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Indonesia has figured prominently in analyses of national communities and state power, especially in research about state formation outside direct political rule and institutions. Much of Benedict Anderson's landmark argument that nationalisms spread and are felt at a popular level used historical material from the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia (see Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983]). Similarly, Ann Stoler's influential thesis that colonial rule rested on creating and policing intimate boundaries of race and sex also used archival records from the Indies (see Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002]). Jan Newberry's Back Door Java , an ethnography of contemporary state and class formation through the domestic, provides an important contribution to this scholarly tradition. Newberry argues that the Indonesian state of the late twentieth century relied on and existed through the very arena that seemed most removed from official institutions, that is, the domestic sphere.
Newberry's analysis connects the idea of the domestic with political ideologies about gender and class, specifically through the Indonesian idea of the kampung. Conducted in the dense urban neighborhoods flanking the kraton of Yogyakarta, Newberry's research does not focus on the relationship of the residents with the sultan so much as...