Overcoming Coordination Problems

1. Spending too much time in my kost revising pilot behavioral-game protocols for translation has made me see strategic situations everywhere (this is what first year grad school felt like; not a fond memory). It's also given me time to observe this guy from my balcony:

Volunteer traffic directors are very common in Jakarta (and elsewhere in Indonesia), solving two major problems in one go: extreme labor abundance, and the classic coordination problem known as traffic. I firmly believe traffic behavior is a great indicator of societal norms (although probably not in the obvious ways). In theory, all you need is a universally acknowledged norm to overcome these problems (e.g. "drive on the right hand side" or otherwise fill your sidewalks with "Look to the Right" to save some foreign lives), but you also need people to follow norms...

The Jakarta solution is to have people volunteer to serve as traffic directors (in most parking lots, for example). It works, and they get voluntarily paid too.

The thing is, I'm not 100% sure this guy is just coordinating traffic. There's a chance he's predating on it as well, being paid not just for direction services, but for simple passage rights.

2. I could use an Indonesia-friendly alternative story for the prisoner’s dilemma that doesn’t involve criminals, non-sharia investments or anything resembling “gambling”. Let me know if you have an idea.

Notice the makup on the bride and groom

A telling fact about Indonesian ceremonies is that people tend to dress in the traditional attire of their hometown, no matter where the ceremony is. I like that.

I was invited to a wedding in Jakarta that took place in the parliament building (it was just hired, no special connection, I was told). The event itself is basically a reception; the actual wedding takes place in a small circle of family and close friends. I was taught to tell the difference between the headdress of someone from Solo vs. Yogyakarta (the two old central Javanese Sultanates). The Yogya one has a bulge in the back. One's batik shirt - the far cheerier variant of black-tie formality - reflects one's culture as well. It was a sign of respect that a Japanese guest came in a proper Kimono and incredibly impractical footwear. It would have been a sign of respect had the Westerner come in proper Western attire (but he tried, in his way).

A Religious Thanksgiving

No Thanksgiving in San Diego for me this weekend. Sate replaced turkey and a local restaurant took the place of Rico's burritos in Del Mar. Still, Thanksgiving Day was actually pretty fruitful workwise and gave me an amusing view of the religious complexity of this place. There are six official religions in Indonesia: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism (reinstated to official status in 2000). The meaning of neither Atheism nor Judaism is much understood here , and since my Latin and Sanskrit are non-existent, I fill out forms with a simple "Kristen" ("Very Old Christianity" or "Christianity-minus-Christ" or "Christianity-minus-Religion" are a few ways of looking at it).

My first meeting of the day was with a senior Catholic banker (courtesy of his colleague, my ever generous former host and friend) who had spent time in official positions. He told me of the difficulties of official appointment for non-Muslims in the past 15 years (since the rise of later president Habibie and the incorporation of Islamic rhetoric into official Suharto regime language). The new saliency of religious divides changed previous taboos and brought out preferences for the majority Muslim, often masking other, ethnic or socio-economic biases (against ethnic Chinese or other minority groups).

A generous dose of emphatically non-chauvinistic Islam is what I got from a taxi driver after the meeting. A young Batawi (original Jakartan) with a cap and facial hair, he was delighted at my interest in his beliefs. A rapidly delivered lecture ensued in Indonesian, spiced with carefully enunciated Koranic Arabic. Its melody was very much like previous experiences I've had with young newly religious Orthodox Jews trying to rekindle my inner light or a born-again Christian enlightening me about my savior. The gist of it, as far as I could tell through the gale of words, was that all creatures are God’s doing and He loves them all. We must never be angry at someone for being Hindu or Buddhist or Christian; this is not the Muslim way any more than terrorism is. Of course, there’s the slim chance he was saying the exact opposite and I missed a few negations in there, but considering the audience he was appealing to, I’d say that’s unlikely. Would he say it to another audience? It seemed genuine, but you never know, I guess.

Stepping out of my sermon/ride I went in to one of the many malls in this city to wait for a meeting nearby. Walking in, I was hit by very loud Western style music and saw a crowd of people, some in jilbabs (the local hijab), watching a small troop of young, attractive dancers of both sexes in very little and very tight clothing. So little and tight, I felt too self-consciously Western-male to watch for long; no one else seemed to think much of it. Jilbab-wearing women were moving along with music and everyone seemed very interested in the gyrating dancers.

And on I went to the next door Catholic university to the lab of a couple of linguists who happen to be native speakers of Hebrew with ties to Stanford and as Catholic as I am. I wandered among students practicing karate, laughing at those practicing karate or checking their email below the giant statue of Jesus to find their office for an extremely helpful methodological conversation on the practicalities of experiments across Indonesian ethnicities.

The truth is, though, this is Jakarta, not “Indonesia”. When you ask a newcomer if they’re originally from Jakarta, they may answer “No. From Java [the island Jakarta is on]”. I spent little time here in my last visit, and it’s shocked me how cosmopolitan and modern the city is. That's great for elite work, to which I’ll return late in fieldwork, but it’s not really that useful for my grass-roots research. Luckily, said linguists happen to have a field-station in Padang, West Sumatra, one of the places I was eying for my experiment anyway. Even more luckily, I now have their help and permission to hire their staff – here and in Padang. So it looks like I’ll spend the next few weeks translating material and setting up procedures, then head to two experimental sites – most probably Yogyakarta (Java), one of the two old Javanese capitals that inherited the kingdom of Mataram, and Padang, home of the matrilineal Minangkabau, first vice president and national hero Muhammad Hatta, an Islamic rebellion against the Indonesian republic in the late 1950s and some of the most famous and spicy cuisine in Indonesia.

PS
1. Update on the next door establishment: while it’s not an auto-body shop, I can now report that it does not seem to be gado-gado restaurant either. I haven’t seen any food or tables and there are a lot of young guys hanging out, especially at night. There’s a guard and a general air of “we have a restaurant sign so the police can pretend to believe it when we pay them off”.

2. A view from my rooftop, in terrible lighting:

Pisherman’s Wharf

I’ve succumbed to the blog plague. It seems like the only manageable way to regularly update on my whereabouts, for those interested in these things. I’ll try and keep it shortish, but I’m not promising much.

This inaugural post is blagged from my new "kost" (a dorm room of sorts with a hotel feel to it) in prime Jakarta location beside some auto-body shops and a crowd of parked motorbikes. The kost is called "De 2nd Home", which might be overstating things a little, although it's quite comfortable. At first sight, I had the uplifting feeling that I'd landed in a microcosm of everything I’m here to study: outside my window a green flag of Islam battles afternoon torrential rains, a small Christian charity hosts a bunch of kids running around, a group of very amiable, not terribly busy people hang out at all hours of the day by a kiosk still adorning campaign material from the Jakarta gubernatorial elections, and the owners of the well guarded De 2nd Home are (I think) Tionghua, the occasionally pogromed ethnic Chinese. In especially inspired moments I can go up to the rooftop terrace for a windy view of the modern towers of Jakarta set to a very loud stereophonic competition of muazzin calls to prayer.

A few days later I can report that the green flag is a commercial for something, the Christian charity is just a government health post with a Red Cross sign (don’t know why they don’t use the crescent), the people are still very amiable and still not busy, the auto-body shop next door turns out to be a Gado-Gado restaurant, and the De 2nd Home owners are still Tionghua (and renovating!) but several of my neighbors are just Bules (Gringos). Indonesian reality seems to be trying to invade my theory, but I will prevail.

But before prevailing over reality… there's just a little bit of bureaucracy to deal with. I spent my first week running between government offices, filling out forms I don't quite understand and trying to keep my story straight on all of them. I now have my SIP and KITAS (!), which along with my SKJ will enable me to get my SPP, and in a couple of weeks my registration card should be ready (this all means as much to me as it does to you). A minor occasion for celebration was my first monetary "token of appreciation" to an official. I didn't actually realize what it was until I didn't get a receipt. But seeing as the man was wearing the stunningly bland uniform of the Department of Home Affairs - dealing with, shall we say, the security aspects of "Home Affairs", I have no regrets. I walked out with letters to the “Home Affairs” offices in 28 provinces (just keeping my options open…).

And now I’ve entered the “calling in all contacts” phase to set up the actual research. I’ll be focusing on elite interviews with politicians for a bit while setting up the many technicalities for later research phases in Islamic and general universities. I’ll be heading out of Jakarta for trips before too long, but in the meantime and in between bureaucrats, I've been enjoying what Jakarta has to offer (more than I had remembered). Luckily, my attempts at coming to terms with being on this side of the earth for quite a while have been aided by several great reminders of "home": a cousin, a friend from my department, delightfully helpful former hosts, a former Stanford Bahasa Indonesia teacher, a wonderful glimpse of the Celtics going 7-0 and counting, and a taxi driver who seemed to know a little too much about San Francisco and was very enthusiastic about showing it:
"Where you from?" - "Amerika, San Francisco"
"Ya, where you live?" - "Di San Francisco. Di California"
"Where?? Daly City?! Ma-ket?! Lombad?! Va-ness? Castro-ha ha ha?!!! Pisherman’s Wharf?!

Oh, and the heat… did I mention the heat? I’m not sure it’s “collective action amidst diversity” I should be researching. Who has any interest in acting collectively or otherwise amidst this humidity, anyway?