Observing Indonesia

In March 2003, while working on a Fulbright-Hays research project in Indonesia, Rachel Rinaldo ’94 and her husband witnessed a million-strong march through the streets of Jakarta to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rinaldo was sympathetic to the anti-war values of the marchers, some of whom she knew from her research project about feminism and Islam. 

Looking around in the throng of demonstrators, she spotted no other foreigners. As she and her husband passed a group of men on the sideline, they saw her and shouted, “America terrorist!” It was a moment of realization for the sociologist, who wanted to participate in the lives of those she was studying. “I realized I couldn’t escape my U.S. identity no matter how critical I myself may have been of American politics,” Rinaldo wrote in a 2015 essay. 

Her relationship with the largest Muslim country in the world began when she was just 17. Her parents suggested that she experience a gap year before starting at Barnard. She applied to the AFS exchange program and was assigned to a host family in East Java, Indonesia. “I knew nothing of the country,” says Rinaldo, who is now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado. 

For the next year, Rinaldo attended a school in the inland city of Malang, where all the students and teachers spoke Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language. She was expected to learn the language solely through immersion. Furthermore, the limited English skills of her host family made complex conversations impossible. There were only Indonesian newspapers to be found, so Rinaldo spent her evenings with an English-Indonesian dictionary deciphering the day’s articles. “It was a tough year,” she recalls. “And sometimes lonely.” 

By the time Rinaldo entered Barnard College as a freshman, however, she’d been changed forever by her experience. The country — with its multiple religions and ornate cultural traditions in music, art, and dance — had left an enduring impression.

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A TURN TO ACADEMIA

At Barnard, Rinaldo studied political science with an emphasis on the comparative politics of developing countries. She was active in social causes on campus, notably the Earth Coalition, which she led, the Anti-War Coalition, and Students for Choice. Her senior thesis was on anti-fascist youth movements in 1980s-’90s Germany and Great Britain, and Rinaldo credits her parents and her thesis adviser, visiting instructor Sanya Popovic, with encouraging her to earn a Ph.D. She applied and was accepted to the sociology program at the University of Chicago. 

After a junior year spent at the University of Edinburgh and her teenage exchange experience, Rinaldo knew that she wanted to do international research. It wasn’t clear to her exactly where, however, until the late 1990s, as she watched from afar as Indonesia became a democracy after 32 years of military dictatorship under Suharto. Seeing this transformation unfold in part through grassroots activism, she decided to return and do her dissertation on Islam and women’s activists during the democratization era. 

“My interest is in how social change happens,” she says. “And I was aware that things were changing all around the world when it came to women and gender. The types of changes that American women saw in the U.S. beginning in the 1950s are now playing out all over the globe.” 

Rinaldo’s first Indonesian Fulbright-Hays coincided with the “war on terror” initiated by the U.S. following 9/11. In fact, her research year was sandwiched between two major al-Qaida-linked events in Indonesia: the 2002 bombings in Bali that claimed 202 lives and a 2003 suicide bombing at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12. The U.S. Embassy urged Fulbright scholars to leave the country, but Rinaldo stayed because she felt too invested in her research. 

Her year abroad resulted in her first book, Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford, 2013), which looks at how Muslim women activists are reinterpreting the Quran to define it as a text that’s more inclusive of women and marginalized groups. 

Rinaldo has just finished a second year of Fulbright research in Indonesia, examining the impact of the pandemic on women’s work and careers as well as their experiences balancing work and family in general. She and her team have interviewed 125 women — from rice farmers and teachers to housewives and lawyers — and hope to document social patterns in this rapidly developing majority-Muslim society. This cohort of women are not educated feminists; many of them are traditionally religious. Yet they are at the forefront of a cultural shift. 

Rinaldo’s qualitative study, which consists of in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, has found that many savvy Indonesian housewives entered the workforce during the pandemic through the informal economy when their husbands lost their jobs or saw their income reduced. Such online activities — for example, selling stylish hijabs or baked goods from their tablets and cellphones — enabled women to both earn money and care for their children in a culture where husbands are not expected to help with domestic work. 

Just like the Indonesian feminists who are reimagining the Quran, the nation’s working women are reimagining their place in the post-pandemic economy, says Rinaldo: “They’re coming to recognize their own capabilities and expressing pride in being able to earn money.”'

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HOMEGROWN COLLABORATION

A 2014 study by researchers at the University of Chicago placed Indonesia’s academic citations among the lowest in Southeast Asia, especially when compared with Singapore and Malaysia. To strengthen the nation’s scholarly reputation, the Indonesian government has created a new agency that requires foreign researchers to have an Indonesian counterpart and work through a domestic institution. 

Rinaldo has found an invaluable collaborator in Fina Itriyati, Ph.D., a sociologist at Gadjah Mada University in the city of Yogyakarta. 

As a Muslim who can speak colloquial Javanese with interviewees, Itriyati was first to notice that the housewives’ pandemic sales activities on WhatsApp or Instagram deserved a closer look. Indeed, the informal sector accounted for more than 60% of Indonesian employment during the pandemic. And within that sector, 64% of the workers are female. Itriyati notes that, in addition to picking up the economic mantle through what was an extremely strict nationwide lockdown, wives often became the family glue as well. 

“I saw that men were quite emotionally fragile when they lost their jobs,” says Itriyati. “Women had to make the family emotionally stable, to take care of their kids and the husband.”

FIRST EXPERIENCE ABROAD

Rinaldo says that today’s Indonesia is a different place than the Indonesia of her first Fulbright in 2003. It is a majority-Muslim country with an emerging economy and democratic government, and citizens freely hold conservative or liberal views of their religion. Only one province, Aceh, enforces Shariah, the Islamic canonical law. Rinaldo notes that many Indonesians remain critical of U.S. foreign policy, but Indonesian anger at the U.S. has greatly dissipated. 

The change has meant that Rinaldo and her husband, Robert, felt comfortable enough to bring their 8-year-old son, Nathaniel, along for the full year. The boy’s first experience abroad, she says, has opened his eyes to the larger world. “We’ve spoken to our son about social justice issues and the ills of the world, but it’s one thing to know it intellectually, and it’s another thing to see it.” 

Recently Rinaldo asked Nathaniel to reflect on a Sumatran jungle trip that made the whole family sick. “Nate’s reply was, ‘That was so hard, but it was worth it to see the orangutans in the wild.’” 

Rinaldo’s decades of research on women in social movements have shown her that women have collective power and are catalysts of social change. There is “no ceiling” on their potential around the globe, provided societies don’t hold them back. 

“There have been a lot of advances,” she says. “But there’s a lot of pushback as well. We’re seeing it in the U.S. right now. Whenever women gain more rights, it challenges the status quo. 

“But if we want progress, we have to be willing to push for it.”