Saturday 4 March 2017

Quotes 2017 #63

"Throughout the country confrontations between intrusive groups and those previously settled in this place or that---what Indonesians call PENDATANG (newcomers) and ASLI(oroginals)---have led not just to sectarian eruptions but to ethnic, cultural, tribal, ideological, and economic ones as well. (Petroleum deposits, being place-bound, are not---as Nigeria also demonstrates---altogether conducive to national unity.) If, as I believe, neither the separation of Indonesia into more workable and homogeneous parts nor the integration of it under the aegis of a pervasive, difference-drowning identity is, save perhaps here and there, on the cards, the country will have to develop effective ways of containing and stabilizing such multiplex and multiform differences---something it has hardly as yet begun to do."

Clifford Geertz, Life Among the Authors.