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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.