The slogan ‘building back better’ became widely used by organisations and governments involved in the reconstruction aid after the Indian Ocean tsunami and the earthquakes in 2004 and the peace agreement signed in 2005 in the province of Aceh, Indonesia. Aid organisations state that the importance of reconstruction process is “in rebuilding lost and damaged values and norms” (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific 2005, 9). Understanding of reconstruction includes more than the quality of the reconstructed infrastructure, it also includes reconstructing ideas, ideals, and norms and therefore, it could be argued that one of the aims of the reconstruction aid is to re-establish the ‘normalcy’ through agendas such as ‘build back better’. Attempts to produce new master narratives for national identity make the traumatic experience invisible and restore the symbolic order of the national self (Edkins 2003).
The paper discusses some of the preliminary findings of a postdoctoral ethnographic study conducted in 2012-13 in the streets of provincial capital Banda Aceh, aiming to map post-disaster memoryscapes, i.e. the social and spatial vernacular memory (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004) as an site of struggle: provoking norms in relation to gender, class, caste, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, in particular through normative calls for piety and propriety. It focuses on the liminal spaces of religious, gender and sexual minorities, and punks, and the attempts by the provincial and town government to normalise subjects in accordance with their visions, such as ahklah dan aqidah (morality and belief) and pious adolescence.
