Jakarta and The Urban Grotesque

Doreen Lee, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northeastern University

This talk draws on my book project on the embeddedness of cultures of circulation in Jakarta. In this book, I distill the flows and values of financial life in Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest city, into a central idea: The Urban Grotesque. The urban grotesque is a name and framework for situating the dynamic, generous, predatory, and unpredictable textures of life for the urban majority, in which scam, debt, and opportunity abound. My book manuscript follows the stories of individuals who experience the high social costs of living in the city, tracking their commonplace gestures of giving and taking to build a systematic understanding of how redistribution and circulation dominate urban life. My research shows that long-standing cultural practices of exchange and reciprocity align with a fast-changing financial landscape in which neoliberal ideas are fast becoming popular. Combining ethnography and memoir, and playing with genre, the book showcases the challenges of capturing the financial edge of urban life without romanticizing the fast-paced economic developments and collective forms of resilience that characterize this Global South city.  

Doreen Lee is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University with a concentration in Southeast Asian Studies and History. She has served as the Acting Director of the Global Asian Studies program at Northeastern University and as a SEAC councilmember for AAS. Her first book Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia was published by Duke University Press in 2016 and won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2019. Her current book project is a demonstration of how cultures of circulation shape the financial lives of the people of Jakarta.