Skinheads find followers around the world

In order to "get" Indonesian skinheads, you need to know a little about the history of the style in England, the country where it began.

The look emerged in the late 1960s out of a weird collision between the white mod subculture and the "ska" music of black Jamaican immigrants. Naturally, a subculture with such roots could not be overtly racist: The original cult emphasized notions of working-class British masculinity that revolved around beer, soccer, fighting and looking smart.

The racist variant of skinhead developed only a decade later, inspired by the early punks' use of Nazi imagery and the temporary rise of the anti-immigration National Front party in late-1970s UK. It was the racist version of skinheads that became dominant in Germany and other central European countries, attracting much of the media attention that came to stereotype skinheads as invariably racist or outright neo-Nazi.

However, some skinheads have always rejected politics, racist or otherwise, and attempted to maintain what they see as the ideals of their subculture during its "golden age" in the late 1960s.

With a fervor verging on the ideological, members of the subculture continue to produce "fanzines" (underground magazines) and other publications dedicated to propagating the notion of the "traditional skinhead." A particularly influential book in these circles is The Skinhead Bible by British skinhead George Marshall.

Perhaps surprisingly for a style whose origins seem so inextricably bound up with notions of "Englishness", the skinhead style, both racist and nonracist, has spread far beyond Europe and America.

Skinheads had already appeared in Japan, seemingly always the first Asian country to adopt Western trends, in the early 1980s. By the early 90s the style had reached Southeast Asia. Skinheads probably first appeared in westernized Singapore and spread from there to Malaysia and Indonesia.

-- Jan Johannsson