Remixing environmentalism in Blora,Central Java 2005–10

Tactical remix in Blora

For many activists located outside the major cities, the end of the New Order was the first experience of a national movement. Regional areas saw a mushrooming of environmental groups. There was not necessarily more activism, but there were many more labels for it. As new alliances were being formed, and old ones were being tested, groups popped up, often only momentarily. If they had a cause, activists formed a group.

The subdistrict of Randublatung and the district of Blora, where the research for this article was undertaken, was no exception. The activists discussed in this article felt that, while some of the energy and experiences of the end of the New Order could be harnessed to make change on a local level, a cultural shift was needed. They described a revelation that occurred after being involved in national campaigns. This led to thinking about activism differently:

After Suharto fell, we were really worried most activism had moved to a national scale. We needed a partnership between art and environmentalism. And we needed to bring the focus back to the local level. (Interview with Exi Wijaya, 3 September 2006)

In this article, I argue that the impetus for such partnerships and the craving for locality among Blora environmentalists shapes the style of their activist practice. The article focuses on three expressions of post-New Order environmental activism in Blora. While the people involved may be the same, the approaches by each are very different. One activist described the feeling like this:

If we talk about Rapala, anakseribupulau, Super Samin Inc. and akumassa-randublatung, actually, we are talking about almost all the same people. We are just wearing clothes that have different styles and colours. (Interview with Djuadi, 26 October 2006)

This article frames such multiple expressions of environmentalism in Blora’s tactical remix. In identifying themselves, each collective discussed here, Rapala, anakseribupulau and SuperSamin Inc., takes samples from pre-existing materials, combining them into new forms and producing new visual vocabularies. These appropriations may seem playful, but they also serve a vital purpose in communicating the concerns of activists in multiple languages at multiple scales.

Drawing on de Certeau (1984), I consider this practice of remix as a tactic, as opposed to a strategy, of resistance. According to de Certeau, distinguishing strategy from tactics highlights the differing degrees of power accorded to privileged subjects, who can strategically signify, develop and master the informational fields, and the weak, who are able to execute performative, creative and rebellious action by making use of the images, texts and tools of everyday life. De Certeau’s most quoted example demonstrating the categories of tactics and strategies relates to spatial practices within the city. Government and corporations use strategies such as official maps, signage and the city’s road grid. These strategies are not ‘bad’: they are designed to help people navigate through the city – but they cannot be reorganized, they are not flexible. The ways individuals actually move through the city, strolling, taking shortcuts and forming their own routes, are tactical. It is in this way that individuals create the city, through the practices of everyday life.

There are three main sources of content that are drawn into the group identities discussed in this article. First, the local mythology of Samin culture builds a genealogy of protest into these contemporary movements. Second, the global punk movement offers methods, which are adopted and localized in the form of tattoo culture, DIY publications and recordings, distros and festivals. ³ Third, activists draw from the shared imaginary of a global environment movement, based on popular images of environmentalism circulated by advertising and the campaigns of large-scale environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace.

What all the groups under discussion have in common is a valorization of village-level politics. This contrasts with a tendency among the previous generation of Indonesian environment activists to view transnational environment bodies’ strategies as alluring (Tsing, 2005: 290). In the new era of environmentalism in Java this allure seems to have faded for many activists. The strategies of transnational organizations such as Greenpeace have been criticized as imperialistic (Osman and Sihaloho, 2010: np). While some attacks on Greenpeace seem to originate with pro-business lobby groups, not all should be dismissed as such. Anti-colonial sentiments among activists are still very real in Indonesia, particularly around conservation. Several activists were suspicious of transnational bodies espousing global environmentalism. For example, Exi Wijaya, founder of Rapala, complains that transnational environmental bodies are often closed to the creative, adaptive processes needed to root campaigns locally.

Rapala, national-scale parody

The name of the Randublatung nature lovers’ group, Rapala, is an acronym that samples the recent history of the national-scale Indonesian environment movement. It combines the word Randublatung (the subdistrict in Blora where the group is based) with pecinta alam (nature lovers) and alludes directly to, indeed parodies, another, more well-known acronym: Mapala. Mapala, or Mahasiswa Pencinta Alam (Student Nature Lovers) is the most well-known form of environmentalism in Indonesia and has a presence at most university campuses. They organize mountaineering, rafting and climbing trips and often produce small guides to the natural environment. Individual Mapala groups operate according a national code of ethics and form a national network, which is often mobilized to help in natural disaster zones.

The rise in popularity of student nature lovers clubs at the end of the Sukarno regime appears in many histories as a calm antidote to the tension of national politics. Throughout the New Order, student nature lovers groups generally elevated environmentalism above national politics. Therefore, this particular form of student sociality was based on interests other than politically motivated, fractional campus-based activism.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Mapala network grew considerably. At the same time, corporate interests became implicated in the image of the student nature lover as, not just politically neutral, but also rough, solitary, masculine and never without a cigarette. Anna Tsing details the way tobacco giants Gudang Garam and Phillip Morris adopted the virile risk-taking image of nature-loving adventurers in their advertising in Indonesia. The campaigns went further than putting manly models conquering mountaintops on their billboards. In 1997, Marlboro ‘organised a new confluence of nature loving concerns’ by sponsoring Mapala groups, setting up exhibitions displaying products and coordinating trips (Tsing, 2000a: 145).

According to Exi Wijaya, Rapala emerged from the new generation of activists’ disillusionment with the romanticism of the Mapala identity. Wijaya was among a handful of young men, all in their early 20s, who left Randublatung before the end of the New Order, enrolled at universities in the cities, and joined Mapala chapters. Using the English word, Wijaya identified the ‘sexism’ of nature lovers, referring to the way many students boasted about mountains they had climbed and territory they had marked (interview, 3 September 2006). In Randublatung, the students’ disillusionment bore fruit, and Rapala was born. While opposed to commercial sponsorship of their events, Rapala activists saw an opportunity to use Mapala tactically, to gain legitimacy and to gain access to a national network.

Rapala was also created as a counterpoint to other, strongly punk-identified activist identities in Blora. By being a nature lovers group, it avoids what the Indonesian musician and writer Hikmawan Saefullah (2011: 4) describes as narrow understandings of punk in Indonesia, by which punk is seen ‘as a type of aggressive and entertaining music enjoyed only by a minority of angry and frustrated kids from urban streets’. Saefullah argues that Indonesian punk is multi-dimensional, and Rapala’s employment of it certainly underscores such multi-dimensionality. On a personal level, many of Rapala’s members identify as punks, but the group’s collective identity steers away from stereotypically punk imagery and language, and towards that of the politically neutral and widely recognized Mapala. By doing so, compared to the two other groups discussed here, Rapala enables activists to speak about environmental issues in more gentle voices, less easily dismissed by mainstream media.

As already mentioned, Rapala is also an act of wordplay. By replacing ‘Mahasiswa’ (student) with Randublatung, Rapala mocks the student movement. ⁴ Unlike most Mapala groups, Rapala is not reliant on an educational institution for its ‘base camp’. Rapala members are not restricted to students. Indeed, most activists in Randublatung have not received a higher education. Rapala is unmistakably recognizable as a ‘Mapala’, using the visual and written language of the movement, but it cheekily locates it in a village rather than a campus, rejecting the generic framework of national environmentalism and relocating it on an alternative political scale.

Rapala’s activities are not unlike those of a typical Mapala group, organizing camps with local high school students in the forests surrounding Randublatung. Activities at these camps include bird watching, mountaineering and tree planting. Yet Rapala programs rarely turn out as politically innocent as they seem, subverting the Mapala view that nature is for leisure. On a group trip to the forest in 2005, for example, Rapala stated they were learning how to build a shelter from teak leaves and branches. The spot they chose to practise on, however, was a disputed piece of land where illegal felling and hunting were taking place. Their workshop inflamed a conflict between official authorities and local militia, and their ‘practice hut’ was torched, allegedly by illegal loggers who resented the attention.

During an earlier program, in 2003, Rapala organized a tour to Mount Lawu, one of Java’s most oft-climbed mountains, to ceremoniously pull out the hundreds of plaques from various Mapala groups across the country, attached to trees with nails as climbers reached challenging points of the hike. ‘Our trip wasn’t about claiming the mountain. The mountain is not ours,’ Wijaya said in an interview. In protest against the practice of conquering nature, the group did not even attempt to complete the climb of Lawu. Half an hour from the summit, they stopped, had a meeting, and turned around to begin their descent.

Anakseribupulau: children of a thousand islands

Anakseribupulau, established in Randublatung in 1999, is an amorphous organization comprising a diverse collection of groups. Its very name signals, indeed, an aspiration to diversity. Anakseribupulau, literally ‘child of a thousand islands’, refers to being a citizen of the vast archipelago of Indonesia with its cultural and ecological diversity. But activists describe the concept as one that could be applied to the entire globe. They express a desire to be connected to unlimited people and localities in the world despite the tight control of borders.

Anakseribupulau members express a reluctance to fix their political identities, and this reluctance surfaces in the way the name of the group is reproduced in multiple variations: anakseribupulau; Anakseribupulau; Anak Seribupulau, etc. The group also has multiple logos, which members use interchangeably, with humour and light-heartedness. The most recent is a crude black and white drawing of a goat framed in a red cog. When asked the meaning behind this logo, Exi Wijaya (not the logo’s creator) said: ‘We might start tending goats. It seems to be too difficult to live as artists’ (23 October 2006).

When quizzed about the impetus for their humorous approach to activism, anakseribupulau members pointed to the activist alliances that formed at the end of the New Order as limiting. It led to the categorizing and labelling of activism that usually implied that activism was only about aggressive street protests and rent-a-mobs. The idea of anakseribupulau was an attempt to evade a ‘fixed’ or ‘concrete’ collective identity.

[In ’98] … you had to be a member of this group, or aligned with that one. We are open. You want to be in anakseribupulau, you are welcome. Let’s save the Earth. (Interview with Exi Wijaya, 3 September 2006)

Anakseribupulau has many projects, but here I focus on a recent collaboration with the South Jakarta collective, Forum Lenteng. The collaboration is called akumassa-Randublatung. Akumassa, which has taken place in various places besides Randublatung, is a series of initiatives empowering small communities to tell stories on video. Forum Lenteng then encourages the communities to embed their videos in a dedicated blog, as a way of circulating them globally.

Akumassa worked with activists from SuperSamin Inc., Rapala and anakseribupulau during 2010 to co-create akumassa-Randublatung: a festival, a website ⁵ and an online community. Below, I focus on the productions associated with anakseribupulau during the akumassa project. What does this intiative reveal of the remix tactics and of the yearning for locatedness we have been discussing? What, precisely does it disassemble and reinvent, and how? And how might these particular tactics distinguish akumassa-Randublatung from the other coexisting initiatives discussed in this article?

In contrast to much online activism, akumassa-Randublatung does not build a movement that is dependent on new networks. There are no email petitions or other strategic methods that are found on the websites of groups such as Greenpeace International. Rather, anakseribupulau draws the internet into existing practices, creating online spaces that are not dissimilar to activists’ experiences offline. This is evident in the casual style of writing and imagery, and the banter that can be found in the ‘comments’ section of the blog. It is also evident in the content to be found on the akumassa-Randublatung channel on akumassa.org, which becomes a space for expressing all the boundless creative explorations of anakseribupulau. The pages here include a fan page for the ‘Anarcho Punk’ band Masberto, a tribute to the great dissident author ‘Pramoedya Ananta Toer dan Aku’, a collective review of the local sate vendor and an interactive comic book titled Teakwood fight and Clandestine in Blora. ⁶ Scroll down a little further and we find the face of local anti-colonial resistance hero, Samin Surosentiko (Soemantri, 2009).

An important point to note about the site is the way in which the term ‘akumassa’ challenges official depictions of the masses as hindrances to or victims of a linear process of modernization. This image was prevalent during the New Order, and aided by dominant media depictions of the masses. In contrast, by combining the terms ‘aku’ (I) and ‘massa’ (the masses), akumassa positions the masses as subjects. At akumassa, individual perspectives (‘aku’) collectively constitute a counter-narrative of the masses’ place in history: a counter-narrative which is plural in form. The stories assembled in this online space may therefore be thought to constitute an alternative history of the era. That is, it achieves its locatedness, its situatedness, through a process of narrating that situates the masses as subjects. Moreover, this narrating takes place beneath the auspices of an amorphous, light-hearted and playful articulation of nationality: anakseribupulau. Let is now turn to our final example, which is effective in ways that resemble akumassa-Randublatung tactics, but focuses more compellingly on a single, although endlessly reproduced, ‘meme’.

SuperSamin Inc.

Of the groups employing remix tactics discussed in this article, SuperSamin Inc. was the first to be established. Initially, SuperSamin Inc. was a small business, a music band and an activist collective. It formed in Blora in 2003. In an interview, founder Koko’ recalled the group’s initial aims to involve young people in the local politics of Blora by revitalizing the activist genealogy of the area. This included interpreting the Samin movement and representing it in forms that were accessible to a young audience. Members produced zines that were widely circulated nationally, and ran a distro (merchandise outlet), which distributed cassette tapes, T-shirts and publications. Many of these items became sought-after fashion items across Indonesia’s underground scenes. SuperSamin Inc. also produced, packaged and distributed a DVD of an interview with the dissident author Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his house shortly before he passed away in 2006. ⁷

One of the ways in which SuperSamin Inc. may be understood is in the context of the post-New Order revival of adat (custom or tradition). The New Order relied on tightly controlled constructions of history, the most important of which, the ‘communist threat’, took the form of what Ariel Heryanto describes as a ‘master narrative’. ‘The master narrative secured the regime’s legitimacy, and served an indispensable function in the protracted political “stability and order” and impressive economic growth’ (Heryanto, 1999: 153). As Suharto lost control, multiple narratives began to emerge and contradict the singularity of New Order history (Conroy, 2007: 41).

One of the ways in which these multiple narratives have become apparent is in the revival of adat, a process Bourchier refers to as ‘groups asserting themselves and the natural resources in their area, according to a variety of customary practices and values’ (2007: 113). Most scholarship assesses this process as a politically conservative one, but the renewed interest in Samin culture by environmentalists in Blora reveals how progressive elements, such as local cultures of protest and non-conformism, can also be implicated in the revival of adat.

The story of the Samin people began with Samin Surosentika, a villager who lived in the area of Randublatung during the latter period of Dutch occupation. Samin Surosentika preached peaceful resistance to Dutch colonialism. His tactics included ignoring Dutch land ownership laws, refusing to pay taxes to the colonial authority, and confusing Dutch scouts with false or misleading information and convoluted language. He soon had a following of people who formed a community and system of land ownership based on pre-colonial cultivation.

When Indonesia declared independence, Samin people resisted the new Indonesian state, refusing conditions of citizenship such as adherence to one of the five recognized religions, state education and use of Indonesian language. Instead, they successfully resisted being integrated into the Green Revolution, carried on with their organic farming methods and educated their children using their own curriculum.

Samin people do not participate in any form of census, but activists estimate that there are now still up to 1000 Samin people living in Central Java. While commonly know as ‘Samin’, these communities describe themselves as wong sikep meaning ‘those who are alert’ or ‘those who embrace’ (Widodo, 1997: 264). Samin people maintain radically egalitarian customs that contrast strongly with the social hierarchy that pervades many areas of Javanese life. For example, Samin people speak only low-level Javanese, Ngoko, ⁸ to everyone, whatever their social position, and they recognize no external authority, only their own customs. With very few resources, no legitimate political clout and not much in the way of a strategy, Samin people have managed to defend their land and culture, first, against colonialism; second, against Indonesian nationalism; third, against the New Order; and, finally, against the corporate exploitation of land and resources occurring today. The significance of Samin people to this article is not so much in their endurance, but their effect on contemporary activism.

Since the end of the New Order, the use of elements of Samin culture as identity markers has become widespread, and before the establishment of SuperSamin Inc., Samin Surosentiko’s image was indeed already prevalent outside of Samin communities. It was often painted onto the back of trucks or used as a logo for streetside shops, for example. But SuperSamin Inc.’s efforts to popularize Samin culture via the internet have accelerated greatly this generalized enthusiasm for Samin culture. This enthusiasm, which manifests as a proliferation of Samin-related images facilitated by digitality, is referred to as ‘Saminisme’ by young people in Central Java, and proceeds well beyond the control of either SuperSamin or wong sikep (interview with Koko’ 30 October 2006).

Saminisme remixes two dimensions of Samin culture. The first is Samin proverbs, for which Samin people are famous. ‘Yo kang ngongkon yo kang nglakoni’ for example, has many meanings, one of which roughly translates to ‘Whoever orders also must be able to do what is ordered.’ ⁹ Activists in Blora have reworked this proverb into their own anarchist philosophies reproducing it alongside the motto in English ‘No Gods, No Masters’. In an interview, one such activist, Koko’, related that: ‘Meeting the Samin community is like learning a new language where words like “anarchist”, “communist” and even “activist” do not exist, yet, somehow, these ideas are still expressed.’

The second dimension of Samin culture employed in Saminisme is the image of Samin Surosentiko himself. The image serves as an important meme in SuperSamin Inc.’s particular remixing of Saminisme. Knobel and Lankshear (2005: 1) describe a meme as an idea or piece of cultural information that circulates the internet. My use of the term here invokes the importance of digital technologies, particularly the internet, and the new kinds of visuality and multiplicity it enables, to SuperSamin Inc.’s political efficacy.

As a result of SuperSamin Inc.’s efforts, one photograph in particular has entered the visual vocabularies of environmentalists all over Indonesia, mythologizing Samin Surosentiko beyond Samin communities themselves. This particular photograph, the origin of which I have been unable to discover, seems to be the only photograph that remains from his life. In its most raw format, it is a blurry black and white group portrait of an unblinking and fairly nondescript Javanese male. The face of Samin Surosentiko has been isolated and enlarged from a group photograph almost beyond recognition. Figure 1 shows something of the extent of contemporary remixes of this image.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

1. The ‘original’ Samin Surosentiko meme, which has been widely circulated on the internet and DIY publications.

Of particular note with respect to the above images is, of course, the use of the word Saminista to achieve a certain local–global straddling, by riffing on another meme of resistance to power: Sandinista. The Blora soccer team T-shirt further stresses such Latin American connections by employing the Spanish word ‘Viva’ to elicit support. Indeed, such reproductions may well be seen to dilute the links between images of Surosentiko’s face and political resistance; it could be read as a failure of the original purpose of SuperSamin Inc. That kind of remix, which eventually depoliticizes an image, would certainly not be unique to Javanese activism. We have seen revolutionary icons appropriated in all kinds of places fairly steadily since the 1990s. In 2005, Streets released a new line of 1960s Magnums, including the ‘Cherry Guevara’, with Che Guevara’s unmistakable portrait in starred beret printed on the pink wrapper. On the back of the wrapper was printed ‘The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!’

There are similarities, indeed, between the modes of circulation of Che Guevara’s and Samin Surosentiko’s images. Both resemble the memes to which Knobel and Lankshear refer: a particular idea or piece of cultural information that circulates in great volume and with great speed due to digitality (Knobel and Lankshear 2005: 1). But there are vastly different processes involved in and motivations for circulating these images, and these different motivations give rise to different meanings. Unlike the young Blora environmentalists and the Samin community, Streets didn’t work with Central American freedom fighters to produce their product; their use of Guevara’s image was part of a marketing strategy. Saminisme has no strategy in the de Certeau (1984) sense, that is, they design no system for organizing their culture, space and public engagement. Everybody involved – Wong Sikep, SuperSamin Inc. and its customers, young soccer enthusiasts who brand the Blora team with the image – all produce and consume these remixes as flexible iterations of a located genealogy. That is, just as it proliferates globally in form and in meaning, the Samin image also affords globally proliferated environmentalism a situated meaning, or what Anna Tsing refers to as ‘grip’ (Tsing, 2005). By remixing local mythologies, such as those around Samin, local activists give meaning, or grip, to a global movement.

Conclusion

This article has explored the identities of three overlapping and intertwined activist collectives in Blora. I have shown that these identities are formed through complex remix processes. Rapala activists imagine themselves both as part of and in opposition to the Mapala network. The akumassa-Randublatung project shows how the yearning for locatedness can give rise to plural local histories that exist beneath the auspices of amorphous, light-hearted articulations of nationality. Saminisme reveals activists’ interest in situating the movement by orienting it to local histories of resistance, while at the same time alluding to those elsewhere through wordplays such as ‘Saminista’.

In concert, these groups produce a variegated sense of belonging among activists. This is a movement where all these identities not only coexist, but mutually define themselves against one another. Perhaps the convoluted language of activism today is another form of Samin-style resistance. Where Samin tactics confused the strategies of colonialism, these multiple sides of the movement confuse the global ordering of environmentalism. Without such contestation and remaking of ‘the global’, these activists may be destined to a parochial environmentalism indeed.