The music of Arabs, the sound of Islam

This dissertation explores the cultural traditions and identity affiliations of Islamic communities of Arab descent ( keturunan Arab ) in Eastern Indonesia. It further explores the role of Arab-Indonesian culture in the larger Indonesian Islamic community. Arab-Indonesian communities are comprised of third and fourth generation descendents of immigrants from Hadramaut, Yemen. Although Arab-Indonesians have assimilated into Indonesian society--their costumes, their cuisines, and even their daily languages are those of typical Indonesians--those that live in this predominantly Christian region of the Indonesian Republic rely on Arab-derived music and dance forms to mark their distinctive ethnic and religious identity. The focus of this study is orkes gambus , a genre of music and dance that remains an essential part of Arab-Indonesian community celebration but is also adopted as an Islamic expressive art form across Indonesia.^ I use this musical genre as means to discuss modern ethnic and religious identity negotiation in Indonesia. I begin the dissertation with an introduction to the history and cultural traditions of Arab-Indonesian communities in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, my fieldwork site, and then offer three thematic chapters that explore (1) how orkes gambus music is used to express "Arab" identity within a typical Arab wedding in North Sulawesi, while in other contexts, Arab Indonesians adopt different forms of music to express national, local, and religious identities; (2) how the orkes gambus genre has changed due to global and technological flows, but remains a form of "traditional" Arab (and even Islamic) music; and (3) the manners in which non-Arab Muslims adopt and reject this music in Indonesia as part of Islamic expressive culture.^ Central to my study is an examination of the ways in which ethnic and religious groups negotiate their group affiliations through sonic and linguistic markers and reinvent cultural boundaries and community through performance. My research suggests that Arab-Indonesian culture, while sometimes presented as primarily ethnic in identification, is also used increasingly as an exemplar of global/Islamic expression due to recent changes in ideological landscapes of ethnic pride and religious conformism in Indonesia.