Nationalism in Indonesia: Building imagined and intentional communities through transmigration

Transmigration settlements are planned according to Indonesian government priorities, which intend them to help build an imagined community, a unified nation. They are also places where settlers struggle to build their own vision of community as a place where they feel they belong. This article introduces the history of the Indonesian program and the place of Sulawesi transmigration settlements in nation-building. (Indonesia, nationalism, development, transmigration, community) ********** Since its earliest days, the Indonesian transmigration program has established, literally from the ground up, thousands of settlements. Each of these is a unique confluence of people, places, and social and structural factors. Every settlement is faced with its own particular challenges and opportunities to become a community. At the same time, the settlements also exist within the government's bureaucratic and ideological framework of variously defined objectives that have been the program's agenda. They are planned communities in the sense that physical infrastructure is calculated as a whole and put into place in accordance with the program's objectives. Despite all the planning, the settlements ultimately succeed or fail on the intentions of those involved, which is a struggle between two quite different intents: the planners' and the settlers'. On the one hand, there are the deliberate objectives of the state to create and maintain an "imagined community," on a national scale, of unified Indonesians drawn together into a single model of citizenship. On the other hand, there are the more immediate, sometimes much less coherent, aspirations of the settlers as individuals, and to varying degrees as groups, to succeed and establish socially, economically, and ecologically viable communities in a particular time and place, according to their own designs. Only so much can be planned. Beyond that is only intent. Realistically, community cannot be planned; it can only be intended. It is evident from the many layers of emotional meaning that are attached to the word or idea of "community" that the concept has meaning that goes beyond mere geographic place or local activity. The concept implies an "expectation of a special quality of human relationship in community, and it is this experiential dimension that is crucial to its definition" (Bender 1982:6). Thus, community may be better defined experientially. A settlement location and its infrastructure are planned, but a community must be experienced. In the case of these settlements, the state's intent is only partially realized. Where these settlements fall short of national ideological objectives, one might see an assertion of local purpose and the realization of intentional community as a distinct social phenomenon. (1) This article is based on research conducted in transmigration settlements of Sulawesi, Indonesia, in 1998, and analyses of government documents on transmigration and popular narratives. (2) Beginning with the government of the Netherlands East Indies in the early twentieth century, millions of people have been relocated voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily from densely populated islands at the country's political center to sparsely populated outlying islands of the Indonesian Archipelago. These outer islands have historically lacked the direct control and influence of the central governing authority. Although liberalizing colonial and postcolonial governments explicitly declared transmigration to be in the interest of social welfare, its implicit agenda has been to build a coherent, centrally governed state. The existence of a nation-state has required a firm connection between a geographically limited space and a culture and history that are perceived as undivided and rooted. In a country as disparate geographically and ethnically as Indonesia, this process has often required containment of the history and traditions of local populations in favor of a greater heritage. …