Home sweet homestay

One of the best things about my time in Indonesia thus far, especially in contrast to the time I spent in Cambodia, is staying with members of Leslie's extended family. I am getting a much better idea of how people in Kesiman, Leslie's 'urban' village, actually live then I ever could have. A lot of the fun of this trip has been the mundane things- going to the market early in the morning (well, early for me...not so much for the women who have been up since 4am making offerings), hanging out on Leslie's living room (which, like most homes in Bali, has no walls around it and is open to the garden) making up lyrics to go with M. and D.'s banjo and guitar blues melodies, having lunch at Taman '65 (the park in Leslie's extended family compound), and, of course, the fun of taking a cold water dipper 'shower' (mondi, in Bahasa Indonesian) each morning. Here are some pictures from my homestay to give you a good idea of where I am staying and my host family. Sadly, the pictures simply can not do the beauty of my house justice, but at least you have some idea of what an upper-middle class family compound in urban Bali looks like.

Alison, fellow PhD student and homestay 'sister', and I in front of my bedroom. The living room(also open sans walls) of our house is doubling as the classroom for our class meetings being facilitated by guest lecturers.


M., one of my homestay siblings (there are three others as well) and S., my homestay mom, with Alison and I right before we went to temple for Galungan.

The entrance to my family compound.


Just inside the front gate of my family compound. The house on left is shared by the younger two children in my hosts' immediate family, and the television room/bedroom and bike storage/laundry room of two extended family members of my host family.

About five yards inside my family compound. The house with my room in it is the building on the right, far left is outdoor sink and pavilion (the one with thatched roof peeking out from behind trees on the left) where ceremonial offerings are prepped by older women in the extended family. Usually all women in family participate in these preparations, but my host mom is a police woman, and works during the day (very, very hard) and purchases some offerings and makes others. The building straight ahead in the distance (behind the trees) is where, traditionally, the oldest son stays with his immediate family. Building to the right of that is an open pavilion for ceremonies. There are a lot of ceremonies that take place within the family compound. New baby? There's a ceremony for that. New car? There's a ceremony for that. New chicken basket (single chicken 'coop'-type thing)? There's a ceremony for that. Kind of like 'there's an app for that' but much, much more complicated and time consuming for the women.

Head on view of the pavilion where many of the ceremonial offerings are made, and the woman in the extended family who is responsible for making many of the offerings. Making the offerings and prepping for ceremonies is so, so time consuming, and mandatory from what my friend P. referred to as the 'currency of guilt' standpoint: women that do not want to participate (because they want to work outside the home, because they are sick, because they are pregnant) are pressured by seeing the other women having to carry their share of the burden. Also, pressure comes from the younger women's husbands,who want to mitigate any tension between their mothers and their wives. The mothers feel/are obligated to make the offerings and maintain the temples, and then want/need their daughters-in-law to help share in the work. The sons then feel the need to put pressure on their wives to keep relationships good between himself and his mother, and his wife and his mother. This plays out in several ways. My friends T. and I. have been engaged for awhile, but are reluctant to actually tie the knot because it would obligate I. to start making offerings (an all day long process), despite the fact that I. is Javanese and not even Hindu, and the fact that she wants to continue working outside of the home. The 'culture of guilt' has tied their hands; family pressure trumps religious affiliations or personal desires. It also plays out on women's health. Leslie's computer got a nasty virus the other week right before Galungan, which involves three days of intense ceremony, and the computer tech that came over to fix it was talking about how his seven-months pregnant wife was having bleeding because she had been on her feet for so many hours making offerings with his mother. They had moved back to Bali from Java, where she did not have/feel pressured to make offerings, and he was lamenting wishing they had the money to move back because then she would not need to make the offerings, and he is terrified she is going to have a miscarriage.

This f'cking bird wakes me up every single morning at 4:30am. At least it's beautiful.

View from porch outside my bedroom.


Temples inside my family compound where their ancestors reside during Galungan.


View from my next door neighbor's balcony at sunset.

An innovative idea in peacebuilding

Ethnographic Anxieties

Yikes. Le sigh. Insert other phrases to express uncertainty here.

So, my first semester of grad school I took a class on feminist research methods which purported to be teaching ethnographic research methods. I designed a research project that relied on semi-structured interviews and ‘field observations’ consisting of observing my target population, not inserting myself into the community I am researching.

This more immersed ethnography is the path I am trying to find my way on here. I am ‘doing’- attempting to do, that is- participant observation to more fully gain knowledge about my research question. To be honest, the entire process of being here has left me feeling really off balance.

For starters, I came here thinking I was going to specifically be focusing my field research on the long-term repercussions of the 1965 political violence on narratives of sexual violence today…in a nutshell, I want to know how the sexual violence of ’65 and the trauma and shame resulting from it have impacted/affected the way people view rape/sexual abuse victims today. Are victims seen as ‘sluts’, ‘rape accusers’, etc.? So much of the justifications for the political violence revolve around the idea of the gerwani- the communist women’s organization from the 60s- being partially influential in the deaths of seven military generals and then desecrating their bodies. This narrative was used to stir up popular sentiment against the communist party, which then justified widespread killing of suspected communists. As in any war, rape played a major role in terrorizing the community, emasculating the men whose wives were being raped and traumatizing the women into silence for fear of retribution. I came here thinking I was going to studying the long term fall out of these occurrences on perceptions of female victims of sexual violence today.

Well, long story short, once I got here and on the ground I realized that I really wanted to push myself to try to do actual ‘participant observation’ type of research as best as possible in the three short weeks I actually have to be asking questions, etc. This desire presented a challenge from the standpoint that I was not going to be able to really immerse myself in a given population to understand the meanings they give to particular aspects. The best way I could think of to go about my research on this topic in such a limited amount of time would be to do something similar to the work I did in Cambodia, and meet with local officials involved in the legal and media responses to rape victims. If I was here for a full year, I would find a way to immerse myself into a community of women and get to understand from their daily lives the way they navigate sexual consent, the ways in which they understand ‘society’s’ perceptions of sexual agency, and monitoring the media and legal decisions around sexual violence cases. A year, however, is a luxury I don’t have, and I really wanted to challenge myself to take a different approach and go ‘deeper’ in ethnography by spending significant (relatively speaking in three weeks) amounts of time with the people I am interested in researching.

Conveniently, the question that kept rattling around in my head for the two weeks prior to officially ‘starting’ my research (I put in quotes because I am still feeling murky on if I’ve actually started to research or if I’m just hanging out with people and getting to know them. In some ways, I think it’s both, and that’s got my black and white brain really freaked out) was one that dealt specifically with the community in which I am living for the time I am in Bali. I am here broadly studying the repercussions of the ’65 violence with Dr. Leslie Dwyer, who has brought students here for the past five years for similar courses. Members of her extended family, especially the members of the younger generation that are my age, have been extremely involved in advocacy around ’65. In addition to supporting the program administratively, they have Taman ’65 (’65 Park), a space dedicated to discussion around ’65, within their family compound.

My anxieties are specifically circling around the fact that the line between ‘new friends’ and ‘research subjects’ is very, very blurry. When I am hanging out and listening to guitar, we’re also chatting about the implications of Taman ’65 on the neighborhood politics, and how the fallout of ’65 has impacted land ownership within the family compound. Is this hanging out? Is this research? Is it exploitative to head to my homestay after our discussion and jot down field notes about what I just learned? Yes, my new pals know that I am ‘researching’ them, but it still feels very voyeuristic to be thinking of these interactions as ‘data’, much less the discomfort I feel holding our conversations up to sociological theory and putting it into neat little boxes in my brain.

Leslie says this is normal. Part of the ethnographic territory. Several feminist ethnographers touch on these issues as well. I especially like Daphne Patai’s (1991) writing questioning the ethics of third world research as Western academics.
Patai concludes that there is no ‘good’ conclusion. The best we can do is just being mindful of the power discrepancies set up in ethnographic research, especially when there are vast economic and social disparities at play. At the end of the month, I will return to the U.S. (sigh again…having too much happiness to even think of leaving) and go back to my life. My ‘subjects’, however, will continue to operate in this weird vacuum of silence around ’65, and will have to deal with whatever ramifications arise from my findings, as I will be presenting them to the community prior to my departure. This leaves me with an uneasy feeling as well.

I spoke with my partner about this a few hours ago and he brought up the good point that the only way to further thinking on a subject is to throw out your best ideas (hopefully grounded in empirical thought) and then let people critique them and further the discourse on the given subject. Thank goodness this group I am studying has the hutzpah to do this on a regular basis by talking with the community about their perspectives on ’65 and the current political, economic and social climate. Hopefully in the process of studying their courage to speak up I will gain a little more confidence to do the same.

Getting comfortable about operating outside my comfort zone

Ten days ago the only things I knew for certain about Bali was that my mentor worked here, and that I trusted her enough to fly halfway around the globe because she said 1) it would further my scholarship on gender and how it relates to mass violence, and 2) because she said it would be fun. Going on that, and the fact that I felt God/Universe/Spirit/whathaveyou had lined things up too perfectly for the series of events that made it possible for me to come here for it to simply be ‘coincidence’, but rather that I really was meant to come…whether this is for some greater purpose or simply because, like Leslie said, it will be good for me, I have no idea.

I do know this, though, ten days ago I had never:
1)Danced (badly) to salsa/low caste Balinese music under the stars with fifty people from another country, much less ones that called me friend from the second we met.
2)Eaten rabbit (delicious).
3)Eaten snakefruit (not so much).
4)Been in a Hindu temple.
5)Seen people go into trance and stab themselves in trance while being protected from getting cut by the gods embodied within them while in trance.
6)Brushed my teeth using a drain as a sink.
7)Eaten out of a paper bag.
8)Ridden on a motorbike without being scared shitless.
9)Ridden on a motorbike with a helmet that I actually own (it’s cute, too!).
10)Slept in an airport.
11)Explored a foreign city on my own.
12)Been afraid of a twelve pound, eight week old puppy (seriously, my host family’s new puppy is not a super friendly guy).
13)Eaten eggs with a spoon.
14)Had a friend whose name literally translates to “second child, upper caste”.
15)Been really, truly ok with using a dipper and airdry in place of toilet paper.
16)Felt safe sleeping in my own room without my partner. Everyone in the village here is related, and goes generation upon generation back. Being a guest of the family I am staying with, extended relatives of Leslie and Degung’s, I have felt one hundred percent ‘safe’, even though it’s an open air house. In the U.S., 'safety' is about being afraid of people breaking in, getting murdered and raped (not in that order, necessarily), whatever. Here, I conceptualize safety much more as access to clean water, medical care, and enough sleep to be able to function without making an ass of myself (at least not with any greater frequency than I do at home).
17)Had a massage on the beach.
18)Regretted having a massage on the beach.
19)Embraced the wonders of a bucket shower as actually just fine and rather efficient, once you get over the cold water.
20)Taken “if Laura Ingalls Wilder could do this shit, so can I” as a personal, frequently invoked mantra.

Yes, I feel super vulnerable in about a million and four ways: I’m out of my element, I am surrounded by people who I don’t know and who don’t know me. I am, on even my best day, somewhat socially awkward in intimate social settings with people I am just getting to know. I’m self-aware to a fault, and often end up coming off as stand-offish when I’m trying to be mindful of not dominating the conversation and being the center of attention. I have a super big personality, and can slip into ‘look at me, look at me’ without even knowing I’m doing it. My awareness of this lovely little personality flaw and my overcompensation for it often come off as stilted and reserved. This has been really, really hard over the past few days, but looking over this list, I don’t regret for one second my decision to come here.

This afternoon I had a conversation with someone about the hopeless dread I feel when I sit down to write anything ‘academic’. It’s like looking over a vast chasm devoid of any light. Staring over the abyss, I have no idea how I will possibly turn my lack of understanding and inspiration into something readable, much less something that furthers thinking on gender and violence. The process of jumping into the abyss, however, has always yielded not just decent- sometimes even good- writing and sound theoretical discussion, but has also helped me to, one abyss at a time, trust the process of walking (or writing) through the unknown.

Perhaps the awkwardness and self-doubt I feel is the personal abyss I am here to work through. Gazing into its frigid depths at the beginning, I really wasn’t sure I would be able to emerge on the other side. The above list gives me hope that, yes, there are glimmering stepping stones dotting the horizon of personal and professional growth before me. Just for today, that’s enough of a reason for me to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trust that the stones will continue to appear on my journey to the opposite shore.

Motorbike Ethnography

Since getting here I have fallen in love with riding on motorbikes. Feeling the wind blowing back my hair and the cool breeze on my face is lovely, but the thing I really love is being able to see the people around me in their day to day. Being in the car on the way to class simply is not the same. Seeing the villagers of Kesiman from behind darkened glass, up high in the elevated mini-SUV type thingie we have for the class just doesn’t give you the same view as the back of the motorbike. Yesterday as I zoomed along with Roro, my research facilitator (and all around brilliant, ballsy superwoman) I saw the following: woman on back of motorbike holding medium sized television- not flat screen- while man up front drove; man with toddler sitting behind him on bike, with sarong sash around them to keep the toddler tied to him while he drove; man driving with small child tucked up front between legs, two small children behind him, mom on end holding baby (yes, five people on one bike).

In the U.S. motorcycles scare the shit out of me . I’ve only ever been on one once at home, and even seeing them on the street driving past me makes me nervous. The difference? We go a million miles an hour at home. We want everything- food, wealth, arrival at destination- to be instantaneous, regardless of the consequences of our safety, not to mention the environmental consequences of driving at a pace that is not so swell for gas mileage. Riding here, going 20-30 miles an hour, I can see the sites around me and get a small glimpse of the way that the villagers around me actually live. Got a bunch of rice to bring to your warung (small food stand/restaurant)? You gotta haul that shit on your bike. Nini (grandma) sick? Ain’t no ambulance here (except for dogs, more on that in an upcoming post), throw Nini over your lap and get to the hospital.

More than just being the most economical and, given the state of the roads, pragmatic means of transport here, I have found another happy effect of riding on the bike vs. riding in the car: people are much more candid and relaxed when riding then in formal settings. The depth of topic and ease with which people speak with me while riding has been far greater than any other setting, even if it’s something ‘causal’ over lunch or dinner. We celebrated another student’s birthday this evening over dinner, and I opted to skip the cab ride back to my homestay and ride back with L., one of the other students who is from West Papua. Over dinner the waitress had asked us all where we come from, and he said Papua. When she responded by saying that, “oh, you’re from Indonesia!” he got really insistent that, No, he was Papuan, not Indonesian.

I asked him about it on the ride back. While watching the moon rise up over the multiple flower nurseries (to serve tourist hotels) , he told me how the U.S. and Indonesian governments pressured individual Papuans to ‘vote’ to join Indonesia, using threats of violence and economically coercive measures. Papua is tremendously rich in natural resources, and its geographically strategic location in the sixties (think Cold War politics), along with the promise of economic gain from copper and gold mines, made it beneficial for the U.S. to ‘help’ Indonesia work to persuade the Papuans to join Indonesia.

My feelings on U.S. intervention in general aside- as I know next to nothing in this context, I can’t form anything like a well informed opinion- the way that this has played out on the individual level is startling. The question of ‘who’ one is is so centrally located to ‘where’ one comes from. L. was telling me about Papua’s national songs, and it made me think of the song “God Bless the USA.” While my patriotism is firmly planted in a rather critical perspective that seeks to improve my country through constructive consideration of past events, I am still very, very proud of the ideals that my country was founded upon, for which many of us are still striving- life, liberty, independence. These ideas are so central to who I am and what I value as an individual, that it’s difficult for me to imagine what it would be like if someone were to superimpose a different nationality upon me against my will. Especially given that I live in an era where my country has absolutely hegemonic influence over every aspect I see abroad, I can’t conceptualize what it must be like to have every aspect that I identify with as “American” subverted by a more powerful nation.

As much angst as I have prior to traveling to study abroad, this type of moment, open and listening to another human who is open and sharing something from a perspective so radically different than my own that I simply would never have ever encountered it at home, despite the fact that I live in a very ‘international’ city, is why I push myself to study in places to which I’m not necessarily ‘comfortable’ traveling. Going into post-conflict zones is life changing because , as someone who has grown up within the safety of THE dominant world power, for the first time you have narratives counter to what you have been taught growing up thrown in your face. Nowhere to hide, no way to deny. Sitting at home you can watch documentaries or see YouTube videos uploaded with critical narratives and perspectives on the U.S.’s influence abroad, but it’s too easy to change the channel or say, “that’s such bullshit”. Perhaps the facts of what L. presented to me aren’t actually what went down. Who knows? I am not in a position to read a tremendous amount about the issue nor criticize the U.S.’s policies towards W. Papua, and that’s certainly not the purpose of this post.

My point is this: being able to have this conversation tonight changed the way that I understood my own identity both as a person who thinks of herself as fitting into this category of “American”, and as a person who is a citizen of a country that- from this particular Papuan’s perspective- subverted his country’s independence for my country’s political and economic gain. This shifts the way I think about myself, and also gives me a better understanding of the way that others view me. In the context of conflict resolution work, understanding – or at least acknowledging the presence of the tension resulting from- both of these things is vital if one wants to have any shot of being able to meet across the table. Or, at the very least, on the back of a motorbike.

Reflections on day one

Putting pen to paper- or font to word file- to try to wrap my head around day one of our class. I have been in Bali for one day short of a week, and left the states eight days ago. After getting in last Tuesday and staying with Leslie for a night, I headed to Sanur Beach to ‘relax’. Oh, do I suck at vacation. Seriously. By hour 2 I was bored and looking for something to ‘do’ (other than, of course, the required reading for this course. Clearly, that could wait until the wee hours of the morning prior to each class).

So, I trolled the internet, got a $6 massage (hold your comments on the happy endings. Seriously, because of the raping and pillaging of local labor, this is what a massage costs here. We will talk more about this later. And yes, I do realize I am a hypocrite for indulging in this…discussions on myriad paradoxes of living in global economy will be continuing throughout this trip, picking up from past posts) and still found myself utterly, profoundly bored lying on the beach. And bored quickly turned into lonely, missing my partner at home and thinking how much fun it would be to tell him a dumb joke for the millionth time or just look at his cute little face. This type of brainstorm is simply not productive, certainly not if I am to enjoy the next four weeks and really embrace the opportunities being presented. I know that I am here for a reason, I don’t know what that/those reason(s) are yet, but I have NO doubt that the series of coincidences that conspired for me to be here were by accident. Or, as one of my friends puts it: Is it odd, or is it G-d?

Anyway, existential musings aside, I was truly grateful for class to get rolling today. Language class at 8AM, barely remember anything, but I can at least ask people their names in Bahasa Indonesian and introduce myself. And ask where the bathroom is. 10AM the other six Mason grad students and I headed to Leslie and Degung’s (her husband) house for research methods class. This course is going to be incredible. Being able to spend so much ‘hands on’ time getting messy, making mistakes, and being able to dialogue in real time with others about fieldwork is going to be such a tremendous gift, especially right at the beginning of my PhD program. The class brought up so, so many issues that I hope to discuss in coming posts, but in the interest of getting to bed with enough time to sleep and not fall asleep in language class tomorrow, I will simply say this: the Bali that is presented/promoted/propagated in the name of tourism is not the Bali that actually exists...indeed, it is an issue worth debating if “Bali”, a unified, common place with unified ideas and ‘customs’- so central to the narrative of tourism- actually exists at all. I have been emailing back and forth with folks interested in my trip and several have commented on how beautiful and “sensual” Bali is. Certainly, watching the sun set over the mountains this evening I was struck by the beauty of this tiny island. But the idea of this entity of ‘culture’- a sensual, mysterious and well defined thing- is something that I am finding in start relief with the actual experience of the day to day here. Much as American does not equal cowboys, John Wayne, basketball, and Barack Obama, this “culture” of Bali is a narrative that has emerged for a number of reasons, many economically and politically motivated, that have nothing to actually do with the experience of life of actual Balinese people.

So, on that note, let me simply say that I am 1) grateful to be here, 2) grateful for a lovely homestay with not freezing water, 3) super happy that I took a dipper shower just now and am going to sleep sans Deet for the first time in several days.

Bali, "Hi!"

I'm here!!! I got in Tuesday night around 5:10pm Bali time, 5:10 in the States. After booking it through customs, I grabbed my stuff and went out into the not-as-humid-as-I-had-expected evening. Met my new friends Putra, Leslie's nephew, and Ika, the program coordinators for the Indonesia: Culture and Conflict program I am here to do with the ever brilliant Dr. Leslie Dwyer.

Ika and Putra and I stopped for yummy food at Bali Bakery (rice! yay!) and then went to Leslie's for the night. Her house is AMAZING. Open on all sides, with this incredible garden all around. And hot water! After 30 hours with no shower other than the rainstorm I got stuck in, I was pretty happy to see a shower.

Bali Bakery food was yummy, but what was funny is that it's a totally Western restaurant. We walked in and Putra said, "welcome back to your culture!" Really, the best way to have Balinese food is from a local Warung, a small food stand/restaurant place...think your mom's kitchen with several dishes set out. You point at what you want (or if you speak Balinese you ask like a nice dignified person, rather than pointing and nodding while smiling like a moron, as I do) and then they wrap it up in a sheet of paper. It's so clever with the paper. They fold it so that it holds the rice, tempeh, chicken, sauce, veggies, everything, in just one little sheet. And it's DELICIOUS! Oh, and, about $.90US.

We spent yesterday zipping around on motobikes looking at the homestays where me and the other students will be over the next month. I am in LOVE with riding on motobikes. I even have my own helmet now. Putra let me borrow one from a family member, then took me to get my own (blue!) yesterday, along with a cell phone.

Last night I moved to the beach for two nights of R&R before the program starts. First impressions of Bali are awesome, I am so glad to be back in Southeast Asia and really, really grateful I had the opportunity to come.

My internet connections have all been super slow and I haven't been able to get pictures up yet. Check back tomorrow, hopefully they'll be up. Looking forward to writing more over the coming weeks!

First adventure? Studying on the beach, natch. Grad school meets sunbathing.