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Paper short abstract:

Throughout Asia a resurgent middle class identifies with a cosmopolitan consciousness that no longer exclusively duplicates Western culture but instead celebrates a future pan-Asian identity. Health spas, new age music and slow-living Asian style are building blocks of this post-national landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The current presentation is part of a larger project, The Poetry of Portable Places, which deals with the rapidly changing landscape of 21st century Indonesia and particularly how such changes are reflected and fed by various media practices, the arts and ecological activism. Within the Indonesian context it has become apparent how over the past decennia disintegration of the nation state has led its citizens to question how cultural landscapes other than those propagated by 35 year Suharto regime might be instrumental in re-imagining the nation. New order rhetoric habitually employed the metaphor of a shared Water-Land (Tanah Airku) urging its people to respect Mother Earth (Ibu Pertiwi), while at the same time constantly exploiting its natural resources for the sake of development. In Post Suharto Indonesia this ambiguous attitude towards the environment is increasingly being questioned.

Here I will focus on one particular case, which consists of a new sort of Green Thinking which presently circulates in many of Southeast Asia's metropolises but particularly gains momentum against the background of wider Indonesian political developments. The New Green thinking consists of a vastly increasing environmental awareness, ideas on using natural resources in alternative ways but also reflections on a future post national landscape that yet has to be realized. These ideas are commercially exploited in advertising, media, even fashion and are thus contributing to the lifestyle toolkit of Indonesia's growing middle class. Beng Huat (2003) and others have shown how throughout Asia the resurgent middle class is identifying itself with a new cosmopolitan consciousness which is no longer solely fixed on duplicating and incorporating Western culture. In this case a new green lifestyle is loosely composed of health spa's, new age like harmonious sounds and slow living Asian style: a bricolage of re-invented and 'real' but often romanticized Oriental traditions that ironically enough are not seldom imported through the West. In the aftermath of much discussed Asian Values, or as some argue amidst an era of Asian Renaissance, the new green thinking seems one of the most successful ways of celebrating an imagined regional identity and a Neo Asian futurist landscape that is composed and experienced throughout the media.

Minority cosmopolitanism, a revival of ancient cosmologies or merely fashion?: this paper will conclude by looking at the possible local effects of Asia's Green renaissance.