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8 Joshua Barker buildings which appear top-heavy since their upper floors, supported by long concrete columns, extend out beyond the lower ones. Such a style-most commonly seen in the thousands of banks that sprang up in all of Indonesia's towns and cities during the boom periods of recent decades-emphasizes two features of the building: the entranceway and the upper floors. The entranceway can be of monumental proportions, with a ceiling several stories high, giving the visitor a distinct feeling of being very small. The upper floors, in contrast, allow their inhabitants to sit atop the structure and survey the scene below, often from behind a wall of one-way glass. On the occasions that I was forced to visit the Department of Interior between 1995 and 1997 (to report my research plans to the Socio-Political affairs bureau), I could not help but notice that the coupling of this architecture of surveillance with the …