In The Urban Grotesque, Doreen Lee shows how ordinary life is made and sustained in Jakarta, one of the world’s largest and most dense cities, through obligation and debt, grift and grounded financial practices. Lee centers the concept of the urban grotesque as a fiscal imaginary and ethical schema, demonstrating how it moves comprehension of urban life beyond the aspirational toward a more sober understanding of the costs of living alongside others in an unequal and expensive modern city. Weaving ethnographic descriptions with parables that illuminate core urban lessons, Lee draws readers into the movements and moods of everyday experience in Jakarta across the city’s most common spaces and problems. Utilizing tropes of circulation to reveal and critique the social forms of Jakarta, The Urban Grotesque explores how compliance and resistance to debts and gifts inform the financial streams that underlie the urban landscape.

Doreen Lee is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. She is the author of Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Jakarta: The Urban Grotesque (Alternatively, “Jakarta: A Love Letter”)  1
Parable 1. The Fake Gift  25
1. Urban Futures  29
Parable 2. The Big Durian (Reuse, Recyclye, Repurpose)  51
2. Absolute Traffic  57
Parable 3. The Haircut  79
3. Gemstones  83
Parable 4. The Switch  103
4. The Friendship Bank  107
Parable 5. Consignment  137
5. Urban Crime  141
Parable 6. The Hot Phone  165
6. Hypnotic Crime: A Theory of Compliance  167
Parable 7. A Sick Child (Circulation, Territory, Rules)  187
Afterword  191
Notes  195
Bibliography  209
Index