Having Change and Making Change: Muslim Moral Transformations in Post-Suharto Jakarta, Indonesia.

Abstract

The collapse of the Suharto-led New Order regime in 1998 set off a cascade of social, legal and political reforms in Indonesia. Set against a history of the colonial and postcolonial management of religion in the archipelago, this dissertation analyzes the moral interventions of two small-scale organizations that emerged amid the ferment of the post-Suharto years. I argue that colonial attempts to limit the political potentials of Islam, continued under successive postcolonial regimes, continue to shape the prospects for “change” available to contemporary Indonesians. This sets the stage for an analysis of the local iteration of an international moral renewal movement called “Initiatives of Change.” Exploring how processes of assimilation and translation domesticate foreign knowledge and practices, I arrive at a corrective to much recent scholarship on Islam. Observations made at Initiatives of Change Indonesia suggest that excessive attention to “piety” has obscured other ethical concerns shaping Muslim subjectivities. I contend that revisiting the central Islamic concept of adab – “right relations” – allows for new understandings of the social dimensions of projects of moral reform. The project then shifts to a discussion of related processes at work in another organization (Kahfi Motivator School), as it disseminates the hybrid discourse of Islamic Hypnotherapy. Kahfi Motivator School, I argue, relies on the presumptive epistemic neutrality of (psychological) science to forge a novel synthesis of “western” technologies and Islamic moral aspirations. Turning finally to Indonesian motivational speaking practices, understood in relation to the global traditions in which they participate, I maintain that the supposed transparency of “self-help” and “popular psychology” demand far greater scrutiny – in Indonesia and elsewhere. In place of the language of “neo-liberalism,” I foreground the particularistic motivations articulated by participants in these discourses. Propelled throughout by an ambition to productively re-assemble the “familiar” and the “strange,” this dissertation sits at the nexus of history, religious studies, and ethnographic inquiry.