New Ways of Teaching Adat (Customary) Law at Indonesian Law Schools

While customary law typically is not the sole legal system regulating people\u27s daily lives, it still plays a big role in shaping the behavior of countless individuals worldwide. For this reason, law schools in many countries teach customary law courses, but these courses often present customary law as a sterile set of principles and norms detached from studying social reality. This approach associates customary law with traditional communities whose members live in relative isolation from the world, ignoring the fact that customary law operates in a legally pluralistic universe, interacting with religious and state law systems, and that it adapts to new economic and social conditions. This way of teaching customary law is common in Indonesia. The present article discusses the origins of the current situation and the need for innovations in customary law courses in Indonesia. We analyze the current shortcomings and challenges in the existing adat (customary) law courses and propose socio-legal approach to improve their relevance. This new approach aims to equip students with knowledge that has more practical relevance and enhances the course’s doctrinal features. In so doing, we pay tribute to Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s indefatigable efforts to better understand and recognize the importance of adat in the context of legal pluralism in Indonesia

Pilkada in East Sumba: An Old Rivalry in a New Democratic Setting

Page range: 81-107As part of Indonesia’s decentralization process, direct elections of regional heads, gubernur and bupati, have been introduced. These elections are referred to by the abbreviation Pilkada. With enhanced regional autonomy and the increased budget, the position of bupati has become very attractive. Those aspiring to become bupati must now compete to win the votes of the electorate. This article investigates a campaign in East Sumba and the candidates’ strategies under these new conditions. It seeks to discover whether the entrenched political-administrative elites generally succeed in capturing this latest institution of democracy, too, or if a direct election opens up opportunities for new candidates. This essay thus contributes to the debate on the development of democracy in Indonesia by examining the case of pilkada in East Sumba

Tribal Battle in a Remote Island: Crisis and Violence in Sumba (Eastern Indonesia)

Page range: 141-15

Ekonomi - UMA ( Penerapan dalam dinamika ekonomi berbasis kekerabatan )

xvi.; 386 hal.; ill.; 19 c

Trading in Discursive Commodities: Biofuel Brokers’ Roles in Perpetuating the Jatropha Hype in Indonesia

Hypes about wonder crops raise critical questions about the actors and mechanisms that link optimistic narratives about the crops’ potentials to actual production in the field. Jatropha curcas has been such a wonder crop, with a wide discrepancy between plans and reality. While many studies focus on agronomic or technological explanations of discrepancy and how to decrease it, much less is known about the influence of specific actors on creating a gap between high expectations and actual production in the field. This paper highlights the role of commercial brokers, who link potential investors and their capital to land and labor in the production areas. How have such commercial brokers contributed to perpetuating the optimism regarding the potentials of Jatropha plantations? The article presents the results of ethnographic research in a case study of commercial biofuel brokers at work in Sumba, one of the marginal areas in Indonesia targeted by policy makers for Jatropha cultivation. The study indicates that these actors have assembled their own short-term projects, translated narratives about future potential activities into the objects of trade in the present and produced optimistic figures about their projects to attract investors. In the conclusion, the paper warns against the unintended effects of green biofuel policies and discourses, when the latter get translated into a business opportunity for short-term private benefits instead of for the social and environmental goals for which the policies were originally intended

Ekonomi-Uma : penerapan adat dalam dinamika ekonomi bebasis kekerabatan/ Vel

xxx, 386 hal.: ill.; 25 cm