Polite Citizenship

This article discusses the ways in which citizens have enhanced agency through informal and polite claims-making. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in West Java, this article argues that citizens tend to pressure the authorities in polite, personal, and highly informal ways to deal with state institutions and gain access to public services. Such forms of informal and polite citizenship signify a reasonably effective communal culture of consensus-formation that defines the predominantly complex character of state institutions in Indonesia. Consequently, citizens have become more capable in claiming their rights and positioning themselves vis-à-vis the authorities. These everyday practices have affected the balance of power between village authorities, informal community leaders, and citizens. By taking examples from rural West Java, this article unveils the everyday informality and the politics of politeness that may also take place in other rural areas of Indonesia and possibly the larger non-Western world.