Organizer: Indonesia Project, Australia National University
Type/Location: Hybrid / Canberra, Australia
Picture: UC Berkeley, Department of Geography / Unsplash
Description:
Join the ANU Indonesia Project for a talk by Siddharth Chandra, Professor of Economics in James Madison College and Director of the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University, who will discuss demographic changes in Indonesia during the turbulent 1960s.
Abstract:
Compared to the 1970s and later, the demography of Indonesia in the 1960s is not well understood. This is partly because of the comparative lack of high-quality demographic data from that period and partly because the attention of early generations of New Order Indonesian and international demographers was forward-looking and focused on lowering the rate of population growth. Unlike the relatively stable decades of Indonesia in the 1970s and later, the 1960s was a decade of tumult. During this time, Indonesia experienced a violent transition during which the economic, political, and social order underwent a dramatic change.
The aim of this talk is to present the results of a series of studies of a variety of demographic data from the 1960s and 1970s in search of the kinds of demographic anomalies that one would expect in the context of the upheavals of the 1960s. Given that few reliable data are available for that time period beyond the simplest demographic aggregates, a variety of commensurately simple and parsimonious methods, including time series analysis of births, variations in sex ratios across space and over time, and computations of discontinuities in population growth trajectories across space are applied to either census microdata or population aggregates from multiple censuses.
The patterns identified as a result enable a conversation with the far richer and vast qualitative literatures on the subject from the disciplines of anthropology, literary studies, history, memory studies, political science, and sociology. For example, they enable cross-validation of accounts of population change in provinces such as Central Java, East Java, and Bali as well as the extension of some individual accounts of the period to population aggregates. A variety of compelling insights can be generated from this kind of analysis that illuminate both hitherto unknown and well-established aspects of Indonesia’s years of “living dangerously.”
About the Speaker:
Siddharth Chandra is Professor of Economics in James Madison College and Director of the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University. He previously served as Director of the Asian Studies Center and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
Registration:
To attend the event virtually, please join the zoom meeting here.