Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Arts and Religious Freedom Debates

ABSTRACT This article re-analyses historical Southeast Asian power concepts and practices to interpret contrasting positions on two contemporary Indonesian legal debates. The first debate concerns the use of intellectual property models to regulate regional arts or ‘traditional cultural expressions’. The second debate concerns a 2017 constitutional court ruling that advocates citizenship parity for ‘belief practitioners’, meaning those who maintain ancestral or non-orthodox practices and do not list one of Indonesia’s six official religions on their identity cards. I argue that contrasting positions on the laws held by state and clerical authorities versus regional practitioners are better explained by reference to distinctively Southeast Asian ideas about unilateral versus decentralised ‘power’ than by standard globalisation, human rights, or modern state versus indigenous resistance explanations. Disentangling two features of Benedict Anderson’s classic model of Javanese power, fluid cosmic force and the concentration of ‘oneness’ by rulers, illuminates how the Indonesian minority and majoritarian legal perspectives fit within a common repertoire of regional power concepts. Framing religion, tradition, arts and law as prescriptive and normative rather than analytic categories, the article draws on historical and comparative Southeast Asian evidence to delineate tensions among differently positioned groups grounded in diverse modalities of power, ancestral authority and customary institutions, even as some now selectively adopt imported legal rights-based and heritage preservation discourses.