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Indonesia’s Cigarette Culture Wars: Contesting Tobacco Regulations in the Postcolony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

Marina Welker
Marina Welker*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
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Abstract

This article juxtaposes representations of Indonesia’s tobacco control as temporally backwards with a counter-discourse defending its clove-laced cigarettes—called kretek—as a form of distinctive cultural heritage. These opposing discourses, which I characterize as public health evolutionism and commodity nationalism, structure clashes over Indonesian tobacco regulations. Public health evolutionism can take the form of voyeuristic, exoticizing, and Othering representations, but it can also be used to argue for more equitable access to global tobacco control knowledge and practices. Commodity nationalists insist that the kretek industry should be a source of pride rather than shame, depicting tobacco control as a neocolonial plot to destroy an indigenous industry that benefits small farmers, factory workers, and home industries. This subaltern emphasis obscures the fact that a few large companies dominate the industry, which is increasingly foreign-owned and mechanizing to increase production while reducing employment. The cigarette industry takes advantage of both discourses by marketing supposedly safer products to consumers alarmed by public health messaging, while also promoting the cigarettes-as-national-heritage narrative and undermining regulations. The stakes of these debates are high in the world’s second largest cigarette market, with over three hundred billion sticks smoked each year and more than two hundred thousand tobacco-related deaths.

Keywords

tobaccokretekcapitalismpublic health evolutionismcommodity nationalismshameIndonesia
Type
State-Corporation Alliances
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 911 - 947
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: My thanks to tobacco proponents and opponents who shared their views and experiences with me in Indonesia, and to Shahnaz Priwingsatiningrum and Fatmawati Mustikasari for their research assistance. For logistical support, I’m grateful to Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Brawijaya; Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi Indonesia; and Aminef (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation). My research was supported by a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies and Institute for Social Sciences. I presented earlier versions of this article at the “Corporate Rights and International Law” Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at Duke University, organized by Philip Stern and Rachel Brewster, and to the Science & Technology Studies department at Cornell. I appreciate feedback from those audiences, as well as from Sarah Besky, Jessica Cooper, Ray Craib, Darcie DeAngelo, María Fernández, Durba Ghosh, TJ Hinrichs, Saida Hodžić, Paul Nadasdy, Kirin Narayan, Kevin O’Neill, Simone Pinet, Rachel Prentice, Philip Sayers, and Wendy Wolford. At CSSH, I owe thanks to David Akin, Geneviève Zubrzycki, Paul Christopher Johnson, and the anonymous reviewers.

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