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Menari di Atas Kuburan Massal: Rekontruksi Budaya Indonesia Pascagenosida
Buku ini menelaah keterlibatan antara perempuan penari dan negara Indonesia sejak 1965,menggambarkan strategi ganda rezim Soeharto: mempersekusi dan membunuh para penari yang dituduh komunis atau beraliran kiri, sembari menciptakan dan mengerahkan tubuh-tubuh “replika” sebagai wajah ideal dari keanggunan dan kedamaian budaya Indonesia dalam ketertundukan terhadap negara otoriter. Berangkat dari refleksi atas pengalaman penulis sebagai seorang penari resmi nasional yang berasal dari sebuah keluarga beranggotakan perempuan-perempuan penari dan aktivitas yang dipersekusi, buku ini menyuguhkan sebuah telaah multidimensi yang sangat kuat atas penggunaan budaya secara meluas sebagai sarana negara untuk mewujudkan represinya sekaligus menjajakan idetitas nasionalnya di kancah dunia.
“Tubuh-tubuh perempuan, tubuh-tubuh yang menari: di buku yang menghantui ini, tubuh-tubuh itu menghantarkan kita pada teror politik dan penghapusannya melalui penampilan budaya yang dibungkus rapi dan aman. Hantu-hantu para penari yang dilenyapkan dalam prahara pembunuhan massal antikomunis yang didukung negara itu berkilapan di depan kita, pergerakan mereka direplikasi secara persis oleh penggantinya yang telah ‘diberishkan’ oleh negara. Memoar di buku ini berayun keluar dan memasuki kritik budaya; kita pun digiring menuju titik pelenyapan di mana kekuasan dan kekerasan mengoyak lorong mereka hingga menembus relung jiwa.”
ANNA TSING
Penulis buku Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
“Tubuh-tubuh perempuan, tubuh-tubuh yang menari: di buku yang menghantui ini, tubuh-tubuh itu menghantarkan kita pada teror politik dan penghapusannya melalui penampilan budaya yang dibungkus rapi dan aman. Hantu-hantu para penari yang dilenyapkan dalam prahara pembunuhan massal antikomunis yang didukung negara itu berkilapan di depan kita, pergerakan mereka direplikasi secara persis oleh penggantinya yang telah ‘diberishkan’ oleh negara. Memoar di buku ini berayun keluar dan memasuki kritik budaya; kita pun digiring menuju titik pelenyapan di mana kekuasan dan kekerasan mengoyak lorong mereka hingga menembus relung jiwa.”
ANNA TSING
Penulis buku Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
- GenresNonfiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 15, 2016
It is an interesting book but with some many logic lines, I am afraid
the work did not analysis well,the argument donot clear to me.
For example
the author only talk about the dance
but concluded that" Cultural construction hast been used by the Indonesian state to dominate it citizen and access global markets." 102
how dance represent the culture?, reconstruct dance means reconstruct culture?
this question has not justify enogh, then want to
talk about the international market, ....
In the chapter staging Alliance, said dance as resistance of the state and self,
so , there is a power transfer to female body by dance, but dance also empower the female to negotiated such cultural construction during the process? contradict your own argument?
talking about Colombia, is that comparable to your counrty?
chapter five call auto ethnography , should not your whole book is your own narrative?
February 19, 2024
This book has significantly expanded my understanding of state violence and its impact on citizens. It reveals that individuals are not only punished for committing crimes but also for engaging in activities deemed contrary to the state's ideology. The repercussions are both social and physical, with victims subjected to torture and even death without the due process of a trial. This exploration sheds light on the grave consequences of dissent in environments where state power is wielded with little regard for individual rights or justice.
June 3, 2025
Komodifikasi perempuan penari oleh bangsa-negara Indonesia pascaorde Lama diposisikan secara ambivalen, penuh paradoks, dan dalam keterasingan. Mereka diharuskan memediasi beragam kerumitan mobilitas status di ruang domestik. Sekaligus, dikooptasi bahkan hingga dinegarakan di ruang publik. Mereka dicap kiri. Konsekuensinya, mereka dipersekusi. Pada sisi lain, tubuh mereka direplika guna menciptakan wajah ideal kebudayaan Indonesia oleh Orde Baru.
June 21, 2013
This book has given me broader understanding about state violence that punish its citizen. Citizen is not only punished because s/he committed crime, but because her/his work considered to be against state's ideology. The punishment is both socially and physically;the victims were tortured and killed without trial.
October 22, 2014
Rachmi Diyah Larasati begins her book, The Dance that Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, with a recollection of when Mr. Soek - her ex- Indonesian Air Force neighbor– signed a document that erased her “dirty genealogy” for her entrance to school. The “unclean” genealogy in this context refers to her family’s persecution as “communist” dancers associated with Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia). Gerwani was a women’s organization affiliated with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), and whose fabricated role in the “coup” of the Gerakan 30 September (G30S) movement resulted in the banning and imprisonment of its members, as well as the elimination of accused communists and their sympathizers under Suharto’s New Order. Scholars generally agree that following the G30S period, approximately 500,000 accused communists were killed from 1965-66.
The literature on this tumultuous period in Indonesia has been analyzed through various histories of the Indonesian military, political groups, the modern Indonesian state, the women’s movement, as well as regional analyses. The choice to review Larasati’s work however, is due to her unique experiences in approaching the 1965-1966 massacres, and the relationship between the contemporary Indonesian state, the “female dancing body”, culture, and the politics of memory. I will focus on how these themes have been discussed in the context of the New Order era. Due to space constraints, I have intentionally excluded her discussion on mobility and globalization – interested readers are invited to consult reviews that have focused on this aspect.
Larasati’s unique background with personal connections to the 1965 period, as well as her status as an Indonesian “cultural representative” and dancer is reflected in the unique format of the book. It is a combination of ethnographic interviews, personal experiences, and a historical account of dance from the 1960s and beyond. The first two chapters include descriptions of her childhood, an analysis of Suharto’s cultural policy and pembinaan: state missions sent to rural areas “to make [culture] better”, and an analysis of how “global diversity projects” influenced the transformation of cultural practices into “material and state-held intellectual property”. The third chapter relates Larasati’s personal experiences with the dances considered “subversive” in the state’s purview, as well as how the state appropriated village and court dances as a legitimization of their mythical Javanese past. Chapter four engages with how dance and the politics of memory in Cambodia differed from Indonesia because it specifically commemorated the aspect of royal tradition that was persecuted by the Khmer Rouge. The final chapter reflects on mobility through Larasati’s representation of Indonesia abroad, the state’s control over women’s roles, and the connection between politics and the “principles of dance movement”. Dance is largely understood in the framework of the state’s political manipulations – a focus that makes it difficult to place culture and dance within its own histories of resistance, change, and meaning before the inception of the modern nation-state.
Larasati’s “historical memoir” explores the intersections between the female body, art and performance as it was appropriated and (re)constructed by the state to forget a particular period in history. This is seen in Larasati’s experience in the Suharto era watching the state’s propaganda film, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the G30S/PKI), as well as the display of specific Indonesian court dance performances at events like the celebration of Vietnam’s membership into ASEAN. It is by contrasting such personal, cultural experiences with the silences in government propaganda that her book is able to convey the complexity of the issues engendered in the aftermath of the massacre.
Larasati’s discussion of how mothers transmitted artistic practices to their daughters in villages provides another example of this complexity. These included non-court dances such as Jathilan, Jejer, and Tayub. Larasati clarifies that the state prioritized adiluhung (refined) court dances over the kasar (uncontrolled or unrefined) movements of village dances. It is in this respect that Larasati’s work can be put into dialogue with other studies on Indonesian dance. Art, as anthropologist Felicia Hughes-Freeland argues, “is not a cultural given…it is used in the processes of cultural production to define appropriateness, and entails struggles for power and identity.” Larasati makes this clear with the example of Tayub. Tayub was banned after 1965 because it was considered dangerous, “low class and unrefined” for its dance movements and popularity among large male crowds that was likened to “communism”. In this way, Larasati clearly demonstrates the conflict between local and state aesthetic values that extended “communist” accusations beyond political ideology to the body, culture, and family.
Larasati’s failure, however, to interweave historical context about the types of dance and dance techniques with her theoretical analyses about performance, and her uncritical use of dichotomous categories such as “traditional” to describe Indonesian culture, art and performance, makes for a difficult work to follow. For example, Larasati does not explore how the generational transmission of dance could have engendered changes in the meanings and practices for those movements over time – both individually and within the community. Tayub, for Larasati growing up, was intimately linked to the “communication of tradition”. Yet this “tradition” is not discussed beyond the assumed homogeneity of the “village” - and only when dancers had to undergo pembinaan to “refine” their dances. This oversight is in addition to her earlier caveat that the value systems in dances were intertwined with specific local hierarchies – again, none of which are elaborated in much detail. Despite Larasati’s well-articulated criticisms of how the state defined and imposed “Indonesian” culture, there is little discussion of how such control may have been resisted beyond the state/village, “traditional”/”Indonesian” dichotomy, or its regional variants. In this respect, only the state’s perspective on the dance is represented (this also extends to the Dutch colonialists and the Cambodian state).
There were also some points in the book that would have benefited from further discussion. Larasati does not provide any literature reviews on dance history, or sources that readers unfamiliar with dance history could consult. Little context is given for the cultural significance of the mentioned dances and their relationship to the community. As such, one needs to access additional sources to contextualize dance within Javanese “mysticism”, its relationship to the Hindu-Buddhist cosmologies, the nuances in dance movements, and the presence of male Bedhaya dancers. For example, only after consulting Hughes-Freeland’s monograph on Javanese dance does one understand how bedhaya as a court dance acquired high status: its “allusiveness” and potency, which was a specifically Javanese understanding of power. In contrast, Larasati discusses bedhaya only according to its difficult movements as a court dance, and its utility on the international stage. There are also very few dates mentioned, with the exception of Suharto’s cultural policy, and her trip to Cambodia in 2002. Interviews, when mentioned, were also brief. Larasati’s liminality is clear, but perhaps attention to other personal histories beyond state narratives may have fulfilled her promise to “investigate and interrogate the erasure of the stories of those who were killed or disappeared”.
The weaknesses of Larasati’s work do not deter from its value for understanding how dance and culture has been, and continues to be a tool for political legitimization and control in Indonesia. Discriminatory state laws and the continued monitoring, abuse and “cleansing” of supposed communists through weekly visits to local authorities demonstrate the challenges to define one’s own “paradoxical citizenship” in Indonesia’s silenced past. The Dance that Makes You Vanish is a testament to how Suharto justified eliminating communists by policing the embodiment of “Indonesian culture” - or risk the wrath of “sexually loose” of Gerwani communists. This justification continues to disconnect the expression of Indonesian performance from the memory of Indonesia’s traumatic past.
Sources Consulted:
Book Reviews:
Hatley, Barbara. “Rachmi Dyah Larasati, The Dance that Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia [review]”, in Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania 169, no. 4 (October 2013): 558-562.
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. “Rachmi Dyah Larasati, The Dance that Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia [review]”, in Anthropological Quarter 87, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 943-948.
Secondary Sources:
Anderson, Bendict. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”, in Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Edited by Claire Holt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
Heryanto, Ariel. State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. “Art and Politics: From Javanese Court Dance to Indonesian Art”, in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 3(September 1997): 473-495.
-------------------------------. Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
Kammens Douglas, and Katherine McGregor. Eds. The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012.
Morgan, Stephanie and Laurie Sears, eds, Aesthetic Tradition and Cultural Transition in Java and Bali. Madison, Wisconsin: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1984.
Vickers, Adrian. “Where are the Bodies: The Haunting of Indonesia”. In The Public Historian 32, no.1 (2010): 45-58.
The literature on this tumultuous period in Indonesia has been analyzed through various histories of the Indonesian military, political groups, the modern Indonesian state, the women’s movement, as well as regional analyses. The choice to review Larasati’s work however, is due to her unique experiences in approaching the 1965-1966 massacres, and the relationship between the contemporary Indonesian state, the “female dancing body”, culture, and the politics of memory. I will focus on how these themes have been discussed in the context of the New Order era. Due to space constraints, I have intentionally excluded her discussion on mobility and globalization – interested readers are invited to consult reviews that have focused on this aspect.
Larasati’s unique background with personal connections to the 1965 period, as well as her status as an Indonesian “cultural representative” and dancer is reflected in the unique format of the book. It is a combination of ethnographic interviews, personal experiences, and a historical account of dance from the 1960s and beyond. The first two chapters include descriptions of her childhood, an analysis of Suharto’s cultural policy and pembinaan: state missions sent to rural areas “to make [culture] better”, and an analysis of how “global diversity projects” influenced the transformation of cultural practices into “material and state-held intellectual property”. The third chapter relates Larasati’s personal experiences with the dances considered “subversive” in the state’s purview, as well as how the state appropriated village and court dances as a legitimization of their mythical Javanese past. Chapter four engages with how dance and the politics of memory in Cambodia differed from Indonesia because it specifically commemorated the aspect of royal tradition that was persecuted by the Khmer Rouge. The final chapter reflects on mobility through Larasati’s representation of Indonesia abroad, the state’s control over women’s roles, and the connection between politics and the “principles of dance movement”. Dance is largely understood in the framework of the state’s political manipulations – a focus that makes it difficult to place culture and dance within its own histories of resistance, change, and meaning before the inception of the modern nation-state.
Larasati’s “historical memoir” explores the intersections between the female body, art and performance as it was appropriated and (re)constructed by the state to forget a particular period in history. This is seen in Larasati’s experience in the Suharto era watching the state’s propaganda film, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the G30S/PKI), as well as the display of specific Indonesian court dance performances at events like the celebration of Vietnam’s membership into ASEAN. It is by contrasting such personal, cultural experiences with the silences in government propaganda that her book is able to convey the complexity of the issues engendered in the aftermath of the massacre.
Larasati’s discussion of how mothers transmitted artistic practices to their daughters in villages provides another example of this complexity. These included non-court dances such as Jathilan, Jejer, and Tayub. Larasati clarifies that the state prioritized adiluhung (refined) court dances over the kasar (uncontrolled or unrefined) movements of village dances. It is in this respect that Larasati’s work can be put into dialogue with other studies on Indonesian dance. Art, as anthropologist Felicia Hughes-Freeland argues, “is not a cultural given…it is used in the processes of cultural production to define appropriateness, and entails struggles for power and identity.” Larasati makes this clear with the example of Tayub. Tayub was banned after 1965 because it was considered dangerous, “low class and unrefined” for its dance movements and popularity among large male crowds that was likened to “communism”. In this way, Larasati clearly demonstrates the conflict between local and state aesthetic values that extended “communist” accusations beyond political ideology to the body, culture, and family.
Larasati’s failure, however, to interweave historical context about the types of dance and dance techniques with her theoretical analyses about performance, and her uncritical use of dichotomous categories such as “traditional” to describe Indonesian culture, art and performance, makes for a difficult work to follow. For example, Larasati does not explore how the generational transmission of dance could have engendered changes in the meanings and practices for those movements over time – both individually and within the community. Tayub, for Larasati growing up, was intimately linked to the “communication of tradition”. Yet this “tradition” is not discussed beyond the assumed homogeneity of the “village” - and only when dancers had to undergo pembinaan to “refine” their dances. This oversight is in addition to her earlier caveat that the value systems in dances were intertwined with specific local hierarchies – again, none of which are elaborated in much detail. Despite Larasati’s well-articulated criticisms of how the state defined and imposed “Indonesian” culture, there is little discussion of how such control may have been resisted beyond the state/village, “traditional”/”Indonesian” dichotomy, or its regional variants. In this respect, only the state’s perspective on the dance is represented (this also extends to the Dutch colonialists and the Cambodian state).
There were also some points in the book that would have benefited from further discussion. Larasati does not provide any literature reviews on dance history, or sources that readers unfamiliar with dance history could consult. Little context is given for the cultural significance of the mentioned dances and their relationship to the community. As such, one needs to access additional sources to contextualize dance within Javanese “mysticism”, its relationship to the Hindu-Buddhist cosmologies, the nuances in dance movements, and the presence of male Bedhaya dancers. For example, only after consulting Hughes-Freeland’s monograph on Javanese dance does one understand how bedhaya as a court dance acquired high status: its “allusiveness” and potency, which was a specifically Javanese understanding of power. In contrast, Larasati discusses bedhaya only according to its difficult movements as a court dance, and its utility on the international stage. There are also very few dates mentioned, with the exception of Suharto’s cultural policy, and her trip to Cambodia in 2002. Interviews, when mentioned, were also brief. Larasati’s liminality is clear, but perhaps attention to other personal histories beyond state narratives may have fulfilled her promise to “investigate and interrogate the erasure of the stories of those who were killed or disappeared”.
The weaknesses of Larasati’s work do not deter from its value for understanding how dance and culture has been, and continues to be a tool for political legitimization and control in Indonesia. Discriminatory state laws and the continued monitoring, abuse and “cleansing” of supposed communists through weekly visits to local authorities demonstrate the challenges to define one’s own “paradoxical citizenship” in Indonesia’s silenced past. The Dance that Makes You Vanish is a testament to how Suharto justified eliminating communists by policing the embodiment of “Indonesian culture” - or risk the wrath of “sexually loose” of Gerwani communists. This justification continues to disconnect the expression of Indonesian performance from the memory of Indonesia’s traumatic past.
Sources Consulted:
Book Reviews:
Hatley, Barbara. “Rachmi Dyah Larasati, The Dance that Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia [review]”, in Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania 169, no. 4 (October 2013): 558-562.
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. “Rachmi Dyah Larasati, The Dance that Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia [review]”, in Anthropological Quarter 87, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 943-948.
Secondary Sources:
Anderson, Bendict. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”, in Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Edited by Claire Holt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
Heryanto, Ariel. State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. “Art and Politics: From Javanese Court Dance to Indonesian Art”, in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 3(September 1997): 473-495.
-------------------------------. Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
Kammens Douglas, and Katherine McGregor. Eds. The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012.
Morgan, Stephanie and Laurie Sears, eds, Aesthetic Tradition and Cultural Transition in Java and Bali. Madison, Wisconsin: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1984.
Vickers, Adrian. “Where are the Bodies: The Haunting of Indonesia”. In The Public Historian 32, no.1 (2010): 45-58.
December 31, 2025
Sebagai orang yang belum pernah baca ataupun menyimak dunia seni tari secara khusus, sejujurnya agak sulit untuk memahami aspek-aspek ketubuhan dan gerak dalam buku ini. Tapi penjabaran dari penulis mengagumkan karena banyak menghubungkan yang personal dengan yang lokal dengan yang global, sehingga pembaca jadi dapat berbagai perspektif buat membaca berbagai fenomena pasca genosida 1965. Salah satu yang paling berkesan bagiku adalah soal gimana penari-penari perempuan dalam misi kebudayaan ke luar negeri menjadi alat diplomasi untuk menunjukkan "budaya Indonesia" yang harmonis dan di ambang kepunahan, tetapi di saat yang bersamaan menghapus kekerasan dan ketidakadilan yang menimpa perempuan.
Buku ini juga jadi menarik karena banyak meminjam sejarah personal penulis, sebagai penari resmi, sebagai akademisi, sebagai perempuan yang lahir di keluarganya. Bagiku pendekatan ini menarik karena mendekatkan teori-teori budaya yang digunakan, tapi juga cukup alot untuk pembaca sepertiku yang awam dan belum pernah mengenal sosok Rachmi Diyah Larasati sebelum buku ini.
Buku ini juga jadi menarik karena banyak meminjam sejarah personal penulis, sebagai penari resmi, sebagai akademisi, sebagai perempuan yang lahir di keluarganya. Bagiku pendekatan ini menarik karena mendekatkan teori-teori budaya yang digunakan, tapi juga cukup alot untuk pembaca sepertiku yang awam dan belum pernah mengenal sosok Rachmi Diyah Larasati sebelum buku ini.
November 19, 2025
Buku ini mengangkat isu yang cukup sensitif karena di dalamnya dibahas bagaimana seni tari saat ini merupakan produk rekonstruksi budaya setelah tragedi 1965. Disebut “rekonstruksi budaya” karena pada tahun 1965 Gerwani dan Lekra diasosiasikan dengan pergerakan Partai Komunis Indonesia. Buku ini juga mengangkat isu ketubuhan perempuan sebagai modal politik di tingkat regional bahkan hingga multinasional.
January 20, 2026
Lumayan lah ya
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews