Seminar Series: Abstract

Diverse Religiosity, Shifting Ethnicities, Multiple Identities: Chinese Muslims in Contemporary Indonesia
Waiweng Hew

Chinese Muslims in contemporary Indonesia have divergent outlooks and diverse faces, ranging from orthodox to heterodox, from sharia-minded to liberal-minded, from strictly observant to non-practicing, from conspicuously Chinese to repudiating Chinese identity.
Focusing on post- New Order Indonesia, my research examines the changing expressions of both collective and individual identities among Chinese Muslims within Indonesian cultural, historical and political contexts. I will discuss how Chinese Muslim identities are constrained by the political situation and constructed by community organizations, as well as how their identities are negotiated and contested in everyday life. Drawing on social construction notion of identity, I try to combine both the political economy of identity formation and cultural politics of identity negotiation to study the complexity of Chinese Muslim identities in contemporary Indonesia, by asking questions such as “who constructs or imagines such identities? Why were they constructed or imagined, and why did such constructions take the form that they did?”
I will also examine the interaction and contradiction between religious, ethnic and national identities for Chinese Muslims, as well as how individuals negotiate them and use them strategically. This study will further investigate how Chinese Muslims, as a double minority group in Indonesia - a minority among Chinese Indonesians, and a minority among Muslim Indonesians - engage with the political discourses and cultural representations of “Islam” and “Chineseness” in contemporary Indonesia. Using Chinese Muslims as a case study, this research will also examine the cultural politics of Chinese and Islam in contemporary Indonesia and Malaysia in a comparative framework.