| 要約(英文) |
There has been a presumption in the explanation of ethnicity as sub-groups of a nation-state that persistent, if not fixed, boundaries between these groups exist. A number of scholars have postulated that the modern nation-state imposes a homogeneous notion of groups that people eventually accept, resulting in rigid social demarcation within the population. The case of Betawi ethnicity, widely known as the “Batavian Indigenous” who emerged as a creole in a colonial setting, illustrates a distinct contradiction to such conventional wisdom. The Betawi people basically accepted the state-sponsored definition of ethnicity, yet emphasized the similarities rather than the differences between cultural features of different groups and those of “Betawi culture” as officially defined by the government, so that people of different group-consciousness could tolerate each other within one broader category. The category of Betawi even subsumes people of foreign origin who were once labeled as non-Indigenous/Inlander and excluded from the category of Indonesian Nation /Bangsa Indonesia. Today this ethnicity exhibits the potential for partly delegitimizing the persistent and exclusive human classification of “Inlander” or “Bangsa Indonesia” long promoted and imposed by colonial authority and authoritarian rule.Such notable tolerance to otherness cannot sufficiently be explained by the sole fact that Betawi started off as a creole. This paper investigates the origin of this tolerance by describing Betawi’s genesis as Creolization, where different groups intermingle and fuse; and the group’s vicissitude under state cultural policy as Amalgamation, where various ideas of group-consciousness are reorganized and reconsolidated under a broader singular category. The transition of Betawi ethnicity instantiates a paradoxical consequence: universalistic rhetoric of difference that the state has constructed, along with the flat-faced demarcation of geographical units, become the principle for partial deauthorization of supposedly rigid boundaries and incessant inclusion of different senses of belonging. |
