Focusing on friendship practices and perceptions in contemporary Java, this book takes an innovative approach to analysing social structure, relatedness, and patronage in the context of a postcolonial nation in the Global South. Friendships in Java are highly flexible forms of relatedness that are embedded in a particular cultural context and influenced by Javanese cosmology, Islam, and political structure. This mixture has produced notions of sociality that were exploited by Indonesia’s first two presidents in an effort to unite the new and fragmented nation. The book suggests that friendship relations in Java resemble a synthesis of Javanese ideals of good behaviour, the need for social security, attachment, and the influence of national culture politics. They constitute a major form of relatedness that is particular to postcolonial Indonesia.
