Revisiting “the Exemplary Centre” in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas, Ideologies, Cosmologies

This talk draws on a prominent tradition of scholarship concerning Southeast Asian concepts of power, which appears to have lost much of its appeal to observers of contemporary political contests (and other social dynamics) in Southeast Asia.

Focusing particularly on the notion of the exemplary centre (a term famously coined by Clifford Geertz), the talk argues that this idea of a centre, where power is concentrated and from which it emanates, is still relevant today and opens analytical perspectives that can help to grasp current political and religious life. Rather than representing an ideology confined to the past, we encounter a cosmology in the making (borrowing and slightly altering the title of Fredric Barth’s classic book), constantly being remade through its entanglements with current conditions.

Concentrating on Indonesia, the talk explores the concept of an exemplary centre rooted in Southeast Asian cosmologies within three interconnected realms. First, national politics, as it has evolved over the last decade, particularly during the Jokowi presidency. Second, Islam, as informed by several waves of reformist movements, modernist thought, and traditionalist responses, including the ideological concepts of centre and periphery developed by Indonesia’s major Islamic organisations in the 2010s. Third, social media, which constitute important sites where today’s ideological contestations take place, with networked structures affording ideologizations of the centre in a seemingly paradoxical way. Finally, the talk attempts to make a more general argument about the analytical value of distinguishing between ideas, ideologies, and cosmologies in the contemporary analysis of socio-political dynamics in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Speaker & chair biographies

Dr. Martin Slama is a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the University of Vienna’s anthropology department with a doctoral thesis on the online practices of young internet users in Indonesia. His anthropological studies of Islam in Indonesia have included projects on diaspora communities of Hadhrami Arab descent, as well as more recent work on the varied Islamic uses of social media in Indonesia, as is reflected in his latest publications: “Conspicuous Pilgrimages and the Politics of Public/Private: Social Media Representations of Indonesia’s Muslim Middle Class”, in: Millie, Julian (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific: Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres (2023), and “Social Media and the Question of Change in Indonesia’s Field of Islam”, Indonesia 119 (2025).

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by David Kristianto on Unsplash

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