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13.2. Inequality, inclusion and the politics of memory in Ambon, Indonesia

Timo Kaartinen (University of Helsinki)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways in which inequality and inclusion are reflected in language and cultural expressions. When people organize their culture as a pattern of concepts, names, narrative texts, or speaking formulae they are simultaneously targeting messages at specific kinds of others. Analyzing language ideologies and cultural texts from this communicative point of view reveals how people construct inequality and inclusion as part of ethnic history and lived experience. Drawing from my fieldwork in the City of Ambon I argue that the continuing interest in local languages and cultures arises from the wish to give voice to the positions of different ethnic and class-based groups within contemporary society. Of particular interest is the politics of memory that aims at turning the tables on marginality: both that defined by local social boundaries and class structures and that defined by the spatio-temporal hierarchies of the nation-state.

Keywords: inequality, language ideologies, marginality, politics of memory, voice