City Performance: Chinese New Year in West Kalimantan

Frans Ari Prasetyo is a scholar working at the Bandung Institute of Technology whose work focuses on etnography, visual anthropology, urban-rural planning and histories.

The tight state control over Indonesia's ethnic Chinese communities under President Suharto's New Order  resulted in the political, social and cultural exclusion of those communities for many decades.In practice the New Order era saw the Indonesian government discriminate overtly against many of the country's nonindigenous populations, but it targeted the Chinese in particular.Certain businesses were closed to Chinese Indonesians, there was a quota for Chinese Indonesians in entering state universities, and there were restrictions on Chinese Indonesians joining the civil service.With the collapse of the New Order in 1998 and the subsequent lessening of state control over all Indonesian social and ethnic groups, attempts have been made to re-establish long-suppressed Chinese cultural formations and practices in Indonesia.
A case in point is the celebration of Chinese New Year, which had been banned since the passing of Order No 14/1967 by President Suharto, the ban also coinciding with the breaking off of diplomatic relations with China.Following the rapprochement between Indonesia and China at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, the Indonesian Government has taken extraordinary steps to bring about better conditions for the country's ethnic Chinese populations.

Prasetyo
City Performance PORTAL, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2016. 2 Given this context, it is important to establish a historical sense of the changing receptions and status of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia since the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998.The subsequent reformation of the Indonesian political system after the Suharto era saw an immediate lessening of state control over ethnic Chinese communities, and other groups.The first post-Suharto era President, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie (1998)(1999), issued a presidential decision that the division between pribumi (so-called Indigenous Indonesians) and non-pribumi (non-Indigenous Indonesians, including the country's communities of Chinese descent) be abolished.Attempts have been made since then to re-establish or resuscitate long-suppressed ethnic and cultural Chinese practices in Indonesia.Consequently, alternative discourses on identity have emerged, ranging from political and religious identifications to those of a more sociocultural nature.
The status of Chinese Indonesians began to change dramatically when the discriminatory distinction between pribumi and non-pribumi Indonesians was nullified formally by President Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as 'Gus Dur, ' 1999-2001)  Some of the street parade performers, acting as spirit mediums, sit on chairs embedded with knives or studded with nails, but more often they stand on the chairs with their bare feet on the sharpened edge of the knife blades.Some parade participants carry portable altars and palanquins on which are mounted images of deities.The procession includes dragon and lion dancers and a group of young men carrying staffs topped with papiermâché sculptures of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals.Carried on the shoulders of chair-bearers, the Singkawang performers ride high above the crowds, as if on parade floats.The crowd that packs the streets has a good view of these performers as they undertake acrobatic stunts, balancing on their stomachs or rocking upon the knives set into the chairs.
Among the performers, there are essentially three distinct groups-Chinese, Dayak and sashes tied criss-cross over their chests and arms, and on their heads bandanas.
Such material and sartorial symbolism-which also imply that audiences will be reading proceedings and bodies for signs of participants' wealth and status-in the context of the visual performances comprising the Chinese New Year celebrations in Singkawang are alluring and powerful precisely because of the complex sociocultural and ethnic identifications that feed into such religious rituals.A focus on the performativities encapsulating Cap Go Meh in Singkawang usefully begins to recognize how the parade is not only typical of the resuscitated, historically anchored work of Chinese cultural practices and identities, but also indicative of how those practices and identities have been institutionalized into the rituals of the city, and the Indonesian nation state itself.As the following visual ethnography aims to reveal, the Cap Go Meh street parades are legible as drama, ritual theatre, a mode of visual identity-making, and political circus and thus, ultimately, as central to the iconography of the city and its ethnicized communities.
Visual ethnography: Chinese New Year, Singkawang figure who is flexible, adaptable, open to a plurality of cultures and willing to engage in, and with, multiple new cultural forms.In practice, what occurs in the festival is a reimagining of the town, a reorientation towards its complex sociocultural history and its contemporary ethnocultural realities.The parade's performance of cultural imaginations, notably Chinese cultural expressions, enacts a sense of cross-community and transhistorical connection, to the extent that participants and audience appear to embrace a national cultural imaginary that fuels the continued construction and reconstruction of Chinese Indonesian culture as at once a specific local identity place and a specific local sociocultural space.
Malay-each distinguished by their dress.The Chinese wear the military uniforms of Ming generals and foot soldiers as depicted in Chinese opera.The Dayak costume comprises embroidered vests that resembled the traditional baju burung (bird garment) or jacket over trousers, covered by embroidered aprons that pass for the traditional sirat or cawat (loincloths).Dayak performers wear headbands or helmets decorated with hornbill and pheasant feathers.Participants who might be termed Malay also wear a distinctive costume, which comprises t-shirt (singlets) or vests over trousers with cloth Prasetyo City Performance PORTAL, vol.13, no. 1, January 2016.6