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Creating citizens through play: the role of

leisure in Indonesian nation-building
a
Sarah Moser
a
Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, 300 Summit Street,
Hartford, CT, 06106-3100, USA E-mail:

Available online: 13 Jan 2010

To cite this article: Sarah Moser (2010): Creating citizens through play: the role of leisure in Indonesian
nation-building, Social & Cultural Geography, 11:1, 53-73

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 Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2010

Creating citizens through play: the role of leisure

in Indonesian nation-building

Sarah Moser
Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford,
CT 06106-3100, USA, sarah.moser@trincoll.edu

In this article, I explore connections between space, the body and the nation by analyzing
Downloaded by [190.249.94.3] at 07:53 18 April 2012

state-introduced leisure activities in a village in Indonesia. While leisure activities are

voluntary and are more enjoyable than more formal nation-building activities,
I investigate how they are politicized and intimately tied to the state’s nation-building
agenda. Focusing on national programs of volleyball, takro (an indigenous game played
with a rattan ball), and Gerak Jalan (marching competitions), I examine how the state’s
national ideology has been translated into recreational programs that attempt to
‘improve’ the bodies of citizens and to inculcate national ideology in the citizenry.
Through the creation of various recreational landscapes and programs, citizens are
encouraged to spend their free time in particular pursuits that serve national goals. Finally,
I discuss how the leisure activities introduced by the state are, despite hegemonic
intentions, unevenly practiced and examine how citizens resist, ignore and renegotiate the
intended meaning of the activities.

Key words: leisure, sports geography, nation-building, national identity, Riau Islands,
Indonesia.

Introduction to the ground over the net. Clusters of people sit

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
defined a period when the ‘problem’ of the body
and the ‘problem’ of nationalism came together
in complex and interesting ways. (Morris 2004: xv)
Today is Sunday and the sun is sinking below the
treeline. Crowds have gathered in the square next
to the mosque to watch young men and boys
playing takro, kicking a rattan ball over a net.
The spectators socialize and cheer when a player
kicks his foot over his head and slams the ball
on the edge of the stage next to the square
chatting and watching teenage boys and girls
rehearsing a Malay dance. The dancers are
accompanied by the energetic beat of the
gendang [Malay drum], played by student
drummers and their teacher. Down the street,
two teams of middle-aged women wearing shiny
football-style uniforms are playing a game of
volleyball. (Field notes, 16 July 2006)
Initially, these activities seem unrelated and
appear simply as ways in which residents of
Pulau Penyengat happen to enjoy their free

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/10/010053-21 q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360903414577
 54 Sarah Moser
time. However, upon further examination,
these activities share several common features.
The first is that they (in their present form)
were not initiated by villagers themselves as
part of an indigenous repertoire of pastimes.
All of these activities were introduced at
various times by the state to induce citizens to
spend their leisure time in particular ways that
link to nation-building. These activities are
intended to ‘improve’ the quality of the
average citizen for national purposes and are
maintained by various levels of the state
through funding and other means.
The second commonality across these
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activities is that a high percentage and diverse
range of citizens are encouraged to participate.
High participation is important as it is the act
of doing that makes the program a success and
fulfills the state’s goal of changing the conduct
of its citizens. To many citizens, leisure
activities1 help to make the ‘imagined com-
munity’ of the nation (Anderson 1991 [1983])
real, tangible and understandable in a way
that is offered through consent rather than
coercion.
The management of leisure activities has
been an important strategy of Indonesia’s post-
Independence nationalization process that has
largely been neglected in scholarly work.
A study of state-initiated leisure activities
will shed light on how the bodies of citizens
are employed by the state for nation-building
purposes and add another dimension to the
nation-building process in Indonesia as well as
probe the extent to which the Indonesian state
has carried out programs at the village level.
Embodied performances in leisure activities
also frequently play a crucial role in popularly
representing and conveying national identity
to a large and diverse group of citizens.
Furthermore, the accessibility of leisure activi-
ties allows a wide range of people to enjoyably
experience the ‘soft side’ of the state either as
audience or performer.
This paper broadly seeks to investigate how
the Indonesian state has extended its agenda of
nationalization to the leisure time of its
populace. Focusing on the context of Pulau
Penyengat,2 an island of 2,000 people in
Indonesia’s recently-formed Riau Islands
Province,3 I examine the everyday leisure
activities and infrastructure maintained by
various levels of the state (national, provincial,
district, village, hamlet) which encourage
citizens to use their free time in ‘productive’
and ‘appropriate’ ways that support national
goals. In the sections that follow, I look
specifically at sport4 as a key leisure activity
which brings the body at play and the nation
together. Sport is also an area in which residents
of Pulau Penyengat are encouraged to actively
perform a version of national identity through
the use of state-funded and maintained
recreational infrastructure.
This paper adopts the perspective that the
concept of ‘nation’ is a social construction, the
‘product of specific historical and geographical
forces, rather than biologically given ideas
whose meaning is dictated by nature’
(Jackson and Penrose 1993: 1). The inherent
constructedness of nations means that they
require constant maintenance (Parker 2003)
through the deployment of particular strat-
egies aimed at regulating, controlling and
governing subjects (Philpott 2000). Further-
more, as Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983])
points out, it is material practices that make it
possible to imagine a community of individ-
uals.5 As this paper argues, leisure activities
are material practices introduced by the state
as a nation-building strategy intended to
change the bodies and minds of individuals
and to bind the populace through creating a
national consciousness.

This paper begins an overview of the
literature by examining how leisure has been
used to improve the individual citizen and as a
strategy for nation-building. I then examine
how sports are linked with nationalism and
how scholars of Indonesia have approached
leisure and how particular leisure activities
were linked to the rise of nationalism. Next,
I turn to three leisure activities introduced by
the state on Pulau Penyengat, volleyball, takro
(an indigenous volleyball-like game played
with a rattan ball), and Gerak Jalan (marching
competitions), and analyze how the popu-
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lation has responded to these programs. While
sports programs are just as much a part of
official notions of national identity as the more
overtly nationalistic activities performed in
schools and government offices,6 they are
understood by villagers as being more volun-
tary and enjoyable than those in the realms of
work and education and are therefore chal-
lenged in rather different ways. Finally,
I discuss some of the silences of state leisure
programs and why some activities have not
received support from the state.
By focusing my analysis on leisure activities
introduced by the state rather than on
indigenous or popular leisure activities, I do
not wish to suggest that it is only through
state-initiated activities that national identity
is understood and performed. Several scholars
of Indonesia have pointed out various leisure
activities that have emerged from popular
culture to take on national meaning. For
example, Jeremy Wallach (2008) has exam-
ined dangdut music as a popular pastime that
has become a grassroots symbol of national
identity. In this paper, however, I focus only on
activities that reach villagers in Pulau Penyen-
gat through state programs and are recognized
as ‘national’ by the villagers themselves.
Creating citizens through play 55
Leisure and population improvement
After many calls over the past two decades to
direct scholarly attention to leisure (Bale 1993,
1996; Bale and Cronin 2003; Bale and
Vertinsky 2004; Brownell 1995; Brownfoot
2000; Hargreaves 1986; Rojek 1999, 2005),
there is now a burgeoning literature that
examines a range of leisure activities from
a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
In A History of Leisure, Peter Borsay (2006:
1 –2) provides a useful delineation of the
various categories of experience through
which we live our lives as work, education,
religion, civil life (which includes politics and
voluntary work), and ordinary life. He then
defines leisure as ‘what is left once these
categories have been removed’. Up until the
1960s and 1970s, leisure studies tended to
take a ‘sunny view of leisure as a melange
of personally life-affirming, wholesome
relations that expand social harmony and
order’ (Rojek 2005: 12). In more recent
decades, leisure theorists have explored more
critical questions of domination, oppression
and manipulation in leisure forms and
practice. Scholars of leisure are now interested
in understanding ‘how we are variously
positioned in leisure forms and practices and
how power relations permeate our motivation
and experience of leisure’ (Rojek 2005: 12).
Much of the work in leisure studies has been
carried out by cultural studies scholars
(Grossberg 1997; Morley 1998; Shaw 1994),
historians (Bailey 1978; Borsay 2006;
Burke 1995; Huggins 2000), sociologists
(Jarvie and Maguire 1994; Rojek 1999,
2005) and anthropologists (Dyck 2000;
Giamatti 1989; Springwood 2000), yet this
body of scholarship is inherently geographical
in that it prioritizes the place and context
of these activities and offers an embodied way
 56 Sarah Moser
of understanding identity and social inter-
actions. Recent work in cultural geography
speaks to the leisure studies literature,
although it does not explicitly make this
connection. In David Matless’s Landscape and
Englishness (1998), for example, he writes in
detail about the emergence of leisure activities
such as hiking and dancing, how they are
linked to place and identity and how the state
attempted to shape its citizenry through
creating or designating particular places in
which the populace was ideally intended to
engage in appropriate leisure activities.
The geographical literature on sports has
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contributed an understanding of how sport is
linked to place, location and landscape. In his
extensive writing on sports geography, John
Bale and others (Bale 1989, 1993, 1996;
Bale and Cronin 2003; Bale and Moen 1995;
Bale and Sang 1996; Bale and Vertinsky 2004)
consider variations in sports across regional
and national borders and ways in which sports
have influenced the cultural landscape. How-
ever, the general omission of sports and leisure
from the geographical literature is ‘peculiar
and paradoxical because geography, like
sports, involves the analysis of space and
place’ (Bale 1993: 5). While the imbalance has
begun to be somewhat addressed in recent
decades, it has frequently been noted that
there is a strong western bias in the literature
with ‘information on the other continents . . .
at best fragmentary, often collected in wide-
ranging surveys’ (Brown 2006; Van Botten-
burg 2001: 13). Furthermore, the geographical
literature on sport generally lacks a depth of
critical analysis in its tendency to take a ‘Carl
Sauer’ approach by focusing on categorizing
sports and their location patterns. Sports
geography has generally focused on the
historical and geographical roots of modern
sport, the growth and globalization of sports,
and the physical location of sports (Bale 1978,
1982, 1986, 1989, 1993, 2003; Bale and
Moen 1995; Bale and Sang 1996; Bale and
Vertinsky 2004; Brailsford 1987). Literature
in recent years has begun to address the more
cultural aspects of sport, treating it as an
aspect of cultural life akin to film, music,
cinema, and so on (Bale and Cronin 2003).
Improving the individual through play
Leisure activities have long been seen as an
opportunity to ‘improve’ the quality of
citizens’ bodies and conduct for national
purposes, including improving morals, culti-
vating discipline, redirecting aggression, and
building physical strength. Scholars from a
range of backgrounds have examined bodily
improvement in various empirical contexts,
most frequently Europe (Gori 2004; Kershaw
1998; Krüger 1987; Mangan 1999, 2000), the
USSR (Makoveeva 2002), China (Morris
2004), and colonial Asia (Brownell 1995;
Brownfoot 2000; MacDonald 1999; Mills and
Sen 2004). In many of these contexts, scholars
have examined how bodily improvement was
believed to most effectively occur through
fitness and sport. The Soviet philosophy
viewed ‘the development of sports as a
way of overcoming human imperfection’
(Makoveeva 2002: 9). In the context of
Victorian England, Bailey (1978) writes that
‘improved’ bodies toughened people up against
the debilities of city life, maintained a readiness
for armed service, and taught self-discipline in
teamwork. Nazi Germany is an illustrative
example of the belief that the individual’s body
and the state were closely linked and advocated
rigorous physical training in schools:
the folkish state must not adjust its entire
educational work primarily to the inoculation of
mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely

healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is
only secondary. And here again, first place must be
taken by the development of character, especially
the promotion of willpower and determination,
combined with the training of joy in responsibility,
and only in last place comes scientific schooling.
(Hitler 1961 [1925]: 408)
Furthermore, there was the underlying notion
in Nazi philosophy that physical education
and sport were not performed by the
individual simply for fun, relaxation or
prestige, but rather as a national duty in the
service of the nation-state (Krüger 1987: 8).
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As body improvement is the target of many
state-initiated leisure activities, the body has
also been a particular focus in the area of
postcolonial discourse and analysis. In The
Rhetoric of Empire David Spurr (1993: 22)
emphasizes how ‘the body of the primitive’
was an important way by which the colonized
were represented and argues that ‘the body,
rather than speech, law or history, is the
essential defining characteristic of primitive
people’. Others point out that colonial travel
writers were keenly aware of the bodies of the
colonized and that ‘physique was a particu-
larly important theme in the European
construction of the athleticism of various
groups of people in the colonized world’
(Bale and Cronin 2003: 2).
Not only can bodies be improved through
play, but conduct can also be shaped. In her
study based on an inner-city recreation centre
in Copenhagen, Sally Anderson (2003) exa-
mines how inner-city children receive instruc-
tion about how to effectively strike the
shuttlecock, but also in how to comport
themselves in an appropriate manner accord-
ing to current Danish values and ideals. In the
context of the Soviet Union, Edelman observes
that ‘sports events in the USSR had been
organized with the official goal of instilling
Creating citizens through play 57
discipline, order, and culture in the masses.
Well-trained and obedient athletes were
supposed to serve as examples for those who
watched’ (1993: 3). According to the Victorian
view, there was a link between morality and
physical virtues. Sports were seen as a means
of ‘character formation, of training captains of
industry and empire in such character traits as
loyalty, self-discipline, competitiveness and
leadership ensconced in an unwritten code of
sporting ethics’ (Riordan 1991: 10). During
Victorian times, English boarding schools such
as Harrow and Eton ‘considered playing a
rough game with strict rules a way to teach
discipline and endurance’ (Colombijn 2000:
174). Altering the body through fitness
became a key strategy by both state and
empire for transforming the ‘lazy’, ‘undisci-
plined’ subjects with local loyalties into strong,
disciplined citizens with a single, common
purpose (Alatas 1977).
Nation-building through sports
Leisure activities have long been considered to
be more than pleasure-bringing pastimes by
ruling elites who recognized them as an
effective tool for binding people, redirecting
loyalties and nation-building. In Victorian
England physical recreation was endowed
with ‘a battery of serious purposes . . . thought
essential for the continued success of the
Anglo-Saxon civilisation’ (Tranter 1998: 2).
Alan Guttmann (1994: 5) quotes a headmaster
of Harrow School from 1881 to 1895 as
saying that ‘England has owed her sovereignty
to her sports.’ Leisure and recreation are seen
as important ways in which to reach the
‘masses’ in a way that engages them physically,
that allows them to participate or perform
their citizenship to the nation. As Tarling
(2001: 288) argues, ‘tied to the nationalist
 58 Sarah Moser
cause, and indeed to “development,” was a
sense of popular participation.’ Brownfoot
usefully highlights the multiple scales at which
sports operate through her study of the British
in Malaya. Sport was seen as a crucial tool
with which to bind the British living in
Malaya together in a way that was ultimately
‘advantageous to the individual, the
group, the wider community and the Empire’
(Brownfoot 2000: 131).
After gaining independence, many former
colonies saw the political potential in sports.
A successful national team encourages citizens,
who would otherwise have few opportunities
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for participation in national politics, to identify
with the nation (Colombijn 2000; Houlihan
1997). For example, Fidel Castro was well
aware of the political potential of sports when
he heralded Cuba’s Olympic success as ‘a
sporting, psychological, patriotic and revolu-
tionary victory’ (Fidel Castro, El Deporte 3,
1976: 1, cited in Riordan 1991: 7). As part of
the strategy to transform and modernize the
population, the leaders of Indonesia, like many
former colonies, turned to sports immediately
after Independence (Bale and Cronin 2003).
Proponents of sports studies argue that it
is through sports that bodies are frequently
linked to power structures (Brownell 1995;
Hargreaves and Vertinsky 2007; Morris
2004; Sands 1999). This is particularly the
case in postcolonial countries, where sport is
a legacy of colonialism (Brown 2008). Many
countries, including Indonesia, owe many of
their present-day sporting traditions to
colonists who brought modern sports to
the colonies, often initially as a form of
social control both for European and
indigenous populations. As Bale and Cronin
(2003: 5) point out, sport was ‘part of the
“civilizing” mission of imperialism, and thus
an essential part of the colonial experiment.’
Sport is a key part of Indonesian national
culture yet has garnered very little attention to
date from social scientists. Much of the
literature on Indonesian nationalism, with
some exceptions (Barker 2008; Nordholt
1997; Parker 1992a, 1992b, 2002, 2003;
Sekimoto 1997; Shiaishi 1986; Simatupang
1996), tends to focus on Jakarta and on more
ideological issues or tends towards ‘intro-
verted, sometimes precious cultural studies’
that neglect the quotidian and ignore the
Indonesian state and how it affects citizens’
everyday lives (Parker 2003: 12). Most
histories of Indonesia hardly mention sports
activities, despite the fact that this is an area
rife with class tensions and racial assumptions,
and actively involves the bodies of the
citizenry in their everyday lives. Considering
the importance of sport in Indonesian society
in terms of the number of participants in all
levels of sports, the vast numbers of spectators,
the state commitment, and the amounts of
money involved, the paucity of studies which
examine sport is striking.
There have only been four recent accounts
published in English about sport in Indonesia.7
The first is Freek Colombijn’s (2000) paper on
‘The Politics of Indonesian Football’, the only
paper to date that explores the development of
Indonesian football over the past century.
In examining football, Colombijn observes a
high degree of continuity across the colonial
period, the Old Order, and the New Order in
how all sides have politicized football by using
it as an instrument for political goals. Colom-
bijn points out that the study of sports is crucial
to understanding nationalism in Indonesia and
that further research is needed in this area.
The second is Iain Adams’s (2003) descriptive
essay in the edited collection Sport in Asian
Society: Past and Present called ‘Pancasila:
Sport and the Building of Indonesia – Ambi-
tions and Obstacles’ in which he provides

a broad overview of the development of sport in
Indonesia. His decision to examine sport
through the lens of the state philosophy of
Pancasila8 is ultimately unsuccessful as the two
are not convincingly connected in any mean-
ingful way. While Adams correctly argues that
sport has been an integral aspect of Indonesian
nation-building, structuring his argument
through Pancasila proves too limiting and
does not help us to better understand the
interplay between politics, nation-building and
Indonesian sport. The third is Colin Brown’s
(2006) paper ‘Playing the Game: Ethnicity and
Politics in Indonesian Badminton’ in which he
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provides a descriptive, historical account of the
development of Indonesian badminton and
how racial politics with Chinese-Indonesians
have been played out in the context of
badminton. Finally, Colin Brown’s (2008)
article ‘Sport, Modernity and Nation Building:
The Indonesian National Games of 1951 and
1953’ investigates the role that sport played in
consolidating national identity in the years
immediately following Independence. Through
examining the first two Indonesian National
Games after Independence, Brown provides
insight into how sport ‘provided a forum within
which the imagined community of the Indone-
sian nation could be realized, at least in part’
(Brown 2008: 447). These scholars argue that
much more attention still needs to be paid to
sport in Indonesia as the nation’s social history
can effectively be told through the development
of its sport programs.
Post-Independence leisure: creating
‘completely new Indonesians’
We want to create a completely new Indonesian
nation, completely new Indonesian people,
completely new Indonesians. Even physically they
are completely new. Yes, physically new. I remember
Creating citizens through play 59
having said in one of my speeches in Solo in 1956:
How wonderful it would be if we could create a
completely new Indonesian person! . . . Our
revolution . . . is not only a national revolution,
but . . . is even a revolution to create new human
beings. (Address by President Sukarno to the
Indonesian Women’s Congress, 1961)
Immediately after Independence was pro-
claimed in 1945, the new national
leadership felt it was necessary for Indonesia
to rapidly change and modernize in order to
reach national goals. The post-Independence
Republican leaders were deeply invested in the
moral priorities of the Dutch and Japanese and
they inherited many of the racist colonial
assumptions that Indonesian people’s sup-
posed laziness, lack of discipline and other
character deficiencies made the population
itself an obstacle to national development and
nation-building (Alatas 1977). Leaders during
the ‘Old Order’ (1945– 1967)9 concentrated
on broadly addressing these deficiencies
through various institutions including social
and welfare organizations, government work-
places, and schools. They also introduced
rationalized sports into the lives of the
populace in an effort to carry out the agenda
of modernization in citizens’ leisure time.
The value of sports propaganda in support-
ing nation-building and in conferring legiti-
macy in the eyes of the international
community was quickly realized in Indonesia.
The ruling elite saw sport as possessing a
unifying power that could focus the popu-
lation’s loyalty towards Jakarta. Sports were
also something nearly anyone could take part
in and President Sukarno, influenced by Soviet
notions of gender equality (Jancar-Webster
1978; Pascall and Manning 2000), encouraged
all citizens equally to participate (Presidential
address, 1953, #0143). Furthermore, the fact
that the most advanced and powerful states
 60 Sarah Moser
also had the most advanced sporting culture
was not lost on early nationalists. In 1947,
while the Dutch were attempting to reclaim
Indonesia as a colonial possession after World
War II, the Sukarno government quickly
founded the Olympic Committee and the
Persatuan Olahraga Republik Indonesia
(PORI), the ‘Federation of Sports in the
Republic of Indonesia’ inaugurated by
Sukarno himself and intended as the ‘sole
vehicle for national sporting activities’
(Brown 2006: 78). Athletes were soon sent
abroad to participate in international sporting
events and Indonesian officials were sent along
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with the athletes in order to learn about
staging them.
Sukarno managed to secure the 1962 Fourth
Asian Games for Indonesia, to be hosted in
Jakarta. He embarked on a grandiose building
programme, ordering the construction of a
national sporting complex which included
a new football and athletic stadium with a
capacity of 100,000 spectators, smaller sta-
diums for other sports, the first-class Hotel
Indonesia, and the Welcome Monument
(Leclerc 1993). The national sporting complex
became the icon of the Old Order and smaller
satellite stadiums were built in provincial
capitals across the country to engage the wider
populace in sports. At this time, national
sports organizations were set up and sports
infrastructure was created with the idea that
young athletes would have the chance to
develop their skills and the most talented of
each province would ultimately form the
national team.
Throughout his leadership, Sukarno looked
to the communist world for guidance.
The Soviet Union and Mao’s China placed
emphasis on sport as a way to fulfill national
goals. Mao’s slogan of ‘New Physical Culture’
was echoed in Sukarno’s policies that empha-
sized a break with tradition and implied
modernity and development. He followed the
communist ‘sports for all’ philosophy in part
to quickly ‘improve’ the citizenry but also to
set up a system by which widespread sports
programs could produce and spot gifted
athletes that could represent Indonesia inter-
nationally (Azis and Laksmi 2006). This
involved a massive effort to introduce the
country to European sports they had never
seen before and spark a sense of national
pride.10 The effort also sought to involve the
citizenry in some form of exercise and
recreation. It was part of a plan-filled system:
every school, workplace, city, region, village,
Kelurahan [village district], and so on, was
expected to reach quotas of participants in
sports and were to incur penalties if they fell
short (Azis and Laksmi 2006).
The following sections examine three
different leisure activities practiced on Pulau
Penyengat that were introduced by the state at
various times. Drawing on observations made
during field research,11 I discuss how each of
the three leisure activities links citizens’ bodies
to the nation and how each activity has served
to nationalize the village to varying degrees.
Volleyball and other ‘modern’ national
sports
The massive push towards developing ‘mod-
ern’ sports facilities in Jakarta after Indepen-
dence was felt in towns across the country.
Spatially, the sporting culture during the Old
Order took the form of facilities concentrated
in provincial capitals that were scaled-down
versions of the national sports complex in
Jakarta (Azis and Laksmi 2006). Over the
decades since Independence, and particularly
in the New Order under Suharto, a large
amount of more humble sports infrastructure
was constructed in villages across Indonesia

with federal funding and the organization of
provincial and village-district (Kelurahan)
level state representatives. On Pulau Penyen-
gat, various sports facilities were built around
the village during the New Order, including
badminton courts (Figure 1), volleyball courts,
and a sepak bola [football] field (Figure 2).
As has been noted by a number of scholars,
the Suharto regime, also known as the ‘New
Order’, has been ‘fond of promoting uniform-
ity among its people and across the country’s
landscape’ (Sekimoto 1997: 307). This was
maintained by a fine-grained system of govern-
ment bureaucracy which employed a massive
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number of people on many levels, down to
unpaid positions at the village and neighbor-
hood level.12 This bureaucratic structure and
increased number of state workers enabled
state plans to be carried out with a higher
degree of uniformity and consistency than was
possible during the Old Order. While the more
grand national sports facilities were built in the
Old Order (Azis and Laksmi 2006; Rangkuti
and Nicholas LMS 2006), more fine-grained
Figure 1 Neighborhood badminton court with a measured court, referee chair and lighting.
Creating citizens through play 61
organization and activity at the village level
occurred in the New Order (Lutan 2005).
A direct result of this expansion of the
bureaucracy was seen in a larger proportion
of the population on Pulau Penyengat engaged
in ‘modern’ national sports.
Many villagers point out the potential for
monetary gain and social prestige in state
sports programs. One of the current members
of the national women’s volleyball team is from
Pulau Penyengat. She has successfully risen
through the national system that scouts out
talented athletes from villages across the
country, encourages them to compete at the
provincial level and, if they are deemed talented
enough, trains them at the national sports
complex in Jakarta. Since volleyball has yielded
tangible results in Pulau Penyengat, it is treated
as a possible (if remote) career choice and some
parents encourage their children to join. While
this has made the connection between volley-
ball and economics explicit in Pulau Penyengat,
it also reinforces and naturalizes the various
levels of state bureaucracy while generating
 62 Sarah Moser
Figure 2 Football field: overgrown and
disused.
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a national consciousness and cementing the
notion of the nation as the most elite and
lucrative level to which one should aspire.
Participation in the state’s national sports
programs on Pulau Penyengat has been
uneven. Volleyball is the long-time favorite
sport to play on Pulau Penyengat. Villagers of
all ages have enthusiastically put together
volleyball teams made up of friends and family
members and there are tournaments organized
by the state between various Kelurahan
[village districts] in Riau Islands Province.
Football, on the other hand, has not been
taken up and is only played on Independence
Day in an event organized by the state. While
football is easily the most popular sport in
Indonesia (see Colombijn 2000), Pulau
Penyengat residents offer various rationaliz-
ations as to why it has not become popular on
the island. Similarly, badminton is only
sporadically played in Pulau Penyengat, with
the high cost of equipment cited as the
reason.13 This variation in participation
demonstrates a high degree of agency and a
freedom to choose what to participate in.
While the state may build facilities and design
programs for national activities, it is no
guarantee that the people will engage in them
as the state intends. Further unevenness stems
from slippages between the various levels of
state involved in introducing and maintaining
leisure activities. Even if the state at the
national level wishes for an increase in the
number of badminton players, state officials at
the provincial and Kelurahan levels may
thwart these efforts. For example, while
money is often available for various sport
and leisure programs, lower-level representa-
tives of the state may not be motivated to fill
out the necessary applications to obtain the
funding or may wish to avoid the extra work if
funding is received.
Despite the broad expansion of participants
in leisure activities introduced by the state over
the decades, there are certain unstated restric-
tions for participation. While volleyball is
ostensibly accessible to all in the communist
‘sport for all’ philosophy, matches and
tournaments are scheduled around the stan-
dard office schedule rather than, say, fishing
patterns or other seasonal occupations as
leisure activities traditionally would have
been. During the Old Order, many residents
on Pulau Penyengat were unemployed or
worked as fishermen, coolies (in the nearby
capital of Tanjung Pinang), boat builders, or
other independent ventures. As the economy
grew and as Indonesia became more rational-
ized, a growing proportion of the population
had jobs that followed an office work day
schedule. Leisure activities are now planned
around the modern work schedule, making
some villagers uncomfortable about partici-
pating. One man in his early fifties initially
claimed he was too old to join state leisure
activities. Over the course of our conversation,
however, other issues such as class and time
emerged as issues that prevented him from
participating.

They all play volleyball in the evening . . .
sometimes I am unloading a ship in the evening,
sometimes catching prawns, depending on the tide.
If you are a member of a team, you need to be
there . . . there are a lot of matches and you have to
practice too . . . They also have to buy uniforms and
sports gear . . . No! The government doesn’t pay for
them—the players pay themselves. Sometimes
I watch with my grandchildren . . . but I don’t
play. (Pak Adit, 28 October 2007)
As leisure activities have increasingly been
rationalized, those not working in an office, in
a school or in a commercial business are being
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increasingly excluded from state-organized
leisure activities. Those with ‘modern’ occu-
pations with rationalized work/leisure
rhythms are better able to participate. Thus,
performing national identity becomes easier
and more natural the more closely one is
implicated in the national system. In this way,
state-introduced leisure activities favor the
participation of those who work during
regular office hours, primarily students and
office workers.
Takro
Takro, a volleyball-like game played with a
rattan ball using only the feet, has been played
traditionally throughout Southeast Asia.
The game was re-introduced to Pulau Penyen-
gat in the 2000s as a component of the school
curriculum. As part of a broader post-Suharto
national effort to decentralize power away
from Jakarta in order to allow greater
political, economic and cultural autonomy
for each province, Riau Islands Province is
promoting itself as a hearth of Malay culture
through funding the development of numerous
‘indigenous’ infrastructure projects and
activities, including takro. In this section
Creating citizens through play 63
I examine the recent (re)introduction of an
official state-initiated version of takro to Pulau
Penyengat.
Takro has generated great interest since its
recent (re)introduction as a rationalized sport
on Pulau Penyengat. It has sparked interest in
younger boys, attracts many spectators, and
the games are a source of excitement and pride
for many villagers, as is the professional-
quality court (Figure 3). The most central,
highly-visible and symbolic space on the island
has been allocated to takro, the main square
next to the mosque and the performance stage,
sending a clear message to islanders that takro
is a state priority.
The takro recently introduced by the state is
highly rationalized and bears little resem-
blance to how takro was historically played.
While takro was once played by shirtless boys
on dirt ‘courts’ in back gardens, there are now
formal spaces designated exclusively for takro
and all teams wear uniforms. Based on
comments of islanders, it is because of this
rationalization that young men are once again
attracted to takro. Where takro was once seen
as something kampungan [boorish, low class],
the flashy uniforms that recall football jerseys,
the official court, the elevated referee’s chair,
and the stadium lighting all look to be a part of
the modern world they imagine and wish to
join. At the same time, participants embody
the state’s recent search for a national identity
that is derived not from ‘foreign’ sources, but
from ‘traditional’ local culture.
While it is acceptable for women of all
ages to don uniforms and play volleyball or
participate in competition marching, takro is
seen as masculine. In the case of takro, the
(re)introduction of a traditional activity
serves to gender villagers according to
traditional norms (real or imagined) in a
way that volleyball does not. The intention-
ally gendered aspect of takro reveals the
 64 Sarah Moser
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Figure 3 Takro practice in the square next to the mosque.
state’s intention to have it perceived as
authentic by villagers through preserving it
as a traditionally male domain. In contrast to
observations made by scholars who have
pointed out that aspects of the nation such as
history, culture and nostalgia are often
positioned as ‘feminine’ while more progress-
ive aspects of the nation such as technology
and modernity are often positioned as
‘masculine’ (McClintock 1993; Radcliffe
1996; Sunindyo 1998), takro is positioned
by the state as an expression of both
indigenous and national masculinity.
Not all residents are satisfied with the
reintroduction of takro; some residents take
issue with the unfamiliar and formal way in
which it has been reintroduced by the state.
While most are happy to see takro once again
being played by young people in the village,
some residents perceive the state as imposing
an inauthentic version of takro. Although the
uniforms, referees, professional courts and so
on are what attracts many participants, there
are those who feel protective towards takro
which they understand to be part of their
cultural heritage, unlike volleyball and other
international sports that are seen as foreign.
Some residents feel that national understand-
ings of local culture imposed on village
residents are infringing upon, and even
making a mockery of, what locals believe is
‘truly authentic’ culture. This reveals a tension
between national and regional culture, a
dynamic that is perhaps particularly keenly
felt in Pulau Penyengat as it perceives itself as a
heartland of Malay culture. However, criti-
cism amongst a small number of residents has
not dampened the enthusiasm for takro and its
popularity in the village continues to grow as
the state organizes more and more tourna-
ments at the local, provincial and national
levels. As a result, takro is increasingly
becoming a material practice of the ‘imagined
community’, serving to bring the nation more
sharply into view.

Gerak Jalan
In this section I examine Gerak Jalan, the
national marching competitions held in vil-
lages and towns across the country and
another way in which the state has encouraged
structured play in citizens’ leisure time.
Civilian marching was introduced by the
colonial Japanese during World War II who
sought to ready Indonesians for battle and
cultivate feelings of solidarity, discipline and
strength in the colonized. The boys in Figure 4
are marching in Seinendan, the Japanese
Youth Corps, where they were instructed in
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the Greater East Asian ideology and received
basic military training (Raben 1999). Japan
had a strong influence on Indonesia during its
occupation of the Dutch East Indies (now
Indonesia) during World War II and was
widely viewed by Indonesians as modern,
technologically advanced and a model of a
successful and powerful Asian nation
(Kahin 1952). After the war, many Japanese
nationalist symbols and activities were
Figure 4 Indonesian boys on a Japanese marching drill. Source: Raben (1999).
Creating citizens through play 65
adopted wholesale by the post-Independence
Indonesian leaders, who saw in them the
potential to mobilize and unite their own
population. One such activity is the civilian
marching, or Gerak Jalan, which has been
continued after Independence and into the
present for nation-building purposes.
Gerak Jalan is broadly inclusive and attracts
men and women equally and people of all
ages. It is a fascinating example of how the
participants determine the character of a state-
introduced leisure activity intended for
nation-building. In contrast to other formal
performances of national identity, such as the
national flag ceremony carried out weekly in
schools and in government offices across
Indonesia, Gerak Jalan is voluntary. If citizens
choose to participate, teams are able to select
their own uniforms and style of marching.
They are also able to organize themselves into
teams of the requisite seven, demonstrating
that the presence of the state is evident even in
details such as the size of the contingent.
Teams consist of a group of family members
 66 Sarah Moser
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Figure 5 Mass Gerak Jalan lessons.

Figure 6 Marching competition—at the starting line.


or friends who know each other through
work, school, or are neighbors. Usually a few
people who are enthusiastic about participat-
ing will canvas their friends, enlist willing
volunteers, and register the team at the village
district office (Kantor Kelurahan). While some
teams consist of a distinct group such as
housewives or rickshaw drivers or teachers,
most are friends who have a variety of
occupations. For example, the winning female
team consisted of an unemployed single
mother, several school teachers, a housewife
and mother of two and a high school student.
According to the competition rules, the teams
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are judged on three qualities, spirit, discipline,
and nationalism, but there is no official
guidance provided as to how these should be
interpreted.
With over thirty female teams and just
under thirty male teams participating, the total
number of marchers is over 400. With 2,000
residents in the village, 20 per cent of the entire
population of the island participated as
marchers in 2006. There was no coercion
involved in attracting participants: villagers
formed teams and signed up voluntarily.
I suggest that there are several reasons for
the popularity of the event. Cash prizes for the
top three teams in both the men’s and women’s
competition attracted participants. However,
the cash prizes were not nearly enough to
cover the cost of the uniforms/costumes worn
by many of the teams and, after being divided
by seven teammates, it was not a large sum.
The real draw for participants was the
opportunity to be seen by the community.
Working within the nationalistic framework
provided by the state, Gerak Jalan is a chance
for villagers to present themselves in a way
that their neighbors, friends and family do not
normally see them. While the format of the
competition appears to be a rigid nationalistic
exercise (e.g. marching in neat rows in groups
Creating citizens through play 67
Figure 7 Marching competition uniforms:
cool nationalists.
of seven while singing nationalistic songs),
participants renegotiate the intended mean-
ings. Working within the given constraints,
they creatively interpret the judging criteria in
a way that combines displays of national
identity with more personal expressions that
carry local meaning. For example, while
marching and singing nationalistic songs,
teen groups assemble marching uniforms that
are locally understood as cool or punk or sexy,
which are unanticipated identities performed
alongside national identity. While on one level,
it is clear to participants that Gerak Jalan is an
activity closely linked to the nation, citizens
reinterpret the purpose and meaning in their
local context, using national leisure activities
to show their fellow villagers a version of
themselves not normally seen in order to gain
prestige.
Silences of state leisure
Significantly, the state has chosen only a
narrow selection of recreational activities to
support and develop on a national scale. At this
point I turn to a discussion about some of the
 68 Sarah Moser
activities that the state has not chosen to
develop and why. Among the host of pursuits
the state could have chosen to encourage in
Pulau Penyengat, only volleyball and football,
and in more recent years, dance and takro,
have received dedicated, permanent spaces
and continued state support in the form of
funding, tournament organization and regular
involvement/surveillance of visiting state
representatives to the island. According to
the state officials I spoke with in the Ministry
of Sports in Tanjung Pinang as well as the
national sports complex in Jakarta, there are
several reasons for the absence of other sports
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but the reason most cited is financial. For
many residents of Pulau Penyengat, badmin-
ton, baseball and other sports are considered
to be a pastime of the rich due to the
prohibitive cost of the necessary equipment.
Pencak silat, the popular Malay martial art,
has seen a resurgence in Indonesia with many
pencak silat clubs and competitions. However,
the state has not been as active in promoting
pencak silat as volleyball. While I have not
been able to confirm why, I suggest that there
are several reasons. The first is that volleyball
is an international sport which the Indonesian
state perceives to bring international
(especially western) respect. The second is
that volleyball is understood as modern, it is
seen as being able to inculcate the correct
‘modern’ values in its players, and it
encourages behavior valued by the state such
as teamwork, conformity and discipline.
Indonesia’s national sports are Olympic sports
(Brown 2008), a western-centric value that is
reflected down to the village level. While
pencak silat is popular in Indonesia, it has not
received state support in the form of infra-
structure and programs at the village level.
Third, and perhaps most important,
pencak silat is widely respected as a powerful
form of fighting. Pencak silat practitioners
fight individually in battles that require
physical strength and cunning, not qualities
the state wishes to cultivate in its population.
Volleyball, on the other hand, cultivates
teamwork and uniformity in an international
format. While teamwork and conformity are
also ideologically constructed, both are valued
by the state as positive characteristics, assum-
ing they are not used against the state. During
the Dutch colonial era and the Indonesian
revolution, there are tales of pencak silat
being used with great effect against the enemy.
The link between pencak silat and resistance
to a dominant force has perhaps resulted in
its deprioritization in state leisure planning.
By omitting pencak silat from funding, the
state reveals that it supports only a narrow
and benign understanding of ‘tradition’ that
proscribes how culture is to be expressed.
Conclusion
This paper has examined how leisure activities
play an important role in nation-building in
Indonesia. Through an examination of three
state-introduced leisure activities in the con-
text of an Indonesian village, I demonstrate
how the arm of the state reaches citizens’
minds and bodies even in their leisure time
through attempting to control how and what
they play. As demonstrated in this paper, some
of the activities in which the people of Pulau
Penyengat have been implicated have been
state strategies to ‘modernize’ villagers
through structured play. The notion that
villagers are an inherently ‘substandard’
population draws from colonial philosophy
and has been maintained over time and across
governments using similar strategies of con-
trol. Thus, strategies of population improve-
ment are intertwined with nation-building
efforts in Indonesia and have affected

the leisure activities of residents on Pulau
Penyengat. The (re)introduction of selected
activities (volleyball, takro, and marching) is
not innocent and villagers are keenly aware of
the linkages between these activities and the
nation: each activity is organized by the state
and receives support in the form of an official
designated space and funding. Furthermore, it
is clear to participants that excellence in these
activities can mean participating in regional
and national events in Jakarta, thus serving to
reinforce the notion that villagers are part of a
larger political entity: the nation.
My empirical examples reveal an uneven-
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ness of participation in state-initiated leisure
activities. First, while the state has provided
spaces for several activities, villagers have
rejected some, demonstrating that villagers
have a high degree of agency when it comes to
choosing activities in which to participate and
how to participate in them. Second, the
activities attract residents’ participation
unevenly, primarily favoring younger resi-
dents, those in higher socio-economic classes,
and those with more predictable leisure time,
for example those who work in offices rather
than more seasonal occupations. Third, state
officials at various levels produce further
unevenness in the extent to which they get
involved introducing and maintaining activi-
ties. Despite the unevenness, participation in
state-initiated leisure activities on Pulau
Penyengat is remarkably high and has resulted
in increased feelings of connectedness to the
greater unit of the nation through tournaments
and through the recognition that it is possible
to advance from Pulau Penyengat to the
regional and provincial levels, the national
level and even go on to represent the nation at
the international level.
Leisure activities have the unique capacity
to simultaneously change the bodies and
minds of individuals and to effectively bind
Creating citizens through play 69
people as a nation. They engage citizens in an
embodied way, and, in the context of
Indonesia, have been employed by the state
for the inextricably linked purposes of
individual improvement and nation-building.
Leisure activities have been a key way in
which the body and the nation intersect on
Pulau Penyengat and an important way in
which villagers participate as citizens.
State-introduced leisure programs have been
largely successful in encouraging particular
performances of national identity as they
generate much enthusiasm and a high level of
participation. Because leisure activities are
experienced as fun and voluntary, they mask
and naturalize the state’s ideological agenda
more effectively than other more formal
displays of nationalism.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editor and three anonymous referees
for their thoughtful and constructive comments.
Research for this paper was conducted with field
work funding and a Graduate Research
Scholarship provided by the National University
of Singapore. I am grateful for the postdoctoral
funding I received through the Aga Khan
Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology. Lily Kong,
Rachel Silvey, Tim Bunnell, Sarah Turner, and
Michael Hendricks provided valuable sugges-
tions on earlier drafts. I am indebted to many
friends on Pulau Penyengat who welcomed me
into their lives and helped me to shape my
research questions.
Notes
1 In this paper I adopt Neulinger’s (1981) definition of
leisure as describing a state of mind and something
done voluntarily for pleasure. While people do an
 70 Sarah Moser
assortment of leisure activities including sleeping and
work-oriented tasks, I focus only on structured play. I
define play as something done in leisure time having
clearly defined goals. ‘Structured play’ is intended to
prevent other types of leisure activities.
2 Residents of Pulau Penyengat, with the exception of one
Chinese family, self-identify as Malay, a complex and
flexible identity that is based on religion (Islam),
language and culture rather than on ethnicity (see
Barnard 2004). For this reason, Pulau Penyengat does
not offer a rich context for examining issues of ethnicity
that are at play elsewhere in Indonesia.
3 Located south of Singapore between the Malay
Peninsula and Sumatra, the Riau Islands broke away
from Riau Province in Sumatra to form a new province
after the introduction of broad decentralization
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policies following the fall of President Suharto in
1998. The Riau Islands have been considered
peripheral in the state’s construction of Indonesia and
are officially categorized as ‘Outer Island II’, the most
remote category in the state’s territorial ranking system.
4 Dance has also been a key way in which village
residents have been encouraged to participate in
particular activities that support the state’s national
ideology. While dance is a key leisure activity for many
Indonesians, particularly on Pulau Penyengat, due to
space constraints, the role of recent state-introduced
village dance programs in the construction of
both provincial and national identity in Riau Islands
Province will be examined separately in another paper.
5 For an in-depth discussion about how national
imaginaries in Indonesia have a material form, see
Simon and Barker (2002).
6 Schools and offices are key sites for national activities
such as the weekly flag ceremony, the weekly
callisthenics, and events to mark various important
dates in the national calendar.
7 Two earlier studies by Pauker (1965) and Sie (1978)
focused on the formation of GANEFO (Games of the
New Emerging Forces). GANEFO, consisting of only
‘emerging nations,’ was established in Indonesia in
1962 as a counter to the Olympics. Unlike the
Olympic Games, GANEFO was overtly political and
included primarily socialist states.
8 Pancasila was created with the intention of uniting the
new nation and to ensure its political stability.
Pancasila is credited with helping to smooth over
differences between groups who had competing
visions for the archipelago, regardless of their
ethnicity or political beliefs. Pancasila has five
principles: belief in one God, a just and civilized
humanity, the unity of Indonesia, representative
government, and social justice for all Indonesians.
9 Sukarno’s presidency (1945–1967) was dubbed the
‘Old Order’ by President Suharto, who referred to his
own presidency as the ‘New Order’. These terms have
been adopted by scholars to broadly denote the two
presidencies.
10 Sukarno’s government distributed tens of thousands of
televisions across the country to ensure an audience
for the Asian Games. Pulau Penyengat received its first
television at this time, a communal set run by the
village head.
11 Field work took place in numerous extended visits to
Pulau Penyengat between 2005 and 2007. During my
visits I lived with local families, took part in daily
activities and special events, and conducted hundreds
of informal and semi-structured interviews with a
wide spectrum of villagers including students,
government officials, housewives, rickshaw drivers,
workers involved in the fishing industry, sailors,
teachers, unemployed, and retired people.
12 In the 1970s, the number of government employees in
Indonesia grew by more than 1.5 million, or about
400 percent (Evers 1987: 666).
13 It has been suggested to me that there may be racial
reasons behind Pulau Penyengat residents’ lack of
interest in badminton, as it is widely associated with
Chinese-Indonesians who dominate the sport in
Indonesia. However, the unusual lack of racial
complexity on Pulau Penyengat combined with many
discussions with villagers about the issue, has led me
to believe that issues of racial identity are not a strong
factor behind the unpopularity of badminton on the
island. It is more likely that there is not a critical mass
interested to sustain the sport through village and
district tournaments.
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Abstract translations
Créant des citoyens par l’amusement: le rôle du
loisir dans l’édification d’une nation indonésienne
Dans cet article, j’explore les connections entre
l’espace, le corps, et la nation en analysant des
activités de loisirs introduites par l’état dans un
village en Indonésie. Bien que les activités de loisir
soient volontaires et soient plus agréables que des
activités de l’édification d’une nation plus officielles,
j’étude comment elles sont politisées et attachées
intimement au programme de l’édification d’une
nation de l’état. En me concentrant sur des
programmes nationaux de volleyball, takro (un
jeu indigène jouent avec un ballon rotin), et Gerek
Jalan (des concours de marche), j’examine comment
l’idéologie nationale de l’état a été traduite dans des
programmes de récréation qui essaient d’améliorer
Creating citizens through play 73
les corps des citoyens et d’inculquer l’idéologie
nationale dans le peuple. Par la création des
paysages et des programmes de récréation variée,
les citoyens sont encouragés à utiliser leur temps
libre dans des poursuites particulières qui servent
des buts nationaux. Finalement, je discute comment
les activités des loisirs introduites par l’état sont,
malgré des intentions hégémoniques, pratiquées
inégalement et j’examine comment les citoyens
résistent, ignorent, et renégocient la signification
attendue des activités.
Mots-clefs: loisir, géographie des sports, édifica-
tion d’une nation, identité nationale, ı̂les Riau,
Indonésie.
Creando ciudadanos través del juego: El papel
del ocio en la construcción de la nación de
Indonesia
En este articulo, exploro las conexiones entre el
espacio, el cuerpo y la nación por analizar las
actividades de ocio que el estado de Indonesia se
introdujo a un pueblo. Aunque las actividades de
ocio son voluntarios y más agradables que
actividades más formales de la construcción de
nación, investigo como los están politizadas y muy
cercanas al agenda del estado para construir la
nación. Enfocando en los programas nacionales de
voleibol, takro (un juego indı́gena jugado con una
pelota de junquillo), y Gerak Jalan (competiciones
de marcha), examino como la ideologı́a nacional
del estado ha sido traducido en programas
recreativos que intentan ‘mejorar’ los cuerpos de
los ciudadanos y inculcar la ideologı́a nacional a la
ciudadanı́a. A través la creación de varios paisajes y
programas recreativos, los ciudadanos están anim-
ados pasar su tiempo libre persiguiendo actividades
particulares que sirvan las metas nacionales. Al
final, discuto como las actividades de ocio
introducidas por el estado están practicados
irregularmente, a pesar de las intenciones hegemó-
nicas, y examino como los ciudadanos resisten,
ignoran y renegocian el significado pretendido de
las actividades.
Palabras claves: ocio, geografı́a de deportes,
construcción de nación, identidad nacional, Islas
Riau, Indonesia.