Jan 26
In Speech and In Action: Gender, Global Inequalities, and the Ethics of Exchange in Eastern Indonesia
Join us for SOAN department anthropology candidate Rafadi Hakim as he presents "In Speech and In Action: Gender, Global Inequalities, and the Ethics of Exchange in Eastern Indonesia."
Rafadi is currently finishing a PhD in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is a 2013 Carleton alumnus of the SOAN department. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, his current research examines how concepts in linguistic and semiotic anthropology illuminate relationships between gender, kinship, and indebtedness in the circulation of global capital. Rafadi has also embarked on a second research project that investigates how queer youth differentiate themselves from heternormative others in digitally mediated interactions.
The dissertation and book Rafadi is writing - Ethics of Exchange: Gender, Religion, and Democratic Life in Eastern Indonesia - examines how the everyday workings of democracy in eastern Indonesia are organized and contested in relation to gendered practices of kebersamaan, or "togetherness." While Indonesia's democracy is conceived through global imaginaries of social reform, the practice of democratic life in eastern Indonesia remains tied to local notions of kebersamaan: ethical affordances performed by the continuation (or discontinuation) of exchange in social relationships. Rafadi theorizes how togetherness - enacted through the exchange of words, money, and other resources - reproduces gendered forms of social inequality in Indonesia and in democratic societies globally.