Stigmatisation, Marginalisation, and Agency in Keluarga Cemara, an Indonesian Young Adult Series

Abstract

Keluarga Cemara [Cemara's family], a series by Arswendo Atmowiloto, displays how the wealthy characters stigmatise the characters living in poverty. The series centres on a petite-bourgeois family shifting from riches to rags, but it entails no downgrading shift from their class to the working class. The depiction of the family members and their interaction with other people shows that, despite the shift of economic capital, the family maintains their habitus as the petit bourgeoisie. The series presents a further problem in the way that this poverty-stricken family responds to the stigmatisation by accepting their dispossession of economic capital but objecting that of cultural capital, showing an exercise of agency in negotiating their position in the petit-bourgeois class. The wealthy disapprove of their cultural capital and marginalise them, revealing the desire of the wealthy to be distinct from them. We argue that in presenting the marginalisation practised by the wealthy and the agency by the low-wealth family, the series portrays the field of struggle where both try to maintain their position in social space. As such, the series clears an open textual space that allows the young adult readership to question the social structural imaginary that they inhabit.