Togetherness: Language, Relationality, and the Politics of Exchange in Kupang, Eastern Indonesia

This dissertation examines the politics of relationality and its mediation through the exchange of language, debt, and other semiotic modalities of interaction in Kupang, an eastern Indonesian locale. In analyzing relationality, I argue that notions of kebersamaan (literally, togetherness), constitute recursive forms of encompassment that organize and mediate social differences among participants of social interactions. Through social interactions that invoke kebersamaan, Kupang residents enact their sense of belonging to the Indonesian nation-state while also claiming that they are different from other Indonesians. Overall, my findings suggest that kebersamaan justifies and motivates forms of exchange that undergird social difference and political agency. In the two constitutive parts of this dissertation, I ask how enactments of kebersamaan shape two interrelated domains of social interaction: (1) local belonging and the encompassing effects of the nation as invoked in linguistic forms deployed during worship meetings at a congregation of the Gereja Masehi Injili di Timor (GMIT), a mainline Protestant church, and (2) gendered forms of inequality as instantiated in the exchange of resources among kin and in local networks of koperasis—cooperatively owned women's microcredit associations.