The Cyborg Conservative

The Lecture

In this talk, Aryo Danusiri will share his current research on “the conservative turn” in Indonesia’s post-Suharto era. He will examine the movements of young Indonesian Hadrami preachers who convert their rudimentary technology, mawlid, into urban machines. These groups have turned themself into cyborg-majelis floating on Jakarta’s cyborgcene, from one kampung to another kampung. Every week, the movement unleashes lavish multimedia congregations on Jakarta streets, taking advantage of the perpetual traffic jams by engaging passers-by and passengers in the many cars that have stalled. Its motorcades travel across and around Jakarta’s roadways, parks, and other public places, including mosques and tombs, attracting tens of thousands of young adherents. The weekly mobile event celebrates the Mawlid, or birthday of the Prophet, which was recently a state-sponsored event and is being celebrated through a range of syncretical-inflected religious rituals. Dominated by male lower-middle-class youths, the followers of this movement are highly mobile, using motorbikes to circulate in the city, and adept at integrating Internet and mobile communication technologies to promote their religious performances. Through sharing an episodic story of this street majelis, Danusuri will show how photographic images have become one of the pivotal instruments to their development of becoming authoritative figures in contemporary Indonesia. 

The Speaker

Aryo Danusiri is a technological anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Secondary Field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University. Danusiri teaches at the University of Indonesia, where he conducted courses on Anthropological Theories, Technology and the Public, Political Anthropology, among others. He is also an adjunct senior researcher at BRIN (National Research and Innovation Agency). His research projects revolve around activism and its technologies that interrogate the subjectivities of conservative and progressive actors. His projects have been supported by various international institutions, including Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Fulbright, and Wenner-Gren Foundation.