How inter-ethnic relations are reproduced through everyday social practices: A perspective from the Javanese nasi pecel vendors in Mataraman cities

Abstract

There is growing scholarship on how ethnic groups with historical tensions recover and manage to build harmonious relationships. However, detailed accounts of the lived experiences of such relations are limited. We seek to address this gap by exploring everyday inter-ethnic relations between Javanese and Chinese Indonesians in Indonesia as exemplified in the practice of selling nasi pecel, the traditional food of Mataraman cities in East Java. Our eight-week fieldwork involved 30 nasi pecel sellers in the four cities of Madiun, Nganjuk, Kediri, and Jombang through go-alongs and subsequent photo-elicitation interviews. Our engagements with the sellers have enabled us to generate a large body of empirical materials comprising 35 interviews and over 200 photographs. In the roles of bricoleurs, we then worked abductively to make sense of the empirical materials generated to build case studies of six sellers which resonated with the stories of the other 24 nasi pecel sellers in the study. We focused on the centrality of the seemingly mundane everyday practices of selling nasi pecel in (re)producing inter-ethnic interactions between the Javanese nasi pecel sellers and the Chinese Indonesian landowners. The everyday interactions for purposes such as accessing electricity and water and serving the customers which have been enacted every day for decades build spaces for inter-ethnic friendship and solidarity. We discuss how such inter-ethnic relations are vital in Indonesian society by emplacing such phenomenon within the broader socio-historical context of Chinese Indonesian and Javanese inter-ethnic relations, which are often framed as adversarial.