ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the structure and contents of SNI and maps out the historiographic and political contexts that reflected and influenced them. It also demonstrates the dynamic relationship between the embodiments of scholarship and the political interests of the regime. It argues that despite the limitations in carrying out the multi-dimensional and Indonesia-centric approaches, the use of these approaches inadvertently set the limit within which the political aims of the project were attained. However, due to the public perception of the ‘officiality’ of the original SNI (1975), attention was diverted from the truly propagandistic version, which was the textbook for middle school, SNI-SMP. This chapter also demonstrates the disjunction and contradictions between different versions of SNI as well between official interpretations of key events and those found in SNI. The incoherent images or interpretations found in various versions of SNI imply the need to underscore the agency of those who actually wrote the relevant parts. Acknowledging their agency calls for a more nuanced analysis of the power relations that underpin knowledge production.