ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a response to state building in contemporary Indonesia. In this civilizational narrative, a lawless, native "wasteland" is tamed and appropriated by the state by "civilizing" it. During the independence period, the state continued to "modernize" and "develop" Indonesia in ways that preserved the old distinction between "civilization"—represented by an urban, Westernized middle class, and "underdevelopment", i.e., the urban and rural poor, who had been relegated to various kinds of "wastelands" on the margins of malls and gated communities in the cities and in the rustic hinterland. Ideas about martial arts, about heroism and about the villainy and violence of local power brokers like the drug lord Tama, have been shaped by long-standing indigenous political traditions but also by three hundred years of exposure to the West under colonial domination, by watching Hollywood movies, and after the end of World War II, by more than thirty years of modernization under the iron rule of the Javanese dictator Suharto.
