Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Welcome to Indonesia Week here at The Wandering Life!

I traveled to Indonesia for the first time in early July, spending a week there for the AAS-in-Asia conference held at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. My trip was, of course, very short, and I only made two stops, in Jakarta and Yogyakarta (pronounced “JO-Jakarta,” often shortened to “Jogja”). Knowing how brief my exposure to the country would be, I wanted to do a bit of pre-departure reading so that I’d arrive there with at least some background knowledge and context for what I was seeing.

In the month before I left, I pulled together several books about the country that had been lingering on my shelves and set myself up with a quick “Intro to Indonesia” course. Two of the books are longer, and I’ll discuss each of them in separate posts this week; today, I’m sharing a couple of shorter books that were helpful in introducing me to the basics of Indonesian history, geography, politics, and society, plus a fun series of madcap mysteries.

Kathleen M. Adams, Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture

I started with the book that requires a “full disclosure” acknowledgement: it’s published by the Association for Asian Studies, which is, of course, where I work—though I didn’t have any involvement in acquiring or editing this short book by Kathleen M. Adams.

I used Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture as a quick refresher to orient myself with major events in history and aspects of society before I went on to more in-depth material. In just about 100 pages, Adams outlines the archipelago’s history from its earliest days as a locus for trade; through Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialism; to its post-World War II independence and development into the world’s fourth-largest country. Adams uses an image to ground each chapter (batik cloth, a mosque, a map in the National Museum) as she moves through building the “collage” of Indonesian history and culture. The point that comes through clearly is that “there is nothing natural” in the present-day identity of the nation-state we call Indonesia: it encompasses 17,508 islands and countless ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. The whole assemblage could have just as easily fractured into different states instead of cohering around the idea of Indonesian nationalism during the early 20th century.

Logically, I knew that my trip to Indonesia was going to be quite short and limited. Reading Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture made me fully aware of just how limited a view of the country I would be getting by only traveling to Jakarta and Yogyakarta.

Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia

This 2021 Penguin Shorts volume by former Financial Times journalist Ben Bland, now based at the Lowy Institute think tank in Australia, is a succinct and informative introduction to Indonesian politics in the 2010s. Not exactly a biography of Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”), Bland has used the president’s rise to power as an explanatory focus for discussions of history, economics, international relations, and religion. Informed by his reporting, which includes multiple interviews with Jokowi, Bland considers the tensions between democracy and authoritarianism, elite politics and on-the-ground campaigning, that have characterized Joko Widodo’s decade at the top. Man of Contradictions effectively conveys that with a two-term limit in place and a new president elected earlier this year, when Jokowi leaves office next week he will have made his mark on Indonesia in important, if not always coherent, ways.

Jesse Q. Sutanto, The Aunties Series
Dial A for Aunties, Four Aunties and a Wedding, and The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties

These books proved to be the perfect light travel reading for the long hours I spent in airports and on the train between Jakarta and Yogyakarta. The trilogy relates the outrageous exploits of narrator/protagonist Meddalin “Meddy” Chan, her mother, and her three maternal aunts. When Dial A for Aunties opens, the five of them are running an all-inclusive wedding-planning business for Southern California’s Chinese-Indonesian community; the two subsequent books take place in Oxford and Jakarta. All three novels feature completely over-the-top bonkers plots, as Meddy’s family has a tendency to stumble into crimes that they inadvertently solve amid nonstop slapstick action. Think Crazy Rich Asians crossed with Bridget Jones and a heavy dose of The Pink Panther. The books are fun, fast reads that admittedly didn’t teach me much about Indonesia in a factual sense but helped me absorb elements of culture and society that gave some context for things I noticed during my travels.

Featured photo: Jakarta, Indonesia, July 7, 2024.