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‘Straightening What’s Crooked’? Recognition as Moral Disruption in Indonesia’s Confucianist Revival

ABSTRACT In 2006, the Indonesian state re-recognised Confucianism as an official religion, but this did not have the straightforwardly positive consequences that either Confucianist revivalists or some theorists of recognition might have predicted. Revivalists were often – but not always – gripped by feelings of outrage and moral torment, whilst the pace of the revival itself was very uneven. These varied outcomes reflect the complex politics pervading the lives of Indonesian Confucianists (and Chinese Indonesians more generally) as post-Suharto reforms force them to grapple with their diverse histories of accommodation and resistance to the New Order’s discriminatory policies. To fully understand such material, first-person moral perspectives must be incorporated into critical anthropological studies of recognition, as a complement to approaches focused on power and domination. Doing so reveals an important general truth about recognition – its capacity to be morally disruptive – and broadens our understanding of why recognition can hurt those it ostensibly stands to benefit.


Introduction
Now that Chinese New Year has entered round seven, It's time to strike the gavel, It's time to straighten what's crooked, It's time for consciences to speak out, It's time to act on empathy, So that couples in love no longer feel sorrow, So that kids are no longer depressed, And state documents record the truth of people's faith! Happy New Year, my brothers. May all your sorrows turn into happiness. (Tanuwibowo 2012) Budi Tanuwibowo, a senior figure in Indonesia's Confucianist revival, first performed this poem in 2006, five days after the Ministry of Religion had confirmed it was prepared to rerecognise Confucianism as a religion, and less than a month before the Ministry of Home Affairs would do the same. It reveals his aspirations for 'round seven': Indonesia's seventh decade since independence. Several lines refer to formal measures for which Confucianists had long been campaigningthe recognition of Confucianist marriages for 'couples in love', and the provision of Confucianist religious education in schools. Significantly, the poem presents these as embedded within a broader affective transformation from a life of 'sorrows' to a life of 'happiness'. Through re-recognition, it suggests, depression at injustice can give way to the pleasures of 'straightening what's crooked'.
To date, however, Tanuwibowo's hopes for post-recognition affect have come to curiously inconsistent fruition. Some Indonesian Confucianists have been able to experience, relatively unadulterated, the pleasures of their religion's re-recognition. For others, re-recognition has not only failed to extinguish feelings of 'sorrow' and 'depression', but has precipitated new feelings of moral anguish. In this article, I examine why such varied responses to Confucianism's re-recognition have emerged, and why they are distributed as they are. I thereby show how a critical anthropology of recognition and its consequences might valuably combine its long-standing attention to power and domination with perspectives focused on the phenomenological analysis of moral experience, particularly the complexities that social actors can face in their efforts to enact 'good', praiseworthy or virtuous lives. I argue that recognition has an intrinsic capacity to disrupt subjects' moral projects, and that by examining the experiential consequences of such disruption, one can account for affective responses to Confucianism's re-recognition that are not readily explained by approaches focusing on power relations. Attention to moral disruption may thus, I suggest, also prove valuable when studying recognition's receipt elsewhere.

Confucianism and Its 'Revival'
A heterogeneous assemblage of theological claims, ethical precepts and ritual practices informed by the writings and teachings of Confucius, Confucianism is considered a religion (agama) by its Indonesian adherentsalthough its status as such has had a complex history in their nation's public life (Chambert-Loir 2015, 79-80). Indonesia has a constitutional commitment to religiosity: the first pillar of the Pancasila, Indonesia's civic philosophy, is 'Belief in the One and Only God' (Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa), and all citizens must adhere to a state-recognised monotheistic religion. The Indonesian state initially accepted Confucianism as one such religion, withdrawing this status in 1952 but reinstating it in 1965. Shortly afterwards, Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime came to power against a backdrop of anti-communist violence that periodically 'took a strong anti-Chinese turn' (Chong 2016, 100) and issued a series of rulings aimed at 'assimilating' Indonesia's Chinese minority. One of these, Presidential Instruction No. 14/1967, restricted the practice of 'Chinese devotional practices' to the family circle and stated that 'Chinese religious festivals' should not be performed 'glaringly in public'. Confucianism's place in the nation became highly precarious. By 1979, Confucianism had been officially derecognised, and Confucianists were required to adopt an alternative religious affiliationusually Buddhism, but sometimes Christianity or Islam. Only after Suharto's resignation in 1998 were these measures gradually reversed.
Confucianism's eventual re-recognition in 2006 was, like previous reversals of anti-Chinese legislation, a significant event in the lives of Chinese Indonesians, even those who were not Confucianist themselves. It contributed to what scholars and the Indonesian media have labelled 'the Chinese euphoria'a term referring to both the rising assertion of Chinese identities and cultural forms in the Indonesian public sphere and the joyful affects underpinning it (Coppel 2003, 330-332). Such sentiments were exemplified by a Chinese shopkeeper from the Riau Islands who exuberantly told me democracy was 'great'. 'We have our human rights', he elaborated, 'We have our Chinese New Year. We have our Confucianism. Democracy is brilliant!' Those directly involved in the Confucianist revival were similarly euphoricat first. They expressed delight that their freedom of religion was being upheld, and excitement that organised Confucianism could enjoy a rosy future in Indonesia. Some still hold such positive outlooks, but many now relate to Confucianism's re-recognition far more ambivalently. One moment, they might speak animatedly of how happy they had been to witness their President attending a Confucianist event, or to see a Confucianist temple included in South Jakarta's 'Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature' theme park. The next, their shoulders might slump as they lament how difficult their lives have become since re-recognition, or rail angrily against the unfairness of the world.
Revivalists' divergent affects partly reflectedand, as I will demonstrate, sometimes accounted formarked variation in the pace of the revival itself. Despite public support for Confucianism's re-recognition, most local revival movements have struggled to attract participants. Table 1 compares the numbers of Indonesians identifying as Confucianist in the 2010 census with the numbers recorded in 1971the last time 'Confucianism' had been available as a census choice. 1 The figures testify to Confucianism's decimation. Nevertheless, there is significant variability within this overall pattern of decline. In some former Confucianist strongholds, such as East Java and Riau, contemporary Confucianists number less than a twentieth of the numbers recorded forty years previously. In others, that figure comes closer to a fifth or a quarter. South Sumatra proves the clearest outlier with a drop-off of 'only' 58 per cent. 2 Clearly, to understand the full impact of post-Suharto Indonesia's reforms, and what it means to live as a Chinese Indonesian after the fall of the New Order, we need to move Note: Data are provided for the nation as a whole, and for the eight provinces that had the largest Confucianist populations in the 1970s.
beyond metanarratives such as 'the Chinese euphoria', which treat Indonesia's Chinese as an undifferentiated national mass, to ask why re-recognition sometimes generates profound ambivalence, why different revivalists experience such ambivalence to such different degrees, and how these forms of post-recognition experience are connected to the variable progress of the revival as a whole. To do this, I draw on data collected between 2006 and 2018 in the archipelago of Bangka-Belitung-Riau, located off Sumatra's east coast. This region houses a large population of Chinese Indonesiansmostly the descendants of Hakka, Hokkien and Teochew tin miners, plantation workers and traders who migrated there during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century (see Lyons and Ford 2013;Somers Heidhues 1992). In the past, my interlocutors told me, 'all the Chinese [in Bangka-Belitung-Riau] were Confucianist'and yet the fortunes of its local Confucianist revivals have varied hugely. Through a comparison of three such revivals, I argue that the divergent affective and practical consequences of recognition both reflect and contribute to a complex politics stemming from Chinese Indonesians' varying histories of accommodation and resistance in the face of persecution. In the process, I highlight the importance of attending to the possibility of moral disruption when analysing the pleasures and miseries recognition can bring in its wake.

Recognition and Its Consequences
Over the past three decades, social and political theory has undergone what Assmann (2013, 73) labels a 'recognition turn', in which the significance of intersubjective recognition for identity formation and lived experience has been increasingly emphasised. Drawing on Hegelian philosophy, symbolic interactionism and relational psychoanalysis, recognition theorists contend that self-construction requires the other to recognise and affirm the identity of the self (Assmann 2013, 74), thereby moving beyond the portrait of the monadic, self-interested subject that dominated much twentieth-century social thought and offering new perspectives on ethical life. Honneth (1995, 172-173), for example, argues that interpersonal and institutional recognition are 'the intersubjective conditions under which human subjects reach various new ways of relating positively to themselves' and are thus essential 'structural elements' of the good life (see also Keane 2016, 25;Lambek 2010, 31). Conversely, their failure, whether because of misrecognition, nonrecognition, or derecognition, is said to inflict 'real damage … imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being' and generating a 'moral tension that can set social conflicts in motion' (Honneth 1995, 162;Taylor 1994, 25). Honneth (1995, 173-174) therefore advances a normative argument for granting legal recognition where it has previously been foreclosed, arguing that its receipt can offer 'the prospect of self-respect', increase 'the extent of one's positive relation-to-self' and, ultimately, facilitate 'a successful life'. When such ideas have a public life, they can significantly shape people's ethical awareness and horizons of expectation. In Native North America, the concept of federal recognition has 'acquired a transformational aura, seemingly able to lift tribes from poverty and cultural decay' (Klopotek 2011, 5), just as Budi Tanuwibowo believed re-recognition would offer Indonesian Confucianists a pathway to 'happiness'. Testimonies of 'elation' after securing recognition (Klopotek 2011, 166-167) indicate that such predictions can hold true for some people, some of the time. Often, however, the lives which unfold in recognition's wake do not feel particularly 'successful' or 'positive' to those that live them. Anthropologists have typically traced this outcome to the power dynamics in which recognition relationships are embedded, an issue normative recognition theory largely neglects.
Some authors note, for instance, that recognition policies typically proceed from and performatively reiterate a political ontology in which nation-states have the sovereign right to determine who is included within a polity, and on what terms. Such arrangements can actively 'diminish opportunities for self-realisation' (Balaton-Chrimes and Stead 2017, 7), for example by undermining indigenous populations' own claims to sovereignty and nationhood and thereby reproducing 'the very configurations of colonial … power that indigenous people's demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend' (Coulthard 2014, 3). In such circumstances, the politics of recognition can be met with outrage and refusal (Simpson 2014). Indonesian Confucianists, however, do not dispute the sovereignty or legitimacy of the nation-state. Indeed, Siegel (1997, 7) suggests that Indonesians often 'feel that the recognition the nation offers is essential to them'. Though social scientists may wish to normatively critique the political arrangements that recognition upholds, their perpetuation is not, by itself, sufficient to explain the moral ambivalence that recognition elicited for my interlocutors.
Two further critiques of recognition, also focused on power relations, are more directly relevant to the Confucianist case. The first argues that, even when recognition is considered legitimate, the conditionality of its receipt renders it a 'form of domination' (Povinelli 2002, 6). The second examines how power relations endow subjects with differential capacities to respond positively to recognition's receipt (McNay 2008). As I now show, both of these arguments can illuminate certain aspects of the Confucianist casebut ultimately need to be complemented by an approach focused on recognition's inherent capacity for moral disruption.

The Conditionality of Recognition
Recognition is always conditional; the norms by which one seeks to make oneself recognisable are never precisely one's own (Butler 2001, 23-26;Kowal 2015, 111). In many recognition policies, those norms disproportionately reflect the assumptions, values and interests of either the state or those who have been designated spokespersons for the group seeking recognition, and reify, simplify or warp the identities, practices and concepts of group members. Paradoxically, pursuing recognition can hence involve extensive self-distortion in order to render oneself legible to the state and its publics. In a seminal analysis of this dynamic, Povinelli (2002, 55-57) describes how Aboriginal Australians seeking recognition for native title claims are required to conjure forth an 'impossible' indigenous subject grounded in national imaginaries of 'traditional' Aboriginality, but purged of anything considered repugnant by liberal multiculturalists. 'Recognition' in such circumstances is not just a form of institutionalised misrecognition; it is a 'cunning' means of domination (2002,6).
Self-distortion can hurt. It may require subjects to 'sacrific[e] sincerity' and thereby compromise their broader moral commitments (Sylvain 2014, 253). The cruelty of the misrecognition can itself generate feelings of injury, outrage and defiance (Muehlmann 2008). Moreover, if subjects establish an identification with the fantasised figure of themselves, they risk being 'affectively constitute[d] as melancholic subjects' whose distance from the state-sanctioned ideal is a source of distress, guilt and shame (Povinelli 2002, 56). Attending critically to recognition's conditionality can thus illuminate why subjects who receive recognition may relate to it, and themselves, unhappily.
Such arguments should ostensibly apply to the Confucianist case since Indonesia's constitutional commitment to monotheism and self-cultivation as a 'godly nation' (Menchik 2014, 595) has led to extensive state control over what is considered a legitimate pathway to God. In 1952, traditions that did not meet state-imposed criteria of monotheism, sacred scripture and prophetism were designated mere 'currents of belief' (aliran kepercayaan) by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and their leaders informed that recognition would be withheld until they could 'homogenize and rationalize their belief systems along monotheistic lines' (Sezgin and Künkler 2014, 464). This process, which Hefner (2011, 73) terms 'religionization', often proved divisive and painful. When Balinese reformers seeking to meet state requirements refashioned their Hinduism as a monotheistic world religion anchored in a tradition traceable to India, an 'unresolved tension' arose between the new vision of 'Hindu religion' and the local customs (adat) revered by many Balinese, precipitating new forms of anxiety and self-consciousness regarding ritual practice (Howe 2001, 149-150). Chia (2018, 57-59) similarly describes how attempts to render Indonesian Buddhism monotheistic led to a schism of the Sangha.
Confucianism's 'religionisation', however, has generated few such tensions. This partly reflects its distinctive history in Indonesia. In the late nineteenth century, Confucianism had been embraced as a set of 'noble, beautiful and useful … teachings' that could be used to restore a sense of 'Chineseness' amongst Java's heavily acculturated, mixedblood Peranakan Chinese (see Chambert-Loir 2015, 81-93). However, when, in 1902, the Dutch missionary Tiemersma published polemical claims that 'the Chinese as a people had degenerated' because they 'lack[ed] a proper religion of their own', some Chinese championed Confucianism as 'the religion of the Chinese', deeming it equal, even superior, to Christianity (Coppel 1989, 126). As Hoon (2013, 165) notes, they appropriated many of the latter's institutional forms and operational mechanisms in order to prove their case: 'partly in reaction to the criticisms of the Christians … [they] institutionalized Confucianism into an organized religion with godhead, prophet, scriptures, creeds and rituals'. The Confucianism advocated by Indonesia's central Confucianist organisation, founded in 1923 as the Khong Kauw Tjong Hwee (Central Assembly of Confucianism) and renamed in 1955 as MATAKIN (Indonesian Supreme Council for the Confucianist Religion), thus conformed to many of the state's criteria for religion even before these were rendered explicit.
As the New Order sought to delegitimise Confucianism, officials seized on its lack of clear beliefs regarding the afterlife as evidence it was not truly a 'religion'. Ironically, this 'lack' had once been cited as proof that Confucianism was more rational than other religions, for how could the Prophet Confucius have written about an afterlife that he was yet to experience? (Coppel 2002, 306). From the 1980s onwards, however, MATAKIN has tasked its highest-ranking clerics (xueshi) with conceptualising the afterlife's relationship to worldly deeds (see Sutrisno 2018, 104-108). Far from interpreting this development as a state-imposed distortion, the revivalists I met discussed it with excitement and nationalistic pride. It was normal, they said, to wonder what happens after death. By developing a robust theology on this issue, they believed Indonesian Confucianism would become 'the most advanced Confucianism in the world', an achievement rendering them assets to the nation. The state's 'disciplining influence' (Hefner 2011, 73) was here experienced not as a constraint, but as an opportunity.
Friction could nevertheless have arisen from MATAKIN's power, as spokespersons for Indonesia's entire Confucianist community, to determine what counts as legitimate Confucianism. MATAKIN leaders are committed to a reformist faith that centres on the worship of Thian (Heaven), conceptualised as an immanent force in human life. They argue that Thian is best revered, and self-cultivation best achieved, via strict adherence to the ethical principles revealed in the Analects and inspired devotion to exemplary figures such as the warrior-sages depicted in temple statuary. Such views conflict with the understanding of many Chinese Indonesians, including many I met in Bangka-Belitung-Riau, that 'Confucianism' is the syncretic and improvisational 'Chinese popular religion' practiced by their ancestors, in which devotions are offered to a wide pantheon of gods and historical figures in hope of their intervention into worldly affairs. Oriented towards practical efficacy, rather than doctrinal consistency, it was precisely such popular religion that reformist Confucianists in the early twentieth century blamed for leading Indies Chinese into 'darkness' and 'difficulties' (Coppel 2002, 262-263).
Such a disjuncture between centralised and local conceptions of Confucianism has occasionally created discomfort. When Mr. Tjandrawinata, a senior MATAKIN cleric, visited the Riau Islands town of Tanjung Pinang to inaugurate its local MAKIN (Confucianist Council), several local revivalists found his actions unsettling. 3 He inaugurated the MAKIN via a 'baptism' (baptis), in which Council committee members all drank from a cup, pledging to increase their knowledge of Confucianism, work hard and fight against discrimination. He then gave a sermon and asked the congregation to recite a prayer from a liturgical booklet. These unfamiliar ritual forms garnered mixed reactions. Some attendees were enthusiastic about the ceremony, arguing that it represented the fully fledged religion that their syncretic Confucianism could have become had its development not been impeded by derecognition. Others found it disconcertingly alien. They had not realised this was the kind of practice for which their revivalism was advocating.
Overall, however, re-recognition has yet to result in many Confucianists being subjected to MATAKIN's normalising gaze. A conversation with Mr. Tjandrawinata after the inauguration ceremony revealed why. He had been unimpressed by Tanjung Pinang's Confucianists, he explained, deeming them 'empty-headed' people whose practices would eventually need radical reform. Currently, however, his priority was simply to bring Chinese Indonesians (back) to Confucianism. MATAKIN was willing to tolerate popular religious practice on the part of its affiliates because it still considered it 'Confucianism', albeit of an impure variety. Consequently, although local revivalists were subject to training and oversight by MATAKIN, in practice they retained considerable license to allow syncretic ritual practices in their temples.
In sum, the realisation that recognition practices can misrecognise their recipients in ways that lead to outrage, self-alienation or a sense of moral compromise, proves valuable in many contexts, including some cases of religious recognition in Indonesia. By happenstance, however, Confucianists have had to do little of the painful self-modification that has historically been required of Indonesia's Buddhists and Hindus, while the 'Confucianist' category by which they are recognised can currently accommodate wide diversities of belief and practice. That feelings of disquiet and moral turmoil have nevertheless been evident amongst some (but not all) Confucianist revivalists suggests there would be value in exploring additional theories of post-recognition affect.

Differentiating Recognition Psychologies
Critiques of recognition's conditionality do not necessarily dispute the relational psychology at the Hegelian heart of Honneth and Taylor's recognition theory, although they certainly question how successfully its principles can be translated into statecraft. A parallel critique, advanced by McNay (2008), argues that the very idea of a 'struggle for recognition' is less universal and primal a psychic dynamic than recognition theorists purport. McNay advocates a constructivist view in which subjects' investment in, desire for and responsiveness to recognition reflect their positionality within broader systems of power and are thus differentiated by factors such as gender, class and race. She cites Fanon's (1967, 163-173) observation that in the colonial Antilles, the racialised inequalities of power were too vast for Hegelian recognition's conditions of 'absolute reciprocity' to be attained; Antilleans' subordination derived not just from misrecognition 'but from historically entrenched processes of overdetermination, where [they were] not free to be anything other than black' (McNay 2008, 55). Merely granting recognition in such circumstances cannot fully redress such subordination, nor the conflicted relations-to-self it fosters.
McNay's argument is highly relevant to the Indonesian case, given that Confucianism's re-recognition has occurred within the context of an ongoing racial politics that has marked 'the Chinese' out as problematically different ever since colonial times. Consider the case of Hartono, a revivalist from Tanjung Pinang. Hartono felt it a priority to increase Confucianism's representation in local branches of the FKUB (Forum for Harmony amongst Religious Communities)a view with which the MATAKIN leadership concurred. A semi-governmental organisation with branches in every district of Indonesia, the FKUB aims to pre-empt religious conflict by establishing strong, mutually respectful relationships amongst the leaders of different religions. Hartono saw it as an opportunity to cultivate relationships with Muslim and Christian leaders who could serve as allies should Confucianism's status ever be questioned in the future. Those same relationships could also be mobilised if fresh waves of anti-Chinese discrimination ever broke out in Indonesia. Since it was almost always Chinese Indonesians who followed Confucianism, a Confucianist seat on the FKUB was a guaranteed Chinese seat. Buddhist seats, by contrast (let alone those allocated to Christians or Muslims), could potentially be seized by hostile Indonesians of non-Chinese descent, since a significant minority of Indonesian Buddhists are Javanese. With FKUB seats allocated in proportion to the number of adherents that each religion had within the district, Hartono considered it vital that as many Chinese Indonesians as possible register as Confucianist so this important opportunity for protection could be fully exploited.
Hartono's distinctive subjectivity as a Chinese Indonesian living in the wake of prolonged anti-Chinese discrimination led him to see the revival not only as the reversal of historical injustice or the building of a thriving community of faith but as a strategic investment in the future of Indonesia's entire Chinese minority. This, in turn, rendered him intensely and anxiously invested in the identifications of others around him. By following McNay (2008, 60) and examining how 'hierarchies of power are internalized as psychic dispositions', we can appreciate that more may be at stake in Confucianism's rerecognition than one's present relation-to-self, such that the progress of the revival as a whole might elicit particular 'moral moods' (Throop 2014): a joyful sense that all was right with the world if the revival were to flourish, perhaps, or an aggrieved fury if it did not.
However, McNay's approach also has limits, insofar as it binds Confucianists' subjective investment in the revival to the psychic effects of structural power relations, and their occupation of a specific sociological category. It consequently struggles to account for the marked experiential differentiation amongst revivalists inhabiting the same structural position (wealthy, male, Chinese), or for the different rates of revivalism amongst ostensibly similar Chinese Indonesian populations. Such ethnographic complexity indicates the need to complement the critical approaches reviewed thus far with parallel anthropology of recognition, one centred on moral experience.

Recognition as Moral Disruption
To take a first-person moral perspective on an ethnographic moment is to consider what, morally, is experienced, understood and at stake for each social actor present, in their biographical particularity. It acknowledges that people are subjects of history, born into a world that both precedes and exceeds them, which structurally delimits their capacities for action, and which discursively, and perhaps even psychically, disposes them towards some courses of action over others. However, whilst recognising that action is never a merely individual affair, it also insists on seeing social actors as subjects with historicity, in the phenomenological sense, locating their actions within their broader 'life trajectories': temporal arcs that encompass the past events and longer-term intentions and senses of future possibility that shape their moral commitments (Mattingly 2014, 18-21). As Keane (2016, 260) argues, the exclusion of first-person moral perspectives would render any account of ethical life incomplete, and, as we have seen, they already inform those studies of recognition that explore how the pursuit of conditional recognition can lead subjects to become morally unmoored (for example Povinelli 2002;Sylvain 2014). Here, however, I advance a further claim: that, regardless of how it has been pursued, recognition's receipt is intrinsically morally consequential.
This claim builds on work that adopts a first-person moral perspective to understand how people are affected by life-changing events like violence, accidents and medical diagnoses (including Das 2007;Kuan 2017;. The circumstances such events precipitate demand response, and yet while social imaginaries and ethical traditions may equip subjects with a general sense of what is required (to be a 'supportive partner', for instance), it is often unclear how those goalswhich should be understood as 'moral projects', attempts to act in the 'right' wayare best achieved. These are consequently situations in which any action taken is necessarily experimental, shadowed by the prospect of moral failure (Mattingly 2014, 5-17).
The granting or withdrawing of legal recognition can similarly be understood as lifechanging events. They transform the political and legal realities in which subjects conduct their affairs and so may, as Das (2007, 64) describes for the Partition of India, confront subjects anew with 'the question of how one makes the world one's own'. Attending to the moral peril inherent in such a situation reminds us that the experiential consequences of recognition decisions are not limited to their immediate psychological impact (cf. Honneth 1995), nor to the general feeling-tones associated with the new social reality those decisions inaugurate, such as 'euphoria'. Subjects must respond in some way to their new circumstances and their responsive (in)action will itself have moral and affective consequences. Klopotek's (2011, 10) study of Louisiana Indians captures this point very effectively, concluding that what matters most 'for tribal wellbeing is not [recognition] decisions themselves but how the tribes respond to those decisions'.
However, nobody responds to recognition decisions ab initio. They encounter them, and the challenges they present, against the backdrop of their pre-existing life trajectories a point of great significance for theorising post-recognition subjectivities. Insofar as recognition confronts subjects with a situation that demands ethical response, it may variously negate, refract or fortify subjects' previous projects of moral striving. Moreover, subjects' capacity to respond to this new situation as they might wish depends on the virtues, abilities and social capital they have cultivated whilst responding to their previous historical circumstances. Finally, these differential capacities to respond to new circumstances in a morally appropriate manner can invite invidious comparisons with others. For all these reasons, recognition can precipitate new moral evaluations of one's life as hitherto lived, producing complicated new relations-to-self, the affective tonality of which may vary considerably. It has an intrinsic capacity for moral disruption. We can thus modify Klopotek's argument (cited above), to conclude that recognition decisions matter just as much for 'wellbeing' as people's responses to them, because the moral disruption engendered by those decisions is integral to how any such responses are experienced.
This can be seen very clearly in the Indonesian case. Confucianism's re-recognition was visited upon people who, despite their similar structural position, had lived very differently prior to its receipt. Re-recognition consequently had a broad range of moral and affective consequences, with significant implications for the extent and character of local Confucianist revivals.

Outrage in Tanjung Pinang
Let us return to Hartono's story. While the Riau Islands never saw any outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence, Hartono's life was nevertheless shattered by the New Order's discriminatory policies. A teenager when the regime came to power, his school was closed down and eventually demolished, simply because Chinese was its language of instruction. He was forced to abandon his Chinese name in favour of a more 'Indonesian-sounding' moniker, and he watched the local temples in which his family had worshipped for generations be seized by Buddhists and removed from Confucianist control.
After Confucianism's derecognition led to many Chinese Indonesians being automatically registered as 'Buddhist' on their identity cards, Tanjung Pinang's Buddhist organisations put great effort into strengthening these new religious identifications. Having taken over syncretic temples, the Buddhists did not remove the statues of much-loved folk gods such as Dabogong (the earth god) or Mazu (protectress of fishermen), but rearranged the temples so that Buddha statues occupied the central altars, allowing visitors to continue with their 'traditional' practices whilst simultaneously exposing them to Buddhist practice and theology. 4 Former Confucianists described Buddhist missionaries subjecting them to daily harassment until they started visiting the temples. Others attended of their own volition, often hoping that active familial participation would allow their children to score highly in their obligatory religious education exams. Few such converts identified as 'Buddhist' to begin with, but after many years of exposure to Buddhist theology, they found they began to believe it.
Hartono watched all this from a distance. Refusing to surrender his Confucianism and start practicing Buddhism, which he considered 'an Indian religion', he was disgusted by the 'cowardice' of other Chinese. He largely boycotted the temples, instead performing 'Confucianist' rituals at his domestic altar. Frustrated by the restrictions on his religious practice, he nonetheless felt he was acting with the utmost integrity given his situation. His friends admired his courage and single-mindedness. However, his actions left him in a difficult position once Confucianism was re-recognised.
Hartono had expected many of Tanjung Pinang's Chinese to convert back to Confucianism as soon as it was legal. That less than 2% did so was a crushing disappointment. 5 Many had come to feel quite comfortable within Buddhism, justifying their inertia with claims that all religions were 'equally good' or 'different paths to the same God'platitudes that, in Hartono's view, overlooked the crucial point that not all these paths were equally Chinese. Others embraced the newly recognised Confucianism, but saw it as a supplement to, rather than substitute for, Buddhism. Anis, the 30-year old daughter of two Confucianists, is a typical example: [Buddhism and Confucianism] aren't the same, but I believe in both. I am a Confucianist. But ask me to go to a vihara (Buddhist temple) and I'm up for that too. Both of them are my religions … .
It's rare to get a fanatic who says 'I'm a Confucianist, I don't want anything to do with Buddhism'. Because let's say you pray to a statue of your favourite Confucianist god in your house. When you go to the temple, you want to pray to the same god. But there's no way that you'd ignore any of the other statues in the temple. So you start praying to the Buddha as well … . Finally, you believe in both religions.
Such emergent claims to 'having two religions' resonate with the long-standing idea of there being three Chinese religions (Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism) and it being 'impossible for a person to practice only one because the belief system of the Chinese incorporate[s] principles from all three' (Suryadinata 1997, 149). It was on these very grounds that a 'Three Religions Society' (Sam Kauw Hwee) was established in 1934, the founders hoping to counter the narrow definition of 'Chineseness' that animated reformist Confucianism (Suryadinata 1997, 148-153). Interestingly, there has been a nationwide resurgence of interest in the Sam Kauw Hweeor, as it is now known, Tridharmasince Confucianism's re-recognition (Hauser-Schäublin 2014), suggesting many Chinese Indonesians wish to engage with Confucianist theology alongside, rather than to the exclusion of, alternative and seemingly incompatible doctrines. For Hartono, however, this offered cold comfort since Tridharma was formally a Buddhist organisation. Not only does Buddhism assume priority in Tridharma activities and spaces (Figure 1), Tridharma affiliation also directs state fundingand the FKUB seats in which Hartono was intensely investedto Buddhists rather than Confucianists. 6 Consequently, while many Tanjung Pinang Chinese were enthusiastic about Confucianism's re-recognition, and the freedom it offered to incorporate Confucianist elements into their Buddhism, Hartono was left with a profound sense of outrage that the Confucianist revival was not unfolding in the way he had imagined or wanted it to. He railed against the 'wickedness' of Indonesia's Buddhists, deploring the way that something as simple as introducing Buddha statues to temples had generated Buddhist sensibilities within people who had once been Confucianist. He hoped the revival would get stronger but there was little he himself could do to help. The oppositional stance that had allowed him to preserve his sense of integrity and moral virtue after derecognition had also created a rift between him and those he was hoping to reconvert; his insistent claims to Buddhistidentifying friends and neighbours that their everyday rituals were 'actually Confucianist' had little effect beyond straining those relationships. Some, like Anis, dismissed him as a 'fanatic'. Nor could he do much to regain control of any templesa measure he imagined would put pressure on regular worshippers to convert (back). His lifetime of shunning the Buddhist leaders who had 'colonised' (menguasai) his religion had deprived him of the connections needed to persuade local Buddhist associations to relinquish their control. What had seemed like a wise and virtuous course of action under derecognition now left him a moral failure, unable to achieve what he wanted the most.

Tragedy in Lingga
Like Hartono, Frangkya charismatic revivalist from the Riau Island district of Linggaconsidered Confucianism's resurgence essential for protecting Indonesia's Chinese. He also stood to gain personally: as a perceived gatekeeper of 'the Confucianist vote', he anticipated receiving honours and favours from aspiring politicians. Nevertheless, as in Tanjung Pinang, Lingga's Confucianist revival had only recruited a small percentage of the district's Chinese population. 7 The roots of Frangky's difficulties lay, like Hartono's, in his actions whilst Confucianism was derecognised. With Mahayana Buddhists taking over temples and imperilling the syncretic 'Confucianist' practice to which he felt attached, Frangky had conferred with his friends and reached a drastic decision. He would train to become a Buddhist cleric. This was not a sincere conversion. Frangky was entering Buddhism undercover, 'shuddering as [he] did so', aiming to appear credible enough to be entrusted with managing his village temple. He wouldand didthen preserve it as a space in which the popular religious practices long enacted in the village continued to be performed despite their formal interdiction.
Becoming involved in organised Mahayana Buddhism allowed Frangky to maintain a Confucianist space in Lingga's public life. It also led him to view Mahayana Buddhists somewhat differently from Hartono. Many of Frangky's counterparts in his Buddhist organisation had joined not because of theological convictions but a desire to preserve their island's Chinese heritage. Their swift 'take-over' of temples and introduction of Buddhist iconography were not intended as acts of 'colonisation', as Hartono claimed, but acts of salvage. 8 Rendering a temple legibly Buddhist would prevent its destruction, allowing it to be used by local Chinese of any or no religious persuasions, just as it had by their forebears, for whom temples had functioned as community hubs. Many were themselves ambivalent about the ontological precepts of formal Buddhism. Others, whilst committed Buddhists, nevertheless tolerated unorthodox or Confucianist practice in the temples out of solidarity with fellow victims of anti-Chinese discrimination.
Such tolerance proved important when a new public prosecutor arrived on Lingga and saw Frangky preparing a suckling pig for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. Understanding that Mahayana Buddhism recommended a vegetarian diet, he accused Frangky of illegally hosting 'Chinese festivities' in his temple. Luckily, the Mahayana Buddhists said nothing to counteract Frangky's claim that the rituals he was preparing were 'a type of Buddhism' and therefore permissible under Suharto's Presidential Instructions. The prosecutor eventually dropped the case, leaving Frangky convinced that without the tacit support of his Mahayana colleagues he would have faced considerable difficulties.
Those feelings of indebtedness left Frangky in a tricky situation once Confucianism had been re-recognised. The resurgence of MATAKIN and the establishment of local MAKINs meant that, if Frangky was to remain as a Confucianist leader, he needed to sunder his ties to Mahayana Buddhism. This in itself had been difficult for Frangky. He had worried that his Mahayana friends might feel betrayed. More difficult still was pressurising Mahayana organisations to release the temples they had 'saved'. Though Frangky often boasted that his knowledge of Buddhism gave him better negotiating skills than revivalists like Hartono, he struggled to ask his friends and former alliespeople who had protected him from the prosecutorto renounce the high-status roles as temple organisers to which they had dedicated their lives. He worried that wresting control of the temples would be an insult to the efforts and risks the Mahayana Buddhists had undertaken to ensure that there were still temples to wrangle over.
Frangky faced a moral tragedy, caught between two incommensurable ethical claims. 9 Yet this was only the case because what had formerly been two commensurable goodsthe expression of his Confucianism and solidarity with his Mahayana friendshad been rendered incommensurable by the world-changing force of legal recognition, turning a life of which he had once felt proud into one he viewed with regret. 'Under Suharto, how were we to know that Gus Dur would suddenly reverse all the laws?' he lamented. 'How could we have predicted the fall of Suharto, or that his fall would lead to a completely different kind of regime with a completely different attitude to us, the Chinese? If we'd known, we'd have definitely adopted a different strategy. We'd have waited. But there was no end in sight, so we paired up with the Buddhists. It's what we thought we had to do to survive.' The last time I saw him, Frangky had yet to reclaim any temples. He appeared to be stalling for time, throwing his energies into alternative revival projects, such as converting Lingga's historically animist populations of orang laut. I wondered whether he really needed more time, or was simply trying to defer the painful confrontation he knew was imminent. Frangky himself claimed it was necessary to handle the situation 'slowly and democratically' as pushing too hard, too soon, could ensnare the temple in a protracted legal dispute. He argued that if the demand to switch back to Confucianism came from the temple congregation, then the Mahayana Buddhists would agree to surrender their control. Villagers who worshipped at his temple, however, told me they had long been making such demands and were frustrated with Frangky's reluctance to act. In the meantime, they stayed registered as Buddhist, reluctant to affiliate with a religion that had no formal place of worship in their village, and gritted their teeth as visiting dignitaries addressed them as 'Buddhists' during their temple festivities. The incapacitating force of Frangky's dilemma had stripped his congregation of an opportunity to reap the full rewards of re-recognition, compounding his feelings of regret and despair.

Triumph in Bangka
Compared to Tanjung Pinang and Lingga, the swampy tin-rich island of Bangka feels palpably more Confucianist. The island's bustling oldest temple stands chock-full of offerings (mainly mangoes and sacks of rice) adorned with signed documents declaring they have 'been offered up in a spirit of thanks to Thian'. Evy, an elderly Chinese lady who visits this temple every day, told me that 'People [on Bangka] are devout in our religion. We have to be. Thian is watching over us!' These repeated references to Thianreformist Confucianism's conception of the Supreme Beingare striking.
A soft-spoken solicitor named Arie stands at the helm of what is arguably Indonesia's most successful Confucianist revival. Bangka was home to over a third of all Confucianistidentifying Indonesians in the 2010 census, and the island's MAKINs have been remarkably successful at (re)gaining control of temples. 10 In Arie's sub-district alone, 26 temples were in Confucianist hands. Though Arie is not solely responsible for such achievements, his story illuminates why Bangka's revivalists have succeeded when their counterparts elsewhere have encountered so many difficulties.
Arie had been brought up Confucianist but accepted the Buddhist identity imposed on him under the New Order, despite his latent Confucianist identification. Dissimulating as a Buddhist was not onerous for him; he lived in a small town where, unlike Tanjung Pinang, Buddhism was not promoted with much force. He was subject to minimal surveillance. Indeed, he gave little thought to religion, focusing instead on his work. Besides his legal career, he established a travel agency that became the preferred supplier for local government offices and worked as a court translator for Chinese defendants who could not speak Indonesian. Only in 2008, when Confucianism had been re-recognised but the religious affiliation of Bangka's temples remained unclear, did Arie decide to get involved in organised religion. He suggested to his friends that they establish a Confucianist organisation, made contact with MATAKIN and secured the permits required to establish eleven MAKINs across Bangka.
For revivalists like Hartono, Arie cuts a morally problematic figure. Under the New Order, he had willingly abandoned Confucianism in pursuit of his own safetyactions suggesting weakness of character. Arie himself felt ambivalent about his past, explaining he had been 'trauma-tised' (ditrauma) by 'the events of 1967'. 11 1967 was the year Suharto issued several Presidential directives restricting Chinese cultural practices. Though Arie did not mention this explicitly, it was also the year of Indonesia's worst ever episode of anti-Chinese violence; up to 5000 Chinese Indonesians were murdered at military behest in West Kalimantan (Chong 2016, 100). 'The trauma took away all my courage (keberanian)', he elaborated, 'It would have been impossible for me to do anything [back then].' Knowing that Confucianism had been legally re-recognised, he said, had given him the confidence to act.
Arie believed that revivalists who, like Frangky or Hartono, were struggling to recover temples and adherents 'lacked the necessary courage' because they were 'still trauma-tised' by New Order policy. Such an analysis simultaneously absolved these revivalists of responsibility (since they were victims of discrimination) whilst positing them as Arie's moral inferiors because, unlike him, they had not overcome their trauma and were consequently failing in their duties as revival leaders. 'Leaders have to act', he emphasised. 'What will happen if we don't? Just last year, there was an attempt to register a temple as a site of Buddhist heritage. If I hadn't opposed that, we'd have never have got it back.' Arie suspected himself to be 'the most courageous' of all Indonesia's Confucianists, and hoped his example would inspire other revivalists to overcome their traumas and become more efficacious.
While Arie's attribution of his success to the confidence occasioned by Confucianism's legal re-recognition should not be dismissed, an alternative analysis is possible. His actions during the derecognition era -'cowardly' to somehad inadvertently left him exceptionally well-placed to 'courageously' spearhead a revival following re-recognition. Particularly important were the strong relationships he had cultivated with local officials whilst handling their travel contracts. He used these connections to persuade Bangka's Ministry of Religion that, if the island's census data was to be top-quality, it should urge the public to declare their true religious identifications, regardless of what was written on their identity cards. A public announcement to that effect was duly issued, doubtless influencing Bangka's subsequent high Confucianist census count. Most important was Arie's friendship with Yusuf, the former head of the district Ministry of Religion, for whom Arie had handled several inheritance claims. Having lobbied to get Yusuf appointed as the head of the local FKUB, Arie leaned on his friend for help with reclaiming temples. 'There was a bit of difficulty at first', Yusuf admitted, 'the Buddhists wanted to keep the temples. But I explained to them we need to safeguard harmony between religions, and it's written in the law that Confucianists have the right to reclaim their former temples'. Temple reclamation was also facilitated by Arie's discovery that a Mahayana religious site had recently opened without securing the necessary permits. In the interests of 'safeguarding harmony', he and Yusuf had suggested the site's legal irregularities could be overlooked if only a few temples were returned to Confucianists. The Buddhists had been furious, but there was nothing they could do.
Meanwhile, Arie's lack of close relationships with Buddhists spared him the heartache faced by revivalists like Frangky. Arie considered himself 'a little bit hard' (sedikit keras)a quality associated with efficacy and determination, but also the negative traits of heartlessness and self-interest. It was not something of which Arie sounded proud: he, like Frangky, recognised something tragic in what the revival required of him. However, unlike Frangky, Arie felt no indebtedness to the Buddhists that the revival would necessarily thwart. They were not his friends, not his former alliesjust acquaintances. Besides, he said, his years in the courtroom had convinced him that one should set aside personal feelings in the name of justice. Rather than a source of crippling moral tragedy, Arie saw being 'a little bit hard' as a necessary, if unpleasant, aspect of acting 'courageously', for which the success of the revival proved his vindication.
Legal recognition was no less morally disruptive for Arie than for Hartono and Frangky. Arie, however, got to enjoy a positive 'disruption'. In the world recognition produced, all the skills, virtues and contacts he had acquired whilst previously cultivating himself as a lawyer-cum-entrepreneur allowed him to experience himself anew as extraordinarily efficacious, the most courageous Confucianist in all Indonesia, and an exemplar for others. He could narrate his life as one of moral triumph. Nevertheless, while Arie tried to explain away the inconvenient truth that, while acquiring these skills and contacts, he had done nothing to defend Confucianism, this detail was rarely lost on those revivalists whose incapacities to act were a direct consequence of their life-long commitment to their religion. That people such as Arie should be more successful than them when they had taken such risks, shown such integrity and made so many sacrifices, merely compounded their enduring sense that the world was unfair, heightening the despondency that characterised their experience of recognition.

Conclusion
I opened this article by asking why the experiential and practical consequences of Confucianism's re-recognition should have varied so widely across Indonesia. Whilst acknowledging the importance of long-standing racial politics to the contemporary Confucianist experience, and the ways recognition's conditionality can require its recipients to selfdistort, I have argued this question can only be fully answered by understanding recognition as a moment of moral disruption.
Re-recognition did yield genuine pleasures, marking an end to years of injustice, removing the stigma of belonging to a derecognised religion, and offering membership of the Indonesian nation on (more or less) one's own terms. Although the legacies of anti-Chinese discrimination still fuelled anxieties that such benefits might one day be withdrawn, there was still plenty to feel 'euphoric' about. However, these were pleasures derived from enjoying re-recognition in the abstract, as formal, decontextualised Chinese citizen-subjects. Seen in the context of individual life trajectories, matters were more complex. Revivalists' experiences of re-recognition were differentiated by the extent to which their actions under the New Order left them well-placed to recruit adherents and seize temples. Some, like Arie, got to experience themselves as efficacious, successful moral actors. Others, especially those who had remained committed to Confucianism following its derecognition, found themselves confronted with insurmountable practical and moral difficulties. I have focused here on just two such examples, but they were cases to which many revivalists could relate. Indeed, after Mr. Tjandrawinata, the MATAKIN cleric, heard of Hartono and Frangky's difficulties in the Riau Islands, he noted that similar problems were hampering the revival across Indonesiahence, I suggest, its sclerotic overall pace. These dynamics led many revivalists to have deeply ambivalent experiences of recognition. They also had broader ramifications for Confucianist-identifying populations, who had uneven opportunities to express their identifications in public, and were not always able to enjoy the pleasures of recognition as fully as they might have liked.
With this argument, I have sought to offer a new way of understanding the contemporary Chinese Indonesian experience. Indonesia's Chinese are often studied as a racial and religious minority, the politics of their cultural and religious life understood in terms of their relations with the state and the autochthonous Muslim majority (see Sai and Hoon 2013). Such frameworks cannot explain phenomena such as the tremendous diversification of the Chinese Indonesian religious landscape, with some districts developing robust Confucianist communities while others witness the enduring dominance of Mahayana Buddhism or the rise of syncretic movements like Tridharma. Accounting for these phenomena requires attention to the emergent cultural politics within the Chinese minority, as set in motion by post-Suharto Indonesia's various reforms. These are complex and unpredictable. They cannot even be straightforwardly reduced to conflicts between particular 'sub-groups', such as 'Buddhists' versus 'Confucianists' (cf. Ong 2008) because they are meaningfully shaped by the locally specific ways in which Chinese Indonesians' lives became mutually imbricated or opposed under the New Order. Given this complexity, first-person moral perspectives offer important insights into the motivations and stakes underlying particular Chinese Indonesians' social action. From their diverse individual stories, however, arises a more general critical insight: that the impact of New Order discrimination continues to be widely felt, despiteindeed, sometimes because ofpolicies that sought to overturn it.
I have also sought to contribute to critical recognition scholarship. At present, this field overwhelmingly focuses on power relations when trying to understand why recognition's emancipatory promise is not borne out in practice. Focusing on the phenomenology of moral experience yields additional insights, most crucially that recognition has an inherent capacity to be morally disruptive. Such disruption can have positive consequences, as Arie's story shows. It can also be devastating. Because recognition catapults subjects into political and legal realities that may demand different skills, virtues and resources from those that had characterised their lives previously, it can easily convert a life welllived into a life ill-judged. Das (2007, 75-76) has written of how, for her informant Asha, the 'brutality' of the Partition 'lay in what violence could do to alter the ways in which kin recognise or withhold recognition from each other'. My ethnographic materials show how recognition can be similarly brutal. It put an end to the world in which Frangky and Hartono could experience themselves as virtuous actors, recasting them as subjects who were struggling to achieve their moral goals. They were transformed in the eyes of others: Hartono from a paragon of single-minded refusal to a laughable fanatic; Frangky from a courageous risk-taker to an ineffectual liability. The recognition they gained from the state disrupted the established bases of their social and self-recognition. It presented them with moral dilemmas that were painful in their own right, compounding these miseries with the humiliation of watching more morally questionable others, like Arie, achieve the very things they could not. Though they might have hoped re-recognition would 'straighten what's crooked', it plunged them into a world that itself felt horribly awry. This is not to suggest that recognition should have been withheld. Nor is it to dispute the importance of attending to power relations when studying recognition. It is, however, to insist that investigating whether and how recognition disrupts subjects' life trajectories and moral biographies will always be relevant for understanding post-recognition subjectivities. Anthropologists seeking to make recognition policy 'better' should hence not only use their ethnographic expertise to ensure that the conditions of recognition are more flexible and accurate (Merlan 2013), but also to anticipate the moral difficulties that receiving recognition might precipitate, investigate how these challenges might be circumvented, and advocate that sufficient resources be devoted to their mediation. In this regard, anthropologists should not let it be forgotten that the moral challenges faced by contemporary Confucianists would never have arisen had the Indonesian state not arrogated the right to recognise some religions and disregard others in its early years, nor that these challenges have been compounded by an enduring bureaucratic presumption that citizens can only be formally affiliated to one religious category at any one time. Following Balaton-Chrimes and Stead's (2017, 2) insistence that we reconsider 'the fundamental valuation of recognition as an innate good … within Northern political theory' in favour of a careful critique of the institutional arrangements from which acts of recognition proceed, we might thus conclude that true justice for Chinese Indonesians will only arise when the Indonesian state recognises not that they have a right to practice Confucianism, but that it has a responsibility to implement reforms that address the harms sustained over decades of its own discriminatory policies whilst minimising the prospects of moral disruption, and the suffering and turmoil to which this can lead.