Session Name: Close-Ups: The Highs and Lows of Social Life in the City
Orang Kaya-Orang Miskin: local economic class division and moral predicament among poor residents under coastal property development in Jakarta, Indonesia
Thursday, August 1, 2024
11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: This article argues that the dramatic disparity between the wealthy and the poor in Indonesia regarding the settlements will have extensive influence on economic class division within the poor settlement. Enlightened by a seven-month ethnographic fieldwork in a coastal kampung of Jakarta, Indonesia, the researcher discovered the phenomenon of local class division (orang kaya-orang miskin) in the context of property development over the coastal area of Jakarta. Poor residents living in a settlement adjacent to middle-class and wealthy settlements, can easily regard other community residents as rich people (orang kaya) but themselves as poor people (orang miskin). They claim their poverty and other residents' prosperity for the purpose of differentiating selves and others, and maintaining their need of receiving material or monetary aid, because local ethics of mutual aid and Muslim morality of charitable help encourages the rich to be kind and generous with the poor. This internal dichotomy of "orang kaya-orang miskin" is widely discovered among the community residents, thus to some extent shaking the moral foundation of community solidarity. The difference between people may embody in consumption, appearance, living places and so forth. The methodology of data collection in this ethnographic study consists of participant observation, random conversation and in-depth interview. This research put forwards that economic relations between people of sharply different economic statuses extend into the intricacies of everyday life and create moral predicament among poor residents, which urges our academia to investigate on the bad impacts of property development at the local level.
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