On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry
Jan Mrázek
Karolinum Press: 2022
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One of the legacies of Dutch colonialism in modern Indonesia is the colonial-era social pyramid that segregated people in the colony into three categories: Europeans on top, Far Easterners (including local-born ethnic Chinese residents) in the middle and pribumi (‘natives’) at the bottom. Some Indonesians still use the latter term online, in casual conversations or when making racist remarks.

The governor of Jakarta, Anies Rasyid Baswedan, brought up the word pribumi in his 2017 inauguration speech, calling for the natives to become ‘hosts in our own land’. Nonetheless, there are concerns that the term was used by Baswedan to distinguish the so-called natives from Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, a group which has suffered prejudice and which some locals continue to see as foreigners, wielding an economic dominance that is not controlled by the Indonesian state.

• Tags: Indonesia, Issue 28, Jan Mrázek, Konstantin Biebl, Randy Mulyanto