Dwight Y. King: Entering a new chapter of the odyssey

DWIGHT Y. KING: (Courtesy of Sinta Febrina)

With his calm, low-key demeanor, it is hard to believe Dwight Y. King, the current director of the Northern Illinois University (NIU) Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), was once being a rabble-rouser who took to the streets and spoke against ill-conceived government policies.

But, during some tumultuous years of modern history, while attending the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, King joined the anti-Vietnam War movement and spoke against the war.

Speaking for the anti-war movement would be his first contribution to a region and country that at the outset was alien to the Kansas native.

The anti-war movement soon opened the way for his long line of work on Indonesia -- contributions which have included breaking new ground for socio-political study on Indonesia, teaching the country's new generation of political scientists, and helping to lay the foundations for democracy and electoral politics.

In the early 70s, under the auspices of the Central Statistics Bureau (BPS), King devised the socio-economic indicators for a nationwide census, as part of an effort to measure how far the country had progressed under the New Order government.

At the invitation from then head of the BPS social division, Haryono Suyono -- a friend from the University of Chicago, King worked as a consultant between 1974 and 1975, assembling social indicators on areas including the labor force structure, educational levels, urbanization, industrialization and family planning participation. At the time, applying such quantitative indicators was a novelty.

"Statistics were not that popular, and above all there was no continuity in data collection of social indicators over time and place," King told The Jakarta Post at his two-story rustic office in DeKalb, a college town 65 kilometers west of Chicago, Illinois.

King was also the first to study, and make sense of, the New Order regime under a different, if not novel perspective.

He was the first American scholar to study the New Order as a "corporatist" structure, by arguing that in spite of the domination of the militaristic state, participatory activities from the trade association to the trade unions were allowed to thrive with relative ease.

King's dissertation on Indonesia, "Social Mobilization, Societal Life, Interest Representation and Political Cleavage in Indonesia," supervised by Latin American Studies giant Philippe Schmitter, was an examination on state corporatism in Indonesia.

And this was long before Indonesian scholars like Mochtar Mas'oed, Daniel Dhakidae or Farchan Bulkin worked on their studies of the New Order political economic structure in the late 80s.

Later, as professor at NIU, King tutored and supervised a revolving door of young Indonesian students who studied at NIU because of the university's excellent scholarships on Southeast Asia. Some of these students went on to become influential figures on Indonesian politics.

Three of his students -- M. Ryaas Rasyid, Ramlan Surbakti and Andi Alfian Mallarangeng -- were appointed by then president B.J. Habibie to sit in the Team of Seven, a panel of experts assembled to propose changes in laws and regulations governing the country's electoral systems drawn up by the New Order regime.

And after protracted horse-trading at the House of Representatives, some of the team's proposals were accepted to become the legal foundations for the 1999 general elections -- the first free and fair elections in the country after more than fifty years. King, however, refused to take much credit for his students' contribution.

"I am glad that their exposure to literature on comparative politics had probably changed their way of thinking," he said.

And even when he was finally resigned to be proud of his students' achievement, it was strictly for academic reasons.

"I am glad that they applied my values in real life experience, and by values I mean the general interests of an expert on comparative politics working on the third world, in how regimes change and become more democratic."

King's latest book, Half-Hearted Reform: Electoral Institutions and the Struggle for Democracy in Indonesia, published in 2003, benefits partly from insights and insider information from his students who were involved in the deliberation of the 1999 electoral laws.

Recently, in 2004, King served as an election monitor and senior political advisor for the Carter Center election-monitoring mission -- a job which required him to brief former U.S. president Jimmy Carter about Indonesian elections and politics. He did the same job for the center when it carried out its election-monitoring mission in the 2001 founding elections of Indonesia's former colony, East Timor.

King first arrived in Indonesia in October 1972, to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation. With Haryono lending a hand, King and his wife Kathy settled in the Tanah Tinggi area in Senen, Central Jakarta, a neighborhood close to the BPS office where he was working as a consultant.

"We were thrown right into an Indonesian community. There were no foreigners at all in Tanah Tinggi. My wife had not learned Bahasa before, so she picked up Indonesian just by going to the pasar (market) .... We had an interesting year and a half in Tanah Tinggi," King recalled.

And this first-hand experience in Java probably cured any disappointment he had for failing to study under Clifford Geertz, the renowned anthropologist who had written extensively on Java.

Geertz' books like The Religions of Java, Peddlers and Princes, Agricultural Involution and Kinship in Bali have become canons in Indonesian studies. Geertz was one of many reasons, if not the chief reason, King went to Chicago University soon after he completed his masters degree at Johns Hopkins University.

Being at Chicago also enabled him to be close to NIU, where he took up reading Dutch classes at the CSEAS, in preparation for his dissertation fieldwork.

This Dutch language stint also made it easier for King to get a teaching job at NIU. When a faculty member of the Center, an expert on Indonesia and Malaysia, passed away in 1978, King was the first to be invited to replace him -- a job that would last more than 30 years.

After serving the CSEAS for more than two decades, King was appointed as the center's director in 2005. And after coordinating programs involving more than 1,500 students a year, concentrating on Southeast Asian languages, literature, anthropology, geography, history, religion, music, art history and government, King is expected to leave his post next July.

After working close to four decades on Indonesia, King remains critical and cautious of the country's progression in its transition towards democracy.

"The changes in Indonesia have been incremental .... We still have the New Order, or most of it. Anyway, the corrosive parts are still reigning in. We have a new administration but the New Order keeps coming back in various ways."