SYLVIA TIDEY
University of Amsterdam

Between the ethical and the right thing:
How (not) to be corrupt in Indonesian bureaucracy in an
age of good governance

A B S T R A C T
Is it possible to be corrupt yet ethical? Or good but
unethical? In one of Indonesia’s most corrupt towns, the
answers to these questions are far from clear for young
elite civil servants, who must navigate the moral-ethical
landscape of post-Suharto bureaucracy. For them,
anticorruption efforts heighten uncertainty regarding what
corruption is and facilitate slippage between various
constructions of ethical selfhood. The uncertainty arises at
the intersection of local moral economies, national
ideologies of state building, the particular global morality
of anticorruption, and a conception of the good that
inspires neoliberal ideas on governance. Finding
themselves at this intersection, young civil servants can
find no unambiguous contrast between being “good” and
“corrupt.” [corruption, anticorruption, good governance, civil
service, morality, ethics, Indonesia]
Apakah mungkin seseorang yang melakukan praktek korupsi
akan tetapi pada saat yang bersamaan menjadi seseorang
yang etis? Atau sebaliknya; apakah mungkin menjadi
seseorang yang baik akan tetapi juga tidak etis? Di suatu
kota yang paling korup di Indonesia, jawaban terhadap
pertanyaan di atas sangatlah tidak jelas dan sulit untuk
diterangkan bagi elit Pegawai Negeri Sipil (PNS) muda,
yang harus menavigasi tatanan moral dan etika dalam
tubuh birokrasi pasca kekuasaan Soeharto. Bagi mereka,
upaya gerakan antikorupsi justru meningkatkan
ketidakjelasan tentang apa itu korupsi dan mempermudah
tergelincir di antara beragam konstruksi dan makna etika.
Ketidakjelasan itu timbul pada saat terjadi persinggungan
antara ekonomi moral lokal, ideologi nasional tentang
pembentukan negara, nilai moralitas antikorupsi global dan
konsepsi tentang kebaikan, yang menginspirasi ide-ide
neoliberalisme tentang pemerintahan. Bagi PNS yang

I

n Kupang, the capital of the Indonesian province of East Nusa
Tenggara, warnings against corruption adorn the desks, walls, and
windows of government offices.
Tips are part of the crime of CORRUPTION! Honey today becomes Poison tomorrow
ATTENTION. DO NOT OFFER/RECEIVE DONATIONS IN ANY
FORM

These are but two examples of a plethora of such warnings. The first
statement was printed on a sticker issued by Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission and affixed to a bathroom door at the mayor’s office.
I found the second message taped to a door at the Department of Public Works. The messages were somewhat redundant, for in the late 2000s,
when I conducted my field research, civil servants in Kupang’s city-level
bureaucracy were well acquainted with the anticorruption slogans that
had permeated every level of the civil service for over a decade. The evils
of corruption figured prominently in the speeches that superiors gave during Monday-morning roll calls, in Friday seminars in the main city-level
office, and in mandatory civil-servant trainings. Few civil servants needed
convincing as to the “poisonous” nature of corruption.
Yet what corruption actually entails was far less clear to many civil servants. For this reason, the visible reminders scattered throughout offices
tried to elucidate its definition: “tips are part of the crime of corruption,”
“do not offer/receive donations in any form.” Rather than merely fostering agreement with Indonesia’s anticorruption discourse, these statements
helped civil servants recognize corruption in everyday bureaucratic work.
When I conducted my research, Kupang’s civil servants were still adjusting to drastic changes in the Indonesian governmental administration. These changes were part of far-reaching reorganizations that resulted from the popular reform movement known as Reformasi, which
in 1998 forced President Suharto to step down after 32 years of authoritarian rule.1 Although Suharto had promised a “clean government” at
the start of his presidency, his regime ultimately became notorious for

berada di tengah-tengah persimpangan ini, mereka
menemukan ketiadaan batas yang jelas antar menjadi
“baik” dan “korup”. [korupsi, anti korupsi, good governance,
Pamong Praja, moralitas, etika, Indonesia]

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 663–676, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12382

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

its rampant corruption (Robertson-Snape 1999). During the
Reformasi era that followed Suharto’s resignation, the Indonesian legislature passed sweeping decentralization laws
(Schulte Nordholt 2008, 114–15), though this was not entirely an Indonesian initiative: it began under pressure from
international donors such as the World Bank. Decentralization, so the expectation went, would not only ensure a more
transparent, accountable, and democratic government but
also break up Suharto’s centralized control over the state
apparatus.
It was in this context that the Indonesian government
explicitly tried to eradicate corruption in the civil service.
For instance, it introduced new regulations and extended
external auditing of governmental departments (Robison
2006). It also established various anticorruption agencies,
which made impressive, high-level arrests. Nevertheless,
Transparency International’s “integrity warriors” (Sampson
2005, 105) continue to give Indonesia a low score on their
annual Corruption Perception Index. In addition, the group
found in a 2013 survey that three-quarters of Indonesian
respondents thought corruption in the public sector was
a serious problem, and that 79 percent considered public
officials to be “corrupt or extremely corrupt” (Transparency
International 2013). Thus, despite efforts to eradicate it,
there persists the problem of corruption in Indonesia’s civil
service. It “remains a ghost in the democracy machine”
(Bubandt 2014, 41).
Corruption in the civil service is a particularly poignant
topic in Kupang, which had the misfortune of being named
Indonesia’s most corrupt town in 2008 (Melayu Online
2009). With about 330,000 inhabitants, Kupang is the capital of East Nusa Tenggara (Nusa Tenggara Timur, or NTT).
Unlike the rest of Indonesia, which is home to the world’s
largest Muslim population, NTT is predominantly Protestant and Catholic. Given its localized economy, limited natural resources, and reliance on traditional agriculture, NTT
generates very little of its own revenue and has a comparatively high unemployment rate (World Bank 2009). Funds
transferred from the central state make up most of the
province’s revenue, and civil service is the main source
of steady employment (Tidey 2012). In state-dependent
towns like Kupang, the increased flow of money and local
decision-making power that decentralization enabled are
therefore particularly significant. Unfortunately, the state’s
centrality to everyday life in Kupang also makes corruption
all the more painful.
How have recent anticorruption efforts affected civil
servants’ attempts to navigate the moral-ethical landscape
of post-Suharto bureaucracy in Kupang? In particular, what
ethical dilemmas do young elite civil servants face in their
daily work and during the harsh training they undergo
at Indonesia’s most prestigious civil-service academy? Because elite civil servants received their education in a postSuharto era of good governance and anticorruption, they

664

are, more than other civil servants, trained to embody being “good” civil servants. This training, however, prepares
them to be corrupt as well. Put differently, although civilservice training produces the ethical disposition it aims to
create, this disposition also ensures a continuation of the
practices that land Kupang high on Transparency International’s corruption-perception list.
Although anticorruption efforts have not necessarily
decreased corruption, they have heightened uncertainty
among civil servants as to what corruption is. To resolve
this uncertainty, young elite civil servants end up relying
on reciprocal obligations within family and family-like
structures. The ethical primacy of reciprocal obligations in
family connections not only resonates in the local context
of Kupang but also, in fact, forms an important organizing
principle of the Indonesian nation-state, creating a slippage
between various constructions of what it means to be an
ethical civil servant. Moreover, the potential for slippage
only increased with the advent of good-governance ideology in the Reformasi era, as the moral-ethical complexity
of navigating civil service intensified. What emerged from
this situation was an ambiguous contrast between being a
“good” or a “corrupt” civil servant, a situation whose ambiguity is the product of local moral economies, national
ideologies of state building, global discourses on the morality of anticorruption, and a conception of the good that
inspires neoliberal ideas of governance. As one civil servant
eloquently put to me, many Indonesian civil servants are
simply stuck between “the ethical” and “the right thing.”
Worldwide, the topic of corruption has risen dramatically on the post–Cold War political agenda. As suggested
by the World Bank’s definition of corruption as “the abuse
of public office for private gain,” much of what drives the
global crusade to eradicate it through “good governance”
is an unquestioned assumption that public office and the
private sphere are distinct. This distinction, which Max
Weber famously considered the hallmark of rational-legal
bureaucratic order, underlies not just anticorruption efforts
but also the entire postcolonial modernization paradigm
that preceded good governance as a development ideology
(Anders and Nuijten 2007, 10; Weber 1990). Early anthropological engagements with corruption or illegality tended
to replicate a dualism between a Weberian bureaucratic
rationality and what anthropologists might call local “moral
economies” (Scott 1976), often based on Maussian gift exchange (Mauss 2002). In Indonesia, the extent to which the
postcolonial state can be understood as an extension of the
late-colonial bureaucratic state or as running along patrimonial lines has occupied scholars since the end of World
War II (Barker and Van Klinken 2009, 19–29) and continues
in discussions on clientelism and neopatrimonialism today
(Choi 2009).
The anthropological focus on corruption over the
past two decades (Gupta 1995; Haller and Shore 2005;

Between the ethical and the right thing

Harrison 2007; Hasty 2005) has, however, questioned
the Weberian foundations of anticorruption discourses
(Blundo et al. 2006; Pardo 2004; Smith 2006; Torsello and
Venard 2015). For example, anthropologists have broadened conceptions of what corruption is (Blundo and Olivier
de Sardan 2001) and problematized the distinction between
public and private that earlier accounts rested on (Anjaria
2011; Gal 2002). They have argued that the state is often
complicit in illegal practices (Herzfeld 2009; Parry 2000) and
that the law enables corruption rather than diminishing it
(Anders and Nuijten 2007; Pardo 2015). In contrast to
assumptions that underlie global discourses of good
governance, in which corruption figures primarily as a
feature of the Global South, some scholars have demonstrated the prevalence of corruption in the Global North
(MacLennan 2005; Shore 2005). Scholars working in Indonesia have shown that corruption forms an integral
part of the politics of democracy (Bubandt 2014) and that
discourses of anticorruption and transparency enable new
forms of corruption (Tidey 2013). These recent works thus
emphasize that neoliberal ideologies of good governance,
transparency, and anticorruption—rather than offer a cure
for the “cancer of corruption,” as a former World Bank president so provocatively stated in his 1996 annual meeting
speech—are intimately interwoven with the production of
what counts as corruption.
Yet local practices do not merely emanate from or
contradict a global discourse of anticorruption and good
governance. Rather, civil-service corruption comes to be
constructed through “multiply mediated contexts,” as Akhil
Gupta (1995, 377) reminds us about the state as a whole.
Put another way, civil servants in Kupang navigate ethics in
a larger “moral assemblage” (Zigon 2013; see also Ong and
Collier 2005) of alternatively overlapping, converging, and
conflicting conceptions and discourses of what counts as
“good,” “right,” or “ethical.” Such an assemblage offers “a
greater range of possibilities for morally being-in-the-world
and ethically working on oneself than is available from
any one moral discourse” (Zigon 2013, 202), such as that
of good governance.2 If the anticorruption movement still
carries traces of a modernization paradigm in which the
public is distinct from the private, and “bad” governments
can evolve into “good” ones, anthropology offers a different
view on modernization.

Corruption and politics in post-Suharto
bureaucracy
In the years following the anti-Suharto protests and the consequent political and administrative reforms, the acronym
KKN, denoting “Corruption, collusion, and nepotism”
(Korupsi, kolusi, dan nepotisme), lodged itself securely
into the Indonesian popular imagination. In Kupang, news
channel Metro TV gave daily updates on the latest arrests,



American Ethnologist

trials, and suspected cases involving KKN at the national
level, offering much to gossip about for the family I lived
with during the 12 months of research I conducted from
2007 to 2009. Local newspapers would also report on local
KKN scandals, which occasioned even more salacious gossip in government offices, on front porches, and in the rivers
during laundry hour, since many people would know of or
be acquainted with the suspects.
Whereas national-level corruption cases provoked
near-unanimous contempt and condemnation, local cases
did not, since they involved suspects who were well known
and whose contexts were well understood, making it far
more difficult for people to condemn them. There was, for
instance, the case of the contractor who went to jail only
because he took responsibility for his son’s misdoings, as I
was told by several neighbors and Public Works Department
officials who worked with him. He was not the actual culprit but merely a good father trying to protect his son. Then
there was a retired businessman who told me how one of
his daughters had been unjustly fired from her civil-service
position as subdistrict head after an office competitor accused her of an act of KKN she had not committed. In fact,
he claimed, she fervently opposed corruption and on several occasions had turned family members away who were
asking for preferential treatment because “she wanted to do
things right.” As these cases showed, anticorruption efforts
were making it increasingly hard to distinguish corruption
as a morally reviled practice from practices that count as
“being good” or “doing things right.” It was therefore hard
to understand what corruption actually was.
These problems were particularly acute for Kupang’s
numerous civil servants, who were still adjusting to the effects of recent decentralization efforts at the time of my research. I spent most of my research time working in the
city’s departments of Governance, Human Resources, and
Public Works, where I participated in daily office activities
and civil-servant trainings and meetings, and conducted
over 40 interviews and had countless conversations with
civil servants. Most civil servants did not worry much about
the first K of the KKN acronym, korupsi, apart from laconically commenting that the “higher-ups” now had more
money to line their pockets with. The second K and the N,
kolusi and nepotisme, worried them more.
As part of the post-Suharto political and administrative
reforms, Indonesia had introduced district head elections
in 2004. Although civil servants are officially prohibited
from being involved in political parties, most candidates
for district-head positions in state-dependent Kupang
consisted of higher-echelon civil servants who relied on
their office subordinates as a base of reliable voters. As civil
servants found during Kupang’s first-ever direct mayoral
elections in 2007, picking sides and rewarding loyalty overrode the supposed neutrality of bureaucracy. According to
one particularly unhappy Public Works employee, a new,

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Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

incompetent department head had received his position
only in exchange for supporting a mayoral candidate. “Promotions are not based on merit but on KKN!” he exclaimed.
While the tension between “merit” and “KKN” in
the post-Reformasi mix of bureaucracy and politics was
cause for concern among ordinary lower-level civil servants, it triggered outright anxiety among elite civil servants who were young and ambitious. Budi, a 30-something
subdistrict head and graduate of the prestigious Institute
for Domestic Governance (Institut Pemerintahan Dalam
Negeri, or IPDN, in Bandung, West Java), thought advancing in his career would hinge on ties to appropriate superiors rather than merit.3 During an interview, he told me
he already feared the consequences of the upcoming 2012
mayoral elections, since his career advancement depended
partly on the whims of the new mayor and on the gossip
Budi may be subjected to. His chances of getting promoted
would depend not on his professional accomplishments
but on whether the new mayor suspected that he had supported his candidacy. Failing to support a successful candidate meant that one would have to wait years for a promotion. After the 2007 mayoral elections, the mayor of Kupang, for example, punished his main election opponent by
giving him an “expert staff” (staf ahli) position, which was
not part of the formal civil-service hierarchy and effectively
excluded him from all city-level bureaucratic business.
Valentino, another IPDN graduate whom I got to know
well over the year I lived in his family’s house, shared Budi’s
concern but feared much harsher repercussions. After
graduating from IPDN in 2007, Valentino was appointed
to the sought-after position of mayoral aide-de-camp
(ADC). As an ADC, Valentino accompanied the mayor on
work trips throughout the Indonesian archipelago, living
a cosmopolitan lifestyle few in Kupang enjoyed. Other,
less formal benefits of the position were the tips visitors
would slip him in the hope that he would secure them an
audience with the mayor. Valentino estimated that such
tips on average amounted to $15 (200,000 rupiah) a day
and that each month they amounted to almost five times
his monthly salary. He also once enjoyed a 10-day holiday
in a resort in Bali with the mayor, the mayor’s wife, and
some other local district heads, paid for by a local banker
who hoped these district heads would appoint him to the
directorship of a local bank.
Valentino was no exception when it came to enjoying
the informal perks of working close to the mayor; other civil
servants in a comparable situation also received material
rewards from those hoping to obtain access to the mayor.
During a conversation we had in 2009, Valentino told me
that, during the two years he had worked as a civil servant,
he had received promotions that would have taken others
at least twice as long, simply because he made good use
of his closeness to the mayor. Although this closeness had
brought him financial and professional extras, he feared

666

how it would affect his still-nascent career in Kupang’s civil
service. Valentino told me about the fate suffered by the
previous mayor’s ADC:
It is impossible for civil servants not to get involved [in
elections], not to take sides. I saw what happened to
the former ADC: he got relegated to a regular staff position. Whereas before he was the hands and feet [kaki
tangan, generally used pejoratively to mean “assistant”] of the mayor, he was now the one being ordered
around to fetch staff cigarettes or lunch in the middle
[i.e., hottest part] of the day and perform other humiliating tasks in the department.
Valentino feared that his impressive IPDN degree and
experience as an ADC would never outweigh the fact that
he had been the mayor’s “hands and feet.” Yet, like Budi,
he was unsure. At the heart of their different ideas on how
to prevent the potential disastrous effect of the upcoming
mayoral elections on their careers is a basic uncertainty
about how to navigate post-Suharto local bureaucracy.
This uncertainty is reflected in scholarly studies on
post-Suharto civil service. Although Indonesia implemented far-reaching formal administrative and political
changes with impressive speed (Hofman and Kaiser 2004),
the practical effects of these changes on local politics and
bureaucracy have raised skepticism. For example, in some
places decentralization has exacerbated money politics and
vote selling in local politics (Choi 2004). Furthermore, instead of countering the patrimonialism that so permeated
Suharto’s New Order regime, institutional changes seem
to have facilitated a continuation of “old ways of politics”
emanating from Jakarta toward the regions (Hadiz and
Robison 2013, 36). Entrenched elites stay in power while
aspiring elites employ the logic of patrimonialism to compete in local politics (Choi 2009). Yet, amid mostly gloomy
analyses that frame the state of Indonesian politics in an
age of good governance as a continuation of old patrimonial political practices, Indonesians across the archipelago
have also used their newfound political power to vote out
known corrupt incumbents (Mietzner 2006). Furthermore,
one-dimensional explanations of decentralized Indonesian
politics in terms of money politics or entrenched elites
miss the extent to which the political “reshuffling of cards”
has actually had multiple effects, as Michael Buehler (2007)
notes. The only certainty, so it seems, is uncertainty.
How Budi and Valentino dealt with this uncertainty
shows how they thought the cards were reshuffled in
the specific context of Kupang. Both had different ideas
about how to prevent potential postelection punishment.
Valentino hoped he could count on his established connections with people who were suspected to run for office. In
his capacity as ADC, Valentino felt he had become close
enough to one of the candidates, the vice mayor, not to
fear any postelection retaliation. A second candidate was a

Between the ethical and the right thing

distant relative who would likely look favorably on
Valentino. The third candidate was a good friend of one of
his uncles, who would probably put in a good word on his
behalf.
Unsure of whether counting on various degrees of
closeness with potential candidates would keep his career
safe, Valentino also devised a strategy to circumvent becoming involved in the coming election turmoil. He would
ask the mayor for one last informal favor: to be granted a
“learning task” (tugas belajar), meaning a chance to pursue an academic degree sponsored by the local government.
Such learning tasks are rare and supposed to be given out
only on the basis of merit and not as a favor; this thus arguably constituted a form of KKN. He planned to enroll in a
master’s program at a prominent university in Java, far away
from Kupang. Another uncle held a lecturer position there
and could probably help him get accepted into the program. If he started the program at the beginning of the election year, he might avoid election politics and return after
the postelection dust settled with a new degree to complement the one from IPDN. Maybe this would even earn him
a new promotion into managerial ranks so that he could
never be demoted.
While Valentino looked upward by strengthening connections with potential candidates, Budi looked downward
by strengthening ties with “the people” (rakyat). As he saw
it, the way to advance in post-Suharto administration and
politics was by appealing to voters. “These are not the old
days when subordinates would actually listen to orders
from above,” he said. “People can now decide for themselves who they want to vote for.” He saw the vice mayor’s
subtle strategic actions as a good example of career advancement in the present-day Kupang administration. Budi
claimed that the vice mayor instructed every subdistrict
head to notify him of all weddings and funerals held in their
subdistrict. On such occasions, Budi would send a small
contribution on the vice mayor’s behalf to the celebration,
such as sugar, candy, or a pig. People would hopefully remember these gifts long enough to reciprocate with their
vote. Budi saw this new unobtrusive way of campaigning as
more successful than counting on subordinates’ obedience.
Although different, Budi and Valentino’s strategies revealed commonalities in how they perceived post-Suharto
bureaucracy to work in Kupang. Both thought favoritism,
rather than merit, would help their careers. Their promotions depended on supporting the right candidate,
not being good at their jobs. Furthermore, both thought
connections were crucial to career advancement. Valentino
counted on existing (familial) relationships with seniors
both within and outside the governmental bureaucracy,
while Budi pinned his hopes on yet-to-be-established
relationships with voters. Notably absent in their musings
were concerns about corrupt practices. In fact, both flirted
with, if not fully engaged in, what some might view as



American Ethnologist

corruption. Valentino accepted tips and fully paid trips and
did not hesitate to ask the mayor for special favors. For
Budi, giving gifts to potential voters was a proper means of
advancing his career.
As in other parts of Indonesia, recent decentralization
and democratization efforts in Kupang have not been as unequivocally successful in countering bureaucratic corruption as some had hoped. Rather than decreasing corruption,
the post-Suharto move toward good governance has merely
increased uncertainty of how to stay afloat in local bureaucracy for young elite civil servants. And in Kupang, these
civil servants immediately turn to reciprocal expectations
inherent in relationships, especially family relationships, as
an important way to alleviate the stress of that uncertainty.

Family obligations in Kupang: Between the
ethical and the right thing
Reciprocity is part of everyday bureaucratic practices and
continually blurs lines between formality and informality,
legality and illegality, and what might be considered corruption and what might not. For example, a neighbor who
worked as the treasurer of a city-level department told me
that all civil servants gave her small amounts of “thank-you
money” every time she handed them their monthly salary;
this extra money added substantially to her income. Clients
receiving official documents, such as driver’s licenses or ID
cards, similarly offered some “bus or cigarette money” to
the civil servant who assisted them. This is not to say that
anticorruption efforts were without effects. Civil servants
at one subdistrict office, for instance, installed a “charity
box” where clients who felt the need to reciprocate services could deposit a contribution. Yet, instead of clarifying what counts as corruption, anticorruption efforts have
added confusion, especially when it concerns reciprocal
obligations within family networks.
Valentino’s acceptance into the IPDN was a case in
point. The IPDN is a highly selective academy that accepts
only a limited number of candidates from each region. Its
selection procedures consist of physical, psychological, and
general-knowledge tests, the initial rounds of which take
place in the regions where candidates live. The final testing
takes place on the IPDN campus in Bandung. In the year
Valentino got accepted, only one other young man and one
young woman from Kupang were accepted in addition to
him. After Valentino made it through the selection rounds
in Kupang, he had to travel to Bandung a few times for further testing. After the final round of tests, Valentino was
happy to find his name on a list posted on a campus wall
in the middle of the night and containing the names of the
lucky few who had been accepted.
Much to his surprise, however, a few hours later his
name had disappeared from the list and had been replaced with someone else’s. Valentino suspected that one

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Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

of the other candidates had used connections, influence, or
money to gain a place on the list at his expense, and he did
the only thing he could think of, which was to ask the help of
his uncle, who had a close relationship with the then president of Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Within a few
hours his name was back on the list.
It appears family connections were pivotal in
Valentino’s eventual acceptance into the IPDN. But it
was unclear to Valentino whether the sudden disappearance of his name from the list was the result of someone’s
KKN, and equally unclear if his uncle merely rectified a
wrongdoing or had to engage in some KKN of his own. It
was clear, however, that Valentino had no qualms in calling
his influential uncle when he needed help, and he was
not alone in relying unhesitatingly on family connections.
Whenever I asked civil servants whether they would pick a
family member or an equally skilled unrelated candidate for
a position, all said they would pick the family member. As
Pak Marinus, the head of the local chamber of commerce,
explained to me,
Of course you have to help out family. The opportunities for employment here are too limited to just say, “Go
make it on your own.” If at a family party a family member walks up to me and asks me to give their child a
project, how can I refuse? I will see them again at the
next party.
This nexus of corruption, bureaucracy, and family
or family-like connections is neither new nor unique to
Kupang. Long ago, Edward. C. Banfield (1958) called the
tendency to act in favor of the nuclear family’s short-term
interest in southern Italy in the 1950s “amoral familism.” In
his view, this amoralism was at the root of societal “backwardness,” interfered with a proper functioning of local
bureaucracy and politics, and obstructed opportunities for
collective action. Although widely criticized for its lack of
historical depth and problematic methodology (Ferragina
2009), his analysis of how morality, family, and bureaucracy are intertwined influenced subsequent and more
sophisticated anthropological analyses of such dynamics
as patronage (Boissevain 1966; Campbell 1964), the role of
kinship in bureaucratic inclusion and exclusion (Herzfeld
1992), and the resurgence of an ethics of gift giving under
neoliberal reforms in southern Europe (Muehlebach 2012).
The logic of familial obligations permeates bureaucratic structures across the world. Mayfair Yang (1994) and
Alena Ledenova (2008) stress the intertwining of informal
gift-giving practices with state power in their analyses of
personalized networks of influence in China (guanxi) and
systems of informal connections in Russia (blat), respectively, in the context of state socialism. Daniel Jordan Smith
(2001, 360) emphasizes the importance of evoking bonds of
kinship in political patronage in his study on the culture of

668

corruption in Nigeria. In US corporate culture, furthermore,
kinship, personalized networks, and socialization strategies
also play pivotal roles in allowing corruption to appear as
normal social behavior (MacLennan 2005, 166–68). Rather
than forming an anomalous contradiction to Weberian bureaucratic practice, the reciprocal obligations in family and
family-like connections that obfuscate the nexus between
corruption and morality in Kupang’s bureaucracy resemble bureaucratic practices the world over. But, for those enmeshed within the conflicting logics of familial obligations
and ideal-typical constructions of bureaucratic practice, the
question of how to ethically conduct oneself becomes a
complicated one.
Anderius, another IPDN graduate whom I got to know
while working in the Department of Governance, continuously struggled with such questions. He was born in a
small village on the island of Flores, another island in the
province of NTT. Although none of his relatives worked in
the civil service, his parents, like many other parents in NTT,
hoped he would. They planned to send him to high school
in Kupang, where he could receive a better education than
that available in Flores. Since this was costly, they collected
small donations from family, neighbors, and friends during a family gathering (kumpul keluarga), as is common
in NTT when families need to raise money for expensive
projects. Thanks in part to this family gathering and the
money raised there, Anderius was able to attend high school
in Kupang, which then enabled him to enter the IPDN and
ultimately land a civil-service position.
After he finished his education, however, relatives and
friends from Flores occasionally asked Anderius for help in
getting civil-service positions. With them, as he explained,
he shared the world of the ethical (etika), which is an ethics
that crosses state-society boundaries and follows the reciprocal logic of family gatherings. He was now, however,
also part of what he called the world of the “right thing”
(kebenaran), which he shared with his university friends
and fellow elite civil servants. In this world he felt the obligation to adhere to office rules that differed from, and often
contradicted, the ethics of family obligations. In a sense, he
thus found himself in what J. P. Olivier de Sardan (1999, 48)
called a “schizophrenic situation,” in which civil servants’
administrative and professional legitimacy conflicts with
their social legitimacy. By helping out family members, he
broke office rules, but by adhering to rules he let down family members. According to him there was no unambiguous
distinction between being a good or corrupt civil servant;
one was either right and not corrupt or corrupt yet ethical.
Thus, in Kupang the reciprocal obligations of family
and family-like circles blurred state-society boundaries and
complicated what counted as corruption. Although most
civil servants could immediately tell me what KKN stands
for, few would consider it to mean common practices such
as giving the department’s treasurer thank-you money after

Between the ethical and the right thing

receiving monthly salaries or accepting some “bus money”
in exchange for services offered. Even fewer would consider
it to mean the “ethical” act of helping family members. As
we have seen, the self-evidence of helping out family went
mostly unquestioned: Valentino called his uncle for help,
Pak Marinus favored family members, and Florenese relatives expected Anderius to give them an entrance into civil
service. Anderius traced the persistence of “the ethical” to
the reciprocal practices in NTT family networks and credited his thorough civil-service education with his realization
of what constitutes “the right thing.” The primacy he gave to
a Weberian bureaucratic rationality over and against Scott’s
concept of a local moral economy, however, is not only uncommon among civil servants in Kupang but also at odds
with ideological assumptions that underlie the workings of
the Indonesian state apparatus.

Family principles in the Indonesian state
The preeminence of family not only resonates in the particular locality of Kupang, where helping out family members
takes ethical precedence over the “right thing,” but also permeates the entire Indonesian state apparatus, thereby further complicating what counts as corruption in the nexus of
bureaucracy, ethics, and family. The idea that the Indonesian state ought to be organized on the basis of a “family principle” (azas kekeluargaan, derived from the Indonesian word for family, keluarga) has been a fundamental
part of what it means to be Indonesian since the very conception of the Indonesian nationalist project in the early
20th century (Boellstorff 2005; Bourchier 1997; Steedly 2013,
203–7).
The family principle holds that the state is organized as
a family. This notion was first articulated and popularized
in the 1920s by the national education movement Taman
Siswa (Shiraishi 1997). The movement envisioned that this
principle would offer a model for a new and egalitarian
community that contrasted with the Dutch model of colonial rule. It adopted the words bapak, ibu, and anak from
Malay, which at that time functioned as a lingua franca
throughout the archipelago but had no connection to any
particular social structure or location. Bapak, ibu, and anak
in Malay, and now in Indonesian, mean “father,” “mother,”
and “child.” The Taman Siswa movement borrowed these
words to refer, also, to superiors and subordinates in
classrooms and bureaucratic structures. A Bapak is not
only a father but also a male teacher or office superior. An
Ibu is not only a mother but also a female teacher or office
superior. And anak are not only children but also pupils and
office subordinates. From these Taman Siswa origins the
family principle became enshrined in the 1945 constitution
and has been central ever since to the organization of
schools, the military, and the civil service. Parents, teachers,
department heads, and presidents alike are Bapak and Ibu,



American Ethnologist

while sons, daughters, pupils, subordinates, and citizens
are all anak.4
The family principle’s ideal family has never been entirely stable and has changed over time. In nationalist debates that ultimately led to Taman Siswa’s adoption of the
family principle, disagreements already existed concerning what kind of family could provide a suitable model
for a future Indonesia. Some advocated a hierarchical family model consisting of a wise father, caring mother, and
dutiful, respectful children, whereas others propagated a
so-called democratic republic model in which children did
not fear standing up to their parents (Shiraishi 1997, 84–
86). Sukarno, who became Indonesia’s first president after
the overthrow of the Dutch regime, modeled his leadership
on the second arrangement. In his political reign, know as
the Guided Democracy, which mixed democracy with autocracy, he and his wife looked over their nation of anak as
a proud Bapak and Ibu, while countless other Bapak and
Ibu in homes, classrooms, and bureaucratic offices led their
own anak/pupils/subordinates—but as democratic equals
rather than authoritarian superiors.
Under Suharto’s New Order regime the egalitarian and
revolutionary underpinnings of the Indonesian familycum-state gave way to a more hierarchical conception of
family based on a strict gender-role division, and with it
a conception of Bapak more in line with the first model.
Julia I. Suryakusuma (1996) describes the gender ideology
that accompanied this version of the family principle as
Bapak Ibuism (Father-Motherism). Civil servants played
an important part in the New Order entanglement of state,
family, and authority, not merely because civil servants
were a vital source of political support but also because civil
servants had to provide a “perfect” example of Indonesian
national selfhood. Perfection entailed both loyalty to the
Indonesian family-state and an embodiment of its gender
and sexual ideologies. Civil servants therefore joined the
national Civil Servants Corps of the Republic of Indonesia
(Korps Pegawai Republik Indonesia, or KORPRI), while
their wives joined the female auxiliary Dharma Wanita
(Women’s Association). The New Order family principle
thus required loyal men, caring wives and mothers, and
obedient children under the all-seeing, watchful gaze of the
ultimate Bapak, wise father Suharto.
In Kupang, the family-cum-state trope was often used,
but not unproblematically. Employees of the Department of
Governance depicted their department head as a strict yet
kind “father” who made sure everything ran correctly. The
subdepartment head at the Department of Public Works
also portrayed his relationships to coworkers in familial
terms. He told me that he viewed the office as a family
with the department head as the “father” and himself as
the “mother.” The department head’s job, according to him,
was to make sure all the work got done, whereas it was his
mothering role to keep all children close to him and take

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Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

care of them. But in light of how many civil servants navigate ethics in post-Suharto bureaucracy, the multiple possible connotations of family and intrafamilial expectations
made it difficult for them to weigh the loyalty that characterized the New Order “perfection” against what Anderius
called the “right thing” of office rules, as well as against “the
ethical” of family obligations.
This difficulty in weighing ethical demands was evident
in a story told by Christian, a lower-level employee at Public
Works. Christian told me that when he and his coworkers
evaluated project proposals, the department head would
sometimes stick his head into the room and tell them that
so-and-so had to win the project. This, as Christian explained, meant that so-and-so and the head had informally arranged for this particular proposal to win, even
if this meant circumventing official rules. Christian said
most of his coworkers usually made sure these proposals won, partly because they stood to receive “smoothing”
or thank-you money, but also because this is simply what
a subordinate does: when the Bapak orders, subordinates
obey. Christian himself tried not to listen to such commands from superiors, or at least so he claimed, and instead
judged each proposal fairly and honestly, even if by doing
this he disobeyed his superior. Christian might be “right,”
but he is not “perfect.” He may be “good,” but he is not
“ethical.”
The self-evidence of helping out family, which strictly
speaking falls under the “collusion” or “nepotism” part of
the KKN acronym, thus does not merely characterize the
rules of a local moral economy that contrasts with a Weberian bureaucratic rationality. The inextricable intertwining
of family ideology with the Indonesian state apparatus puts
the primacy of family and reciprocal obligations at the heart
of good bureaucratic practice.
Some civil servants did not face the dilemma of being stuck between the ethical and the right thing as Anderius did, yet they cannot be straightforwardly understood
as corrupt. The moral-ethical navigation of Kupang’s civil
service does not consist of choosing between several totalizing moralities. Rather, the question of how not to be corrupt in contemporary Indonesia takes place in what Jarrett
Zigon calls a “moral assemblage,” which unites “diverse and
often contradictory discourses as well as diverse and sometimes incompatible embodied moral dispositions” (2013,
202). This allows people to recognize “more possibilities for
resonance that permit individuals to comfortably live, reflect, and ethically work on themselves” (202). In such an assemblage what counts as corruption at times overlaps with
what is “ethical,” “right,” or “perfect.”

Training loyalty and obedience
Young elite civil servants in Kupang grasp for the trope
of family and the imperative of reciprocity when they are

670

uncertain of how to navigate post-Suharto local bureaucracy in an age of good governance and anticorruption. This
trope of family and implied reciprocal obligations reverberates in the contexts of both Kupang and a larger historical context of Indonesian nation- and state-building. The
trope therefore makes possible a slippage between a Weberian “right thing,” Maussian “ethical,” or nation-state “perfect.” Put differently, it makes possible a slippage between
what counts as corruption and not corruption. But how are
civil servants prepared to navigate the ethics of local bureaucracy? What do they learn at the IPDN?
Whereas most universities and other tertiary educational institutions churn out content civil servants who,
for the most part, are happily employed in lower-level
bureaucracy with modest but still-present prospects for
promotions, the IPDN trains civil servants for the elite
bureaucracy, where the opportunities for upward mobility
are greater. The IPDN’s program consists of four years on
a carefully secluded campus in the art of governance, and
gives students all the skills and opportunities necessary
to move up in regional, provincial, and national bureaucracies. Ironically, however, the dispositions that make
up the professionalism that the IPDN trains its students
for are also the ones that potentially prepare them for
engaging in corrupt practices. Rather than countering the
potential for slippage in the particular moral assemblage of
post-Suharto Kupangese bureaucracy, it reinforces it.
The IPDN is rumored to be a violent institution. Occasionally, newspapers publish stories about injuries and
even deaths among the students. For example, in 2003 several IPDN dropouts discussed the frequent beatings they
suffered from their seniors (Tempo 2003), and in January
2011 a female student died from internal bleeding caused
by being beaten in the stomach (Kompas 2011). Although
Valentino generally remained tight-lipped about his IPDN
past, every now and then he would give in to my relentless inquiries. One afternoon while hanging out on our front
porch, for example, he showed me a video shot and edited
by a fellow IPDN student that depicted outdoor exercise
sessions.5
The video started off pleasantly enough with groups of
young men and women in exercise outfits jogging, running
up and down steps, and doing push-ups and sit-ups. After
a few minutes, however, these scenes were followed by
others that depicted the same young men lined up and
getting kicked or punched in the stomach one by one
by what appeared to be their superiors—although it was
unclear to me whether these superiors were senior students
or institute staff. The camera then focused on a row of
young men lined up at the top of a long flight of stairs. One
superior ran up and forcefully kicked the first student in
line, then the second, the third, and so forth. Unable to stay
standing, the young men tripped backward and fell down
the stairs, gasping and coughing. How did this seem like

Between the ethical and the right thing

a suitable way of preparing aspiring civil servants whose
most strenuous tasks would consist of sitting behind desks
and processing documents?
Vigorous physical training has long formed a part of
the IPDN. Although this is partly explained by the militaristic style of the New Order regime (Suryakusuma 1996), the
IPDN’s current educational system is no longer based on
an explicit military ideology. Yet physical training still forms
a central component of its curriculum. The IPDN’s system,
as explained on its website, is based on the “central trinity”
of education (pendidikan), which refers to the transfer
of knowledge; training (pelatihan), which pertains to the
internalization of civil-service values in the students; and
“upbringing” (pengasuhan), which involves the transfer
of motor skills necessary for the execution of civil-service
tasks.6 Civil-servant trainings thus exceed a classroom
exchange or transfer of information and rely to a great
extent on bodily disciplining.
Why such bodily disciplining is deemed important becomes clearer if we examine another context in which civil
servants are trained: the Pre-office Education and Training
(Pendidikan Dan Pelatihan Pra-Jabatan, commonly known
by the acronym diklat), a civil-service course.7 Newly accepted civil servants who have been working in the offices
for a year on a trial basis take this course to become “full”
civil servants. Although part of the course consists of classroom learning and lectures on governance, as I found out
when I joined a few sessions in Kupang, much of diklat
training explicitly targets the body. Learning how to march
properly or how to hold one’s body in a specific manner, for instance, creates a bodily disposition necessary to
civil servants. In the documentary Performances of Authority, a drill instructor explains the purpose of these diklat
marching drills:
This is a marching drill, a part of the training for civilservant candidates. The purpose of this drill is to create discipline. In marching, people have to obey commands. So later in their duty as civil servants, they will
also be disciplined. They march in good order, following commands. (Steijlen and Simandjuntak 2011)
According to the instructor, learning how to march
properly is a means to becoming a well-disciplined and
obedient civil servant. Those who can march in order
and follow commands while doing so will also execute office tasks properly in an obedient and cooperative manner. Marching, therefore, is a means of making obedience
an embodied disposition. But what does this embodied
disposition reveal about being an ethical civil servant?
Another scene from Performances of Authority, this one
from a diklat held in the little western Indonesian island
of Bintan, depicts a female trainee’s attempt at marching
and practicing roll call, followed by a superior’s scolding



American Ethnologist

outburst. As the trainee carries a folder under her left arm,
she must lead her fellow trainees into reading the KORPI’s
Code of Ethics, which she eventually does after repeatedly
being corrected by the instructor as she marches up to the
spot where she can start reading. Speaking in a loud voice,
she finally reads all the sentences of the ethics code, as her
fellow trainees repeat after her:
We the members of the Civil Service Corps of the
Republic of Indonesia [trainees repeat] are people of
faith [trainees repeat] and subservient to the one God
[trainees repeat], loyal and obedient to the unified state
and government of the Republic of Indonesia [trainees
repeat], prioritizing the interests of the state [trainees
repeat] and society [trainees repeat] above our personal or group interests [trainees repeat]. (Steijlen and
Simandjuntak 2011)
After the participants finish proclaiming their practiced
lines, the instructor singles out a woman in the assembled
row of trainees, who apparently squatted while everyone
was repeating the lines. He now forces her to squat while
everybody else remains standing. He explains why he is
punishing her:
Please heed this. When there is a command to stay
in attention, stay in good attention. When you return to your own duties later, if you ask help from
your colleagues, let alone your subordinates, what
would you feel if they don’t obey you? Especially you,
who are educators: if you don’t follow my command
here, it will also happen to you at work. (Steijlen and
Simandjuntak 2011)
As in the previous example, civil servants repeatedly
practice how to march, how to move their arms and legs,
when to stop, where to turn, how loud to speak, when to
answer, and whom to answer to. In doing so, they come
to embody the importance of following rules. This disposition cannot be separated from the particular moral discourse that diklat instructors aim to attach their trainees
to through this bodily disciplining. What ultimately matters
is subservience to a greater good, whether this is following
superiors’ commands or loyalty to God or the state.8 One’s
own private or group interests are unimportant; what is important is one’s place in a hierarchy that emphasizes obedience to superiors and loyalty to the corps, government, and
nation.
As a kind of extended diklat that trains Indonesia’s future bureaucratic elite, the IPDN also succeeds in delivering obedient, loyal civil servants. This, at least, is what
Valentino took from the IPDN reminiscences that he occasionally shared with me. He remembered, for instance, the
times when senior students would wake him and his fellow
cohort members in the middle of the night and make them

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Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

run laps. Or when they had to stand in formation for hours
in the pouring rain. Or when a senior student had them
clean the toilet with a toothbrush when he found the toilet too dirty, and then made them all brush their teeth with
it. Valentino said he could still recall the taste that the rancid toothbrush left in his mouth. While relating such anecdotes, he smiled. He never expressed anger over harsh or
senseless punishments. Instead, he emphasized that all his
cohort members shared feelings of disgust at their communal punishments, that they would laugh together afterward,
and that they would cover up one another’s missteps. To
him, punishments were about experiencing a sense of togetherness and learning obedience, respect for institutional
superiors, and discipline. Punishments such as these produced strong, long-lasting bonds of loyalty, camaraderie,
and solidarity among students and alumni.
This kind of strict training can be understood as a way
of breaking students’ particularistic ties and reorienting loyalty toward the universalistic principles of bureaucratic rationalism. Indeed, the Code of Ethics emphasizes loyalty to
God, government, and state. Yet this successful disciplining
into a rule-following disposition does not necessarily create
an ethical disposition of loyalty solely to nation, state, and
God, and of obedience only to office superiors, given the
complex entanglement of state and family in Kupang’s local state apparatus and the centrality of the family principle
in the Indonesian nation-state. When one is both a member of an actual family and a child/servant of the familycum-state, in which the demands of each not only conflict
but operate in highly differentiated ways, such demands
may regularly become incompatible, so being a good family member may require one to act in ways that contradict
either the regulatory disciplines of civil service or the ethics
of family life.
In other words, in a larger moral assemblage with
overlapping and conflicting discourses and ideologies,
the ethical disposition of obedience and loyalty based on
the importance of following rules facilitates a slippage
among the “right thing,” the “ethical,” “corruption,” and
“perfection.” It is perhaps no wonder that the latest move
against corruption in civil service, the move toward good
governance, only adds another opportunity for slippage.
Indeed, as we will see, good governance does not clear up
the ethical murkiness in which civil servants like Budi and
Valentino try to stay afloat. It confuses things even further.

Ethics in an age of good governance
More or less in tandem with their concern about corruption, development institutions such as the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF) developed an interest
in the concept of governance in the 1990s, after they decided that “bad governance” was responsible for the failure
of structural-adjustment programs. They associated bad

672

governance with the personalization of power, endemic
corruption, and unelected governments, among other
things. “Good governance,” which counts transparency, anticorruption, and accountability among its values, became
the new key feature that would facilitate development and
become a condition for receiving international aid (Hough
2013; Weiss 2000). Although international finance had long
praised Indonesia’s large-scale economic growth under
Suharto’s authoritarian rule, it also blamed the country’s
financial collapse in 1997 on its corruption, cronyism, and
lack of political transparency. The IMF therefore made good
governance a nonnegotiable condition of the bailout package it offered Indonesia later that year (Thompson 2004).
The political and administrative anticorruption changes
that Indonesia underwent after Suharto’s resignation in
1998 were thus not only a reaction to the fervent Reformasi
protesters but also part of the IMF-supported move toward
good governance.
Good governance also forms an important part of the
IPDN’s institutional aims. The section of the IPDN’s website on the principles of good governance—which could
have been translated directly from a World Bank website—
covered general topics such as public participation, upholding the rule of law, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and efficiency.9 It also included an Indonesia-specific
agenda to “realize good government,” which depicted
Indonesia in a state of political, economic, and social turmoil that could all be traced to Indonesia’s “less democratic” (kurang demokratis) past. The way forward is
through political, economic, and legal reforms along the
lines of “good governance adapted to the real conditions of
the nation at this time.” Indeed, as the website went on to
emphasize, good governance has become an integral part
of public discourse in post-Suharto Indonesia:
Since the fall of the New Order and its replacement
with the Reformasi movement, the term Good Governance has become so popular. On almost every occasion or important event related to governance, this
term is not left out. Even in speeches, government
officials use the above-mentioned words. In short,
Good Governance has become an increasingly popular
discourse in society.10
Yet, so the text reveals, it is not entirely clear what
“good governance” and, particularly, “good” actually entail.
Whereas similar neoliberal catchwords such as transparency, efficiency, and accountability have been borrowed
from English into Indonesian and phonologically adapted
(transparansi, efisiensi, akuntabilitas), good governance
remains untranslated, which might be why the text elaborates: “Even though the words Good Governance are often
mentioned . . . at various events and by various groups,
the meaning of Good Governance can differ from one

Between the ethical and the right thing

[person, institution] to the next.” Nevertheless, it specifically showcases the World Bank’s definition of good
governance, which stresses responsibility, market efficiency, principles of democracy, prevention of corruption,
and legal and political stimulation of business activity. In
case these manifold conceptions of good governance might
still confuse readers who have noticed the upsurge in the
term’s use but are not entirely sure how to make sense of it,
the website offers a concise definition: “Good Governance is
generally defined as ‘the management of government that
is good’ [pengelolaan pemerintahan yang baik].” For those
to whom this tautological description is still insufficient,
the section finally singles out the word “good.” What does
good mean? “The word ‘good’ here is intended as following
certain rules in accordance with the principles of Good
Governance.”
At this point it is probably unnecessary to point out
that this equation of “good” with following rules is familiar
to IPDN students and civil servants in general, and offers
further potential for slippage. Following rules is, after all,
what civil servants are taught to do, and thus offers something recognizable to grasp onto. Even if the meaning of
good governance is still unclear, the idea of following rules
is not. As a result, the idea of the good that neoliberal goodgovernance ideology offers does not, as its proponents
hope, lead to an unequivocal moral victory over corruption.
When neoliberalism seeks to reform, as Stephen Collier
(2005) claims, it does not so much bring its own values as
co-opts and transforms already-existing values. In a similar
vein, the good of good governance does not establish a
new conception of ethical selfhood but, rather, becomes
incorporated into the already-ambiguous moral-ethical
entanglements of “perfection,” the “ethical,” and the “right
thing,” which conflict and overlap in the wider moral assemblage in which Kupang’s civil servants live their lives.11

Conclusion: The good, the bad, and the ethical
To a large extent, Budi, Valentino, and other civil servants
struggled through their ethical dilemmas to feel at home
again in the moral-ethical landscape of post-Suharto
bureaucracy. Anticorruption measures inspired by goodgovernance ideology only increased civil servants’ uncertainty about what counted as corruption in this already
ethically complex landscape. Reciprocal obligations within
family and family-like structures, the family principle at
the root of the construction of the Indonesian nationstate, and harsh training practices have all facilitated a
slippage among various ways of being ethical. Rather than
clearing up this complexity, the good of good governance
has merely added to the already-existing potential for
slippage since good governance became the international
community’s primary development ideology in the 1990s.
Furthermore, the good of good governance helps make



American Ethnologist

Budi and Valentino recognizable as corrupt while rendering invisible how they could simultaneously be “perfect”
civil servants, “loyal” anak, or “ethical” family members.
Good-governance discourse thus renders a particular
“good” as the only possible constituent of ethical selfhood
while neglecting its complicity in producing the “bad” it
supposedly combats. Budi and Valentino’s struggles, then,
show that ethnographers should attend to the complexities
of actual ethical being-in-the-world in a global context of
unwavering neoliberal advancement, whose logics and
particular moralism ensnare not just Kupang’s bureaucrats
but workers in bureaucratic institutions the world over.
Budi and Valentino had to find their grounding in a
changing matrix of bureaucracy, corruption, and ethics
in which old and new ways of doing politics, local and
national reciprocal logics, and familial and neoliberal
discourses simultaneously clashed and corresponded,
contradicted and overlapped. The ethical primacy of family
resonated, albeit in different ways, in both the particular
locality of Kupang and the national context of building the
Indonesian nation-state. The importance of following rules
formed a central part of IPDN’s harsh bodily training, with
its ambiguous ethical outcomes, but it also reverberated
in understandings of good governance and was thus implicated in both an unintentional furthering of corruption
and an intentional furthering of a particular good. For civil
servants like Budi and Valentino, finding one’s grounding
was not about progressing from being corrupt to being
good but about making sense of the ethical bureaucratic
murk that anticorruption efforts had added to.
Attuning to the ethical dilemmas that civil servants
face reveals some of the contours and contents of particular moral assemblages in which civil servants, as well as
others, find themselves enmeshed as neoliberal discourses
expand. The concept of moral assemblages captures the
points of resonance, overlaps, and contradictions we teased
out of civil servants’ dilemmas, and it does this much more
clearly than, for example, the teleological modernization
paradigm that underlies anticorruption efforts. Considering corruption from the starting point of ethical dilemmas
and through the framework of moral assemblages thus offers anthropologists productive ways of investigating the
complexities at the intersection of corruption, bureaucracy,
and ethics.
For years, anthropologists of bureaucracy have heeded
calls by such pioneers as Don Handelman (1981) and
Michael Herzfeld (1992) to attend to actual bureaucratic
practices in order to challenge the on-the-ground viability of rigid Weberian conceptualizations of bureaucracy
(Abélès 1991; Gupta 1995; Hull 2012). Given that these conceptualizations of contemporary neoliberal anticorruption
efforts have an enduring influence and that they are part of
the wider good governance ideology, the need to focus on
actual bureaucratic practices has lost none of its urgency.

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Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016

But since anticorruption efforts are never neutral in either
their assumptions or their effects, anthropologists should
also turn to actual bureaucratic ethics to dismantle the
on-the-ground viability of simplistic conceptualizations
of corruption that form a part of ideological attempts to
do good. In Kupang, Budi and Valentino navigate daily
between the ethical and the right thing under constant fear
of being seen as corrupt. In a context in which a particular
conception of good is gaining increasing moral force, it is
imperative that we attend to the manifold ways that people
must ethically negotiate this moral ambiguity in all of its
contradictory complexity.

Notes
Acknowledgments. This research formed part of In Search
of Middle Indonesia, a research program initiated by the Royal
Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
and generously funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Science. I am grateful to Masdalifah Marbun, Diana Pakasi,
Annemarie Samuels, Amalinda Savirani, Jarrett Zigon, and the
anonymous reviewers of AE for their detailed and helpful comments. To avoid potential conflict of interest with AE’s editor in
chief, who worked in the same department as me when I submitted
this article, the review process was overseen by AE associate editor
Susan Brownell. I would like to thank her, Angelique Haugerud, and
Niko Besnier for their guidance.
1. The Reformasi movement was a coalition of pro-democracy
and human rights groups that in 1998 held mass demonstrations
demanding political openness and democratization. It played a
pivotal role in ending Suharto’s New Order regime and ushering in
a new period of reforms—Reformasi.
2. Although the concept of assemblage within anthropology
tends to be associated with either the work of Aihwa Ong and
Stephen Collier (2005) or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987),
it has a conceptual history that can be traced to the phenomenological tradition, most notably in the work of Martin Heidegger,
Hannah Arendt, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
3. To protect the anonymity of my interlocutors, I use
pseudonyms throughout.
4. To clarify, the Indonesian words for father and mother,
adopted from Malay, are bapak and ibu. The capitalized Bapak and
Ibu refer to teachers, department heads, and other social and professional superiors.
5. In April 2007, Indonesian TV channel Metro TV News
aired parts of this video. It consequently made its rounds on
the Internet and attracted a score of outraged comments on
YouTube. See the video at YouTube, accessed July 12, 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9OqM0AOAKUA.
6. IPDN website, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.ipdn.ac.id.
7. The Indonesian civil service is inundated with acronyms and
abbreviations for positions, practices, and procedures. Diklat is the
abbreviation for the Pendidikan Dan Pelatihan Pra-Jabatan (Preoffice Education and Training). The acronym results from joining
the “dik” in Pendidikan (Education) with the “lat” of Pelatihan
(Training).
8. The subservience to “the one God” echoes the first of the
five pillars (Pancasila) that form the founding philosophy of the
Indonesian state. Although the vast majority of Indonesians are
Muslim, the government also recognizes Hinduism, Catholicism,
Protestantism, Buddhism, and Confucianism as part of the first
pillar, which is the belief in one God. The IPDN, in line with the

674

secularist basis of the state, does not single out specific religious
values in its trainings. It does offer places of worship to students
of diverse religious backgrounds, such as Christian students from
Kupang. The importance of Indonesia’s unity, which is the third
pillar, overrides its many internal differences, including religious
ones.
9. The good-governance principles were posted on the IPDN’s
website, accessed August 1, 2014, http://www.ipdn.ac.id/index
.php?option=com-content&view=article&id=106%3Agood-%20
governance&catid=40%3Aartikel-&lang=en. As of this writing,
they no longer appear.
10. Ibid.
11. Daromir Rudnyckyj (2010) demonstrates such moral-ethical
entanglements and neoliberalism’s capacity to co-opt and transform already-existing values in his analysis of how the seemingly
incompatible discourses of neoliberal capitalist ethics and Islam
converge in trainings aimed at Indonesian factory workers’ individual moral reform.

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Sylvia Tidey
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Postbus 15718
1001 NE Amsterdam
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s.tidey@uva.nl