Laine Berman: the Art of Life in Indonesia

Laine with husband Athonk
Las Vegas 2007

Laine's research and consultancy work

Dr. Laine Berman is a dynamic and highly creative researcher, writer, consultant, and curator who works in a broad range of areas. She is a linguistic anthropologist with a strong background in social psychology and visual arts. All of these eclectic interests are combined in her research which includes work on youth, gender, violence, and the social construction of identity in oppressive environments. Laine's research work includes the Indonesian and Javanese languages and how relations of power and inequality are constructed and reflected in everyday discourse - the verbal and the visual. Most recently, this work focuses on the social construction of youth in Indonesia - and specifically how young people confront or avoid the cultural, social, and political worlds that shape their lives. Laine has a strong background in field research, social development, advocacy and training in Indonesia, where she has lived for over a quarter century. In addition to advocating on behalf of street children since 1991, Laine continues this important responsibility by conducting volunteer trainings for youth in harm reduction, safe sex, and HIV/AIDS/STI prevention. In 2008 Laine completed her certification in Client-Centered HIV Prevention Counseling and VCT through the Las Vegas Department of Health. In addition, she trains NGO workers in communication strategies and participatory training, kampung women in community empowerment, communicating with children, and violence prevention, and government officials in communicating with children and with victims of violence. To further these ends, she finished Post Doc studies in Public Health at Tulane University in 2002. Research at Tulane focused on issues of youth violence, drug use, and adolescent reproductive health, and more 'cultural' aspects of health with special reports on the social and cultural contexts of tattooing and drug use among Indonesian youth (see links below to media articles on these topics). While in New Orleans, she had the opportunity to work for Freeport McMoRan in their human rights division which included a field evaluation of resettlement communities in Timika. Since then, she has had an ever-growing number of consultancies with organizations as diverse as the US Department of Defense in California, and Peace Brigades International in Jakarta!

Publications: Laine's first book examines the social consequences of oppression and violence on working class women in Java, Indonesia. The book, Speaking through the Silence: Narratives, Social Conventions, and Power (www.oup-usa.org/isbn0195108884.html), has been very favorably reviewed by Fairclough, C. in Discourse Studies 2000 Vol. 2(3):381-383; Kingsbury, D. in Australian Association of Asian Studies Journal March 1999; and in the Australian magazine, Inside Indonesia at www.insideindonesia.org/edit58/laine.htm. And see this one too: http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/oceanic_linguistics/v040/40.1zimmer.pdf

Below: Very happy (and cold!) times on Bourbon Street in 2002 with Yusan Yeblo and Christina Joseph (alm.)

 

 Our new love:

Baby Blue is a 1960 Holden

we found here in Yogya.

We are slowly renovating her and can be seen cruisin' town

thoroughly enjoying our new family member!

Come for a ride!

 

 

 

 

1961 Morris Oxford

 

Mine!!! IF only I could get her out of the repair shop and on the road.........

 

 

Jogjakarta 2006

At 05:53 on 27 May 2006, an earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale struck Indonesia’s central island of Java. The epicentre was located approximately 37 kilometres south of the city of Yogyakarta. The earthquake impacted five districts within Yogyakarta province and six within neighbouring Central Java province, together home to 6.9 million people, severely damaging infrastructure, housing, schools and clinics. The two worst-affected districts were Bantul in Yogyakarta, and Klaten in Central Java. 5,744 people were killed immediately with more than 45,000 injured. Over 350,000 houses were damaged beyond repair and 278,000 suffered lesser damage, directly affecting 2.7 million people and rendering 1.5 million of them homeless, three times the number in Aceh after the Tsunami (26 December 2004).

Where were we? In Las Vegas because of the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender and celebrating my dad's 80th birthday. Our home in Nologaten, meanwhile, suffered a fair bit of damage - nothing compared to our neighbors. But enough to require we start looking to move shortly after returning on 6 June.

FFollowing the Earthquake, I was offered a series of jobs all of which focused on ensuring community involvement in post-disaster reconstruction. Being a victim myself, as well as pretty well-known in Jogja, I was able to accomplish quite a bit of work in training outsiders to work productively with the local Javanese people. While people always say the Javanese are so easy to work with and projects run so smoothly here - that is more often than not a sign of ignorance. The Javanese will tend to tell you what you want to hear rather than what they want to say. Thus, while at first glance Java might seem an easy place to work, in reality it is very difficult. But then, that's part of why I love it here!

See this article published in the Jakarta Post in 2006 about common post-disaster misunderstandings in Indonesia.

 


ACEH 2005

From March - May 2005 I spent time in Aceh working on a community based organization assessment for UNDP. It has taken a long time for me to load the pages I wrote - too traumatic..... Not just because of the devastating tsunami and the death and destruction - but also because of my experiences working among NGOs and seeing first hand how little real support most Acehnese were receiving.

 

    

 

Aceh 2008-9

 

From mid October for the next few months, I have a series of jobs again in Aceh. Between evaluating programs and capacity building for local staff, I am so looking forward to this opportunity to see how the region has gotten on since the devastating tsunami, the peace treaty, and the implementation of Syaria law.

 

OECUSSI Timor Leste - 2003

 

In 2003 I spent 3 months in Oecussi, the East Timor enclave. Please click on any of the photos for access to photos and brief commentary from my Oxfam report.

 

 

LEFT: In the mountains of Oecussi, the East Timor enclave, with villagers preparing a feast.
RIGHT: Leaving a 'kore metan' ceremony at a cemetery. See my new page on Oecussi by clicking on the photos above.

 

Dili, Timor Leste - 2006

 

Almost 3 years later, I had another opportunity to visit Timor Leste on another type of consultancy. This time it was with UNIFEM to help them design a training manual for Domestic Violence prevention. The minute I saw the job advertised, I knew I had to do it. Not only was it a chance to go back and see how TL has developed over the last few years, but it also provided me with the opportunity to work in gender equity and gender-based violence prevention, areas I have not had much chance to work in since my early research with street kids and my gender and oppression PhD research. Opportunities like this happen for a reason - as they say - and only time will tell iff my efforts have been fruitful....

      

 

 

Laine and friends at Humana, Yogyakarta (the foundation for street kids)

Laine Berman

Researcher, Writer, Lecturer, Curator, and Consultant

Links

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Art??? Laine became involved in studying art movements in 1992 when she learned how artists were confronting the authoritarian regime of Suharto through street art and symbolism, in addition to, and often separated from their 'official' art work. Recent projects explore these various types of 'dialogues' and the consequences they hold for the broader population, as they have emerged during and after Suharto's reign.

Research: Currently, Laine is exploring how ordinary young people are struggling for a voice in the shaping of modern Indonesia. With interests mainly in the areas of youth and everyday life, she looks at popular culture and society. Anything on or in society is fair game and armed with a developing interest in public health tacked on to many years of work with children, she is now doing a great deal of work on adolescent sexuality, psychological development, violence, and gender. She has been investigating the massive conflicts that are developing at the interface of traditional and modern interpretations of local culture and also photographing how these challenges appear through social behavior (sexuality, drug use, tattooing, violence, gender roles, etc) and public art (street theater, graffiti, T shirts, comics, and tattoos in 'dialogues' with official slogans, billboards, and the mass media).

Topics of recent research projects include:

Tattooing : lots more to be said here. Click for a preview and short article.

 

Drug Culture : youth alienation and the general inability to face serious social problems. I was recently interviewed by Radio Australia on this topic. Click on the web address to hear the interview:

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/asiapac/programs/s1235986.htm

HIV/AIDS : based on field research with school and street kids, officials, NGOs and others in West Kalimantan and East Nusa Tenggara. Click for some excerpts of the book-length report I wrote for Save the Children UK.

 

Domestic Violence : see excerpts from my report for UNIFEM on domestic violence in Timor Leste.

 

Training:

the majority of my consultancy work lately seems to be focusing on training. I take great pride in creating highly participatory, effective training modules that include community mobilizing so they will actually achieve their goals! I guarantee it!

Life Skills Training : see several pages from the life skills handbook I made for Indonesian youth on decision-making skills, sex education and preventing pregnancy, STIs, and HIV/AIDS. The module has been adapted to create a small army of dedicated peer trainers here in Yogya so that we can reach out of school youth who desperately need this type of training.

See also my Jakarta Post articles on Life Skills in Indonesia.

Talking to your children about sex

 

Domestic Violence Training: Since domestic violence is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality, this training module I wrote for UNIFEM, Timor Leste starts with social inequality and leads participants to analyze violence in their own communities - and find solutions. Then, it moves on to community mobilizing for prevention as community responsibility. This manual will become the foundation of the Timor Leste national strategy to combat domestic violence.

new!! Disaster Prevention:

Recognizing a huge hole in disaster preparedness materials, I created a Coloring Book for young children through which they could work together with their school, their family, and their community to understand risk and create disaster plans! See these links for several pages from the book! Buku Bergambarku

Articles on Indonesian Street Life

Articles on Indonesian Culture

 

The Politics of Street Art:

authority, compliance, and resistance in the public realm

Table of Contents

 

1. Transcending Boundaries: an Introduction

2. The Past as a Portrait of the Future

3. The Birth of the New Order

4. The Writing on the Wall: Monuments and Symbolism

5. Symbolism and Censorship: the Color Wars

6. Where are the People in the People’s Art?

7. The Seni Sono Generation

8. Pictures and Words: Consciousness raising art in the pre-Reformasi era

9. Post-reformasi: The Public Art Explosion

10. The Re-emergence of Sanggar: a Cure for the Disease of Silence

11. Reconsidering Art and the State: on the Streets and Demanding Attention

12. Women’s Roles and Women Artists

13. Popular Art at Home and in the Streets

14. Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

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Indonesian Comic Books

What is all the fuss over comics in Indonesia? For one, Indonesians love them and have a long, fond history of growing up with them. Now, that fondness is limited to a faint memory. Since the so-called 'golden age' of Indonesian comics, back in the 1960s through 70s (which died with accusations of subversion and denounced as garbage and poison by two presidents), the local comic industry has been overrun by foreign comics. Beginning with the 1980s, translations of Donald Duck, Spiderman, Flash Gordon and other American and European favorites have filled the book shop shelves, while their Indonesian native cousins wallow in the dust of neglect, if, that is, they can even be found in the storage bins. By the end of the 80s, translations of Japanese and Chinese comics such as Dragon Ball, Candy, and Kung Fu Boy entered the local scene with their more "eastern" styles of story-telling and drawing. Indonesian comics, reduced to the efforts of a handful of artists who tend to present witty and often sarcastic social commentary, appear only in newspapers, one page of the Sunday comics supplement, and in weekly magazines. If comics mirror the environment in which they appear, the ‘Golden Age’ was a time of heroes and legends, whereas now Indonesia is an occupied nation. Very few komikus have found their own voice since the dictator Suharto was overthrown. The post-Suharto era may well be termed the reformasi. But in terms of comics and far too many other aspects of creative endeavors, the vast majority of those available in book shops or as independent publications are copies of either the western comic tradition or Suharto era hero-worship in terms of art, story, design, location, characterization, and even language.

Then there are the independent comics.......

The search for the Indonesian comic becomes a search through the very private negotiation of identity in a nation devastated by conflict, oppression, censorship, confusion, and change. The independent comics drawn by modern Indonesian youth portray the struggles these dynamic men and women undergo for a sense of self within a highly unstable national environment. There are superhero selves that have the power to shape the direction of the nation or at least one’s own future; an artist awaiting the international curator who will purchase their work and exhibit it in the world’s galleries; socially concerned youth who teach the oppressed masses to stand up for their rights and reject capitalist pigs; local normal kids who are terrified to ride the city buses because of threats of violence by other school kids. These national struggles often enough appear as a weak, frustrated, oppressed youth - despite reformasi. Clown-figures resort to violence and always fail, turn to drugs, illicit sex, and suicide. Self-gratification and guilt, oppression and righteous victory offer pictures of the modern Indonesian environment that never appears in news reports or history books - just the hearts and unuttered feelings of a nation’s youth.

Articles & Links on Indonesian Comic Books

 
Language Research
 

This (very) academic offering deals with the Javanese language as a vehicle for oppressing the Javanese themselves. This paper was written and published in Indonesian for presentation at the Third Javanese Language Congress held July 2001 in Yogyakarta.