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This article documents how the democratic detective is related to important changes in the meaning and clustering of both keywords and social types since the democratic transition in Indonesia in 1998. The article describes how during a governmentorganized street vendor relocation, Arif, a young street vendor, as a democratic detective, positions himself in relation to the rakyat (the people), which is viewed as the most authentic body to bring forth social and political change in Indonesia; and to the oknum, an individual who abuses his position of power for personal benefit. In this paper, I show how the democratic detective is developing new techniques for achieving transparency based on a shared pattern of latent communication in newspapers and is involved in producing a narrative reminiscent of a detective story.

On a warm spring evening in 2007, I sat on a bench with "Arif," a street vendor, discussing the municipal government's plan to relocate three groups of vendors to a marketplace. He explained that the government's relocation plan had raised questions and suspicions among a group of traders who identified themselves as Pethikbumi (Paguyuban Pedagang Klithikan Mangkubumi). In their opinion, the municipal government was trying to impose this relocation onto the street vendors in an undemocratic manner. Furthermore, the government was misrepresenting the situation in order to further its own political ends. The municipal government claimed that the traders being relocated were secondhand-goods (klithikan) and antiques traders. However, while this was true for some of the groups of vendors involved, the majority of the traders selling on Mangkubumi Street sold new merchandise. From Arifs viewpoint, the mayor, Herry Zudianto, was behind this project. Arif said, Because Yogyakarta is famous for its tourism, [Herry] wants to build a specialized market for antiques and secondhand goods. Because Herry is the 11 am grateful to my informants who shared their knowledge and experiences with me during my fieldwork in Yogyakarta. The Wenner Gren Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) made this research possible. I thank Joshua Barker, Katherine Maclvor, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on earlier drafts. I also thank Indonesia's editors for their comments. Any remaining errors are my own.

Street traders in many Indonesian cities face social and legal constraints because they are deemed to be hampering the city's order and cleanliness. I describe how a group of vendors adopted the state's concern over greenery and developed their own “green” project. They also called themselves the rakyat kecil (small people) and argued that they were the poor underdogs being mistreated by the corrupt government. This moral positioning is best seen as an expression of what I am calling “citizenship as ethics,” in which the legitimacy of being in a public space is validated through discourses and actions deemed “good” or “right” in the local public imagination.

In 2006 and 2007, Pethikbumi (Pedagang Klithikan Mangkubumi), a group of street traders1 slated to be relocated to a newly renovated marketplace in Yogyakarta City, Indonesia, argued in government meetings and in the newspaper that the relocation plan was not clear (kurang jelas). The Kedaulatan Rakyat newspaper reported that 'the leader of Pethikbumi, Akbar, said the concept developed by the municipal government regarding the relocation was not transparent (tidak transparan), especially with money…. "I also have asked for a detailed relocation concept but I haven't been given it,' said Akbar."2 In the months leading up to the relocation deadline of November 2007, Pethikbumi publically critiqued the municipal government's lack of proper sosialisasi (socialization) regarding its plans to relocate hundreds of traders to a marketplace through letters to the government, newspaper articles and public and private meetings. Proposed by then-mayor of Yogyakarta City, Herry Zudianto, the klithikan (second-hand trader) relocation would move street vendors from three locations in the city to a renovated former animal marketplace, Kuncen. The traders would gain clear legal status and be empowered to develop their businesses.3 The new marketplace was also pegged to become a tourist attraction because it would bring together in one location a variety of traders selling secondhand and antique merchandise (Pethikbumi meeting, personal communication, January 16, 2006). With this plan, the municipal government of Yogyakarta intended to follow the example of the mayor of Solo (now governor of Jakarta), Joko Widodo, who had 'successfully' relocated klithikan traders in

This article explores post-colonial memories about street traders among individuals who lived in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies. It argues that these narratives romanticize the relationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Street vendors are also used to differentiate between periods within colonial and post-colonial history. The nostalgic representation of interracial contact between Europeans and traders is contrasted with representations of other figures such as the Japanese and the nationalist. A recurring feature of these representations is the ability of Europeans to speak with street traders and imagine what they wanted and needed. The traders are remembered as a social type that transgressed politics and represented the neutrality of the economic sphere as a place for shared communication. The article concludes that the figure of the street vendor contributes to the nostalgic reinvention of the colony but is also used in narratives to differentiate between and mark changes across the colonial and post-colonial periods.

This paper investigates the sociotechnical imaginary surrounding Uber’s supposedly imminent arrival in Winnipeg, through an examination of communication in the public sphere. We examine how actors mobilized their communicative resources in efforts to either bring ride-hailing or keep it away. For some advocates, ride-hailing technology was less important than Uber’s symbolic value of building Winnipeg’s image as an innovative city. Media coverage contrasted innovation and Uber with Winnipeg’s anxieties about being behind other cities and its taxi industry’s reputation as stuck in the past. These visions of Winnipeg’s future addressed an unspoken White, middle-class city dweller. While Winnipeg’s transportation industry was shaped by the socially located experiences of racialized immigrant men as taxi drivers and Indigenous women as passengers, these actors had less power to shape the imaginary. Our analysis suggests that cities like Winnipeg view Uber as an image-making product as much as a beneficial service for their citizens.