| Summary: | This study is conceptually framed to explore how certain discourses operate and
shape political subjects and their agency through specific political patterns with
which the subjects aspire to welfare. Main question of this study is how patronage
practices, as specific political pattern, become routinized and normalized in certain
society that currently experiences democraticization? Central to this question is the
careful exploration of (1) how patronage practice relates to the actual discourse
within which such practice takes place, and (2) consequently, why democratic
project fails to cope with patronage practices? Theoretical and practical context of
this questioning centres upon the current academic debate on the progress and
problems of democratization in Post-New Order Indonesia. It has twofold objective.
First, to highlight specific nature of political power that resides in actual powerrelation,
which is spacialized and temporalized in certain discourses, rather than in
both state�s sovereignty-authority and power-holder�s autonomy-interest. Second, to
reframe democracy debate by putting together development, power, politics.
Through in-depth study on patronage practice in Manggaraian society, this study
reveals how these practice takes place within the political logics of Kairos dan
Developmentalism. These two discourses has for four decades developed together
with the workings of the local Catholic Church�s project of Christian Salvation and
that of local goverment�s project of development. Through the historical interplay of
the two discourses, their political logics and technics become mutually reinforcing in
patronage practices that blurs the practical and symbolic articulations of both the
state and the church in dealing with their respective subjects. Patronage has become
increasingly govermentalized and, in fact, functioned as actual model of integrating
the two institutions and their subjects, Tuang (patron) and Roeng (client), with
different subject-positions in terms of political identity and agency. Tuang belongs
to the domain of knowledge-truth, while Roeng belongs to the domain of objects of
control and intervention. Tuang Pegawe, Tuang Pelitik, and Tuang Gereja (nonpriest
leading figures) are attributes of patron that grant this subject certain rights
and duty to rescue Roeng from �poverty� and �sinful crimes�. Poverty and sins no
longer differ, their meaning coalesces that makes possible the essentializing of
Roeng�s identity and agency together with the spacialization of their presence in the
margins of the two discourses. Roeng, this de-politicised subject, becomes
routinized target of development and salvation. This identity-agency formation is
produced and reproduced through patronage practices as ideological event, as
technology of the two identical discourses.
Drawn upon Discourse Analisis within Radical Democracy Studies, the mutually
reinforcing relationship between Kairos-Developmentalism and patronage practices
goes together with the functioning of two specific notion of �politics� and
�development�. Tuang and Roeng perceive politics and development as activity of
the Tuang. Politics relates to development insofar as it ensures the distribution of
public funds and resources through patronage practices. Politics is Pilkadal and
Pemilu, comprising activities to ensure the commitment of the Tuang-patron and
loyalty of the Roeng-client. Patron�s responsibility is to provide the clients with
infrastructure projects, into which the latter gets involved and benefited.
Development means technical-intelligible projects and results. The �success� of
development correlates with the accomplishment of the projects as this becomes the
basis of Tuang�s political �legitimacy�. However, this study also points out two types
of resistance againts the two hegemonic disources. The first resistance, though
poorly organized, is againts the politics of exclutionary inclusion, and the second is
revisionist in characters as it in fact promotes patronage governmentality in
Manggaraian society.
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