Tom Pepinsky

Category: Food and Drink

  • Indonesia is Neither an Islamic nor a Secular State

    I recently came across a discussion of alcohol regulations in Indonesia, housed on a site that apparently caters to Indonesia’s expat community. (Westerners have something of an infatuation with restrictions on alcohol as a measure of how religiously tolerant Muslim societies are. This is true even though it is still far easier to purchase beer in Jakarta than it is in my home town in central Pennsylvania.)

    What struck me was not the discussion of alcohol—old hat—but rather an instructive error in the very first sentence.

    Indonesia, being a Muslim majority country, is also a pluralist, democratic and secular nation.

    The error is in the word “secular.” Indonesia is not an Islamic state, but it is also not a secular state and it never has been. Misunderstand this, and you misunderstand Indonesian politics and religion.

    The Indonesian constitution (PDF) declared in Chapter XI that

    (1) The State shall be based upon the belief in the One and Only God.
    (2) The State guarantees all persons the freedom of worship, each according to his/her own religion or belief

    (1) is the key, establishing the founding principle that the state is religious, from which follows the conclusion that the state has legitimate role in regulating religious practice and religious affairs. Chapter X also stipulates that

    In exercising his/her rights and freedoms, every person shall have the duty to accept the restrictions established by law for the sole purposes of guaranteeing the recognition and respect of the rights and freedoms of others and of satisfying just demands based upon considerations of morality, religious values, security and public order in a democratic society.

    This provision clarifies that the protection of religious values may serve as the basis for lawmaking. Note that this is not a reasoned argument on legal grounds about where the rights of one infringe on the rights of others, this is a constitutional provision that asserts that such laws are permissible.

    From these and a few other provisions, many interesting things follow that have no place in a secular state. There are religious courts. There is a Ministry of Religions that regulates religions, not just Islam but others as well. The Indonesian state has the constitutional architecture necessary for state actors to take a position on what religious beliefs and practices are normatively acceptable, which ones are deviant, and which ones are a threat to social order. The argument that the sale and consumption of alcohol inflicts harm on Indonesian Muslims even if they do not consume it themselves is an entirely coherent position (even if I don’t agree with it at all).

    The politics in Indonesian Islam is not about defending the state from Islam. It is about positioning Islam within a state apparatus that can and does regulate it and other religions. Secular states solve these problems by preventing the state from taking a position on religion. For better or for worse, that is not the path that Indonesia’s elites chose at independence.

  • Lorraine Chuen on Food, Race, and Power

    This is relevant to my interests (HT Angry Asian Man).

    The amount of power that White people hold continues to both amaze and disturb me. White folks have the power to tease, torment, and mock (this food smells like poo, they’ll tell you, or perhaps: your lunch looks like worms, or maybe, simply: that’s disgusting, with a pinch of their nose). I spent an entire childhood lying about my favorite foods and being embarrassed about bringing noodles to school for lunch because of the casual racism that White folks learn apparently as early as middle school. White adults are no better: I recently had a coworker tell me, over dim sum, that chopsticks were the laziest eating utensil ever invented (whatever that even means).

    White folks have the power to torment, often without consequence; but the special thing about White people is that they also have the power to make a trip to your home country for a month or maybe twelve, get inspired, and dictate when your previously unpalatable dishes suddenly become socially acceptable, trendy, and profitable in the Western world. And inevitably, with the popularization of certain ethnic dishes, comes erasure. I can’t help but wonder, what becomes of dishes when they are prepared for the white gaze – or in this case, white palette? What remains of food, after it’s been decontextualized? What are flavours without stories? What are recipes without histories? Why are people of colour forgotten, over and over again, while their food (also: vocabulary, music, art, hair, clothing) are consumed and adopted?

    …

    When I look at the repertoire of work that White chefs and restaurateurs have built on ethnic cuisine, it feels in a way, dehumanizing. White people are able to establish outrageously successful careers for being experts and authorities on the stuff that racialized folks do every day simply by existing. But of course, people of colour will rarely, if ever, be called experts on how to simply be themselves. It’s as if racialized folks and their ways of life are objects to be observed—study material, of sorts—rather than entire countries, cultures, and individual complex lives.

    It reminds me of this, which I wrote a year ago, and which may strike some readers as rather more (or, for some, rather less) urgent right now.