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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security
in Indonesia; The Case of the Madurese
Dinna Wisnu
To cite this article: Dinna Wisnu (2015) Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia; The Case of the Madurese, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:2, 310-312, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1061923
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1061923
Published online: 24 Aug 2015.
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310 Book Reviews
had suffered an economic as well as a political crisis and had undergone major reforms to its democracy—including a process of decentralisation that was heavy
on expenditure and light on revenue. Malaysia, on the other hand, did not expe -rience a political crisis and emerged from the transition period with most of its pre-1998 political institutions intact.
Hutchinson describes the third period (2004–13) as one of divergence between
Johor and the Riau Islands. Johor experienced further development and the
struc-tural evolution of its electronics sector. It also established new areas (for example, Iskandar Malaysia) to encourage more development of services and higher-value-added activities. The Riau Islands, in contrast, suffered from political bickering at the national and local levels, labour unrest, and substantial outmigration of electronics irms.
Mirror Images is equipped with time-series data across all three periods,
cover-ing variables such as gross regional product per capita and its sectoral compo
-sition, irms and employment by sector, and the proportion of central transfers in subnational revenue. Aside from presenting quantitative data, the book also
provides useful qualitative information on the politics and policy settings in each period, including the rules that were changed, the statements made, and the polit-ical priorities and relationships developed. A small portion of the data are
admit-tedly interpolated, or gathered from non-formal sources, but these instances are clearly identiied and do not compromise the credibility of the argument.
The second generation of iscal federalism, while helpful, does not completely
explain the development trajectories of Johor and the Riau Islands. For example,
the fast growth and development of Riau Islands (that is, Batam) before 1998 was driven not by an incentive structure but by a strong interest and commitment from the likes of Soeharto, B. J. Habibie, and their afiliates, who treated Batam
as their special project. Overall, however, Hutchinson has provided a strong
response to one of social science’s long-standing questions: why some regions develop faster than others. The book is a welcome addition to the literature on cross-border regions, foreign investment, institutional analysis, and Southeast
Asian studies.
Mulya Amri
National University of Singapore © 2015 Mulya Amri
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1061927
Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia; The Case of the Madurese. By Gerben Nooteboom. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Pp. x + 314. Hardback: $163.00. Open-access version available at http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789004282988.
Having been troubled by poverty studies that focus primarily on income, assets, and structural approaches emphasising inequality, capitalism, and globalism, Nooteboom argues here that poverty is often linked to lifestyle choices: rags may turn into relative riches, and vice versa, because the poor use mutual help and
community-driven social security in diverse ways.
Book Reviews 311
Nooteboom employs the livelihood approach to examining poverty. Inluential
among human geographers, rural sociologists, and development economists, this
approach focuses on the strategic and creative choices that people make in deal
-ing with poverty. For this book, Nooteboom spent 1998–2010 study-ing Madurese
people in Krajan (an infertile and under-developed village in upland East Java) and Samarinda (a migrant destination in East Kalimantan). He interviewed three
generations of about 400 families, compiling detailed community histories and and observing kinship networks. He participated in most community activities
and noted the rules of the game that allowed some players to escape poverty.
Social security is understood here as all the ways by which individuals, house
-holds, and communities protect their livelihoods against shocks and stresses that threaten continuity and stability. Social security, in this context, includes
locally organised sources of support in times of need (pp. 12–13, 113). Among
the Madurese, shocks such as harvest failure, death, illness, and unemployment
qualify a person for material and emotional support from other villagers.
Nooteboom found that long bouts of misfortune can make poor Madurese feel alone, because they must seek help from close relatives, neighbours, and friends. Their society expects them to ask for help delicately, humbly, and in the right tone, without losing their pride (p. 114). In Madurese culture, such help is based on reciprocity; the community holds selamatan (thanksgiving ceremonies) and com
-munity members give loans. Nooteboom notes that this mutual help is neither uniform nor built on ixed rules. Villagers watch closely to see what the benei
-ciaries do with the inancial support: whether they spend the money carefully and therefore keep the trust of the community. Mutual help can generate inan
-cial insecurity among contributors, because of the high cost of gifts and because
attending selamatan may deplete household savings.
Nooteboom cites Hall, Hirsch, and Li’s Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (2011) in pointing out that village-based social security has always
relied on people’s access to resources and income. This is true in Krajan, where
those who are most in need receive the least (p. 142). Even if they can afford to meet the expectation of providing mutual help in their communities, they pay
relatively more than their richer neighbours and more than they will ever receive in return (p. 142). Nooteboom argues that this explains why some villagers choose to become risk-takers.
This book provides excellent details on the lives of the Madurese, who, Nooteboom says, are a forgotten ethnic group in Indonesia. In chapter 5, he goes into detail about the risk-taking activities of villagers (such as gambling and hav -ing casual sex) and how they affect men, women, migrants, and the poor. This is
an invaluable response to the studies of poverty that portray villagers and the poor as risk-averse, such as Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976). Nooteboom’s depiction of the dilemma of whether or not to participate in providing mutual help—that is, whether to
share resources with neighbours in order to ‘invest’ in the goodwill of others, or
to accumulate wealth for self-support in times of need—is particularly insightful (chapter 4).
This book is a strong reminder that even locally driven social security is not all-inclusive and may entice the forgotten to venture into risky (and illegal) behaviour. Furthermore, those hanging on to non-cash labour relationships and non-cash
312 Book Reviews
forms of cooperation and exchange may suffer more in the future, because of the growing trend for relationships to be commercialised and commoditised.
Nooteboom’s more valuable contributions are embedded in different parts of the book, making it easy to miss the correlations between variables. There is also a limit to how much of this book can be applied to poor Indonesians of differ -ent ethnicities, such as the C-entral Javanese, who are often stereotyped as strong
carers of relatives, or the Papuans, who are often stereotyped as dificult.
To make a stronger impression on policymakers, Nooteboom could have framed his indings in the context of existing government programs—for exam
-ple, Jamkesmas (health insurance for the poor), Jampersal (inance for pregnancy care and delivery services), Raskin (cheap rice for the poor), or Jamkesda
(local-government health insurance). Would national- or district-driven social security
it with the culture of the Madurese? Would such support alleviate the plight of the forgotten people? After all, Nooteboom does mention the state’s ongoing
Liem Sioe Liong’s Salim Group: The Business Pillar of Suharto’s Indonesia.
By Richard Borsuk and Nancy Chng. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014. Pp. xiv + 573. Paperback: $52.90.
The Salim group is a business conglomerate that was born at the dawn of the Soeharto regime. It became the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia before collaps
-ing, along with the regime, during the 1997–98 Asian inancial crisis. It has since been drastically restructured and revived. This consummately detailed book is the group’s most comprehensive history to date, centring on Liem Sioe Liong, the group’s founder, and his links to Soeharto.
The authors are experienced journalists, adept at turning information into
grip-ping narratives. They were able to speak to many people connected to the group, including Liem himself. It is well known that Liem hated being interviewed, but the authors had built trust with Anthony Salim (Liem’s third son and the group’s current CEO). The information obtained during these extensive interviews unearthed much historical evidence and corrected much basic data on Liem, who died in 2012. For example, Liem was born in 1917, not 1916 as documented in the literature; married in China in 1937, not 1935; and arrived in Java in 1938 at the
age of 21, not 22.
The book also reveals when and how Liem irst met Soeharto, details that neither man ever recounted publicly. According to Sudwikatmono (Dwi), who was Soeharto’s cousin and one of the Salim group’s ‘gang of four’ core owner-managers, his older brother Sulardi, who was in charge of military logistics in
Central Java, recognised an outstanding supplier named Liem and, in 1949
(ear-lier than had been thought), introduced this supp(ear-lier to Soeharto. As Dwi told the authors, the Salim group’s gang of four was organised by Soeharto: in 1967,
