Generating History: Violence and the Risks of Remembering for Families of Former Political Prisoners in Post-New Order Indonesia.

This dissertation looks at constructions of generational difference, intergenerational relationships, and the links between family and nation in the aftermath of political violence that occurred in Indonesia at the start of the Suharto regime (1966- 1998). In this 1965-66 anti-communist purge, hundreds of thousands of alleged communists were imprisoned without trial for more than a decade (while up to three million more were killed in one of the largest massacres of the latter part of the twentieth century). For decades afterwards, the children and grandchildren of those imprisoned or killed were also subjected to political and social ostracism because of their family background. My fieldwork research conducted in Jogjakarta, Indonesia between 2005 and 2007 focused upon the intergenerational relationship between former political prisoners and their descendents, as manifested within households, social and political movements, and public representations of the liminal “communist child.” I argue that the Suharto regime, by defining the “communist family” as a potent political entity and a site for the transmission of political ideas and ideals, inadvertently laid the foundation for a reconfigured intergenerational social movement that emerged after Suharto fell from power in 1998. While the Suharto regime established its hegemony in part by using a “family” model of the nation and its citizens, I suggest that practices within and between the households of former political prisoners were used to subvert this discourse and redefine the “former political prisoner family” as a space of dissonant historical memory. Using ethnographic interviews, memoirs, literature, and observations of meetings and sessions of a court case, I treat the relationship between family and national histories as unstable, contested, and mutually constituted. This dissertation contributes to the scholarly literature on intergenerational transmission of memories of political violence and the experience of “postmemory,” while arguing that we should view such phenomena as both cutting across and helping to define boundaries between family/ nation and private/ public. It also asserts that any study of large-scale efforts to reframe, rewrite, or “straighten” history should take into account the lived experience of epistemological uncertainty and the practices deemed possible in the absence of certain memories.Ph.D.Anthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91409/1/aconroe_1.pd