Brokerage, Creativity and Space: Protest Culture in Indonesia

Abstract

Protest movements in Indonesia resist the government’s liberal development policies and the destruction of culture and environment through capitalist intrusion and land (or sea) grabbing. This article analyses the role of intermediaries, or brokers, and how they draw on a global rhetoric of human rights, as well as environmentalism, indigeneity, local identity markers, and performative means to mobilise resistance. Drawing on Lindquist, the broker here serves as a theoretical concept and a methodological entry-point for an ethnographic study of intermediation and translation between different places and spaces involved in these protest movements. The article first conceptualises brokerage and carves out its creative and performative aspects, challenges, and spatial dimensions with regard to emerging resistance – a combination that has not been covered in the anthropological literature on brokerage so far. These conceptual reflections provide a framework for the analysis of two Indonesian case studies – one in Bali, one in Maluku – and the various translation processes involved, including environmentalism and indigeneity, media convergence and local creativity, in which the crossing of space and networking are important features in protest brokerage.

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