From clients to citizens? Democratization and everyday citizenship in a West Javanese village

This study seeks to trace how democratic reforms shape the practices and the character of everyday citizenship of Sariendah villagers. Focusing on everyday negotiations and contestations between a diversity of village actors, this study analyzes how their relationship is being reworked and contested, especially in terms of accountability, access to services and livelihood resources. It is an answer to a growing call for a greater understanding of the diversity of the state-citizen relationship, especially within the context of a postcolonial society like Indonesia. Based on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in a village in West Java called Sariendah that has been a site of earlier in-depth ethnographic study by Hans Antlöv during the late 1980s, this study exploits a unique opportunity in tracing the changes that the democratization has brought to Indonesia’s villages. This study argues that democratization has opened up the political space at the village level, enabling more contestation between village elites. This, in turn, encourages higher accountability and responsiveness to the need of the poorer village. However, despite the overarching formal institutional changes in Sariendah, the underlying socio-economic structure remains largely unchanged. Class, therefore, remains an important dimension on how citizenship is practiced, especially among the poor and marginalized. I argued that this prevailing topography of class and power relations has shaped the character of everyday citizenship that is mediated, negotiated and vernacularized, where informal and clientelistic relationship still constitute an important dimension of everyday citizenship in contemporary rural Indonesia.