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Part of
Consensus and Dissent: Negotiating Emotion in the Public Space
Edited by Anne Storch
[Culture and Language Use 19] 2017
► pp. 35–58

Chapter 3
Anger and sadness in Indonesian public emotional expression

Genre and social change in politics and religion

In Indonesia, the embrace of modernization does not seem to have resulted in a compartmentalization, bureaucratization and corporatization of emotional expression is not an inevitable outcome of rational modernization (a la Weber, Parsons, & Elias), but may more accurately be viewed as a recontextualization, and indeed “blurring” of genres of expression (Geertz, 1980), in which emotions are mediated by expressive styles, and re-entextualized in new and sometimes unpredictable ways (Kuipers, 2009). This paper analyzes examples of the ways in which Indonesian public emotional expression is recontextualized in presidential debates, in public protests, in corporate training sessions and shamanic healing. In each case, the ethnographically relevant unit of analysis is not so much a single labeled “emotion,” as a genre of emotional expression that mediates between the forces of history and social change on the one hand, and the structures of individual language use on the other.

Keywords: Indonesia, modernization, emotional change, public sphere
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Some background: An ethnographic and linguistic approach to emotional change
  • Changing Indonesian frameworks of emotional expression
    • Inner versus outer islands: The performance of anger
  • Expressing anger in Sumba: Blurring of genres with deadly consequences
    • The Dutch colonial encounter with the angry man
  • Confrontation of genres
  • Religious emotion in political and economic life
  • Arabic and the Shamanic creation of sadness
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.19.03kui
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