Petra Mahy

Presumptions of promiscuity: reflections on being a widow or divorcee from three Indonesian communities

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with a pervasive gender stereotype within Indonesian society, that of janda, meaning both widows and divorcees. The term janda is no neutral signifier of marital status, but rather carries a bundle of pejorative meanings concerned with status and presumed sexual availability to men. It is bound up within assumptions about the normality of heterosexual marriage in Indonesia, and in many ways janda is the antithesis of the ideal of ibu, meaning a virtuous wife and mother. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by each of the three authors, the article examines the reproduction and effects of this stereotype in three Indonesian communities; a village in East Java, a mining town in East Kalimantan and among Indonesian expatriates in Perth, Australia. Using this multi-sited and multi-positioned material we reflect on the everyday lived experience of being a janda, in particular how the stereotype affects social status, livelihood opportunities and modes of representing oneself within a particular community.

The evolution of company law in Indonesia: An exploration of legal innovation and stagnation

The question of the extent to which “transplant” countries continue to exhibit a particular style and substance of company regulation that mimics that of their respective “origin” countries has become particularly salient since the influential “legal origins” theory was proposed. This Article examines in detail the long historical evolution of company law in Indonesia from the colonial period to the present. Inspired by the approach of Pistor et al. (2002), this research finds some “legal origins” effects in the ways that Indonesian company law has developed, but it also notes that patterns of change have been significantly different from that of its former colonizer, the Netherlands. Indonesia experienced an extended period of time in which no change to its main company law occurred and has displayed evidence of adaptation to local conditions only more recently. This research reveals, however, that many of the contributing explanatory factors for this long period of legal stagnation in Indonesia are found outside Pistor et al.’s analytical framework. They include the ongoing effects of “colonial legal history” rather than “legal family effects,” particularly of the race-based plural legal system, competing ideological approaches to business regulation, and the existence of informal business entities. This suggests that a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial and developing economy realities is needed in order to redefine the category of “transplant” countries in comparative studies of company law.

The Functional Approach in Comparative Socio-Legal Research: Reflections Based on a Study of Plural Work Regulation in Australia and Indonesia

This article examines the potential use and limits of Zweigert and Kotz’ classical functional approach in comparative law for an empirical socio-legal research project. The project involves a comparison of the formal labour laws and informal norms and institutions which regulate restaurant work in the cities of Melbourne, Australia, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The article argues that the functional approach is a necessary but incomplete method for overcoming the many issues of comparability between the two research sites; the method requires both extension of its analytical steps and explicit explanation of its limitations.

Classifying the Legal System of the Philippines: A Preliminary Analysis with Reference to Labor Law

In some recent international literature on comparative law and economics, the Philippines has been misclassified as a civil law family country. This paper provides a corrective to this view by tracing the foreign influences on the Philippine legal system as a whole, and on the development of labor law specifically, to demonstrate that American common law influence has far outweighed that of the Spanish civil law heritage. However, this is only part of the story, as in the post-colonial era, the law of the Philippines has progressively reflected local political and economic conditions and in many instances has developed without any direct reference to external models. Hence, this paper argues that the Philippines is more rightly classified as a hybrid legal system dominated by common law traditions, but that such a classification will still not adequately describe the nature of the current system.