Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates re-branding practices that conjure new subjective and institutional processes of reflexivity about local culture on the Indonesian island of Sumba, as exemplified by the wide circulation of the brand-like notion of ‘Very Sumba’ (Humba Ailulu) in national creative network.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my 18-month doctoral fieldwork on Sumba island between 2019 to 2020, this paper documents the structures of social connection to national and international political, commercial, and art elites that are important conditions of this transformation of reflexive Sumbanese representations of Sumba-ness. For example, the origin of the phrase itself is national, even as it appears local and vernacular: the phrase is a back-translation of the distinctively south Jakartan colloquial frame utilizing the adjective banget (‘very, truly, really’). This small further detail is again exemplary of the highly particular links that have emerged between south Jakarta (the centre of the nation), and Sumba island, which is in the periphery of the nation.

These innovations, which parallel similar processes in many other world regions, have also been supported by a general rise in consumer culture and middle-class consumption in Indonesia, including expansion of national domestic tourism and national middle-class interest in regional cultures that impact places like Sumba very directly. Unlike a top-down, corporate-led branding process, ‘Very Sumba’ was created through decentralised and erratically-innovated collaborative activities of networks of like-minded people. While my fieldwork tracked the great diversity of events and sites where this new configuration of cultural self-consciousness has been fashioned, the main subjects of my study are participants in two collectives. The paper also looks at how these subjects created the brand idea against the backdrop of extractive mining and plantations, growth in tourism, and state administrative decentralisation.