas tunggal’, or sole foundation [...].” (2003: 14)

Indonesia’s striving to foster democracy and abolish corruption, collusion and nepotism (popularly abbreviated as ‘KKN’) needs to be regarded in relation to the turn of events resulting from the era of Indonesia’s second president Suharto, who ruled the country for over 30 years, from 1968 to 1998, in the manner of an absolutist Javanese king (Barker/van Klinken 2009; Philpott 2000). The president, his family and their cronies (also referred to as the ‘SuhartoClan’ or ‘Suharto dan kronco-kronconya’) monopolized political and economic power, administered foundations (yayasan), and controlled the media. Initially, the government and its technocrats, who mostly held diplomas and degrees from overseas universities, accelerated national economy by attracting foreign investment and establishing a labor-intensive industrial production. This New Order (orde baru) was publicly promoted by the prospective rhetoric of ‘progress and development’ (kemajuan dan pembangunan). Suharto promoted himself as the ‘father of development’ (bapak pembangunan) and promised his children – the Indonesian citizens – a prosperous future, if they followed his orders. Contrary to his predecessor Sukarno, Suharto targeted the decline of the population growth rate in order to foster the nation’s market economy. As early as 1968 he founded a national institute for family planning that promoted a policy of ‘Dua anak cukup’ (‘Two children are enough’) in nationwide propaganda campaigns. By the mid-1970s, around three thousand clinics and twenty thousand community health centers (pusat kesehatan masyarakat or PUSKESMAS) offered not only contraception services, but also forced infertility ‘free of charge’ (Robinson 1999). In order to promote education while at the same time strengthen the national ‘Indonesian’ identity through the national language, the New Order government introduced and implemented a compulsory program of nine years schooling. Compared to 1968, when only 41 percent of Indonesia’s children attended grammar school, today statistically almost every child between seven and twelve years of age enjoys basic school education (Vickers 2005). Although Suharto had economically and logistically neglected the vast northern and eastern islands, towards the end of his rule around 56 percent of the population living below the poverty line were still found in Java and Bali – where development was supposedly centralized (Booth 1999). In the aftermath of the economic crisis that hit Southeast Asia in 1997 and Indonesia in particular, food prices skyrocketed and the poverty rate rose from 15 to 33 percent, equaling to around 60 million people living in absolute poverty. Economic instability,

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high food prices, a drastic rise in unemployment among the new middle class, and rumors of Suharto’s systematic and large-scale corruption led to a climate of fear and rage, which ultimately unloaded in mass demonstrations against the government primarily organized by student movements. The president’s ‘reelection’ for another five-year term by the National Assembly in March 1998 elicited protest from a number of universities in Java and Sulawesi and quickly spread to a nationwide discontent. This led to mass violence instigated by both police and protesters and incited a severe state of chaos throughout the archipelago. Suharto was finally forced to resign on the 21st of May 1998. Vice president B.J. Habibie took over in the first critical post-Suharto year, before the Muslim liberal intellectual Abdurrahman Wahid was appointed president. In 2001, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia’s independence proclaimer, was elected as the first female president for a three-year term. The succeeding president Susilo Bambang Yudyohono was the first ‘directly elected’ president (2004 until 2014). His ten year-long presidency continued to lead the era of the so-called reformasi with some main agendas including the arrestment of corruption and establishment of a democratic political system in both national and decentralized regional governments of the provinces. Taking in mind the ongoing rural exodus and the radicalization of Muslim hardliners or striving separatist movements, human rights activists, intellectuals and artists celebrated president Joko Widodo, who was elected in 2014, as Indonesia’s hope for a better future. An open question remains as to whether the number of people who live in absolute poverty can be continuously decreased and shrink under 2011’s record low of 12.5 percent. As of 2016, Joko Widodo’s presidency could not yet fulfill the hopes that Indonesia becomes more tolerant towards minorities, as reflected by various radical regulations and laws on marginalized and minority communities that have been ratified in the nation’s current 34 provinces since the president’s inauguration (see chapter 8). The protagonists’ ‘fragmented home stories’ of chapter 4 illustrate that the patriarchal, development-driven and authoritative state of the New Order and thereafter shapes forces of structural violence that foster individuals’, families’ and communities’ marginalization and ill-being. The New Order, which fed on an essentialized concept of ‘Javanese culture’ instead of acknowledging the colonial and post-colonial historical exploitation of the ‘Javanese ways’ of doing and talking about things, created lifeworlds that seem impossible to be thought without clear-cut hierarchies. Since hierarchies need leaders that secure and manifest social and political order, the ‘male’ and the ‘father’ continue transpiring as centers of local, translocal and national power and authority. The sections on ‘Javanese Hierarchies’ and ‘Javanese Ways’ and the following chapter 4 on ‘becoming a tekyan’ elucidate how national development

‘City with a Warm Hear t’

policies affected person’s experiences with regard to institutionalized power asymmetries and moral devaluation. Yogyakarta is named after the Indian city of Ayodhya from the Ramayana epic. Yogya is Sanskrit for ‘suitable’, ‘fit’ or ‘proper’, while karta means ‘prosperous’. Together, they can be translated as ‘a city that is fit to prosper’. The proud ‘authentic Yogyakartans’ (Jogja asli) and their political and cultural elites do not only adapt, but also expand this ascription by staging the city as the archipelago’s capital of higher education, cultural heritage and tourism, and center of fine arts. Image 1. Street sign in the city center.

A picture of Governor and Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X during his campaign for Indonesian presidency in 2009. Next to the Sultan is the national emblem of the garuda (eagle), below him workers who seem to march towards a prosperous future under his guidance, and the map of the Indonesian archipelago. The slogan reads, “Rise my nation, my country, my Indonesia – towards a second national resurrection”. Interestingly, the rhetoric and iconography are reminiscent to campaigns of the former president Suharto. Both belong to the same political party (Golongan Karya or GOLKAR). Below: The city’s slogan ‘Yogyakarta berhati nyaman’.

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Yogyakarta holds a special administration status as a Special Region within the Indonesian republic (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta)3. This status was bestowed upon the city for its significant contribution to the independence of the nation in 1945. It is the only Indonesian region that is still headed by a monarch, the Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, and home to around 3.5 million people. The official slogan of the city reads “Yogyakarta Berhati Nyaman” (see image above). The slogan stands for Yogyakarta ber(sih) (clean), (se)hat (healthy), i(man) (faithful), nyaman (pleasant) and aman (safe) (Solvang 2002: 52). I have also encountered its translation as ‘Yogyakarta with a warm heart’. In the 1970s, as a result of prolonged economic crisis in the region, recurring droughts, the effects of the ‘green revolution’, a capitalist restructuring of agriculture (Hüsken/White 1989), the lack of a labor-intensive industry, scarce work opportunities aside from agriculture and small-scale business (Booth 1992), and excessive violence related to the killings of alleged communists in the mid-1960s (Farid 2005), a great number of farmers moved to Yogyakarta from the surrounding villages. Heidi Dahles writes that their marginal existence, which was further intensified by crop failures and the resulting threat of starvation, “caused many rural poor to move to the city where they either found a place to live in the kampung (sic.) that constituted the majority of Yogyakarta’s residential areas, or established squatter houses on waste land” (2001: 63). Simultaneously, the New Order’s education campaign strived to revitalize Yogyakarta’s reputation as city of higher education.4 In 2010, Yogyakarta accommodated four state universities, 17 private universities and over forty colleges, and housed around 25,000 Indonesian and international students, which make up around one fifth of the city area’s population (Badan Pusat Statistik Yogyakarta 2010). Over fifty Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and an abundance of high schools add to the city’s young and vibrant atmosphere. The universities in Yogyakarta, moreover, offer attractive curricula for both their domestic and international students. Often, this includes mandatory fieldwork 5 in the marginalized areas of the city and its surroundings for domestic students and voluntary work in NGOs for international students. 3 | The ‘Special Region Yogyakarta’ (DIY ) comprises the districts (kabupaten) Bantul, Gunung Kidul, Kulonprogo, Sleman and the Municipal District Yogyakarta. 4 | This reputation dates back to the 19 th century, when the Dutch founded schools, which were also open to the children of the Javanese royalty and their relatives. The first state university, Universitas Gadjah Mada, was founded inside the Sultan Palace Keraton Ngayogyakerto Hadiningrat (which also serves as a tourist attraction today) in 1949 during the last attempts of the Dutch to re-conquer Indonesia. The first private university of the country Universitas Islam Indonesia Yogyakarta opened its gates one year earlier. 5 | This is also referred to as ‘KKN’, meaning ‘Kuliah Kerja Nyata’ – Real Work Studies.

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Although students return to their hometowns after graduation, or move to Jakarta in search of employment, a great share remain in Yogyakarta to work in the flourishing tourism industry. The writer’s collective of the ‘Jerat Budaya Association’ (1999) emphasizes the eminent influence brought by students from all over the archipelago, as they challenge rigid Javanese social hierarchies within the various kampung where many students live. Former dictator Suharto promoted Yogyakarta as the ‘cultural heart of Java’ (Friend 2003). This and other similar slogans targeted domestic tourists, to learn about their Indonesian (which was often equaled with Javanese) history as ‘one people’ and thus develop a ‘national consciousness’. The cultural legacy of Yogyakarta and its surroundings (Buddhist temple Borobudur, Hindu temple of Prambanan, Kota Gede as the former capital of the 17 th century Mataram Sultanate, the Sultanate royal palaces, royal graves at Imogiri, Parangtritis beach with its mystic stories of the Queen of the South6, the myriads of batik galleries, and shadow puppet and gamelan performances) were instrumentalized to depict cultural, ethnic and religious pluralism and bestow a historic continuity and depth upon the national ideology of the Pancasila. These cultural attractions and its laidback and comparatively liberal atmosphere attract international travelers and tourists during their ‘Southeast Asia on a shoestring’ routes (Suter 2016). Yogyakarta had been for decades a place for a vibrant scene for classic and modern Indonesian art performances. Following the downfall of the New Order regime, independent galleries and art communities surfaced from their clandestine niches, overtook the former ‘Pancasila art’ industry, which stood in the service of the indoctrination of the New Order’s state ideology, and turned Yogyakarta into an illustrious ‘post-alternative’ spot for international art reputation (Shah 2016; Tsui 2015). As one of the archipelago’s relatively affordable cities in terms of living costs, the city does not only attract unskilled workers, vendors, and food sellers, but also artists of various kinds. This melting pot of workers, artists, vendors, sellers, students and tourists and the lack of a large-scale industry and labor opportunities continuously create informal sectors, which foster opportunities for temporary jobs and projects especially along the main roads of the city center. Although Yogyakarta’s streets are increasingly surveyed and controlled by means of legal decrees (see chapter 8), it remains a place where the public space is comparably accessible for various protagonists of the city’s vast informal economy, including streetrelated communities.

6 | A mystical queen named Nyi Roro Kidul (Javanese: Lady of the South Sea) who is symbolically married to the Sultan of Yogyakarta (see Schlehe 1998).

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Image 2. Crowded evenings around Beringharjo Market, Malioboro.

Image 3. Angkringan (‘Javanese snack bar on wheels’) in front of street art mural.

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The steady encounters with workers, vendors, pedicab drivers, street artists, tourists and students, who all utilize the informal sector and the city’s streets in their own distinct ways, do not only foster mutual understanding but facilitate cooperation opportunities of various kinds. Yogyakarta’s high population and public visibility of students of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds and politically active artists seem to accustom the city’s residents to unique and comparably ‘strange’ (aneh) outfits and styles. The protagonists of the streetrelated communities often benefited from this relative tolerance, as they could play with their social identities as artists or art students. Furthermore, streetrelated communities, street artists and more established musicians, painters and actors sometimes shared close relationships and performed together at the numerous public art festivals. But even though Yogyakarta is peculiarly liberal in terms of a street art and street-related community movement, the immense competition for space and working opportunities continuously pushed streetrelated people out of the city centers to the big street junctions of the circular multi-lane Ring Road Highway, until in 2015 the ‘loitering’ in public spaces was penalized through the application of the Yogyakarta Special Province by-law on ‘homelessness’ and ‘begging’ (Peraturan Daerah Gelendangan dan Pengemis No. 1 2014). Image 4. Street Art music performance at a parking lot near Bendoro junction.

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Image 5. Street Art mural near the Sultan’s Palace (kraton): ‘Against Domination’.

Similar to other regions of Indonesia, the city’s long celebrated laidback atmosphere (suasana Jogja) has considerably changed since the application of the by-law that is publicly referred to as Perda Gepeng. Since this longitudinal ethnography follows the paths of five protagonists and their friends from twostreet related communities from childhood through adolescence to adulthood between 2001 and 2015, the consequences of the by-law, which now penalizes ‘street music’ (ngamen) in the public space, will be addressed according to its chronology in chapter 8.

J AVANESE H IER ARCHIES AND ‘J AVANESE W AYS ’ Referring to the classical accounts of ‘Javanese culture’, Norwegian anthropologist Ingvild Solvang notes the criticism towards early anthropological works “for aiming at presenting Javanese Culture as a holistic, logical and integrated cultural universe” (2002:25). Analogous to Eldar Bråten (1995) and Franz Magnis-Suseno (2003), she refers to an essentialism that has constructed the cultural elites of the Javanese aristocracy as ‘normative Javanese’. ‘Javanese culture’ has been idealized as the values and ideas of elitist interlocutors, and what was not in accordance with these privileged accounts was either ignored or regarded as deviant from general cultural patterns (Bråten 1995). This ethnography takes a different perspective, because it center stages the ‘Javanese ways’ of so-called ‘little people’ (wong cilik) and marginalized communities

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instead of cultural elites . The stigmatized and marginalized are not ‘deviant’ per se, they are also Javanese. Ultimately, such ethnographic practice falls in line with contemporary anthropology that promotes ‘culture’ as processual and contested systems that stem from established, constructed or (re)invented traditions as well as politics. First foreign ethnographies were motivated by the Dutch colonial administration’s need for knowledge in order to control the East Indies. The first ethnographers were affiliated with the Leiden School of Anthropology and were disseminated to study various parts of the archipelago. Fascinated by patterns of social organization and local village economies, Patrick E. Josselin de Jong and Willem H. Rasser focused on the relations between descent and social organization in the early 1920s. Theoretically, these early ethnographers formed an acclaimed ‘Dutch structuralism’, as seen particularly in Johan P. Duyvendak’s (1926) studies of marriage and alliances in the Moluccas, which later also inspired French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (Solvang 2002:31). Nevertheless, the ethnography of Indonesia took a turn of direction following World War II. Until 1949, the British assisted the Dutch in reclaiming Indonesia by bombing Javanese cities, which led to a ban of Dutch and British ethnographers from entering the country. In the 1950s, North American scholars started to arrive in Java and produced ethnographies most significant until today. These include Clifford Geertz’ The Religion of Java (1960) and Hildred Geertz’ The Javanese Family (1961), which were part of an extensive research project focusing on cultural and social formations of the city of Modjokuto, East Java. Modjokuto became world famous, and the two ethnographies were responsible for almost every anthropologist knowing at least something about Java, regardless of their geographical or theoretical interest. In personal communications, Indonesian colleagues argued that Javanese culture was not only described but actually invented by Clifford and Hildred Geertz, when referring to their strong and sustainable impact on anthropological and public discourses of ‘being Javanese’. Influenced by Dutch structuralists, Clifford Geertz categorized the Javanese into what he called ‘three main cultural types’: the abangan, the santri, and the priyayi. Geertz related these types to the ‘three social-structural nuclei’ of the village, the market, and the government bureaucracy. He argued that at all times a group’s behavior was formed by these types, which constituted three vertically ranked social classes (1960: 5). Although Geertz’ model of Javanese social structure has been severely criticized (Beatty 1999; Bråten 1995; Hefner 1985), it continues to influence succeeding generations of international and Indonesian scholars. A central continuity, which dates back to the Java of Hildred and Clifford Geertz, is the significance of the kampung as central social and spatial neighborhood unit in both rural and urban environments. According to Hildred Geertz, a kampung is a residential unit where the majority of the

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urban population lives, and in which various cultural particularities of the people’s originating rural structure are reproduced (1963:37-8). Clifford Geertz defines the kampung as a residential unit with an urban social structure that is organized around rural cultural patterns (1960). Over twenty-five years later, Patrick Guinness has used a similar definition in his detailed ethnography of a Yogyakarta kampung (1986). In his restudy, the author defines the Yogyakartan kampung as a “low-income, off-street settlement” (2009:2), when compared to the recently mushrooming multi-apartment houses (rumah susun), gated communities and more ‘modern’ housing complexes (perumahan). Patrick Guinness’ studies (1986; 2009) of a low-income kampung have demonstrated that a person’s relative social position in the local social structure is gauged within dyadic social encounters (am I higher or lower ranking than my interaction partner?). In Yogyakarta, social hierarchy consists of relational social positions that result from both ascribed social rank and achieved social esteem. Because ‘knowing one’s own position’ within social encounters remains crucial in everyday life, it is necessary to describe how interacting persons gauge their social positions. I will avoid the term ‘social status’ as conceptual term, since it undermines the quality of a person’s social position as situational, relational and malleable. Accordingly, a person’s social position is defined by the collusion of a variety of cultural, social and economic aspects. It is defined along the dimensions of descent (bibit), economic and material wealth (bebet), and professional and ethic performance (bobot) according to the person’s ‘cultural refinement’ in Javanese ways (see next section). The local parameters of bibit, bebet, bobot by which a person’s social position is appraised are further affected by social and economic criterions related to age, gender and locality. In Bambangrejo, where some of the protagonists had moved after their eviction from their ‘base camp’ behind the Congklak street junction (chapter 6), the jalanan (‘street people’), pengamen (‘buskers’), or pemulung (‘scavengers’) lived in the very north of the kampung, close to a little creek and next to the paddy fields in ramshackle houses. Living conditions were ‘substandard’ with unpaved roads and no sanitation or fresh water. The formally employed middle and upper class residents further south (often referred to as orang mampu7), lived near the main road in bigger houses embraced by gardens, and were safeguarded by a belt of houses inhabited by people who perceived themselves as wong cilik (‘the little people’). This may include bus drivers, vendors, and (hired) laborers. The children of the people in the south attended good schools both public and private and were expected to graduate from high school (SMA). 7 | Literally translated orang mampu means ‘people, who can/are entitled to’. Figuratively, it might be comparable to what is often described as ‘middle class’ (Banerjee/ Duflo 2008; Blackburn 1999; Boellstorff 2003).

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The children of the so-called wong cilik went to the nearby public schools, whereas the children of the north had the highest drop-out rates of the kampung due to work obligations, and the limit of formal education was graduation from elemental (SD) or middle school (SMP). Yogyakarta-based anthropologist Bambang Ertanto (1999a;b) argues that the actual possibilities of social mobility are limited for street-related persons. Although a child born of low rank can theoretically attain a good position in the bureaucratic apparatus through good schooling, such education is expensive. Furthermore, in a socio-political system that is highly personalized and based on social proximity to higher ranked and influential people, and where formal employment is rare also for the formally well educated, finding good work requires good patronage networks and money. Although Yogyakarta’s social hierarchies are continuously liquefied, both are hard to attain for persons of lower descent. Increased monetization of community life, diversification of professions, ongoing enthusiasm for the ‘modern’, and related consumptive desires increasingly influence kampung life. Although increased possibilities of socio-economic mobilities for some are beginning to challenge local social structures, marginalities and stigmatization of formerly street-related persons remained sticky even after leaving life on the streets behind (chapter 7). Compared to other ethnographies that draw more positive conclusions on gender relations (Berman 1998; Handayani/Novianto 2004; Steedly 1999), the ‘fragmented home’ stories of the protagonists (chapter 4) reveal a different picture. Many authors (Atkinson/Errington 1990; Bowen 2003; Stoler 1989) have related rigid gender divides to historical feudal systems, European colonialism, and an increased popularity and influence of Islam since the 15th century. The rhetoric of the New Order (1966-1998) perpetuated these gendered social structures. Wives ‘received’ their social identity through their husbands, and women were praised as responsible educators of the younger generations and contributors to the prosperity of the household; but their socio-political agency was limited to governmentally supervised women’s organizations (e.g. Dharma Wanita). Regarding the continuity of a culturally masked sociopolitical machismo, ornately masked as ‘state ibuism’8, is not a historical bygone of the Orde Baru era, as some authors have claimed (Blackburn 2009; Brenner 1998; Robinson 2007; Suryakusuma 1996). Although the political participation of upper-middle class and elite women has increased in the realms of local, regional, and national politics, as well as in the economic and the health sectors,

8 | State-ibuism can be translated as ‘state-mothering’. Ivanovich Agusta summarizes that the mother (ibu) “is reconstructed by the state as follower and servant of Father. The discourse of state-ibuism located Mother below Father. Control is materialized by disciplining” (2009: 59).

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the machismo of the ‘state-ibuism’ continues to thrive in the everyday lives of the kampung and related streets (Wieringa 2015). Next to descent and locality, profession, wealth, age and gender, the local and social proximity to persons of high social positions remains crucial. Besides holding a good family name, actual or assumed proximity to higherranking ‘good people’ (orang baik) reflects one’s socio-cultural and moral refinement and can influence one’s social esteem and position. ‘Good people’ perform Javanese qualities, which are related to acting refined (halus), pious, polite (sopan), are economically successful, yet modest and caring for those less privileged.9 Being associated with orang baik was important, because their ascribed virtues and integrities were assumed to radiate and increase one’s own social position. Chapter 6 focuses on this social radiation of morality in the context of street-related communities and their skills to transform intersecting marginalities into social and economic capital.

S OCIE T Y M ARGINS : ‘J ALANAN ’ ‘Jalanan’ can be literally translated as ‘street-er’. The suffix ‘-an’ grammatically transforms a verb into a noun. As ‘jalan’ means both ‘to walk’ and ‘street’, the suffix ‘-an’ stresses a sense of belonging, an ascribed fixed state or an identity. In its translation, the term can be semantically understood similar to for example ‘Berliner’ (someone from Berlin) or ‘New Yorker’ (someone from New York). ‘Anak jalanan’ is literally translated as ‘child’ (anak) ‘from the street’ ( jalanan) or ‘street child’. As ‘anak’ can also indicate descent or a belonging to someone or something, its meaning as ‘belonging or related to the street’ is more appropriate than its assumed English equivalent ‘street child’, because such a reading does neither refer to a particular gender nor a chronological age set10. But being identified as ‘jalanan’ or ‘anak jalanan’ can equal the erosion of the all-encompassing bibit, bebet, bobot of being Javanese. This ascribed cultural 9 | A local politician, who was elected district head, and subsequently builds a mosque, to show his gratitude to particular kampung communities can be considered an orang baik, regardless of the quality of his political decisions or private way of life. For many of the protagonists, popular Indonesian singer-songwriters (Sawung Jabo, Iwan Fals, Anto Baret), who publicly articulate the concern for the ‘little people’ and the and perform together with street community bands at public festivals, painters, actors and other artists (e.g. Imam Rasta) and social workers, who have continuously proven or are assumed to care, are . 10 | Similar to ‘anak Yogya’ (someone from Yogyakarta) or ‘anak kota’ (someone from the city), the term ‘anak’ does not necessarily refer to the particular age group of children or youths.

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and moral vacuum can trigger severe stigmatization and result in existential marginalization. Referring to Bruce Link and Jo Phelan (2001), or Lawrence Yang and Arthur Kleinman (2008), the ascribed lack of appropriate bibit, bebet and bobot transpires as societal origin of street-related stigmatization. The moral framing of street-related communities as social and cultural pariahs creates further derogatory and discriminating labels, such as ‘gembel’ (bum), ‘preman’ (thug), ‘asu’ (dog) or ‘copet’ (pickpocket). Although ‘jalanan’ are perceived differently regarding age and gender11, they share an ascribed ‘moral lack’ from sociocultural ideals of what it means being Javanese in terms of a continuously reproduced elite priyayi version. Deprived cultural personhood and low social positioning make way for (im-)moral ascriptions and trigger economic, social, spatial and temporal marginalization in various forms. In order to understand and appreciate the protagonists’ cultural refinement (halus) and related social skills of empathizing and affective attunement to various social situations and spatial environments as they are described in chapters 4 to 8, it is helpful to describe the cara Jawa, the Javanese ways of positioning oneself when encountering and addressing others.

R EFINEMENT, B AL ANCE AND H ARMONY The overarching metaphysical and social “measuring rod” (Geertz 1960: 232) of the priyayi-related cara Jawa, which morally appraises people and their public social behavior, is the cultural dichotomy between ‘the refined’ (halus) and ‘the rough’ (kasar). According to Clifford Geertz: “[…] alus12 means pure, refined, polished, polite, exquisite, ethereal, subtle, civilized, smooth. A man who speaks flawless high-Javanese is alus, as is the high-Javanese itself. […] one’s behavior and actions are alus insofar as they are regulated by the delicate intricacies of the complex court-derived etiquette. Kasar is merely the opposite: impolite, rough, uncivilized; a badly played piece of music, a stupid joke, a cheap piece of cloth. Between these poles the prijaji [priyayi] arranges everyone from peasant to king.” (ibid.: 232; emphasis in original)

11 | The power asymmetries between young men and women who live on the streets shall be scrutinized in the analysis of their encounters in Chapter 6. 12 | Although the author uses the local idiom ‘alus’, it shall be comprehended as synonym with ‘halus’, which was absorbed by the national language and thus is also used by non-Javanese speakers.

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The dichotomy halus and kasar is intrinsic in Javanese moral values, and renders halus to ‘being Javanese’, ‘being of pure thought’, ‘without negative or emotional drives’ or ‘moral’. Meanwhile, kasar is the opposite of ‘being Javanese’ and instead is ‘driven by negative emotions and/or lust’ or ‘immoral’. Because the worldview of the priyayi is still powerfully construed as Javanese cultural ideal, the moral dichotomy is intimately entangled in the lives of most residents in the court city of Yogyakarta. In order to be refined (halus) a person has to master emotions and balance the outer (lahir) and the inner (batin) self. Geertz wrote that lahir refers to “the outer realm of human behavior” (ibid.), whereas batin refers to “the inner realm of human experience” (ibid.). The distinction should not be mistaken for a body and mind dichotomy, as batin (the sphere of feelings and emotions) and lahir (the sphere of visible social behavior) are mutually related. The balance of the outer self is achieved by the performance of politeness (sopan) and pleasantness in social interactions, which is connected to the ordering of inner life and a refinement of subjective experience, including feelings (rasa). Cultivated persons need to give form both to the naturally jagged physical gestures that make up external behavior, and to the fluctuating states of feeling that comprise inner experience. A truly halus person is polite all the way through. Rukun refers to three kinds of culturally desired harmonious relationships: between a person and God, between persons, and in relation to a person’s outer appearance and inner achievements. The latter is supposed to evoke the emotional ease of tentram, resulting from the balance between lahir and batin. Because my primary target is not the analysis of kejawèn13 practices, which promote rukun between person and God, I concentrate on rukun between people and its relation to tentram, which I perceive as the Javanese concept of equanimity and subjective well-being. The concept manifests as the desire to establish and maintain harmony in social relationships. In social interaction, rukun indicates a cultural and moral imperative to avoid or regulate the display of strong emotions, and to avoid and ignore public arguments and dissonances so as not to jeopardize one’s own and others’ tentram. From the perspective of identity politics, rukun and tentram are the central social and emotional motivators to participate in communal work (gotong royong), perform ritualized services to one’s local community (arisan and slametan), and adhere to institutionalized cycles of communal and life cycle rituals. From the perspective of subjective well-being, rukun is strongly linked to the concept of tentram, which can be translated as a way of ‘being at emotional ease’, and is also often referred to 13 | Kejawèn, Agama Jawa, Kebatinan and Kepercayaan are terms that relate to Javanese religious tradition, consisting of animistic, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic, especially Sufi, beliefs and practices (Mulder 2005; Schlehe 2015).

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as tenang (‘unperturbed’, ‘calm’) or damai (‘at peace’) in Bahasa Indonesia. All three terms relate to a person’s feeling of ‘inner harmony’, which results from the balance between outer appearance (lahir) and inner feelings (batin). Ideally speaking, tentram and rukun are complementarily related. Even in the face of an insult or a public offence, the abilities of keeping composure and securing the public image of rukun are usually valued. Because public offence might destabilize persons’ tentram, being startled (kagèt) is downplayed for the sake of maintaining social harmony and inner and outer balance. In order not to affect both one’s own and the well-being of others, foreseeable actions are favored over unpredictable situations and behavior. A person’s subjective well-being can be defined as inter-personally and socially related: a person’s subjective well-being is affected by both one’s own and the displayed well-being of others. As the protection of rukun and tentram are hypercognized (Levy 1973) interaction and feeling rules, social encounters seem predictable and conservative, strongly opposing social change. As a consequence of the prioritization of social predictability over unpredictable individuality, social interaction is supposed to be emotionally detached and one’s individuality socio-culturally masked in relation to one’s social position. In order to not disturb the metaphysical and social order of Javanese society, social behavior is collectively monitored and evaluated according to its contribution to rukun and inter-affective tentram. This description sketches a very schematic and almost neo-functionalist social actor. But, as we shall see in the analysis of the protagonists’ coming of age, the close-knit Javanese corset of interaction, feeling and display rules is not only constraining, but also provides social and emotive repertoires for persons that are considered marginalized and non-Javanese (durung Jawa) in order to initiate social and economic cooperation and foster both temporary and longterm upward social mobility.

‘B UDI P EKERTI ‘ The city’s residents stress that “Jogja”, as they call it, is the cradle of ‘Javaneseness’ (kejawèn) and Javanese culture (budaya Jawa), which promotes refined, respectful, and harmonious social interactions and relationships. Despite the dynamism of everyday life where people from different social strata, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds interact in resourceful and culturally blended ways, people allude to a way of life that is endorsed as ‘Javanese ways’ (cara Jawa) and is best encapsulated in what is locally understood as budi pekerti14 . 14 | Literary translation from basa Jawa (Javanese language): Deeds (budi) that originate in pure and good (pekerti) thoughts.

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This idealized folk model links moral norms of social conduct with a good and virtuous life, and socially embodies metaphysical dichotomies (halus, ‘refined,’ and kasar, ‘rough’) and the balancing of the outer appearance (lahir), inner self (batin), and feeling (rasa) in order to achieve and maintain the sociocultural aspiration of social harmony (rukun) and inter-affective equanimity (tentram) (Beatty, 1999; Geertz, 1960; Magnis-Suseno 2003; Stodulka, 2016). Interlocutors have taught me over the years that the ‘Javanese ways’ of feeling and interacting are expected to comply with the following principles: 1. Honesty (kejujuran), sincerity (ketulusan), obedience and compliance (kepatuhan, or manut) with social and cultural norms. 2. A good name (nama baik). Protect the reputation of a good name so as not to experience or induce feelings of malu (‘shame’/‘embarrassment’) in oneself and others, which can equate to the loss of one’s ‘respectability’ (hormat). 3. Social harmony (rukun). Avoid conflicts in the family, among neighbors, the village, and the larger society. It is said that destruction and chaos emerge when people ignore rukun and tentram. 4. Patience (sabar) and wholehearted (ikhlas) acceptance (nrimo) of life’s adversities. 5. Avoid feeling envy (iri) of other people’s achievements. One must work hard and be rewarded only with God’s blessings. 6. No profit (tanpa pamrih) or ‘egoism’. The focus on one’s own success and profit (pamrih) is misleading in a person’s path to becoming ‘a good Javanese’. Instead, the cooperation (gotong royong) on various social scales and collective enjoyment of achievements is valued. In order to deal with the complexities of community life, people are expected to know their position within the society and behave accordingly. Acting as if not knowing one’s place within Javanese hierarchical social order is perceived as ‘ignorant’ (cuek), ‘wild’ (liar), ‘not-yet-Javanese’ (durung Jawa), and even ‘not-yethuman’ (durung wong). Being aware of one’s social position in social encounters, persons are expected to behave deferent and never ‘loud’ (keras) or as if ‘not knowing oneself’ (tidak tahu diri) to those of higher status, or generous but never ‘arrogant’ (sombong) or too ‘proud’ (bangga), to those of lower status. Such refined socio-cultural practice is the key to avoid unrest, agitation and conflict in personal and community life. The expression of one’s subjective opinions is avoided in the presence of socially higher-ranking persons, and in the undesirable case of conflict, situations are faced with masked indifference and the use of appropriate speech level of Javanese (Basa Jawa). In order to secure harmonious social relationships, it is crucial to master and regulate one’s own and others’ emotions. Instead of taking action, it is more esteemed to glide along (ngalir) with the flow of social life, practicing endurance, patience (sabar)

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and respectful deference (hormat), as well as accepting (nrimo) misfortune wholeheartedly (ikhlas) by hoping for a better future, and yet not passively surrendering to the adversities of life. It does not go without mentioning that the rather ‘egalitarian’ lingua franca Bahasa Indonesia has continuously replaced and changed the complex Basa Jawa since its introduction into the national curricula of schools in the 1950s. And yet, with over 100 million potential speakers, ‘Indonesianized’ Basa Jawa still reflects a person’s ‘being Javanese’. It remains an essential indicator of being halus (refined, cultivated), linguistic means to maintain equanimity (tentram) and social harmony (rukun). The Javanese language is categorized into the three speech levels of krama (which is further distinguished into the ceremonial speeches of andhap and inggil), krama madya, and ngoko (Berman 1998). Anthropologist Laine Berman explains that the three speech levels of the krama, krama madya and ngoko reflect the quality of social relationships and the rank-related proximity of the interacting persons (1998: 14). If the interactants’ social rank is similar or they are related through kinship ties or spatial neighborhoods, they can address each other either in ngoko or madya, depending on their social positions. When their social positions differ, and they share no or only distant kinship or friendship ties and/or spatial proximity, they would speak in either madya or krama – assumed that both of the interaction partners know how to speak these more refined (halus) forms of Basa Jawa. Speech level and behavior are linked to the mutual awareness of interlocutors’ social positions, and the situation in which conversations or encounters take place. Berman writes that “these speech levels, directed by social-contextual factors in the speech event, signal identity as a reflection of social relations […]. Speech must reflect social contexts by clarifying who the participants are relationally in the social order.” (1998: 14-5) The interactants’ social actions (including mimics, gestures and body posture) and speech (level of Basa Jawa, prosody, use of particular forms of address) need to be constantly adjusted to their (relative) social position in order to maintain social harmony (rukun) and foster mutual equanimity and well-being (tentram). In both classic and contemporary ethnographies, hormat is predominantly translated as the English term ‘respect’. From a subaltern perspective, it is necessary to scrutinize this translation more critically. Hildred Geertz already wrote that hormat and related emotion words have a “complex meaning, which only slightly overlap with the American notion of respect” (1961: 110). Although Koentjaraningrat (1984:251) disagrees with Geertz, I consider this dissent as a result of their different levels of analysis and respective differences in the ‘research subjects’’ social positions. Whereas Geertz predominantly focused on women and children of priyayi and abangan, Koentjaraningrat’s anthropology

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adopts the point of view of the male priyayi cultural elite. Differences between their interlocutors affect both the definition of emotion words and their related social actions, and their definitions of what is considered ‘Javanese’ and what is not. From the street-related protagonists’ perspectives, ‘hormat’ highlights the cultural ideal of displaying ‘deference’ in social encounters. ‘Hormat’ transpires as a permanent reminder of inferiority, since ‘deference’ is displayed by enacting malu (‘shame’) in order to exhibit a consciousness and acknowledgement of (low) social position. Through embodying ‘hormat’, the adolescents and young men proved they could act in ‘refined’ (halus) Javanese ways. Anthropologists have stressed the pervasiveness of shame-like emotions in Indonesian cultures from a normative perspective, and argue that malu and related ethno-local concepts constrain actors’ social agency, and marginalize minorities because it protects those who are in social or political control (Beatty 2005a;b; Boellstorff/Lindquist 2004; Fessler 2004; H. Geertz 1961; Goddard 1996; Heider 1991; Keeler 1983; Koentjaraningrat 1984; Lindquist 2009; RöttgerRössler 2004; Shaver et al. 2001). These studies have neglected the potential of malu as a strategy to contest marginalization in a culturally refined way. From an anthropological perspective, which intends to analyze social interactions between marginalized persons and those of higher social position, I will discuss the feeling and meaning of malu in relation to repeated situations, encounters and social events of the extended case studies. This praxeological (Scheer 2012) approach to affects, feelings and emotions complements taxonomic classifications of semiotic landscapes, linguistic registers, questionnaire-based cross-cultural assessments and physiological categorizations of facial expressions, that have been conducted in various Indonesian contexts (Ekman/Heider 1988; Fessler 2004; Heider 1991; Kuipers 1998; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013; Shaver/Murdaya/ Fraley 2001). The following chapters intend to explain shame-like and other emotions in relation to their initiation and socialization into street-related communities (chapter 4), to their particular tekyan ideology and style (chapter 5), as emotive techniques and strategies of transforming affective bonds into social and other capital (chapter 6) and as painful experiences and impediments of sustainable aid-seeking in the context of HIV-AIDS (chapter 7).

4 Becoming Tekyan THE P ROTAGONISTS MONCHI (* 1980, † 2013) was the leader of the komunitas Congklak in the North of Yogyakarta, a frequented contact person for various NGOs, and a successful broker between different communities on and off the streets. He knew all the other protagonists and they knew him. Monchi is not only the protagonist of the following chapters; he was my research partner, mentor and close friend. His élan and spirit kept me going even in the bleakest of times when so many of our friends had died within only a few years. We addressed each other as orgil (an acronym for orang gila, i.e. ‘crazy person’), a gentle mocking. In recent years he started referring to me as his ‘ayah’, meaning father, when he introduced me to others, and his wife Dyah and their two children call me ‘uncle Tom’ (omtom). This book would have never manifested without Monchi’s help. During the last two years of his life, in which we also started talking about death and dying, he was pushing me to finish my doctorate thesis on which this book is based in order to jointly disembark on a reading tour around Java and Bali. After I had finished the thesis in February 2013, he assured me in phone calls, that he was very happy and also proud of me. Monchi died in December 2013 and we did not meet again in person. I remember one of our last face-to-face conversations in June 2012 very vividly when we discussed the first draft of my thesis over two days at a homestay at the beach of Parangtritis, where we had first met in the bamboo hut eleven years earlier. When he asked me to ‘wrap up’ until the end of the year, he looked me directly in the eyes, and said, Do you know how we built our wooden huts behind the Congklak street junction? One side is made of bamboo that we found at a nearby construction site, one side of recycled wood. For the third side we stole a textile commercial band for cigarettes, and for the fourth we built our own wall made from the wood and fresh bamboo we found near the river. For the roof we used corrugated metal that we traded for hundreds of collected empty plastic bottles at a scrap iron and recycled plastic dealer. You have to be creative. Rarely have I heard a more adequate definition of writing ethnography. Monchi was born in a Central Javanese town in 1980, as the second of four children of Ibu Wijono and Bapak Heryanto. At the age of two he moved with

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his parents and older sister to Jakarta, where his two younger brothers were born. When Monchi was six years old and attended first grade (kelas 1 SD1), his parents sent him back to Central Java to live with his grandparents for a year, before he was taken back to Jakarta again. According to Monchi, he changed schools ‘too often’ during these years, and he hated having to adapt to new classmates and teachers again and again. His father worked as a truck driver. He was on the road most of the time, delivering his load to Sumatra, East and Central Java. When Monchi’s father was not on the road, he spent most of his time at bus terminals and the garages of his employers. And he was a playboy. He always had other women around him. I did not like that, Monchi often mentioned when talking about his childhood. His father had more or less disappeared from the family at that time, and mostly returned back home when he was drunk to ask his wife for money she did not have. One late afternoon near the end of 2006, while sitting at one of our ‘secret spots’ in a small shelter in the middle of a rice field, looking at the slopes of Mount Merapi, Monchi started telling me about his life before we met. It was so unfair. My mother even had two jobs; one was to sell vegetables at the market in the morning until noon. Then she made lunch for us, and in the afternoon she went cleaning in an office at Jalan Sudirman. Before she started selling vegetables at the market, she made 17,000 Rupiah2 a day as a housemaid (pembantu). When my father was at home, he sometimes brought other women. That was very embarrassing (malu-maluin). He had no respect (enggak hormat) for my hard-working mother. The extra-money that my mother earned all went to his booze, women and gambling. My father actually was a real playboy and a criminal (preman). He had five wives. And these five were only the official ones. Once, when my mother was sick, I was looking for him, and found him in a cheap hotel near the bus terminal. He was lying naked on the bed. The woman he was with was also naked. When she saw me, she took a sarung and covered herself a little bit. But I could see her breasts, because she had to get up to look for the ‘sarung’. She was laughing at me and made some moves as if she liked me. I told my father that mom was sick and that we needed money for the doctor, medication and food for me and my brothers and my sister, because my mother couldn’t work. He stood up, got a few thousand Rupiah, and said that has to be enough, and if I needed more, I should work myself and never come back and ask him anymore. I was very angry (marah), and also ashamed (malu), so I didn’t tell my mother where I’d found my father.

Because there was no economic support from his father, Monchi began working after school at the age of eight, while he was still officially attending 1 | SD (Indon.): Sekolah Dasar (grammar/elementary school; comprises six grades). 2 | At an exchange rate of approx. 2,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in the early 1990s: $8.50 USD.

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his third grammar school in Jakarta after he returned from his grandparents in Central Java. His older sister and his younger brothers did not work because their mother wanted them to finish school. Ratih did graduate from senior high school (lulus SMA 3), however Monchi and his younger brothers, Prapto and Tirto, left school after the 7 th grade (kelas 1 SMP4). On another evening in late 2006, at the same ‘secret spot’, Monchi continued his story: I was washing buses and other cars at that time. They paid me 1,000 Rupiah5 per bus. Sometimes I cleaned up to fifteen buses a day. The work was very hard and exhausting, because you are wet all the time, especially during the rainy season. And when it gets dark, you are cold all the time. Besides washing the buses, I actually hoped for rain, so I could make extra money by borrowing an umbrella from someone and accompanying passengers to and from buses and taxis. Normally, I got 100 Rupiah, 500 was already a lot at that time. Sometimes people gave as much as 1,000 Rupiah. You know, you have to be very clever (pintar) when you grow up in the circumstances I did, like all our other friends, too. Besides, I worked in dark and hidden places, where my father and his friends were gambling. I served the men tea and bought cigarettes for them. Usually they gave me 100 or 200 Rupiah per person. In case one of the men won in the gambling, he would give me 5,000 Rupiah straight away. The men called me ‘little one’ (krucil) at that time, because I was so skinny and small.

Monchi’s break up with his family was a continuous process of many years, an accumulation of economic and social adversities that a child at his age could hardly cope with on his own. Finally, he dropped out of school at the age of thirteen. Besides the fact that their household was not able to pay for school fees any longer, he felt too tired to continue attending school. I decided to drop out of school myself. It was not my mother who told me to. But I had seen how she suffered. So, I decided it was better that my older sister goes to school, not me – and I started to work at the bus terminal full-time. I always wanted to finish school, if possible until SMA, but I was just too tired in the evenings when I finished washing the buses and after a few hours of sleep had to wake up to go to school again. After spending more and more time at the bus terminal, I got to know some friends who were also working there. We had a lot of fun together, and one day they took me to the train station. There were so many other children there. They did not go to school. They 3 | SMA (Indon.): Sekolah Menengah Atas (senior secondary high school; comprises three grades). 4 | SMP (Indon.): Sekolah Menengah Pertama (middle junior high school; comprises three grades). 5 | At an exchange rate of approx. 2,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in the early 1990s: $ 0.50 USD.

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Besides contributing to the household income so that his siblings could attend school, Monchi always mentioned his abusive father when asked why he turned to the streets at such an early age. When my father was drunk, his anger (marah) was directed against my mother and me. We got beaten up quite often. That was after he took all the money we had, and then left again. And still, he was angry with us. It was never enough money for him. One time, when I tried to protect my mother, he was so angry (marah) that he locked me in the bathroom for a whole day after he’d punched me and then slapped me using his leather belt. I heard my mother cry outside while he beat her up. My older sister was also crying. I swore to myself that I would kill him one day, when I was big enough.

Monchi became very agitated whenever we talked about his father, taking deep breaths, just to break out in laughter the next moment, always cutting the story at a different point. Sometimes he didn’t finish the story for weeks, but nevertheless the end was always remembered in the same way. The day, when at the age of fifteen, Monchi finally broke with his family home and ran off to Yogyakarta for good. The last time I met my father he was drunk and I punched him with a big glass. He was angry (marah) again, but I was bigger now. And I’d had enough. I almost killed him, because I punched him with a heavy glass; many times, on the head, on the chest, in the face. I hardly remember it, and when I ran out of the house, and stopped when I was far enough from our house, I couldn’t remember what happened. I hoped, but somehow was afraid (takut), that I killed him, so my mother could live in peace. That was the last time I saw him.

KRIS (* 1982) was a member of the komunitas Congklak. I had met him at the beach hut together with Monchi in 2001. Our relationship lacked the depth in 6 | At an exchange rate of approx. 2,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in the early 1990s: $35 USD.

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mutual trust that I shared with Monchi. Probably due to his ‘craziness’ (gila), a sometimes not so gentle mocking by his friends, our relation was more of a humorous ‘joking relationship’. Kris was very funny and nobody was safe from his jokes. Initially, when I still felt strange and out of place among the anak Congklak, the encounters with Kris could be very challenging and unpredictable, as he adeptly managed to make me feel embarrassed due to his unconventional sense of humor. My relationship with him intensified rather unexpectedly when he became – in the words of his friends – ‘error’, ‘stres’ and ‘gila betul’ (‘really crazy’), referring to diffuse states of ‘craziness’ in terms of a mysterious mental illness (later diagnosed as ‘spirit possession’ by local healers and ‘schizoaffective disorder’ by psychiatrists), in November 2006. At that time, Monchi and I assisted in caring for him and his family during following months. After his recovery, which took over one year, our relationship was characterized by respectful avoidance and malu on his behalf. He married a young woman from his kampung in 2012, and he is now a father of two girls. Kris was born in the north of Yogyakarta, and grew up in a kampung next to the Congklak street junction as the first child of Ibu Wijila and Bapak Hartono. His mother worked as a hired laborer in the rice paddies a few kilometers north of the city. His father, who was almost fifteen years older than his mother, sometimes contributed to the household income as a hired laborer at construction sites in and around the city. Around the year 2000, at the age of almost sixty, it became more and more difficult for his father to find work because contractors preferred to hire younger workers. Kris dropped out of school after the 6th grade (kelas 6 SD), whereas his younger brother Trianto finished junior high school (SMP). Both began working at construction sites at an early age to which their father had introduced them. In 2007, Trianto found work at a mobile phone outlet, generating the biggest income of the family. At that point Kris’ youngest brother Hari, a second grader, was already on and off at grammar school (kelas 2 SD). The family’s rented house, which was located in a neighborhood near the Northern Ring Road of Yogyakarta, was basically an empty cement house. The three-room house simply contained two woven mats, two mattresses, an old sofa, a coffee table, and an old portable radio. At the back of the house was an open kitchen where Kris’ mother cooked with firewood. After finishing grammar school at the age of 15, Kris started avoiding his father. He told me how his father’s authoritarian attitude was unbearable. Instead of attending school, he was ordered to work at construction sites in and around Yogyakarta. In 1999, soon after his brother Hari was born, and after weeks of arguing with his father, he finally left home at the age of 17 and joined the nearby komunitas Congklak. He started working as a pengamen (‘busker’/‘street musician’) at major intersections and spent most of his nights on the streets until he became severely ill in November 2006 (see chapter 7).

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HARVEY (*  1976) and I met in 2005, shortly after the wooden huts of the komunitas Congklak were burnt down (see chapter 6) and just before he left the komunitas Congklak and joined the komunitas Bendoro. At that time, he stayed in an NGO’s open house near the riverbank in the city center, and started working at a workshop for wooden and handcrafted toys. The handicraft workshop was temporarily co-managed by Jempol (see below), who introduced me to Harvey. When compared to the other anak Bendoro, Harvey had always struck me as extremely polite (both in speech, gesture and language), helpful, responsible and caring for his friends. Harvey was born in East Java. His parents died when he was still a child. As he had difficulties to concentrate in school and did not want to further burden his three older siblings, he decided to leave his hometown in East Java at the age of fourteen. Similar to Monchi, Harvey arrived in Yogyakarta by train. In retrospect, he described that his first experiences of being alone in Yogyakarta, where all his possessions were stolen, made him brave (berani) and tough (keras) in order to survive on the streets. He joined a community near the Lempuyangan train station in Yogyakarta, sold newspapers, started busking (ngamen), and shoe shining. Although he had always been close to the komunitas Bendoro, he joined the komunitas Congklak in the year 2000, where he lived until their huts and shelters were burnt down in April 2005 (see chapter 6). We spent many afternoons and nights together at the workshop in 2005. When I returned to Yogyakarta in July 2006, he had just left the city together with Harto, another anak Bendoro, to begin a one-year vocational training in organic gardening at an educational center in West Java. After his return in April 2007, we often met at our jointly organized HIV-AIDS workshops, where he contributed as an important broker between counselors and the street communities. Furthermore, we had a series of in-depth talks during my visits to the organic gardens at the slopes of Merapi, which he and Harto set up with the help of an eco-social project, upon their return from West Java. His ‘career’ is undoubtedly outstanding in many ways: he exited the streets, trained in organic farming, accumulated economic capital, ‘started’ a family, and traveled the Indonesian archipelago as a well-paid training supervisor, just to find himself back on the streets again collecting and selling scrap iron and secondhand furniture years later. He stopped working as trainer in organic farming in late 2012 after his wife had died of cancer in order to care for their daughter. Since 2013 he runs a scrap iron and second hand furniture shop together with his brother-in-law and two other friends, who have also left komunitas Bendoro a few years before. JEMPOL (* 1976) is half a year older than me, which – besides his position as ‘boss’ of the komunitas Bendoro – often led to teasing and mocking on my behalf.

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We met at the beach hut in 2001, where we spent many weeks together with 17year old Sayang, whom he cared for after the latter’s release from prison. Sayang died in 2003 from diagnosed ‘chronic asthma’. Jempol spoke good English and enjoyed the company of foreign tourists, and they enjoyed his. His charm and wit seduced many equally charming and witty expatriates, particularly women who were staying in Yogyakarta for short or living there for long-term periods. Our relationship was never close in terms of sharing frustration or pain, but was focused on displaying mutual respect related to us caring for his komunitas. After Jempol had left the eco-social project in late 2006, we only met each other as parts of greater groups. Although he started to slowly but steadily ‘exit’ the komunitas in 2007, and he was never thrilled about being friends with an anthropologist, his role as a mediator during our HIV-AIDS workshops and VCTs was invaluable. After we got involved in a dispute over caring practices in relation to Jim’s hospitalization, he made his standpoint on my endeavor of being both ‘friend’ and ‘anthropologist’ particularly clear: If you want to write about us, it is better we stop being friends. We have been exploited one too many times. Better think of it…! We have only met sporadically since 2010. Jempol will be a vital part in all of the subchapters, but only a summarized version of his life story will be touched upon. Jempol was born in Madura. He escaped from his family and home in East Java at the age of fourteen because he could not stand living with his father under one roof any longer. In 1991, he arrived in Yogyakarta by train and instantly joined the komunitas Bendoro, where he worked his way up through community hierarchy until he became ‘boss’ years later. Similar to Harvey, he explained that the initial hardships, violence and oppression on the streets enhanced his resiliency in order to become a both well-respected and feared authoritarian figure. In the late 1990s Jempol became an important liaison between the komunitas Bendoro and various local NGOs. Because he was also personally involved with the organizers, he helped to set up the eco-social project’s open house, the workshop and the beach hut, which all became important retreats for the younger anak Bendoro in the early to mid-2000s. Starting in 2006 he continuously distanced himself both personally and professionally from the open house and its workshop and focused on his own life apart from the komunitas. JIM’S (* 1977, † 2007) life story could fill a thick book of its own. His prominence will be focused upon in the context of suffering and coping with extreme stigmatization and physical pain in the face of AIDS in chapter 7. I knew Jim only by sight since 2005. We had never talked to each other before he became terminally ill in May 2007 when we suddenly spent almost every day together for over two months until he died in July the same year. His friends from the komunitas Bendoro had turned their backs on him for various

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reasons after he was diagnosed with AIDS, so Jim needed someone to support him financially and care for him. I was simply at hand. Jim literally dictated his life story into my paper notebook during daily and nightly sessions of tears and laughter, in-between fever fits and other painful outcries of his ‘rebelling body’. Jim always stressed that we were meant to meet because we were both ‘crazy enough’ (cukup gila). On one of our first encounters, when he was still physically apt to stay in his rented room (kos) just behind Jalan Malioboro, he started joking. Jim: I really love ‘The Doors’. Jim Morrison. Do you know why? I love them because it is the best music when you are high. You can really feel the music then. I even had the Jim Morrison book and all the original CDs. While I was in prison, ‘The Doors’ kept me alive. I always listened to their songs by myself, in my head. Crazy (gila), isn’t it? Thomas: Yes, crazy. But you are a crazy man, aren’t you? J: Yes, you are right, I am crazy. But you are also a crazy guy, aren’t you? Or why else would you be here with me, when all my friends are gone?

Jim was born in Madura in 1977. His father left the family and married another woman when Jim was six years old. At the age of seven, his mother moved Jim and his four older siblings back across the Madura Strait to her hometown of Surabaya, East Java, where she quickly remarried. Jim’s stepfather physically abused him and his siblings, favoring his own two daughters. Jim left his family for the streets of Surabaya at the age of twelve. In the first two years, he regularly returned to his family. In 1990, at the age of almost fourteen, he left his family for good and started living with other children and youths in semipermanent huts behind the central bus terminal in Surabaya. He worked as a street hawker selling sweets and used newspapers, which he collected on the platforms of the terminal. He remembered the time in Surabaya as being very violent and rough (kasar): Life is hard in Surabaya. You really learn to take care of yourself there. One mistake, and they are all after you, and beat you up, no matter how young you are. Fortunately I was used to that from my stepfather, so even I was young and still small, I was not really afraid of the others.

He took a deep gulp of warm water – a huge success on that day in late June 2007, when every bite of rice porridge and every drop of water must have caused him unbearable pain due to the infections in his mouth, severe diarrhea, stomach pain and constant fever. Nevertheless, he smiled and continued: If you only received a glass of shared drink with the wrong hand, it was reason enough for the older kids to beat you up. You cannot imagine this on the streets of Jogja. Here

Becoming Tekyan people talk to you first, they explain to you why they are going to beat you up when you make a mistake the second time. Jogja is really relaxed (santai) and safe (aman). That’s why I finally stayed here after visiting a few times with a friend of mine from Surabaya. In Surabaya I would have never dealt drugs. The people, who deal there are way rougher (lebih kasar). One mistake and they kill you. But here – easy.

Jim lived in the surroundings of the bus terminal in Surabaya, East Java for almost ten years. During his time on the streets, his mother moved to Kalimantan in the wake of the New Order’s structural transmigration 7 project. His oldest brother and his two sisters went in search of work to Malaysian Borneo. The only family member Jim kept loose contact with was his older brother who lived near Surabaya with his family. In 2000, at the age of 23, Jim joined his brother’s family and worked occasionally at the Surabaya harbor as a day laborer in order to contribute to the household income. He returned to his community at the bus terminal in Surabaya after six months, as he realized that he couldn’t remain in his brother’s home because family life was too rigid and he was malu (‘ashamed’/’embarrassed’) regarding his limited financial contributions to their household income. Just before New Years 2001, he finally left Surabaya and moved to Yogyakarta to live in the surroundings of Malioboro. In the years to come, he was on and off the streets, in and out of jail, and returned to his brother’s house every other year for visits, particularly in the months before he had to be hospitalized in May 2007. The protagonists’ stories reveal the intertwining of both structural and more personal political, social, economic, cultural and psychological forces that triggered their family break-up. Jim reminds us that institutionalized social inequalities and governmental policies (e.g. transmigrasi) can have a strong impact on the social and emotional development of children, whereas Monchi, Jempol and Kris illustrated that the interweaving of structural and domestic violence can prove fatal in dissecting and fragmenting whole families8. Monchi’s and Kris’ mothers had worked in multiple jobs and had substantially 7 | Transmigrasi (Indon.): a transmigration program, which was initiated by the Dutch colonial government, and since 1969 continued by the Orde baru regime. The governmental program targeted the resettlement of landless people from the densely populated islands of Java and Bali to less populous areas of the archipelago (Papua, Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi) in order to reduce the rural poverty and overpopulation, and to provide a workforce to better utilize the natural resources of the outer islands. The program, however, has not only fueled anti-Javanese resentments, but contributed to the reinforcement of separatist movements and ethnic violence (Friend 2003). 8 | See Findeisen/Großmann (2013) for a kaleidoscopic assessment of violence against women in Southeast Asia and China.

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contributed to the household economy. In the households and families of the urban marginalized and the squatter communities, as well rural communities, working wives and mothers have never been an exception. Furthermore, Jim and Monchi’s cases hint towards the potentially detrimental force of polygamy when the fathers neglected their families, but refused to divorce their wives, because it does not only burden the women economically, but deprives women of their right to re-marry or live with other men without being morally stigmatized by their neighborhood or kampung (Lemelson 2014). The exploitation of the young and the female could be read as a manipulation of the cara Jawa, where the male and the senior mistake mutual respect (hormat) as taken-for-granted submission or ‘deference’ of those who are supposed to be cared for, and confuse the moral guidance (tata krama and tata susila) of nrimo (‘acceptance’), sabar (‘patience’), and ikhlas (‘wholeheartedly’) with ‘infinite obedience’ (see chapter 4). In a social, cultural and political environment where controversy and interference into ‘so-called ‘internal’ or ‘household affairs’ (urusan rumah tangga) is considered uncultivated (kasar), disrespectful (tidak hormat) and a severe source of inducing malu in both the intruder and the accused, the power of higher-ranking and elites can turn foul and foster despotism, ostracism and oppression.

A RRIVING ON THE S TREE TS OF YOGYAK ARTA One of the first destinations for most of the new arrivals to Yogyakarta was the economy class train station, Stasiun Lempuyangan. The formally employed/ middle class, tourists, or university students usually arrived at the Stasiun Tugu, where the trains of the business and executive classes stopped. The area around Lempuyangan station consisted of many abandoned buildings (which once served as depots or warehouses), vast areas of uninhabited space along the railroad tracks, and two road overpasses, places that served as homes and hangouts (nongkrong) for especially younger street-related children, transgender (waria), sex workers, and pedicab drivers (tukang becak) from the countryside, who spent weekdays in the city, and returned home on most weekends. It was a lively and crowded area both day and night, and a central meeting point for nearby kampung residents, the jalanan, and peasants from the surrounding villages who were accompanying or picking up arriving and departing relatives and friends. Food was sold by women sitting on woven mats at prices only slightly higher than those at the traditional markets. The empty cigarette packs and butts on the floor were predominantly no-name brands, self-rolled tobacco, and clove cigarettes (kretek) without filter. In Lempuyangan it was hard to find a place to sit, as the floor of the station was always crowded with families waiting for delayed trains and relatives. Older people were dressed

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in traditional blouses (kebaya) and batik wraps or batik shirts and trousers, the younger ones in worn out T-shirts, jeans, well-used leather jackets, and most of the people – both men and women – wore plastic flip-flops (sandal jepit). As a ‘bule’ (foreigner, ‘Westerner’), it was impossible to not get asked dozens of questions like dari mana-mau ke mana-sudah bisa makan nasi-sudah menikahsudah punya anak?9 Trains were late by hours not minutes, the loudspeakers of the station manager cracked and made funny noises, the whole place smelled of kretek (clove cigarettes), sate (sticks of grilled chicken or mutton), sweet perfume, sweat and during its season – durian (referred to as the ‘king of fruits’ by many Indonesians, but also feared for its stomach-churning odor by many expatriates). Lempuyangan was a very lively, hot and bustling place, which was only symbolically guarded by indifferent station guards in threadbare uniforms. This has changed over the years. Today its gates are equally guarded as those of the historical Tugu train station near Jalan Malioboro, where a tall iron fence as well as spotlessly uniformed security officers secured its two entrances. If you weren’t traveling anywhere, but wanted to accompany your friends or relatives to see them off on their journey, you had to pay 2,000 Rupiah10 just to enter the station. Since 2012, it is forbidden to enter the station any longer without a valid train ticket. The floor inside Tugu station was made of ceramic and was on constant watch of cleaning services in blue and orange uniforms. The food was served in little warungs (foodstalls) that were integrated into the old colonial building. The coffee was made from powdered Nescafe instead of roasted coffee beans (kopi tubruk) and the food prices were similar to those of the newly renovated Adisuscipto International Airport on the eastern outskirts of Yogyakarta. As for many others who came from all over Java to Yogyakarta, Lempuyangan was also Monchi’s first refuge after leaving Jakarta. There he made first contacts with new friends who lived and worked in the area. Besides Lempuyangan, which was known to be a place for waria and street-related children, the next destination for many newcomers to the city, be it tourists, both domestic and foreign, or ‘jalanan’, was Jalan Malioboro just around the corner from Tugu station, well known as the city’s most popular ‘outdoor’ tourist shopping destination. ‘Malioboro’ as it was simply called, was promoted as the geographical and economic center of Yogyakarta.

9 | This refers to the almost obligatory standardized conversations, which most bule were exposed to when sitting in a crowded public space. Dari mana-mau ke mana-sudah bisa makan nasi-sudah menikah-sudah punya anak? translates as ‘where are you from–where are you going–are you used to eating rice yet–are you married–do you have children?’ 10 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2007: $0.20 USD.

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This was where the tourists hung out, where people traded their goods at the nearby central market (Pasar Beringharjo), on the sidewalks and in little alleys, where small shops sold alcohol in dark corners, and where people would hang out (nongkrong) until the early mornings, drinking AO11 or lapen12 , playing guitar and singing together. Malioboro exerted a magic attraction for the ‘jalanan’, street musicians, artists, and students until the mid-2000s. Yogyakartabased anthropologist Laine Berman, who documented and contributed to the flourishing of the Malioboro street movement (GIRLI) during its heydays in the 1990s, once described the street very precisely and in delightful words as the center of Yogyakarta: “Anyone who has ever been to Yogyakarta will know Jalan Malioboro, the “Main Street” of the city. To those of you who have not yet had the pleasure, it is hard to describe. Jalan Malioboro is the center of life for Yogyans historically, religiously, politically, economically, and socially. It directionally links the kraton (the sultan’s palace) with the two “centers” of traditional Javanese power in both the mythical and religious senses: Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire), the world’s most destructive volcano, is located 30 miles to the north. Parangkusuma, the beach 30 miles to the south, is said to be the domain of the Queen of the South Java Sea, the patron saint of Javanese mysticism. Jalan Malioboro is also the location of the Governor’s office, as well as the local legislative councils. Jalan Malioboro is lined on both sides with shops and shopping malls of all kinds. It is considered the world’s longest permanent open air market with stalls lining both sides of the street, both on the street side, and in front of the shops. It is thus a Mecca for tourists, vendors, artists, musicians, thieves, and anyone looking for a bit of easy recreation at pretty much any time of the day or night.” (Berman 1994:20)

Malioboro still attracted many people and ‘newcomers’ to the city, but friends who either lived or still live on the streets, and experienced its ‘heydays’ in the 1990s, claimed that it had lost its magic, its liveliness, and its spirit of freedom. Police patrols increased to two times a night instead of the former routine of once or twice a week. The police neither had been less brutal nor had the punishment been less sadistic, if one got caught (e.g. for not having an identity card13), but raids seemed less often. Over the course of the last ten 11 | Anggur Orang Tua was sold in little shops (warung) and herbal shops, which sold traditional medicine. It comprises of 14,7% alcohol, tastes very sweet and is often mixed with other alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks. 12 | Lapen is a mix of low-quality alcohol, which was sold in little shops near Jalan Malioboro. Due to many cases of alcohol poisoning, its sale is now formally prohibited, but since the prohibition of beer in supermarkets since 2014, its consumption has increased again. 13 | In Indonesia, an ID is referred to as ‘KTP’ – Kartu Tanda Penduduk.

Becoming Tekyan

years, Malioboro has transformed into an open-air mall for the self-designated ‘middle class’, who fought about window seats at the global fast food restaurants in Yogyakarta’s first (of now innumerous) malls, the ‘Malioboro Mall’, which opened its air-conditioned gates in the mid-1980s. But Malioboro continues to be one of the city’s main destinations of both Indonesian and foreign tourists, and many hotels in every price range are located near there. As one former pengamen, Utomo (in his early forties) who lived on the streets of Malioboro for many years put it in 2007: Today there are more ATM machines14 on Malioboro than you can see guitars that are played by the jalanan. They want to clean the city of its rubbish. And to them we are rubbish. So there is no space for us anymore.

THE A TOMIZ ATION OF THE ‘GIRLI M OVEMENT ’ The peak times of the ‘Jogja street culture’ were the 1990s, coinciding with ‘street children’s’ universal prominence in the mass media and NGO agendas. Australian, American, European and Indonesian NGO-activists, artists and anthropologists collaborated with the ‘anak jalanan’ (which was not necessarily a negative term at that time) and contributed to the creation of a distinct ‘Jogja street culture’. Ten years later, when I started to get involved, these times were almost over. The street-related communities’ positive self-perceptions as ‘anak jalanan’ or tekyan had given way to an atomized landscape of street-related communities, referred to as ‘komunitas’. The stressing of differences between one’s own street community and others outweighed the collectivism of the 1980s and 1990s ‘street movement’. This atomization was strongly linked to the demise of the joint movement of street artists, activists, and students called GIRLI. The Yogyakarta GIRLI ‘street movement’, initiated by social activists in 1984, was an outstanding example for a social movement in which stakeholders from various social groups, university students, anak jalanan, artists, anthropologists, and the wong cilik from the kampung around Malioboro countered state and media driven marginalization and stigmatization campaigns against children and youths living on the streets. GIRLI is an acronym for pingGIR kaLI, ‘beside the river’ or ‘river bank’, where most of the poorest residents of Indonesian cities live. Although the movement originated in Yogyakarta, GIRLI also existed in most of the larger Javanese cities and reached as far as Medan in North Sumatra and Makassar in South Sulawesi. 14 | It is not clear here, whether he means real ATM machines, or foreign backpackers and tourists, who are also sometimes referred to as ‘ATM’ by some of the protagonists.

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In 1994 Laine Berman wondered about the future of the GIRLI children, whether they would be able to change their fates. She wrote, “for now, they are just one more example of the callousness and failure of this era of modernization and development in just one more third world country” (1994:21). Over twenty years later, answers to Berman’s raised question seem odd at a first glance. Some have ‘exited’ the streets, others are still busking alone or with their wives and children, and yet others have died or disappeared. This ethnography’s coming of age perspective is an attempt to describe, analyze and understand the different stories of the anak GIRLI of the komunitas Bendoro and komunitas Congklak, in times where the ‘street child’ has suspiciously vanished from anthropological discourses. The Yogyakarta street movement, which was localized in the wider Malioboro area, has continuously lost its integrative force over the last ten years. The solidarity movement is still celebrated annually (related communities in Semarang and Jakarta also hold anniversary festivals), but in terms of collective identification and the feeling of belonging, it has constantly waned. What has remained is a reference to shared tekyan ideology and values that are passed on to newcomers. The self-attributive term ‘tekyan’ is an acronym of the Javanese ‘sithik ning lumayan’, which translates as ‘a little but enough’. During the last years, the term tekyan has more and more disappeared from the streets. Monchi stressed that it has remained an important reference in terms of identity formation when interacting with non-GIRLI street communities, but that its use has become less frequent among the newer generations. Although his komunitas Congklak now competed with the anak Bendoro and other former GIRLI-communities for the resources and attention of a constantly decreasing number of supporting NGOs, CBOs15, or more personalized sponsors, he assured me that they all still carried the tekyan within their hearts (see chapter 6). Increasing competition was linked to the permanent cleansing of former centers of ‘tekyan culture’ by the police and both formal and informal economic and spatial developments of the inner cities, legitimized by national and local laws and decrees. Yogyakarta was no longer the ‘tolerant city of street art’, but continuously drifted towards becoming an icon of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘safety’, driven by political and economic policies of progress and modernity. These ideological shifts were bluntly propagated by means of slogans on large posters and statues all over the city, like for example Jogjaku bersih! (‘My Yogyakarta is clean!’), Jogja berhati nyaman (see Image 1), and have peaked in the passing of

15 | CBO: acronym for ‘Community-based organization’, a locally operating civil society non-profit organization.

Becoming Tekyan

the by-law commonly referred to as Perda Gepeng in 2014 (see chapter 8), which penalizes public begging (ngemis) and being homeless (gelandangan).

K OMUNITAS B ENDORO The Bendoro community comprised of adolescent and young men who were sometimes referred to as gembel (vagrants) or preman (gangsters) by people who passed them while they worked, slept or hung out at a traffic light and related sidewalks of Yogyakarta’s city center. More benevolent people referred to them as anak jalanan, jalanan, or anak Bendoro. Considering their self-description, anak Bendoro would be the appropriate term. It means literally translated ‘child of the Bendoro’ or ‘belonging to Bendoro’. With Bendoro being the name of a street junction near Malioboro, the term stands for the young men’s (anonymized) local point of reference, where they lived and worked. The flock of tourists and various street busking and vending opportunities for handicrafts, temporary tattoos or T-shirts still rendered Malioboro a profitable location to generate income. However, official vending and busking opportunities became more limited throughout the last fifteen years by means of the numerous vending bans that were imposed by the Yogyakarta Municipality. Informal vendors such as the anak Bendoro had to struggle in order to keep their selling and busking spots. Increased spatial pressure and the frequent violent struggles over working spaces, combined with the anak Bendoro’s past media prominence when they were portrayed in a docufiction in the late 1990s, and their high exposure to NGOs and tourists, created pride narratives that the anak Bendoro continuously reproduced. They were not tired to stress their bangga Bendoro (‘Bendoro pride’) in relation to other street-related communities including their GIRLI ‘friends’ of the komunitas Congklak, who lived and worked about eight kilometers North of the Bendoro hangouts at a busy city highway intersection. Both the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak described initiation at Malioboro as tough (keras) and painful (sakit). Monchi, who later became the ketua (‘leader’) of the komunitas Congklak, initially had to endure dares in order to be allowed to sit with the anak Bendoro when he first arrived in Yogyakarta in 1996: If you wanted to join them and sit with them and they knew you were a ‘new kid’, they beat you up. Afterwards you were asked to drink and sit with them. Crazy. Thomas: And now? Monchi: It’s not the same anymore, when a ‘new kid’ joins, or one misbehaves in the eyes of the anak Bendoro. Although he will definitely be beaten up, it is more human now. Hahaha.

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Jim, who joined the komunitas Bendoro in 2001 described the street-related communities on Malioboro as more violent than those that had formed later at the outskirts. He described the komunitas Bendoro as the ‘bajingan betul’. Bajingan can be translated as ‘criminals’, and betul is a further affirmation – making them the ‘real criminals’. Bajingan was often used benevolently in order to show one’s respect or admiration of being ‘clever’. Jim recalled one of his first encounters with Harvey, who had joined Bendoro during the GIRLI years in the early 1990s: Once I was involved in some problems with three guys from another group further south, who also busked at the Southern bus line. Our little ones (cilik) wanted to busk there, but got chased away by them. They were bigger and older than they were. And actually it was also their spot. The little ones came back to our base camp at Malioboro and told us what had happened to them. Harvey did not say a word, got a knife and asked me to join him. We borrowed a friend’s motorbike, and off we were on our way. When we arrived there, things happened really fast. He attacked the three guys, who were still there, with his knife. The first guy, he slashed him in his back. Blood splattered everywhere. The other one, he got it in his face, and the third one in the stomach, until you could see his intestines. Then, we drove off, returned to our base camp, and nobody said a word about the incident. Harvey acted as if nothing had happened. But Harvey is also one of the bravest. He is from East Java, too. There is no one who would take him on.

After a few more stories on Harvey and other friends (teman) from the komunitas Jim continued: Do you know why the ‘anak Bendoro’ are so different from other groups? Well, first of all, we are rougher (lebih kasar) because we are in the center of the city. Here is a lot of competition (kompetisi), and we have to keep newcomers and other communities out of here, because everybody wants to busk and sell his handicrafts here, but then we would not earn enough. Sometimes others say that the ‘anak Bendoro’ are arrogant (sombong), but actually we are proud (bangga) because everybody knows us. There are also two of us who became film stars in a movie16 . There are many girls (cewek) who like the film, and also many tourists. Some of us even made it to Europe and live there now. No wonder that some of us now look for foreigners (bule) instead of money. That’s easier (lebih gampang) and it lasts longer (lebih awet)! He laughed loudly.

16 | The docufiction ‘Daun di atas bantal’ (1998; Garin Nugroho; English title: ‘Leaf on a Pillow’) won various awards at film festivals across Asia.

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On the first occasion where Jim and I met alone17 in early June 2007, at a little park behind Malioboro, the description of his youth (waktu masih muda) was more joyous and less analytical: When I was younger, I spent a lot of time here in this park. At that time the big mosque in the corner there did not exist yet. The whole place was darker and wilder. People were still allowed to sleep here. I spent a lot of time here together with Rudy. Do you know Rudy? he asked. – Rudy Bandung? I replied. – Yes, he was a good friend of mine. We had so much fun together when we were still young. We borrowed a becak from a friend and drove around here in the park, then down along Malioboro into the Beringharjo market area. People were screaming because we didn’t really know how to steer. Hahaha … and then we crashed into a market stall. The woman who owned it was very angry. She had to arrange all the fruits and vegetables all over again. We pretended to help her, but actually we stole a bunch of fruits by sneaking them into our becak. After we figured we had enough we stopped helping her, and drove away. We were very naughty (nakal). I was very sad (sedih) when I heard that Rudy died. I was in jail then. Why he died I don’t know. – They say he died from alcohol poisoning. He got blind first, and then his heart gave up, I amended. He frowned shortly and stared at the ground. Then continued: Yes I know. The ‘lapen’ on the streets is very dangerous. And Rudy always mixed it with other things like alcohol from the pharmacy and pills.

50-year old Utomo, long-term street worker, open house manager and central part of the RSL team, and who once was an anak GIRLI himself, hinted to the peculiarity of the communities along Malioboro from a more critical perspective: Well, Malioboro. It is particularly hard to work together with the anak Bendoro. They feel very proud (bangga) of being on Malioboro. There are many fights on Malioboro. No one wants to be weaker than another group there. Actually, they all know each other, and also drink together, but at times the tension just erupts. Furthermore, they don’t trust anyone. They are skeptical about NGOs, researchers, journalists, social workers – including you and me. They always have the feeling that someone exploits them, maybe because they made many bad experiences with people of our kind. As a result, they do not really cooperate but still get what they want anyway because there are so many NGO-activists and foreign women who are attracted to them. They’ve become extremely spoiled (manja) over the years.

32-year old Cak, who lived on Malioboro for many years and now lives in Europe together with his wife, alluded to the lacking skills of the ‘new generation’ (generasi baru) one evening in late 2007: 17 | The situation itself will be described in more detail in chapter 7, as it is considered more relevant there.

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java They sit and drink, and drink, and drink. And when they busk, they hardly play the guitar. They mumble a few words, open their hands, wait for the coins, and leave. There are very few groups now that really engage in street music, and are proud of their music and the art they stand for: street art (seni jalanan). Now they just want to have the easy life (asyik-asyik aja).

As Jim had mentioned before, through their media exposure in the late 1990s and early 2000s the then children – now young adults – from Malioboro became famous among expatriate NGO activists, travellers, local students and neighboring kampung residents. Even 18 years after the film’s release, the four lead characters, all former members of the komunitas Bendoro, still enjoyed a special reputation as the slickest guys along Malioboro. Since they had started different careers before my involvement with the community, only one of them is part of this book. Work opportunities, possibilities of upward social mobility by encountering foreigners, filmmakers, students, tourists or NGO activists, excitement, but also competition, the danger of police raids, fights with other communities and the local ‘mafia’, were more amplified on Malioboro when compared to the Congklak street junction at the Northern Ring Road Highway. In the words of Jempol, life on Malioboro is more exciting (lebih asyik) and crazier (lebih gila), and working did not necessarily mean to busk, beg or work in various casual jobs. Work on Malioboro could consist of the juggling with opportunities, images, people and their emotions. Remembering his early times in Yogyakarta, Jim stated: I didn’t like to busk on the streets. I just followed the people. I didn’t like it because it was too hot and boring. And people treat you like a dog. […] So basically, my main activities on the streets were hanging out (nongkrong), eating (makan), and getting drunk (mabuk). I came to Jogja after I had spent many years at the bus terminal in Surabaya. Jogja is very pleasant (enak sekali) compared to Surabaya. Initially, I came to Jogja to quit using ganja. I was smoking too much of it in Surabaya. But, of course, my plan didn’t work out. And finally, that’s why I went to prison, because of the ganja. My main activity in Jogja was dealing, hanging out, and letting others work. That suited me better (cocok).

Hanging out (nongkrong) together at particular locations was crucial for the collective identification as a community. The very important nongkrong, sleeping, and working at particular locations, required safe spaces that had to be occupied and defended against others. Although the nongkrong usually took place at the same places, the anak Bendoro’s sleeping spots varied according to safety and situational convenience between friends’ boarding houses, terraces of little homestays in the adjacent traveller area, open houses of NGOs, and over the years to a lesser extent public parks, hidden corners of stairways, or abandoned backdoors. Harriot Beazley described that these spaces were

Becoming Tekyan

defended against authorities of the ‘civil society’, other street communities or vendors and created “a strong sense of belonging and positive self-identity which allow the boys to look beyond the dangers of being homeless in the city, and to feel secure. In effect, certain spaces have become a ‘home in the public space’, and help a boy to survive.” (2000a: 485) The following community map intends to depict the social relations and alliances of the community’s core members between 2005 and 2010 for better orientation and guidance throughout the text. They were not locally present at all times, some have died over the years, and there were also other ‘friends’ and ‘guests’ that joined the communities more temporally and then left again. Figure 1. Community Map I: Komunitas Bendoro (2005 – 2010).

The protagonists Jim, Jempol and Harvey are highlighted. Names written in black refer to boys/men, those written in blue to girls/women; (E) behind a pacar’s name indicates her European origin. Dotted lines indicate pacaran; continuous lines signify a marriage. The white circles symbolize families/relationships, where only the husbands or boyfriends were a part of the komunitas. Names framed in orange refer to those central communitiy members, who had died before 2005.

Referring to the GIRLI communities, Harriott Beazley writes, “when a child first arrives on the street he is asked where he is from. He may simply be chased away, but it is more likely he will be beaten up, or mugged of his possessions, clothes and money.” (2003b) Since I never witnessed such ritualized initiations,

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I depend on the stories of Mikini18 and Jim. They stated that besides being punched, which they described as ‘eating hard bread’ (makan roti keras), while clenching their fists in the shape of a bread roll, they had to give away all the little belongings they had, either money, clothes or whatever they had carried with them. Then, the seniors bought food and drinks for everyone, and the anak baru newcomers sat among their new community being both fed, beaten, hugged, and mocked, fed, beaten, hugged, and mugged, until they were ‘full’ (kenyang). During their first weeks on the street, the anak baru were literally broken. All their actions were monitored, commented upon, and often publicly ridiculed. At other times they were slapped or beaten up without obvious reason. Their courage and endurance was constantly tested. Mikini and Jim, who were both initiated by the komunitas Bendoro and also initiated others in the years after that, stated that they tried to get out of their status as anak baru as fast as possible by complying to new rules and not opposing them. Although they were taken care of and provided with food, Mikini said that he was tremendously malu (‘ashamed’/‘embarrassed’) of being permanently ridiculed and mocked publicly amidst the community by even the youngest members: They treat you like an idiot (goblok) in the first weeks. And some of the older ones are really rude (kasar) and obscene (kurang ajar). Once, they took away my pants while I was having a bath in a backyard and then they made me run through the streets without pants. I was very ‘malu’.

One of the most important factors to mark the end of this humiliating stage, which could take up to many months, was the newcomers’ ability to contribute food or drinks to the communities’ hanging out (nongkrong) at night after earning their own money. If the stage of mockery and humiliation lasted too long without fighting back, or the community leaders had the impression that the anak baru did not fit (enggak cocok) into the group, he could be chased away even before he became a member of the komunitas (see also Beazley 2003b). The violence of initiations becomes particularly evident in a practice that Mikini and Jim described as sodomi or bo’ol – ‘anal sex’ between a kakak (senior, older brother) and the anak baru or adik (junior, younger brother). I first came across these practices of sexual patronage and rape in the published biography of Heri Bongkok, who worked for an NGO as street worker. The former anak GIRLI described that he cooperated with the older ‘Abah’ during his first three months on the streets of Yogyakarta (1995:43). Heri begged (ngemis), looked for food and leftovers (hoyen), and used newspapers that he could resell. He 18 | Mikini was a prominent adolescent of the komunitas Bendoro in 2001. He will be described in more detail regarding his severe norm transgressions in chapter 5.

Becoming Tekyan

handed his little income over to Abah, and traded bo’ol for food and protection. After Heri was not afraid (enggak takut lagi) anymore, felt safer on the streets and had lost his shame (enggak malu lagi) to work as a ‘jalanan’, he left Abah and joined another street-related community in a different part of the city. After he had already spent some years on the streets of Yogyakarta, Heri described a situation, where he ‘used’ his new adik called Subur: “Subur is my ‘brother’, I hug him and it feels warm, not too cold, maybe because I had once been ‘sodomized’ I did the same to Subur.” (Bongkok 1995:71)19 During one of our HIV-AIDS workshops in 2007, Harvey described: We don’t have to be hypocrites (munafik). Everybody here knows what we sometimes do with each other in order to feel warmer (lebih hangat). Maybe we keep on doing it with each other because we get used to it (karena jadi biasa). And mostly, we do it without condoms. This has to change. Too many of us have died already.

When I asked Monchi about the bo’ol, he just starred at me with eyes wide open, then averted his gaze, lowered his voice, and said: Enggak tau – I don’t know. Three years later, in 2008, when we talked about the AIDS deaths of his friends, he had less difficulties talking about it. He mumbled: I was ashamed (aku malu) to talk about it. It’s nothing you’re proud (bangga) of to tell a stranger. But now, after so many of us have died, and we are already brothers, we can talk about it. It might have felt warm and good for some of us, but we also had sex with women. I am not so much of a sex fan anyways. There are others who are more into it.

The integration of newcomers, who lived in other parts of the city or on the streets of other cities, was less shocking or shaming. Mikini, Monchi and Jim confirmed that there were no multiple initiations after one had already been initiated into a street community. Life on the streets manifested itself in a certain language and behavior that was recognized by other communities. Being a jalanan is not only a matter of speech, image, and style, but is communicated in terms of body movement, gesture and mimics. Jim was sure that everyone could easily tell the difference between a real newcomer and a jalanan from another area or city: You can recognize a jalanan. It’s the whole body movement (gerak tubuh), the style (gaya), the language (cara ngomong), and the mischievousness (nakal). A newcomer looks scared (takut), shy (malu) and does not object (enggak protes) if you tease him. 19 | “Subur adik-adikan saya, saya pelukin, ternyata terasa hangat, tidak begitu dingin, mungkin karena saya merasa pernah dibo´ol saya lantas membo´ol si Subur” (Bongkok 1995: 71; translation by the author).

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java One who has already lived on the streets would always defend himself (protes) if someone were impudent/obscene (kurang ajar) to him. Don’t mess with a jalanan!

The integration or ‘hosting’ of a jalanan from other cities or other areas of the city could also take time, but it was based on proof of trust, not proof of courage. The new member had to show his respect to the community by buying drinks, food, stealing, or beating someone up as a sign of loyalty. If a newcomer from another GIRLI community either from Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Semarang or other Indonesian cities wanted to join the komunitas Bendoro, there was no initiation necessary. The newcomer would look for the seniors of the komunitas and explain why he wanted or needed to join the komunitas. This was the case when they got bored in their former community (bosan), were involved in a heavy crime or a crime against their own community (kasus), or just wanted to hang out (iseng aja). Jim said that GIRLI-related friends from Jakarta or Surabaya were never asked too much, as long as they followed their rules and showed their respect (hormat).

K OMUNITAS C ONGKL AK When I asked GIRLI senior and anthropologist Bambang Ertanto when the komunitas Congklak came to existence, he responded that until the turn of the century there were hardly any street buskers (pengamen) along the Ring Road. ‘Anak jalanan’ were an exclusive phenomenon of the city center. The anak Congklak themselves dated the origin of their komunitas back to sometime around 1999, when they started to continuously build their huts behind the big street junction after the nearby ‘GIRLI Street Children University’ had closed down, and other friends moved down South to the city center and engaged in ‘establishing’ the komunitas Bendoro. Similar to the Bendoro community, the komunitas Congklak had founded a music band, in 1999 (which lasted until 2010) in cooperation with the NGO Humana, which despite closing down their ‘Street University’, was still very engaged on behalf of the issues of ‘street children’. Even street art exhibitions were held within their emerging informal kampung. Good relations with local police officers who guarded the traffic and with neighborhood shop owners; the lucrative location just behind a busy street junction; the informality of the place with its comparatively loose social rules; the openness of the komunitas and the safety it offered to ‘homeless’ and busking children, youths and adults, made the community soon grow in number.

Becoming Tekyan

In 2005, the komunitas Congklak comprised of over 40 members between the ages of two and 66 years. As its leader (ketua20), the then 25-year old Monchi aimed at attaining formal recognition for their place. After collecting the signatures of local bureaucrats, the police, and representatives of different political parties, the collective efforts of formally adhering to the neighboring kampungs’ formal rules of appropriate conduct almost resulted in the squatter community’s legal authorization as an officially registered kampung. Until one day in April 2005, an infuriated mob burnt the whole place down. After six years of growth, the community decreased in size and those that continued working at the street junction had to move out of the area and find a kampung that would accept them as their dwellers. After the incident, which will be described in chapter 6, the following families and friends formed the nucleus of the community between the years 2005 and 2010: Pak Tanto (37)21, who was married to Ibu Ida (32), their three daughters Dyah (15), Ratna (9), Anita (8), and their four sons Tirto (14), Dian (13), Heri (11), Monti (5) lived at Congklak, but sometimes returned to their little wooden house in a squatter kampung called Bambangrejo, some fifteen kilometers north of Congklak, where Ibu Ida’s mother had been living for a few years. Ibu Ida’s older brother Pak Slamet (37) was married to Ibu Nuning (34). They had a daughter named Ayu (10), and two sons called Mukri (13) and Affandi (15). They lived in the kampung bebas together with Monchi, Kris, Ronggo, Danang, Nasri, Koko, Danar, Habib and his girlfriend (pacar) Nita, Gianto, Harvey, Irianto and his girlfriend Tika, her friends Riana and Diana and some other more temporally related young men who have disappeared over the years.

20 | Ketua is a rather formal Indonesian expression for a ‘chairman’, ‘speaker’, ‘head’ or ‘chief’. The term might hint at the community’s efforts to become officially registered, especially when compared to other communities’ labels for their ‘heads’, such as boss. 21 | The age refers to the year 2005, the year of the so-called ‘Congklak tragedy’.

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Figure 2. Community Map II: Komunitas Congklak (2005 – 2010).

The three protagonists Monchi, Kris and Harvey are highlighted. Names written in black refer to boys/men, those written in blue to girls/women. The green circles symbolize families, who lived and/or worked at the Congklak inter-section, the white circles are families, where only the husbands or boyfriends were a part of the komunitas. Dotted lines indicate pacaran; continuous lines signify a marriage. Above left: since Harvey moved from komunitas Congklak to komunitas Bendoro in 2005, he is depicted as a primary (yet not exclusive) link between the two communities. Fatima was not living on the streets, but was nongkrong with the anak Congklak after her studies. She was a close friend of Harvey’s future wife Ratih (who lived close to the Congklak intersection with her parents), and the pacar of Henky from komunitas Bendoro (see Figure 1).

There were no foreign or local tourists, and hardly any students, journalists or anthropologists at Congklak. The only ‘strange’ people who sometimes hung out (nongkrong) there were two local NGO activists from Humana, sometimes students of the nearby campuses, and myself. Possibilities to initiate cooperation with foreigners were comparatively rare, and no mixed relationships with foreign students, travellers, or NGO activists evolved during the communities’ 13 years of existence until their disbandment in 2012 (see chapters 7 and 8). When I asked Monchi in late 2006 why he chose to live at Congklak and not at Malioboro when he was younger, he replied that he didn’t feel comfortable at Malioboro (enggak merasa nyaman). He continued: They are too macho (terlalu macho), rude (kasar), and they always play around with foreigners (main bule terus). Congklak is more familiar and safe. We are a community where everyone, children, families, and older people can live. Life at Malioboro is very

Becoming Tekyan loud and more extravagant. Here, we are more normal (lebih biasa), more Javanese in a way (lebih Jawa). We are less selfish and more concerned about each other (peduli). That’s what I like at Congklak. But of course, sometimes, we also go to Malioboro to hang out with our friends there.

Before Monchi started to live at Congklak, he spent time at the ‘GIRLI Street University’, which was established in 1996 and opened its gates to anak jalanan from all over Indonesia until it closed down about two years later. What seemed most important to him was the feeling of belonging to a family (seperti keluarga) and feeling comfortable (merasa nyaman) at a particular place. The other protagonists of the komunitas Congklak also mentioned these two factors, when they referred to their ‘new homes’. Later Monchi added: Two years or so, before we met, and after they closed down the street university, I started to get close to the families around Congklak. I really felt safe there. And I liked the way people took care of each other. That’s also where I met Ibu Badam22, Mbak Cakalang23 and all the others. They took care of others and me, although we were very naughty (nakal) 24 at that time.

In May 2005, just after the anak Congklak had been violently evicted from their former ‘home’, Kris explained to me what he appreciated most about the komunitas: It’s really exciting (asyik) here. The people are exciting, more so than at home. And I like busking (ngamen) on the streets. Drinking is also exciting, and the girls here are exciting, too. There is no one here who orders you around. On the streets, there is real freedom (bebas). I feel comfortable (merasa nyaman) here with my friends, and if you’re beaten (digebukin) up, someone always helps you.

Contrary to Monchi, Jim, Jempol or Harvey, Kris was born and raised in Yogyakarta near the Congklak junction. Sometimes, he returned home, as it was 22 | Ibu Badam was the like a ‘godmother’ to the anak Congklak. She took care of the young ones when they needed a place to hide out or simply an advice. 23 | Mbak Cakalang ran an angkringan (food cart) at the Congklak junction during the day. It was a central hangout, ‘food supplier’ and a ‘safe haven’ for the komunitas. Mbak Cakalang’s daughter Renti, who was 15 years old in 2007 and attended SMP, got married to Danar, a close friend of Monchi and also part of the komunitas Congklak, in 2011. Their daughter was born the same year. 24 | The meaning of the Indonesian word ‘nakal’ is also age-related. Whereas it means ‘naughty’ in a rather endearing manner during childhood and adolescence, it can translate as ‘promiscuous’ in (young) adulthood.

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only a 20-minute’s walk through rice paddies and narrow kampung alleyways, but most of the time he slept in the self-made huts behind the big crossroads. Kris enjoyed the company of his friends Monchi, Ronggo, Danang, Danar, Habib, Gianto, Harvey, and Irianto more than his life at home. The freedom and excitement – ‘bebas dan asyik’ – was a central rhetoric of their articulated identity. It was permanently reproduced in order to exalt their identity as anak Congklak over non-jalanan peers, who were described as ‘stupid’ (tolol) and ‘fools’ (goblok). Both the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak considered themselves as more ‘open-minded’ (sangat terbuka) than the ‘primitive’ (masih primitif ), ‘backward’ (kampungan, ketinggalan) and ‘rigid’ (tertutup) kampung neighbors. Harvey described the komunitas Congklak as a very ‘comforting and comfortable’ (nyaman) community, where people helped each other – quite different from komunitas Bendoro, he added and smiled. All five protagonists, both from komunitas Bendoro and komunitas Congklak, stressed that it was important that one’s character (sifat) fits with the others of the komunitas, and one felt ‘compatible’ (cocok). Feeling fitting (cocok) emerged if an individual and the people of the community felt that they were suited to each other and the places where they hung out, slept, and worked. Compared to the komunitas Bendoro, Monchi, Kris, Ronggo, Danang, Danar, Habib, Gianto, and Harvey appreciated the solidarity and the familiarity at Congklak. Values like respecting each other (saling menghormati), responsibility (tanggung jawab), caring (peduli) and harmony (harmonis)25 were central to feeling cocok. The anak Congklak’s narratives of belonging and place-making had always ended with the conclusion that the community was ‘like a family’ (seperti keluarga). Considering that the komunitas Congklak comprised of children, adolescents, but also many young and older adults from the surrounding kampung, villages near the Mount Merapi and Mount Merbabu area, and faraway areas from all over Java and also South Sumatra, the senior women of the community in concordance with Monchi as leader (ketua) and his ‘wingman’ (wakil) Ronggo upheld the family narrative. Compared to the komunitas Bendoro, where life was fast, and hectic, more materialistic and profit-oriented, the comfort (nyaman) spaces of the Congklak community were more stable, almost kampung-like, even though they had carved out their ‘safe enough’ (cukup aman) spaces just behind a big four-lane street junction with traffic lights at all four sections. These traffic lights were the anak Congklak’s primary work spaces, where they begged, busked and hawked, hoping that the window slots of cars or big trucks coughed up some spare change (receh). Sometimes in groups of two or three, the anak Congklak entered the small city buses or the bigger economy intercity 25 | Interestingly, the protagonists did not use the widespread Javanese term ‘rukun’ (see chapter 4 for a definition) in this context.

Becoming Tekyan

buses, which led north to the local Congklak bus terminal, east to the cities of Solo, Malang or Surabaya, south to the city center, and west to Bandung or Jakarta, to busk for a few minutes before they hopped off at the side of the road. Next to the intersections were little permanent and semi-permanent structures, lined up like a strip, where food, wood, mirrors, paintings of mosques in golden frames, and other random goods were sold amidst the exhaust of the passing trucks and buses. At one side of the junction was a small food stall (angkringan), where mbak Cakalang and her daughter Renti sold little rice packets (nasi kucing), vegetable stew cooked with coconut milk (sayur lodeh), fried tempe and tofu snacks, prawn crackers (krupuk), tea and coffee during the day. Behind the angkringan was an empty sun shaded space of fifteen square meters, which served as a mechanic’s workshop for motorbikes (bengkel) during the day. In the evenings and at night, the anak Congklak used this space as their hangout (tempat nongkrong), where they joked, ate, drank and hung out together. During the day the young children would sleep on pieces of cardboard behind the bengkel under a big shady tree, which marked the end of a small rice paddy that was surrounded by the houses of kampung residents. Later in the evening, they moved with their parents or older siblings across the road further to the west, where the komunitas Congklak collectively put up temporary shacks made of split wood, banners and other materials that they had found in the nearby river behind the adjacent bare rice paddy. The shallow river banks were the place where the adolescents built their temporary houses and hung their hammocks, which had been made out of old street banner cloths advertising Indonesian cigarettes. This is where we made kwak, kwak, kwak, kwak, Monchi said in retrospect, when we visited the place only a few weeks after they had been banished in April 2005, moving his folded hands up and down, grinning. What? I asked him. You know, ML26, ngentot27, he whispered. The kampung bebas28, as they themselves called it, was a complex of ten little huts just behind one of the big roads, framed by corrugated steel fences on two sides where the big roads were, the river on the third, and the waste land of the former rice paddy to the front. Behind the rice paddy, about 50 meters in the distance, one could see the walls of the adjacent kampung, whose residents had only recently set the whole place on fire (see chapter 6). Initiation into the komunitas Congklak seemed less ritualized and was described as monitoring process, in which newcomers had to prove that they were trustworthy over a certain period of time. Although an anak baru was also intimidated and sometimes beaten up, depending on his ‘character’ (sifat), the 26 | ML (Coll.): acronym for ‘Make Love’. 27 | Ngentot (Javan./Indon): colloquial for ‘to have sex’. 28 | Kampung bebas (Indon.): means literally translated ‘a free-floating neighborhood’.

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bo’ol had never existed at Congklak. Monchi claimed that every komunitas had different rules when taking in new members. In 2005, Kris told me that he was completely ignored (dicuekin) when he first came to Congklak as a fifteen year-old. When he tried to sit with members of the komunitas, they made the circle smaller and smaller and turned their backs on him. They were eating nasi kucing29, ceker ayam30 and kepala ayam31, and he was sitting about three meters away under the roof where the motorcycle workshop (bengkel) was. He remembered ‘these bastards’ (bajingan) talking about ‘dogs’ (asu), and that there were different kinds of dogs: good dogs, bad dogs, and dogs that had to be beaten up because of their annoyance to the public. At that time, he did not understand that his later friends Habib, Gianto, Monchi, Irianto, Harvey, and Danar were actually talking about him. Then, they started throwing the leftovers over their backs into his direction, which Kris recalls as ‘bone rain’ (hujan tulang). After they had finished eating they sat down next to him, and Habib suddenly grabbed him roughly and asked what he wanted from them. Kris replied that he only wanted to sit with them. He had not even finished his sentence, when Habib suddenly slapped him in the face. He asked Kris to eat up the bones, the rest of the fried chicken heads and feet as fast as he could. After almost vomiting, Habib gave him some Topi Miring 32 (local whiskey-gin-vodka-mix) to drink. It tasted awful, he remembered. Then Kris was invited to sit and drink more of the Topi Miring with them. They called him ‘a dog’ for the whole evening, made him dance on the streets and mocked him for being drunk. During the next weeks, he was invited to join them at their work on the streets by rattling an icik-icik33 between the cars. After a while, it became more bearable to be with them, and the joking and mocking became less frequent, until he also started to make fun of them and fight back whenever he was beaten without reason. Kris added that he was no longer afraid on the streets (aku enggak takut lagi di jalan) once the mocking stopped, and that he was no longer worried that his parents, relatives, or neighbors would spot him while busking (ngamen) between the cars and motorbikes at the Congklak intersection. He said that it was very important to him not to be ashamed (malu) anymore to be a jalanan, and that after a while he was even not afraid (takut) anymore to be discovered by his parents, because he really felt that he was an anak Congklak. 29 | Nasi kucing (Indon.): literally translated as ‘cat’s rice’. It consists of a very small portion of rice with chilis, dried fish, or tempeh (fermented soy bean cake), wrapped in a banana leaf. 30 | Ceker ayam (Indon.): fried chicken claws. 31 | Kepala ayam (Indon.): fried chicken heads. 32 | Topi Miring (Indon.): the brand can be literally translated as ‘crooked hat’. 33 | Icik-icik (Coll.): a self-made rattle.

Becoming Tekyan

He assured me that life was better there, and that he was more fitting (cocok) there than he was at home. I am proud (aku bangga) to be an anak Congklak, he closed in one of our early conversations in 2001.

PASSAGES AND A T TUNED F EELINGS OF B ELONGING A life course perspective needs to take at least three forms of interrelated temporalities into account. The transformation of space, place and society in terms of ‘social change’ (rather slow but ongoing transformations of spaces, discourses, values, beliefs or desires), the protagonists’ coming of age in terms of their maturing bodies, changing role ascriptions, changes in selfperceptions, and feelings of belonging, and the transmogrification of the immersed fieldworker into an analyst. Whereas the first and the second are the primary focus of this and the subsequent three analytical summaries of chapters 5, 6 and 7 (Tekyan – Resistance, Subversion or ‘Javanese Way’; The Mutual Benefits of Empathy; and ‘Revelation Blues’) the latter will be hinted at more implicitly throughout the book. Since the early 2000s the protagonists and their friends had to cope with increasing police raids, restraining legal decrees, and a decreasing number of NGOs focusing on their affairs as ‘street children’. These public space related political transformations resulted in increased competition for space, income and social support in the city center, and fostered the atomization of a formerly spatially, culturally and socially unified streetrelated movement (GIRLI) into locally dispersed communities (komunitas). The differences between the komunitas Bendoro and the komunitas Congklak were related to their respective spatial and social environments, which affected working opportunities, income generation techniques and group composition. Moreover, the different localities and social environments had a strong impact on the personal and affective dimensions of the protagonists’ feeling to fit (cocok) and blend into their community. The protagonists mentioned ‘feeling comfortable’ (merasa nyaman) as the most important motivation to stay with a particular komunitas. Accordingly, the anak Congklak affirmed that the anak Bendoro were ‘loud’ (keras), ‘rude’ (kasar), ‘macho’ (macho), and ‘spoiled’ (manja) by their tourist and NGO friends. The anak Bendoro, in return, perceived the anak Congklak as ‘creative’ (kreatif ) and ‘good’ (baik), but ‘not as strong’ (kurang kuat) and ‘not brave enough’ (kurang berani), and, due to their spatial marginality compared to their own, as less authentic in terms of their ‘GIRLIness’. Street-related community identity and its ascriptions were not only articulated by its locality, but also related to their leaders’ personalities (sifat). Community members described the respective leaders at Bendoro (Jempol) and Congklak (Monchi) almost identical to those of their communities.

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And yet, the comparative perspective illustrates that competition for economic and social resources, spatial atomization and contrastive selfelevations did not annihilate their common ‘street ideology’. The protagonists stressed that they belonged to either the Bendoro or the Congklak community, but they used the otherwise rare term ‘tekyan’ when they referred to norms of conduct and style (see chapter 5). The interlocutors’ narratives of experiencing the city’s streets before and after integration into the komunitas revealed a stark contrast in terms of selfesteem and subjective well-being. Whereas disquiet, insecurity, shame and fear, were prevalent experiences when arriving at the streets, their integration increased the newcomers’ self-efficacy, feeling of belonging and identification once they worked their ways into the community. In addition to the protagonists’ statements, the subsequent chapter ‘Being Tekyan’ suggests a powerful affective force of tekyan ideology and practice on newcomers’ paths to becoming self-confident, self-reflexive and skilled social actors despite their public stigmatization as jalanan (‘street kids’). The socializing practices of forced anal sex (bo’ol), excessive beating, and prolonged mocking are painful ordeals. Whereas the immersed activistfieldworker could never make sense of such in-group violence, the analyst wonders whether these excesses of seniority could be discussed in Victor Turner’s (1964) framework of initiation rituals. Rituals are defined as processes that existentially transform neophytes, whereas repetitive practices that do not exert such profound emotional repercussions on individuals or collectives are considered ‘ceremonies’. At odds with Turner’s argument that the liminal stage of rituals is of limited time and ultimately leads to the confirmation of involved social actors’ and the social structure’s previous status quo, the initiation practices on the streets of Yogyakarta might be better comprehended as ‘rites de passage’ in Arnold van Gennep’s terms (1909). Passage rites assist an individual’s transition from separation from the family (séparation), chaos and crisis (marge) to his incorporation (agrégation) into a new community including its attunement to initially unaccustomed norms and values (van Gennep 1909). Ultimately, rites de passage bridge the gap between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ and thus give meaning to the liminal phases of the transformations of both individual experience and societal life (Kappus 2009: 15). The protagonists broke away from their families and started embracing life on the streets between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Being young, unprotected and homeless gave rise to negative attributes that strongly affected the adolescent newcomers and lead to feelings of shame, embarrassment (malu) and emotional distress (stres). The protagonists were addressed as ‘jalanan’ (street kid), which included derogatory terms such as ‘pengelem’ (glue sniffer), ‘gembel’ (beggar, scum), ‘tuna’ (rag picker, tramp), ‘preman’ (criminal, thug), ‘copet’ (pickpocket), ‘maling’ (thief) and the like, reducing adolescent newcomers to their deviant

Becoming Tekyan

identity as ‘society dropouts’ (Ziv 2013). This ‘othering’ was further increased by their visible lack of the Javanese bibit, bebet, bobot, which can also be regarded as social, economic and cultural capital related to persons’ and their families’ descent, wealth, and merit. Becoming tekyan and a fully integrated anak Bendoro or anak Congklak respectively could transpire once the adolescents had waded through the liminal stage of distressing, humiliating and painful initiation rituals. In order to establish a certain degree of subjective well-being, ‘newcomers’ were forced to reappraise and embrace their stigmatized social identities in a more positive light. Since “emotions play a vital role in transforming the meaning of a stigmatized and marginalized identity [and] they are not merely a by-product of that transformation” (Fields/Kopp/Kleinman 2007: 164), a positive re-evaluation of the self is difficult without emotional mobilization. The process of identity attunement entails ‘emotional promises’ of stress relief and an enhanced well-being at the end of the adolescent intiation path guided by ‘emotional rewards’ through seniors’ approving looks, words of solace or the introduction to new income generating opportunities (that are crucial for breaking away from exploitative kakak-adik relationships) when particular norms of conduct and emotion display rules were performed according to tekyan ideology. The neophytes attempted to leave this initial theatre of pain, not only because it was physically painful, but also because they were exposed to derogatory shaming and belittling not only by outsiders, but also by those senior tekyan that supposedly controlled them into the komunitas. From an identity politics perspective, shame- and pride-like emotions can manifest as subjective perception of social exclusion and inclusion (Casimir 2002; Lewis, 1998; Scheff 2003; 1988; Tangney 1999). Their experience is connected strongly to the norms and values of social groups and communities one aspires to belong to. Participating in and attuning to community action contributed to converting shame and loneliness (triggered by their ‘exclusion’ from family, discrimination within their new communities as uncultivated pariahs that had to be disciplined and socialized first, and the painful experiences related to sexual and other exploitation by senior community members) into the pride of having become an acknowledged member of the komunitas. Painful experiences of shame and perpetual humiliations during the liminal phase of community initiation underwent processes of reevaluation once the newcomers felt integrated into the community (Stodulka 2009). The senior community members’ positive feedback on the embodiment of tekyan ideology when reproducing particular emotive displays and rhetoric when addressing friends and foes and the cessing exposure to excessive interpersonal violence could evoke pleasant (nyaman) feelings among the anak baru.

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Contrary to the wider Javanese context, the public display of bangga (‘pride’) on being a member of a street-related community was prerequisite to being perceived as ‘one of them’. Whereas the feeling of bangga is locally perceived as appropriate by being “rightfully proud of the accomplishments of some person or thing to which one is connected” (Collins/Bahar 2000:40), its public display is considered ‘arrogant’ and referred to as ‘sombong’. ‘Jalanan’ who publicly displayed bangga (‘pride’) by talking about their achievements, embodied a steady gaze and erected posture, were seen as ‘arrogant’ or ‘vain’ (sombong), ‘not knowing themselves’ (enggak tahu diri), and ‘not-Javanese-yet’ (durung Jawa) from a local coming of age perspective. In Yogyakarta, people continuously underscored this impropriety with the dictum, ‘Arrogance is a sin!’ (Sombong itu dosa!). By contrast, life in the komunitas required the newcomers’ public pride displays on their otherwise stigmatized identity if they wanted to become anak Bendoro or anak Congklak. The newcomers shifted their framework of primary reference from their families and the surrounding society (masyarakat) to the community (komunitas). Far from being ‘dull’ or ‘irrational’, the public accentuation of a stigmatized identity could transpire as emotionally and socially rewarding enterprise. Although socially scorned as culturally immature, the protagonists’ public displays of pride were sensible techniques of coping with marginality and stigmatization. The protagonists’ efforts to resolve the fundamental conflict between socioculturally valued and stigmatized identities within their manifold encounters on the streets migh be adequately captured as ‘oppositional identity work’ (Schwalbe/Mason-Schrock 1996): people try to fashion and then maintain identities that make them feel good, or at least better about themselves, even they might not be morally valued by the majority of the surrounding environment.

5 Being Tekyan

The fear (takut) and shame (malu), which could dominate the experiences of ‘newcomers’, gave way to more positive self-evaluations and narratives of freedom (bebas), happiness (senang) and pride (bangga) once the adolescents were integrated into their komunitas. By observing, learning and imitating speech and body language from senior community members, power inequalities, which were previously responded to with frustration became more contestable. This chapter focuses on the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak’s narratives and embodiment of the tekyan ideology. The concluding analytical summary discusses whether the protagonists’ social and cultural practices are best defined as resistance against local social order, a deviant subversion or reproduction of ‘Javanese ways’ (cara Jawa).

A DVENTURE , F REEDOM AND S T YLE Although the protagonists referred to themselves as either anak Congklak or anak Bendoro in terms of their localized identity, they were often ‘on the road’ within and between Yogyakarta and other cities of Java. The movement between different komunitas could have various reasons. Sometimes it was necessary to leave Yogyakarta to avoid police harassment or fights with other communities. At other times, wandering from one place to another ( jalan-jalan) was referred to as act of pleasure and freedom. Kris explained: The good thing about ‘jalan-jalan’ is that we can go wherever we want, and we do not have to tell our parents. We just go. The only thing I do not like about other cities is that you always feel like a guest. There are so many things you don’t know, once you get into trouble there. So it’s quite easy to become a victim (korban). When I was in Jakarta the last time, together with Monchi and Habib, we had to return to Congklak after only three days. Going by train. The problem was that we got beaten up by a group of criminals (preman), because they suspected us to have stolen cell phones and watches. So, they beat us up. It’s really rough in Jakarta. I don’t like it there. It’s better in Jogja.

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Moving within and between cities was an important and often highlighted feature of life in the komunitas. It was not only the jalan-jalan itself, which was important, but also talking about it. The narratives of adventures and hardships endured in other cities were features of self-constructions as strong and tough (kuat), compared to peers who worked near the traffic light at Congklak but lived with their parents in the surrounding kampung. Monchi’s story about his time in Surabaya is such a vivid example: When I was in Surabaya a few years ago, the city is so hot and loud. But as you also said, that you liked it somehow, I also liked it. I stayed there for a few months. I lived nearby the old town center in a ‘kampung preman’ (gangster community). You (he pointed at me) would definitely get ripped off there, and people have a lot of prejudices against that kampung. But I felt really safe there, because I knew the right people. They even had a system like in the military, where you get stars on your shirt when you achieve something. Usually you get a star for going to prison when actually it was one of your friends that was guilty. The police never had a chance there. As soon as they showed up, people gave signals, like whistling, and everyone and everything disappeared within seconds. If someone was asked whether he had seen a wanted person, they all answered: “No”. Nobody ever talked there. But when I was there again a few years ago, the whole kampung had disappeared. The people said there was a big police raid and the inhabitants were evicted. Now, it’s a parking lot. Compared to Surabaya, Jogjakarta is a kindergarten. Here people mess around stealing motorbikes once in a while and think they are criminals. But in Surabaya, or Jakarta, there are the real ‘preman’ (gangsters).

In addition to these stories of endurance and toughness, accounts of journeys that were undertaken jointly as a komunitas affirmed their collectivity and fostered their feeling of belonging. These stories were told over and over again in many nights, and repeated even years later in order to stress the freedom and adventure that the life at Congklak held for them. Over the years, the stories about journeys and the adventures in other cities were transformed, exaggerated, and heroically celebrated – especially in the presence of ‘friends’ from other komunitas, NGO workers and other related outsiders like myself. Belonging to the komunitas Congklak was negotiated through the sharing of common histories. My own relatedness to the two communities was also stressed by others’ storytelling. When my later wife, an activist and scholar, started visiting the anak Congklak together with me on the weekends in 2007, where she offered English lessons and hiking excursions to nearby riverbanks and rice paddies for the little ones, Monchi repeated the stories to her about how I met him and his komunitas in 2001. The stories also revolved on how we celebrated New Years of 2007 together at a nearby beach and ‘chugged’ a fifteenliter gallon of a local brew within 24 hours. The stories were usually exaggerated and extended by those who were actually not part of the story but invented their

Being Tekyan

participation in the events. Collective journeys and the subsequent narratives of masculinity, toughness, fun, adventure, alcohol and also drug consumption were crucial for group inclusion and the exclusion of particular others. ‘Having been there’ also served to increase narrators’ social esteem within the komunitas. There was a certain ‘glamour’ attached to the travelogues, because traveling as such was imagined as a characteristic of wealthier families. Harriott Beazley, who has conducted research over many years with street-related communities in Yogyakarta writes, “Just as the children relish the fact that they can eat better in the street than they would at home, buy snacks, and spend their money on extravagant things, their ability to travel, which poor people in the kampung are less able to do, also gives them feelings of pride.” (2003b) Besides freedom, spontaneity was a cherished characteristic of life in the komunitas. This spontaneity extended to creating a common story, negotiating belonging and also the instances of avoiding danger or unpleasant encounters. Spontaneity could also be related to the protagonists’ attitude towards short-term gratification. A life grounded in the moment, the ‘here and now’, triggered the downplaying of the protagonists’ life perspectives directed towards the future. Until young adulthood, the future was ‘too far away’ in order to be of concern. The collective enhancement of spontaneity in both the presentation of stories and in reactions to situations and social encounters was a striking attribute of the tekyan ideology. The unpredictability of life called for a spontaneity in order to maneuver around dangerous situations, places and people. The tekyan ideology that stressed life in the moment and generosity to one’s friends could at times lead to a comparatively lavish lifestyle, despite their credo that ‘a little was enough’ (as reflected in the tekyan acronym). Being boros (extravagant, lavish or wasteful) by spending one’s earnings for shared food, drinks or entertainment was highly valued. Solidarity and the ideal of collective property and consumption were core values of both communities. Within the literature on street children and youth, this is often considered as groupimposed social leveling strategies in order to avoid economic status distinctions at the expense of collective solidarities (Beazley 2003b). Compared to being generous proportional to one’s social rank, being boros was considered ruthless by local standards. Jim described: On the streets we are rather ‘boros’. We spend our money very fast. For food, drinks, and other things. If you do not spend it fast, either you loose it or somebody would take it from you without asking. Better than spending it for yourself is to share it with your friends, because we don’t like to be egoists (egois) on the streets. In the end, you sometimes get everything back from your friends when they buy food and other things for you. I know that people think we do not care and spend all our money without thinking. But I don’t really care (cuek aja) what they think either!

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Jim’s description about being boros on the streets touches upon cuek, which is an expression of the urban bahasa gaul1. Within the wider society cuek was perceived as an unfavorable attitude, and was considered as ‘ignorant’ and indicated a neglect of one’s social and moral duties. Ruth Sahanaya, an Indonesian pop singer popularized the word in her 1980s hit Astaga! The word is etymologically derived from the Malay word cuai (‘negligent’/’insignificant’). As an adjective it means both ‘easy going’ and ‘negligent’ or ‘indifferent’. As a verb it might be best translated as ‘to ignore’ or ‘to not pay attention to someone or something’. I understand cuek as strategy of coping with adversities that are too powerful to deal with head on, so instead they are ignored in a ‘cool way’: ‘cuek aaaaja’, just ignore it! In terms of psychological research on emotion regulation it might be best defined as reappraising a stressful situation in order to avoid experiencing negative emotions (Gross 2002: 282). Although cuek is widely used, the protagonists used the term more frequently compared to their non-street-related peers. Besides using words from Indonesian differently, their particular slang to which some referred as bahasa senang, the ‘happy language’, consisted of new word creations, acronyms and a mixture of ngoko-Javanese, Indonesian, English and the Jogjakartan Dagadu (based on an inversion of the Javanese ‘alphabet’). Learning, speaking and further advancing the bahasa senang was crucial in terms of belonging and identity formation as anak Bendoro or anak Congklak. Solidarity was strengthened while the ‘infiltration’ of unwanted strangers into their komunitas was elegantly avoided by leaving them rhetorically in the dark. Compared to lowlevel ngoko-Javanese the slang was rough and vulgar. It was an essential part of tekyan ideology to playfully curse, mock and insult each other publicly without most of the passersby understanding what the young men and also women shouted at each other. These ‘rituals of obscenity’ could at times resemble staged cursing competitions, where two community members insulted each other with obsceneities until one of them ran out of words. By means of such rhetoric contest and contestation, newcomers were socialized into speech and interaction practices of their komunitas. The otherwise impossible public articulation of sex and swear words like ‘bajingan! ’, ‘asu!’, ‘homo!’, ‘banci!’, ‘wadam!’2 and other made-up vulgar expressions was particularly celebrated during the nightly sit ins (nongkrong) at their public hangouts. Public swearing was considered inappropriate in a local context in which refined speech, reserve, and devotion was the dominant way of interacting in public. In bahasa senang food leftovers were called ‘hoyen’, the police ‘nyakit’,

1 | Bahasa gaul (Indon.): slang. 2 | Bajingan (Coll.): bastard; Asu (Javan.): dog; Homo (Coll.): homosexual; Banci (Coll.): transvestite, gay; Wadam (Coll.): acronym for wanita adam, meaning ‘transsexual’.

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cleansing operations were ‘garukan’, break-ins and burglary became ‘jerka’3. Furthermore the Indonesian language’s abundance of acronyms was adapted to new meanings: SH, originally the academic title for Sarjana Hukum (Bachelors of Law) became Susah Hidup (hard life), when the protagonists spoke of SMP (Sekolah Menengah Pertama/Junior High School), they actually referred to NGOs that provided food without any restrictions, (Sudah Makan Pergi/leave after you eat). When they said they attended UGM or Universitas Gajah Mada (Yogyakarta’s leading university) they actually meant Universitas Gelandangan Malioboro (University of the Malioboro Homeless) referring to their ‘home’. Besides the use of a rough (kasar), vulgar ( jorok) and yet happy (senang) language, another striking identifying feature of the anak Congklak and the anak Bendoro in particular was their physical appearance. Beazley (2000b) argues that their bodies are sites of resistance against the state as well as against marginalizing and criminalizing social environments. Ertanto (1999a), on the other hand, states that their bodies are not only becoming sources of community production, but also a genesis of mutual knowledge and a site of collective identity articulation. The decorated body expresses the particular tekyan style and becomes a means of communicating within their various social encounters both with other street-related communities and also outsiders. Compared to the anak Congklak, the anak Bendoro were more extravagant in terms of body decoration and cultural inscription manifested by slick haircuts, long hair, and dreadlocks, sometimes red, yellow or green dyed hair, reggae (red, yellow and green) colored hats and shirts, or punk accessories like piercing, tattoos, ripped jeans, and black shirts. Ongoing encounters with travellers, expatriate residents, international and local artists around Malioboro, the preferences for punk and reggae music, and the enthusiasm for tattoos molded into an extravagant style long before Indonesian celebrities started getting tattooed. Among the anak Congklak of 2001, nineteen year-old Irianto had a Mohawk, eighteen year-old Gianto shaved his head, Monchi recreated an ‘Oasis-Brit Pop’ look, and Kris wore his hair long. When they were asked why their haircut was so important, all of them answered: ‘Biar keren!’ (‘To look cool!’). Irianto replied that he earned more money with the Mohawk, because especially passing young students, who liked his hairstyle, gave him more money when he was busking (ngamen). Gianto said that by having his head shaved he had two advantages: first, he was more successful with girls, because a shaved head was said to symbolize sexual lust (nafsu), and second, he looked more ‘striking’ (lebih seram) so that bus passengers would give him more money. Kris said that his long hair meant long life (long hair, long life, long everything!), and as he perceived himself as a street artist, it was mere logic to grow his hair long. 3 | Jerka: inversion of the word kerja (Indon.) – ‘work’.

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Other artists (seniman) in Yogyakarta had long hair, too, he reflected. Monchi liked the Britpop haircut, because it was both polite (halus) and slick (keren). When I asked him why tattoos were so popular, he answered: Karena asyik! (‘Because it’s cool!’). Tattoos are cool. They give you a special personality, and it’s nice to compare tattoos with others, also with guys from Jakarta and other cities. Because it’s very interesting to also see what tattoos they have. We can compare and surprise each other. And the girls like it, because tattoos are very tough. Only criminals (preman) and artists have tattoos. Even though there are also girls and celebrities who have tattoos today.

Others argued that tattoos were important communicators of shared ideologies, or as a rejection of being considered ‘spoiled’ (manja) and ‘a crybaby’ (cengeng). Images 6 & 7. Junior anak Bendoro at a natural pool near the ‘Beach Hut’, 2005.

M ASCULINITIES , PATRONAGE AND L E ADERSHIP Although the anak baru could be very young of age and were still in their physiological growth phases, they adapted quickly to adult and masculine performances within their komunitas. They imitated dirty talk, smoked, drank alcohol, tried drugs and pills, inhaled glue (lem) and, at least they claimed so, were sexually promiscuous (seks bebas). Similar to the seniors of the community, who were in their mid-twenties, the boys spent some of their income on public video gaming, Internet, porn and action movies, billiard, gambling and sometimes sex workers. Being a tekyan meant being tough and acting like a man (cowok). This toughness and masculinity was predominantly articulated in the company of peers from the surrounding kampung (anak kampung) in order to distance themselves from being manja (‘spoiled’). The youngsters adopted the use of vulgar language and macho behavior to communicate their belonging to the komunitas. But the seniors also mocked and teased the young

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ones when they acted ‘too manly’, for example when they smoked in public but had to cough, or drank alcohol but had to choke, or showed up with an alleged ‘girlfriend’ (pacar) who was either too tall or too old for them. Within the community it was important to discard the impression that one was ‘still a child’ (masih anak) or ‘still little’ (cilik). Alcohol, glue and drug consumption were effective ways of proving one’s tough identity as well as belonging to the komunitas both at Congklak and Malioboro. Alcohol was purchased by the principle of bantingan, a way of financial contribution relative to one’s recently earned money. Because beer was too expensive, everyone contributed to buying local spirits. The contributions were collectively monitored and mooching was collectively punished through physical violence or by ignoring the person during drinking. Both in the komunitas Bendoro and to a greater extent in the komunitas Congklak, the seniors also took responsibility for the younger ones by sometimes denying them alcoholic drinks. Alcohol was predominantly shared and drinking alone was an offense and a violation of the ideal of collective consumption of food, drinks, and a way of cherishing valuable social relationships. At Congklak, if cigarettes, alcohol and snacks were finished, groups of two or three returned to the crossroad and busked until there was enough money to buy more supplies. At Malioboro, where income generation was faster, the groups would depart for the dozens of nightly tourist spots on Malioboro or around Tugu station, or simply invite travellers to join and pay. Alcohol and other drugs consumption helped in creating atmospheres of collective emotional security. Especially the anak baru, took pills so they could bear or avoid feelings of malu when busking (ngamen) publicly at street intersections. Both newcomers and seniors involved themselves in daredevil actions like riding on the roofs of trains, picking fights, or stealing while they were intoxicated. Those, who were arrested by the police, were often caught while they were tripping on synthetic pills of various kinds. When I asked Monchi where they got the pills from, the answer was always the same: Ada orang yang jual, there are people who sell them. When I asked eighteen year-old Mikini in 2001 why he was so keen on taking pills, he answered: ‘Biar cuek’ (To not give a damn)! When you are high (mabuk), you forget all the trouble and you feel very brave (berani). You can do whatever you want. ‘Cuek aja’! (Just don’t care!) Sometimes you don’t sleep or eat for two days. But in the end, you always collapse and sleep and sleep and sleep.

This cuek-related technique is different when compared to the cuek in the sense of ‘staying cool’ as it had been mentioned before. Whereas a conscious reappraisal of a stressful situation can be considered healthy, long-term drug

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induced suppression of emotional distress and frustration comprised high potentials of future ill-health. Besides glue-sniffing and pills, which was considered appropriate for junior community members when compared to intravenous drug use that was reserved for seniors, the newcomers were exposed to various sexual practices from a very young age. Sexual experiences were either forced during initiation or otherwise attainable through seniors, sex workers, or waria friends. Like their peers in the kampung, too, the adolescents grouped together in order to watch porn movies in small cinemas, or in more recent years in internet cafés and on their smartphones. The practices of seks bebas (promiscuous sex), premarital sex and even public ‘sex talk’, alongside public alcohol consumption, were stressed when interacting with non-street related peers who stopped by at their hangouts. Similar to the wider social context (Hegarty/Thajib 2016), being labeled homosexual (homo) was a severe insult for both anak Bendoro and anak Congklak. The protagonists assured me repeatedly, that if someone called a community member a ‘homo’ outside their obscenity contests, the person would have been ‘di-gebukin’ (beaten up) straight away. From their point of view there were no ‘homo’ or ‘gay’ members in the komunitas. The practice of the bo’ol or sodomi, which had been described in relation to newcomers’ initiations, and that could occur as transaction sex with men and waria from their immediate social environment, was communicated as a sign of masculinity and dominance. Referring to these practices as homosexuality was beyond the imaginable. Sexual intercourse and stories surrounding intimate encounters with female sex workers, street-related young women, or high school and university students were considered important. Sex with women was highly reputable and the most masculine form of sex. ‘Managing’ (ngatur) different girlfriends (pacar) at once without being exposed was most prestigious. Besides many similarities, there were considerable differences between the two communities regarding their macho ideologies and practices. In the komunitas Bendoro, seks bebas could be practiced with street-related girls and young women, whom they derogatively called ‘rendan’ (kere berdandan, an acronym for ‘vagrants wearing make-up’), sex workers, waria, travellers, or students. According to Jim having either a tough or an easy life depended on the skills to court the right women: You know, there are a few friends of ours on Malioboro who are very clever in looking for women (cari cewek). Some of them even got foreigners (dapat bule), and they now live in Europe. To look for foreign women (cari bule) is not easy. You have to be handsome or brave (berani). But when you succeed, you lead a great life and you can mostly live from the money of your foreign girlfriend (pacar bule). You know, I even know of one

Being Tekyan has two foreign girlfriends at the same time, one from Japan, the other one from Europe. Fantastic, isn’t it? He never really had to work, but he leads a great life and travels a lot.

Pacaran relationships at Congklak were more engaging and binding. Compared to the anak Bendoro, who excluded girls and women from their komunitas, the komunitas Congklak also comprised girls and women. Pacaran relationships were mostly stable over many years and even resulted in marriages at a later stage (see chapters 6 and 7). Similar to the rigidity of gender relations, the komunitas Bendoro was also more hierarchically organized along the principles of seniority and patriarchy when compared to the komunitas Congklak. The patronage between senior and junior anak Bendoro manifested an ‘anak buah system’ that was imposed on newly arriving juniors from their first days on the streets of Yogyakarta. The term refers to asymmetrical relationships within patronage systems, which in this context manifested as exploitative temporary alliances between a kakak (older brother/senior) and an adik (younger brother/junior). At Bendoro, hanging out was separated along gender and age distinctions. Joining the nightly nongkrong sessions of the seniors (this could take up months or years, respective to the juniors’ age and especially their tekyan performances) symbolized another identity transition to that of a senior (kakak) and signified a higher social position in community hierarchy. Leadership of the komunitas Bendoro was related to charisma and authority. Jempol had had proven his tekyan style and masculine skills on Malioboro throughout the years. He stood out for his loyalty and solidarity to other community members, acted excessively violent in the case of conflicts or fights with other communities, was smooth and clever in encounters with travellers or expats, and was reliable when negotiating with NGOs and other tentative support networks. Jempol was the boss of the komunitas Bendoro until 2008, when he finally moved into a house in an area where many artists and expatriates had rented houses. Although, he was not at Malioboro on a daily basis during the last years, Jempol still served as a role model and was called in case of conflicts. As a boss, he managed a skilled oscillation between extreme egocentric individualism and caring collective solidarity with his fellow anak Bendoro. I have learned to understand the comparatively ‘egalitarian’ collectivism and gender balance at Congklak as result of various factors. The komunitas Congklak consisted not only of previously unrelated individuals, but also of whole families that had moved and settled there. Monchi continuously articulated that his community was ‘caring’ (peduli). Leadership was shared between Monchi, who considered himself as ‘ketua’ and Ronggo as his ‘wakil’ (co-leader). They distanced themselves from the rigid hierarchies of the komunitas Bendoro and extended the title of ‘boss’ to all community members.

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Ketua and wakil were titles of kampung leaders and implied both particular social responsibility and social hierarchy positions and obligations. In contrast to the Bendoro community, where individual achievement was celebrated, the anak Congklak stressed the community’s group solidarity, mutual help, and politeness to outsiders. Monchi became ketua also due to his proliferate social skills of framing encounters and brokering between various people of different backgrounds. These skills promoted his own and contributed to the community’s ‘prosperity’ and survival over the years. He was particularly praised for his great optimism and inspiration for the young community members. Moreover, the anak Congklak appreciated his non-macho attitude and his non-violent approach when handling disputes and violent conflicts of others. Solidarity and reciprocity are not exclusive of tekyan ideology. They are described as characteristics, but also as rhetoric of many marginalized urban communities various local contexts. In her study of a marginalized Jakartan kampung during the 1980s, Lea Jellinek described social and economical support networks as effective, yet fragile strategies of coping with the harshness of urban life (1991: 50). The limits of egocentrism and the practices of solidarity become tangible in what the protagonists called ‘kasus’. The term describes a ‘case’ in the criminalistic sense of the word. Kasus #1: Mikini, 2001. After Mikini had joined the open house and handicraft production of an eco-social project for many years, and had become a close friend of most of the staff, he stole two million Rupiah4 out of the collective’s cash box one day in late 2001. The staff and the friends from the komunitas were surprised and ‘shocked’ (kagèt). At that time, the open house was an important refuge for the anak Bendoro. When the seniors of their community found out about the kasus, they started to frenetically look for the then 17-year old. Two of them even went to as far as the neighboring city of Solo (a two hour bus ride) to search for Mikini. But he had simply disappeared. Some assumed that he might have gone to Semarang; others claimed – many years later – that he was reportedly seen in Surabaya. Still others stated that he had become a waria so that nobody could recognize him, and that he had actually been living in the area around the Yogyakarta Lempuyangan station since 2006. Wherever he ran off to, Mikini never came back to visit his friends at Malioboro or Congklak. The senior anak Bendoro, especially boss Jempol who was closely related to the open house, announced that he would punish him severely if he found him: If I ever find him again, it would be better for him to kill himself in front of me! After I returned to Germany in late 2001, I received emails from Jempol, in which he asked me whether I knew where the outcaste was hiding. As a close friend 4 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in early 2001: $200 USD.

Being Tekyan

of the komunitas, so he argued, it was my duty to immediately report to him in case Mikini contacted me. Otherwise, I would become a kasus, too, and he could not guarantee my safety on Malioboro anymore. Monchi and I kept talking over the years about the great times we had together with Mikini at the beach hut. When I asked Monchi why Mikini never showed up again or contacted anyone of us, Monchi explained: First of all, he is afraid (takut) of Jempol and the anak Bendoro, that they might beat him to death. Mikini was never really brave (berani). He was funny, and I really liked him a lot, he was like a little brother (adik) to me, but whenever there was fighting involved he always cried or ran away. And, to be honest, I believe that Jempol and the anak Bendoro would have really killed him. The open house was like their home at that time. And if there is a ‘kasus’ within the community, the punishment is very harsh, no matter how much you actually like the person. And if you never got punished for a ‘kasus’, you cannot come back. You have to be brave and get your punishment – like it or not. When I asked Monchi why Mikini did not contact the open house, even after ten years, he replied: He is ‘malu’. He is ‘malu’ to face the head of the open house and all the other staff. And, who knows, maybe Jempol would still try to beat him up.

Mikini’s kasus was considered as a violation of community rules and endangered the anak Bendoro’s reputation. Such norm transgressions were severely punished. Being in solidary with Mikini was impossible, the loyalty towards the komunitas was more important. If an anak Bendoro or an anak Congklak violated the collective interests of the group, he was aware of the danger of being beaten up or excluded from the community. Through this collective strategy, the protagonists strengthened their rules of conduct, which helped to secure their survival as a community. The prominence of physical violence translated their masculinity and toughness, into concrete social action that could also be witnessed by newcomers. Kasus #2: Buster, 2007. One afternoon while I was having coffee with the staff of the eco-social project, our talks about further strategies how to organize HIV-AIDS prevention workshops within various street-related communities was interrupted by a visit from two police officers. They asked us whether we knew the whereabouts of Buster, a twenty year-old anak Bendoro who was a frequent participant of handicraft workshops at the open house during his early years on the streets. After being imprisoned twice in 2006, he never showed up at the workshops again. The issue at stake was the theft of a motorbike

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in a kampung behind the Bendoro street junction near Malioboro. The police officers instructed us to tell them where Buster was hiding, if we wanted to avoid trouble for ourselves. After we affirmed that Buster was not a part of the workshops any longer, the policemen ordered us to find out where he was and report his whereabouts to them immediately. In the face of the seriousness of the policemen’s threats to the project, we started asking around. Whoever we had encountered, the answer was always the same: I don’t know. None of the anak Bendoro or the anak Congklak gave any information about Buster’s whereabouts, even when the police interrogated them directly. Buster simply disappeared. When I asked Jim about the incident two months later, he smiled and said that he didn’t know where Buster was. Nobody knew where he was, and even if someone knew, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because you could never betray a friend to the police.

M USIC W ORK Work on the streets followed particular rules. The street junctions, traffic lights and public spaces of the city were delineated into territories where only certain communities were allowed to work and reside. Unauthorized trespassing was severely punished by excessive violence from entitled streetrelated communities. This could provoke prolonged spirals of revenge (balas dendam) between certain communities. The territorial division of the city into community territories was also a way of controlling and limiting the access of peers and families from neighboring kampung who intended to work on the street junctions, too. In order to protect these informal territorial rights to work and sleeping places, the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak nurtured good relationships (hubungan baik) with policemen, neighborhood officials, neighbors, shop owners, parking attenders, or passing city bus drivers. The cultivation of good relations included respectful and deferent behavior, sharing of profits in case of successful deals of trading goods, or passing on information on suspicious activities of other communities or individuals surrounding the street junctions and its neighborhoods. The way in which income was generated reflected social positions within the komunitas. Begging (ngemis) on the streets was profitable, but considered shameful (malu-maluin) by the anak Bendoro and the anak Conglak. It did not fit into their pride narratives of independence and freedom. It was mostly the newcomers, who begged, because they did not yet comprise of more prestigious skills to secure their survival. At Congklak, it was considered shameful if a community member’s girlfriend or wife had to beg publicly while the men were hanging out. Begging was appropriate for single older women, but not for a women who was in a relationship with an anak Congklak. The collection

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of plastic spoons from leftover takeaway food, the omnipresent plastic water bottles, cans, and used newspapers that were resold was estimated appropriate, but still not a real tekyan style of income generation. Some young men worked additionally as parking attendants at the local bus station, in front of outlets, as newspaper sellers, or scrap iron collectors, and those women, who did not beg on the six-lane city highway, sometimes worked as temporary dish washers and attendants at nearby food stalls. Being an anak Congklak meant being skilled in street arts. Whether one produced handicrafts that were then sold to related NGOs, or one was ngamen (‘busking’) in buses or at the street junction appropriate work at Congklak had to be related to ‘street art’. In the case of the ngamen, some were singing, some shook their homemade rattles or banged small drums, while others clapped their hands or just hummed silently. The anak Congklak formed groups at bus stops, in buses and at the close-by bus terminal’s food stalls and played popular Indonesian hits and songs of their idols Iwan Fals, Bob Marley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, or other Indonesian pop bands. Sometimes they also performed self-composed songs. The anak Congklak and the anak Bendoro were proud of their music. Life on the streets is about music, they kept repeating to me. I learned that making music was a central cultural practice, because it was a way of relating to others, performing and publicly articulating tekyan ideology, a means of income generation, a style of celebrating during nightly nongkrong sessions, and a process of reframing painful experiences of public stigmatization. The collective composition of songs while hanging out (nongkrong), the articulated solidarity with politically critical artists like Iwan Fals, Sawung Jabo, or Anto Baret, and the peace and love rhetoric of reggae was important to feel at ease, biar nyaman (to be comfortable), to put it in Kris’ words. In a documentary that was produced by Etnoreflika, a visual anthropology collective linked to the GIRLI-related NGO Humana, Ronggo, the wakil of the komunitas Congklak described the meaning and feeling behind two of their self-composed songs as follows5 : ‘Tunes of Discordance’ (Nada Sumbang). The song is about the fact that their [the anak Congklak’s] voices have not been heard yet. The only thing they get is some coins, a few hundred Rupiah, but it makes them happy. Because that is what their lives are about. Well, maybe there are problems with their parents and other things, or just because they are just raised that way because of economic hardships. So, the streets and the busking are the only way. By means of this song, although the voices are husky, they can still be accepted, although there are only some people who want to accept us. 5 | Transcribed and translated by the author from the video documentary ‘PKACC’ (Etnoreflika 2004).

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java ‘The little hearts of the street-related people’ (Hati kecil kaum jalanan). The third song is about those who work to earn their own money for school. Although they can only earn a part of the school and other fees, they try. Their little hearts have never been paid attention to by the ones up there. By those who are in power, and those who are above us. Because we are only those who are often called “the rubbish of society”. But we cannot rebel. We can only rebel through our songs, in music, and also poetry and theater. And although we are marginalized (tersingkir), we still can do it. Although we are not part of the formal society (masyarakat), we still go on. We still struggle, although only through our songs; because this is all we can do, play music. There is nothing else we can do.

On busy and crowded Malioboro, the anak Bendoro worked as buskers in city buses, at street junctions or along the ubiquitous lines of food stalls (kaki lima). Sometimes they drove pedicabs, directed heavy traffic through inner alleys, roamed the city in private buses that had not been replaced yet by now omnipresent air-conditioned and semi-automatized public buses as assistants picking up passengers and announcing bus routes. A common work for the junior anak Bendoro was shoe shining on the sidewalks of Malioboro. Once they grew older, the shoe shiners were sometimes teased and mocked by their friends. After having been teased for too long, many of them had become tired of it and started to feel that they were growing out of their jobs. They tried to save money to buy a small ukulele, perform at food stalls and street junctions and thus climb the social hierarchy within the komunitas along with the maturing of their bodies. Whereas owning and playing an ukulele was considered appropriate, the guitar symbolized rich social, cultural and economic capital among both the Congklak and Bendoro community. With regard to the material and social value of the guitar, their owners had to consider strategies for keeping the prestigious objects in their possession for as long as possible. Instruments were hidden in homes of friends or the shops of trusted people. Guitars could be stolen and re-stolen among members of the same community. They could be stolen and sold in order to gain money or sabotage another’s social position and economic advantages. If the theft victim found out who had stolen the guitar, a kasus was announced and the perpetrator was severely punished by the whole community. Performing on buses, at street junctions, or food stalls was prestigious, but the perfection of tekyan work at Malioboro was not to appear working at all, but always having material resources and money at hands at the same time (see chapter 6).

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TEK YAN : R ESISTANCE , S UBVERSION OR ‘J AVANESE W AY ’? Newcomers were continuously socialized and socialized others into their komunitas by means of long periods of ritualized initiation, the acquisition of the bahasa senang, the introduction to masculinity performances, practices of seks bebas, working patterns, localities, learning how to reappraise adversities that exceeded coping resources, and witnessing the dramatic consequences of in-group kasus. The collectivity of the komunitas with its group norms of conduct and narratives of self-elevation and superiority created a social and localized identity that the protagonists celebrated with their peers and resourcefully communicated in their encounters with others (see next chapter). Initial feelings of fear (takut) and shame (malu) were transformed into a tekyan pride and the feeling of belonging to a komunitas. Negative emotions and selfstigmatization gave way to enhanced well-being and pride (bangga) displays that fuelled the emotional climate (de Rivera 1992) of community life. Sociologist Jack Barbalet (1998: 159) defines ‘emotional climate’ as a set of emotions and feelings that are shared by groups of individuals implicated in common social structures and processes. Particular emotional climates may further function as a signifier of group membership as particular emotions – and emotives – are fostered, highlighted, sometimes even shared by community members. Once anak baru were integrated into the community and learned how to effectively oscillate between various emotive displays, they became acquainted with social techniques that increased their social esteem and also socio-economic mobility (see next chapter). Classic subaltern and post-structuralist scholars have argued that a collective style of body inscriptions, music preferences and specific slang can come across as symbols of resistance or subculture (Gelder 2007; Hall/Jefferson 1993; Hebdige 1979). Accordingly, Beazley (2000b;c) argues that the tekyan ideology is both subculture and resistance against the hegemonic Javanese society at the same time. But the coherence and the political force of the 1990’s and early 2000’s street-related GIRLI-movement was continuously atomized into street-related communities during the 2000s. Considering Yogyakarta’s political, economic and social transformations during the last ten years, ‘resistance’ might not be the adequate term to capture the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak’s ways of dealing with marginality. Susan Seymour writes that the “concept of resistance has become ubiquitous in contemporary cultural anthropology” (2006: 303; emphasis in original). In the wake of increasing analyses of power relations and social inequalities since the late 1970s, ‘resistance’ became a counter-hegemonic concept, which has been applied to a broad spectrum of activities such as poetry among Bedouin women (Abu-Lughod 1986) or love letters by Nepali youth (Ahearn 2001). Emerging ‘subaltern studies’ have promoted the concept as a capacity of subordinate groups to challenge the power and hegemony of

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political, economic and cultural elites. Instead of likening the concept to wide arrays of collective and individual agency in the context of differential power relations in a Foucaultian sense – “Where there is power, there is resistance” (1978: 93, quoted from Seymour 2006: 303) – my understanding of ‘resistance’ follows Seymour’s definition. Resistance comprises of “[i]ntentional, and hence conscious, acts of defiance or opposition by a subordinate individual or group of individuals against a superior individual or set of individuals” (ibid.: 305). From this perspective, I do not consider tekyan ideology as primarily intentional resistance against local social hierarchy or sociocultural and political elites. On the contrary, I understand tekyan ways of living as socially and spatially attuned coping practices in order to navigate through various social fields in manners that neither jeopardize their subjective well-being and self-esteem nor offend others without reason. Tekyan style and conduct might at first sight appear deviant and subversive, a closer look at tekyan ideology and practice reveals that the young men reproduced many facets of local social structures and Javanese ways of being, thinking, feeling and interacting. Both communities were organized along structures similar to those of the kampung (see chapter 3). The organization of the komunitas Bendoro, in particular, reproduced politicized cultural ideals of seniority and patriarchy. Moreover, both communities built their collective identities around the localities of their hangout places. They stressed in-group solidarity, and drew their social prestige from their ‘professions’. The following chapter illustrates that the protagonists intended to increase their social esteem from their proximity to ‘good people’ (orang baik), similar to the practices of kampung residents. Only if the protagonists attuned to the identities of their respective interaction partners could cooperation be induced and social and economic capital increased; a social and cultural practice that lies at the heart of ‘being Javanese’ and its principles of the budi pekerti.

6 Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

With time, practice and experience the protagonists learned how to relate and attune to various types of persons in ways that did not result in frustration, harm or derogation. The young men clustered persons and related spaces into those that needed to be avoided due to anticipated harm and others that were provoked and sought after, because of their imagined social support, economic, material and other rewards. Douglas Hollan’s definition of subjective wellbeing in relation to place-making helps to clarify my understanding of what I define as affective ‘avoidance’ and ‘attention fields’, as subjective zones of anticipated distress on the one hand, and comfort, security and benefits on the other, when he writes: “[A]ll communities create zones of activities and engagements for people that affect their sense of well-being in relatively positive or negative ways. As people move through the course of a day and traverse the socialscapes around them, as they move from one location to another and engage with various types of people and activities, they feel more or less safe and secure, more or less stimulated and engaged, more or less well or unwell.” (2009:215)

I will illustrate the protagonists’ empathy-based techniques of ‘reading’ and encountering different sets of actors within various extended case studies of both avoidance and attention fields and ultimately summarize their emotive practice and rhetoric as ‘emotional economies’ in the final section.

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A VOIDANCE F IELDS Police Encounters Regarding their low social position, street-related young men were expected to perform malu (‘shame’, ‘propriety’) displays in order to communicate their hormat (‘respect’ and ‘deference’) towards figures of authority (chapter 3). Besides lowering their gaze, decreasing their body posture, ‘smiling politely’ and not speaking, or only responding with short and polite affirmations if adressed (ya, Pak, injjih, Pak/ ya, Pak, betul Pak) – techniques of displaying malu – in direct encounters with policemen that oversaw the traffic at ‘their’ street junctions, the street-related protagonists were sometimes ‘shameless’ (enggak tahu malu) enough to curse and drink in public and ignore proper malu-displays towards passersbys. In the public space, this ‘weird’ (aneh) behavior gave rise to vivid discursive rhetoric of public campaigning against them, because they did not only ‘not know shame’, the literal translation of enggak tahu malu, but their lack of social and cultural awareness of their marginal social positions hinted to the anak Bendoro and anak Congklak’s absence of self-awareness (enggak tahu diri). Hinting to the ‘Javanese ways’ of feeling, thinking, communicating and maneuvering public spaces (chapter 3), a person that does not know her- or himself indicates lacking moral consciousness. No surprise, policemen other than those at the traffic posts with whom they nurtured good social relationships, referred to the anak Congklak and the anak Bendoro as ‘sarang penyakit’ (pestilence), which needed to be eradicated before it spread further. In a society where smell and dirt are linked with a person’s immorality, a rhetoric that labeled the protagonists as ‘dirty’ (kotor) referred to their bodily appearance, but also their lack of social conduct and morality. The cleansing campaigns by the local government and police, random arrests, and physical violence were manifestations of marginalizing and stigmatizing state policies. The long-term objective behind physical abuse during arrests and interrogations was the street-related communities’ permanent banishment from the city. Compared to other marginalized and criminalized social minorities, many of the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak did not possess an identity card (Kartu Tanda Penduduk, KTP), meaning that they were officially non-existent, which made them especially vulnerable to police violence and abuse. A KTP required the possession of formal documents such as a birth certificate, a local registration card, and address of the family, which most of them did not possess. Children younger than 17 years old did not need a KTP because they were under their parents’ legal protection. Because most of the tekyan neither possessed a KTP nor a family registration card nor lived with their parents, their only legal protection was the one offered by NGOs, who tried to provide them with

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

formal and nonformal education, health care and legal protection. From a legal perspective though, the lack of a KTP was reason enough to get arrested by the police and institutionalized in an asylum. Both the legal and the social aspect of a ‘homeless’ identity of cut family, social, and professional ties (bibit, bebet, bobot) led to a stigmatization of their very selves. The protagonists tried to avoid the police wherever and whenever possible and keep them at distance by means of encountering them in spotless Javanese ways. Senior Bendoro or Congklak members were regularly insulted, beaten up and brought to far away places on the city’s outskirts. Based on their ‘cute’ appearance, the children of the komunitas could evoke sympathy and were often pitied (kasihan). Both police and public often perceived children who lived and worked on the streets as victims of irresponsible families. But with the development of their bodies and their coming of age, their social perceptions changed dramatically. Physically more mature adolescents and young adults were labeled as preman (criminal, thug) and believed to be responsible for their own ‘misery’. Simultaneously, the degree of violence and the punishments became more excessive. One day in April 2007, Jim explained to me: Look, in my case, it is like this: I never liked to busk on the streets, but I liked to hang out with my friends from the ‘komunitas’ while they were busking. If I wanted to stay a part of the group, I had to contribute in a different way. So, I became a specialist in stealing food, later in drug dealing. With the things I sold, I could supply the ‘komunitas’ and didn’t have to work in the heat. I often stole things together with Rudy, who also hated to work in the heat. When we were still small (masih anak) and were caught, the people would take the stolen snacks, shirts or watches, be angry with us, maybe hit us once or twice and then send us away. We always tried to steal at different places, because we thought that if we got caught in the same place twice we would be in big trouble. Later, when I got older, there was a lot of trouble. I was beaten up many times by policemen and security guards, and I went to prison three times – once for stealing, twice for dealing. When you’re older and not busking or collecting stuff, you have to come up with something. In my case, it was drugs. This way, I could also take care of the younger ones and provide them with food.

Monchi, who was never in prison, clarified: You know yourself that life on the streets can be exciting (asyik), but sometimes very boring (bosan dan jenuh). Some of the ‘anak’ get frustrated (frustasi) also as they’re getting older (kalau sudah mau dewasa) and they’ve been on the streets for a long time and they see that things haven’t gotten any better (enggak maju). Some go to Jakarta, some go to hell, hahaha! … And some go to prison. When I was small, I was also very naughty (nakal sekali). Sometimes I stole things, but only small stuff, not important

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java stuff. Just ask Utomo … But when you get older things can get really messy (bisa kacau). I don’t exactly know why, but the police then treat you really badly (parah), they beat you up without reason and treat you like a criminal (preman). You know, like others, who were in prison for over two years because of ganja. They said that the police treated them really badly.

On another occasion Monchi added: There is no joking with the police. You have to be polite and pretend (pura-pura) that you respect (hormat) them. If not, they just find any reason to take you with them. Of course, when they’re gone you can make jokes about them, but never directly! I think that sometimes they just show up because they want to be respected or praised (untuk merasa dihormati). Whether you want it or not, you cannot fail them.

In those cases where encounters with the police were performed successfully even in face of committed crimes, the young men expressed their pride (bangga) in ‘fooling’ the police by acting in Javanese ways. The following incident shall illustrate this argument. One Saturday night in January 2007, after working all day, Gianto, Kris, Monchi, Danar, Habib, Jambul, Koko, Tirto and I sat together under the awning in front of the closed motorbike workshop (bengkel) behind the Congklak street junction. We were drinking, smoking and discussing the circumstances that led to the imprisonment of a close friend. Rumor had it that Irianto had been severely beaten up during interrogation and would be sentenced to at least three years in prison. The atmosphere was downcast compared to most gatherings on a Saturday night. Hardly anyone smiled or made the usual jokes. All of a sudden, Irianto turned around the corner. He parked his motorbike, dismounted and walked towards us. He was smiling mischievously. Irianto asked for a drink and a cigarette and then started his story about encountering two policemen earlier that day. On the way to Congklak he got caught in one of the frequent stop-and-search operations at the other end of the city. These operations were held at strategic street corners in order to inspect vehicle registration documents (STNK), driver’s licenses (SIM) and identity cards (KTP), as well as the use of proper helmets and general motorbike conditions. Irianto explained to the police that he had forgotten all his documents because he was in a hurry to get to the recreational village of Kaliurang at the slopes of Merapi where his friends from campus and NGOs held regular meetings and workshops. The 23-year old pretended that he was an art student from Jakarta (imitating the Jakarta slang), currently studying at the well-reputed Indonesian Art Institute Yogyakarta. He claimed that he was on his way to give a presentation for foreign exchange students on the issue of public security from the perspective of contemporary

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

art. By then, the two policemen had forced him to dismount the motorbike, which he had borrowed from a friend. When the policemen asked him to prove his story, he told us that he had opened his backpack and showed the two policemen a new laptop, one he had actually just stolen at one of the campuses in town, continuing to tell them that the foreign students waited for him and that the whole event couldn’t start because all the presentations were on ‘his’ laptop. The policemen were confused (bingung), he said and laughed out loudly. The policemen told him to remount his motorbike and make sure to bring the documents next time. While he drove away and waived, they wished him good luck with the presentation. The anak Conglak were thrilled. Everyone started cheering, joking and clapping Irianto’s back, and friendly mocking him asu, asu, asuu! – ‘you dog’ when translated loosely from low Javanese. The atmosphere changed. The following conversations praised Irianto’s ‘cleverness’ (pintar, jago) and courage (berani) to ‘fool’ (goblokin) the police. We jointly agreed that policemen actually were rather ‘fools’ (goblok, tolol), and that one only had to know how to trick them. We were rejoicing and drinking for hours without being bored to repeat the story over and over again by slightly changing Irianto’s initial version. Every now and then, one of the anak Congklak would come up with another heroic story that they themselves had experienced in relation to encounters with policemen. Although everyone knew the stories already, this did not prevent anyone from rejoicing excessively over and over again. I could never confirm whether Irianto really had a laptop in his bag (as he was not asked to show it that night), or whether the encounter with the policemen had truly taken place. What was more important to me was not the ‘truth’ of the matter, but the story’s effect on the whole group. It triggered a temporary narrative subversion of power differentials between the police authorities and the anak Congklak and produced situational collective pride narratives, which resulted from a subjectively perceived superiority in a social encounter that would otherwise have been characterized in terms of fear, humiliation, violence, or avoidance at best.

Kampung Encounters Because some anak Congklak and anak Bendoro were repeatedly or allegedly involved in ‘criminal’ actions, they were often made scapegoats of crimes that occurred in neighboring kampung communities. Depending on the gravity of the accusations, this could lead to overt disrespect, scolding, displacement and eviction. The most prominent eviction within the last ten years was supposedly the so-called ‘Congklak tragedy’ of April 2005. As has been described in the context of the protagonists’ arrival to the streets of Yogyakarta, the anak Congklak had built shelters behind the major

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intersection where they worked. They gradually built shacks made of wood, bamboo, metal and tin roofs, with materials they found on the streets or in the nearby river. By means of their strategies to keep local police officers (who guarded the street junction’s traffic), shop owners, and kampung neighbors at respectful distance according to Javanese ways of social interaction, the number of community members soon rose to more than 40 members, between two and sixty-six years of age. As its ketua, the then 24 year-old Monchi aimed at a formal authorization of their newly emerging local community. After having collected the required documents of local bureaucracies, the police, and representatives of different political parties, it seemed the komunitas’ collective efforts of formally adhering to the adjoining kampungs’ formal rules of social conduct would soon be rewarded by legal authorization. Until, one day in April… Well, you know… they needed scapegoats (‘kambing hitam’). But I think they were just waiting until we made mistakes. Because we were so close to the legal authorization of our community, the neighbors might have feared that they would never get rid of us. Even when they seemed nice to us for a while, in fact we were always an annoyance to them,

Pak Slamet explained to me two years after the tragedy in a very low voice starring at the cigarette in his right hand when we sat and smoked together in his new home in Bambangrejo, a low-income kampung in the very north of the city’s outskirts. Pak Slamet, the father of Affandi, Mukri and Ayu, was a street musician (pengamen) since he was teenager (anak muda). Until the late 1990s their family ran a dangdut1 band, in which he played the tabla2 and his wife Ibu Nuning was one of the two singers. His eyes filled with tears but his face began to glare when he talked about the old days at Congklak. Since they burned down our shelters, nothing is like it was before. I am not even allowed to work at the Congklak junction anymore, because the people from the neighboring kampung put something like a ban on me. If I ever will be seen there again, they couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t be beaten up or worse, they said. I don’t know why and how this could happen. We were all so happy (senang) and we were so cautious with the kampung people. But when the stealing began, everything changed. They made me responsible for the theft of a motorbike and an electronic water pump. But we didn’t do anything. They 1 | Dangdut is a popular Indonesian music genre that is influenced by Malay, Arabic, and Hindi music. Due to its popularity among the ‘little people’ it can be described as (a sexually rather explicit) ‘music for the masses’. 2 | Tabla (Indon.): an Indian percussion instrument.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention needed scapegoats, and we were the weakest there. No identity card (KTP), no rights (hak), no nothing, only a few shacks. But the kids were happy (senang) there. I was happy.

After I had not been to Yogyakarta for four years, I arrived again in May 2005, only three weeks after the Congklak tragedy had happened. On my third day there, Monchi, his fiancée Dyah, and two of her younger brothers took me to their former homes. Monchi was visibly agitated. Look, you can still see the ashes here, he said while pointing towards black spots on the asphalt. He continued: They only gave us a few hours to pack up everything. At noon the youngsters (anak muda) of the ‘kampung’ came, and told us that they are going to burn the whole place down. Whether with or without us, that was up to us. We had no chance. There was nothing we could do, because we would always lose against them. Most of us are not registered, do not have a KTP, and for them we are nothing but bums and criminals. So most of us moved. We were just about to remove our belongings when they came with gasoline and torches and in only a few minutes they burned down all of our homes.

The other three remained silent. No expression of anger or grief visible, at least not that I could identify them. No visible signs of shock or sadness in their faces. Not a single muscle in their faces seemed to move. Then, after a long silence, Dyah smirked forcedly followed by a loud and short laughing outcry – huhui! Monchi stood up, smiled at me and went over close by the riverbank, on the other side of the now empty space. Once he arrived there, he shouted towards us: Come here to the riverbank! This is the place where dreams came true. He laughed again. This is the riverbank. This was our relaxing spot. This was where we put up our hammocks, and where we ML3. Hahaha. Quak quak quak… he folded his hands and made a sizzling sound with his mouth. You know? Quak quak quak… Hahahaha. Quak quak quak… Dyah affirmed giggling shyly. Here we could really be free, because nobody could see us here. During the days we were fishing, washing, and we guys were watching the girls bathe from a secret spot. In the evenings we would have a smoke, and down there, beneath the trees, where the hammocks were, we had our little love shack, Monchi added.

While we were sitting, talking and smoking, 25-year old Ronggo, who took a break from busking at the intersection and was looking for some place to hide from the burning heat, also joined in our conversation:

3 | ML (Coll.): to make love.

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java You can hardly imagine this, I think. I wouldn’t believe it either if someone just told me and I hadn’t seen it myself. They didn’t care whether there were small kids crying or mothers breastfeeding their babies. They poured their gasoline all over the place and lit a fire. Then they disappeared again. Just like that. And where were the police who just sat a few meters away controlling traffic? They waited until the fire destroyed everything, and then they ordered us to put out the last flames and leave. I couldn’t believe they did that to us. I have already given up (aku udah pasrah).

When I talked to the other anak Congklak about this tragedy, most of them concluded with the words: Ya udah! Mau gimana lagi?4 – ‘Well, what’s done is done! What else is there to do?’ After their little huts were burned down by the neighboring kampung residents there seemed to be only one option: move on. Thomas: So, do you know who stole the items? Monchi: It was a new kid from a komunitas in Jakarta. He was a real troublemaker. He was drunk (mabuk) and on pills (obat-obatan) all the time. He stayed with us for about one month. After he stole the motorbike and the water pump from the kampung he disappeared. But it was already too late, because the neighbors already decided to evict (usir) us. When I talked to the head of the kampung, apologized for what had happened, and declared that we were also surprised (kagèt) and angry (marah), he told me that it was too late now, because they’d already decided that we had to move. Ya udah! Mau gimana lagi? Thomas: Did you meet that new kid from Jakarta again? Monchi: I heard he went to Surabaya. But as you know yourself when we were looking for Mikini all over Yogyakarta, how difficult this can be. When someone does not want to be found, the chances are minimal to ever see him again. He definitely uses a different name now. And maybe he didn’t use his real name when he was with us at Congklak. If we ever see him again I think he won’t survive. Our friends are so outraged (emosi) I wouldn’t be able to prevent them from beating him up. I’m also very disappointed (kecewa) that this happened. The Congklak tragedy illustrates the protagonists’ marginal position and their ultimate powerlessness in encounters with many kampung residents, local authorities and the police, when they tried to make their way into 4 | This expression was articulated almost habitually in difficult situations, where there were no solutions at hand. Instead of ruminations and tormenting laments, there was no further complaining or dwelling in the situation. People just moved on. If asked what one intended to do about the desperate situation, most people responded that they intended to do nothing, and that it was best to simply continue with life as usual. The subjective experience was defined as ‘pasrah’, a Javanese and Indonesian term that can be translated as ‘(fatalistic) surrender/submission’.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

formally belonging to the city’s society. Their stigmatization could be directly experienced in brutal psychological and physical forms, revealing the urgency to create and maintain social and economic security networks with more benevolent interaction partners. The strategy of cuek (‘ignore’) or pasrah (‘fatalistic surrender’), to ignore and surrender to phenomena of excessive distress that cannot be coped with more progressively, and to avoid and withdraw from those situations and interaction partners where cooperation could not be induced, remained pragmatic strategies in order to reduce the impact of emotionally painful experiences. Referring to the dramatic consequences of individual misbehavior that is considered harmful for the whole komunitas, the punishments related to kasus (chapter 5) might appear more comprehensible. Most of the anak Congklak continued with their lives around the Congklak junction, looking for new spaces to occupy. Some of the anak Congklak moved to other parts of the city, returned to their families temporarily or slept over at friends’ rented rooms (kos), but almost all of them continued to work at the street junction in one way or another until five years later, when the community finally dissolved (see chapter 7 and 8). At night, many of them returned to their new ‘homes’, but with time passing most of them claimed new safe-enough spaces to sleep and hang out, like for example near the motorcycle workshop (bengkel) at the opposite side of the intersection. But the eviction from their previous kampung bebas resulted in the community’s decrease in numbers, and it lacked the stability and the collective ‘spirit’ (semangat) of the pre-tragedy era.

A T TENTION F IELDS ‘Macho’ Encounters The analysis of the protagonists’ encounters with street-related young women focuses on the anak Bendoro’s reproduction of institutionalized patriarchy and machismo. Although the anak Bendoro verbally rejected such ‘backward’ kampung practices, they enacted them ‘effectively’ for their own advantages by further marginalizing, stigmatizing and exploiting their female peers. The anak Bendoro stressed their masculinities in order to cement the gendered power asymmetries that cut through the kampung societies they themselves rhetorically rejected. These gender asymmetries resulted in a reduced display of malu and an increased performance of masculine bangga in the social encounters with street-related young women. Patriarchic rhetoric and practices described in chapter 4 demarcated the agency frames of street-related girls and women and became gendered accomplices of the anak Bendoro in “shifting marginalities” (Beazley 2002: 1672) along a public discourse of patriarchy.

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The number of visible street-related girls and women was comparably low to those of boys and young men who lived on the streets. The young women’s low visibility in the public spaces of the city also resulted from their clandestine behavior, style and income generation strategies, which were aimed at public invisibility. These practices might be interpreted in relation to the discursive power of gendered socialization and its public propaganda of women as ‘pure and deferent housekeepers’, who had to be protected from the immoral dangers of the uncontrollable and wild (liar) public space. A visibly homeless girl or woman challenged the moralized scheme of the ‘ideal patriarchal family’, and was perceived as a dangerous disruptor of social harmony (rukun). The young women who publicly and visibly deviated from idealized and moralized images of purity and deference were labeled as ‘anak nakal’ or ‘cewek nakal’ by the media, opinion leaders of surrounding kampung, and also their immediate social environment of pedicab drivers, market vendors, passers-by, and last not least the anak Bendoro. Compared to the men, where ‘nakal’ referred to ‘being disobedient’, the same term could translate as ‘being a prostitute’ or ‘promiscuous’ in the case of women. Although gender dichotomies were less asymmetrical in some social environments, the anak Bendoro and to a certain extent also the anak Congklak argued that the private sphere was still predominantly ascribed to girls and women, and the public sphere was the domain of boys and men. Macho rhetoric, not only among the anak Bendoro, about young women who were said to ‘look or move in a nakal way’ can be summed up in degrading statements like ‘itu bisa dipake’, implying the imagined and alleged ease with which these women could be ‘used for sex’. The stigmatizations as prostitutes (‘cewek nakal’, ‘pelacur’ or ‘lonte’) forced young women who lived on the streets into public invisibility. They wore unsuspicious blue jeans, wide shirts, and baseball caps, hid or cut long hair short in order to be ‘blend in’ and not be identified as women. Body movement was equally masculine-ized and speech could be equally vulgar to those of their male peers. As has been described in a previous subchapter, the komunitas Bendoro and the komunitas Congklak differed in terms of their gendered group composition. Whereas the komunitas Congklak also comprised of both older and younger women, the komunitas Bendoro was strictly male and also organized more hierarchically in terms of group membership and age. The subsequent observations are based on encounters that either took place during nightly sitins at the community’s hangout, where the anak Bendoro sometimes invited their ‘girlfriends’ (pacar), or during and after our mixed workshops at various open houses. It was especially during the nightly nongkrong sessions when the anak Bendoro celebrated their community pride, performed swearing contests, engaged in collective drinking (mabuk), and articulated heroic stories

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

about violent encounters with peers from other komunitas, outstanding sex adventures, or stories of ‘playing’ policemen, shop owners or NGO-activists. On those nights, where young women were part of the company, stories were exaggerated, continuously retold, transformed and contested so that they could fuel into a spiral of mutual outperformance. Stories I had heard before in different versions were vertiginously embellished, sometimes collectively affirmed, at other times contested by others’ even more astonishing versions. Even the swearing seemed more creative and rude (kasar). Masculinities were further endorsed by body performance and body talk in which the young men displayed and verbally elaborated on new tattoos or recent scars from fights and accidents. Social hierarchies within the komunitas were negotiated by means of masculine pride performances, which were supposed to impress both the young women, and their peers. Young women who were not ‘belonging’ to a particular anak Bendoro as their girlfriends (pacar) were courted bluntly, offensively and with vulgar language. The in-group conflicts that resulted from cheating and ‘stealing’ a girlfriend and the ritualized practices of reconciliation shall not be further scrutinized here due to confidentiality agreements. Instead of showing their solidarity with street-related young women, marginalities and stigmata were shifted. The exploitation of the girls and young women was not only accepted, but also promoted for the sake of personal and collective social, economic and psychological gain. The rhetoric stigmatization of the young women manifested in the term ‘rendan’, which is an acronym of the Indonesian-Javanese (ngoko) ‘kere berdandan’, ‘vagrants wearing make up’. When I asked the protagonists whether there were also female anak Bendoro, they argued that ‘rendan’ could not be part of the komunitas because the street was not a place for women. Jempol argued that the streets were a rough and tough (keras) place where you had to be rude (kasar) and strong (kuat), drink and smoke, and misbehave (nakal) once in a while, and hence not a place for a woman (cewek). Mikini sincerely wondered who took take care of girls and women when they were in trouble. The streets were ‘too dangerous’ for women, and the best place for them would be at home where they could take care of other kids, study, cook and become good wives one day. If they worked, who would take care of their children? he asked. – Poor children, he added mumbling to himself. 18-year old Danny argued that women were ‘too weak’ for the streets and that whenever he saw a girl who worked on the streets he forced her to go home. He said that he could not imagine how parents could send their daughters to work on the streets. He further wondered what women did when they were involved in a fight if they had no one to look after them. When I asked Jempol and Danny together about the ‘rendan’, their attributions were less empathic. They both agreed with each other that the ‘rendan’ were different because they

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were very ‘naughty’ (nakal) and ‘dirty’ (kotor), and they could not be trusted because they changed their lovers all the time. In order to control them, one had to provide food and also money. They both assured me that ‘rendan’ were materialistic (cewek materi) and egoistic (egois), and lacked the solidarity that characterized their own komunitas. The protagonists reproduced a shifted stigma discourse that worked for instead of against them. Paradoxically, the young men used the same labels (nakal, kotor) that others expressed towards them and they reproduced a gender rhetoric that fostered the moral stigmatization of street-related women. These narratives were not without consequences. Those young women, who shared relationships with the anak Bendoro, participated in the nightly hangouts when they were invited as girlfriends (pacar) of a community member where they mostly remained silent, passive and shy (malu). But the same young women could behave very differently once they were among themselves or in the company of others, who showed no interest in oppressing them. They could curse and cheer loudly. Beatings, fights, insults and obscenities among themselves were not exceptional. It was striking how Rara, Tami, Gita, Ambar, Daisy or Micky (all in their early twenties) who were loosely related to the anak Bendoro could make them dumbstruck and confused within only a few seconds once they had been in the majority. Consequently, the anak Bendoro avoided being outnumbered by their female peers, occasions that mostly occurred in the safe-enough spaces of workshops and open houses of NGOs. The young women contested their stigmatization in direct face-to-face encounters with individual anak Bendoro. These encounters were predominantly circling around the pacaran, in this case a reciprocal social, sexual and economic relationship. Due to the women’s limited mobility and lack of income-generating opportunities when compared to the boys and young men, the pacaran was an effective strategy to establish social security networks, which fostered their protection and safety. Alongside a pacaran with an anak Bendoro, where sex could be traded for protection, food and clothing, the women maintained similar relationships with other pacar (boyfriends), for example students, pedicab drivers, market vendors, and young men from nearby kampung. Harriott Beazley, who has worked with street-related young women in Yogyakarta, observed that “[...] the main form of rivalry between street girls is over boys, but that the girls also feel very easy to find another boyfriend if they lose one (2003b).” Although the women publicly rejected their female identity by altering their conduct and physical appearance, emphasizing their femininity as pacar (girlfriend) was an effective strategy of coming to terms with multiple stigmatization. Although their ‘materialism’ was refuted by the anak Bendoro as immoral, the young men – if they were in a pacaran – regarded young women

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

as their ‘property’. The pacar transpired as a symbol of powerful masculinity, sexual and economic potency vis-à-vis other community members. To a certain extent, the anak Bendoro depended on their female peers, because without them their means of demonstrating power and virility within the komunitas were limited. Like other protagonists, Danny framed this as a dilemma: If I do not supply her [his girlfriend] with the things she demands, she will leave me and become the ‘pacar’ of another guy. Then the others would mock me and make me ‘malu’. Although the women could exert sexual, social and economic power over their male peers by means of establishing and maintaining extended pacaran networks, these practices could also make them vulnerable to physical violence, undesired pregnancy (which sometimes resulted in abortions by illegal selfclaimed ‘specialists’), sexually transmitted diseases or HIV infection. In order to avoid these risks and lead a secure and sound life, Gita, Rara, Tami and Ambar often articulated their desire to take a foreigner (bule) as their boyfriend, just like the ‘anak Bendoro’ do.

Intimate Encounters Compared to street-related young women, where ascribed promiscuity and individuality became moral sources of stigmatization, the same attributes could transpire as sources of fascination and attraction in the case of the anak Bendoro’s encounters with foreign women travellers, students and expatriates from Europe, Australia or the USA. Individuality, independence, and sexual ‘open-mindedness’ (instead of the female version of ‘promiscuity’ in its negative ascription) were important assets of the anak Bendoro. Depending on the context and the locations where such transcultural encounters took place, ‘being different’ could fuel stigmatization, but also materialize as favorable cultural capital that facilitated cooperation of various forms (e.g. social, economic, intimate or sexual). As mentioned earlier, the opportunities to meet foreigners were disproportionally more frequent for the anak Bendoro compared to their female peers that worked and lived in the area around Malioboro and also the anak Congklak. The tourism industry and the proliferation of NGOs in Yogyakarta opened up a variety of opportunities for transcultural encounters and income generating possibilities. Besides selling handicrafts on the sidewalk, working as informal guides (guide liar), or busking, some anak Bendoro established friendships with foreigners and developed intimate and sometimes long-lasting relationships with foreign women travellers, expats or students. Yogyakarta as a city itself provided a perfect backdrop for such encounters between different worlds to take place (see also chapter 3). The many galleries and art collectives as well as universities attracted foreign students, artists and

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social activists who were enthused by a laid back and creative atmosphere, also described as the ‘suasana Jogja’ – the special Yogyakarta atmosphere: Coming home to your town, I’m caught by the stir of my longing Still the same as before Every corner greets me friendly, filled with thousands of meanings I am lost in the nostalgia, of the moments we’ve spent together As we enjoy Jog ja’s ambience together At the intersection, my steps stand still Bustling food stands, peddling a variety of delicious cuisines People sitting cross-legged And street musicians begin to play, to the rhythm of my sorrow of losing you Alone in my moans, engulfed by your city’s roar Although you are no longer here, and will never return Your town brings back your eternal smile Please allow me to always return When my heart aches of loneliness with no cure, oh ... With no cure Source: KLA Project, ‘Yogyakarta’ (1991) 5

The song became a legend not only for Yogyakartans, but also for travellers and former residents from all over the world. The romanticized lyrics describe the ‘sweet’ atmosphere, which not only the anak Bendoro construed around transcultural encounters both through their own songs, their talk and their behavior, perfectly embodying the city’s praised romantic and timeless character. The anak Bendoro’s particular location in the city center and the nearby backpacker and expatriate nightlife quarter of Sosrowijayan, resulted in frequent encounters with foreign travellers, activists, and students. Through their social skills, this geographical proximity was often transformed into close personal relationships between some of the protagonists and foreign women. Compared to more rigid Javanese social interaction rules between men and women, which can be dominated by shyness and restraint (malu), or blatant machismo and sexism, the anak Bendoro developed particular ways on how to approach women. Whereas tourist touts often approached foreign women in their respective languages, while they still had their backpacks on in order to drag them into backpacker hostels, hotels or batik galleries for a commission, the anak Bendoro waited. Most of the foreign women with whom they established relationships 5 | Lyrics translated from Bahasa Indonesia by Victoria Kumala Sakti and the author.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

were either long-term travellers who spent many weeks, sometimes even months in the city; trainees in NGOs; exchange students; or students conducting research for their Bachelor or Master thesis. The places of initiating encounters were not the bars or hostels, but the nightly hangouts on the sidewalks of Malioboro, the parking spaces in front of popular expat bars, or open houses of NGOs. If considered ‘asyik’ (cool), a bule was invited to join nightly drinking sit-ins, where the atmosphere was “relaxed and a great getaway from the heat of the day, the hectic and stress of other encounters”, as one young woman traveller had put it. Whereas encounters were initiated collectively, following steps towards more intimate relationships (pacaran) were individualized by offering day trips around ‘the real Yogya’ to locations ‘off the beaten track’, one of the many nearby beaches, or the scenic and cool mountain resorts at the slopes of Mount Merapi. The protagonists’ initial imaginations of a ‘white’ (bule) woman rested upon cultural clichés of the rich, sexually open-minded, and independent ‘Westerner’. These images fueled into the imaginations of a ‘white lover’ (pacar bule), who provided shelter, food and money, enhanced the successful seducer’s social esteem within the komunitas, and opened doors and opportunities of increased socio-economic mobility. On one Sunday morning in June 2005, at an NGO-sponsored outing with the anak Bendoro to a public swimming pool, 19-year old Harto approached me in the shade of the grandstand. The others were performing artistic jumps from the diving board, painfully landing on their bellies, while picking on a group of high school girls. Harto sat next to me, took the cigarette out of my hand, finished smoking it, but remained silent. After a while, I asked him: T: What’s up, boss? H: Tom, how does it work… when I want to be close with a ‘bule’? T: Girl or boy? H: You filthy dog! Girl of course! Laughter. He slapped me on the shoulder and made a kissing grimace. H: What should I do so I can be friends with one, or even better be a boyfriend? I’m confused. Jempol said I should be smooth and sweet. But Raden said that I had to be direct. He said ‘bule’ girls want guys who are more direct. Teach me Tom! T: Well, you need to rely on your own cleverness. We’re all different, aren’t we? ‘Bule’ aren’t all the same, sometimes they prefer direct men but sometimes they don’t like it if guys are too pushy. H: I know how to get high school girls, but I don’t know the key to get ‘bule’ yet. I am ‘malu’ and afraid to make mistakes. T: How could you be ‘malu’? With all your tattoos, busking on the streets, and drinking, how could you?

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Again laughter. H: I don’t know what to do, Tom. You have to teach me, so I can go abroad, too.

The imaginations of ‘how bule women are’ and ‘where they will take you’ one day, were frequent topics of conversation among the younger anak Bendoro. Imaginations ranged from romantic and mutually caring relationships to frequent, quick and dirty sex in various positions and locations. The continuous circulation and modification of both successful (sukses) and unsuccessful encounter stories fueled Harto and his peers’ imaginations. The omnipresent discussion of how to approach a bule woman and observable examples of sukses elevated the ‘conquest’ of a bule woman to a collective desire. Those, who did not succeed yet (belum sukses), were convinced that the key to the women’s hearts and everything that was kept inside for them was their own transgression of malu. Relating to a bule woman, and becoming her pacar, was imagined as emotionally, socially and economically rewarding. Excursions as ‘friendguides’, short-term affairs or long-term relationships included aspirations to spend time off the streets, not having to work as pengamen, exit street life for a certain period of time, and enhance one’s social position within the community. Love affairs and pacaran perfectly complied with the masculinity, freedom, independence and mobility of being an anak Bendoro. The embodiment of tekyan values of ‘freedom’, ‘individuality’ and ‘independence’, by means of vulgar language, body decoration, and public rudeness might have distanced the young men from those who imagined themselves as ‘proper Javanese’ or ‘ideal Indonesian citizens’, but it promised an attractive and compatible gateway into experiencing the traveller’s highest good of seeking and engaging in ‘culturally authentic adventures’. Contrary to street-related young women, the anak Bendoro’s marginalities could be cultivated into a mysterious strangerism that proved attractive for travellers and other expatriates. Being ‘strange’ to the surrounding kampung and the bule women opened up possibilities of re-inventing their identities and shifting between various ways of addressing the other. In the encounters with foreign travellers, being ‘strange’ and different was not necessarily perceived as immoral, but could transpire as a fascinating way of life. Whereas public alcohol consumption, hanging out on the streets, singing and playing subversive songs countered Javanese conformity rules, these practices could turn into cultural capital in their encounters with foreign women. Depending on the situation, the context and the imaginations of encounters, the young men could highlight their ‘tekyan-ness’, their Javanese-ness, their cosmopolitan Rastafarian and punk, or their pauperized ‘street kid’ identity.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

When ‘strange’ anak Bendoro met ‘strange’ bule, there was enough space, freedom and motivation to let each other’s imaginations and ways of addressing each other fuse and manifest in various forms of social, economic and other cooperation and relationships. Backpacking, internships, or studying abroad freed travellers from their own localities and related social and moral constraints. Shifted localities and related social and cultural scripts could trigger shifted desires. Whereas the anak Bendoro’s time-intensive hanging out (nongkrong), creative free-floating and easy-going attitudes may have proved unattractive elsewhere, the exotic, oriental, creative, spiritual and subversive stranger at the margins of society could develop into attractive imaginations of the anak Bendoro, that they in return did not reject responding to.

Jempol and Charlotte Charlotte was 22 years old when she traveled to Indonesia in the European winter of 2006-07. She described to me over an extended lunch how she became attracted to Jempol (29) a few days after they had met for the first time. She highlighted his difference to the other Indonesian men she had met during her journey and praised the laid back and creative atmosphere that he emanated. “The people here are almost like the Balinese,” she continued, “very relaxed and not as pushy and nosy as the people in East Java and Sumatra.” What made the Yogyakartans more bearable than the Balinese, she claimed, was that money was not such a big issue. Compared to Bali, where everything was commercialized, in Yogyakarta she was even invited to hang around with “real street kids”, which she described as her most genuine travelling experience so far. To witness firsthand the polarity of street life, the hardships on the one hand and the creativity and happiness on the other, had strongly impressed her. Although she had “only spent three evenings at the Bendoro hangout,” she had the impression that she had “somehow become a part of the group.” When asked what she particularly liked about the nightly sit-ins, she described the liberal atmosphere, which reminded her of her own student friends in Europe. She felt that the people at the nightly gathering were very similar to “cool European students.” The way of joking, drinking, smoking and the “live-and-let-live” atmosphere was something she knew from home and had not encountered anywhere else in Indonesia. In contrast to the tourist touts on Malioboro, “the people at the sit-ins were full of surprises, extremely patient, respectful towards women, and not pushy at all.” Nobody asked her for money, and if asked, then it was only for food, drinks, or cigarettes, which were purchased and shared together. Charlotte was impressed that although most of her new friends were “street kids”, she felt they almost equally contributed to her purchase of drinks. Whereas the tourist touts were only after her money and her body, “the guys at Malioboro just wanted to have fun and enjoy life.”

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While most of the Indonesian guys she had met in Java or Bali were either rude, asked for sex, tried to kiss her directly, or were “too Asian” (meaning too shy and boring for her), her new friends at the hangout “were just right.” Referring to Jempol, Charlotte rhapsodized about his “otherness, yet gentleness” when he approached her the first time outside a bar in the backpacker quarter, where her hostel was located. Charlotte described that after the bar had closed, some people moved to a little dark alley just opposite the bar. Skeptical at first, she decided to accept Jempol’s invitation to join him and his group of friends there. To her, the atmosphere in the dark alley was very intimate and exciting. The people were sitting on little self-made wooden benches or on the asphalt, drinking liquor from bottles. Just before the crowd dissolved around 1 am, Jempol sat down across from Charlotte in the narrow alley, smiling as he offered her a cigarette, before joining the collective singing. Instantly, Charlotte was enchanted by his “cute smile, his modesty, and also his amazing voice.” When she wanted to go back to her hostel with the other backpackers, Jempol asked her whether she would like to join him and his friends for a cigarette and some more singing in a more “authentic” spot. She waved goodbye to her friends and followed Jempol through dark alleys until they reached the Bendoro hangout on the sidewalk next to a food stall (kaki lima). As she was really impressed by the great atmosphere, the singing, and the “open-mindedness of the street kids”, she joined in buying a few bottles of liquor, cigarettes and snacks. At around 4 am, after she had also talked to others of the group, Jempol gave her a ride back to her room, “gentleman-like”, on a borrowed motorbike. She was impressed that he just dropped her off in front of her hostel, waved and left without asking for a kiss or a drink inside her room. Charlotte was so excited about her adventure that she returned to the hangout spot the next evening in hopes of seeing Jempol. After a short period of collective hanging out, Jempol took her to the nearby beach of Parangtritis on a motorbike where they talked until sunrise. She enjoyed his company, and she had the feeling that she could “really trust him.” Besides that, she admired both his courage to live on the streets and his knowledge about life in general, “wisdom” in her words. What preoccupied her most was that she could not understand that such a sensitive and intelligent person lived on the streets, whereas she herself could just hop on a plane and return to her life back in Europe anytime she wanted. “Life is so unfair,” she concluded, before she left our conversation in a café that was next to her hostel. She had to pack a few things because she planned to go to the mountain resort of Kaliurang with Jempol in the evening. “Maybe,” she concluded, “I will extend my stay in Yogya for another week.” About a week later, when I met both of them again at the nightly Bendoro hangout, they were in a publicly announced pacaran (dating) relationship.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

What happened between the moment when Jempol first offered Charlotte a cigarette, and ten days later when they were officially having a pacaran? In order to represent their encounters in a straightforward manner, I will divide the period between the first cigarette in the alleyway outside the bar and the first kiss three days later into three situations; separate occasions that I observed, participated in, and that were later commented on by Jempol.

Situation 1 On a Friday and Saturday night Malioboro Street and the adjacent backpacker and red light district of the Sosrowijayan area was what Yogyakartans called ramai (bustling). Vacationing Indonesian families slowly strolled down the shopping strip. Foreign backpackers, expats and students merged in the bars and cafes on Jalan Sosrowijayan. Mostly local youths and men from the city and its surrounding rural areas sneaked into the narrow alleys of the neighboring red light district with its little houses inhabited by sex workers from all over the archipelago. For the anak Bendoro, Friday and Saturday nights were full of excitement and income generating opportunities. Most of their activities were centered on the street, including selling handicrafts, making new friends, reunions with old friends (reuni), meeting friends from different street communities, pacaran, drinking–the sky was the limit. On that particular weekend, Raden, Poni, Kuno, Joko and Jempol decided to go to the Sosrowijayan area to look for women (cari cewek) and get drunk (mabuk). They took me along. We sat down on a woven mat opposite a crowded bar just a few meters inside a narrow and dark alleyway. From there, we could watch the people entering the bar, but they could not see us. Tekyan eyes and ears were everywhere around the wider Malioboro area. When asked why the anak Bendoro would not enter the bars, they simply replied not comfortable (enggak enak)6 or no fun (enggak asyik). Some admitted that they felt malu, referring to their uneasiness or boredom of mingling with local and foreign students, expats, artists and backpackers inside the bar. Bule women were approached outside, either at the parking space of the motorbikes or in the narrow alley, after the bar had closed. At around 1 am a group of five bule, including Charlotte (whom at that time I had not yet met) joined the talking, joking and singing in the alley. When Charlotte and the four young bule men (all in their early twenties) sat down at the other end of the circle, the dirty joking stopped and Raden, Poni, Kuno, Joko, and Jempol suddenly became very charming and offered drinks to the newcomers. The music switched from local hero Iwan Fals’ resistance songs to Bob Marley, The Doors and The Beatles. Instead of talking about women and drinking in the slang of the bahasa senang, the conversation now circled around the beauty of the city in both Indonesian 6 | Enggak enak: literally translated means “not delicious/tasty/pleasant”.

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and (sometimes better, sometimes worse) English. Everyone tried to integrate the backpackers into the circle, with Charlotte obviously being the main target. She seemingly enjoyed the attention. After various failed attempts to get Charlotte involved, the five friends asked me to invite her over to our side of the circle. When I refused, they switched into their bahasa senang and deliberated who would be the right person to approach her. As Joko and Jempol spoke English best among them, they were ‘assigned’ to make advances in order to persuade her to join them at their hangout later. When Joko withdrew by simply mumbling enggak cocok (not fitting), it was Jempol who took the first step. He became silent, inspected her for a few minutes, asked me for my pack of cigarettes and shouted at the backpacker sitting opposite the young woman: “My friend, come here please, my friend. I want talk to you!” Then he stood up and swapped places with the new Australian ‘friend’, and the other four started to directly involve him in small talk, which I had witnessed dozens of times before. Where you from? Ah… Australia, kangaroo. Many beautiful women, Australia. You first time Yogya? Yogya better than Bali, and so on. While we were involved in small talk (basabasi) with the others, Jempol sat down across from Charlotte, smiled at her, nodded and offered her a smoke. After lighting her cigarette, he started to take the vocal lead of Bob Marley’s tune No Woman, No Cry. The first to applaud once the song was over was Charlotte. Jempol bowed his head, lowered his gaze and then smiled at the visibly enchanted woman. The singing went on for one more song, but Jempol was now busy talking to Charlotte, smiling, laughing, then showing and explaining the tattoos on his arms. When the crowd dissolved a few minutes later and we passed the two, she waved at us and Joko shouted over at Jempol, Ngajak! (‘Invite her!’). While we took the shortest way to the hangout, passing the rubbish containers of two big hotels, Jempol guided the young woman through more enchanting alleys of the city center until we met again fifteen minutes later at a sidewalk on Malioboro Street where the nightly food stalls had set up their lesehan7. Charlotte’s companions returned to their hostel, because they had booked a sunrise trip to Borobudur temple and were being picked up by their tour operators in a couple of hours. When we arrived at the hangout there were five other community members sitting in a circle, drinking, smoking and joking. After we sat down Raden told the circle that they would have a guest (tamu), sketching the silhouette of a woman into the dark night. The community cheered, shouting out various slang terms for women. A few seconds later, Jempol and Charlotte approached the crowd, still far enough not to hear the cheering of the others: sweeeeeeeet, sweet, sweet! Joko took the guitar and started singing corny song lines. The 7 | A (warung) lesehan is the most widespread sort of food stall or a little restaurant, where the customers sit on woven mats to enjoy their food and drinks.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

friends cheered, but once the two came closer, the laughter and exuberance stopped, cigarettes were collectively lit, laughs made way for friendly but sincere faces, and everyone sat up right. Joko handed the guitar to one of his friends and signaled, with his head, for him to play a song. Kuno whispered he should play Bob Marley, because he had learned that foreign women liked reggae. Just before they reached the circle the whole group joined in, I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy… Assalam alaikum! Jempol joked, and the circle opened and made way for him and Charlotte to join. Charlotte uttered a hello, nodding her head. I waved and smiled at her. The others nodded and continued singing, not paying too much attention to the guests. After the song was over Jempol started talking to his friends, and Kuno and Joko started a conversation with Charlotte. They were very polite, smiling and nodding. A few moments later, Kuno showed his tattooed upper arms, explaining the various motives. To everyone’s surprise Charlotte lifted her tank top and showed her colorful dragon tattoo on the side of her torso. Silent astonishment filled the circle. Until finally Joko asked: Missus, you like tattoo? – Yes, the Missus replied. The group cheered. Then Kuno, Missus, you like drink? Again, Yes. The crowd cheered again until Joko’s Bantingan yuuuuk! (‘Let’s all share!’), cut the collective Huhuuuuiiii! Everyone joined, yuk, yuk, bantingan yuuuuk! and threw coins and a few Rupiah notes into the middle of the circle. Danny quickly grabbed the money, and then asked Charlotte to also contribute. Compared to the others, who gave about five hundred to five thousand Rupiah, she gave 50,000 Rupiah8, which could be translated into free drinks and cigarettes for everyone until morning. After more singing, joking, and mutual tattoo exhibiting, Jempol accompanied Charlotte to her hostel on a motorbike at around 4 am. Instead of withdrawing together with the others to a nearby hideout, I walked to my rented place at the outskirts of the city. The memory protocol had to wait until the next day. A week after Charlotte had left Yogyakarta I met Jempol at the workshop of the eco-social project, which he was visiting in order to pinjam uang (borrow some money). After he was denied the loan, we sat down in the garden of an adjacent warung, ordered coffee and shared a cigarette. Jempol looked tired. He said that he was pusing (‘having a headache’ or ‘being troubled with something’) because he needed money. He did not tell me what it was for, and in order to avoid signaling my interest in possibly helping him out, I did not ask any further. Instead, I told him that I wanted to know more about his time with Charlotte. He started smiling. T: How did you actually approach her that night in front of ‘Starbar’? J: Hahaha, that’s none of your business. You were there too, you saw for yourself. You 8 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2007: US$5.

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java know, you need to be clever with women. It takes a lot of practice to make her interested. Actually, you need skill to take her heart (harus pintar ngambil hatinya). The key to this is always different. It depends on the character (sifat) of the woman. Actually, it is similar to what I had told you the other day about the professional burglars. You need to survey the situation and the target first, before you can be successful. You can’t just simply do it. T: Very funny, you can take a woman’s heart the same way as a burglar steals a motorbike? J: No, no, no. A motorbike is always the same. And anybody can do it. To be ‘sukses’ with a ‘bule’ you need more experience. Some women like it when you take it slowly and ‘malu-malu’, others like it the direct way. Like with Charlotte, you’d have to be brave (berani), because she didn’t like the ‘mutar-mutar’ and the ‘malu-malu’. It was obvious. But you can’t be too direct either. I’m not a gigolo. T: Why aren’t you looking for women inside the ‘Starbar’? J: No. I don’t like the people there. The people who work there are nice (baik), the tourists are also nice, but the Indonesians and the students there are very arrogant (sombong). I don’t feel comfortable there (enggak nyaman). Except if I go there with someone, like you for example, together. But sometimes I also feel ‘malu’ then. Too expensive, and I feel uncomfortable when I’m invited all the time. It’s better outside on the streets anyways. T: What did you do to make Charlotte follow you down the dark alley? J: That’s my secret.

After half a minute of smiling and staring at some far point at the horizon, Jempol seemed to realize that I had ‘trapped’ him in an interview situation, which he tried to constantly avoid during the years. His looks became more skeptical. Then he continued: You have to take it easy (santai) because you can’t force anyone. And you also have to take it slowly with our friends so nobody gets angry (marah-marah). When you succeed, it’s great. You don’t have to be confused about money, and the traveling is also great. But most important is that one is compatible (cocok), because if not, there will only be trouble. And you have to be careful with the friends. You can’t be arrogant (sombong) and ignore (cuek) them. You need to contribute. We have to be compact.

Situation 2 After taking field notes during the day, I went back to the Malioboro hangout around sunset time. It was Saturday night, so almost all the anak Bendoro were already there. Some were selling handicrafts and T-shirts, while others were simply hanging out. I felt that I was not the only one curious about how the story between Jempol and Charlotte turned out. When I asked Kuno why that day everybody was on time for the nightly gathering, he smiled at me and simply said, malam mingguan (‘Saturday night’). At around eight o’clock in the evening, while talking with other friends, Kuno poked me and gave a brief nod to the left, whispering situ (‘there’). I spotted Charlotte with another bule

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

man among the other pedestrians about twenty meters in the distance. Nobody seemed to pay attention until they stood right in front of us, smiling, greeting those in the circle and sitting down on the sidewalk next to me. Charlotte introduced me to her Australian friend Mick, and as they seemed quite insecure at first, I introduced them to the friends from the komunitas. After a few minutes, she asked me whether I knew where Jempol was. Joko took over and assured her that he was still working but would join us soon. After the obligatory bantingan (contributions), Raden and Danny purchased tea served in little plastic bags and snacks, which we consumed together, using our hands to eat food, served on banana leaves and used newspapers. At first Mick and Charlotte hesitated, but after they were offered to join the ‘feast’ over and again, they helped themselves to some of the boiled peanuts that lay between the fried chicken heads and feet, steamed rice, grilled intestines (sate usus), and spicy sambal (chili) sauce. At around nine o’clock the first drink-and-cigarettebantingan started and Charlotte and Mick each gave 50,000 Rupiah. About twenty minutes later, Jempol arrived on a borrowed motorbike. In place of his usual attire, he wore a new muscle shirt, blue jeans and sneakers (instead of the usual flip flops). He smelled sweet. After both the friends of the komunitas and he himself made fun of his spotless appearance in their own slang, he took a seat a few meters away from Charlotte, Mick and me, nodded, smiled and then suavely lit a cigarette. After singing and joking for an hour, in which time Charlotte talked to many different friends from the komunitas, Jempol finally came over to talk to Charlotte, switching to English. After talking to her and Mick for almost an hour, while the others shared more and more drinks, Jempol started charming the young woman. Whereas Mick was kept busy drinking and requesting songs, Jempol attuned to his conversation partner. He did not only move closer to Charlotte, also his charming shyness, politeness, restraint and gaze-averting made way for piercing looks and coincidental hugging. Whenever he offered her cigarettes, he lit them with another surprising artistic move of his lighter. Somewhere further along the circle I could hear Raden and Danny mocking Jempol. All of a sudden, Jempol started to shout curse words at them and told them to stop giggling, because it was impolite to the two guests in a mix of English and ngoko. He called them ‘little children’ (cah cilik), and when they started laughing even louder, and all the others joined in, he started smiling and shouted, asu, asu, bajingan! (‘dogs, dogs, criminals!’), pointing his fingers at all of them, jumping at them and pretending to beat them up. Soon everybody joined the laughter, joking and playful beating. Charlotte and Mick also started laughing, but could not conceal their irritation. When Jempol asked for the guitar and started to play Iwan Fals’ street hymn Bongkar! (Expose!), the oddities stopped and the human bundle regrouped around the three illustrious bule guests. Within a second, the circle banded together.

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Once love is thrown away Don’t hope for justice to come Sadness becomes mere spectacle For those who are drawn to power Ooh ya oh ya oh ya expose Patient, patient, patient and wait Is the only answer we get We have to go on the streets Tear down the devil standing with his legs spread Ooh ya oh ya oh ya expose Oppression and arbitrariness Too many to count Oh stop, stop, don’t go on We are sick of uncertainties and greed On the streets we lay our hopes Because at home there is no one we can trust Parents, see us as humans We ask you, please answer us with love 9

Jempol handed the guitar to Joko and asked Raden to pour a full glass of liquor for Charlotte. The routine of circling the glass was interrupted and the glass was passed over to her. Jempol nodded and smiled at Charlotte. While she downed it, the others collectively joined in a loud sweeeeeeeet, sweeeet, sweet, before laughing and moving on to the next song come on baby, light my fire… Joko smiled at Jempol and kept singing. While the others were busy singing, Jempol started explaining the Iwan Fals song to Charlotte. He told her that Iwan Fals was a protest singer during the Suharto regime, the Bob Dylan of Indonesia, who was always on the side of the jalanan. In simple English he continued talking about politics, the power of street-related movements, and how they forced Indonesia’s dictator to step down in 1998. Charlotte talked about her experience with student movements in her own country, and that they lacked the force of taking real political action. Jempol talked about Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, the Sultan of Yogyakarta, his own decision to live on the streets as a protest against the regime, and of his plans to open a library for the urban poor in the city together with his friends. There was no use in joining their conversation. Jempol was on his way to melting Charlotte’s heart. Suddenly I myself felt ‘enggak enak’ (uncomfortable, uneasy) listening to their conversation. Although Kuno started to pour out his heart about his relief 9 | Lyrics translated from Bahasa Indonesia by Victoria Kumala Sakti and the author.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

that he tested negative for HIV during a workshop the day before, my left ear could not stop listening to Jempol’s seductive words. When Jempol suddenly handed the circling glass of liquor to me, he politely apologized for interrupting our conversation and asked me to tell Charlotte about the beauty and mysticism of nearby Parangtritis beach, which was located some 20 kilometers south of the city. I told her about my time at the beach house in 2001, and that Jempol and I actually got to know each other there when we were still ‘young and even more handsome’. We talked about our nightly discussions at the beach, the Nyai Roro Kidul (the mystical Queen of the South Seas), and that one should avoid wearing green when going there. Jempol added that the beach was especially spectacular on Saturday nights, because many couples went there to get away from the hectic city life and have a fresh coconut drink at the 24-hour warung located on the hills behind the beach. Jempol looked at Charlotte, inhaled deeply from his cigarette and raised his eyebrows. Silence. Jempol: You want to go? – Charlotte looked at him, then at me: Is it safe? I took a deep breath, then looked at Jempol, and said: Why not? Instantly, I felt … strange. Jempol nodded at her and touched her hand softly. Then he stood up, looked at me, then at her, and helped her up. Charlotte went over to Mick, who was in a conversation with Joko at the other end of the circle. They talked for a short moment before she hugged him and stroked his arm the way some European students do. Then Charlotte and Jempol faced the circle before he quickly uttered a, Duluan ya? (‘We’re taking off, okay?’) Another collective sweeeeet, sweeet, sweeeeeet, and off they went on the motorbike, which was somehow thoughtfully equipped with two helmets. Kuno turned towards me and said: He rocks. When are you going to teach me English? The singing went on and during the bantingan a few moments later, Mick gave me a worried look and contributed another 50,000 Rupiah. I replied with a smile and stroked his arm. Let me go back to the shady place under the mango tree in the garden of the eco-social project. Thomas: It took you quite a while on that Saturday night. Charlotte seemed to have waited for you. Whose bike was it anyways? Jempol: Ah, I borrowed the motorbike from a friend. You know if she already likes you and not someone else, you need to try to go on a date with her, so that our friends aren’t watching all the time. Because when we get drunk there can be serious fights because of that. So it has to be clear at some point. T: And to get her to go on a date with you, you needed to dress up? J: Hahaha. No, that was just normal. He smiled. T: You don’t mind when the others make fun of you? J: They were only joking. We like joking, not being too serious. But sometimes, you need to be rough. If you want to go on a date, you have to be brave. T: How was Parangtritis then?

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java J: It was great. We didn’t talk too much. She started to hug me from the back when we were on the motorbike. We didn’t talk, just enjoyed the moment. When we arrived at the beach, I invited her to have a young coconut and grilled corn. We rented a woven mat and an oil lamp by the beach. Then we hugged and talked until morning. It was great! After sunrise, we drove back to Yogya.

Situation 3 I was excited and curious on how the story between Jempol and Charlotte was developing. After I finished taking notes, I went to the hangout at around 4 pm the next day. It was still quite hot, and I found a place in the shade of a huge tree, just behind the little woven mat where Joko, Raden and Danny sold T-shirts. Jempol and Charlotte appeared at around 8 pm (without Mick). They were neither holding hands nor hugging each other, but there was a different affection between them than there had been the nights before (maybe it was their excitement in the eyes, permanent grins or erratic glances). This time, there was no giggling, joking or mocking by the others. The clandestine negotiations over Charlotte had ended. Nobody flirted with the young woman, and Jempol was not challenged any longer. Charlotte did not pay one single Rupiah that evening, and after only one hour, they took leave, and headed back to the Sosrowijayan area. I asked Joko where they went. His answer was short: To make love. What else? Three weeks later, back under the mango tree again, ‘boss’ Jempol and I talked about that evening. Thomas: So, that evening you slept at her hostel. How was the hostel? Clean? Jempol: Yes, at night it was great. But around noon, when we got up, it felt very strange because of all the other bule who sat around in the lobby. I’m tired of being stared at. T: Really? You were malu because of the tourists there? J: No, I wasn’t malu, I was just not comfortable (enggak enak aja). And I don’t know the people who work there, but I knew that at that place it is forbidden to bring guests, particularly guests like us. He laughed. I always tried to leave and return when the watchman was taking a nap. T: How long did you stay there? J: Only a few nights. Then we left because I also didn’t feel comfortable with my friends when I was pacaran all the time. Malu. We were going around Yogya and hanging out in the north of the city. There are also many lesehan, but we were eating in restaurants all the time, which was cool. But with my friends it can become very difficult, because they would ask for favors after a while. So, we went on a trip by motorbike. To Kaliurang, Borobudur, Solo, Semarang and Dieng. That was great!

Jempol rhapsodized about the beauty of those places, about the people they met on the trip, and how much he liked riding the motorbike with Charlotte in the

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

back, hugging him. Then suddenly his smile changed into slight worry lines on his forehead. He sat up, looked at me sharply, and said: But you know, she paid for everything. In the beginning that was cool, but I didn’t want it anymore after a while. I’m not a toy dog that can be bought. You have to show your pride (bangga), too. When you’re ordered around all the time, only because she has the money, it’s not cool anymore.

Jempol seemed upset. His voice got louder, the word flow increased: When we were back in Jogja I could hardly take it anymore. It wasn’t cool any longer. I wanted to meet my friends again, but she forced me to eat in the restaurants all the time. I became malu myself whenever a friend saw me having a good time in the restaurant. Finally she agreed and we went back to the hangout together. Although she was asked for money for drinks and cigarettes all the time, I didn’t care anymore. But I still like her. Just sometimes it’s very difficult also with a bule. Stubborn (keras kepala). Fortunately, we checked in at a friend’s homestay. It’s a tolerant place, and I don’t have to be malu when going out or coming back there. Thomas: So, how was the farewell last week? Jempol: Hmm, well. At the train station… she took a train to Jakarta because she had to catch a flight to Europe. It was strange. She cried and I was also sad (sedih). We are in contact by email now. We’ll see what happens. Just take it easy.

Bagus and Henrietta At the time of our first conversation at the nightly Malioboro hangout in late 2007, 23 year-old Henrietta introduced herself as not being a newcomer to Yogya. She had already spent ten days in the city. She seemed very accessible and talkative. The friends would later call her ‘cerewet’ (chatty). On her third night in Yogyakarta, she met Bagus from komunitas Bendoro in front of the Starbar. They related straight away, she said, and they soon had a ‘love affair’. He showed her around Parangtritis beach, the mountain resort of Kaliurang, the water castle of Tamansari at night, Borobudur temple, and some other ‘secret spots’ whose names she could not recall. After colorfully describing her ‘authentic’ adventures she started praising Bagus and enumerated the many similarities they shared. Even more than Charlotte, Henrietta stressed that she and her 23 year-old pacar Bagus were very similar. She had left her European hometown because she had enough of the conservatism and the hypocrisy of the people there. She needed to see something else. She complained about the attitude of her family and friends, who seemed to have found their meaning of life in work, marriage, children and final retirement. In her opinion, the propaganda of such a life

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philosophy could only lead to unhappiness, stroke and cancer. She complained that people in her country complained too much about their life without trying to change it. She appreciated the attitude of poor people in Yogyakarta and Indonesia in general, who possessed less, but smiled and enjoyed their lives more. She felt happier in Indonesia than at home, because people were simply more positive about life. In her opinion, her pacar Bagus was very similar to her for especially two reasons: first, she did not like her father either. She defined her six months trip around Australia and Southeast Asia as an escape from home. The difference between her and Bagus was articulated in structural terms and resulted from the fact that the world was unfair and the fate of either poverty and illness or wealth and health was a mere consequence of one’s coincidental birthplace. She reasoned that she had escaped by plane to another continent, and lived in low-budget hostels, whereas Bagus had escaped from his town in Sumatra by hitchhiking and sleeping on the streets. Actually, she argued, they were very similar in terms of life philosophy, common preferences in music, traveling, shared hopes and desires for the future. Two days later, I met Henrietta and Bagus again at the nightly Malioboro hangout. As usual when there was a ‘guest’ (tamu), there were more bottles of liquor, cigarettes and snacks than on other nights. As it was usually me who was ‘played’ for a few bottles of local brew and a pack of tobacco, I felt relieved when other strangers were around. Henrietta had extended her stay in Yogyakarta and she considered rescheduling her flight to Thailand, the next stop on her flexible schedule. It was a joyous night, tinted by Bagus and Henrietta’s glaring faces and big grins. The young woman seemed to have a great time talking, whereas Raden, Danny, Kuno, Joko and the others listened and did not miss an opportunity of calling for one bantingan (chipping in for drinks and snacks) after the other. Henrietta talked – and paid. Bagus smiled and smiled and took the lead vocals of one song after the other. During the next days, the two had disappeared. Raden told me that they went traveling ( jalan-jalan) to a beach resort in West Java, which was a popular destination for pacaran. As a joke, I asked him whether he was angry that they didn’t take him. He looked at me incredulously, then smiled and said: Why would they take me for this and that (Masa aku diajak gini-gini)?, moving his hips back and forth laughing loudly. Two months later I met Bagus again. He stood in the shade of an abandoned sales booth at a crossroad near Malioboro, talking to a young woman in high school uniform. The girl was sitting on a wooden bench, giggling into her hand, staring at the ground, sometimes glancing at him or turning her back on him for a few seconds. Handsome Bagus was ‘all tekyan’. He was casually leaning on a pole, wearing a clean white shirt under which his tattooed arms and chest stood out, his long hair combed, black jeans, and white sneakers. While smoking filter cigarettes, his gaze was directed towards some far point on an imaginary horizon. Every time he addressed the girl, and gave her piercing

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

glances, the young woman slid back and forth on her bench, before her head swiftly turned towards him just to quickly snap back again after their eyes met for the glimpse of a moment. After ten minutes of head snapping, eyes piercing and giggling, Bagus accompanied the young woman to the nearby sidewalk where she entered a city bus and left. Bagus approached Raden, Kuno and Danny, who were sitting in the shade nearby taking a rest from ngamen (busking) in the buses. All three laughed at him, pointing their fingers, holding their stomachs and clapping their knees from laughter. Bagus approached Raden first, trying to kick him in the thigh, but he missed. Whereas Raden started coughing out of laughter, Danny stood up from the used cardboard used as mat, and started imitating Bagus’ way of smoking. Just before Bagus burst into laughter, too, I could hear a loud Asu! (Dog!), cutting through the hot air. After Bagus handed cigarettes to each of his friends, they sat down together and started chatting. A few moments later I joined them from my shady place under a big banyan tree next to a police post. What are you laughing about, boss?, I asked – Silence ... and then again hysterical laughter accompanied by Bagus mumbling: asu, asu, asu. The next day, when I met Bagus alone, I asked him cautiously about his time at the beach in West Java. Enthusiastically he described the bamboo home stay where he and Henrietta had spent a whole week, also the beach and the cool people he had met there in bloomy words. When I asked him where his pacar was, he joked: Which one? He laughed loudly. He told me that he had accompanied Henrietta to Jakarta where she got on a plane to Thailand to continue her travels. She wanted to return to Europe earlier than initially planned, earn some money and then come back to Yogyakarta to study there the following year. They planned to move into a house together and open a small NGO for his friends. He would be happy if she returned to Yogya, because she was asyik (‘cool’, ‘fun’). He explained that Henrietta was ‘asyik’ because she was ‘not a hypocrite’ (enggak munafik), ‘honest’ ( jujur), ‘relaxed’ (santai), ‘liked drinking’ (suka mabuk), and ‘liked to joke’ (suka bercanda). He missed her, but he summoned that longing would wane soon, because there were so many other ‘asyik’ women around. There was no need indulging in ‘dreams’, because he was not sure whether Henrietta would really come back after all. The reason for our meeting was that Bagus, who spoke comparatively good English, had difficulties understanding Henrietta’s emails. He asked me whether I could explain the emails to him and translate his feeling into words. Although I had repeatedly told him on our way to the Internet café that I felt very awkward (aneh) to read such intimate emails, he insisted. If I rejected his request, he would ask someone else, he insisted. To my amazement, there were not only over ten long emails from Henrietta, but I could glimpse the names of other foreigners, some of whom I had also met, in his inbox. Bagus could not resist showing me the most devoted emails, smirking and clicking through

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more love talk without even looking at me. After more than half an hour of witnessing his masculine potency and global affective network, he opened Henrietta’s latest email. I felt like a little dog, waiting for the moment when the master would call it to perform its two or three little tricks, before it was allowed back to its kennel. Henrietta’s way of writing resembled the way she talked. Besides being very detailed about her feelings for Bagus, she expressed most of them in little poems. After repeatedly translating the intensive love talk and attempting to answer in verses during three long sessions over the course of one month, I finally ‘resigned’. The situation became too awkward and I felt increasingly uncomfortable. At least, Bagus and I got closer through this common experience of translating and articulating French, English, Indonesian and Javanese emotion terms. Bagus’ initial machismo made way for jokes and a more agreeable atmosphere between us. Sometimes he would even tell me that we were finally cocok (‘fitting’, ‘matching’). I was not sure how he meant this. Since I had refused to pay three million Rupiah10 to rent a house for him and his friends in 2005, he ignored (cuek) me whenever and wherever he could. Nobody wanted to be ignored by Bagus, because he was prominent on Malioboro. My impression was that he chose me to translate the emails in order to both impress me and display his dominance. Bagus was smart in cementing his claims of leadership and accumulating and transforming various forms of capital. Although some of his pacar bule never returned to Yogyakarta again, they continued transferring money for years after their ‘romantic’ encounters. Compared to most of the other anak Bendoro, Bagus and also Jempol, who had engaged in constant quarrels over who was the ‘boss’ of the Bendoro community, appeared most skilled in terms of cari cewek (‘looking for girls/women’). They were indeed, what Heidi Dahles described as “romantic entrepreneurs” (2001:203). In the case of those successful encounters where sustainable relationships could be established, the economic support of the young men was not limited to the women’s stay in Yogyakarta itself. Even before the advent of mobile phones, Skype and Facebook, couples stayed in contact for many months, sometimes years, even though they might have never met again face-to-face. With the omnipresence of Internet cafes, smartphones and virtual social platforms, the young men’s strategies of recalling themselves into the minds and hearts of their pacar (lover, girlfriend) or ex-pacar in Europe, Australia or the US has become even more sophisticated. In those cases where more than one pacaran was initiated, advanced communication technologies and devices assisted in coordinating the anak Bendoro’s lovers’ and friends’ visits to Yogyakarta. The existence of another pacar was silenced for acclaimed reasons of respect (hormat) 10 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2005: $300 USD.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

in order not to hurt the women’s feelings (biar enggak sakit hati), or lose pleasant (and lucrative) relationships (rugi). The community conspired, and other pacar, both local and foreign, were collectively silenced and kept secret. In 2007, Jim (29) stressed that it was crucial to be loyal to the friends from the komunitas: When it comes to girls no one is allowed to interfere. We have to be cohesive. The truth is, we’re all bastards (bajingan). But when we play with girls, be they ‘bule’ or ‘lokal’, we have to stick together. If you don’t respect that, it can become a ‘kasus’. Many girlfriends equal lots of luck and money (banyak rejeki). Even better if you get a ‘bule’! Lots of luck equals lots of girlfriends. But I myself don’t prefer ‘bule’.

The two extended case studies demonstrated that shared strangeness and projected similarities could transpire as vantage points for mutually benefitting relationships between foreign traveller women and some of the anak Bendoro. Although they could be extended over years, many ‘romantic affairs’ were limited to the honeymoon phases of excitement based on mutually spiraling imaginations. The anak Bendoro’s initial emphasis on similarities and the women’s attributions as ‘asyik’ often turned into irreconcilable differences, which could lead to emotional distress (pusing) in the long run. This distress often emerged in the case of long-term relationships, when couples tried to live together either in Yogyakarta or in the women’s countries of origin for a few months. Whereas too confining practices of permanently sharing time and space became the most rampant disruptor of those relationships, their implicitly framed temporalities fuelled their desirability. A prolonged emotional distress and frustration could be avoided either by just moving on, in the case of the backpackers, or by the young men’s withdrawal from intimate pacaran by either disappearing and hiding, or withdrawing by reintegrating themselves into the komunitas. Only very few of these ‘romantic affairs’ had developped into long-term relationships. In these rare cases, long-term cooperation predominantly developed between young women NGO-activists, trainees or students who stayed put and worked in Yogyakarta over a longer period of time, and had different motivations for living, studying or working there than the perambulating travellers and tourists. Referring to professional ‘gigolos’ in Bali and Yogyakarta, Judith Schlehe argues that prestige accumulation, which resulted from the ‘conquest’ of bule women might be related to a personal triumph in transgressing racial borders (2001: 132). In the context of the anak Bendoro, I argue that such ‘prestige surplus’ resulted from the young men’s increased economic capital, which was displayed publicly by means of new clothes, shoes, mobile phones and providing cigarettes and drinks for the whole group. This in turn prodded their social esteem and put them into favorable positions to extend their social networks and increase their social capital.

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Activist and Researcher Encounters The encounters of the anak Bendoro and anak Congklak were as diverse as were the actors within this so-called ‘charity field’. Nevertheless, particular interaction patterns between protagonists of the komunitas and NGO activists11 did not only catch the anthropologist’s attention. These patterns were constantly discussed among activists and volunteers of various NGOs, whose insights and ad-hoc analyses have substantially contributed to formulating my argument. Compared to most other Indonesian cities, there was an immense proliferation of both local and foreign social activists, volunteers, and researchers in Yogyakarta. Particularly until the mid-2000s street-related communities have been a central part of the city’s charity and media focus. But with the shifting of donor organization’s policies and changing media discourses, the jalanan have faded more and more into oblivion (Pravitta 2012). The focus of this section is to analyze the transformation of interactions and attunements between activists and the street-related young men during the last fifteen years. I will describe and analyze case studies of social encounters between activists, anak Bendoro, anak Congklak, and myself. After I started to systematically focus on social encounters and their affective and emotive practices and rhetoric, it struck me how contradictive both the protagonists’ and activists’ narratives about each other were compared to their observable behavior in their face-to-face interactions. While hanging out on the streets, the protagonists continuously badmouthed NGOs and their activists. After listening to the adolescents’ and young men’s talk about NGOs, encounters with activists would have had to be subsumed within the ‘avoidance fields’. Asking for help and being dependent on someone else was perceived as manja (‘spoiled’), and thus incompatible with the protagonists’ proud selfnarratives. Within these narratives of community-related pride, NGO-workers and activists were labeled as ‘opportunistic’ and ‘exploitative’. They were objects of constant gossip and complaint. After a long-term activist from a closely related NGO once rejected 20-year old Raden’s request for monetary support, I witnessed him complaining to his Bendoro peers: 11 | Although there are differences between the Indonesian terms ‘aktivis’ (activist) and ‘orang LSM’ (NGO worker) regarding their monetary compensation and identification with their ‘cause’, and there was a considerable quantitative shift from volunteering activists to paid ‘contract workers’, I will not further focus on these differences here. The people in this ethnography are all paid for their work (some more, others less), but would not consider themselves an ‘orang LSM, but an ‘aktivis’. By referring to their perspectives, which distinguished themselves between an ‘aktivis’ and an ‘orang LSM’ regarding their commitment and rasa, I stick to the English term activist (Barker/Lindquist 2009; Heuser 2012)

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention What are they actually doing? If we need something from them, they always ask us to explain why, blah blah blah… We even need to bring receipts in order to get money for medication. They really couldn’t care less. I wonder why they get paid so well. I would also like to have such an easy job. Just sit and order people around. Very convenient!

On the contrary, when observing the social interactions between Raden and NGO activists, I obtained a very different impression. Especially when – in the case of illness, legal support, or other crises – the encounters took place face-to-face and without the collective. Once the presence of the komunitas was bypassed and shaken off, the protagonists could transform into extremely ‘spoiled’ (manja) and indigent sympathy-seekers when aiming at attention, support or assistance.

Contested Images: NGO Activists and ‘Jalanan’ Both professional NGO-workers and volunteering activists were defined as ‘good people’ (orang baik, orang asyik) when they did not oblige the protagonists to adhere to fixed timetables and rules or ‘force’ them to attend compulsory workshops. The ideal activist was someone who understood their way of life, spent much time with them, did not ask the wrong questions, and helped out financially. The tekyan repeatedly articulated that time-intensive persistence in really caring (betul-betul peduli) for them and their problems was very important. In order to not only become, but also remain an orang baik, activists had to convey permanent attention for their personal and collective concerns without giving the impression to prioritize particular persons. The young men emphasized that in order to become an ‘orang baik’, activists had to prove first that they were not a ‘bad person’ (orang jelek). Regarding the myriad conflicting interests that lurked in encounters with the young men, remaining an ‘orang baik’ seemed almost impossible. Because being a good and caring person for Monchi and the komunitas Congklak may at the same time be considered ‘jelek’ for Irianto from the same komunitas, and different again in the eyes of the anak Bendoro. Individual and collective interactions with NGO-activists were monitored by other communities and were a central part of daily gossip and rivalry. Although the expression of ‘iri’ (envy) or ‘cemburu’ (jealousy) had to be avoided, as they were perceived as signs of vulnerability, inferiority and cultural immaturity (Stodulka 2017), they were often articulated when referring to others. Monchi was especially takut (afraid) of making members from the komunitas Bendoro ‘iri’, when either he himself or his komunitas were perceived as being supported too much by the activities of an NGO or particular activists. Moreover, Monchi worried that friends from his own community might have become envious or jealous because he, as the community leader, was socially very close with many

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foreign and local NGO activists and also researchers like myself. Discussing his opportunities of getting involved in a formal job one day, he said: Do you know why I don’t look for a steady job? I know that I would succeed if I wanted. But what will happen to the friends in my ‘komunitas’ then? I’m afraid they might get jealous (cemburu) and distance themselves from me. I can’t do that. I have to consider their feelings (perasaan), too.

In another conversation, also in early 2008 when he told me why he had rejected a steady position with a regular income as street worker of an NGO, he explained: Crazy man, do you know why I didn’t take that position? So my friends won’t envy (iri) me. When I borrowed your ‘pitung’12 yesterday, Irianto was already jealous (cemburu). When he saw the ‘pitung’ he said: ‘Ah, this must be another gift from Thomas.’ And he continued to say, ‘You have a slick tongue’, meaning that I was lying to the community. He suspected that I was paid by you and also Humana, and that I didn’t share with the other friends. Crazy.

Inducing envy (iri) or jealousy (cemburu) in other community members, or in other communities had to be avoided because it could easily turn into anger (marah), revenge (balas dendam), fights and the temporary break up of friendships until the disputes were settled by compensations. To a certain extent, envy, jealousy and anger were to be avoided in the volunteers’ permanent drifting towards being labeled a bad person (orangnya jelek). Only those activists who managed to balance their attention and support between individuals and communities decently were continuously acknowledged as a ‘good person’ (orang baik). Local long-term activists who had put their own private lives on hold for the concerns of the protagonists over sometimes decades were often termed ‘bad’ (at least temporarily), because when compared to the many well-intending expatriate and short-term activists, interns, students and researchers, they did not only refuse to contribute financially, but clearly articulated rules of conduct and reminded the youths and young adults that the participation in workshops or the sojourns in open houses did not only encompass privileges, but also implied particular responsibilities and duties. The most scorned among activists were described as people who had forgotten the protagonists, and now lived in big houses with their families at the outskirts of the city, in Jakarta or abroad, and built on their own careers, which was, from the protagonists’ point of view, based on exploited and stolen tekyan-knowledge and hospitality. 12 | ‘Pitung’ is a 70 cc motorbike manufactured in the 1970s.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

I realized that the bad-mouthing of activists during hangout sessions could be related to their belittling rhetoric that positioned the protagonists as children that needed to be educated, disciplined and saved from their fates as jalanan. NGOs that did not closely collaborate with the anak Bendoro or the anak Congklak, but invited them to workshops about sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS prevention or violence against women once or twice a year by grooming them with food and transport money, often engaged in shame oratories that insulted their pride as street-related tekyan. I understood the gossip about NGOs as a means to reinstate their identities as fully-grown persons and, by telling and retelling stories about how they had fooled activists and activist researchers and how ‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’ they were, as a way to collectively refuel pride and reinstate self-esteem, well-being and equanimity. It took me many years to understand that their powwows were also a way of addressing myself. Even after many years of friendship, Monchi, Jempol, Kris, Harvey, Jim and others’ stories were not only told for the sake of simply talking about others. Their narratives were also a way of socializing me into a ‘good anthropologist’. The descriptions of the ‘orang baik’ and the ‘orang jelek’, who was ‘arrogant’ (sombong 13), were not only narratives about how people actually were behaving, but how NGO activists including myself should behave. In their extensive study on the relation between emotion, gender and social structure in Sumatra, Collins and Bahar (2000:40ff) write that accusing others of being sombong is also an effective strategy to make them fall in line with one’s desires or an established order. Continuously emphasizing how ‘bad’ ( jelek) some activists were, the young men motivated newcomer activists, NGO interns and researchers (especially the foreigners), to be ‘better’ than their ‘bad’ colleagues. In other words, it was not primarily the NGOs and activists, who framed the rules of encountering and collaborating with them, but the street-related young men themselves. They motivated them to ‘do it better’ in order to be accepted by them and become their friend (Cs14). The ‘orang baik’ translated into an imperative, ‘This is how you should be!’ By contrast, I understood the ‘orang jelek’ stories as indirect yet compelling warnings, ‘Don’t you dare treat us that way!’ These narratives were reproduced in encounters with newcomer students, volunteers, activists and researchers. During the decade of the global ‘street children movement’ of the 1990s and early to mid-2000s that also manifested 13 | Collins and Bahar (2000: 40ff) argue that accusing someone of being sombong is also an effective strategy to make others fall in line with one’s desires or an established order. 14 | Cs (Coll.): The tekyan term for a ‘trusted friend’. Other, less intimate, but often used terms were the Javanese term ‘konco’, or the Indonesian ‘teman’, ‘sahabat’ and ‘kawan’.

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in mushrooming local NGOs, especially the anak Bendoro saw many activists and researchers come and go. Stories about ‘naïve anthropology students’, the gossip about ‘bad activists’, and the flattering feeling of being ‘really special’ among all the other activists and anthropologists accompanied me throughout the years. The protagonists managed to address particularly the expatriates among volunteers and activists in ways that drew them into their long-term emotional economies. Cooperation with local activists, who stayed put and did not leave the city again after a few weeks or months, was initiated in terms of regular and sustainable project activities like workshops, medical treatment, or access to education. With the expats on the other hand, cooperation targeted the establishment of socio-economic security networks in times of crisis. The latter were built on shared affect that transpired as sympathy, compassion and care. As long as foreign activists followed the implicit rules of conduct, they were flattered and publicly promoted as ‘asyik’ and often contrasted with the ‘arrogant’ (sombong) and rigid local activists, who could not be as easily ‘played’ by attuned and concerted emotive displays and articulations. Utomo, a founding member of the RSL, senior activist, street worker of the GIRLI-related NGO Humana, and ‘godfather’ of many of the protagonists, lived near the riverbank in the city center not far from Malioboro. One night in February 2008, when I asked him whether working with our friends was at times stressful (pusing), he for once forgot about his otherwise genuinely Javanese way to ‘accept problems wholeheartedly’, and started to curhat about how the anak Bendoro had developed over the years: Yes, they give me a headache (pusing). And this is what just makes me mad (kesel): I care (peduli) for them. You know that I have always been there for them for many, many years. But they have become bitchy troublemakers. And you cannot do a thing about it. When you try to make an event together with them, organize a workshop, or help them to get an education or a job it is just useless. They could all go to school if they wanted to. We [Humana] provide them with apprenticeship opportunities. They even got loans from us to open up a workshop (bengkel), a laundry, a little shop (warung), or work at a hair salon, and so forth. We provided the younger ones with scholarships to complete a basic high school degree. But it is just useless to try motivating them. There are huge differences between the different groups and communities nowadays. It is unbelievable. But our friends from Malioboro are just among the worst. I sometimes really think, ‘Ah, just let them be. Just leave them (biarin)!’ But the problem is, that they always show up at my house, even in the middle of the night. And when something happens in the kampung, the neighbors contact me, too, because I live next door. You would not believe how often we discussed the rule that there were no girls allowed in the former open house after the six o’clock prayers at sunset, and that the house was exclusively there for the little ones. The juniors simply did not feel safe when the older ones slept there all the time and

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention took away their space. But they are too clever (pintar). They manage to twist arguments, and have started to accuse me that I don’t care about them any longer and have become increasingly selfish (egois). It’s crazy (gila). When the head of the kampung asked me again and again to warn our friends that the house would be closed down if they didn’t follow the rules of the kampung, and to stop bringing their girlfriends there, our friends spread the rumor that ‘Humana’ and I wanted to get rid of them. It‘s horrible. It seems like there is a battle between them and us. Sometimes it is like blackmailing. That’s absurd, because we are here for them, but there are certain rules, and when they just can’t obey them, one day you have to say ‘that’s it!’, or ‘go and live your lives alone now!’ Take our friends at Congklak, for example. You can motivate them. They have a community there. They have band practice, they have performances, and they take care of each other. They work, and don’t just hang around. But here, they go to bed in the morning and wake up at 2 or 3 pm. Then they are hungry and go busking or ask the young ones for food. After that they drink, pick a fight, seduce girls, and so on.

Mono, another former ‘jalanan’ from a non-GIRLI community in the south of the city, who was co-heading a local community of non-GIRLI street-related people, shared Utomo’s position: We also have some problems with the GIRLI15. In other communities it is more relaxed. But the ‘komunitas Bendoro’ still works on the principles of seniority. So once you approach the young ones in order to perform together or invite them to discussions, they have to ask the older ones for permission first. Any development or progress is impossible with groups like these. Although one might think that the seniors are happy when the young ones participate in joint projects, or work on their education and skills, but it does really not seem so. Another big problem in that whole NGO and ‘jalanan’ system is that some communities were spoiled (dimanja) too much by providing them with food and shelter without offering education or the like. And when you do not provide that as an NGO, they will always take the easy way. Who wouldn’t?

Expatriate narratives on the differences between the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak were similar to those described by Utomo and Mono. But compared to many local or long-term activists, who continuously shifted their attention away from the anak Bendoro and closed down all related open houses by 2010, shortterm foreign volunteers were fascinated by the anak Bendoro’s self-confidence and creativity. They became the anak Bendoro’s best allies in playing those that were involved with them for over two decades.

15 | Members of non-GIRLI communities sometimes still referred to the anak Bendoro and other Malioboro communities as ‘anak GIRLI’.

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When compared to the anak Bendoro, the komunitas Congklak had a more positive image. It was often stressed that the anak Congklak were ‘more polite’ (lebih sopan), ‘responsible’ (tanggung jawab), and that cooperation with them ‘made sense’ (masuk akal). Patti, the European founder of the eco-social project, who had both lived and worked with the anak Bendoro for twenty years, decided to stop recruiting them to her project’s workshop one day in 2007, because her patience and energy was all used up. She explained: This does not make sense any longer. Enough is enough. We offer them an education as craftsmen, feed them healthy food, and they can shower and relax here. We provide them with medication, workshops and assist them when they have problems with the police, other NGOs, doctors and the like. And what do they do? Hang out, smoke, make their jokes and obstruct the motivated ones from working and learning sincerely. They are ignorant (cuek) about everything! But once they feel neglected, because other communities also cooperate with us, they accuse us of being unfair, exploiting them and making money by selling them to our donors as ‘street children’. They are increasingly arrogant and spoiled. But we also made our mistakes in the past. They were never really taught how to take responsibility. When I look at Harvey and some of the young women, who acquired working skills here and managed to progress in their lives, I sometimes really wonder why most of the others are so ignorant (cuek).

Patti had watched the anak Bendoro come of age since their childhoods and was sometimes ‘shocked’ why the impacts of her and her colleagues’ work remained so little: Many of them are just ‘asyik-asyik aja’ (want to have fun), and besides that it is one big ‘cuek’!

Growing Out of Focus Until the mid-2000s, many NGOs were focusing on ‘anak jalanan’, but the policy change of international donor organizations and the mere fact that most of the protagonists had reached their mid-20s and hence grew out of their donors’ focus, prompted more personalized cooperation networks. Instead of the established cooperation between particular communities and particular NGOs, cooperation had to be crafted between skillful empathic brokers on behalf of the communities and committed ‘orang baik’ or individual activists from formerly cooperating NGOs, who could ‘pull strings’ even beyond their employers’ shifted policies. The following identity performance in July 2005, at the opening of a new conference hall at a church-sponsored campus illustrates the emotive skills of the anak Congklak that targeted affective responses of guilt and shame in those who they felt had insulted them, and provoke a more appropriate support of their matters. Affandi (15 years old) lived on and off the streets at Congklak together with his younger brother Mukri (13), his younger sister Ayu (10) and

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

their parents Slamet (37) and Nuning (34). He was short of stature and never went to school, but he was the lead singer of komunitas Congklak’s music band, which consisted of sometimes more than ten members. The band was invited to perform at the inauguration party of the new assembly hall. They were scheduled to perform between a group of diffable children from a rehabilitation center and a group of youths from an orphanage. After the first group finished their well-received performance, the anak Congklak, who had been violently evicted from their homes only two months before, entered the stage and set up their drums and guitars. They were ready to start performing three newly composed songs. The presenter, a student in his late twenties started introducing them: And now please welcome the next performance and listen to the songs of ‘anak jalanan’ (street children). Songs of children that have nothing, live on the streets, but make the best out of their hard and miserable fate. Please welcome the ‘anak jalanan’ from the ‘komunitas Congklak’!

Everybody, including myself, was ready to watch the performance when Affandi stepped up and stopped the first few chords of the drums intro. He took the microphone from the presenter with a polite bow of the head and a smile and said in a very calm voice: Excuse me for interrupting this beautiful event. We were not invited here as ‘anak jalanan’, but as the band of the ‘komunitas Congklak’, a collective of self-sufficient people from a street junction in the north of Yogyakarta. Thank you very much for the invitation, but we will not perform as ‘anak jalanan’ here.

Within the blink of an eye the band members packed their instruments and left the stage of the auditorium, which was filled with students, professors and other spectators, including the director of the campus. One week later, when we were nongkrong under the awning of the little motorbike workshop, two cars suddenly stopped in front of us. Some of the anak Congklak whispered: garukan, garukan! – ‘Police raid!’ But instead of policemen, the director of the university himself stepped out of the first car, together with four students. They approached the workshop where Monchi received them with a smile, a polite bow and started talking to the director of the campus in polite Javanese language (kromo). Only a few seconds before he was still making obscene jokes in ngoko and the vulgar bahasa senang, waving at young women who passed us on their motorbikes. The director politely refused to accept the offered tea from Mbak Cakalang’s neighboring food stall. Instead, he told the accompanying students to join in his apology for the incident at the campus event, while they presented two new

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guitars and two new drums to Ronggo, Danang, Habib and Kasino. As if that was not enough, the director asked Monchi to come to his office the next day together with an activist from Humana, so the university could award them with a donation to build a small shelter for them, where they could practice. Over the next few weeks, students from the campus kept stopping by to chat over tea and cigarettes, asking whether the community needed support in building the shelter. Monchi and Affandi politely refused in refined Javanese language, lowering their body posture, nodding their heads, and smiling in perfect malu displays, asserting their hormat (‘respect’) towards the campus authorities and students. After an earthquake had destroyed many parts of Yogyakarta and the Bantul area in May 2006, many formerly street-related non-governmental organizations broadened their scope of work with an upcoming shift from children’s needs to a children’s rights based approach (Pravitta 2012). This coincided with a new focus on preventing children to turn to the streets (by empowering not only the children, but also their families and the kampung communities), trauma therapies, or the support of small scale-economic enterprises (McRae 2008). Since the term ‘at risk’ has no consistent definition, program providers still had some leeway in how to translate the term for their own programs (Moore 2006). Some NGOs, who were still committed to the issues of the maturing protagonists and their friends, used these conceptual loopholes to integrate them into their programs in order to provide for at least their basic needs. Hence, the protagonists began to increasingly engage in the establishment of short-term relationships with individual activists on a more personalized level in order to maintain their social proximity to NGOs and foster their crucial social and economic support networks. Although the structure and working patterns of NGOs have always been based on personal and patronage relationships of activists with both the street-related communities and decision-makers in the legal (lawyers and governmental offices) and health sector (doctors and hospitals), the now young men’s reduced alternatives in ‘choosing’ between NGOs intensified their emotive performances within their emotional economies. Both the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak increasingly aimed at cooperating with particular persons for particular purposes. Through their yearlong experiences of try and error, they had learned which NGO, which NGO worker, and which ‘orang baik’ outside these organizations could be activated for what issues. Their skills of imagining and empathizing with multiple others and emotively attuning to spaces, situations and persons, were crucial in framing social encounters in ways that could generate trust, affection, social and economic capital. The following description of encounters focuses on the protagonists’ effective oscillation between malu and bangga as crucial affective practices of their emotional economies.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

Encounter 1: Suram One morning in September 2007, I received a text message (SMS) from 24-year old Suram. He wrote: ‘Thomas, I want to meet you. When do you have time? Suram Bendoro.’ We met the next day at the street junction, where he was busking (ngamen), and had tea and snacks together. We were not really close, and had never talked to each other without the company of others before. As a member of the komunitas Bendoro he took part in the workshops we had organized, and we had started talking to each other more frequently during recent weeks about health issues, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV-AIDS. When we met that day on the street, he started talking about how important the voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) was, and that he wanted to get tested again, because he was afraid that he had contracted HIV. After a few minutes, Suram changed the topic rather abruptly: Sorry to bother you. Can I ask you something? – By apologizing in every other sentence (Maaf, ya, Thomas, maaf sekali), he told me in a low voice that his mother was sick. He feared (aku takut) that she might die, so he intended to visit her as soon as possible. Because he had no money to go to her house in Jakarta, he would have had to wait until he earned enough in order to make that visit for the festive days of Idul Fitri (Eid Mubarak) in a few weeks. Suram underscored repetitively that he really needed my help, and because he had never asked me a favor before, because he was ‘malu’ to do so, he hoped that I realized the urgency of his plea and trusted (percaya) him. Before I could answer, he hugged my shoulder, looked me in the eyes and said: It is true, you really are a good man (orang baik). Thank you so much! Slightly confused, I replied that I would try my best, but that I needed to confirm with my colleagues from our research collective first, because I could not contribute the expected amount of money myself. I asked him to come to the workshop of the eco-social project for lunch the next day, and assured him that I would talk to Patti and Bayu, who ran the project, in the meantime. Suram agreed. In the evening, I received another text (SMS) from Suram: “Please help, Thomas. I need to go to Jakarta now. My mother is in a really bad condition. Maybe she will die. Can we meet at the train station at Lempuyangan now?” – I called him and said that I was very sorry for him, but that all I could offer was to meet the next day. He sounded very sad and hardly spoke a word. I felt guilty. Suram did not show up at the workshop the next day. He neither answered my phone calls nor did he answer my text. Instead, he surprised me in my rented house the next morning and asked for help again. Although he could look very sinister with his tattooed arms, his slight squinting and his dark eyes, he was very polite and apologized dozens of times that he bothered me so early in the morning. Over coffee, cigarettes and dry biscuits, which he refused at least three times before joining me in my breakfast, he talked about everything else but his mother. After avoiding the topic for half an hour my guilt finally pressured me to ask about her. He answered that although she was still very ill,

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he might not have to go to Jakarta because he had a mobile phone now. So he could contact her whenever he wanted. I told him that Patti and Bayu agreed to help him visit his ill mother. But they wanted to talk to him first. I don’t want to. I am not brave (berani) enough to talk to Bayu, and I am embarrassed (malu) to ask Patti for further help. She has already helped me a lot. After I offered to accompany him, he did not seem any happier. Ok. But you have to help me, ok? he asked for my support. I nodded. At the open house we were lucky because Patti was available. I asked her whether Bayu could also join, because Suram wanted to ask for their support. Unfortunately, he was out and only expected around midday. Suram started to tell his story to Patti, ending with a request for financial support to go to Jakarta to see his ailing mother. Patti seemed surprised that his mother was in Jakarta, since she had previously lived in a village near Yogyakarta. But Suram insisted that she had moved. Patti affirmed that she could not decide alone to support him because Bayu was in charge of the finances. Silence. After some more inquiries for help from Suram, he suddenly apologized, became silent, he sunk into his chair, his eyes fixed the ground. More silence. He took a deep breath before he started another attempt. Besides his mother being sick, he stated that he also needed money to pay for his mobile phone, which he had bought on credit (kredit) so he could call his mother. Surprised, we both asked why he did not tell us before. I was malu, he replied and looked to the ground again, smirking. A second later, he continued that he needed 300,000 Rupiah16 to pay back the loan within the next 24 hours; otherwise he would be in trouble. Can you help me? He asked. Patti asked Suram for the reason of his plea again. She wanted to know whether he needed support for his sick mother or for his mobile phone. Both, he answered, smiling. He reasoned that he might not have to go to Jakarta if he could pay for the mobile phone. My poor mother (kasihan ibu) … He was just about to continue his plea, when Bayu turned the corner and sat down next to us. They greeted each other and Bayu pulled a few jokes, which made all of us laugh. So, what’s up, Suram? Silence. In his affectionate and joking, but assertive way, Bayu asked him again. I am not comfortable (enggak enak) to ask Mas17 Bayu for help, sorry to bother Mas Bayu, he addressed him. Silence. After ten very long seconds, I jumped to Suram’s rescue and started my own version of his previous stories. After my second or third sentence, he took over himself: 16 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2007: $30 USD. 17 | In Central Java, people are usually not addressed with their names or in personal pronouns, but with either the Indonesian ‘Bapak’ (father) or ‘Ibu’ (mother) with or without the name following, or the more colloquial ‘Pak’, ‘Bu’. Younger men are addressed the Javanese way as ‘Mas’, younger women as ‘Mbak’, older (well-respected) men and women as ‘Mbah’ (also meaning elder) with or without the name following.’

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

Mas, I need money to pay back my mobile phone so that I can contact my sick mother. Bayu answered empathically: That’s funny, because yesterday we waited for you because Thomas told us that you needed to go to Jakarta urgently to see your sick mother. Today you tell us that you need to pay for your mobile phone. What will it be tomorrow? – Suram apologized with a trembling voice. He repetitively articulated that he was sorry that the situation became so confusing. But he himself was in a state of constant confusion these days. Not only that his mother was ill, or that he could not pay back the mobile phone, he was also worried that he was HIV-positive. He informed us that one of his closest friends, who lived in Jakarta, had recently died because of AIDS. He would already ‘feel helped’ (merasa dibantu), if we paid for his mobile phone. But if we could not afford to do so it was no problem either, he concluded his apology. – Hm, what should we do now?, Bayu replied. If it’s for the mobile phone, we can’t help. If you want to contact your mother, just come here. You can call her from here or from my mobile phone. You can come here anytime, no problem. If you are worried that you are HIVpositive, we will help you to find a good counselor. We care for you. Suram smiled, bowed his head, thanked the three of us, excused himself abruptly – and left. On his way out he mumbled that he would come back the next day to call his mother. I rushed after him and accompanied him to the main road from where he hopped on a bus. He thanked me politely. Again, his eyes were glued to the ground. Suram only looked up to briefly pierce my eyes before he diverted his gaze again. I apologized and told him to take good care of himself. I emphatically reiterated my support in case he wanted to have an HIV-counselling or get tested. He did not come to the workshop the next day, but I received another text message (SMS) in the late afternoon: “Thomas, can I have Daniel’s phone number? Thank you for everything. Take care, Suram Bendoro.” Still feeling guilty for turning down his very emotive plea, I texted him the number without confirming with Daniel first. I wished him good luck. Daniel was an exchange student at the Yogyakarta Institute of Arts where he learned how to play traditional Javanese music (gamelan). I had introduced him to Suram three months before. It was a Saturday night at the anak Bendoro’s hangout on Malioboro, where we shared snacks and drinks until early morning. A week later, Bagus ‘hired’ Daniel as an English teacher for the youngest members of the community. The enthusiastic exchange student reported to me after his first lesson, which he held in a little park behind a busy street junction, that his new students Raden (20), Danny (18), Bangor (19) and Buster (20) had overwhelmed him due to their shyness, open-mindedness, good manners and joyful personalities. The young Czech student was particularly impressed that they had welcomed him so open-heartedly and shared so many stories about the pleasures and challenges of street life with him. I think they trust me, he said with a grin on his face.

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I met Daniel again a week after my encounter with Suram. He told me that they had met at a secluded little park behind a mosque near Malioboro. Suram had approached him to ask for his help. He needed 250,000 Rupiah in order to visit his sick mother in Jakarta. Touched by his trust and sad story about his mother, Daniel did not hesitate to support the young man’s good intentions. This time, I remained silent.

Encounter 2: Bangor Bangor had lived on the streets of Yogyakarta with his older brother Raden since he was 11 years old. The two were sent to an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) and orphanage with their middle brother, Danny, after their parents had died in a traffic accident. In 2001, after one year at the orphanage, Raden and Bangor escaped and joined the Bendoro community. Danny followed them in 2003. Raden, Bangor, and I had known each other since their first weeks on the streets of Yogyakarta. In the early days, Bangor was very quiet and shy whenever I addressed him. Six years later, in early December 2007, Bangor, then 17 years old, called me from the mobile phone of Pram, an activist who directed an NGO that focused on HIV prevention, care, support, and treatment. I had introduced Bangor to him on one of our jointly held workshops on STDs and HIV prevention. HIV had shocked the anak Bendoro after they had witnessed two of their friends die painfully from AIDS between April and October of the same year. HIV was never discussed among the young men, but almost all of them started to initiate separate face-to-face interactions and build trust with NGO activists who focused on HIV prevention. Bangor sounded worried: he wanted to meet me immediately. He said he wanted to pour his heart out (curhat). About an hour later, we met at Lempuyangan train station, where economy trains left for destinations all around Java. Bangor was sitting alone on the platform, smoking. After a few minutes of small talk, he dragged me into a quiet corner of the station, and started to tell his story: Well, you know that I was close with Jim (who had died of AIDS-related illness; see next chapter). We did many things together. And then I thought, what if I am HIV positive, too? So I went to Mas Pram in his office and had some counseling and an HIV test. Now I’m HIV positive. And now my eyes are sick, I can’t see in the dark. I decided to go to Jakarta to my auntie and have some HIV treatment there. You know the pills and stuff. In Jakarta I can stay at her place because if I start with therapy here in Yogyakarta, I’ll be ‘malu’ when my friends find out. Can you help me? I was in shock. Can you help me? he asked again. I need money to go to Jakarta now, for the train and the first few days because I do not want to be ‘malu’ with my auntie when I show up and ask her for money straight away. After talking for a few

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

minutes on further measures to be taken, and him assuring me that he would keep me updated via text message on what happened in Jakarta, he lowered his gaze and asked me again in a barely audible voice: Can you help me? I am really ‘malu’ because of my condition and I don’t know where to go now. I’m also ‘malu’ to ask you actually, but the train leaves in ten minutes and I need to catch it, because if I don’t I will go crazy tonight here in Yogya. – Ok. How much do you think you need? I asked. 500,000 Rupiah18 should be enough, Bangor replied. I was puzzled. None of the three brothers had ever asked for such a huge amount of money from me. I did not want to embarrass him, but neither did I think that it was an appropriate amount of money that he was asking from me. Finally, I gave him 250,000 Rupiah. Bangor had tears in his eyes and hugged me intensely: Thank you, Thomas. Thank you so much! He hopped on the train to Jakarta and left me in shock. I called Pram and asked him whether he knew of Bangor’s HIV status. He replied that he was not allowed to tell me, as the test results were confidential, but he did not seem too worried. So I drove to the workshop of the eco-social project where Bangor sometimes spent time, and where he had been producing and selling handicrafts when he was first on the streets. Although it was already after midnight, Bayu was still in the office. He looked worried. As we had become close friends over the years, I asked him whether he had heard from Bangor recently. He nodded. I said that I knew Bangor wanted to go to Jakarta to see his aunt. He looked surprised. He already knew that Bangor was ‘HIV positive.’ He was surprised that I had given him such a huge amount of money because he had already given him a letter of reference for a hospital in Jakarta where he would be treated, and also some 80,000 Rupiah for the train ticket as it was an emergency. Usually, he never gave money without receipts. Three days later, when I was at a street art concert on Malioboro, next to the Bendoro hangout, I saw Bangor sitting with Raden, Kuno, and Danny, smoking and drinking. When he saw me from afar, he quickly disappeared into the crowd. It was the last time I saw him before I left Yogyakarta a few months later. Out of curiosity, I met with Pram the next day and asked him whether there was something I should know about one of our friends. We had a deal that he would not tell me the name of the person if one of the guys had tested HIV positive, but that he would tell me the number of ‘positive cases’. He assured me that there had been nothing to worry about during the past three months. After I asked him whether he had seen Bangor since he left for Jakarta, he said no, but added that he had borrowed him money because Bangor wanted to buy medication for his hurting eyes.

18 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2007: $50 USD.

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Encounter 3: Bicycle Joe Around Christmas 2007, I was having tea with two volunteers from our shelter near the train station at Malioboro, where both worked as counselors for sex workers in the nearby red light district. We talked about the difficulties of encountering the anak Bendoro and their arrogance when compared to other street-related communities in the city. We were about to head back to their counseling clinic when an ‘old friend’ from the Bendoro community, who had been in prison for the past year and whom I had known since 2005, turned the corner of the narrow alleyway and stopped suddenly in front of us. He was known as ‘Bicycle Joe’ (then 32 years old) because of his expertise in making bicycles appear and then disappear again. He stood in front of the woven mat where we were sitting. He smiled at me and waved his hand: Hello Thomas, it’s been a long time since we’ve met! How are you doing? May I sit with you? He introduced himself to the others in polite Javanese language, bowing his head, communicating his respect (hormat). When we offered him tea and snacks, he politely refused, smiling: Thank you. I’ve just eaten. But please, enjoy your drinks. He nodded his head and pointed at the drinks with his right thumb, in the polite manner of the Javanese ways. He then sat down next to me, and started to talk about the ‘good old times’ we had had together, and his loneliness since his release from prison two months ago. He told me that he needed a job, and mentioned too that he had a wonderful antique bicycle he would like to sell. I replied that I was leaving soon for Germany, and that I already had a bicycle. He looked at Aryani and Gatot, who gave forced smiles. He turned toward me again, but remained silent. After staring at the ground for a few seconds, he looked at me and said: Excuse me, Thomas. Sorry. Can I ask you something? Then he stared at the ground again. I looked at my two colleagues, who were slowly shaking their heads and preparing to leave. They handed me the money for the tea and left. On their way out of the little food stall, they nodded at ‘Bicycle Joe,’ uttering Mas! (Javanese equivalent to Sir for a younger man). He replied with Monggo Mas! Mbak! (Please Sir! Miss!), nodding his head and smiling politely. To avoid getting involved in another story, I told Joe that I also had to leave because I had a meeting in the south of the city. I assured him that I was really happy to see him in such good health again. He replied that he would accompany me, because it was very impolite to let an old friend walk the ‘dangerous streets’ alone. After negotiating whether I was bold enough to take a bus by myself or not, I finally told Joe that I really wanted to be alone. Joe replied empathically: No problem. If you’re tired, it’s better you relax first. . . . When can we meet tomorrow? He put his hand on my shoulder. It was useless to try to further reject him. The only way for me to escape this situation without being ‘brutally impolite’ and disrespecting him was to agree to meet the next day.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

The next day, we met for tea and snacks at a little food stall, where we used to sit in 2005. The situation was typical of my encounters with other protagonists with whom I was involved on a more daily basis. Joe had framed the situation perfectly: he was polite, friendly, courteous, charming, and pushy at the same time. He had proposed to meet at a place that was linked to our ‘long friendship’, and he had already signaled that he needed help. Again, we had a very pleasant and witty conversation. Although I knew that at any moment he would come up with a rather predictable request and a sympathy-triggering story, I was caught by his charm, wit, and resilience in the stories he told of his time in prison. The whispering leaves of the big banyan tree provided shade for the food stall, making the midday heat more tolerable. Joe: Mas, sorry to bother you, but my fiancée has cancer! We need money in order to get medical treatment. Her family is very poor. They can’t afford it. And we wanted to ask for your help. There it was, the ‘catastrophe.’ Thomas: You are engaged? Congratulations! When did you meet? And how can I help? Joe: I am really ‘malu,’ but I wanted to ask you whether we could borrow some money from you?

We talked about his fiancée and the possibilities she had in order to get medical treatment free of charge by applying for public health insurance available for the poor, via the head of his neighborhood (ketua kampung), the municipality, or via various other local bureaucracies. I also offered to register his fiancée for the governmental program of the social health system via an entitled NGO. Joe refused both suggestions. He declared that they could not wait for the ‘lame bureaucracy’ because it was an emergency. I said that I would discuss his case with the colleagues from the eco-social project and get back to him. He interrupted and said that he did not want to be helped that way, because he felt ashamed (malu) when facing his future parents- in-law and coming up with such a poor solution. He needed to pay for other bills related to his fiancée’s treatment, which they could not afford to repay yet; he would need money, not the government’s alms. After talking for over an hour about his hardships of getting started again after his time in prison and negotiating about how we could cooperate, I agreed to help him sell the antique bicycle to one of my (bule) friends. I insisted I could not help him with further monetary assistance. If he wanted, I could link him up with the right NGOs or accompany him and his fiancée to the hospital in order to get easier access. He refused. I was close to losing my temper but smiled. I gave him my mobile phone number and wanted to leave. After we said goodbye and had already walked a few steps in opposite directions, Joe turned around and said: Here it is, Mas. The bicycle. Do you like it? It is from the 1950s, it is a real Javanese bicycle. – It is beautiful, and very clean!

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I replied. I realized I was in ‘trouble’. After years of fieldwork, I had learned not to comment on material objects when they were for sale. But sometimes I still made crucial mistakes. I knew now that I might not get by without buying or at least renting the bicycle. Joe started smiling. He came closer, leaned over, and whispered in my ear: Just buy it. Then you can sell it to one of your friends. Today it’s cheaper than tomorrow, because many people would want it! My fiancée would also be happy if I showed up with at least some money. After ten more minutes of futile negotiation, I finally paid a ‘friend’s price,’ as Joe assured me, and went on my way with two bicycles.

THE M UTUAL B ENEFITS OF E MPATHY It took me years to understand and put my feelings of sympathy, compassion, admiration, and fascination related to the young men’s survival skills, and my insecurity, disappointment, even rage when reflecting on their “judicious opportunism” (Johnson-Hanks 2005). I could not always make sense of the protagonists’ behavior; I felt hurt and exploited over and over again. I became very skeptical of ‘the truth’ behind their stories, especially when I was drawn into curhat sessions, emotive episodes and social dramas that concluded with a plea to me to take action on their behalf. No matter how long I had known the young men and how persistently I negotiated with them, in the heat of the moment taking action meant that the issue at stake could only be solved by me, immediately, and by ‘borrowing’ money and other goods. It felt painful to be reduced to a ‘walking cash machine’ or to find out from others that stories might be altered depending on their respective interlocutors. Not knowing where to put these recurring emotions of disappointment and deception, I banned them to an emotional scrapbook that I kept separate from my professional notebooks, in which I targeted emotional detachment in my descriptions and reflections of others’ experiences, actions, and narratives. Only later, while at my desk, when I was forced to make sense of the turbulent times in the field, I reluctantly remembered my emotional diary, that gloomy witness of my unprofessional emotional shadow life in the field. Reading through it led to some surprising insight. My notes hinted at patterns in the protagonists’ and their interlocutors’ interactions that were hidden from my detached analytical sight. The emotional diary revealed two things. First, I realized that the young men’s judicious opportunism was not necessarily a hostile act toward me as a person, but related to my positionality as an activist-anthropologist. This helped me to cope with disappointment and disillusionment. Second, the emotional landscape of my jottings was almost identical to those recounted in the interviews and narratives of the street-related young men’s most prominent interaction partners, such as employees and activists of NGOs.

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

The recognition, reflection, and analysis of my own emotions related to the encounters with the anak Bendoro and anak Congklak (see Appendix: Data Analysis), and their comparison with the narratives of NGO activists, expatriate social workers, artists, doctors, and other researchers, helped me to develop a theoretical framework that could make sense of the social and affective practices on both sides of the observed interactive continuum. A more experiential comprehension of what was at stake in the street encounters only emerged after I had compared my own emotions as they were produced in my encounters with the street-related young men, to those of local NGO activists’ and street workers’ narratives about their involvement with them. My emotions were not an exclusively subjective experience, but a widespread social fact that related me to both the anak Bendoro, the anak Congklak, and their interaction partners. Without putting my own emotions into the ethnographic picture of the other, the theoretical enquiry into the affective dynamics of social interactions between actors of significantly asymmetrical power positions may not have proceeded. Analyzing my own emotions as they emerged in my encounters with Monchi (see chapter 6), Suram, Bicycle Joe, Bangor and other protagonists and juxtaposing them with those articulated by their primary interaction partners, led me to two points of crucial analytical concern. First, I could make sense of the protagonists’ ways of coping with scarce material, economic, and kinship resources. Keeping differing sets of interactants involved for their causes, by attuning their emotional display to the situation and context of the social encounter, expanded their social networks and could be translated into social and economic capital (Bourdieu 1986; Yang/Kleinman 2007). Whereas expatriate and local activists, researchers, travellers, local artists, or journalists were useful for their economic potencies, others could be ‘activated’ for shelter (local students), medical support (some doctors and nurses), goods (owners of food stalls and local artists), comfort, or sexual gain (street-related women, tourists, or expatriate residents). Paying attention to my own emotional experiences related to encounters with the street-related communities fostered valuable empirical and theoretical insights that led to formulate a theory of ‘emotional economy’ (Stodulka 2014a; 2015a;b). Second, I understood the motivations of activists, artists, researchers, or students to remain involved with the street-related communities, despite their ongoing complaints about them. Similar to myself, the anak Bendoro and also anak Congklak’s interaction partners did not empathize without reason. They were not only ‘exploited,’ as some of them had repeatedly claimed. NGO activists, journalists, travelers, anthropologists, street-related women, or shop owners pursued their own motivations, tasks, and targets in their social encounters with the protagonists. They equally benefited and created their own emotional economies. Whereas the young men could initiate and

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translate generated affective bonds into social and economic capital on the spot, the actors on the other side of the interactive spectrum often profited in the long run. Female travelers and expatriate residents at times became involved in exciting, romantic, and adventurous affairs, and sometimes long-term and fulfilling relationships. Activists, volunteers, and researchers often profited from the ‘vocational expertise’ acquired during their research with extremely marginalized communities, enabling them to secure further funding for their respective projects and organizations, or to produce documentaries, dossiers, journal articles, and ethnographies. In my case, these artifacts transformed generated social capital from ‘the field’ into cultural capital in a strictly Bourdieusian sense, materialized in the form of educational qualifications (Bourdieu 1986:47), and subsequently, into economic capital by means of my employment. The extended case studies and emotive episodes above suggest that the adequate display and communication of emotions is a vital skill and acquired competence in generating connections and cooperation–“social capital” in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. The display of the right emotions, towards the right people, at the right time, and the right place, facilitated the emergence of mutual trust and fostered the transformation of social into economic capital. The anak Bendoro and anak Congklak’s skills of attuning their emotion display according to what was at stake in a social encounter can be defined as essential symbolic capital, which “is represented symbolically because it is set within the known ‘logic’ of the world, is not perceived as capital per se, and is instead recognized as a legitimate form of competence” (Yang/Kleinman 2008: 401). Such ‘mute’ capital assisted street-related adolescents and young men in creating, accessing, mobilizing and extending social connections and cooperation. French anthropologist Bourdieu has defined emerging connections as social capital, which in his words is “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group” (1986: 51). A persons’ social capital is ascertained by the size of the network of connections that she or he can access. More generally, the French anthropologist conceptualizes capital as materialized and convertible social energy in the form of living labor or accumulated labor in an objectified state. Besides social capital, Bourdieu distinguishes between economic capital, which is directly convertible into money, and cultural capital that materializes in the form of educational qualifications. Under certain circumstances and depending on the emotive skills of social actors, each form of capital (social, cultural, economic) could be transformed into another. Yang and Kleinman’s approach to social capital and its transformation is paramount in explaining the protagonists’ techniques of relating, emoting and navigating through social spaces in a way that induces mutual trust, reduces

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harm and increases well-being, social, and economic capital. In an extension of Bourdieu, the authors consider social capital as an ‘accumulation of trust’ derived from individuals’ willingness to cooperate with one another and argue that “trust [...] forms the prerequisite for social capital to be transformed into economic capital.” (2008: 401-2) Building upon this argument, I argue that empathy and attunement are paramount efforts to build trust with particular others, and transpire as affective currencies of emotional economies. The young men managed to transform limited kinship, material, economic, social and professional resources into affective bonds and vital socioeconomic cooperation with various actors of their widespread social networks. By relating to, affectively bonding with, and ultimately emoting particular brokers and persons–other authors refer to such well-orchestrated emotion narratives and displays as “emotional blackmail” (Beatty 2005a: 25) – who could provide them with medication, admission papers to hospitals, healthier food, job opportunities, and money, the young men managed to transform social ties into material goods, money, and increased well-being. While coming of age on the streets, the protagonists acquired and continuously refined their social skills of assessing and framing encounters with various interaction partners. The social, cognitive, and emotional knowledge inherent in these skills of perspective-taking distinguished them from their peers who were not living on the streets. Their capability to adequately relate to and interact in highly diverse social fields was amplified by their permanent exposure to others within the public space, where the refinement of social encounters was an important strategy of survival. The encounters illustrated that trust was particularly generated through the protagonists’ social skills of connecting to multiple others by attuning their emotional display according to the mutual imaginations that were at stake in respective encounters. When required, the adolescents and young men acted restrained, even shy (malu), at other occasions they stressed their community pride (bangga) by swearing, singing and drinking loudly in public, exhibiting tattoos, and performing macho attitudes. Attuning one’s speech and behavior is a complex social practice that combines the body, the mind, personal experience and knowledge about the physical and social environment, and the person’s motivation to imagine another’s feelings and ways of relating to them. Many psychologists and philosophers have defined this complex both cognitive and affective process as ‘empathy’ (Batson 2009; Stueber 2006). Anthropological approaches remained marginal for a long time due to various reasons (see Hollan/Throop 2008), but have gained momentum within our discipline’s ‘compassionate turn’ (Sluka/Robben 2012) by phenomenologists and psychological anthropologists (von Poser 2011; Engelen/Röttger-Rössler 2012; Hollan/Throop 2011; Jackson 1998). For my purpose here, I shall draw on Jodi Halpern’s (2001) perspective on empathy, which was introduced into

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psychological anthropology by Douglas Hollan. The anthropologist subsumes the physician’s definition of empathy as: “[A] first-person-like, experiential understanding of another person’s perspective […] empathy is a type of emotional reasoning in which a person emotionally resonates with the experience of another while simultaneously attempting to imaginatively view a situation from that other person’s perspective. It is a type of understanding that is neither purely cognitive and imaginative nor purely emotional, but a combination of both.” (Hollan 2008: 475)

If we strip empathy from its pervasive folk theory and remain mindful about its widespread confusion with the related phenomena of sympathy or compassion, the concept can help illuminate the black box of what happens when two or more people connect, mutually affect each other and initiate social and other cooperation. Referring to social psychologist Daniel Batson’s typology of empathy definitions, it is here understood as the human capacity of interactional perspective-taking with regard to “imagining how another is thinking and feeling” (2009: 7) in a particular situation. “At issue is not so much what one knows about the feelings and thoughts of the other but one’s sensitivity to the way the other is affected by his or her situation” (Ibid.). Douglas Hollan and Jason Throop highlight the emotional dimension of empathy: “empathy is a first-person-like perspective on another that involves an emotional, embodied, or experiential aspect. The emotional aspect is one of the things that distinguish it from other ways of knowing about people.” (2008: 391-2)19 Considering empathy as an intentional, action-oriented and dialogical human capacity, the perspective-taking of interacting persons shall not be comprehended as a dialectical dichotomy of a person, which empathizes with another person, but as a relational, reciprocal, both cognitive and affective attunement between the two. Empathy is neither good nor bad per se. Related actions, speech or behavior can be empowering and caring, but also harmful and destructive depending on the motivations of the intractants and the tasks of the encounters at stake. The illustrated encounters demonstrated that in those social encounters where interacting persons did not inhibit mutual perspective-taking but equally attempted to take in the respectively other’s perspective and make themselves understandable, mutual trust and cooperation could be established. In marginalized environments, empathy becomes a vital foundation for 19 | The concept of intersubjectivity, for example, entails “complex emotional, embodied, and cognitive work that is implicated in approximating the subjective experience of another from a quasi-first-person perspective, what we are here calling ‘empathy’” (Hollan/Throop 2008: 386-7).

Emotional Economies of Avoidance and Attention

transforming in-advantageous power asymmetries into social and ultimately economic capital. The protagonists’ empathy – in terms of both cognitively and affectively assessing social encounters through previous experience and collective sharing of these experiences within their communities – and the resulting display of contextually attuned emotions were crucial social and emotional competences that orchestrated the connection and cooperation with others. Moreover, since successful social encounters can result in increased subjective well-being, the protagonists sought the attention and interaction with those people that proved to be affectively, socially and economically beneficial to them. In the avoidance fields, malu proved to be an effective cultural resource of communicating deference and respect (hormat) towards respective interaction partners. Since the adequate and almost mechanical ‘Javanese’ display of malu could be of great service to keep policemen and other authorities at proxemic and emotional distance, it could be defined as a strategy of tactical withdrawal in those social encounters where the young men anticipated unpleasant experiences and condescending remarks and actions. Situations and encounters that transgressed the protagonists’ social and emotive capacities (e.g. Congklak tragedy, police violence, or imprisonment), were faced with ‘indifference’ (cuek). Whereas performances of bangga (pride) in public social encounters were considered inappropriate for marginalized and socially inferior persons and communities, they could convey positive impacts on both individual and collective well-being. Even successful malu displays (as was the case in Irianto’s story about ‘fooling’ policemen) that managed to prevent the young men from further harm could be transformed into pride narratives in the aftermath of those encounters.

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7 Leaving the Streets

This final chapter focuses on the relationship between physical maturation, rebelling bodies, changing social role expectancies, related transformations of coping strategies, and attempts of leaving the streets during later stages of the protagonists’ ‘street careers’. The life stories reveal that regardless of individually differing coping strategies and biographies, the protagonists increasingly attuned to the ‘Javanese ways’ (cara Jawa) of the kampung and, in some cases their ‘new families’, as re-emerging primary social fields of focus and interaction, which they had so strongly opposed during their youthful ‘heydays’ on the streets (chapter 5). I will scrutinize age-related transformations and adaptations of coping with a matured body, its self-perceptions and social ascriptions by the social environment, and discuss these vis-à-vis increased stigmatization of streetrelated communities and their radical disciplining by means of laws and surveillance policies. The chapter highlights Monchi, Kris and Jim’s stories of personal calamities and mental and physical illness, which surfaced and accumulated during early adulthood. Jempol and Harvey will appear within these stories, but their life stories are only touched upon as contrastive foils.

M ONCHI : C OPING WITH HIV-AIDS After Monchi and I had parted in 2001, Monchi continued working at the Congklak street junction next to their prospering and growing community. In 2002 he moved to Jakarta, because he was ‘bored’ (bosan) in Yogyakarta and he longed to revisit his mother, who still lived in the capital. In the end he never visited her, because she had moved on and worked as a helper in the kitchen of the Indonesian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan until 2009. Once he found out that his mother had left from his older sister Ratih, he decided to look for his old friends at a komunitas in South Jakarta instead. He worked as a pengamen (street musician) and as a ‘nurse’ (perawat), as they called street vendors of syringes and needles. The then 22 year-old met his childhood friend ‘doctor’

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(dokter) Nasri again, who became his closest companion during his one-year stay in the capital. ‘Doctors’ were those people who injected low-quality heroine into the veins of their customers. In retrospective, Monchi described his year in Jakarta as ‘crazy times’ (gila-gilaan). He almost died of a drug overdose and the body weight of his almost 160cm frame dropped under 40 kilograms. He assured me that the only reason why he was still alive was the solidarity of his friends at the komunitas Congklak in Yogyakarta. When he returned there in 2003 in a devastated health condition, the community members took care of him and forced him to rehabilitate from his severe drug addiction. After his rehabilitation without any substituents, which he described as most painful experience in his life, both due to cold turkey and the ‘compassionate beatings’ (kena pukul tapi peduli) by his friends, he wanted to pay back their solidarity and care and take responsibility (tanggung jawab) for the komunitas Congklak. Within a few months he developed into a well-respected leader (ketua) of the komunitas. His solidarity with and care for community members was further fuelled by the death of ‘doctor’ Nasri in August 2004, who had followed him to Congklak a few months before. Nasri’s death was the first AIDS-death among the former GIRLI communities, which was communicated as such and not euphemized as a result of ‘chronic liver damage’ or ‘acute tuberculosis’. The witnessing of Nasri’s rebelling body and inevitable death was a tremendous shock not only for Monchi but the whole komunitas Congklak, and the associated former GIRLI community of the komunitas Bendoro. On the third anniversary of Nasri’s death, Monchi and I visited his grave. It was located at the far opposite end of the city in the neglected cemetery of the Social Welfare Department (Makam DINAS Sosial). After chasing away the grazing sheep, cleaning the grave from rank growth and stones, and filling it up with earth that we had dug out with our hands from a seemingly vacant lot near the dry water pump, we covered the grave in flowers, lit two incense sticks at each end of the grave, and put a burning cigarette on the wooden plaque, which vaguely showed Nasri’s full name and the dates of his birth and death. Then we sat in silence. It became a ritualized act of commemoration, which Monchi and I have performed at all the graves we had visited throughout the years. After very long 15 minutes Monchi looked at me. Without his otherwise ceaseless smile and ‘sheep-sound’ laughter, he asked whether I wanted to say something to Nasri. Instead of just remaining silent and letting Monchi talk, I started uttering awkward things about how I respected Nasri (we had actually never met), that we would come back here (we never did), and that he should give us the strength and spirit to convince our friends from the komunitas to live responsibly and protect them from further HIV-infections. When I finally stopped, Monchi assured Nasri that I was a very good friend and part of the Congklak family, before he started his confession: There is something I have to confess. I want to apologize (aku mau minta maaf). You asked me to visit your wife

Leaving the Streets

and son in Jakarta to tell them that you loved them. The last time I was in Jakarta I could not find them. The next time I go there I will try to find them again. I am sorry. I realized that it was Monchi’s first return to his best friend’s grave since the funeral. Silence. Only the sheep baaed and the leaves of the frangipani tree (kamboja; also referred to as the ‘graveyard tree’) rustled in the afternoon wind. I heard segments of stories about Nasri before, but I never really understood who he was and how he had actually died. Monchi either never finished the story, started off at a point where I could not relate to or suddenly changed the topic. On our way back to Congklak we stopped at a food stall (angkringan) in a shady place, where we had iced tea and snacks and recovered from the heat. After we sat down on the woven mats, Monchi looked right through me to some point in the sky and started talking: Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. He died alone in a little shack. I was out for a few hours, working on the streets. When I came back to the others who were sitting together, I asked them: ‘Where is Nasri?’ They said: ‘He is not here. He is not here anymore.’1 I said, ‘Yes, I know that he is not here, so where is he, why did you leave him alone?’ The friends looked at me and said once again: ‘He is not here anymore.’ This is when I started to realize that he was gone forever. He died. He died alone and in a sitting position like this.

He imitated Nasri’s position, opened his mouth and stared into the sky. I tried to ignore the cold shiver that went down my spine. This time, I remained silent. He continued: Crazy, Tom. Crazy. He died completely alone. Crazy. His voice was trembling. I had never witnessed a situation before where not a spark of his optimism and ‘happy-go-lucky’ attitude had remained. Usually he laughed and joked inbetween sad and serious stories, changed the topic abruptly, or started mocking me. Not this time. We sat there for a few seconds staring at each other. Swoon seemingly took hold of him for a few seconds. Then he went on: I was shocked because they let him die alone. Nobody took care of him. Even before he died there were so many occasions where our friends did not want him to be around and we were ‘cuek’ with him. They never integrated him into their collective meals. Most of them did not even dare to touch him or even be near him. He was completely isolated. I always told our friends that they have to take care of him and that they were his friends, too. It was very sad (sedih) to see how everyone was ‘cuek’ with him. I think this is what hurt Nasri most. Even though he always said ‘no problem’ (enggak apa-apa), I can now better understand how he must have felt. And maybe this was also the reason why he died 1 | ‘Dia enggak ada’ (Indon.) can refer both to someone not being there and having passed away.

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java so fast. The day before he died he asked me for permission ‘to leave’ (mau pamit). He told me that he was tired and that he could feel he had to leave soon. Sometimes he was already fantasizing, and you could not tell whether he was fully conscious or not. When he told me that he was ready to return home, I told him it was not the time yet, and that he would definitely recover again. He ignored me and asked me for only one favor: that I visited his wife and his son once he was dead and tell them that he loved them. He was too weak to go back to Jakarta himself. They had separated. He had left them, but before he died, he wanted to see them again. Since nobody knew where they lived, I could not find them either. Thomas: Why did he not die in hospital? Monchi: I don’t know. Silence. He was in hospital before. You know, when Nasri was already very skinny and he could barely drink or eat, even his father did not want to see him. T: What do you mean? M: He was here. He came from Jakarta. Nasri’s parents were divorced. But when he stood in front of the hospital room, he suddenly decided not to see his son again. Nasri wanted it so much: to see his father, his wife and his own son again. But his father was so ‘cuek’. He went straight back to Jakarta. T: Why was that? M: I don’t know. I think when he heard that his son had AIDS; he just didn’t want to see him anymore.

Being diagnosed with HIV or AIDS in 2004 led to severe ostracism. Similar to the time of writing up, twelve years later, HIV-AIDS often resulted in the cutting of marriage, family and friendships ties and the exclusion from local communities. At that time (and also similar to this day) there were hardly any NGOs, CBOs or self-help groups for street-related persons, and some hospitals refused to treat patients who suffered from HIV- or AIDS-related infections. Physical and social proximity to the virus was perceived as ‘immoral’, ‘not Javanese’, ‘Western’, and ‘other’ (see the excursus on HIV-AIDS-related stigma in a section below). If you believed in God and lived according to the idealized ‘Javanese way’ (cara Jawa), it was considered ‘impossible’ to contract the virus. In the face of severe stigmatization, one might better understand the anak Congklak’s distress related to collectively endure a VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Test) at the local PKBI (Indonesian Family Planning Association) shortly after Nasri had died. Let alone Monchi, who constantly shared syringes with Nasri for over a year. Over two years after his own first VCT, he recounted in February 2007: When I first heard that I was HIV-positive, I had the picture in my mind of swimming alone in the wide ocean near Parangtritis where we had met, while holding on to a piece of wood, which hopefully one day would arrive at the shore. I was very afraid of telling

Leaving the Streets my friends on the street that I was HIV-positive. Three of them actually know: Danar, Irianto, and Habib. Habib told it to others, and the rumor of me being HIV-positive went as far as Jakarta. At that time, the rumor spread further after he told Harvey. Then Harvey told others within the ‘komunitas’, who then told friends from other communities along Malioboro.

A few weeks later, he completed the story, which he had only presented in segmented bits and pieces during the months before: At that time I really wanted to die. I remember that day exactly. We were all tested at PKBI only shortly after Nasri had died. There were about fifteen of us. Everybody was really nervous, including me. When we came back there a few days later to get our results, I had this strange feeling. I felt (merasa) that I was positive. I remember my number, because it was of course anonymous, it was number 6669. I went in last. When the counselor opened the envelop with the test result, I knew I was positive. And then she said it: ‘You are HIV-positive.’ I said, ‘I know.’ The counselor asked me: ‘How do you know?’ – ‘Well, I just knew (tahu aja) it.’ She was very surprised, because I reacted so cool. I thanked her. She offered me someone to talk to, but I told her that I was going to handle this myself, and left. I was the only one who was tested positive. At that time, I did not know much about HIV-AIDS except that it would kill me. After I knew that I was positive, I went back with the others to Congklak but then I left silently. I bought a bottle of liquor and a few pills, and then headed for the bridge over the river Gadjah Wong. There I sat under the bridge drinking, drinking, and drinking. When it got dark I headed somewhere. I forgot where, but finally I ended up at Congklak again. There we went on drinking collectively. I was already wasted (parah). Then I lost consciousness and woke up again in the emergency unit of the hospital. In Sarjito Hospital. This is where I met Dr. Yanri for the first time. She asked me to come and see her as soon as I felt better. But once I was clear again I left the hospital straight away. I did not give a damn (cuek) about being dead or alive at that time. Funny thing was, that I was delivered to hospital again three weeks later – again because of an alcohol and pill overdose. That time it was even more serious. And again, when I woke up, Dr. Yanri stood there in front of me. Smiling at me. She said: ‘Here you are. I was waiting for you. You know, you don’t have to get drunk to see me. You can just drop by my office.’ I really liked that she did not pity (kasihan) me. In that moment, I decided to visit her one-day. When I came back to Congklak I could not stop worrying (khawatir). One evening, when I was really drunk again and refused to eat, Ibu Badam became very angry with me. She brought me a bowl of rice and snacks and told me to eat. She said she wouldn’t leave before I ate. I was still being really silly, pouring the rice over my head and laughing out loud like a crazy man (orang gila). Then I ran around juggling the snacks. When I sat down again I realized that Ibu Badam was crying. Quickly I realized that she was serious and that I had made a fool out of her. I felt so sad (sedih), because she looked so sad (kelihatan sedih sekali). She cried and asked me many times what was wrong with

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Coming of Age on the Streets of Java me. I told her that I was all right (baik-baik saja) and that I just wanted to get drunk (mabuk). Then she ordered Irianto and Habib to buy a bottle of ‘Topi Miring’ liquor. When they came back, Ibu Badam poured me a big glass and told me to finish it. I did. Then again and again until I was so drunk that I couldn’t drink any longer. But she forced me to. So I had another glass. Then she poured another one. I refused, and in the end I promised to never drink alcohol (mabuk) again, if she only let me go. Everything was spinning and turning, I felt so dizzy. With Habib, Danar and Irianto beside me, I had to promise to Ibu Badam that I would take my hands off the booze. I did, and since then I stopped the excessive drinking and a few weeks later I even met Dr. Yanri. This was when I joined her support group.2

Monchi started to attend closed meetings, and soon became a steady member of the support group and a frequent guest at the (then) only HIV-clinic in the city. It was run by Dr. Yanri, who later also became a cooperation partner of the Rumah Sehat Lestari (RSL) collective. During the months to come, Monchi was trained as a so-called ‘lay counselor’ at various workshops in Yogyakarta and Surabaya. Although he enjoyed the closed meetings, Monchi finally left JOY again, and refused to become an institutionalized member of Dr. Yanri’s team as a lay counselor and broker between the clinic and Yogyakarta’s street communities. Monchi preferred to stay ‘independent’ (bebas). He did not want to take up the steady position, because his friends at Congklak would have surely disapproved of it in case they found out. Besides, being affiliated with the HIVAIDS clinic at Sarjito Hospital too closely carried the risk of being stigmatized as an ODHA 3 within his own komunitas. When, two years later, we discussed Nasri and also Oberon’s4 AIDS-related deaths, his diagnose as HIV-positive, the subsequent hospitalizations and the following Congklak tragedy of April 2005, he assured me that these ‘incidences’ made him realize that he had to change his life and his way of working on the 2 | JOY: Jaringan ODHA Yogyakarta (Network of PLWHA Yogyakarta) was one of the city’s first self-help groups. 3 | ODHA (Indon.): acronym for the politically correct NGO-term ‘orang yang hidup dengan HIV-AIDS’, the Indonesian equivalent of the English term PLWHA (‘people living with HIV/AIDS’). 4 | Only a few weeks after Nasri had died, 24-year old Oberon, from a komunitas that was closely related to the anak Bendoro, was hospitalized in a very weak physical condition and diagnosed with AIDS. They were not very close friends, but as they knew each other since childhood, Monchi tried to assist Oberon in his struggle for life. Together with Oberon’s German girlfriend Mary, who was a long-term volunteer and friend, he took turns spending nights and days in the hospital. Monchi repeatedly tried to convince Oberon not to give up, and that an AIDS diagnosis did not necessarily have to result in a painful death. It did not help. Oberon died three days later.

Leaving the Streets

streets in case he did not want to die soon. And yet, he did not change his habits of smoking and drinking (although not as excessively as before), nor did he leave the community and start focusing on himself and his health condition, as he had continuously put forward as his future plans. On the contrary, Monchi immersed himself in taking responsibility for his friends from the komunitas, extended his social network by obtaining even more cooperation with various stakeholders of the rapidly emerging field of NGOs that focused on HIV-AIDS prevention, care, support and treatment. Whenever there was an accident, a friend was ill or needed to be taken care of, fights and conflicts were to be appeased, workshops and other events to be organized, Monchi was always there to help and take responsibility. He did the exact opposite of what doctor and counselors advised him to do as an ODHA. Since JOY had closed down in 2006, he was not attending any support group; refused to start with an antiretroviral therapy (ART) although his CD4 cell (also referred to as helper T-cells in lay terms) count was only slightly above the World Health Organization’s threshold5; worked physically hard in the midday heat in various jobs on the streets; smoked high tar cigarettes; occasionally drank low quality alcohol; had an unhealthy diet; and was always surrounded by the noise of the street junction and other squatter communities. Doctor Yanri had warned him, that if he did not change his lifestyle, he was investing in his own premature death. I wondered how he managed to not only survive but also lead a contented life, when all the other middle-class friends from the support group, who started with therapy (ART), took dietary supplements and vitamins, attended various self-help groups, ate and drank healthy, worked in an air-conditioned office or stopped working, had died earlier than him? How did he cope and preserve his physical health in the face of severe and intersecting social and spatial marginalities? What made sense for doctors, NGO activists or scientists, did not necessarily make sense to him. In October 2007, while sitting at our favorite ‘curhat spot’ in the shade of a big banyan tree, I asked him without the usual ‘twirling’ (mutar-mutar): What is your secret to staying healthy? 5 | This threshold refers to the WHO’s recommendation to start ART when a person’s CD4 count falls below 200 cells/mm 3. Two years later, on November 30 th 2009 the organization released the following ‘New HIV recommendations to improve health, reduce infections and save lives’: “In 2006, WHO recommended that all patients start ART when their CD4 count (a measure of immune system strength) falls to 200 cells/mm 3 or lower, at which point they typically show symptoms of HIV disease. Since then, studies and trials have clearly demonstrated that starting ART earlier reduces rates of death and disease. WHO is now recommending that ART be initiated at a higher CD4 threshold of 350 cells/mm 3 for all HIV-positive patients, including pregnant women, regardless of symptoms” (www.who.int).

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Monchi laughed: Yes, the others from the open meeting we went together the other day keep asking me this, too, when I show up there once a year. Yes, my secret. They always ask me whether I started with the ARV therapy yet. And when I tell them I didn’t and that my CD4 was still fine, they don’t believe me. Maybe because they all started with their therapies and they feel bad and experience many negative side effects. They lose weight, feel sick, have diarrhea, and sometimes also heavy nausea. I then told them that I also have diarrhea sometimes, but that I can still cure it with jamu6. T: So, you trust in herbal medicine? M: Yes. No, not really, actually that is only a supplement. My secret is to forget (lupa). T: Sounds interesting. Silence. M: Instead of seeing myself as an ODHA, I often forget that I am HIV-positive and consider myself as a normal person. Do you know what I mean? T: Sounds like you indeed. Laughter. M: And my second strategy is ‘sharing’7 – with you. That’s very important. That I have someone I can talk to, to get rid of the stress.

For Monchi, ‘being busy’ (sibuk) in keeping his emotional economies running, ‘sharing’ his thoughts and feelings, and ‘forgetting’ (lupa) about his status as ODHA every now and then seemed effective strategies of coping with HIV and retain his well-being. The sharing was also highly recommended by counselors, doctors and local psychologists. Sharing with others does not only mean ‘to let go’, but is also a way of social support seeking, which is defined as a rewarding and healthy coping resource in positive psychology and academic stress research (Thoits 2010). But in a cultural context, where HIV-AIDS was not only silenced, but also afflicted with a severe stigma, sharing was not an easy endeavor. Monchi’s greatest fear was talking to the wrong persons, who would then gossip about him or ostracize him. I think one reason why we related to each other so well was that we managed to create a shielded arena of mutual trust, which prompted the basis for sharing inconvenient and harmony (rukun) disturbing issues with each other. Being a ‘professional stranger’ (Agar 1996), Monchi did not have to fear the same consequences as if he talked to his community friends, NGO activists, doctors or family members. The only threat that I represented to him was my ethnography: what would I make public of our sharing sessions, 6 | Jamu (Javan./Indon.): natural herbal medicine. For detailed accounts on the tradition and use of jamu in Yogyakarta, see Ferzacca 2001 and Lyon 2003. 7 | Similar to other non-tekyan friends, who temporarily joined support groups or were trained as ‘lay counselors’, in the context of HIV-AIDS Monchi used the term ‘sharing’ when he referred to what was actually described as ‘curhat’.

Leaving the Streets

and what would remain only between us? To counter his, but also my own suspicion, we agreed that we would go on a lecture tour together through Java and Bali once the book was finished. Although the doctors and counselors warned Monchi not to remain so busy (sibuk) without taking a break from time to time, he explained to me that this was his way to survive. Sitting and thinking would make him depressed (depresi), and his health condition would decline (nge-drop). He needed the heat of the action. Either he slept or he was on the move. The only times he seemed to sit still were our curhat sessions. When asked why he felt responsible for so many other people he always replied that ‘we have to care for each other’ and that ‘we must not be egoistic’. It seemed that Nasri was permanently looking over his shoulder even years after his death. Although Monchi was a ‘jalanan’, an anak Congklak, these mantras, his smoothness in maneuvering through social encounters, his speech, his smile and politeness (sopan), his humbleness and patience (sabar), and his always respectful behavior (hormat) towards others, even his spirituality, were more refined (halus) than those of so many ‘honorable’ Javanese. By embodying the cara Jawa with all its facets, Monchi’s permanent being sibuk was also an effective way of enhancing his social esteem and thus upgrade his social position within various social fields. His empathy and social skills fuelled his status as a leader (ketua) and reliable cooperation partner both within and outside the komunitas Congklak. Compared to Suram, Bangor, or Bicycle Joe from komunitas Bendoro, Monchi seemed like an emperor among kings of strategic, socially and culturally skilled interaction. He knew exactly how to trigger the right buttons in social encounters where he felt comfortable (nyaman). In irregular but steady intervals, he managed to skillfully orchestrate his advanced brokerage by involving foreign NGO-activists and researchers (including myself) into supporting either education or health care measures for the anak Congklak, but particularly for his ‘new family’ (which will be introduced a few pages further on and shed a different light on his solidarity and care for the friends of the komunitas). By weaving a sustainable web of cooperation, he arranged scholarships, funding for small-scale economic enterprises, and other work opportunities for his friends of the komunitas. Compared to others, Monchi managed to not only individually connect to street-related activists, but also those NGOs and CBOs, which targeted people living with HIV-AIDS (PLWHA), or ‘children at risk’, into which he occasionally involved himself as a temporary volunteer. Since he never made the impression to exploit his vast socio-economic support network directly for himself, most of the persons he approached for assistance continued trusting and supporting him. Before switching to Harvey’s story, a brief analytical note in relation to sociologist Neil Fligstein seems illuminating, who writes that strategic socially skilled actors

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manage to have a lot of balls in the air, and even when most things failed, there were always a few that worked out: “Other actors or groups will only remember the successes and one must try many options in the hope that some will work. […] If they can convince others that they have more power or control or ability to get others to go along, then once something gets set in motion, everyone will fall in line.” (2001: 115)

Although theoretical in his argument, the sociologist could not have provided a better description of Monchi. Through his proficiency in framing situations and brokering between various sets of actors of his vast affective and socioeconomic network, many of the anak Congklak started working at a hair salon (salon), as mechanics (tukang bengkel), craftsmen (tukang) or as small-scale vendors (pedagang) after their eviction in the aftermath of the Congklak tragedy in April 2005. The jobs were facilitated by those NGOs with whom Monchi had fostered close affective bonds and social connections. Sometimes these projects were short-term and ended in a ‘disaster’ for everyone involved, but in some cases they worked out over years and provided some of the anak Congklak with profitable and sustainable income generating opportunities.

H ARVE Y : G O O RGANIC! Harvey had remained a close friend of Monchi and the komunitas Congklak, although he had joined the komunitas Bendoro after the Congklak tragedy in 2005. In chapter 4, Jim had described Harvey as excessively violent in case he or his komunitas were threatened. By contrast, I got to know him as polite, affectionate, and cooperative person, whose speech was considerate and polite (halus), whose gestures were serene, and whose walk was smooth and elegant. When the neighbors of the kampung had burned down the Congklak communities’ shelters in April 2005, Harvey was almost killed because he tried to secure some of the community’s belongings. The neighboring kampung residents, who had burnt down the huts behind the busy street junction, inscribed their disapproval of the ‘jalanan’ and left burning scars on his torso and on his back. After the Congklak tragedy he moved to an open house near Malioboro, joined the komunitas Bendoro and started working at the workshop of the frequently mentioned eco-social project, where he produced wooden toys that were sold in the gallery together with Jempol. In February 2006, at the age of 30, Harvey made a decision that would change his life. Together with Harto from komunitas Bendoro, he started a vocational training program as organic farmer in West Java. 15 months later, in April 2007, they both graduated from the training with certified distinction.

Leaving the Streets

Back at the eco-social project where he had worked before, and which had encouraged and supported Harvey in his decision to become an organic farmer, the managers Patti and Bayu, together with the recently graduated organic gardeners, made plans to rent farm, land and a house at the fertile slopes of Mt. Merapi. To many people’s surprise, the two embarking farmers managed to transform the wasteland into a prosperous piece of land and integrated themselves into the local kampung community by attending to the village’s rituals of ceremonial meals (slametan) and joining the evening prayers at the local mosque. Regarding his motivation to get up at 5 am every cold mountain morning, work physically hard the whole day, pray every evening and go to bed early, Harvey explained in early 2008: I would like to encourage the younger ones (adik) on the streets to join us here in the organic gardening project. I have a long-term plan to run this farm and integrate as many of them as possible in the future, because on the streets, they have no future. But they have to be motivated themselves. They need to develop a certain degree of responsibility (tanggung jawab) for their own lives first. They cannot be dependent on NGOs, ‘ngamen’, and the good will of others all their life. The problem is that the change between a life on the streets and the life here in the village is huge. Here, you cannot wake up at noon, ‘ngamen’ a bit to get food, and then hang out getting drunk (mabuk) and looking for girls (main cewek). Here, you need discipline. But the reward is real independence and freedom (bebas dan merdeka betul). Even for me, who is used to a farmer’s life for over two years now, it is often still very hard. But it is also sad (sedih) to see friends on the streets and realize that they are only hanging out. I also was like that once, but you can’t go on like that forever. You can do that when you’re still young (waktu masih muda), but now we are grown up (sudah dewasa), we have to take responsibility (harus tanggung jawab) and we cannot continue to be ignorant (cuek). You know, I lived on the streets for over ten years with different jobs here and there. And there were also times, and years, where I was just ‘ngamen’. But I got really bored there, and there was no future perspective if you think it through. And look at what we have created here, just the two of us, Harto and me. If we can do it, why would the others not be able to do it? But most of them are not ready yet (belum siap), that’s the problem. Maybe one day we can also help our ill friends, and give them shelter and work here.

Harvey and Harto managed to transform 1,600 square meters of wasteland into an impressive organic garden, where almost twenty varieties of vegetables and herbs have been cultivated amongst the fruit trees. Besides working the fields and participating in village life together with Harto and visiting junior anak Bendoro (whom they tried to recruit for farm life, but who never stayed longer than one or two weeks), Harvey started teaching organic gardening at an orphanage and grammar school in a neighboring village in 2008. After he got married to his long-term girlfriend Ratih in 2009, who was also acquainted

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with the anak Congklak, but grew up with her parents, who owned a fried noodles food stall next to the street junction, Harvey moved to Bali in early 2010 where he taught organic farming techniques to both staff and students of an internationally renowned school for expatriate and so-called ‘upper-class’ children. After one year of working and teaching at the international school, he was hired by an international NGO to train women in organic farming near Makassar, South Sulawesi. He recruited his companion Harto to take over his position at the Bali school, and moved back to Yogyakarta, commuting to Sulawesi every other month. In late 2010, Ratih gave birth to their daughter Farah. Although Harvey’s skills as teacher and farmer were very much in demand with regard to the organic food wave that started pouring into Indonesian cities, the couple started running a small food stall where they sold organic vegetables during the day and fried noodles (which he approved of only reluctantly due to their limited nutritious value) at night. Although his life had fundamentally changed over the last five years, Harvey always kept close ties with the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak, who sometimes visited the organic gardens in order to get away from their bustling lives on the streets or their new families in the kampung communities. Despite having to cope with substantial adversities in the aftermath of Mt. Merapi’s devastating eruption in November 2010, which heavily affected the area around the organic gardens, Harvey and the other two organic farmers, whom he had trained together with Harto in late 2011, accomplished to maintain and even extend their organic gardens. With Harto, who became a husband and father, too, still teaching in Bali and Harvey moving into his parents-in-law’s house to focus on family life, the organic gardens were run by the two young junior farmers from Central Java. When Harvey was at the peak of his dreams for a prosperous and healthy life, his wife Ratih died from cancer in June 2012, leaving him with their two-year old daughter and his parents-in-law, with whom he did not get along well. With his unbroken dreams of introducing his street-related juniors from both the komunitas Bendoro and the komunitas Congklak to an ecologically and socially sustainable life, Harvey switched gears in 2012 when he started collecting recyclable waste near his new home north of the Congklak junction, where he lived with his daughter and parents-in-law. Together with three other friends who were also related to the Kommunitas Bendero, he opened a second hand vintage furniture outlet halfway between the city and the organic gardens at Mount Merapi. This way, he could continue working independently, sometimes sleep over at the shop and raise his two-year old daughter together with his parents-in-law.

Leaving the Streets

M ONCHI : M ARRYING A F AMILY Although Harvey and Monchi continued discussing joint ways how to guide junior anak Bendoro and anak Congklak to a life beyond the streets by renting a piece of land behind Monchi’s new ‘home’, their plans never transpired. After the shacks of the Congklak community had been burned down, Monchi moved to Bambangrejo, a kampung about 10 kilometers to the northwest of Congklak, into the rented house of his 15-year old girlfriend Dyah’s parents, who were also part of the komunitas Congklak (see Figure 2; chapter 4). Monchi slept in one of the two rooms together with Dyah and her seven siblings. The belakang8 of the kampung, which consisted of ten houses and huts, was located at the fringes of a prospering kampung (see chapter 3). None of the belakang houses had access to clean water, sanitation and sewage disposal, and only few of them had cement floors. The drinking and cooking water was taken from the little creek behind the hut, which was also used as the communal lavatory. Electricity was provided almost 24 hours a day, and the kampung residents also participated and contributed to the arisan (community meetings) and the gotong royong (mutual help) of the adjacent kampung. Monchi’s new home consisted of both refurbished wood planks and bamboo walls (gedek). The roof consisted of a mixture of bamboo, wood and tiles. Inside the house there was a TV, two beds with woven mats on them, a used cupboard and kerosene stove. Ronggo and Danar, who had no other place to go to in the weeks and months after the tragedy, spent their nights as guests at Monchi’s new home. The two brothers’ co-habitation was temporary, as they were not granted permission from the village head (Pak RT) to become permanent residents, because they were not married and had no proof of steady income. While Monchi was grateful to have a roof over his head, the new location also imposed prevailing social norms expected from a Javanese kampung. Monchi and 15-year old Dyah got to know each other at the Congklak junction. They knew each other since she was ten years old. Together with her parents and some of her siblings, she worked on the streets from a very young age, and grew up in the kampung bebas at Congklak. Monchi and Dyah got closer when he returned to Congklak after his times of excesses in Jakarta. Dyah was 13 years old at that time, and Monchi was 22. Together with her siblings and other girls and young women at Congklak, Dyah had spent her formative years in the komunitas behind the street junction. Similar to Monchi’s friends Habib, Irianto and Danar, who got involved in intimate relationships with other girls 8 | Belakang (Indon.): means both ‘behind’ and ‘backward’. Here it refers to the ten huts of the ‘orang belum mampu’ (the multiply marginalized strata of society), which were considered a part of the kampung, but were always referred to as ‘behind’ or ‘in the back of the kampung’.

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and young women from the komunitas, whom they later married and raised families with (see Figure 2), Monchi and Dyah started a pacaran in 2004. Her family also worked on the streets and was part of the Congklak community. Dyah’s mother would dress in rags and beg for money, while her father occasionally busked and worked as a hired laborer at construction sites. He would more often, however, sit in the shade, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and playing cards while ‘monitoring’ his children working on the streets. After they moved to Bambangrejo, he accompanied his children to the street junction in the mornings, and in the evenings he sometimes drove his wife and the youngest of their children back home on a motorbike, which was purchased on installment. The payment of these installments were frequent, and created diffuse networks of debt and dependence (utang-piutang); money was borrowed from a creditor (rentenir) at high interest rates (up to 50 percent of the actual loan) in order to pay back loans from other creditors. Besides spiralling debts, these economic maneuvers resulted in frustration, distress and suffering among the family members including Monchi, who was expected to act as provider for his new family. Dyah’s brothers Tirto (14 years old at the time of the Congklak eviction), Dian (12) and Heri (11) continued working at the street junction as buskers (pengamen). Their sisters Ratna (10) and Anita (8) both worked on the streets as beggars (pengemis) in the late afternoons after they returned home from school. Their little brother Monti (5) accompanied them whenever he was bored sitting around with his father and his company. Economic pressures, scarce material and kinship resources were not surprising in a family that lacked culturally esteemed family wealth (bibit), honorable descent (bebet), and professional background (bobot). But despite the children’s hard work, the economic pressures mostly affected them not their father. Malnutrition, the denial of a basic school education for most of the siblings, frequent diarrhea, fever and heavy coughs without proper treatment, affected everyone in the family but Pak Tanto. In contrast, he was rarely ill, without food, cigarettes, or drink, and neither busked nor begged in the rainy season. Those who suffered most worked the hardest: 10-year old Ratna, 11year old Heri, 12-year old Dian, their mother, and Monchi, who worked on the streets every day, except Sundays. In December 2004, Dyah found out that she was pregnant. Monchi wanted to take responsibility and become a caring husband and father, better than his own, so they married three months later. In the kampung, a wedding had to precede giving birth in order to avoid malicious gossip, further stigmatization and ostracism. However, Monchi, who had been recently diagnosed HIVpositive, had no idea how to cope with this, and so kept it to himself; Dyah did not know that her husband was HIV-positive. Their daughter Ary was born, six weeks premature, few weeks after Dyah and Monchi’s wedding. Feeling guilty

Leaving the Streets

(merasa bersalah) for not using prevention to protect his wife and daughter from HIV, Monchi tried to make it up to his young family by literally living for them. He reduced his work on the streets except when essential, and instead, started cycling the streets with a big rear basket rack on his heavy hand-me-down bicycle looking for scrap iron to sell. Besides providing for his daughter, his wife, her siblings and his parents-in-law as much as he could, he volunteered for a non-governmental organization (NGO) that he knew since his ‘heyday’ on the streets. The local organization appointed him as volunteering contact person in belakang Bambangrejo. Image 8. Monchi, the anthropologist and pet dog Chico.

In the front: Monchi’s self-made vehicle to collect scrap iron (photo by Ralf Göres, 2006). Thomas: How is your work as a scrap iron collector (pemulung)? Monchi: Working as a ‘pemulung’ is fun. You are your own boss. You ride your bicycle across the city, through different ‘kampung’ and sometimes over rice paddy. Sometimes you even see Mount Merapi on the way down to Yogya. And on some days I make more than 50,000 Rp9, on others only 30,000. Now that I have a daughter and a wife I need a steady income in order to provide them with food. There is nothing sadder than when your daughter is hungry and you have nothing to give. And nothing makes me more ‘malu’ than when I have to borrow money from neighbors or friends, because I have no food for my family. When I was still alone, it was not a big problem, because I just had to ‘ngamen’ for a little while, then I had enough for a meal and cigarettes. Or I just joined friends when they were eating.

9 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2006: $5 USD.

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Although the rules of conduct were less rigid in Bambangrejo than in the places that have been described by Beatty (1999), Guinness (1986; 2009) or Newberry (2006), kampung life still consisted of many formal and informal obligations, if integration and cohabitation in harmony (rukun) was aspired. There were formal obligations like joining the ronda (patrolling) every other night in order to contribute to neighborhood security, taking part in neighborhood meetings, holiday celebrations and their preparation meetings to only name a few. When asked how his new life in the kampung was, Monchi shook his head and answered: Meetings, meetings, meetings, rules, rules, rules. To attain integration into the kampung, Monchi kept adding communal activities to his everyday schedule. By means of his contacts to hospitals and NGOs he started to provide the neighbors’ children with access to cost-free medication and appointments at health practitioners in the city’s hospitals. Once the neighborhood found out that he was volunteering for an NGO, the head of the kampung assigned Monchi with the honorable duty to create an extra-curriculum for the neighborhood’s children in order to teach them English, and make Bambangrejo a fix stop on the route of the local PUSKESMAS’10 mobile clinic11 through the district. On the other hand, the NGO got better access to Bambangrejo’s alleged ‘children at risk’ and could implement their projects there. Again, Monchi functioned as an eminent broker between the NGO, the kampung authorities, the children and their parents. Whereas Monchi had previously described ‘being busy’ (sibuk) as adequate coping strategy in order to stay healthy, the over-burdening with responsibilities and his increasingly rebelling body made him visibly stressed and tired. His almost chronic diarrhea and increasing opportunistic infections decreased his body weight at times to 43 kilograms (with 48 kg being the already skinny average since he was diagnosed as HIV-positive). Although he knew that the 10 | PUSKESMAS (Indon.): acronym for ‘Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat’ – Community Health Center. Each city district comprised one community health center. These increasingly well-equipped health centers were important points of primary care. From there, patients could be referred to medical specialists in the hospitals. For the people who had access to the subsidized Social Health Insurance for the Poor (ASKESKIN/‘Asuransi Kesehatan untuk Masyarakat Miskin’), which was introduced in 2005 and replaced by the Social Health Insurance (JAMKESMAS/ ‘Jaminan Kesehatan Masyarakat’) in 2008 and targeted the informal sector and the poor, a direct access to hospitals was hardly possible. Except in emergency cases, the PUKESMAS were always the first steps to medication and/or hospitalization. 11 | Only few of the Community Health Centers could offer a mobile clinic, which visited marginalized communities once a week for both health prevention and treatment. YLPS Humana, where Monchi volunteered over the years, organized these visits to Bambangrejo.

Leaving the Streets

enormous workload might ruin him one day, Monchi had not found a solution yet how to escape these predicaments without being malu when facing his parents-in-law, the new neighbors or the komunitas. The reasons that made Monchi increasingly furious (emosi), confused (bingung) and distressed (pusing) were similar to the reasons that made him leave his home in Jakarta almost twenty years earlier: economic pressures and exploitative family structures, predominantly based on seniority and patriarchy. Again, the consequences of an exaggerated ‘machismo’ of his father-in-law and the heads of the new kampung painfully affected the most vulnerable. Monchi’s stigmatized identity as jalanan (he was neither a ‘local’ from Bambangrejo nor did he hold any favorable family wealth, honorable descent or professional background) put him in a subordinate social position both within the kampung and the family. In January 2007, Monchi, Dyah and Ary finally managed to move out of the house into their own home. Surprisingly, the small wooden Javanese house (limasan) was only 20 meters from Pak Tanto’s house. When I asked him why they did not move further away, he said that there were various reasons why his choices for the new place were limited: his wife did not want to move too far away from her parents, he himself felt pity (kasihan) for Ibu Ida and his brothers and sisters-in-law (adik-adik), and there were not too many places that would ‘accept people like us’ (terima orang seperti kita) in their kampung. Although Dr. Yanri and other activists continuously warned him throughout the years to take better care of himself, Monchi kept rushing through the various social fields of his vast networks brokering between the anak Congklak, his new kampung, and various NGOs, community health centers and hospitals. Monchi knew that he had to slow down and start focusing on his own and the well-being of his wife and daughter in the long run, but in early 2007, it was ‘not the time yet’ (belum waktunya), as he said. Then he added: I can’t stop too abruptly. It takes time to change. In Java you need to go slowly (alon-alon), step by step so that your steps are strong. If you run too fast, you will only fall. He kept repeating his credo in most of our conversations like a mantra. Monchi realized that he needed to change his way of coping with these new circumstances, because on some days he could neither contribute to the income of his new family, nor take care of his own health condition because he was too busy either looking for hideaways from his father-in-law or focusing on others’ pleas. At that time, Monchi frequently communicated being ‘capek’ (tired) and ‘pusing’ (confused, having a headache). Although he frantically contributed to community life and complied with the rules of the kampung, so that he and his family were tolerated there, he became more and more frustrated because he did not have the courage to confide his HIV-status to his wife and have his daughter tested. At that time, he repeatedly concluded our conversations under the big banyan tree with tears in his eyes and the words I think I’m going crazy, and I will burn in hell!

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At the back door of his new home, I asked Monchi one night in late 2007 whether his wife didn’t actually assume that he was HIV-positive. I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. I talk about HIV a lot with her. Sometimes I also bring leaflets and little booklets from NGOs and the clinic home. And I talk about the basic information. But I think she does not really understand yet. Because the rumors are so strong, I think. The fear of HIV is huge. Kampung people think you die straight away when you have HIV. And people are very afraid of you once you have it. And because I still look healthy, I think she would not believe me anyway. But if the neighbours found out, they would chase me out of Bambangrejo.

A few days later, I asked Monchi under our ‘curhat-tree’ how he faced such overwhelming adversities. His pale face lightened up, he smiled at me, breathed out heavily and then said: It is amazing. In the evening when everybody sleeps, I sneak out of the house and if I have some cigarettes left, I sit down in the little hut in the middle of the rice fields behind our ‘kampung’. Then I look at Merapi’s red lava flow and have a smoke. This is where I get my inspiration (inspirasi) and calm down (bisa tenang). When I return to the house I usually read a novel. Then I can really slip into the story and feel myself in it. My thoughts are triggered by a word or a sentence in the book. But in these moments, I can really feel the book, and I feel close with those friends and family who are far away or who have already died. This is when I feel comfortable (nyaman).

K RIS : A N E PISODE OF ‘C R A ZINESS ’ After the Congklak tragedy in April 2005 Kris moved back to his family’s house and started working at construction sites. Sometimes, he was still ngamen and slept near the bengkel, especially on Saturday nights when the komunitas gathered to eat and drink together. I had not met him since I returned to Yogyakarta in July 2006. Our reunion four months later was initiated by a short SMS text from Monchi: “Hi ‘crazy man’! Please come to my house, something important happened. All the best for you and peace on every single of your paths, Monchi.”12 When I arrived in Bambangrejo a few hours after I had received the text, he waited for me at the entrance gate (gapura) of the kampung. Let’s go, he shouted, while the motor of my pitung throbbed. A second later he sat on the back of my aching motorbike smiling. Let’s go, I will tell you on the road.

12 | In his sophisticated sms-language the original reads briefly: Hai orgil! Tlng mn k rmhq, d yg pntng. Vsbll, M.

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Then 24-year old Kris was taken to a mental health institution because he went ‘crazy’ ( jadi gila) six weeks before. The anak Congklak assumed that his ‘craziness’ resulted from a frequent combination of alcohol, pills, and magic mushroom consumption. After he had been isolated in a ‘cell’ for two weeks at an asylum near the mountain resort of Kaliurang, he escaped during the warden’s lunch break and walked the 20 kilometers home the very day when he was supposed to be transferred to the instution’s third class section.13 There he was supposed to share a small room with six other patients. After spending one week at home Kris had recovered and seemed better, Monchi assured me. But for the past two days he had become strange (aneh) again. His temporarily improved health condition developed into another phase of ‘real madness’ (gila benar), as Monchi described it. Kris’ mother had called Monchi in the morning and asked him to calm down her son and – if possible – bring him back to the institution. I was shocked. I remembered Kris as a very funny and entertaining young man. In 2001, we became good friends after a few weeks of testing each other’s waters. Every time we walked down the streets near the house at Parangtritis beach, he hugged me, gave me exaggerated ‘amorous’ looks, shook his hips and pretended that I was his so badly desired bule girlfriend in order to make me malu. Kris was a real ‘malu-machine’. Because he had permanently involved me into embarrassing situations with passer-bys or other anak Congklak, I tried to avoid him as much as possible. His friends had always called Kris ‘crazy’ (gila) in an endearing way, but ‘real madness’? What would that be then? – I wondered. When I asked Monchi what I had to expect, he just pointed at Mt. Merapi, which revealed its majestic summit while we were driving between lush green paddy fields on the way to Kris’ kampung, before he smiled and finally replied: You have to see it yourself, it is hard to describe. When we reached the kampung, the neighbors had already assembled. They whispered in each other’s ears, some pointed their fingers at us from afar. Right after we had parked the motorbike in front of Kris’ family’s house, Kris turned the corner, seemingly returning from one of his strolls through the neighborhood. He was sweating and breathing heavily. After he had hugged me intensively, he didn’t let go of my hand and squeezed it firmly. Monchi intervened, smiling. I 13 | In most Yogyakarta city hospitals, rooms were divided into the categories VIP, 1 st , 2nd and 3 rd class. The rooms differed in their costs, equipment, service, the quality of the treatment, and the frequency of nurses’ and doctors’ visits. Patients, who were treated based on the subsidized Social Health Insurance, were referred to 3rd class. In case those were occupied, these patients could be upgraded to 2nd class. In the 2nd and 3 rd class section, water bottles, towels, syringes, soap, or blankets needed to be either rented or purchased. In 2nd class, patients shared a room with two to six patients, sometimes separated by curtains, 3 rd class could accommodate up to twelve beds per room.

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told you, he said. Kris stared at me with his eyes wide open. He seemed to look through instead of at me. His body moved in an awkward way, almost like a robot. There was nothing left of his smooth motions and his wit. Hey, how are you? he asked me. I am fine. How are you? I replied. Kris smiled, took a deep breath, before he literally spit his breath out again only a second later. He later continued exhaling and spitting every 30 seconds during our two-hour visit. Then he looked at me again and said: Mbah Maridjan14, Chris John15, West Kalimantan tribe, South Sumatra, Central Java… Chris John! – Yes, I replied startled. He kept repeating these words over and over again. Monchi looked at me and smiled before he took Kris by his arm. They smiled at each other, Monchi tried not to avert his eyes from him: Do you know who this is? Kris looked at me for a few seconds, then smiled and said: Thomas. He hugged me again, and we walked into his house hugging each other. Kris’ mother was waiting for us inside. His younger brother, who was only nine years old then, and his father also welcomed us, but apologized and left the room as soon as we sat down on the worn-out sofa, which was covered with old newspapers as cushions. His mother apologized that she could only offer us boiled warm water to drink, and not tea, coffee, or biscuits. She explained that since her son had returned home the whole family could not work and earn an income, because they had to take care of Kris and keep him at a distance from the agitated and frightened neighbors. His behavior struck me as awkward in many ways. He had an incredible craving for water to satisfy his permanent thirst. When he started drinking, he almost finished a whole one and a half liter bottle of water within only a few seconds, spilling half of it over his face. His eyes were always wide open, and he started to laugh out loud during a conversation that was not funny to others, just to perform Muslim praying rituals a moment later. He stood up from the sofa, crossed the empty room towards his chamber in robot like movements and mumbled that he had to pray (harus sholat). After having entered the room, he came out again after only a few seconds, sat next to us, and repeated the words Mbah Maridjan, Chris John, West Kalimantan tribe, South Sumatra, Central Java… Chris John. After he drank another bottle of water, which his mother had already prepared, he sat down, stood up again, went to pray, came out of his room again. He did not get tired of it. After my initial irritation, his mother, Monchi and I started discussing what we could do to make him and his family feel better again. His mother was in favor of treatment by a local healer (dukun). In case this treatment would not help, she proposed to institutionalize him again. Ibu 14 | Mbah Maridjan: famous spiritual ‘caretaker’ ( juru kunci) of the Merapi volcano. Died in a pyroclastic flow during the volcano’s last major eruptions in October/November 2010. 15 | Chris John: Indonesian boxer (former WBA featherweight champion).

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Wijila was a very polite, warm hearted and – inferring from her gaunt physical posture – hardworking woman. Obviously she was completely overstrained regarding the ‘strange’ (aneh) behavior of her eldest son. She did not use the word ‘gila’ (crazy) like his friends did. Not only did she feel deeply malu facing the neighbors, but also she, her husband, and their two other sons were afraid (takut) of Kris. Instead of locking Kris into his room again, as her husband advised her to do, Ibu Wijila stopped working as a hired laborer in the rice paddy and looked after her son 24 hours a day. After a few days she started to feel tired (capek) and had surrendered (pasrah). With nobody else to turn to, she was looking for advice from Monchi, because she knew that he was one of Kris’ best friends. Sorry, sorry, Thomas! (Maaf, maaf, Mas Thomas), she requested me not to be angry ( jangan marah!) after Kris had spilled a whole bottle of water over his head, while holding my hand, and asking me whether we would finally go to Australia to get married there. I hoped he was making fun of me, as he used to, but after he addressed me as Sandy, I sensed that he was not joking. The ‘malumachine’ seemed out of control – full error, Monchi said and smiled. Sandy was an Australian social worker volunteering for an NGO the years before. Kris did not stop talking about her after she returned to Australia in 2004. Ibu Wijila threw her hands up against her head and started laughing. God, I surrender (Ya allah, wis pasrah), she whispered before she burst into laughter and hugged me in tears. Monchi and I joined in her laughter, all three of us shaking our heads. Kris smiled to some (for the three of us) invisible person, walked to his room and prayed again. We left after two hours. After we returned to Congklak in late afternoon, Monchi called a community meeting. Everyone agreed that Kris needed to be hospitalized again as soon as possible. When we arrived at Kris’ house to pick him up the next morning, his mother felt relieved (lebih tenang), and agreed. On two motorbikes – one with Monchi and Kris, on the other Ibu Wijila and I – we drove to the Congklak junction, where eight other friends already waited in a hired minibus, pretending to go on a holiday trip to Mount Merapi. Because Kris was terrified of going back to the mental health institution, lying to him seemed the only way to get him on the bus, and hand him over to experienced doctors and psychiatrists again. The anak Bendoro neither mocked Kris nor pitied him. On the contrary, when we were on our way to the mental hospital, they cared for him very compassionately: they hugged him, stroked his hair, tried to involve him in conversations, and even laughed politely about his strange jokes. Only the young ones, who would not let the seniors prohibit them from accompanying Kris, watched him from a distance and tried to avoid eye contact. When Kris saw the hospital from afar, he started panicking and raging. Ngamuk!, the smaller ones shouted in panic. Kris refused to get out of the bus, so he had

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to be carried by Ronggo, Monchi, and Irianto, while his arms and legs kicked into the air and the bundle of their three bodies. After we registered at the front desk and accompanied Kris to the emergency unit, a doctor put him back into the isolation cell. The cell, which looked like a small cage from a zoo, was located inside a gloomy room next to a colossal wooden chair, where Kris was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) the week before. After we insisted that Kris was not treated with an ECT again until we further discussed it with specialists, the nurses and the head of the psychiatric unit finally signed our agreement. The journey back to Congklak in the minibus was far from depressing or sad. You will be next! You will be next! – No, you will be next, you crazy man (orang gila)! I know, why you stayed in the bus all the time, because they would have kept you there straight away! You are all crazy!, they shouted at each other laughing ecstatically. Instead of lamenting, worrying, and discussing Kris’ condition, the whole bus seemed to laugh off its disturbance collectively. It was impressive to witness how they cared for Kris on the way to the hospital, and how the stressful situation was turned into jokes on the way back, and later at the hangout next to the busy street intersection, collectively silenced. When I asked Gianto after we had returned to Congklak why everybody was so funny and not terrified (kagèt) inside the bus, he replied: What else would you do? It’s better to joke and laugh instead of being depressed, right (‘Ya udah, mau gimana lagi? Lebih baik ngawur daripada depresi, toh’)? When I asked Monchi how he felt about the decision to bring Kris back to the hospital, he replied: We all help each other. I think Kris actually knew, that we were going to the hospital. You know, even if he was very afraid of the electric shocks, and we promised not to bring him back there, we really had no other choice, right? It is really funny in a way, that Congklak becomes more and more experienced with ‘crazy people’ (orang gila). Suharto just had been released from the same mental institution two weeks ago. He was in a similar condition like Kris is now. He also mixed too much alcohol, mushrooms, and pills. And then he ran naked around Bambangrejo, trying to kiss all the neighbors. At first it was funny, but after he didn’t stop that for days, we had to bring him to the hospital, too. He stayed there for three months. Now he is almost healthy again. But he has to take his medicine routinely. If he doesn’t, who knows?

Two weeks later, Kris escaped from the hospital for the second time. Although he was in a better condition, he was still far from recovery. Instead of admitting him into the mental health institution for the third time, his mother had decided to keep her son at home and try to treat him with the assistance of a local traditional healer (dukun) and a ‘therapy’ of voluntary construction work at the local mosque, which had been destroyed by the earthquake six

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months before. After some bureaucratic detours within the village, in the local municipality, the PUSKESMAS, hospitals, and pharmacies, we received his prescribed medication for the following two months free of charge. Yet, the doctors were pessimistic concerning Kris’ full recovery outside regular psychiatric treatment. The official diagnose that was communicated to us was ‘skizofrenia’ (schizophrenia; see Good/Subandi/DelVecchio-Good 2007). Whereas the anak Congklak ascribed Kris’ mental illness to his long-term use of alcohol and pills, the psychiatrists hinted to traumatic experiences in relation to the earthquake, which occurred a few months earlier that triggered their patient’s symptoms. Whereas the anak Congklak referred to Kris as ‘gila’ (crazy), his mother used the more halus term ‘aneh’ (strange). The widespread Indonesian term for mental illness would be ‘sakit jiwa’, vaguely translated as ‘ill soul’ or ‘illness of the soul’. Kris started to work at the local mosque under the supervision of the local kiai16 who was a dukun (traditional healer) at the same time. Every morning, he purified Kris with water from a holy well that was located next to the mosque. The dukun was very optimistic in regards to Kris’ recovery, as the water had already saved General Sudirman from dying of tuberculosis just before his attack on the Dutch in 1948, when Yogyakarta was still the capital of the newborn Indonesian nation. It seemed that both the medication and the supervision of the kiai contributed to the recovery of Kris. Although he appeared almost healthy (hampir sembuh), his movements and behavior were still ‘strange’ at times. Besides contributing to the gotong royong at the village mosque, which the kiai considered more as a form of occupational therapy than primarily a contribution to the construction of the new mosque, Kris started to work at other, smaller construction sites in his kampung and thus started to contribute to the household income. After one month, in which his mother supervised his routine medication intake, everyone was confident that he would recover soon. A few days later, I received an SMS text from Kris’ younger brother who started taking him to his work at construction sites in the city as an assistant. He asked whether I could stop by (mampir) for a visit, because the whole family was appalled (kagèt). Kris started to become strange (aneh) again. He relapsed (kumat). When I arrived at their house together with Monchi, Kris’ mother was frantic with worry (khawatir) since her son had not returned home for two days. Then he dropped by the house that morning and shouted at them and also their neighbors. While screaming ‘nonsense’, Kris threatened to beat up his brother if he refused to give him money. The anak Congklak had told Monchi that Kris stopped by at the bengkel only a few hours before. He had asked his friends for cigarettes, and once he received 16 | Kiai or kyai (Javan.): expert of Islam; also a leader of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren).

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one, he broke it and started to laugh hysterically (histeris). As Ronggo and Irianto had told Monchi, he repeated this ‘joke’ in every single one of his encounters. The strangers who did not know him became ‘angry’ (pada emosi) and started to beat him up. After he heavily insulted his friends, who had rushed to his aid, he headed back towards his kampung. They said that he was drunk (mabuk) and smelled like alcohol. In the evening, Monchi, Ronggo and I finally managed to find Kris near the Congklak junction. He was sleeping next to the river, where he had lived before their kampung bebas was burned down. After he was sobered up, we discussed his options. Kris agreed that it was best if he went back to hospital until he felt better again. He was released from the hospital one month later and the doctors attested his full recovery. In the months after his release his mother and younger brother supervised Kris’ medication. He took his medication routinely and has not relapsed since. He started working at construction sites together with his brother Trianto, until they could save enough money to open a small shop where they sold mobile phone vouchers (pulsa) and second-hand mobile phones. At the age of 28, he married a young woman from a neighboring kampung and became the father of two girls in 2010 and 2011. The family lives in his parents’ house together with Kris’ mother, father and youngest brother Hari. For two years he has worked at various construction sites and since developed into a sturdy young man. His mother continued working as a seasonal worker in the surrounding paddy fields.

J IM : C ONFRONTING S TIGMA The Fear, Shame and Stigma of Street-related HIV-AIDS Narratives Similar to the year 2004, after Nasri and Oberon had died of AIDS-related illnesses, the affected komunitas were shaken again by the death of Henky, a former member of komunitas Bendoro in April 2007. Similar to Oberon’s case, the collective witnessing of 29-year old Henky’s painful suffering resulted in shock and insecurity. Fatima, his pacar, who was training to become a nurse, was also diagnosed HIV-positive shortly after his death. As a collective response, concerned NGOs, and HIV-activists closed ranks and organized workshops and voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) free of charge17. Together with the governmental PKBI, two NGOs, a team of doctors and nurses 17 | Between 2006 and 2008 both voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) and anti-retroviral therapies (ART) were free of charge, as the government of Indonesia and its stakeholders of the health care sector including NGOs were furnished with a grant to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by the The Global Fund.

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from the PKU Muhammadiyah18 Hospital Yogyakarta, and three street-related communities, we organized a two-day workshop and VCT. The concerted action was simultaneously the birth of our described collaboration between activists, doctors, academics, counselors and the street communities (JPKJ), which later fueled into the foundation of the Rumah Sehat Lestari (RSL). HIV-AIDS triggered fear among the communities, and the protagonists and their friends preferred to avoid and ignore (cuek) the issue as far as possible. Gama Triono, RSL volunteer and then head of the division for ‘Street Children and Youth’ at the local PKBI Yogykarta, explained in an interview: “I think that that their knowledge about HIV is still limited, that the virus can only infect ‘troubled people’ (orang-orang yang bermasalah) like homosexuals, sex workers, drug addicts, and that a handshake, a hug can transmit HIV. That creates a climate of fear (takut) and hostility (musuh) towards the infected person. Because until today, the image of HIV is still attached to a skinny body, skin cancer, an image, which is very frightening. I think that this is also a media campaign, which is misleading. This is what makes them/us fear HIV (Itu yang buat kita ketakutan dengan HIV).”

Many communities were increasingly concerned about the actual dangers of the virus, not the gossip surrounding it. Notably due to the rising number of AIDS-related deaths in street-related communities all over the city, and the promotion of the issue by HIV-activists and NGOs, increasing knowledge fueled slowly into the narratives within the komunitas. What are you afraid of when you think of HIV?, the counselor of our workshop asked the 25 participants, both young men and women from various communities, during the collective counseling one month after Henky’s death. ‘Death’, ‘To be neglected by friends’, ‘To be thrown out by one’s family’, ‘The expensive medication’, ‘The decrease of self-esteem’ (harga dirinya turun), ‘To infect others’, and last not least, the omnipresent and by HIV-activists frequently used and widely reproduced term ‘stigma’, were the most frequently articulated answers. Next, our skilled counselor switched from Bahasa Indonesia to Javanese (ngoko) and also integrated some bahasa senang expressions in order to ngobrolngobrol (‘chat’) and focus on the participants’ articulated fears. The ice was broken when he handed around an illustrated book on sexually transmitted 18 | Muhammadiyah is the second largest Islamic organization in Indonesia. The organization was founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta as a reformist socio-religious movement. Although Muhammadiyah members are often actively involved in Indonesian national and local politics, the organization is not a political party (www.muhammadiyah.or.id). Although its doctrine veered towards conservatism under the rule of its contemporary leader Din Syamsuddin (since 2005), it has still devoted itself to social and educational enterprises.

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diseases (STD). Within only a few seconds the dirty jokes about each other made way for an intense discussion about various infections like herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea of ‘others’ who ‘had told them that they were infected’. After a lively discussion in which young men and women were separated, the first session closed. Before lunch was served, the counselor wrote on the blackboard: ‘Do not stigmatize yourself, do not stigmatize others!’ (Jangan buat stigma sendiri, jangan buat stigma terhadap orang lain!). Besides the articulated fear (takut) that hindered many tekyan from conducting an HIV-test or seek aid in case of illness, their community pride was a crucial factor, which impeded sustainable strategies of coping with HIV and other illnesses. When I asked Jempol why he and the other anak Bendoro never took part in cost-free HIV-workshops he explained to me: Look, would you like to spend a day or even two with prostitutes, junkies, waria and gays, then have your picture taken and be labeled as ‘high-risk’ (berresiko tinggi)? No, thank you. I am really not interested to go there and so we better stay away from these events.

34-year old Poni, another tekyan, who lived both at Congklak and at Malioboro before he got married a second time and became father of a then 4 year-old son, argued: These events are not good. The only ones who profit are the NGOs themselves, so they get more money. If you want to make a workshop then only for us (kita-kita aja), so we can talk more openly. During our meetings prior to the workshop, Monchi reasoned that we should only invite friends from the komunitas, because otherwise no one would attend because of their gengsi (‘prestige’/ ‘avoidance resulting from prestigeembarrassment’). Our friends are ‘annoyed’ (kesal) of being put into one group with all the others like prostitutes and the like, he affirmed. We took up the issue during our workshop. In the afternoon session of the first day, the counselor started to explain that the ‘high-risk’ policy might lead to a stigmatization of certain communities, like sex workers, ‘waria’, homosexuals, injection drug users, and ‘jalanan’, but that on the other hand, it was necessary to spread the knowledge among these groups. Why? Poni asked. Harvey took up his role as senior and countered: Come on, we don’t have to be hypocrites (munafik). We all know that we sometimes do naughty (nakal) things among each other. It is better to seek knowledge about HIV instead of ignoring (cuek) it! The counselor took up Harvey’s argument and started to explain that the ‘high-risk’ policy referred to particular sexual practices in certain communities, not the communities themselves. He addressed the tekyan in the right manner. The wall of silence surrounding HIV and AIDS started to crumble slowly, so that the myths surrounding the virus could be tackled carefully. At first, we asked the participants to tell us what others had told them about HIV and AIDS. The presented stories circled around HIV-infection, contraception and

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sex practices on the one hand, and the avoidance and stigmatization of ODHA on the other. The following were the most prominent statements: “A friend of mine said that only prostitutes contract HIV because they have sex with so many different people.” “If you take antibiotics before you have sex, and wash your penis with liquor after sex with prostitutes, then you are safe, they say. Is that true?” “If you have sex with a prostitute, you can avoid infection if you take an antibiotic after sex. A friend of mine says that if your penis itches, or it bleeds, it helps if a young woman cleans it with her salvia. Is that true?” “Only bad people get HIV, it is a message from God. Not true, is it?”

Besides the above-mentioned statements themselves, it was interesting to see how the participants emphasized their proficiency by ostensibly ridiculing and mocking the statements of ‘uninformed’ and ‘backwards’ kampung people and clerics. They stressed their own superiority in terms of knowledge, tolerance, and progress: “When I was at the hospital to visit Henky, there was this nurse who did not want to touch him. I told her that it was no problem if she touched him because it does not infect you with HIV – stupid!” “The believers are really stupid. They think that you get HIV from eating from the same plate with an ‘ODHA’. Stupid, right?” “The people always think that you should isolate an ‘ODHA’, and that even drinking from the same glass makes you sick. But they need our help, right’?

Before we closed the first day of the workshop, the counselor wrote two words on the blackboard: cuek (indifference)

peduli (to care for)

He turned towards the participants and asked: Imagine you are HIV-positive, what do you want your friends to do? – Peduuuuli! the young men and women

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responded collectively. Asyyyyiiiik (Great), he replied, before he turned around, faced the blackboard, and crossed out cuek

and underlined

peduli.

Enjoy your meals! The first day of the workshop was over.

Anthropologists are taught to pay attention to the discrepancies between what people say they do, what they do when observed, what they do when presumably unobserved, and how this all changes with regard to the titulation and who the who the encountered person is. This wonted discordance was particularly striking in the context of the stigmatization of HIV-AIDS. The protagonists had understood which narratives NGO-activists and health providers expected from them, but their skillful anticipation of appropriate responses to a both tangible (in terms of witnessed deaths of friends) but at the same time abstract idea of the responsibilities, the tentative pain and suffering related to the pleasures of sex and also intravenous drug consumption hardly translated into everyday actions. Triono explains: “Well, at first, they [the street-related communities] only knew a little bit, but after we discussed the issue over and over, I think that they gained a lot of knowledge. And they actually know how HIV is transmitted. I am very sure that they know. But how they control their behavior in order not to get infected, that is the bigger problem. That also has to do with the supply of condoms on the streets, and the insight that they really need them. Or in other words, they know, but their awareness to protect themselves and others is still very limited. […] The difference between knowing (tahu) and being aware (sadar) is not satisfying yet.”

When the medical team from the hospital arrived, most of the participants opted against being tested. At first, the paramount reason not to be tested was the ‘fear of syringes’ (takut jarum), which provoked excessive laughter and mocking especially among the young women, who all opted for a test. After realizing the threat to their masculinities and some ‘embarrassing’ discussion, the men’s excuses switched to blaming the nurses who would ‘definitely be disrespectful’ towards them and were only after their blood in order to ‘make more money’. 20-year old Bangor from komunitas Bendoro said that he was annoyed by all the people who just dropped by at their hangouts and started talking about HIV, and that all the ‘jalanan’ needed to be tested in order to prevent the komunitas from the virus. Jempol was particularly clear on this: It’s really funny how everybody tells us that we need to get tested for HIV, but most of the time, when I ask back whether the persons themself had been tested already, or whether

Leaving the Streets they would join the test, they usually replied that they would not need to be tested. How should we trust such a person? Funny, isn’t it? That means that we actually know more (lebih pintar) than them!

After further discussing the young men’s lack of confidence in counselors, and being teased by Gita, Rara, Tami, Ambar and other young women who had joined the workshop, they considered to participate. The mobile VCT-team built up their mobile laboratory in one of the rooms. A few minutes later, after we filled up our coffee, tea, and water cups, and the counselor started to explain what steps were advised to be taken after an HIV-positive diagnose, Bangor shouted: If I was positive, I’d better get a lethal injection (disuntik mati)! Danny joined in and stated that he would never get tested, because it would be better to be ill, and not know, instead of knowing that he was HIV-positive. It’s better to die instead of being positive!, he added. Jempol and Harvey intervened as seniors. They asked Bangor and Danny how it was possible that they were afraid of a simple blood test if they were brave (berani) enough to live as tekyan. Harvey brought out into the open that he was sure that Henky, Oberon, Nasri and all of their deceased friends, who were watching ‘from above’ wanted them to know about their HIV status and take up joint action. Otherwise, Monchi joined in, we could just wait until the HIVbomb explodes and kills us all. And then you, you, you, you and you would be next! He pointed at Bangor, Danny, and the other anak Bendoro who were hesitant to join. Ultimately, they all agreed to join the VCT. Just after Harvey had entered the counseling and testing room first, a young man entered our workshop venue and asked whether he could join. He was skinny. He coughed, he smiled and he nodded his head, sometimes he pulled a joke, when addressed, but otherwise he remained silent and closed his eyes. He introduced himself as ‘Jim’. Jim arrived together with Utomo, a member of the RSL group. Other senior anak Bendoro, who did not attend the workshop, had informed him the day before, that Jim was severely ill and needed assistance. When Utomo had asked them over the phone what was wrong with Jim, they simply replied: His body is finished (badannya habis). Just like Henky. The results were presented in individual counseling sessions two days after the workshop. After Jim had stepped out of the counseling room, he lay down on a woven mat at the other end of the small yard, where we had been seated. He stared at the sky. Then he closed his eyes and hid his face under his right arm. After a few moments of solitude he got up again and joined his friends from the komunitas. He just sat there, while the others jumped around, seemingly relieved from previous anxieties and worries. After we had lunch together, the participants dispersed into various parts of the city. Jim left with Utomo on his aching motorbike. We briefly shook hands, smiled at each other, bowed our heads and off he was.

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Jim’s behavior struck me as almost identical to the responses to the positive diagnoses I had witnessed in the cases of Fatima, Irianto and his wife Tika. All four of them, both the meen and the women, acted in composed and inconspicuous ways. Although they remained more silent than others after they had received the positive diagnose, they blended in, smiled and replied politely if their friends addressed them. A subtle quietude, distancing and detachment from the current situation were the ‘motions’ I could observe. When I talked to them weeks after their diagnoses, all four described their initial reaction as ‘putus asa’ (‘a state of despair’).19 After all the anak Congklak, the anak Bendoro, and the young women had left, the counselor and his assistants sat down at a table and began with their evaluation. They told me that one test result was positive, but due to confidentiality reasons the counselor could not tell me the name of the person. Without trying to be prejudiced, I had to think of Jim.

A Chronolog y of Enduring Pain, Suffering and Death JUNE 8th 2007. I received an SMS from Pram, who was one of the counselors of our workshop three weeks before. He wanted to meet me together with Jim somewhere on Jalan Malioboro. After walking to a quiet place in a little park off the crowded main street, we sat down and talked about the weather, the city of Yogyakarta, and the memories that Jim attached to the little park. It once was like a ‘home’ for him, a long time ago before he went to prison for the first time in 2001. In a moment of disquieting silence, Pram suddenly looked at me and said: Thomas, I think Jim wants to tell you something. Jim looked at Pram, who returned his piercing glance with a smile. Jim started to talk very directly without circling around issues (mutar-mutar): I want to tell you something. I am HIV-positive. He waited for a moment, and then he looked at Pram again and said: That’s what you meant, right? Pram nodded. It felt awkward. Before I could react, Jim continued – again without the typical mutar-mutar – and told me that his greatest concern was that his upcoming wedding to his newly engaged girlfriend, who lived in East Java, might be canceled on behalf of her and her family due to the diagnose. He had not told her yet that he was HIVpositive, because he did not want to talk it over on the phone, he explained. They got engaged only three months before and the wedding was already arranged between her and his older brother’s family. After a few seconds of silence, he added that he considered leaving her in order to protect her, and avoid being malu.

19 | Putus asa (Indon.): literally translated: ‘cut off hope’.

Leaving the Streets Jim: What should I do? Pram: Like it or not (mau enggak mau), you have to tell her. And running away leaves a very bad impression of you and your family. J: But I am afraid that she will leave me when I tell her that I got HIV (kena HIV). P: That’s her choice then. But if you respect (menghormati) her, you have to tell her.

A few moments later Pram stood up and left us alone. There we were, two overstrained ‘strangers’ not knowing yet that we were facing arduous weeks to come. JUNE 9th. Jim lived in a very small, windowless room of six square meters in size. The former storeroom (gudang) was located behind the kitchen of a backpackers’ homestay in the Malioboro area. The hot and muggy room contained a mattress, a sarung, a pillow on the floor, and a poster of Jim Morrison on the wall next to where the pillow was. The hostel was owned by an elderly couple from Central Java, and managed by their eldest son Mas Ndut, who was once one of Jim’s closest friends. Due to his degrading health condition, he was not expected to pay for the little room. Besides his concern about his fiancée and the fear of not being allowed to marry her, the 29-year-old was agitated by his disappointment about his friends, who had not shown up since he fell sick and could not leave the house anymore. Out of insecurity and in an attempt to distract his frustration, I asked him about the poster on the wall. He sat up and grinned: Jim: I really love ‘The Doors’. Jim Morrison. Do you know why? I love them because it is the best music when you are high. You can really feel the music then. I even had the Jim Morrison book and all the original CDs. While I was in prison, ‘The Doors’ kept me alive. I always listened to their songs by myself, in my head. Crazy (gila), isn’t it? Thomas: Yes, crazy. But you are a crazy man, aren’t you? J: Yes, you are right, I am crazy. But you are also a crazy guy, aren’t you? Or why else would you be here with me, when all my friends are gone? T: Come on, your friends are not gone. They will come. Just give them some time. J: Yes, maybe you are right. But you know, I really started to lose faith in them when I returned from prison. I was so much looking forward to listening to ‘The Doors’ again in full volume. Not only in my head. Do you know what happened? They took away everything. All my original CDs and the book were gone. The other things, I didn’t have much anyway, didn’t matter that they were gone. The only thing left was this poster of Jim Morrison. They used it to decorate the hallway of the homestay. They’re all dogs and criminals (Asu, bajingan semua)! You know, you should never trust an Indonesian. They are not trustworthy. Indonesians are stupid (bodoh). They cannot accept if you are different. I could never tell an Indonesian friend of mine that I am HIV-positive, because everyone would blame me and think I’m a ‘bajingan’ (bastard). Indonesia is the land of

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JUNE 10th. Jim wanted to go on a trip out of the city. We decided to visit Harvey and Harto at their organic gardens near Mount Merapi. They knew each other for many years, so Harvey offered Jim to stay at the mountain village, and help them with minor tasks at the farm as soon as he got better again. After we had visited their fields, we had tea at their house in the little kampung. Jim had to lie down because he felt very exhausted. Although he did not want us to see that he was in pain, he must have suffered during our walk to the fields. Even though it was ‘only’ a 10 minutes walk. Jim did not tell his friend that he was HIV-positive. When Harvey asked him about his cough and his extreme weight loss, Jim answered that he had tuberculosis and had just started therapy. It was astounding how compassionately Harvey cared for his friend. He made him tea, encouraged him to come and stay with him and Harto in the mountain village where life was healthier. He hugged him tenderly when we walked through the fields. JUNE 11th. After we had lunch together at a nearby food stall we returned to Jim’s room. Walking became more and more difficult for him and his cough got still worse. He obviously felt very weak, and he was happy when we were back in the cool hostel lounge, where we could sit down on the leather couch. This time we did not sit opposite, but next to each other. Shoulder to shoulder we started to talk. Jim told me, that it was not only his friends who did not show up, but that he himself also avoided contact with others since he felt sick. He feared that his friends would turn their backs on him once they found out that he was ill. Jim kept repeating that his confession to me was a secret and that I was not allowed to tell it to anyone. When I asked him whether he wanted to talk to someone who was also tekyan and HIV-positive, he remained silent and ignored my question. In addition to keeping his illness a secret, his rapidly declining health condition, and his fiancée, he was worried about money. Besides being enggak enak (‘uneasy’, ‘embarrassed’) to leave his room, he was too weak to work on the streets or to nongkrong with his former friends. His savings were used up, and he was malu to ask Mas Ndut for money again. I liked Jim’s directness and honesty. It was incomparably easier to handle than the usual mutar-mutar. When I asked Jim what he had eaten in the two and a half weeks since we had seen each other the last time after the HIV-test, it became obvious that his diet consisted of mainly instant noodle soup and ‘fast food rice’ (nasi kucing). His meals did neither contain essential nutrition, nor were they cooked or stored adequately in order not to contract bacteria in regard of his severely enfeebled immune system. Being down to 45 kg at height of 160 cm, heavily coughing, and feverish during the night and most of the day, his body’s defenses were

Leaving the Streets

lacking antibodies to fight typhoid or other bacteria effectively in case of an infection. As he felt very weak, and tried to avoid walking in the sun or be outside his room during the day in order not to meet any of the guests of the homestay, he seemed not to have eaten at all on some days. Moreover, after his tongue was infected with fungi, eating and also drinking became more and more painful. And once Jim finally could eat because he had borrowed some money, the pain in his tongue was bearable, he had no fever, and managed to walk outside, intensifying diarrhea often sabotaged his strenuous endeavor. On some days Mas Ndut, who lived on the third floor and visited him in his room once a day, offered him food, too. Although he was actually too weak, Jim said that he needed to find work and earn money in order not to be dependent on his friend any longer. After none of his friends had visited yet, Jim became bitter and decided that he managed to survive alone. He told me to stay away, because he did not want to burden me any longer: I feel uneasy (enggak enak) to ask you or Mas Ndut for food and money all the time. JUNE 12th. Jim was nervous because it was the first of his anti-retroviral therapy (ART). Together with Pram he had been to the hospital in the early morning to get anti-diarrhea blockers and start with the heavy medication. We met to have a late breakfast together at a food stall near Jim’s homestay at around noon. When we were back in his room, we discussed the therapy’s side effects and promised to be honest to each other during the next weeks. Jim called this the ‘Morrison style’. Come on, tell me the Morrison style! he would shout at me now and then, when he did not believe that I told him the truth on doctor’s opinions, his chances to survive, or when he thought I was being ‘too Javanese’ (terlalu Jawa) again. When I stood up to leave the room and visit Monchi to ask for advice concerning Jim’s situation, he looked at me and started joking: Tom, the economic crisis hit me (aku lagi krismon)! The doctor told me this morning that I should take my medication after meals. Funny, some doctors don’t consider that some people just don’t have enough money to buy food. If I have no money for food, does that mean that I do not have to take the medication?

He smiled again. After maghrib prayer time around 7 pm, he was to start with the therapy. The medication needed to be taken every twenty-four hours sharp. Jim affirmed that he did not need any support and that he would take the medication by himself. So we made an appointment for the next morning and I left. In the evening, when I passed Malioboro with my rusty Pitung on my way back from Congklak, I took a turn and stopped by at the homestay to check

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whether Jim took his medication. It was around 10 pm. The reception was closed, and the airy lounge was locked. I made my way through the back of the kitchen to Jim’s room. He was lying on his mattress, squirming in pain. I knocked at the open door. He looked at me, and said (his face distorted with pain): Aduuuuh, my whole body shivers and I can’t breathe. My lungs hurt. My stomach also hurts. I am thirsty but there is no water left. And I cannot stop thinking of my fiancée. I am afraid, really afraid (takut, takut sekali). When I called her today, she told me that she wanted me to come to her place in East Java and get well there. But you see, I can’t, and I do not want to either. All these questions again, and again. And I do not want to bother her mother and her family.

Jim panicked. I boiled enough water for the night and put it next to his mattress. We did not really talk to each other this evening. We were both overstrained with this situation. I sat next to him and held his hot feet until he fell asleep. At 3 am I left him alone. JUNE 13th. When I visited Jim in his hot and muggy room in the morning, he looked devastated, bending in pain, rolling back and forth on his mattress, which was soaked with sweat. He was throwing up and went to the toilet every ten minutes or so. He suffered from extreme diarrhea, stomachache, headache, high fever, and a terrible cough. As if that wasn’t enough, he suffered from fungi in his mouth and on his tongue, which had become open wounds over night, and thus made it almost impossible to eat or drink. He muttered: Hey, Tom. I am sick (aku sakit). I couldn’t sleep last night. I had nightmares (mimpi buruk). And I want to get away from here. Everybody keeps asking whether I might be HIV-positive. I do not want them to ask me again. And I also do not want any friends to come here.

He was in extreme pain and distress. He experienced terrible side effects of the ARV medication. I tried to calm him down and told him that this horrible phase, which could last for a few days, was part of the therapy. I promised that he would get better again once his body got used to the medication. He was exhausted, and he must have been sick of my mantra that things would get better again. I felt helpless, and we needed support. But whom should we turn to? Jim’s friends seemed to have disappeared, and Pram and the other counselors seemed to be overworked with their own patients and clients. After Jim tried to sleep for three hours, in which he went to the toilet again and again, we decided to finally go to hospital.

Leaving the Streets

The homestay was located in the middle of a clean, prosperous, and conservative urban kampung with narrow little alleys (gang). During late afternoons these were filled with children who played together, and men and women who chatted, smoked, fed their birds in cages, watered their plants or simply just stared (bengong). Because the little alleys were so narrow, even a pedicab (becak) could not get through to pick us up. Jim was terrified to walk through the kampung while it was still bright, because everyone could see in what a bad shape he was. We decided to wait until magrib around 6 pm, when the sun had set and most of the neighbors were either praying at home or in the mosque. When the adzan20 finally resounded in the setting sun we made our way through the kampung, where still enough ‘witnesses’ had gathered in front of their houses and watched us – hugging each other – passing by in slow motion. Jim gave me a slight push, so that he started walking alone without any assistance. Nuwun sewuuuu, Paaaak (‘Excuse me, may I pass, Sir’), he addressed the oldest man of the ‘crowd’, asking for permission to pass in formal and polite Javanese ways. He smiled, bowed slightly, and nodded his head, when passing others in front of their houses, and walked slowly towards the sidewalk of the bustling Malioboro street, about one hundred meters ahead of him. When we reached the end of the kampung, he turned around the corner and immediately held on to me and sat down on the sidewalk. He was sweating and shivering. But he smiled at me. I smiled back. When we arrived at the hospital, and got off the taxi, Jim started performing an almost perfect cara Jawa again. He was offered a bed in the emergency unit where he could lie down after we had registered and completed the bureaucratic essentials. There were four beds at the unit, each separated by looped mint green curtains. The light was even brighter than the neon-lamps people would have in their houses. It seemed like a quiet day for the emergency doctors. There was only one other patient who was surrounded by his comparably large family. Outside the hospital, numerous muezzins were dazzling the city’s streets with their prayers. Jim closed his eyes, and fell asleep while we waited for the doctor. The doctor looked at me and asked whether I was a friend of the patient before he installed an oxygen mask and connected it to Jim’s nose. It was a ‘dokter muda’, a physician who still had to pass his final examinations. I wondered why he was continuously mumbling and talking to himself. At first, I thought it was a prayer. Then I realized even under his plastic cap and mask that he was nervous. His hands were covered in plastic gloves up to his elbows. They were shaking. Finally, I could understand his mumbling: I can’t do it, I can’t do it… I looked at Jim who had woken up. When the doctor tried to inject the syringe of the IV into Jim’s right arm, his hands were still shaking and so were his lips: Aduh, I can’t do it. Aduh, I can’t do it. I can’t find the veins. After 20 | Adzan (Indon.): the prayer of the muezzin.

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he tried a few times and Jim finally took his arm away in pain, the doctor ran off. Crazy, Tom. The doctor is even more afraid of syringes than I am! Do you think it is because I am HIV-positive? He looked puzzled. I tried to cheer him up with jokes about the doctor. After politely asking for another doctor at the front desk several times, a senior doctor arrived at Jim’s bed thirty minutes later. Besides discriminating comments about Jim’s tattooed arms and legs, he fixed the IV within seconds. Jim fell asleep again and I needed a break. I had just lit my cigarette near the car park, when the doctor suddenly appeared next to me. I offered him a cigarette. He refused. Smoking is unhealthy, he replied. Of course, he was right. After the usual ‘interrogation’ where I was from, what I did in Yogya, and finally, how I was related to the patient, he sat next to me on a bench. I told him that I was a friend, and that I was teaching cultural anthropology at the renowned Gadjah Mada University (UGM). I often pretended to be an assistant professor in order to upgrade both Jim’s and my own social esteem during the weeks to come. It turned out that the hospital staff treated a young lecturer and his friends better than just an activist and his tattooed, HIV-positive ex-junkie friends. In the face of my low profile look and wearing flip-flops on my feet, he seemed surprised. He asked me whether I knew what was the actual cause of Jim’s illness. I knew that he was hinting towards Jim’s HIV-status, but refused to answer, and just nodded. He asked me again. This time with an insulting undertone: Doctor: Does ‘Mister Foreigner’ (Pak bule) really know about the illness of his friend? Thomas: Yes, I know, ‘Mister Doctor’ (Pak Dokter). He is very sick, needs medical treatment and emotional support. He asked a third time: I mean, do you know why he needs medical treatment? The cause of his devastating condition? T: Yes, I do. I know about his condition and I know about the virus. D: And… you do not mind? T: Why? I do not understand.

He started shaking his head and laughing sarcastically, while starting to teach me his view of HIV-AIDS as a doctor and faithful Muslim. You know that this disease has no cure, don’t you? At least there is no medical cure for it. Do you know why? – Because it is God-given. The only way to become healthy again is through God, the prophet and our religion. If you believe in God, and live by the rules of our religion, then you will get cured. God gives this disease and God takes this disease. You only have to believe in him and trust him.

Leaving the Streets

Even though I knew that the local Muhammadiyah ran the hospital, I was quite shocked about the merging of religious and medical perspectives. He continued: Look, when I look at your friend there, with all his tattoos, I am not sure whether he believes in God. I can tell you here and now that he will not become healthy again. Even more so, I do not give him more than a few weeks to live. So don’t hope for too much.

I stopped breathing and gasped, but remained quiet. I hoped the doctor would just leave when he was through with his advice, but he didn’t. Even worse, he asked me for my opinion on his thoughts. Anytime, but not now. I have to look after my friend, I replied politely. I was stressed and tired and the least I wanted was to get involved into another discussion about the relationship between HIV-AIDS, God and religion. After we spent more than three hours at the emergency unit, without any further notice from the nurses or doctors, they finally brought Jim to the 3rd class intensive care unit (kamar isolasi). Everyone was wearing masks and plastic gloves, and nobody dared to touch Jim. JUNE 14th. Utomo from the RSL group came to visit Jim. His fever decreased, the diarrhea and the vomiting had stopped. But still, his heavy cough and the pain in his stomach remained. Although he was still unable to eat, the IV nourished him. The doctors had decided to interrupt the ART after only one day, because the side effects were too dangerous. As his hemoglobin level was alarming, the doctors arranged a blood transfusion. The hospital organized two liters of blood, which were given the same day. I felt relieved that Jim was monitored and treated by professional medical staff now. The nurses and doctors did not conceal their repugnance towards Jim. He was put in a dirty, dark and hot (the air condition was broken) room without windows at the very end of a corridor, hidden around a corner. The walls were stained with mold. The nurses did not talk to him in those rare cases when they entered his room. Sometimes, they refused to change the IV, at other times they denied to serve him fresh drinking water. Every time we asked for a towel, drinking water, or for assistance when the IV needed to be changed, the nurses made us wait, ignored us, or simply did not listen, when we talked to them. It was frustrating for all of us. I have strange dreams, Jim said after he woke up around midnight. I can’t sleep. What do you think the dreams mean? – What are you dreaming about? I asked him, lying on the woven mat on the floor, next to his bed. I am dreaming about my friends who are dead already. I can see them clearer now. They smile at me and want me to join them. Silence. We both stared at the moldy ceiling. What does it mean? And then there is another dream. A man visits me. He looks like you,

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a bit taller still. And he comes to take me away from here. We both closed our eyes. Exhausted, we fell asleep. JUNE 15th. Finally, there was laughter. Life filled the small room, which was overflowing with seniors from the Bendoro and other Malioboro communities. As the room was too crowded to enter I turned around again and sat down on a bench in the hallway. There I met Suki for the first time, a pengamen from a small komunitas, who performed near the campus of the Gadjah Mada University (UGM). I knew him only by sight from the busses where he and his friends performed. It turned out that he was a close friend of Jim before the latter went to prison. Suki and Jim’s fiancée Pama – she was expected to arrive in Yogyakarta late afternoon – had contacted and invited the friends to visit Jim at the hospital. Suki became one of the most important friends and carers for Jim during the following month. Our shared suffering (sama-sama menderita), as he put it, made Suki join the RSL team and become one of its volunteers. He sat there on the bench together with Utomo. They greeted me heartily and started to make jokes about me: how stressed I looked, and that it would be better if I went straight home to sleep and take a shower before I started to look like Jim. They burst into laughter. I could not believe that they were so insensitive and were not apt to understand the graveness of the whole situation. I was angry at them. But as soon as I looked into their laughing faces, I could not help but sit down next to them and join their laughter until all three of us burst into tears. The laughing and joking in situations of extreme distress has always impressed me – not only among the tekyan. In times, when I myself was stressed, self-centered, self-pitying, disappointed, angry or furious about nurses and doctors, the tekyan managed to mirror my rather ‘German’ way of coping with distress by seemingly accepting instead of constantly fighting adversities. When our laughing fit had finally stopped, I looked at Utomo and asked him: Why are we laughing? – I don’t know. But what else can we do (Ya udah, mau gimana lagi)? he replied. Jim’s fiancée Pama arrived in the late afternoon, when the crowd was gone again. Although Jim was terrified that she might leave him, he told Pama that he was HIV-positive only a few moments after she had entered the room. Pama was a 27 year-old believing Protestant from East Java. Her mother was a nurse in a small hospital and her father had died the year before. Pama had studied accounting at a Yogyakarta campus between 2001 and 2005. Pama assured Jim that she would always stay with him and marry him no matter what happened. She had stayed with him when he was in jail twice and she would stay with him now. In the month to come, she was his best friend, best nurse and best fiancée in spe in one person. She endured his anger

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fits when he got frustrated, served him food, and waited on him almost every night, sleeping on a woven mat or a little sofa chair next to his bed. JUNE 16th. Jim was allowed to ‘return home’ (pulang) the next day, if his health continued improving as it had during the last three days. He still had difficulties eating even the smallest portions of vegetable soup or plain rice, but the high fever, the headaches, the diarrhea and the vomiting had ceased. The side effects of the ART were gone and he was able to walk again on his own without the assistance of others. Before we left hospital, I asked Jim whether he would agree if I complained to the director about the staff’s condescending demeanor towards him. Relax (santai), Tom, he said smiling. What do you expect? This is a religious hospital. What do you expect, when they have to treat a fully tattooed ‘criminal’ (preman) free of charge? Relax. JUNE 17th. Two days later, Jim was discharged from the hospital despite his obviously weak condition. After Pram and two other activists had arranged the payment by means of their NGOs’ access to the Social Health Insurance (Jaminan Kesehatan Sosial) system21, which was subsidized by the local Yogyakarta government, there were still some minor bureaucratic issues that could not be covered and had to be solved before Jim was allowed to leave the hospital. Because the settlement of the bureaucracy took half a day, Jim had to stay until the next morning. His mood had dropped again. So the next day Jim would finally be allowed to ‘return home’ (pulang) – but where would he go to, if there is no ‘home’? Pama signaled that she wanted to take Jim to her family’s house in East Java. Unfortunately, it was ten hours by train and bus from Yogyakarta, and we did not know whether the hospitals there would be willing to treat Jim in case of another emergency22 . Pama guaranteed that her mother would love to have Jim around and care for him. But Jim was afraid that her family would not accommodate him once they found out that he was HIV-positive. He wanted to stay in Yogya, although he had no place to stay.

21 | Compared to other autonomous local governments, both the Municipality of Yogyakarta and to a lesser extent also the Special Region of Yogyakarta (DIY ) provided its residents and local NGOs with special education and health programs. Since this is practice has made way for a general health system reform, which targets the insurance of every Indonesian citizen to provide medical treatment free of charge, and the structure of the Indonesian health sector is not the primary focus of this section, I can only refer to Dwicaksono/Nurman/Prasetyo (2012). 22 | The ‘adequate’ treatment of HIV-patients was practically limited to city hospitals. Even some city hospitals on the so-called ‘outer islands’ could sometimes not guarantee access to ART, medical and social support.

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Jim made clear to us that the homestay was not an option for him. We needed a place where people would regularly cook or provide healthy food, shelter, additional medication, company, and take Jim to check up visits at the hospital. Furthermore, he would need support to face the painful side effects of the ART again. Besides economic reasons, a crucial obstacle that discouraged potential caretakers to accommodate Jim was their anxiety to become a target of gossip in the face of HIV’s contagious stigma. After discussing the remaining possibilities of either the open house near Malioboro, where some of the younger anak Bendoro could spend their nights, or one of the rooms of the eco-social project, Pama and Jim finally moved into our house at the outskirts of Yogyakarta. My wife Victoria and I took turns cooking and taking care of Jim when Pama was not around or needed a break and stayed at one of her friends’ places in the city center. Our two fellow coresidents did not mind either, but wished not to be involved in the caretaking, as they were busy themselves. Finally, they left the house for a week to give Jim and Pama the space they needed. Jim recovered continuously. We went for short walks together, bought vegetables and fruits at the nearby market, had dinner at a nearby warung, played cards, listened to The Doors and watched TV together. JUNE 21st. Three days later his nightly cough fits became more frequent and his condition worsened again. Every time he returned from the toilet he had to pass a wall with a mirror. Whenever he felt unobserved, he inspected his body, his face, and his tongue. Sometimes he covered his face in his hands and remained in this position for a while, before returning to his mattress under the mosquito net. When I asked Novianto, a counselor from our group for caring advice, he encouraged me to work on Jim’s attitude towards his illness. He needs to get out of this denial (denial) and self-stigmatization (bikin stigma sendiri), he summoned. We had an appointment at the hospital at 7 pm. Jim was tested positive for tuberculosis, so he needed to start another therapy as soon as possible. JUNE 22nd. Jim finally agreed to visit Dr. Yanri, Monchi’s doctor for a second opinion. Besides teaching at campus, she headed various AIDS commissions and was the director of Yogyakarta’s biggest – 15 square meter ‘large’ – HIVAIDS clinic. We got to know each other at Monchi’s wedding in 2005. I had explained parts of Jim’s story to the doctor on the phone in the early morning. She appraised his condition as ‘critical’ and ‘alarming’, and received us in the clinic at 9 am. We sat down behind a little curtain, and before the doctor started her examination she gave a basic counseling on HIV, what treatment opportunities were available, and what the best diet would be in order for Jim to get better. She was not only the first doctor who explained the effects and

Leaving the Streets

side effects of the ART, but she was the first to touch Jim without gloves. After measuring his weight and examining him, the doctor inspected Jim’s stomach. She was worried that Jim’s permanent stomachache was not caused by the ART or the OAT23, but because of further infections. She decided to take X-rays the same day. She gave us a letter (surat rekomendasi) for the laboratory and asked Jim whether he had any questions. I have already accepted my status (aku sudah menerima statusku), was his short reply. He was not very cooperative. He disliked being examined again and silenced every of the doctor’s efforts to talk about HIV-AIDS. He did not want to hear the words. And he expressed his disappointment in me, because he felt that I betrayed him. I had promised him that we would not go back to hospital so soon. After the three of us discussed the therapy strategy for the next week, the doctor took me aside and expressed her concerns about Jim not being treated in hospital. In the case that his condition did not improve over the weekend, we were strongly advised to bring him to hospital again. JUNE 23rd. Jim’s health condition got worse. Pama and I decided to go to see Novianto again. Jim stayed in the house together with Victoria. When we arrived at the VCT clinic of PKBI, the counselor took Pama into his office straight away. She took me by the hand and dragged me into the room with her. He did not talk about an HIV test, but he explained to her what was at stake now for Jim and for her. Novianto tried to slowly convince Pama to conduct an HIV test. He was not tired of repeating what he had repeated so often already: Do not stigmatize HIV yourself! How do we want to reduce the stigma towards people living with HIV-AIDS, if we keep feeding the stigma ourselves? Pama turned towards the counselor, thanked him for the brochures he had given her, and said that she was not ready yet (belum siap) and wanted to concentrate on Jim’s recovery before taking a test. Since she had arrived in Yogyakarta, the words ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ did not cross her lips. Neither did Jim, Victoria, nor myself utter these letters in each others’ presence. We assumed that not mentioning the ‘unspeakable’ helped us to cope with the collective insecurity that was increasingly taking hold of our house. JUNE 24th. The heavier Jim coughed, the more often he had to rush to the toilet, the higher his fever raised, the less sleep he got, and the less he could eat, the more intense the atmosphere became between the four of us. Insecurity, desperation and the fear to make even the tiniest – or a major – mistake that could turn out fatal, made our own behavior inside the house increasingly awkward. We cleaned the house repeatedly out of fear it was not clean enough. We boiled water and food for hours in order to make sure no bacteria or germs 23 | OAT (Obat anti tuberculosis) (Indon.): Tuberculosis therapy.

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could affect Jim’s fragile immune system. We added supplements to Jim’s very small portions of meals, but his health condition continued to worsen almost by the hour. The nightly coughing fits were getting longer and the intervals of breathing at ease became shorter. He hardly slept during this night and the night before. In the early morning, when I found Jim in front of the mirror, he mumbled without further looking at me: I have these strange dreams again. And I cannot sleep. So, my brain is going crazy, I have the strangest thoughts and I cannot control them. His fever went up to 40° C (104° F). His inability to eat more than very little bites might have been a side effect of the various medications and the tuberculosis therapy, but we were not sure. Whatever the cause, Jim was in great pain. After consulting with Dr. Yanri, we decided that Jim needed to be hospitalized again. We were exhausted, and Jim became more and more frustrated. As our own health was weakening, too, there was no other way out. JUNE 25th. Jim could hardly walk by himself. This time, Jim did not have the energy to perform his Javanese ways to the neighbors. We took a taxi, and headed straight for the emergency unit (UGD 24). After getting registered within a few minutes, Jim was put on one of the beds in the emergency unit, got an IV, and the nurses took a blood test. Jim’s decrease of body weight from 45 kg three days before, when we visited the doctor for the X-rays, to 41,5 kg, ‘relieved’ us in the sense that we felt we had made the right decision by taking him to hospital. The doctor, a colleague of Dr. Yanri, asked routine questions about his symptoms, but did not ask about his tattoos or his ‘profession’ in relation to HIV-AIDS as another doctor did in Henky’s case two months earlier. Three hours later they managed to provide us with a 3rd class bed. We were surprised when we were led to Jim’s new room. Until then, all of our friends who had suffered from AIDS and were hospitalized were all isolated from other patients. Now, there was someone else in the room. An elderly couple sat on a sofa watching over their waria (‘transgender’) daughter in the bed. From the observable symptoms and the medication written on the whiteboard over her bed it was obvious that she was HIV-positive, too. After the nurses, who accompanied us to the room, had left, Jim took me aside and begged for a single room. He told me he did not want to share a room with strangers in his poor condition. But with all other beds occupied Jim had to get used to the other people in the room. The young waria in her late twenties was suffering from the side effects of the ARV. Jim got very upset about her ‘wining’. When both her parents were out of the room for once during the four days to come, Jim whispered to me: Does she think that she is the only one who is suffering around here? What is 24 | UGD (Indon.): unit gawat darurat.

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she whining (nangis) about? She is getting on my nerves (nyebelin)! He was further uncomfortable with the parents who were ‘camping’, with food, mattresses, and pillows dispersed all over ‘their’ side of the small room. Compared to German hospitals, in Indonesia it is the family that is expected to care (nengok) for the patient while in hospital. What had struck me most when I started my involuntary ‘hospital ethnography’, was the lack of space, the heat and the noise in the rooms caused by the crowds, which sat, slept, smoked, ate, cried, or just stared (bengong) while sitting on their woven mats in the sick rooms, corridors, waiting areas, or under the outside awnings of laboratories, emergency units or specialists’ clinics. The second and third class division of the five different hospitals where I had spent dozens of nights and days reminded of family gatherings. Relatives of patients traveled from villages remote and near to the hospital, leaving their work to neighbors or other relatives for indefinite periods of time, until the patient was allowed to leave hospital again. Families or other relatives were also expected to pay for medication, hospital fees, the doctors, and food. Because patients were only allowed to leave the hospital when all the expenses were covered by either themselves or a combination of assistance from NGOs, the social welfare department (Dinas Sosial) or the health department (Dinas Kesehatan), hospital stays could end in even greater dramas and economic Waterloos than the illness itself had produced. Whenever an anak Congklak was hospitalized, the community organized a system of taking ‘shifts’ (shif-shifan) to care for them and avoid feelings of loneliness and isolation. When I asked why the Bendoro community was so cuek with Jim, Jempol answered that everyone was afraid to come to the hospitals again after they had witnessed Henky’s suffering and shocking death only three months earlier. Furthermore, Jim had turned his back on the community years ago, so there was no real solidarity for him. The permanent sight of other patient’s family and friends might have not only been ‘annoying’ in the face of the other’s crying and screaming at night and his own suffering, which Jim wished had not been witnessed by other strangers, but the presence of other patients’ families might have permanently reminded him of his own ‘lack’ of family or a close circle of friends. The parents of Jim’s ‘roommate’ were very polite, but avoided answering even the most innocent question about themselves or their child. I tried to break the silence a few times but communication beyond the almost ritualized Where are you from? Is this a friend of yours? Have you eaten? We’ll eat now, or Please enjoy your meal, never took place. We continued ignoring and keeping each other at a distance through the ritualized politeness of the Javanese ways. The ‘spoiled neighbor’ (manja), as Jim called her, almost died the same night. Her parents had to call the nurses in the middle of the night, who injected anti-fever medication, and tried to relieve her coughing fits. At one point, we thought that she almost suffocated, but in an incredible effort the

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doctors brought the 32-year old back to life. Her parents were crying, and the whole corridor was alerted by the doctors’ frantic activities. The next morning we encountered the parents’ smiling and content faces again as if nothing had happened. We did not manage to break the silence between us until the young waria was released from hospital three days later. JUNE 27th. Jim’s hemoglobin level was alarming. He needed another – his fourth – blood transfusion. His stomachache got worse. His fever went up, then down again. The doctors assumed that he had malaria, but the blood tests were negative. The fungi in the cavities and on the tongue got better with medication. But he got skinnier and skinnier. We delivered the self-organized blood donations to the clinic’s laboratory around noon, because they had to be screened first. Although the situation seemed urgent, there was no notice regarding the transfusion until late afternoon. After five hours of waiting we asked the nurse in charge whether they had received the blood, which was stored for Jim. The same nurse who advised us to look for blood donors ourselves seemed not to remember. She turned her back on Pama and me and started chatting with one of the doctors in charge. We tried to get her attention again by a plain, simple and polite Excuse me, ma’am, sorry… (Permisi, Bu…maaf, Bu). She ignored us. It was the same nurse that had refused to touch Jim since his first day in hospital, and she continued making derogatory remarks about his outer appearance and giving him demeaning looks when she entered his room. Jim named her ‘the witch’ (si nenek sihir). I asked again, this time with an angry tone in my voice. Pama looked at me and gave me a serious look. Slowly, the nurse stopped talking to the doctor and finally looked at me, then at Pama. Pama lowered her gaze and smiled politely. Then the nurse looked at me. I gave her an angry look. She put her head back, examined me from head to toe – and back again – and bawled at me: Whaaaaaat (Apaaaaaa)? Drama was rising. In a usual encounter, I would have addressed her politely although she had ignored me, and she would have asked me politely and smiling: Can I help you (ada yang bisa dibantu, Mas)? I might have replied: Oh yes, thank you very much. Sorry, if I may, I would like to ask for the blood we organized during the day (Oh ya, ada Bu, terima kasih banyak. Maaf, Bu, kalau boleh nanya, darah yang kita cari tadi siang kira-kira sudah bisa diambil belum)? Instead, I volitionally ‘insulted’ her subtly, by not addressing her as Bu (senior woman) but as Mbak (younger woman). As she was older than me and in charge of the ward, this was a lack of acknowledging her authority and showing my respect and deference (hormat) towards her: How can we get the blood that we are waiting for? (Mbak, gimana caranya untuk ambil darah yang sudah ditunggu?), I asked calmly. While we exchanged subtle insults by adding or leaving out

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particular prefixes, suffixes, and personal pronouns, Pama still stared at the hospital floor. She did not dare to look up, but finally took a glimpse at the nurse, thanked her, Thank you, ma’am (Terima kasih, Bu), and headed back to Jim’s room. The nurse ordered me to the section of the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) laboratory inside the hospital in order to pick up the blood there. Back at our ward, I politely begged the nurse for her assistance. In hospital, I thought to myself, and especially in situations of increased emotional distress, social interactions that were to always aspire to harmony (rukun), could transpire as sequences of subtle micro power battles. Patients, their relatives and friends either complied with the doctors’ and nurses’ regime and surrender to their authority, or they better did not interact with them at all. Again, similar to the social worlds outside the hospitals walls, gossip and silently complaining behind authorities’ backs often remained the ultimate ‘weapon of the weak’. Just after I returned from the laboratory, Pama received me in front of Jim’s room with a smile. Meanwhile, Suki had also dropped by to look after Jim. He smiled when Pama started to complain: Crazy, Thomas. The nurse is really rude (kurang ajar). Does she want Jim to die or what? After all, she works in a hospital, doesn’t she? She’s very unfriendly! We should report her to Novianto or Dr. Yanri. Good, you told her off ! When I asked Pama why she did not oppose to the nurse’s (and also doctors’) condescending conduct, she looked at me and said with a smile, pulling up her shoulders: Malu, Mas Tom. JUNE 28th. Jim had high fever fits. He needed to be cooled with wet towels. When Victoria asked the nurses at the front desk for tissues or pieces of cloth that we could use for cold compresses, she was ignored. Jim was lying on his bed, staring at me with his eyes wide open. His whole body was shivering and he seemed to be glowing. Victoria and Pama wetted towels, which we had borrowed from another room and ran back and forth between the sink and Jim in order to cool his temperature down. His fever reached 40.3° C, another critical situation. A doctor entered the room. I recognized him. We had met earlier that day at the ward when I was filling in some forms. There, he asked me where I was from and how I was related to the patient. I explained that I was Jim’s pendamping (aide) and friend. The doctor responded quite sarcastically, Oh, that means Mas Thomas is a ‘veeeeery’ good man. I did not know how to interpret his reaction and decided to go back to the room. This time, the doctor entered the room with the same smile that I could not make sense of earlier. As we continued compressing Jim’s shaking body, he approached Jim’s bedside and started examining him with his looks. He took the last tissue out of the box we used to make the cold compresses between his thumb and the index finger and touched Jim on the forehead with the tissue. With his hand moving forward to the patient, his head seemed to move further and further back. Jim smiled at him and nodded

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his head to show his ‘respect’ (hormat). The doctor smiled. Then he shook his head and said: Oh, that is some temperature you have, yes? Jim replied: Yes, Sir. He smiled politely while the doctor ignored his temperature and continued to scrutinize Jim’s body. He opened Jim’s blanket, so that his kemaluan (genitals) and his thin body were fully exposed. Jim was still shivering from his fever. The doctor made a disgusted expression with his face but did not stop staring at him. Jim kept his polite smile. The doctor started to laugh pretentiously, while saying: You like tattoos, don’t you? Or why is your body all covered in paint? Jim’s smile froze, but he remained silent. The doctor continued asking: You like narcotics, don’t you? Jim shivered while we were still busy compressing his legs and forehead, circulating around the doctor. Who is this Mister Thomas? What relationship do you have with him? he asked. Jim replied that we were friends. Aaaaahhhh, friends. Mhm, he replied and laughed, shaking his head ostentatiously. Still with wet cloths in our hands, we were astonished by the doctor’s behavior towards Jim. It was not long until Victoria threw the doctor out of the room. She chased him to the ward and told him that we would report his unacceptable behavior to the Yogyakarta AIDS Commission25. We continued making cold compresses for another hour, before the doctor in charge came and prescribed a higher dosage of the fever medication. I knew Jim could be modest, thankful, and master his emotions vis-àvis authorities. And yet, I was surprised by his calmness in this particular situation. He was severely sick and he was in great pain, but still he showed his hormat and displayed malu to an unhelpful and insulting person, because he was a doctor. JUNE 29th. Thomas: Hey boss, how are you feeling today? Jim: I am fine. How are you feeling? T: I am all right. Thanks. Strange person yesterday, that doctor. Wasn’t he? J: Hm. Yes he was very impolite (enggak sopan). He was really rude (kurang ajar). What did he want from us? Was he one of these ‘young doctors’ (dokter muda), who come here every day and always ask questions? T: Do they come here every day? J: Yes, they do. Sometimes they come here even three times. They all ask the same questions, look at me as if I was a monkey and then disappear again. It is like a zoo in here. They only ask stupid questions and then they leave. Some of them only stare at me. I don’t want them to come anymore. Can you tell them not to come any longer? Crazy dogs.

25 | The report was presented at a meeting between hospital directors, NGOs and the Yogyakarta AIDS Commission in late July 2007.

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During the visits that I had witnessed, the ‘young doctors’ – medical students in their mid-twenties wearing white doctor’s overalls – entered the room in a group of four or five, and asked questions about Jim’s social background and his way of life. The ‘brave’ ones even had the audacity to ask about Jim’s past drug career. Jim had always answered all of their questions politely. To them he was ‘the living ODHA’ with all the symptoms defined as AIDS, real tattoos and a drug career. Jim did not only have to cope with his rebelling body, but was exposed to blatant and overt stigmatization by doctors, nurses and groups of medical students in most of his daily encounters even within his own hospital bed. How would a recovery be possible in an environment where those who are supposed to heal stigmatize their patients? I have learned that the preference of traditional and religious healers, the fear of hospitals and the skepticism towards doctors is not a matter of ignorance or lack of education. They are products of harmful individual and collective experiences of hospital encounters. JUNE 30th. Although Jim’s older brother had repeatedly refused to visit, Pama was optimistic that he would not decline her this time. After all, she was almost part of the family, too. Disappointingly, he rejected Pama again in a short phone call by referring to his wife’s ill grandmother who needed full attention and care. Pama was desperate. Jim coped with his brother’s ignorance in his refined ways: Well, fine. No problem. Just let him be (Ya sudah. Enggak apa-apa. Biarlah)! Ignoring his brother, Jim started talking about his mother, who had rarely surfaced in our conversations before. If he had one wish for free, then he would love to see his mother again. If only my mother was here, I would become healthy very fast. I am sure about that. But I do not know where she is, and my brother does not know either. I miss (kangen) my mother, he murmured before he finally fell asleep. JULY 2nd. Again, Jim’s condition got worse than the day before. He lost weight again. His body weight dropped to 40 kilos. Pama, Victoria, Suki and I realized that we had lost our vitalizing effect on Jim. He refused to eat, drink, and he did not want to take his medication either. It became a very intense situation of distress for everyone involved. We literally got ‘sick of each other’. Since Pama arrived in Yogyakarta over two weeks ago, she had spent almost every day and every night with her fiancé. Jim stopped listening to her when she told him to drink or eat. Whenever she did, he got angry. He got angry at me again (aku tadi dimarahi lagi), Pama told me during our lunches in the hospital canteen. We tried to laugh it off. We had reached our limits and we needed more support. When we tried to see the psychologist of the hospital’s HIV-AIDS unit, her assistants told us that she was ‘busy’ (sibuk). When we tried to involve activists from NGOs into our daily routines, they told us that they were ‘busy’, too. Jim’s ‘case manager’ Pram replied to our text message (SMS)

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and apologized that he was ‘busy’. Every time we invited friends to come to the hospital so Pama, Suki, Victoria and I could have some time off, they were ‘busy’. Everyone was ‘busy’. I felt alone as a group. My despair increased when Jim became ever more frustrated, angry and desperate himself. He started blaming us for small things, and complained about everything. It was mostly Pama who was the target of his anger and frustration: Why is the water you gave me so cold? Why did you put me in this stupid hospital? What does this stupid smile on your face mean? You can’t wait until I’m dead, right? We were caught in a downward spiral of anger and frustration. After almost one month of intensive care, we needed a timeout and Jim needed new faces to regain energy and motivation (semangat). We finally managed to force Jim’s old friends from Malioboro to hospital by calling on their tekyan pride. For the days to come, there were four more people who took turns in visiting Jim. Two of them even spent a night at the hospital. JULY 3rd. Jim was suffering. He could hardly eat, but had to swallow twentyfour different pills per day (see below) excluding the intravenous antibiotic. Not only the doctors were worried. Figure 3. Transcript of the medication board next to Jim’s bed.

JULY 7th. On his 30th birthday Jim started to recover. He stood up from his bed and sat on the sofa for half an hour. He smiled again. We celebrated with a big chocolate cake, and he even had a small piece of it. He was still in pain, and had difficulties to eat and drink, but he was on his way to regain strength. And after one month, we finally had a ‘care team’. It consisted of three friends from Suki’s komunitas, two NGOs and four former friends from komunitas Bendoro. Since

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Victoria and I had to leave to Jakarta for a week because of visa and research permit matters on July 9th, this was just on time. JULY 9th – 15th. We called Pama every night, and she assured us that Jim was recovering with every single day and night that passed. One night, she could even laugh about her and Jim’s experiences with a psychology student from an NGO, who volunteered to look after them for one afternoon. She explained on the phone: This Buco is a very funny person. He really did not know what to do. He sat next to Jim and tried to hold his hand and talk to him. But Jim, of course did not want his hand to be held. Buco was really nervous. His hands and his voice were trembling. In the end, we needed to calm him down, not the other way round. Laughter. Thomas: Aduh. How often did he come? Pama: Two times. He stayed for about an hour. But one could see that he was very confused (bingung). And when he did not know what to do anymore, and he felt uncomfortable (enggak enak), he just left. He was very different from Mas Novianto. I felt sorry for him (aku merasa kasihan sama dia). He was really too nervous (grogi).

JULY 16th. When I arrived at the hospital at 10 am, I felt rejuvenated and I was looking forward to seeing Jim, Pama and Suki again. Once at the right corridor, I saw Pama from afar. She was crying and panicking. She dragged me by the arm and pulled me into Jim’s room. Look, look, what happened! Look, look, see yourself ! Jim was in a very critical condition. Suki sat on the sofa in the corner, as he usually did. We nodded and greeted each other. He did not smile. Jim was shivering. His body was strangely shaking. His eyes were wide open. When he saw me, he smiled. I sat next to him and tried to talk with him. He wanted to talk, but the words would not come out of his mouth. His lips moved, but there was no voice. He seemed in panic. He had difficulties breathing. Pama was completely out of her mind. She stood in the middle of the room and cried and cried. She looked at me with tears in her eyes. Suki accompanied her out of the room. Then, the doctors finally came. Jim’s body started almost jumping up and down on the bed. The doctors tried to assess his heart rate. One doctor, her two assistants and I tried to fix his arms and legs. Pama re-entered the room and helped us, but Jim’s legs and also his arms would not keep still. Relax, Jim, relax …(tenang), I continued whispering into his ears like a mantra. Various doctors rushed in and out of the room again. Someone injected medication into Jim’s arms. Our eyes met, and a cold chill went down my spine. I had the impression that Jim looked right through me. His eyes were blank. They seemed both panicking and calm. He looked at me, but he looked at me as if he looked at someone behind me – someone, who was way far behind me, somewhere behind the palm trees, and

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behind the clouds, which were outside the window. Relax, Jim, relax… Suddenly he started to cough heavily again. He vomited. As there were no tissues left, and the hospital would not provide any, I sprinted to the little shop in front of the hospital. When I wanted to start running, Jim sat up in his bed, still shaking, and stared at me with big eyes. Go home, it’s not a problem (pulang dulu aja, enggak apa-apa). That’s what he always said. He never forced anyone to stay with him. No, no, I do not go home, I just buy some tissues. I’ll be back in a minute. Relax, relax. He gave me one last look. On my way back to the room, I saw Suki sitting on the floor of the corridor. When I entered the room, I saw Pama. She was crying. There was one nurse. Cables were everywhere. Jim was calm. Doctors came in, trying to reanimate Jim again… and again… and again. After the third time, they gave it up. I stood next to Jim. His eyes were open. I stood where he looked at me for the last time only five minutes ago. Behind me, I could hear a doctor: Exitus. The other two assisting doctors remained silent. And again, a doctor’s voice: Exitus. Half-past twelve. Exitus. It was over. One hour later the corridor was crowded with little groups of friends from both komunitas Bendoro and komunitas Congklak who joined the silence in the hallway and hung their heads. Jim’s death came surprising. Only five hours before, the doctors had raised both Jim and Pama’s hopes by declaring that he might be allowed to leave hospital the next day, if he kept progressing like he did during the last days. But then, suddenly he couldn’t breathe and his heart raced. Possibly there were other inner organs affected, Dr. Yanri explained two weeks later after we had insisted to get more information on his sudden death. Why? … I cannot tell. I wasn’t there. But there may have been some problems with the medication, she wondered. The other doctors disappeared within a few moments after the exitus. We never saw them again. There were no explanations, no condolences. Nothing. It was painful. Suki and Pama had a different theory on Jim’s death, which had nothing to do with medication and inner organs. After the doctors had announced that he might leave hospital soon, Pama told Jim that she finally got a job interview at a bank in Bali in a few day’s time, and that she would like to attend it in case he felt better again. Coincidentally, the evening before, Suki had told Jim that he was preparing to go to West Java to attend a spiritual and herbal medicine workshop, and that he would stay there for about two weeks. Suki explained: I think that was too much for Jim. He imagined Nana going to Bali, me to West Java, and you were not back yet from Jakarta. He must have thought ‘who will be here for me then?’ He felt abandoned (dia merasa ditinggal). I do not blame any of us, but the timing was just not good. He panicked, got afraid, and then his health condition dropped. That’s what I think. Thomas: Did we abandon him? S: No, no, we didn’t. We were there for him. All the time, and he knew it. It was just a

Leaving the Streets bad timing. And do you know what I think? I think he waited for you. He wanted to say goodbye to you, before he left.

After payment and bureaucracy were cleared, two nurses and about ten friends accompanied Jim to the forensic unit of the hospital where he would be washed. I was asked by Pama, Suki and the others to join the washing. I felt both honored and afraid of what to expect. Inside the cold unit Jim was undressed and placed on a huge metal table. Then he was washed. I stood about half a meter next to Jim. I suppose it was not the time yet to understand what just had happened and what exactly made the difference between life and death, where the one ended, and the next began. After Jim had been washed, the two nurses wrapped him in white cloth and lay him into a metal coffin. They handed me his clothes in a plastic bag. I opened it, and took out the white Morrison shirt I had bought on his first day in hospital – it smelled like Jim. JULY 17th. Jim was buried as ‘official resident’ of the kampung where our RSL shelter was located. The evening before, friends from the komunitas Congklak, Suki’s komunitas, komunitas Bendoro, activists and Pama’s friends had gathered there. Jim’s brother and family did not attend the funeral. Although Jim wanted to be laid to rest by a priest, there was no chance to find one in the kampung. Since we were glad that he could be buried at all facing Jim’s lack of official registration documents, he was finally buried by a Muslim kiai that was organized by Utomo after he had pulled neighborhood strings. Regarding the bureaucratic obstacles, there was no other choice. Sadly, it was a major achievement already that Jim could be buried next to his friends Oberon and Rudy from komunitas Bendoro at all. And Jim could be saved from being laid to rest at the neglected graveyard of the ‘Social Welfare Department’ (DINAS Sosial), where Nasri had been buried three years before. On July 22nd, the evening before the seventh day (tujuh hari) after Jim’s death, we gathered for the first of the Javanese commemoration rituals, which were simply referred to by everyone as the acara tujuh hari after seven days, the acara seratus hari after a hundred days, and the acara seribu hari after a thousand days. On both the tujuh hari and seratus hari, the komunitas Bendoro gathered in the shelter, prayers were spoken, and in the late evening, we moved over to Malioboro to sing and drink. It was crowded. On the morning of the 25th of October, the seratus hari commemoration, we had a collective VCT, in which seven anak Bendoro participated. It was Jim’s wish that everyone should get tested in order to avoid further hospitalizations and sufferings. With experience and time, the communities’ attitudes towards HIV and AIDS started to slowly change and translate into a more heedful behavior regarding HIV-prevention

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and the care, support and treatment of HIV-positive community members and friends. For the annual anniversary celebrations of the GIRLI movement in late 2007, the organizers, among them Utomo, Jempol and Kuno from komunitas Bendoro, decided to commemorate their deceased friends and hang their pictures over the stage, where the more than fifteen komunitas from Yogyakarta, Semarang and Jakarta performed. The motto of the 2007 festival was ‘melihat lebih dalam’ – ‘taking a closer look’. Jim’s closest friends chose to display the following picture, which was taken in a time when he was still a healthy member of the Bendoro community. Image 9. Jim (photo by anonymous, 2005).

E xcursus: The HIV-AIDS Stigma Putting the rhetoric and practice of opinion leaders into the context of those affected by them, the power of discourses can be elucidated. ‘Discourse’, then, is understood as ‘affective talk’. In the context of a hierarchical and authorityworshiping society, publicly articulated virtues that are reproduced by alleged moral authorities transpire as normativizing affective talk on how to lead a moral life and how to measure those who do not fall in line. Novianto pointed out that – similar to other local contexts (Butt 2005; Dilger 2005; Dilger/Luig 2010; Farmer 1992; Kroeger 2003) – the phenomenon of HIV-AIDS was constructed as a stigma from the very moment that local moral institutions had publicly commented upon it. When I asked the counselor about HIV and AIDS’ first public emergence in Indonesia in a formal interview, he recalled, “[…] it was around the year 1987, if I’m not mistaken. In Bali, that was the first case. A ‘bule’. A tourist. It was there that various stigmata (stigma macam-

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macam) surfaced.” Dr. Yanri explained that the public image of HIV-AIDS was highly influenced by religious (tokoh agama) and governmental stakeholders (tokoh pemerintah): The strongest opinion leaders are the representatives of religion, especially Islam. […] Wherever you go, and who ever you ask about the issue, you will always encounter severe stigma. […] Furthermore, when people, who are not directly concerned or involved with HIV-AIDS, one way or the other, are asked about their opinions on the virus, one gets the impression that it is directly linked to social minority groups, like IDU26, street children (jalanan), waria or commercial sex workers (PSK27), which are labeled ‘dirty’ (kotor) anyways.

Because HIV-AIDS combined everything that was considered ‘non-Javanese’ and ‘non-religious’ like drugs, promiscuous sex in general and homosexuality in particular, since its first public appearance in Indonesia, it was related to the images of ‘morally decayed souls’, which ravaged ‘physically decaying bodies’. This moralized public discourse created an emotional climate of fear and anxiety among those who considered themselves as sacrosanct and fueled a fear of social exclusion (i.e. malu) amid HIV-positive persons and related families and communities. The discursive link between ‘non-Javanese’ drug use and sex practices, and the immorality of the virus becomes apparent in the following two series of photographs.

26 | IDU: intravenous drug users. The acronym is also widely used among Indonesian NGO activists and doctors. 27 | PSK: acronym for ‘pekerja seks komersial’ (Indon.) – translated as ‘commercial sex worker’.

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Images 10 & 11. ‘Random’ street banner: ‘Destroy drugs, AIDS/HIV and the new PKI in its new vesture’.

The banner explicates the discursive link between drugs and HIV-AIDS, and blatantly unveils the deeply rooted stigmatization of not only HIV-positive persons, but also former (alleged) members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), even 50 years after it was crushed and officially banned (Baskara 2014; Lemelson

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2010). The photographs were taken in 2007, when the banner ‘decorated’ a crowded street junction in the south of the city for almost five months. As usual, in such cases of aggressive public stigmatization, there was no organization that took responsibility for the banner. Even after trying to investigate the initiators at local authority offices, their identity remained disclosed. By concealing the instigators, the banners could be read as ‘public truth’ and develop a moral force and authority over those, who had to pass it underneath. Image 12. World AIDS Day 2007.

The photograph above was taken during the official ‘demo’ of the World AIDS Day on December 1st 2007 in front of the Post Office, Bank Indonesia and Benteng Vredeburg, the city’s former colonial center 300 meters north of the royal family’s kraton. The ‘demo’ predominantly consisted of activists of HIVrelated CBOs, NGOs and their hired photographers, who almost outnumbered the former. The articulated messages of this flamboyant group from the Bantul area near the beach of Parangtritis were: ‘Free Sex Not My Culture’, ‘AIDS = Global Warming No. 2’, ‘Stop AIDS right now’ and ‘Drug 100% Real Hell!’ Significantly, the messages were written in English, whereas the bearers of the signs were dressed in the traditional clothes of Javanese commoners: a Javanese hat (belankon), cotton shirt, sarong (sarung) flip-flops (sandal jepit) or barefoot (nyeker). The mask suggests a protection against the influences of a ‘Western’ sex and drug culture, which penetrates the head through the belankon in the form of syringes, symbolizing intravenous drug injection. Young men, dressed as characters from the Ramayana epic, flanked these human signposts. No

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women were part of the group. Just before magrib, when the collective sit-in ended, the ‘Javanese characters’ cycled towards the nearby Masjid Agung, the city’s biggest mosque, on their ornated becak. Susan Sontag wrote almost 30 years ago that, “there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept with wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien.” (1988: 48) Contrary to Yogyakarta’s image as ‘tolerant’, ‘enlightened’, and ‘caring’, HIV-AIDS was constructed as a religiously and culturally legitimized basis for the discrimination and stigmatization of those associated with it. For the sake of the local society’s harmony (rukun), HIV-positive persons were often evicted from their communities so the phenomenon could be publicly silenced and ascribed to those who did not belong to local ‘pure’ mainstream society. Local and national newspaper articles focused on ‘spectacular AIDS rumors’ (Agustina/Julianto 2004; Kroeger 2003), whereas more studious contributions were only printed if sponsored by the National AIDS Commission (KPA) or particular NGOs. Although journalists (Julianto 2002), novelists (Sukanta 2000) and policy makers of the Yogyakarta Institute of Research, Education and Publications (LP3Y) called for more compassion in the coverage of HIVAIDS, the daily practice appeared in very different terms. A senior journalist of a renowned local newspaper revealed his private opinion on effective care, support and treatment during a press conference that preceded a ‘cultural week’ on HIV-AIDS-related phenomena at the French Cultural Center (LIP) in 2008: “When I look at all those students that have nothing else to do but take drugs and have promiscuous sex, I can’t hear it anymore. AIDS, AIDS, AIDS … and oooh … the poor ‘ODHA’. If they took care a bit more they would not have become HIV-positive. They waste their parents’ money on sex and drugs, and we are supposed to have sympathy for them? The best would be to just isolate these people. Or even better still, get rid of them, so they do not infect others.”

After regaining his inner and outer balance again, he assured the audience in a more composed and refined way that this was only his personal opinion, and since his employer disapproved of such fierce statements, he could never write ‘the truth’ as a journalist. A younger journalist from a Jakarta-based newspaper admitted, “nobody really wants to write about HIV-AIDS anymore, because it is boring. It is always the same. There is no solution to the problem. So nobody wants to write about it, and nobody wants to read about it either. It is too far from the reality of the local society (masyarakat).” An ustadz28 from the Council of Muslim Scholars in Yogyakarta (MUI DIY), who was publicly respected for his open mind, opened the second day 28 | Ustad (Indon.): (Muslim) master or teacher.

Leaving the Streets

of the ‘cultural week’ with a brief 15-minute talk, before the audience had the opportunity to ask questions. After the ustadz had finished his rhetorically elaborate presentation, a participant asked why the Council of Muslim Scholars had composed various rulings ( fatwa) against ODHA and why decent Muslim scholars had to divide the complex phenomenon of HIV-AIDS into good versus bad dichotomies when addressing the public. Participant: “Why do you keep telling us that ODHA are ‘impure’ (haram), and the non-ODHA are not? Did you ever consider that the problem might be more complex?” Ustadz: “It must be known that our teaching is not meant only for specific communities of people. We understand that the society (masyarakat) also consists of common (awam) people, who understand religion in a very dogmatic and exclusive way. But, I do not agree that HIV is a punishment from God. One’s own doings bring punishment, just as positive deeds bring good rewards. But why, sometimes, an MUI Fatwa can result in stigma as we have discussed earlier? – It is due to a tendency of understanding Islam in a dogmatic way, just to make it easy. Slogans connected to ‘sin’ (dosa) using terms like ‘curse’ (kutukan) are easier understood by ordinary people. But of course, those with more education cannot be easily swayed to make such generalizations. […] Fatwa should function to bridge such academic people, the intellectuals, together with non-academic people of ordinary society (masyarakat awam).”

The ways in which moral othering, social silencing and pedagogic oversimplification can affect the attitudes of ‘bystanders’ and conspire against the bodies of ‘ODHA’ bluntly manifested in an encounter in a kampung, that was located about fifteen kilometers south of the city. After the RSL team had finished its workshop on HIV-AIDS, a teacher at the local grammar school (SD) invited me to his house for tea and to ‘have a chat’ (ngobrol-ngobrol). After the usual friendly small talk and just when I wanted to leave, the teacher told me that he and the other men did not approve that we came to the village bringing ‘impurity’ from the city. In his opinion, HIV-positive people – not the innocent three young mothers of his village though, who were ‘proven’ to be infected by blood donations from ‘already contaminated Bali’ (yang sudah terkontaminasi) in the wake of the earthquake in May 2006 – should be tattooed with the letters ‘HIV’ on their right hand29 and isolated in a separate part of the kampung or village to save the ‘pure’ population from danger. After I asked him what he would do if the people resisted being tattooed or isolated, he answered quietly and in a very refined (halus) manner, from punishing to killing, everything is possible.

29 | The teacher’s statement literally translates the original Greek term ‘στíγμα’ (‘sign’ or ‘branding mark’) into its local context of the village.

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M ONCHI : THE ‘R EBEL B ODY ’ When compared to Jim’s story, an early diagnosis provided Monchi with more time to develop strategies of coping with the newly acquired attribute to his identity. Monchi’s phenotypically healthy body did not reveal his illness to others. Since he navigated carefully through the social webs of family, friends and neighborhood, and managed to cope with self-blame and guilt as long as he was healthy, he was not necessarily exposed to a stigma. On the contrary, the HIV-positive, but phenotypically healthy body became ‘attractive’ for numerous NGOs that focused on HIV-AIDS prevention, care, support and treatment. By playing his cards right, his attractive ‘NGO-body’ could facilitate access to new social fields of emotional, social and economic attention. In case of an early diagnose, HIV opened up new possibilities of evoking sympathy and compassion within the HIV-AIDS colored ‘charity field’. Regarding the ongoing decrease of accessible social fields in the process of the coming of age, HIV could create possibilities to generate new social fields of attention and allure new companions in terms of his sophisticated emotional economy. Whereas the stigma of AIDS regarding Jim’s highly visible ‘rebelling’ body scared off even those, who were once clustered into the attention fields, the stigma of HIV, tacitly communicated to particular sets of out-group actors (particularly NGOs and HIV activists), could open up new doors as long as one managed to keep a phenomenologically healthy body. Attending closed and open meetings of NGO-sponsored support groups and confiding one’s HIV-status and related emotions to empathizing interactants (curhat) was not only an advisable way of relieving distress. It worked as technique to create trust and affective bonds, and establish new social networks and emotional economies (between 2006 and 2010 NGOs, for example, sponsored ‘ODHA’ when setting up small-scale economic enterprises like a warung, a laundry, a beauty salon, or angkringan). Monchi started to realize after Henky’s and Jim’s deaths that his coping in terms of herbal medicine ( jamu), forgetting (lupa) and being busy (sibuk) for others needed to be attuned to changing responsibilities as husband, father, neighbor and his increasingly ‘rebelling’ body. The week after Jim’s funeral, when we started meeting again more regularly, he told me – again – that he wanted to change his way of life. If not … - klok, he said and turned his right hand so that the inside of his hands showed up to the sky. I cannot remember that Monchi ever used the word ‘dead’ (mati). He referred to ‘death’ by either using the words sudah pergi – ‘he/she already left’, sudah tidak ada – ‘he/she is not there anymore’, or simply … - ‘klok’ by simultaneously turning his right hand and raising his eyebrows. He continued:

Leaving the Streets Sorry that I did not really assist you with Jim, but I just could not get involved too closely this time. I cannot be so ‘cuek’ anymore. Now I have a family and a daughter, and there are the little siblings, too. It would not be fair (kasihan) to them if I were too busy with NGOs, Congklak and the others. Who would care for my daughter when she’s ill? Or when I am ill? I have to live up to my responsibilities now.

Monchi articulated that a change of priorities was necessary in order to finally get his wife and daughter tested for HIV. Although Monchi had joined support groups and had been educated in ‘HIV work’ in the first months after his diagnose, his wife and daughter were not tested for HIV. All the information and the efforts of doctors, activists and friends could not prevent his wife’s pregnancy and the unattended birth of his daughter, putting the lives of both at risk. With time, and his daughter being particularly prone to infections, Monchi began to realize that not only his own health, but also that of his wife and his daughter could only be secured by an intimate ‘coming out’ within his family circle. He realized that ‘lupa’ might have worked as long as he himself was in good physical shape, but that it could turn out lethal in the context of family life. However, Monchi was terrified by the mere thought that he might be excluded from his family and the kampung at Bambangrejo in case they found out that he was HIV-positive. Besides feeling guilty (merasa bersalah) of betraying his wife and daughter, another major reason why Monchi finally wanted to come out to his wife was an increasing prevalence of opportunistic infections. Starting in late 2007, he sometimes could not work because of strong diarrhea, typhus, or fever. In the face of his intensified worries about his family’s future and his own ‘rebelling body’, an antiretroviral therapy, which he had so strongly opposed over the years, had to be considered. Monchi and I had often discussed the further steps of his coming out (coming out). Compared to telling his friends from the komunitas or particular NGO-activists whom he learned to trust over the years, revealing his status as HIV-positive to his wife and having her and Ary tested on HIV seemed an insurmountable task. Too much was at stake for him. The fear of losing his family and his social reputation in the kampung exceeded the guilt (rasa bersalah) he felt regarding the betrayal of his wife and daughter by putting their lives at risk. 27-year old Monchi always managed to master and wriggle out of delicate situations in which activists and friends talked to him about taking responsibility for the health of his family. Depending on the interlocutors, he responded either that it was ‘not the time yet’ (belum waktunya), that he had already told his wife or that he assumed that she tacitly understood and knew anyway (tahu sesama tahu – TST). After my own attempts to convince him became more rigorous, he promised to take Dyah and Ary to a VCT soon, but his answer remained the

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same: It is not the time yet. Dyah is not ready yet (belum siap). And I also have to be ready first, so that she is not startled (enggak kaget) when I tell her. In the more than twenty stories that I had collected during open meetings of various support groups, the strategy of the coming out, or buka (‘open’) as some put it, was never direct in terms of a one-on-one conversation. In order to prepare partners, parents or friends and to avoid startling them, the coming-out strategies were all long-term, tacit and indirect. Sometimes the most intimate persons were invited to join presumably ‘innocent’ open meetings of ODHA, workshops, a VCT and the like, until one day the counterparts were forced to acknowledge the HIV-status of their partner, parent, friend or child. Whereas the coming out to confidants (like in this case myself) was often direct, the disclosing of one’s HIV-status towards one’s family was an exhausting and agonizing process of spinning and continuously weaving a web of hints, coincidences and tacit gestures, previously described as mutar-mutar (‘twirling and circling’). Thomas: What about Dyah? Doesn’t she actually assume (curiga) that you are HIVpositive? Monchi: I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. I talk about it a lot with her. Sometimes I also bring leaflets and little booklets from NGOs and the HIV-AIDS clinic home. And I talk about the basic information. Actually, she started asking me whether I was HIV-positive. I’ve always denied it. She asked very often when Fatima30 was at our house after Henky died. But I think she does not really understand yet (belum ngerti). Because the rumors are so strong, I think. Everybody thinks you die straight away when you have HIV. And people are very afraid of you once you have it. And because I still look healthy, I think she would not believe me anyway. But if the ‘kampung’ neighbors found out, they would chase me out of Bambangrejo. T: Who else can you talk to? M: You, and there are two friends at the NGO. Actually, they all know there, I think. And the ‘doc’, but she is very busy. T: Would you like to meet other ODHA? Like a ‘sharing group’? M: I had that at JOY. But they are all dead now. I would like to open up a little group, actually. T: Did you ever think about starting with the therapy?

30 | Fatima was Henky’s girlfriend (pacar) and a close friend of both the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak. She studied nursing at a local campus and lived at her parents’ house, which was located only a few minutes behind the Congklak junction. After Henky’s death in April 2007, she spent two weeks at Monchi and Dyah’s house in Bambangrejo to recover from the shock. A few weeks later Fatima joined a support group and became a successful and compassionate HIV activist over the years.

Leaving the Streets M: I am not ready yet (aku belum siap). I hope (harap) they will develop better medicine one day. Maybe they can cure it one day. I am afraid (takut) of its side effects. And I do not like chemicals. I still better trust in ‘jamu’. Especially when I have diarrhea, I eat buah merah31. It is really bitter, but it helps way better than the pills from the pharmacy. Sometimes I also go to a ‘dukun’ (healer) and he gives me a particular ‘jamu’ and honey. But I don’t like honey. It hurts in the teeth. Until now my CD4 is good enough. I am at 276 now. I dropped about 80 since last year32. But I am really afraid of the next check-up, because my diarrhea gets worse. And I feel very tired (merasa capek) now and then. But I have to work, because of my wife and my daughter. … Okay? T: Okay? M: Let’s go? Ary awaits us! T: Okay.

Monchi started talking about HIV more often, whenever Dyah and I were both in their house. I started to insinuating and provoking questions, because as the months passed, my lethal conspiracy became unbearable. We spread brochures from various NGOs on the old refrigerator that they used as a closet, where everyone could see them. Monchi started evoking unpredictable situations inside his house, in which anyone could have asked him about his HIV-status: he talked on the phone with doctors and made appointments for CD4-check ups while Dyah and her mother were sitting next to him watching TV; he insisted that Dyah joined him during a street art performance on World AIDS Day; he started wearing a T-shirt, which said “HIV-AIDS – Take care of yourself!” He exposed himself, but nobody asked. The provoking and insinuating became particularly awkward after Monchi came out publically in a video documentary, produced by a local filmmaker whom he had known since his early days on the streets. He decided to screen the video during the ‘cultural week’ at the French Cultural Centre that included talks, workshops, concerts and theatre performances surrounding HIV. In the last sequence of the documentary33, we see Monchi standing by the riverbank at Congklak, looking into the sky. He says: “I wish that everyone, ‘kampung’ neighbors, people in the red light districts, office workers, will accept (menerima) people who are infected with HIV or have AIDS, and that they support the ‘ODHA’. So that they do not stare at the person and say ‘Uaaaah, this one, this one has AIDS! Watch out, don’t get to close!’ I would like to eradicate the 31 | Buah merah (Indon.): Pandanus Conoideus. 32 | Monchi’s CD4 count in August 2006 amounted to 345 cells/mm 3, in July 2007 to 276 cells/mm 3. As we shall see in the ‘Epilogue’, it dropped to only 52 in December 2011, before it slowly increased again in June 2012. 33 | ‘Janji Jabrik’ (Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni, 2007).

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It all sounded reasonable, but ultimately, Monchi did neither appear at the public screening nor did he tell his wife that he was HIV-positive until I left Yogyakarta a few weeks later in early 2008. When we parted, Monchi promised to tell his wife everything about his illness. In return, I had to promise to come back the following year. With me keeping to our promise, it was his turn now. In March 2009, he managed to introduce his older sister and youngest brother to his ‘new family’ in Bambangrejo. Monchi framed the meeting as a formal get together and prepared a slametan. After we had lunch together, he asked his sister and his wife to make coffee and tea and meet him behind the house at the little creek, which cut through the kampung. He took me by the hand and placed me at the backdoor of their house. We shared a cigarette in silence. When they arrived with a tablet of fresh brewed coffee and tea, he asked them to sit down. Without any further mutar-mutar, he started to talk about HIV, his experiences during the last years, and finally, in a trembling voice, looking at both Dyah and his sister Ratih, he said: I am HIV-positive (aku HIV-positif). They could not hide their shock (kaget). Their faces froze and their eyes stared at Monchi. Silence. After a few seconds they both turned their heads towards me. I could only nod. His older sister Ratih started to cry silently. Tears ran down her cheeks. She asked Monchi for forgiveness, that she had not tried hard enough, when they were both still young. She told him that after he had not returned home that one day fifteen years ago, she went to various train stations in Jakarta and finally took a train to Yogyakarta to look for him. She had asked around near the train stations there and at Malioboro whether someone knew her brother or could even tell her where he was. But no one knew you, she said. So I Ieft again after two days. – I know, Monchi replied, my friends told me that you were looking for me. I had changed my name. And the least I wanted was to go home. His wife Dyah stood up and went into the house. Monchi apologized to Ratih and me and followed her. Three days later, when we were back again under our curhat tree, we discussed his coming out to the family. Monchi said that he was very relieved (lega). Next, he said, I will take up the ART again. ‘Jamu’ cannot help me any longer. He had already started an ARV therapy in May 2008, but the doctors halted it again after two weeks, because the side effects were affecting him too heavily. He got infected with very painful herpes all over the right half of his face, which affected some of his facial nerves. Although he kept strictly to the doctor’s prescriptions, half of his face became lame for a few weeks. At that time, I was really ‘down’ (ngedrop). And because you were not here, I really had no one to share my frustration with. But now, everything is fine again, he said happily and smiled.

Leaving the Streets

Whereas Monchi had always radiated a ‘happy-go-lucky’ attitude, he now increasingly articulated uncertainty and anxiety about the future. During my next revisit in late 2009, our curhat talks shifted from talking about him or the komunitas Congklak to discussing his family’s future. His thoughts and articulated anxieties circled around his health condition, the future of his wife and daughter, how he could provide for his daughter’s and also his wife’s siblings school education, the trouble with his parents-in-law, and his work. Although he was always uneasy about the subject matter, I repeatedly asked him why they did not move further away from his very demanding in-laws. Like a mantra, he replied each time: I cannot leave the little ones behind, the poor kids. Pak Tanto will keep beating them up. He will send them to the streets again to busk, and he would take them out of school. I promised Ratna that we would put her through SD and SMP, maybe SMA, if she keeps being so committed. And poor Mom Ida would have to beg or prostitute herself. I have to take responsibility (harus tanggung jawab) for the little ones.

During the last year, Monchi had further withdrawn from the komunitas Congklak, which shrunk to only five people on some days. He only went there to work when he could not earn enough as pemulung, or when he picked up his daughter, his wife and her siblings on some late afternoons. Monchi highly disapproved that Dyah took their daughter Ary to the street junction, but his parents-in-law thought that it was better if they all went together. He uttered: It hurts when I think of the time when I will not be here anymore. Who will take care of Ary? I know that Pak Tanto would take her to the streets so that he does not have to work himself. I get furious (emosi) when I only think of it. Dyah sometimes is still so ‘naïve’ (polos). She does everything her parents tell her to do. She does not understand yet (belum ngerti) that we could be more independent from them.

By marrying Dyah without being of appreciated descent, bringing economic wealth or other prestigious family heritance qualities (bibit, bebet, bobot) into his new family, his parents-in-law could easily take Monchi’s tireless contribution to the family income and his care for their own children for granted. Monchi felt that it was his responsibility as a father and husband to take care of his new extended family – particularly as he had known all of them since they still lived at the Congklak street junction. Hence, 29-year old Monchi’s ‘shortcomings’ of coping with his increasingly ill body, and the manifold phenomena surrounding HIV, particularly his ‘incapability’ to take Dyah and Ary to a VCT, the fear of stigma and exclusion both for himself and his family, is best understood with regard to HIV-AIDS discourses and his family’s multiple intersecting marginalities.

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After the family had managed to pay back half of the rates of Pak Tanto’s motorbike over the last three years, his father-in-law took up another loan of five million Rupiah34 at a local rentenir (money lender) in order to pay back the remaining installments of the motorbike loan at once, and buy a TV and a DVDplayer. Since most of the neighbors had a TV and his brother-in-law Pak Slamet had an especially big one, Pak Tanto decided that they needed one, too. He was given one month to pay back the credit plus one million Rupiah of interest. With every month that passed in which the loan could not be paid back, the interest was doubled. Basically, debtors ‘bought time’ in order to look for the money at other creditors. After a few weeks, the family got caught in another spiral of exorbitant multiple debts. Because six million Rupiah were not very easy to earn by collecting scrap iron and busking, Pak Tanto decided to take up a credit at yet another moneylender to pay back the interests at the first creditor. Three months later, in September 2009, Pak Tanto had accumulated almost twenty million Rupiah35 of debt at four different creditors. Regarding such colossal debts, Monchi refused to get involved this time by his skillful ‘borrowing’ (pinjam) money from various persons of his vast emotional economy network. In the face of lacking alternatives to solve this ‘messy’ (kacau) situation, Tanto’s wife Ibu Ida offered to go to Parangkusumo beach during jumat kliwon, when the jumat (Friday) of the Western calendar coincides with kliwon of the Javanese 5-day week (pasaran). On jumat kliwon people went on pilgrimage to the sacred location by the seaside in order to meditate, pray, nongkrong, gamble, drink, or visit sex workers, who offered their services there. During this nightly mixture between spiritual gathering and amusement park, some appeased the mystical Queen of the South Sea (Nyi Roro Kidul) with offerings and rituals (Schlehe 1998), others inspected the kampung behind the ceremonial space, which transformed into a clandestine red-light district that accommodated women from all over Central Java who hired rooms during these occasions. Pak Tanto welcomed his wife’s idea of renting one of the rooms, leaving her and Monchi without hope that Pak Tanto’s commitment to the family might change for the better. Over lunch at a warung along the Yogyakarta-Semarang highway, where Ibu Ida worked as helper, Monchi disclosed that debt collectors had paid a visit to the family’s house and claimed the money. They threatened to beat up Pak Tanto, Ibu Ida and Monchi, and take one of them to prison if they did not clear debts within the next four days. There were two more days left. Pak Tanto escaped and hid for the next two weeks. In a family meeting, Monchi, Ibu Ida, Ibu Nuning, and Pak Slamet had discussed the options that were left. They concluded that there was no other solution than sending Ibu Ida to prison. The other three 34 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2009: $500 USD. 35 | At an exchange rate of approx. 10,000 Rupiah/US Dollar in 2009: $2,000 USD.

Leaving the Streets

committed to take care of the children. When they told me the same evening, I was shocked. And yet, there was no way for me to get directly involved into yet another of the family’s financial calamities. Because Monchi had advised me to stay away from the kampung during the days to come (because he anticipated that once the creditors found out that his family had a bule friend, they might have increased their claims), I lost track of the heated debates, and could only witness the confusion, which took hold of the family and their immediate neighbors. I relied on Monchi’s reports through phone calls and text messages on how the ‘story’ was resolved. Neither Ibu Ida nor anyone else went to prison or was beaten up by the debt collectors. Subsequent to a meeting of the various kampung heads (Pak RT) of Bambangrejo, who had noticed the turmoil in the rearmost part of their neighborhood, a wealthy entrepreneur from the southern part of the kampung promised to take care of the family and settle the business with the creditors. The 50-year old married Pak Surip, a father of two grown up sons, had been ‘a friend of the family’, as Monchi expressed it, for a few months already. After his decision to help Ibu Ida and her family, Pak Surip showed up at their house often, when the children were either at school or working and Pak Tanto, who turned up again after the problems were settled, was out for irregular jobs at construction sites. One day, when Monchi, his little brothers- and sisters-in-law and I returned from stroll to a nearby river, I was introduced to Pak Surip as close friend of the family. The refined and very polite entrepreneur, who owned various clothing outlets in the city offered me a ‘real Javanese cigarette’, as he put it, made of tobacco from the nearby slopes of the Merapi volcano, lit his own and apologized that he had to leave to work. Pak Surip’s repeated visits to Ibu Ida’s room took place for over five months, before Pak Tanto caught him and his wife red-handed one day in late 2010. After beating up his wife he reported her to the head of the kampung, who acted surprised. After a subsequent meeting of kampung leaders where the transgressors had to ask for forgiveness in order to restore the neighborhood’s harmony (rukun), Pak Surip’s oldest son suddenly showed up at the house. He threatened to kill Ibu Ida and all her ‘whore kids’ (anak lonte). During the following nights Monchi held watch over the family together with Ronggo and Danang from the Congklak street junction. The expected violent assaults never happened. However, Pak Surip’s sons and his wife forced the Bambangrejo community leaders to punish Ibu Ida for her ‘immorality’, and teach her malu. The next day, Ibu Ida was sentenced to walk naked through the kampung in order to admit her ‘immorality’ and restore the rukun of the community and Pak Surip’s family. One month later, they were evicted from the kampung and moved a few hundred meters away into a little hut alongside the three-lane highway that connects Yogyakarta and Semarang. When playing with their friends near their former home, the younger children Heri, Ratna, Anita and Monti were

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publicly stigmatized and insulted as ‘kids of a whore’ (anak lonte) by both peers and their parents. One night, Ratna, who had never spoken about her private feelings with me before, turned to me with tears in her eyes, took my arm to hug her and said: Uncle Thomas, I never want to be like my parents or anyone else in my family. If I promise to study hard, will you promise me to help me make it until high school? And then I want to study at university, leave my family, leave the city, and become a teacher somewhere abroad. I hate (benci) them. Although their new hut was geographically closer to Pak Surip’s house, it formally belonged to another kampung unit. For his family, the problem was more or less solved. For Monchi and his family, this was only the first of three relocations that followed. Monchi ‘reunited’ (reuni) with his mother, who had returned in late 2009 from working as kitchen staff at the Indonesian Embassy of Tokyo, Japan. She moved to her hometown in South Sumatra in 2011, where she bought a small parcel of a palm oil plantation from the money she had earned abroad. She expected not only her three Jakarta based children and their families to move there soon, but also tried to convince Monchi, Dyah, and Ary to join her. Not least because of the birth of Monchi and Dyah’s son Gembul in June 2010, his commitment to his ‘new family’ and his increasingly ‘rebelling’ body, Monchi preferred to stay in Yogyakarta. Rebuilding a completely new support network and establishing access to health care practitioners similar to the ones in Yogyakarta seemed impossible in the face of his advancing illness. He continued to cycle the hot city streets with his big attached woven basket to collect scrap iron, which he still sold near the Congklak junction until late 2011. The then 31-year old father and husband only stopped working when he was too sick or had to recover from being hospitalized. With frequent illness and his CD4-level having dropped to less than 50 cells/mm3 in late 2011, he started another ART in early 2012, which had to be halted again after only one week. He could not endure the therapy’s side effects of extreme headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and hallucinations. I had not been in Yogyakarta at that time, but we kept weekly contact over the phone. Dr. Yanri tried to put him on another medication again two months later, but without success. His health condition was too critical. During one of his frequent visits at the clinic, he finally conducted a first blood test with his almost seven year-old daughter Ary, who was looking forward to starting grammar school in July 2012. If asked what she wanted to become one day, she smiled shyly, twisted her head towards her right shoulder, then looked at me elfishly and said, a doctor, uncle Tom, twinkling her eyes before putting her head up straight again. During May and June 2012, I visited Monchi and his family in their new home two kilometers south of Bambangrejo. Monchi, Dyah, Ary and two-year old Gembul had moved there together with Pak Tanto’s family to live under one roof again, after they had been forced to leave from their previous house

Leaving the Streets

in a kampung further south. Since they were evicted from Congklak in 2005 and expelled from Bambangrejo in 2010, Monchi and his new family were constantly on the move. While staying in rented empty and little houses in the back (belakang) of different kampung, they were always depending on the ‘benevolence’ of their neighbors and village heads to be allowed to stay. Monchi described their permanent moving as very exhausting (capek sekali), because the family needed to continuously adapt to different people, who were mostly not very eager to have ‘people like us’ (orang seperti kita) as their neighbors. When I asked now 21-year old Heri how he liked his new neighborhood at the very back of Dwiharjo, he simply replied ‘cold’ (dingin). He might have not only referred to the chilly evening winds. Monchi explained that the new kampung was very conservative and that the neighbors were not very welcoming, because tattoos are actually not allowed here. Since Monchi was tattooed on his arms and legs, he could not always hide his inscribed tekyan past. Before moving to Dwiharjo, Monchi had again recovered from various infections. Fortunately, his body did not rebel this time when he took up the ultimate remaining option of an anti-retroviral therapy two weeks before we met again. Since cycling the city in search of scrap iron and ngamen at the street junction were impossible in his health condition, he started spending his days looking after the kids and accompanying his siblings-in-law to and from their various schools on an aging motorbike. This, Monchi did in turn with his brother-in-law Heri, so that on other days he could visit the clinic and, if he was feeling well enough, collect and sell scrap iron to make some extra money. As the oldest son Tirto refused to work, Dyah’s mother Ibu Ida was the main income earner of the family. Since 2010, she worked as a cook and waitress from early morning until late evening at a warung, which was located just outside the gates of Bambangrejo along the Yogyakarta-Semarang highway. Monchi accompanied her every morning and picked her up every evening, since Tanto, his father-inlaw, and Dian, his then nineteen year-old brother-in-law, had recently departed to work on palm oil plantations in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. Four months after they had moved to Dwiharjo they were expelled again after former neighbors from Bambangrejo paid a visit to the kampung heads and told them about Ibu Ida’s ‘disgraceful past’. In August 2012 they moved a few kilometers to the north, where the Yogyakarta Special Region (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta) bordered Central Java (Propinsi Jawa Tengah). By that time, Monchi had physically recovered from his last bout of illness and, unthinkably, was about to sign a contract with a company to leave for Kalimantan in January 2013 to work on a palm oil plantation. In the end, he never went. After we had finished discussing my dissertation on the terrace of a friend’s house at the Parangtritis beach on my last evening in Yogyakarta, before I returned to Germany again in June 2012 (and did not return there until two years later), Monchi took out a small booklet that I had given to him on New

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Year’s Eve 2006/2007. Since I had always taken notes more systematically and frequently in his presence, when compared to the company of others, he wanted to write up important events in his life, too. We have never talked about his diary since then. If asked, he simply replied it’s still there (masih ada). On that evening, five and a half years later, he placed it next to my laptop and asked me to take good care of it. Then, he lit a cigarette, opened my laptop, asked for some advice on the keyboard and started typing his ‘legacy’ – warisanku, he said and smiled.

The Alleyway Autodidact “I don’t know from where to start my scribbling. What is for sure, is that life in the alley has many twists and turns. Many people say that the alley can only be dark, tough, dry, and dead. But such assumptions, I can only consider them like the wind passing by. I live in the alley precisely because I know what real life is like. Where companionship is always embraced together, it is rare in the families and houses of those who are perceived as elite. They are only united when they try to circumcise the rights of the little people. We see many cases where they eat our country’s money or simply the coins … but the alley is the one that is considered a parasite dying off on a lush and fertile green grass and strong roots. And yet, we can stand upright on our own feet. What is the difference between You, me, us, You of different rank, You of white, black, brown skin? Surely not our gender, Bro. Between so many different communities that grow like mushrooms nowadays, both of formal and informal education, that lump around those who wear brilliants so big that they could beat David Copperfield. In good or bad magic. It all depends on the person itself, whether he wants to be useful only for himself alone or also for other people. It is on us to choose. See you again, ok, Crazy Man.”

Image 13. Monchi.

‘In disguise’ (with borrowed sunglasses and a hat) at the age of 31, Parangtritis Beach, 2012, after authoring ‘The Alleyway Autodidact’.

Leaving the Streets

Sadly (a word that cannot not quite grasp the experience behind it), these were the last moments that I shared with the ‘Crazy Man’. We did not see each other again. My friends and colleagues from the former RSL collective had contacted me by text messages and phone calls in mid-December 2013 at my Berlin home that Monchi was about to die. I did not believe them. I was sure that he recovered again as usual, and that I could introduce him to our newborn son in a few months, when we were about to disembark on another research year in Indonesia. While Monchi died, I was busy growing into a social role that he had mastered so impressively on different scales during the years of our friendship. Having become a father myself, the pleasure, but also the distress related to it in case of the baby’s illness or its sometimes inexplicable crying and one’s own lack of sleep, my respect and admiration for Monchi had grown even more extensively – despite his ‘acts’ of having two children with Dyah as the knowledgeable HIV-positive person and otherwise responsible and reliable young man that he was. In April 2013 Monchi had already spent two weeks in hospital due to painful virally induced neural dysfunctions in his brain. He suffered from spasms and had difficulties talking. His mother and his siblings made their way to Yogyakarta in order to wait on the ‘lost son’ and return him into the hands of God. But again, the then almost 33-year old recovered from the spasms and also from slurring. We remained in contact by sms texts. I cannot leave Ary and Gembul just like that, was one of his last texts in October 2013, promise me to take care of them once I will be gone, were the last lines I have read from him. After he was hospitalized in December 2013, he did not fight long. His body gave up after three days. When I met Dyah, Ary, Gembul and her siblings again in August 2014, the now adult young woman assured me that Monchi had died in peace. And he asked her to tell me ‘thank you, and see you in hell!’ – we burst into tearful laughter.

‘R E VEL ATION B LUES ’ This chapter highlighted the afflictions in the lives of former ‘street children’ and ‘street youths’ while they were exiting the streets. Adversities resulted from various interrelated changes both ‘within and without’ the protagonists: the change of the socio-cultural environment in terms of a more general social change, the transformation of their bodies, shifting social fields of interaction, and a revision of their life priorities. Coping with the stigma of being a (former) ‘jalanan’ (and even more so being an ‘ODHA’) was not always an easy task in the face of intersecting dimensions of marginality, branded bodies and social role expectancies.

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The extended case study of Jim’s struggle for survival and the adjacent excursus on HIV-AIDS illustrated that related stigma did not only create climates of fear, which deeply affected HIV-positive persons, but that the stigma was highly contagious to those associated with the affected person (i.e. the community or the family). In Yogyakarta, HIV and particularly AIDS comprised everything that was ‘non-Javanese’ and hence ‘immoral’. Without considering the main tenets of Javanese ethics (budi pekerti), it is difficult to comprehend Jim or Pama’s ‘resignation’ (pasrah), ‘passivity’ (nrimo, sabar, ikhlas), ‘obedience’ and ‘compliance’ (manut) in their encounters with nurses and doctors, or the ‘fear’ (takut) and ‘indifference’ (cuek) of the tekyan regarding the illness and suffering of community members. This can only be understood against the backdrop of the ‘Javanese ways’ (cara Jawa), in which the avoidance and public denial of conflicts and unpleasant emotions is a common practice in order not to imperil social harmony (rukun), affective equanimity and subjective well-being (tentram). In the context of HIV and AIDS, malu did not only work for the affected as effective cultural repertoire to keep unpleasant experiences and condescending encounters at social and affective distance, but became a perfidious accomplice of the socially and physiologically ravaging HIV: the fear of ‘pouring shame’ over community and family, and the fear of one’s own and associates’ social death (Králová 2014) worked against timely aid-seeking, sustainable cooperation with NGO activists and doctors, and manifested as an insurmountable obstacle in coming out towards ‘intimate others’ (i.e. wives or husbands, children, pacar) and preventing them from infection and illness. Pram, the counselor, explained that the ‘social needs’ (kebutuhan sosial) were higher in Java compared to ‘other cultures’ (budaya lain). Since people enjoyed getting together with friends and family (kumpul) in crowds, the mere imagination to be excluded from community and family was an unbearable thought. He added that this was discomforting and intolerable enough even without being HIV-positive. The notion of being socially excluded and having to deal with a HIV-positive body was unbearable to most of his clients. The prominent Javanese saying ‘mangan ora mangan asal ngumpul’ (eating or not is trivial as long as one gets together) hints to these increased ‘social needs’. In light of the ‘fear’ (takut) and ‘shame’ (malu) related to HIV-AIDS, and the protagonists’ marginalized identities, a public coming out (especially towards neighbors) was ill advised. Recalling Jim and his aides’ manifold condescending encounters with doctors and nurses – as those who are assumed to care – elucidated the institutionalized silencing, gossiping and collective fainting related to HIV-AIDS. Based on the widespread Javanese notion of social order and moral conduct (budi pekerti), many practitioners felt that they acted correctly according to their high social positions. Since hospitals are not culture-free zones, the ‘deference’ (hormat) and the displayed shame,

Leaving the Streets

embarrassment, shyness, and subordinance (malu) of HIV-positive patients was mere consequence of their inferior social positions, lack of adequate descent, economic wealth, and personal qualities (bibit, bebet, bobot) when compared to the doctors and other hospital staff. In a local context where people treasured social harmony (rukun), despised open conflict and displayed their devotion to superiors, high social positions, political and economic power could easily seduce even ‘decent persons’ (orang baik) and ‘refined Javanese’ (wong Jawa) into moral corruption. What prevailed throughout the years, though, was not the lack of care or compassion of persons and communities I had encountered. On the contrary, it was moving to witness the care and commitment of some doctors, counselors and activists over more than fifteen years now. What kept sticking to my mind was how Monchi and his friends from the komunitas Congklak cared for Kris during his episodes of ‘gila’. And although the neighbors at Kris’ house rounded up and pointed fingers at Monchi and me from afar when we repeatedly arrived at their kampung on a motorbike, which might indicate that the stigma of gila and the emotions related to it are contagious, my experience was different. The stigma of ‘being crazy’ might have poured through Kris’ house and affected his family, but the care of the kiai and other neighbors in supporting the family in various ways like keeping Kris occupied, mediating paid work, and thus taking off affective, social and economic pressures from Ibu Wijila and her family, was touching. If contrasted with Jim’s experiences during the last weeks of his life, it becomes obvious how important social ties within the family, the neighborhood and one’s local community, are in case of illness, affliction and other misfortunes. Being cut off the important social, cultural, and professional capital of the bibit, bebet and bobot, the street-related protagonists fostered solidarity networks within and between communities that they could rely on in case of severe adversities and emotional distress. This did not work in the case of Jim, because he had turned his back on the community and tried to make his way into the kampung society and marry his girlfriend just at the time when his body started to rebel fatally. From such a perspective, the significance of the protagonists’ emotional economies, which could transform marginal resources into socio-economic security networks by emoting those that were willing to support them, becomes obvious. Uttering and embodying emotives at the right time with the right persons at the right place might have been opportunistic at times, but from a subaltern perspective, such practices hint to the resourcefulness and creativity of street-related coming of age even in the bleakest of times. The protagonists’ both maturing and rebelling bodies evoked intersecting social, cultural and moral ascriptions, which changed with regard to the eyes, ears, hearts and minds of those encountered. Whereas the anthropologist defines

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the traversed life stages as ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ or ‘adolescence’, and ‘young adulthood’, Yogyakartans referred to these with the Indonesian terms ‘anak’ (child), ‘ABG’ (anak baru gedhe), ‘remaja’, or ‘anak muda’ (youth, adolescent) and ‘dewasa’ (adult). NGO activists referred to the young protagonists as ‘anak jalanan’ (anjal), street-related children, and the older ones as ‘remaja jalanan’ (remjal), street-related youth. Some kampung residents claimed that the older ones among the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak physically outgrew the status of the Javanese ‘durung ngerti’ (not yet understanding), ‘durung Jawa’ (not yet Javanese) or ‘durung wong’ (not yet human) and were expected to behave like a ‘wong Jawa’ – a mature Javanese and full member of local society. Recalling that stigma is not an attribute in the person, but an ascription and hence a relationship between persons, these can also change during the coming of age. When they were still regarded as ‘children‘, the protagonists were often encountered with pity and compassion (kasihan), which could provoke social and economic assistance. Once they developed into ‘adolescents’ and ‘young adults’, these ascriptions made way for more derogatory attributions. When coming of age, they were increasingly addressed and referred to as ‘naughty’ (nakal), ‘bums’ (gembel) or ‘thugs’ (preman). They were no longer excused as ‘durung ngerti’ (not yet understanding), as their ‘childlike’ bodies had previously suggested. As physically matured adults, the ‘durung ngerti’ was meant derogatory and turned into a stigma that hinted towards persons’ social, cultural and moral immaturity due to their incapability of fulfilling the minimum required standards of the adult Javanese person: starting and providing for a family and behaving according to the budi pekerti. A mature and adult ‘wong Jawa’ and responsible Indonesian citizen was obliged to behave in a refined manner according to the ‘cara Jawa’. Having physically matured into adult bodies, the protagonists were socially and morally gauged as Javanese (wong Jawa) adult (dewasa) men (cowok) and exposed to the omnipresent social pressure to get married, raise children, behave and work properly. Since Jim, Monchi, Harvey, Kris, Jempol and most of their friends from the Bendoro and Congklak community desired exiting the streets since their midtwenties, the initially ridiculed and mocked family and kampung life turned into their primary fields of interaction and identification. Shifting priorities from encounters with friends of the komunitas, street-related women, or NGOactivists (to only name a few), to encounters with their new families, in-laws, kampung neighbors and authorities that were avoided at an earlier stage in life because they triggered insecurity, unease and weariness, needed to be confronted and dealt with. Motivations to exit life on the streets besides repetitive local evictions, discriminating laws and impeded work opportunities, were described as being malu, bored (bosan), having had enough ( jenuh) of ‘life on the streets’, and a desire to progress in life (mau maju). The pride (bangga) in being an anak Bendoro

Leaving the Streets

or an anak Congklak had faded with their coming of age. The marginalization of street-related young people and their difficulties in blending in with local society did not stop after they had exited the streets. Contrary to the komunitas, in the kampung, tattoos, piercings, ‘tattered’ clothes and recurring illnesses could unfold as social inscriptions of marginality and stigmatized identity into their conspicuous bodies. Regarding the protagonists’ own low descent, impaired economic prosperity and devalued moral qualities, the most viable way to improve their social positions was to comply with the norms and rules of neigborhood life. Attuning their emotion displays to their low social position according to the hierarchical kampung structure by adequately embodying their hormat (‘deference’) by performing malu was equally crucial as contributing to the social harmony (rukun) of the village by complying to kampung rules and performing services for the community (gotong royong; ronda). This way, the protagonists aspired to transgress social boundaries and finally become kampung dwellers. In order to pursue these newly aspired priorities in life, Monchi, Kris and Jempol frequently articulated that as fathers, husbands and officially registered kampung citizens that held identity cards (KTP), they could not be indifferent (cuek) towards their surroundings any longer. Over the years, they increasingly emphasized that as adults (dewasa) they had to take responsibility (tanggung jawab) for their families. Monchi did not jeopardize the health and lives of his wife and children, because he was a morally degenerate ‘street kid’. Rather, the cultural ideal of securing social harmony and silencing ‘aberrant’ matters (in this case, HIV) conspired with aggravated social pressure in the face of marginality and stigmatized identity as a jalanan – a ‘street kid’. Despite the remarkable and creative coping styles of young men and women on the streets, marginality, stigma and inequity were persistent. A long-term perspective highlights the need of a wider ethnographic lens when designing ‘intervention strategies’ in order to alleviate the psychological and physical suffering of street-related children, adolescents and young adults. It is not necessarily the ‘immorality’ of ‘deviant’ street communities that undermines local moralities of mutual respect and compassion. Sometimes it is the socio-cultural fabric of the family and the surrounding local society, the purported haven of care, support and security itself, that stirs up and fosters painful transgenerational spirals of shame and deference and puts the lives of infants and young children at great risk.

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Similar to the protagonists, who have exited the street, the two komunitas have come of age, too. Although most of the protagonists and their friends still referred to themselves as either ‘anak Bendoro’ or ‘anak Congklak’, depending on who they encountered, many young men have become part of kampung communities, mostly those of their wives and new families. Some moved out of the city, and others have died due to chronic illnesses, traffic and other accidents. What was beyond imagination over ten years ago became reality in 2012: both the komunitas Bendoro and the komunitas Congklak evaporated into collectively shared memories. Not only did the protagonists and their friends outgrow the age of the ‘jalanan’ at their former communities’ locations, but also the former hangouts themselves, were either deserted or turned into shopping centers and hotels. Until 2014, the Bendoro and Congklak junctions were still crowded with children, adolescents and young adults during the day, but none of them was part of the two communities. To them, I was just another funny bule, passing their intersection on a motorbike, flipping a coin into their hands and cut plastic water bottles. Like other researchers and activists before me, I realized that there were new generations of Monchis, Kris’, Harveys, Jempols, Jims and others involving each other in inventive emotional and other economies.

Komunitas Congklak When I asked Monchi in June 2012 where all our Congklak friends had gone, he simply answered: Congklak is deserted, they are all working now. The anak Congklak’s former ‘godmother’ Ibu Badam moved back to Sumatra after the Congklak tragedy in April 2005, and Mbak Cakalang still ran the angkringan near the street junction until 2015. Her daughter Renti, who graduated from junior high school in 2013, got married to Monchi’s close friend Danar in 2011. He moved into Mbak Cakalang’s place in order to care for his daughter, who was born a few weeks after the wedding. Ronggo, the

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community’s former wakil ketua got married in 2009 and is now father to a daughter who was born the same year. Unfortunately she had died when she was only 12 months old. He moved to South Sumatra in 2011 and started working at a palm oil plantation near his recently deceased mother’s hometown. His wife died in 2013. His brother Danang had a serious motorbike accident in late 2008, from which he recovered only slowly. Since 2010 Danang is in a steady relationship with a young mother of two, and at the time of writing up he can walk almost as smooth as he did before the accident. They moved to his parentsin-law’s house not far from Bambangrejo. Habib, his wife Nita, their daughter Sinta and her two little brothers relocated to a street community in Jakarta ‘to make more money’1. Nita has recently remarried to a ‘boss’ of a GIRLIrelated community in South Jakarta after a police officer shot Habib in early 2014 in a friend’s house, where they were suspected of dividing stolen goods from a previously conducted raid through jewelry shops. Gianto ran the little tambal ban behind the Congklak street junction until 2014, before he started working at nearby construction sites as hired laborer. As a father of two boys he moved into his wife’s kampung about ten minutes to the east of Congklak. Irianto spent almost two years in prison and was released in early 2010. He was imprisoned again in late 2010. He was discharged in early 2015. His wife Tika, whom he had married in 2006, divorced him and took their daughter into her new marriage. Monchi said that she successfully invested her ‘capital’ (modal), referring to her fair looks, into a ‘better’ wedlock and became the second wife of a local nightclub mogul. Her friend Diana died in a motorbike accident in 2013. Koko, who had always remained a close friend of Monchi’s family died of a stroke at the age of 27 in early 2014 three weeks after Monchi was buried at the local cemetery of the kampung, where Dyah, her children, her siblings and her parents keep living under one roof. None of them works on the streets anymore, and Ary and Gembul are both attending primary school. Dyah has graduated from an extra-curricular highschool degree in 2016 and is looking for formal employment. Her younger sister Ratna has also graduated from highschool the same year and is now looking for employment as accountant. Ibu Ida continued working at the restaurant, and Pak Tanto keeps spinning, 1 | According to the anak Congklak, a woman could earn up to 200,000 Rupiah (approx. $20 USD) per day by begging (ngemis) at strategically located intersections in Jakarta if carrying her youngest offspring between the cars and motorcycles and not getting caught by the authorities. This was almost four times the amount one could obtain at the Congklak intersection on a ‘good day’ (hari yang baik). Whereas all the protagonists opposed such an income strategy, Habib was convinced this was the best solution for him and his growing family. Monchi added that although the revenues were higher in the capital, it was also less comfortable (kurang nyaman) to live there, and that ‘in Jakarta, the pockets were pierced there’ (di Jakarta, kantongnya bolong).

Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’

twisting and turling his household’s economies. Ibu Ida and her oldest sons and daughters keep fixing debt spirals in cooperation with various actors of those networks that Monchi had established so sustainably. Unfortunately, I have lost contact with Dyah’s cousins Affandi, Mukri and Ayu and their parents Ibu Nuning and Pak Slamet. In 2015, Dyah assured me that they were doing fine and that they were planning to move back to the Magelang area in Central Java, and start a soy bean cake (tempeh) business in their family’s kampung halaman (place of origin).

Komunitas Bendoro Although Malioboro has lost its ‘street charm’ over the years due to formal and police regulations and the sell-out of formerly public spaces to private investors, street-related communities were still making their living along the shopping mile. But as a community, the proud komunitas Bendoro had finally dissolved, too, in 2013. The slow demise of the komunitas had begun already in late 2007, as a result of too many kasus and some of the protagonists’ move to a related komunitas in the more exciting capital of Jakarta, while others started to work as becak drivers, vintage furniture resellers or organic farmers. Although most of them still referred to themselves as ‘anak Bendoro’, they moved on in their own particular ways. Besides Harto, Harvey, and Suram, who got married and all had a daughter, none of the former anak Bendoro have married yet. Joko joined an art collective and was staying in a friend’s rented one-room apartment. Kuno rented a small room in the outskirts near Jempol’s house and was still going to Malioboro on Saturday nights, but neither worked, nor lived there any longer. After his pacar Charlotte left in early 2007, Jempol still emailed with her for many months. Ultimately, she never returned to Yogyakarta. Half a year after their encounters in early 2007, Jempol told me that he was not up for long distance relationships any longer. When he met Charlotte he had just returned from a three months’ stay in Europe, where he had been invited by his then ex-pacar, whom he had met in Yogyakarta two years earlier. Jempol had returned to Yogyakarta in early 2007 after they split up. He admitted that he had difficulties in re-adjusting to his former life in Yogyakarta. He withdrew from the komunitas Bendoro and moved into a house at the outskirts of the city with his new European girlfriend and her children. As a skilled and charming craftsman he has worked either ‘free-lance’ or at one of the numerous manufacturers of the city. The former ‘boss’ managed to exit the streets in his late twenties. Today, he travels between Europe and Yogyakarta together with his new family. Bagus had opened a small art studio in 2012, and still paraded Malioboro and the Sosrowijayan area on weekends. As a master of nongkrong he never

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appeared to work but always seemed to have money (a funny analogy to myself, the anthropologist, as he had put it in a bar encounter, where we had met in late 2014). His ex-girlfriend remained in Europe together with their daughter, who was born in 2005. They visited Yogyakarta every now and then. The three brothers Bangor, Danny and Raden joined a closely related komunitas in South Jakarta, but returned to Yogyakarta in early 2014. They opened a snack and cigarette stall on Malioboro next to the bustling Beringharjo Central Market. Their close friend Buster developed from a particularly lucu (‘funny’, ‘cute’) child into a particularly dreaded young adult and a true master of ‘postkasus behavior’. He was in and out of jail and temporarily joined different komunitas in the city center around Malioboro’s nongkrong hotspots just off the Dutch fortress (Benteng Vredeburg). At ‘Benteng’, as it is called, people of different social backgrounds intermingle and celebrate the late nights and early mornings on the weekends. The sidewalks and the two little squares on both sides of Malioboro’s southern tip, which are picturesquely set between the old fortress walls and the colonial buildings of Bank Indonesia and the Post Office, lit by old dim lanterns, have developed into a popular hangout for students, who also bring their guitars and celebrate the particular ‘suasana Jogja’ – the ‘Jogja atmosphere’. These venues of courtship, pacaran and simply nongkrong are surveyed by police patrols, but on Friday and Saturday nights the places can transform into a ‘who is who’ of the alternative young art and student scene. With regard to the many guitars that are played by the students and artists, the crowds defy ‘economic potential’ from a tekyan perspective. Since 2014 busking is legally sanctioned, and the public consumption of alcohol has become if not illegal, so at least considered ‘dirty’, alien’ and ‘immoral’ over the last years. The place has been taken by students, and hanging out with them makes me ‘malu’. I feel ‘minder’ (inferior) there now, Monchi said in 2012 when I wanted to hang out there together on a Friday night. I have lost sight of Bicycle Joe since 2012. He must now be in his late thirties. But I am almost sure that he still cycles and roams the city streets, managing to involve both friends and customary strangers into cooperation of various kinds with his rather predictable but disarming charm. Jim’s former fiancée Pama returned to Yogyakarta again in 2009 and now works as an accountant in a small company in the north of the city. She has helped in organizing Rumah Sehat Lestari film screenings every now and then before we had closed down our doors in 2013. She remained in contact with Suki and Utomo. In 2009, she was tested HIV-negative. She keeps encouraging her friends to take a blood test and counseling with Novianto, who has remained an inspiring and knowledgeable counselor throughout the years. The young women from the handicraft and sewing workshop, Tami, Gita, Ambar, Daisy, Micky, Rara and Indri have completed their vocational training at the eco-social project and either worked there as supervisors for new trainees

Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’

or they have joined various tailors, laundries and handicraft companies in the city. All of them have married and became working mothers.

Cleansed Streets In 2014, the government of the autonomous Special Region Yogyakarta (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta) has adopted a by-law, which is publicly referred to as Perda Gepeng No.1 2014. The regional law targets the social welfare (kesehjateraan social) of the Special Province’s citizens and reveals in its opening paragraph that it is concerned with “vulnerable social groups living in poverty, lack, limitation, and a social divide, and who lead a disorderly and unworthy life […] in effective, rigorous ways based on a sustained legal basis and human dignity, to ensure social welfare and public order.”2 A similar regional law was first introduced in the capital autonomous region of Jakarta (Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta), and has since been passed in most of the Javanese provinces of Indonesia. The Perda Gepeng penalizes the ‘begging street music’ (ngamen) in public places, the street-related communities’ source of income. Article 5 prohibits being a homeless person (gelandangan), who has no ID card, no fixed abode, no steady income, and who has “no future plans either for themselves nor for their children.” Article 6 forbids to be a beggar (pengemis), that is a person “a. whose income generation depends on the sympathy and compassion of others (tergantung pada belas kasihan orang lain), and exerts pressure or induces anxiety and fear in others (agak terpaksa/takut), b. who wears dirty and disheveled clothes, c. who loiter in busy or strategic places, and d. who applies the abovementioned and similar practices in order to induce sympathy and compassion in others”. After almost ten years of negotiation between NGOs, CBOs, street-related communitites, lawyers, ombudsman and various departments of the local governments, the Yogyakarta administration has translated sociocultural stigma categories into a legal document that criminalizes street-related communities and subsumes them under the new term gepeng, which is an acronym of the Indonesian words for ‘homeless’ (gelandangan) and ‘beggars’ (pengemis). The increased regulation of public spaces does not come as a surprise, but it is striking that a law directly targets the feeling norms and emotive practices of street-related workers, pedestrians, motorcycle and car drivers. It is prohibited to work at strategic locations if wearing inappropriate clothes and trying to evoke sympathy or compassion. Offenders are arrested and brought into camps, where they are observed and assessed into one of 2 | Quoted from the opening paragraph of the by-law Peraturan Daerah Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta, Nomor 1, Tahun 2014, Tentang Penagnanan Gelandangan dan Pengemis; translated by the author.

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the main categories ‘homeless’, ‘psychotic (psikotik) homeless’ and ‘beggars’ according to their behavior, local origin, social provenience, age, and gender.3 Warning signs at the road junctions remind motorcyclists and motorists, not to give money to the gepeng, but transfer money to the administration’s social welfare office (Dinas Sosial) instead. Other signs, like the one below, are less subtle and directly refer to the fines and charges as they are established in article 24, paragraph 1 to 5 of the by-law (see image 14 below). Image 14: Street sign, Yogyakarta, 2015.

Stop! Giving coins on the street (blue background). Register of penalties and fines related to bums and beggars. Transgression – penalty – fine (red background). Bumming and begging per person: 6 weeks (in jail), 10 million; bumming and begging per group: 3 months, 20 million; using others: 1 year, 50 million; bringing in bums and beggars: 1 year, 50 million; coordinating bums and beggars: 6 months, 40 million; giving money/ goods: 10 days, 1 million.

3 | I would like to thank Paul Kellner and Sandeep Nanwani for sharing their insights with me.

Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’

The last paragraph of article 24 does not target those considered ‘beggars’ and ‘homeless’, but also regulates the passersby how (not) to be affected by ‘illegal’ emotive practices that aim at the evocation of sympathy and compassion: “Any person (including NGOs and legal entities), which violates the regulation not to give money and/or other goods to the gepeng publicly [...] is sentenced with of up to ten days of prison and/or a maximum fine of Rp 1.000.000,00.” Sympathizing ‘illegally’ and giving a few coins, bills or small gifts into the hands of the gepeng at the street intersections, is now considered a criminal act. The local government has curtailed street-related communities’ participation in the city and regulated ways of publicly sympathizing with and supporting them with money. The Perda Gepeng controls citizens’ agencies at the street junctions and alters prevalent local feeling norms of compassion and care. Ignorance towards street musicians and beggars is not an individual’s choice any longer. It is a legally prescribed ‘good practice’ of civil obedience. The new ‘gepeng’ are no longer public annoyances that challenge passersby’s fellow feelings. The intricate question (‘do I or do I not spare a coin?’) how to behave morally savvy when ‘beggars’ or ‘buskers’ stretch out their hands has been answered by the local government. Ignorance is now legally endorsed. The good and obedient citizen has no reason to feel compassion or sympathy for street-related persons or even guilt about ignoring them any longer. The state has taken care of it. Furthermore, the by-law defines social responsibility in Article 18, paragraph 1b in more ‘modern’ ways: Yogyakartans are obliged to report to the police when there are homeless persons or beggars ‘loitering’ in their neighborhood. Although religiously, culturally and ethically contradictory (Retsikas 2016), public compassion towards street-related people is now governmentally regulated. Sympathizing with street-related communities in face-to-face encounters and being drawn into their skilfull emotional economies has been ruled out. Although the law was supposed to assist vulnerable families in their commitment to keep their children at school and not send them off to the streets, it currently contributes to the criminalization and marginalization of streetrelated communities and individuals. Street-related communities’ opportunities to generate income have been continuously curtailed by the government over the last fifteen years without providing alternatives. Many public spaces and empty land lots that once belonged to the Sultanate of Yogyakarta have been sold, privatized and transformed into shopping malls, hotels, restaurants or fun parks. In the administration’s aspiration to promote Yogyakarta as Southeast Asian hub of cultural tourism, the local administration has released dozens of new licenses for hotels and leisure parks since 2012. From a broader perspective, the rigorous application of the Perda Gepeng in 2015 feeds into Yogyakarta’s neoliberalization, which intends to clear the city from the non-normative and dirty. It is striking

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that the ngamen of street-related communities is penalized, whereas recently mushrooming angklung4 bands that comprise of up to six performers per street junction are promoted as Central Javanese cultural heritage. With the criminalization of ngamen and the promotion of culturally more valuable ‘traditional public music’, the attention fields for those who were considered disturbances on the city’s path of ‘Javanese refinement’ were continuously shriveling over the last years. The emotional economies of those young men and also women, who continued working and living on the streets, have radicalized in terms of their emotive practice and speech. Moreover, promising social encounters had to take place in highly contested privatized or threshold spaces. During my last fieldwork between July 2014 and June 2015, street-related communities have almost disappeared from the public eye. The ‘successors’ of the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak have shifted their workplaces into the city buses of semi-privatized companies, leisure and recreation parks, the beaches, restaurants and the food courts near the kraton’s big squares (alunalun). The latter have remained safe enough spaces in which the regime of the Javanese ways (cara Jawa), where social relationships and spaces are negotiated in relation to the budi pekerti rules over the local government’s by-law. This seems paradox, because the Sultan Hamengkubuwono X is also the governor of the Yogyakarta Special Province, who has ultimately passed the Perda Gepeng, at the same time. I had always refrained from buying into narratives of Yogyakarta’s nationalist and religious radicalization, the rise of neoliberal consumption patterns and public control. The anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak’s manoeuvering through controlled public spaces, radicalizing discourses and xenophopic social currents helped me deconstruct the moral panics of an ‘Indonesia gone awry’. But in the face of the rigorous application of the Perda Gepeng, the approval of almost one hundred new licenses for the construction of hotels and four ‘mega-shopping malls’ in 2013 (http://www.thejakartapost.com), that were expected to open their gates by 2017, suggests that the local government is serious in pursuing a radical cleansing campaign driven by economic desires to further promote Yogyakarta’s image of a clean and well-mannered haven of an orchestrated Javanized Indonesian consumer culture. The institutionalized economic and political crave for staging both refined Javaneseness and the ever-modern, a rhetoric that cannot but remind of Indonesia’s New Order rhetoric of a national family, progress and modernity, marginalizes, stigmatizes and criminalizes communities that are ascribed ‘lacking morals’ that refer to nothing more than disheveled clothes, non-normative public appearances and engegements in the informal economic spheres and sectors. Coupled with politico-religious 4 | Angklung (Indon.): multi-layered bamboo tube instruments.

Epilogue: ‘Cleansed Streets’

manipulation of various ‘faiths’, fanatism, increasing public shaming and stigmatization campaigns of LGBT, violent protests against peaceful feminist events, the continued stigmatization of children and grandchildren of alleged former members of the communist party (PKI), violent attacks on cultural events, the public demonization of alcohol consumption and its prohibition of sale in shopping centres and little vending stalls, and a local media and police that gives in to the threats of politico-religious thugs for the sake of ‘public harmony’ suggest that the suasana Jogja has indeed turned sour. The Perda Gepeng and related camp assessment do not only affect streetrelated communities as I have described them in this book. The Yogyakarta version equally affects street-related waria (‘transgender’) and other communities (Hegarty 2016) in terms of income generation and subjective wellbeing. From a broader perspective, which takes the legal practices and related curtailing of free speech, the regulations of public spaces, the disciplining of gender identities and sexualities (Hegarty/Thajib 2016), and politics of care of Indonesia’s decentralized and autonomous local governments into account, the Yogyakarta Peraturan Daerah Gelandangan dan Pengemis No. 1 2014 hints to a national movement of disciplining and normativization of Indonesia’s citizens. The joint forces of activists, academics and stakeholders of the governmental apparatuses seem critical in contributing to more compassionate ways of Indonesia’s current campaigns of governing its most vulnerable populations, and uniting against politico-religious hardliners and their bold techniques of stigmatizing, marginalizing and excluding those who do not fall in line.

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Appendix

D ATA A NALYSIS With regard to this ethnography, the collected data was analyzed along the following seven steps. STEP ONE: TIDYING UP. The various transcribed and digitalized types of data were arranged into the following folders according to their quality and genre: • • • • • • • • • •

On-the-spot interpretations and loose theoretical models from action research in the field Memory protocols from the systematic observations of social interactions Transcriptions from recorded formal interviews Memory protocols from conversations, especially the curhat-sessions Transcriptions of recorded FGDs Workshop materials: educational tools, participants’ notes, questionnaires Protocols of Rumah Sehat Lestari meetings Photos and videos (and their transcription) Media artifacts (newspaper articles, public signposts, and advertisements) Emotion-based research diary

STEP TWO: FINDING ITEMS. After having the various data sets at least typologically administered, which included an open reading and the composition of memos with reflections on every single document, I started looking for central items included in the data. This was accomplished by an open coding by means of the index-function of data processing software1 . 1 | Although such a practice is less flexible and more time-consuming than a softwarebased coding (e.g. maxqda, atlas-ti), it worked quite efficiently for myself. The lack of flexibility forced me to decide on central categories. This was particularly helpful in order to define the central aspects of the ethnography. And not coding the data on more

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The criteria for the open coding (i.e. attaching multi-level codes to the transcribed and digitalized texts) were based on the following dimensions: (1) relevance to the research questions, (2) composed memos alongside the documents, (3) frequency of phenomena in the data, and (4) statements of local research partners and the collaborative action research team, by integrating onthe-spot interpretations and loose theoretical models formulated in the field. The result of step two was an abundance of single indices of every document of the above mentioned ten folders of data sets. In order not to complicate the data but to reduce its complexity, it was important not to code the emerged texts on more than three levels. Figure 4. Example I of a three-level single index.

Explication: The protagonists’ common practice of joking was identified as a peculiar communication (and interaction pattern) within the identified item street communities – activities. The silencing, gossiping and tremendous fear of HIV was derived from the frequency of the following code within various documents: Figure 5. Example II of a three-level single index.

In order to obtain information not only on the quantitative frequency of a code, but also regarding its relevance to the research, the contents of these text passages were juxtaposed with composed memos alongside the documents and the statements of local research partners of the collaborative action research team. than three levels provided me with enough flexibility and authorial freedom during the writing up of the ethnography.

Appendix

STEP THREE: CREATING STABLE SETS OF ITEMS. In order to create stable sets of items, a meta-analysis of the single indices according to the same criteria of relevance, composed memos, frequency, and statements was conducted. The following eight stable sets of items emerged: (1) Life in the street communities, (2) ‘Javanese ways’, (3) HIV-AIDS, (4) Hospital practices, (5) NGOs, (6) Life stages, (7) Self-reflection, and (8) Conceptual issues (regarding data collection and representation). After assessing this thematic octagon, I conducted manual ‘open associative clusterings’ of each of these eight ‘meta-categories’. Subsequently, the dominant items of the emerged clusters were crosschecked with the single indices to find out whether relevant phenomena had either not been coded in the first coding step or were simply not contained in the data. After subjectively interpreting the clusters with the aim of identifying sets of stable items, and merging them with the items of the single indices, the single indices were recoded where necessary. The next step contained the assemblage of the recoded single indices into eight multiple indices of the eight emerged meta-categories. STEP FOUR: IDENTIFYING ACTORS, ACTIVITIES, AND SETTINGS. Guided by an actor-centered research interest, data-inherent taxonomies in the tradition of James Spradley (1979), constant comparisons in the Grounded Theory tradition of Anselm Strauss (1987), or the creation of patterns and assembling of structures (LeCompte 2000; Schensul/LeCompte 1999) were not pursued. Aspiring an extended case study and life story approach, the data analysis had to be adapted accordingly. Referring to Van Velsen (1967) and Mitchell (1982), who both underline the importance of focusing on the chain of social events within a particular time frame, besides creating stable sets of items, a timeline was identified that could be carried by chronologically arranged life stories. Because the life stories had been narrated and witnessed at different life stages and in different locations, this needed further scrutiny. Besides having collected sufficiently thick data, the emergence of the five key protagonists, Monchi, Jim, Kris, Jempol and Harvey, was based on the criteria of both similarity and particularity. They shared similar social and cultural backgrounds, knew each other for many years, shared similar experiences during their socialization into street life, and all impressively and visibly embodied the particularly Yogyakartan ‘tekyan style’. Furthermore, the five protagonists shared many differences from an idealized Javanese coming of age during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. In terms of the protagonists’ particularity, it was striking how their life courses developed very differently during young adulthood, although some of them shared so much time together during childhood and adolescence. Monchi emerged as primary protagonists due to the rich data and his own motivation of turning this ethnography into a ‘stunning book’, as he put it.

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Consequently, he guides the reader through the ethnography, whereas the other four protagonists and their friends are juxtaposed to illustrate both individual particularities and communal similarities in their extended street careers. STEP FIVE: IDENTIFYING PATTERNS OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND STRUCTURES. The analyses of the protagonists’ life stories and social encounters by means of the extended case study method are oriented along sociologist Jack Katz’s (2001) ‘analytic induction’. The sociologist urges researchers to focus on recurring actions and interactions in particular events, from which hypotheses shall be subsequently developed. By means of comparison with other similar events, i.e. social encounters and other protagonists’ behavior in similar events, it was crosschecked whether a hypothesis could be formulated, or if revision was needed until compared cases fit the developed hypothesis. STEP SIX: THE RESEARCHER’S EMOTIONS. There has been little work on the epistemological dimensions of emotions (Davies 2010, Spencer 2010; Svasek 2010). I expand on the critical self-reflexivity of anthropologists such as James Clifford and George Marcus (1986), Vincent Crapanzano (2010), Georges Devereux (1967), Byron Good (2012), Douglas Hollan (2008), Elisabeth Hsu (1999), Judith Okely (2012), Renato Rosaldo (1991), Philip Salzman (2002), or Unni Wikan (1992), highlighting the methodological significance of emotions as embodied social communicators between ethnographers and their interlocutors. As I describe more concisely in chapter 6, the display and articulation of emotions is crucial in communicating one’s positionality within social encounters. As embodied products of researcher-researched interactions, emotions may either motivate or discourage further engagement. The emotions that researchers express (or suppress) and articulate (or mute) in encounters with their research protagonists, shape the ways in which stories are told and social realities are conveyed. Ignoring the epistemic quality of emotions obstructs our capacity to make profound claims about other peoples’ experiences, behaviours, and speech. I am inclined to argue that making the participant observer’s social involvement and pervasive affective practices in the field more transparent solidifies the ethnographic data. Since the research protagonists’ experiences, behaviours, and narratives–‘ethnographic data’ in other words–are not only relational but are also affective and emotional, obscuring the researcher’s emotions represents only half of the ethnographic reality. More provocatively, one could argue that failing to acknowledge the inter-affectivity of ethnographic data (i.e., both relational and affective) distorts the data. Similar to other colleagues, I have documented my excitement and anxiety when I arrived in Yogyakarta for the first time, the happiness after having established social relations, the pride of sensing a ‘belonging’ to my host

Appendix

communities, the fear and anxiety to do fieldwork ‘the wrong way’ and the distress related to playing many different social roles as activist, anthropologist and friend. These reflections have translated into the introduction (chapter 1) and the method section (chapter 2). When compared to other disciplines, this has become inevitable good anthropological practice, a rhetoric where ethnographers demonstrate their research ethics and self-reflexivity. Anthropology seems ahead in terms of reflecting on the ethnographer’s positionality and subjectivity when compared to other disciplines like psychology, social psychology, or political science. But once it comes to ‘theory’ and ‘ethnography’, ethnographers sometimes transform from immersed empathetic fieldworkers into robotic analysts that disappear behind a collage of detached ethnographic data and others’ texts. This is a pity, because it homogenizes ethnographers’ vivid and unique perspectives on encountered, documented and analyzed social realities. It obscures the generative formation of ethnography and reproduces our mode of knowledge production as ‘hermeneutic black box’ that sometimes obstructs collaboration with scholars from other disciplines (Shryock 2016; Stodulka 2017). What seems methodologically promising is a thorough documentation of emotions that are directly related to encounters with research partners, interlocutors, informants, and witnessed less impersonalized phenomena, because they arise from and influence the social relationships and encounters with informants, interlocutors, collaborators, research partners, and spaces. Treating the fieldworker’s emotions as relational data can be epistemologically rewarding, because emotions are by definition phenomena that relate us with others, and relate others with us. This widely acknowledged fact is standard procedure when we analyze the experiences and emotions of others (Engelen/ Röttger-Rössler 2012; Hollan 2008), but it has been ignored as epistemological plot, as embodied and robust attempt of understanding, imagining, and representing others. In my case, the montage of ‘traditional empirical data sets’ with my emotion diaries in which I documented my emotions related to the encounters with research protagonists has enriched my understanding of the lifeworlds I got involved in. I have conducted an emotion-based research diary (see above, step one: tidying up) in which I have documented emotions related to my encounters with research partners and protagonists, and subsequently analyzed them in relation to the other data sets. Whereas this complementary data set remained marginal in many analytical steps, the recognition, reflection, and analysis of my own emotions related to the encounters with the anak Bendoro and the anak Congklak, and their comparison with the narratives of NGO activists, expatriate social workers, artists, doctors, and researchers, helped me to develop a theoretical framework that could make sense of the social and emotional practices on both sides of the observed interactive continuum (see

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chapter 6). A more experiential comprehension of what was at stake in the street encounters only emerged after I had compared my own emotions as they were produced in my encounters with the street-related protagonists, to those of local NGO activists’ and street workers’ narratives about their involvement with the young men. My emotions were not an exclusively subjective experience, but a widespread social fact that related me to both the protagonists and their interaction partners. Without putting my own emotions into the analysis of the other, the theoretical enquiry into the affective dynamics of social interactions between actors of significantly asymmetrical power positions may not have proceeded. STEP SEVEN: RESTUDY, CROSSCHECKING THE DATA, AUTHORIZATION. The hypotheses and the remaining loopholes, which became obvious after the data analysis, were further crosschecked in restudies by means of interviews and focus group discussions with the collaborative action research team, the protagonists and academic research partners in the field. In May and June 2012, after a first draft of this book had been accomplished, I could luckily obtain approval to publish the monograph from most of the the protagonists and local research partners.

Appendix

L IST OF A CRONYMS ABG

Anak Baru Gede (A child just growing up; adolescent).

ART

Antiretroviral Therapy.

ARV

Antiretroviral (Medication).

ASKESKIN

Asuransi Kesehatan Masyarakat Miskin (Health Insurance for the Poor).

AusAID

Australian Agency for International Development.

CBO

(Nonprofit) Community-based Organization.

CD4

Cluster of Differentiation 4; a glycoprotein found on the surface of immune cells such as T helper cells.

Cs

Slang word: a ‘beloved and trusted friend’. Other, less intimate, but often used terms were the Javanese term ‘konco’, or the Indonesian ‘teman’, ‘sahabat’ and ‘kawan’.

CST

Care, Support and Treatment.

FGD

Focus Group Discussion.

GIRLI

Acronym for pingGIR kaLI, ‘beside the river’; where most of the poorest residents of Indonesian cities live. A Yogyakarta based ‘street movement’, initiated by social activists, students, ‘street children’, artists, anthropologists, and the ‘little people’ from the kampung (see glossary) around Malioboro Street in 1984.

IDU

Intravenous drug users; acronym widely used among Indonesian NGO activists.

JAMKESMAS Jaminan Kesehatan Masyarakat (Community Health Insurance) JAMKESOS

Jaminan Kesehatan Sosial (Social Health Insurance).

JOY

Jaringan ODHA Yogyakarta (Network of PLWHA Yogyakarta).

JPKJ

Jaringan Peduli Komunitas Jalanan (Support and Care Network for Street Communities).

KK

Kepala Keluarga (Head of Family, ‘household’); also: Kartu Keluarga (Family Registration Card).

KKN

Korupsi, Kolusi dan Nepotisme (Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism); also: Kuliah Kerja Nyata (Real Work Studies).

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Komisi Penanggulangan AIDS (National AIDS Commission).

Krismon

Krisis Moneter (Economic/Monetary Crisis).

KTP

Kartu Tanda Penduduk (Resident Identity Card).

LIP

Lembaga Indonesia Perancis (French Indonesian Cultural Center).

ML

Make Love.

MUI

Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Council of Indonesian Muslim Scholars).

NGO

Non-governmental Organization.

OAT

Obat Anti Tuberkulosis (Tuberculosis Therapy).

ODHA

Orang yang Hidup dengan HIV-AIDS; Indonesian equivalent of the English term PLWHA (People Living with HIV/AIDS).

PKBI

Perkumpulan Keluarga Berencana Indonesia (Indonesian Family Planning Association).

PKI

Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party; banned 1965).

PMI

Palang Merah Indonesia (Indonesian Red Cross).

PSK

Pekerja Seks Komersial (commercial sex worker).

PUSKESMAS Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat (Community Health Center). RSL

Rumah Sehat Lestari (Home for Sustainable Health); community health project and shelter for ill street people.

RT

Rukun Tetangga (literally translates as ‘neighborhood harmony’; a territorial division within a kampung. Each kampung is comprised of numerous RT, which in turn consist of around 30 KK (‘households’). The next level of local kampung administration is the RW (Rukun Warga), which can be translated as ‘residential harmony’. Each ‘district’ has its elected head, known as Pak (and rarely also a Bu) RT or RW.

SD

Sekolah Dasar (grammar/elementary school; comprises six grades).

SIM

Surat Izin Menyetir (Driving License).

Appendix SMA

Sekolah Menengah Atas (senior/secondary high school; comprises three grades).

SMP

Sekolah Menengah Pertama (middle/junior high school; comprises three grades).

STD

Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

STNK

Surat Tanda Nomor Kendaraan (Vehicle Registration Document).

TKI

Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (Indonesian Work Force).

TST

Tahu Sesama Tahu (Mutual/Shared ‘Tacit’ Knowing).

UGD

Unit Gawat Darurat (A&E: Accident and Emergency Unit).

UNICEF

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, since 1953 renamed as United Nations Children’s Fund.

USAID

United States Agency for International Development. VCT: Voluntary Counseling and Test.

WHO

World Health Organization.

L IST OF F IGURES AND I MAGES Figures Figure 1

Community Map I: Komunitas Bendoro (2005 – 2010)

Figure 2

Community Map II: Komunitas Congklak (2005 – 2010)

Figure 3

Medication board next to Jim’s bed

Figure 4

Example I of a three-level single index

Figure 5

Example II of a three-level single index

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Images Image 1

Streets sign in the city center, ‘Yogya berhati nyaman’

Image 2

Crowded evenings around Beringharjo Market, Jalan Malioboro

Image 3

Angkringan (‘Javanese snack bar on wheels’) in front of street art mural

Image 4

Street Art music performance at a parking lot near Jalan Malioboro

Image 5

Street Art mural near the Sultan’s Palace (kraton): ‘Against Domination’

Images 6/7

Junior anak Bendoro at a natural pool near the former ‘Beach Hut’

Image 8

Monchi, the anthropologist and pet dog Chico (photo by R. Göres)

Image 9

Jim (photo by anonymous)

Images 10/11

Street banner: ‘Destroy drugs, AIDS/HIV and the PKI’

Images 12

World AIDS Day 2007

Image 13

Monchi at the age of 31, near Parangtritis Beach

Image 14

Street sign: Stop giving coins on the street

Appendix

G LOSSARY Adik (Indon.): younger bother

Bahasa gaul (Indon.): a continuously

or sister; refers to kinship, friendship and acquaintance relationships. Adzan (Indon.): the prayer of the muezzin. Aman (Indon.): safe; secure. Anak (Indon.): child; also used to convey a person’s ‘belonging to’ and ‘identification with’ someone (individual or group) or something, regardless of the person’s age. Anak baru (Indon.): newcomer to the streets. Anak buah (Indon.): refers to a subordinate or lower rank position in the hierarchical structure of patronage systems. Anak jalanan (Indon.): ‘street people’ or ‘street child’. Anak muda (Indon.): youth; youngster. Aneh (Indon.): (being) strange. Angkringan (Javan.): ‘snack bar’ on wheels, which starts selling basic food and drinks late afternoon until late evening. Anggur Orang Tua (AO) (Indon.): alcoholic drink, which was sold in little shops (warung) and herbal shops. Arisan (Javan./Indon.): social gathering to discuss each family’s contribution to public and social services within the kampung; sometimes also comprises a ‘village lottery’. Asu (Javan.): dog. Asyik (Coll.): ‘cool’.

changing predominantly urban, sub-cultural or youth slang; comprises many neologisms and acronyms. Bahasa senang (Coll.): ‘happy language’; tekyan slang. Bajingan (Coll.): bastard. Bangga (Indon.): pride; being proud. Bebas (Indon.): independent; free. Becak (Indon.): pedicab. Belakang (Indon.): behind; backward. Belankon (Javan.): ‘Javanese headgear’ for men. Bengkel (Indon.): small motorbike workshop. Berani (Indon.): brave; courageous. Bibit, bebet, bobot (Javan.): descent, family wealth, ascribed moral and other qualities. Bingung (Indon.): confused. Bodoh (Indon.): stupid. Bo’ol or sodomi (Coll.): anal sex. Boros (Indon.): extravagant; wasteful. Bosan (Indon.): bored; boring. Boss (Coll.): leader of a community; also colloquial form of address. Budi pekerti (Javan.): folk model that prescribes moral norms of conduct in order to lead a good and moral life. Literary translation from Basa Jawa (Javanese language): Deeds (pekerti), which originate in pure and good (budi) thoughts. Bule (Indon.): ’whitey’. The word is sometimes used for white buffaloes, but predominantly when referring to (Caucasian) ‘Westerners’ and other foreigners.

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Capek (Indon.): being both psychologically and physically exhausted or tired of something or someone. Cara Jawa (Javan.): ‘Javanese way’ or ‘Javanese culture’. Cari Cewek (Indon./Coll.): ‘to look for girls/women’. Ceker ayam (Indon.): fried chicken claws. Cewek (Coll.): girl; woman. Chris John: Indonesian boxer (WBA featherweight champion). Cocok (Indon.): suitable; fit; adequate. Copet (Indon.): pickpocket. Cowok (Coll.): boy; man. Cuek (Indon.): (to be) indifferent, unconcerned. Curhat (Indon.): widely used acronym for curahan hati, to confide and to open one’s heart to someone.

Dangdut (Indon.): popular Indonesian music genre that is influenced by Malay, Arabic, and Hindi music. Due to its popularity among the ‘little people’ it can be described as (a sexually rather explicit) ‘music for the masses’. Dewasa (Indon.): adult. Dinas Sosial (Indon.): Department of Social Welfare. Dinas Kesehatan (Indon.): Department of Health. Dukun (Javan./Indon.): healer, curer; shaman. Durung Jawa (Javan.): ‘not Javanese yet’; yet to learn the ‘Javanese way’ (cara Jawa).

Durung wong (Javan.): ‘not human yet’; yet to learn the ‘Javanese way’ (cara Jawa).

Emosi (Indon.): (with) stirred affect; (negative) emotional arousal. Enggak (Indon./Coll.): no; not. Enak (Indon.): delicious, tasty; pleasant.

Garukan (Indon.): police raid. Gembel (Indon.): bum; snot. Gengsi (Indon.): prestige; social rankrelated embarrassment. Gila (Indon.): crazy (used both in a pathological and mocking sense). Goblok (Indon.): fool; idiot. Gotong royong (Javan.): communal work; neighborhood help. Grogi (Indon.): (really) nervous. Halus (Indon./Javan.): refined; cultivated. Harga diri (Indon.): self-esteem; selfrespect. Hormat (Javan./Indon.): respect; deference. Hoyen (Coll.): (food) leftovers.

Ibu or Bu (Indon.): form of address or title for an (older) woman; also: ‘Misses’. Icik-icik (Coll.): self-made rattle. Infus (Indon.): intravenous drip feed; infusion. Isin (Javan.): shyness; shame.

Jamu (Javan./Indon.): natural herbal medicine. Jelek (Indon.): bad. Jenuh (Indon.): negative for ‘saturated’; ‘fed up’.

Appendix

Jogja asli: ‘authentic Yogyakartan’.

Kacau (Indon.): messy; chaotic. Kagèt (Javan./Indon.): (being) startled. Kakak (Indon.): older bother or sister; refers to kinship, friendship and acquaintance relationships. Kampung (Indon.): closed social community, which is organized along strict social and cultural rules and norms of conduct. Java’s cities are both geographically and socially structured as mega-clusters of thousands of kampung, which are only interrupted by the commercial units and centers along the cities’ highways or big roads. Kasar (Javan./Indon.): rough; uncultivated. Kasihan (Indon.): compassion; pity; someone, who is pitied. Kasus (Indon.): case; incident in the criminalistic sense of the word. Kejawèn (Javan.): Javanese cosmology and belief system; sometimes referred to as ‘Agama Jawi’ (Javanese religion). Kelompok berresiko (tinggi) (Indon.): high-risk groups (in terms of HIV-infection). Kepala ayam (Indon.): fried chicken heads. Keren (Coll.): slick. Ketua (Indon.): chairman; speaker; head; chief; sometimes also ‘head’ of a street community. Khawatir (Indon.): to worry.

Kiai or kyai (Javan./Indon.): expert of Islam; leader of Islamic boarding schools (pesantrèn). Kos, kamar kos or kos-kosan (Indon.): rented rooms; boarding house (particularly for students and wage workers). Kotor (Indon.): dirty. Kraton or keraton (Javan.): Palace of the Royal Family (Sultan). Kredit (Indon.): credit; loan. Kurang ajar (Indon.): brash; brazen; rude. Kutukan (Indon.): curse (of God).

Lahir dan batin (Javan./Indon.): batin, as the inner sphere of feelings and emotions, and lahir, the outer realm of visible social behavior, are mutually related and need to be balanced (in both thought and action) in order to establish emotional equanimity (tentram). Lapen (Coll.): mix of low-quality alcohol, which was sold in little shops near Jalan Malioboro. Due to many cases of alcohol poisoning, its sale is now formally prohibited. Liar (Indon.): savage; wild. Lokalisasi (Coll.): red light district; brothel. Lupa (Indon.) or lali (Javan.): to forget.

Mabuk (Indon.): (being or getting) drunk; drinking alcohol; dizzy. Magrib (Indon.): sunset prayer (time). Malu (Indon.): shame; shyness; embarrassment; restraint; propriety. Manja (Indon.): spoiled.

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Marah (Indon.): (state of) anger. Mas (Javan./Indon.): form of address or title for a (younger) man; also: ‘Mister’. Masyarakat (Indon.): (Indonesian) society. Mbah Maridjan: famous spiritual ‘caretaker’ ( juru kunci) of the Merapi volcano; died in a pyroclastic flow during the volcano’s last major eruptions in October/November 2010. Mbak (Javan./Indon.): form of address or title for a (younger) woman; also: ‘Miss’. Minder (Coll.): inferior; subordinate; embarrassed. Minta maaf (Indon.): expressing regret; asking for forgiveness. Muhammadiyah (Indon.): second largest Islamic organization in Indonesia, founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta as a reformist socioreligious movement. Munafik (Indon.): hypocritical. Mutar-mutar (Indon.): circling; refers to convoluted opening stories, followed by more circling around problems.

Ngentot (Coll.): to have sex. Ngobrol-ngobrol (Javan.): to chat. Nongkrong (Javan.): to hang out; also: tempat nongkrong: hangout (place). Nrimo (Javan.): accepting the experiences and adversities given by life wholeheartedly (dengan ikhlas). Nyaman (Javan./Indon.): comfortable.

Orang baik (Indon.): a (morally) good person Om (Javan./Indon.): form of address for ‘uncle’ in the widest sense of the word. Orang gila (Indon.) or wong edan (Javan.): ‘crazy man’ (used both in a pathological and mocking sense). Orang mampu (Indon.): literally translated means ‘people, who can/are entitled to’. Figuratively, it might be comparable to what is often described as ‘middle class’. Orde baru (Indon.): ‘New Order’. The term refers to the regime of Indonesia’s 2nd president Suharto (1966 – 1998).

Nakal (Indon.): naughty;

Pacar (Indon.): boy- or girlfriend;

promiscuous. Nasi kucing (Indon.): ‘cat’s rice’; consists of a very small portion of rice with chilis, dried fish, or tempeh (fermented soy bean cake), wrapped in a banana leaf. Nengok (Javan./Indon.): to look after; to pay a visit; to care (for). Ngamen (Coll.): busking. Ngamuk (Javan./Indon.): raging. Ngemis (Javan./Indon.): begging.

partner. Pacaran (Indon.): intimate relationship; partnership. Pak or Bapak (Indon.): form of address or title for an (older) man; also: ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister’. Pak RT (Indon.): neighborhood authority. Pancasila: ideology (deeply ingrained in the Constitution) introduced by Indonesia’s first

Appendix

president Sukarno; consists of five principles: nationalism (kebangsaan), humanism (kemanusiaan), rule of the people (kerakyatan), social justice (keadilan sosial) and belief in one God (ketuhanan yang maha Esa). In its translation to everyday life, the philosophy of mutual help and cooperation in achieving a collective goal (gotong royong) is highly emphasized. Pasrah (Javan./Indon.): (fatalistic) surrender or submission. Peduli (Indon.): to care; to bother. Pengamen (Indon.): street musician; ‘busker’. Pemulung (Indon.): scavenger; garbage collector. Pinjam (Indon.): to borrow; to lend. Pitung (Coll.): 70 cc Honda motorbike manufactured in the 1970s. Preman (Indon.): thug; criminal. Priyayi (Javan.): Javanese bureaucratic elite, strongly driven by hierarchical Hindu-Javanese tradition. Pusing (Indon.): (having a) headache; dizzy. Putus asa (Indon.): a state of despair; literally translated: ‘cut off hope’.

Ramah (Indon.): friendly. Rasa (Javan./Indon.) derived from the Sanskrit word for ‘juice’ or ‘essence’; a sensual and mental perceptual capacity; refers to particular forms of perception in terms of taste, touch and smell; a feeling for and the sensual perception of objects and others’ mind states. The verb ‘merasa’

is mostly used similar to the English ‘to feel’, ‘to sense’ or even to ‘(feel-)think’. Rasa bersalah (Indon.): guilt. Rejeki (Indon.): fortune. Remaja (Indon.): youth; adolescent. Rendan (Coll.): acronym for the low Javanese ‘kere berdandan’, ‘vagrants wearing make-up’; refers to ‘street girls’. Rukun (Javan./Indon.): (social) harmony.

Sabar (Indon./Javan.): patience; to be patient. Sadar (Indon.): being aware. Sakit (Indon.): sick, ill; painful. Santai (Indon.): relax(-ed). Sarung (Indon.): sarong. Sedih (Indon.): sad. Segan (Javan./Indon.): shy; reticent. Seks bebas (Indon.): promiscuity. Sharing (Coll.): to share one’s thoughts and emotions. Sibuk (Indon.): (being) busy. Sifat (Indon.): character, traits (of a person). Slametan: communal feast, symbolizing the social unity of those participating in it. The life cycle, communal, or personal ceremonies take their name from the Javanese word slamet (a peaceful state of equanimity, in which nothing will happen). Sombong (Indon.): arrogant; vain. Sopan (santun) (Indon.): polite (manners). State-ibuism can be translated as ‘state-mothering’: the mother (ibu) is constructed as follower and servant of the father

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(bapak). The national discourse of state-ibuism was supposed to ‘discipline’ women and hierarchically locate the mother below the father. Stres (Indon.): (emotional) distress. Suasana Jogja (Indon.): ‘Yogyakarta atmosphere’. Sungkan (Javan.): respectful politeness; propriety; restraint; shyness.

Takut (Indon.): (state of) anxiety, fear. Tambal ban (Indon.): a little shelter at the side of the road, where flat tires can be patched, and petrol is sold by the liter in used bottles. Tanggung jawab (Indon.): responsibility. Tata krama (Javan.): cultivated manners. Tata susila (Javan.): ethic; moral obligations. Tekyan (Coll.): acronym of the low Javanese (ngoko) ‘sithik ning lumayan’, which translates as ‘a little but enough’. Refers to a particular ‘street ideology’. Teman curhat (Indon.): a friend to confide in. Tenang (Indon.): calm. Tentram (Javan.): equanimity; culturally aspired subjective wellbeing. Transmigrasi (Indon.): a national transmigration program initiated by the Dutch colonial government; continued since 1969 by the Orde baru regime.

Uang transpor (Coll.): ‘transportation money’ for workshop participants. Ustadz (Indon.): (Muslim) master or teacher. Utang (Indon.): debt; loan.

Waria (Indon.): ‘wanita pria’ (woman-man), refers to a ‘traditional’ third gender role in many Indonesian societies; often translated as ‘transgender’. Warung (Indon.): shop; little restaurant or food stall. Warung lesehan (Indon.): widespread sort of food stall or a little restaurant, where the customers sit cross-legged on woven mats to enjoy their food and drinks. wedi (Javan.): social fear; anxiety. wong cilik (Javan.): ‘the little people’ or ‘working class’. wong Jawa (Javan.): a Javanese person; being Javanese.

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Documentaries/Videos Etnoreflika (2004): “PKACC”, Etnoreflika/YLPS Humana/Sorot Media, 20 min. Lemelson, Robert (2012): “Standing on the edge of a Thorn”, Elemental Productions. 33 min. Nugraheni, Dwi Sujanti (2007): “Janji Jabrik” [Jabrik’s Promise], 20 min. Nugroho, Garin (1998): “Daun di atas Bantal” [Leaf on a Pillow], Christin Hakim Film. 80 min. Ziv, Daniel (2013): “Jalanan” [Streetside], DesaKota Productions. 108 min.

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