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Abstract: In DIY punk scenes around the world there are varying interpretations of what 'doing-it-yourself ' means. For the punks at Rumah Pirata, a punk collective near Bandung, Indonesia, DIY is a form of practiced anarchism. They frame their definition of DIY around interactions based on mutual aid, non-hierarchical organizational practices, and deep-seated anti-capitalist sentiments. To them, doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-friends and doing-it-without-profiting. In many ways, the power dynamics embedded in standard ethnographic research run counter to Rumah Pirata's collectivist ethics. In this article I discuss a collaborative visual ethnography project done in conjunction with the Rumah Pirata collective, designed to incorporate DIY anarchist principles into ethnographic methods. Through participatory ethnographic photography and the collective construction of a photo-book/ zine, I demonstrate that collaborative visual methods offer a way to curtail the power dynamics inherent in ethnography, thereby facilitating enhanced understandings of the interworking of a punk anarchist collective.
Keywords: Visual ethnography, Punk, Anarchism, Indonesia
Somewhere in the volcanic mountains surrounding Bandung, Indonesia, is a punk rock anarchist collective called Rumah Pirata. Though purposely difficult to find, the collective and its do-it-yourself (DIY) venue called Klub Racun are key components of the underground music scene in Bandung. Punk rock is alive and thriving in the urban centers of Indonesia and has been for some time. If you are tuned in to the visual cues of punk, it is difficult to wander around Bandung, Jakarta, Denpasar, or any other major city in the country without seeing markers of the scene. Early in my fieldwork I bumped into some teenagers who were misbehaving in the Dago area of Bandung, and one of them was extremely excited that the band shirt I was wearing and the backpatch on his jacket were both representing the same obscure punk band from Portland, Oregon.1 Indeed, the punks in Bandung are both numerous and plugged into the broader global punk rock scene, in no small part due to the translocal networking of Rumah Pirata.
Discussing the Bandung punk scene as though it is a cohesive and well-delineated group would be inaccurate. From a purely logistical standpoint, Bandung is too big a city with too much gridlock to portray as if there were merely one scene. If you were to travel by car...