Subjects to Freedom: the Entanglements of Desire in Upland Indonesia

This paper draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia (Toraja) to explore the role of discursive genres in mediating political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, the IMF-driven governance reform in Indonesia has disseminated novel ideals of accountability, transparency, and entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the individual freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options. The establishment of this new consumer-citizen acting in a reformed political marketplace requires the dissemination of transnational discursive genres (i.e., customer satisfaction surveys, training workshops, motivational cheers, etc.) aimed at transforming desire from cultural apparatus for legitimizing longstanding relations of social inequality to core idiom of emancipatory imagining. These discursive technologies are, however, only partially effective. By describing the partial uptake of some of these genres, I reflect on a predicament underlying the ethnographic scrutiny of reformist rationalities ensuing from the collapse of authoritarian regimes: if, the emphasis on individual choices and aspirations may undermine entrenched social hierarchies, the emancipatory promise of democratic reforms irradiating from transnational lending agencies and metropolitan centers may also conceal new forms of subjection to capitalist valorization whereby individuals are turned into bundles of measurable desires.