Abstract
Officially, street youths are as nonexistent as street children in Indonesia. Stigmatized by the media and most of their social environment and excluded from the “Indonesian national family” by the government, it seems almost impossible for these youngsters to develop any degree of self-confidence or emotional well-being on the streets. This chapter deals with the (sub-)cultural strategies of male street youths in a Javanese city of about one million inhabitants that enable them not only to cope with their hardships on the streets but also to create a collective identity―the “tekyan” identity. Tekyan means “a little, but enough,” and expresses the youths’ pride in being able to live independently. Without neglecting the physical and psychological suppression they experience in their numerous encounters on the city’s streets, I focus on the collective strategies of emotional regulation that transform initial individual shame in being a society dropout into a collective pride in being a tekyan, a street youth.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the tekyan in the Javanese City, Ebby, Jonathan Harrow, and the members of the ZiF Research Group Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes, especially Susanne Jung, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Stefanie Kronast, Manfred Holodynski, Michael Casimir, and Daniel Fessler for their great emotional and intellectual assistance.
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Stodulka, T. (2009). “Beggars” and “Kings”: Emotional Regulation of Shame Among Street Youths in a Javanese City in Indonesia. In: Markowitsch, H., Röttger-Rössler, B. (eds) Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09546-2_15
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