PD Dr. Martin Ramstedt

In the late 19th century, when the eminent Dutch scholar of Islam, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, became adviser to the government of the Netherlands Indies, he introduced two conceptual fault lines that henceforth constituted important reference points in public policy and debate. These fault lines separated, on the one hand, “religion” (agama) from “custom” (adat), and, on the other, “religion” from “politics”. From then on, custom and politics were identified as secular domains that were regulated in legislation and policies separate from those dealing with religion. While the aforementioned fault lines had originally been developed with the aim of controlling Islam, they were also to inform the policies of the colonial government with regard to the ethnic traditions of the non-Muslim peoples in the archipelago. This is borne out by the particular legal pluralism developing in the Netherlands Indies, involving ordinances on “foreign Orientals”, “customary law”, “formal education”, and “retraditionalisation”. Further important aspects of this setting are the “social movements” of the late colonial period, such as the religious reform movements and the different ethnic nationalist movements of the time, which contested and renegotiated the fault lines between “religion” and “the secular” promoted by the colonial government.

This project aims to demonstrate how the evolving legal order and institutions of the post-colonial Indonesian state have cemented the old colonial conceptual fault lines. While “religion” has, since the beginnings of the unitary Indonesian nation state, been regulated by the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, “custom” and “culture” have been the responsibility of the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Education and later also of the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism. Politics in the sense of governance or affairs of state, on the other hand, have been the shared domain of the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Indonesian Ministry of Defence. Lastly, I will analyse how different social movements in post-colonial Indonesia, like the indigenous peoples movement, political Islam, environmental activism, and various ethno-nationalist movements have challenged anew the old conceptual fault lines between “religion” and “the secular”, opening up new spaces of both secularity and religion in the event.