City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Teresa P. R. Caldeira. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi. 487pp., maps, illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, references, index.

In keeping w ith the overt symbolism that marked political monuments in Suharto's New Order, the Department o f the Interior on Jakarta's main square was ornamented with a giant kentongan. A kentongan is an instrument made from a hollowed branch that is struck to give off a sound. Kentongan have been used by neighborhood watches (rondo) in Jav a's towns and villages for centuries as devices to keep thieves away, to call forth populations for territorial defense, and to keep people alert and ready to ward off threats to community well-being.1 Hung by a mosque, in a guard house, or in front of the village head's house, it is the quintessential technology for community policing. The kentongan at the Department of the Interior, by virtue of its size and location, would seem to represent a departure from the strictly local connotations of village kentongan. This grand kentongan was undoubtedly meant to provide the many thousands of kentongan in the nation's villages and towns with a new center w ith which to resonate. Through a sort of crude symbolism, the installation of this kentongan signified the subordination of local security apparatuses to the overarching security framework provided by the state.

This paper describes an analog chat network in Bandung, Indonesia known as 'interkom.' Interkom is a network that links together the homes, food stalls and farms of a segment of Bandung's urban and peri-urban underclass. Interkom is interesting because it provides the occasion for users to reflect upon and manipulate the material and ideological conditions that shape experiences of self, talk and sociality in a densely mediated world. Interviews with users reveal that interkom constitutes a public that straddles the line between an indefinite community of strangers and a known audience. In playing with this public, users also play with an image of ideal sociality.

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