Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion

Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans Self and Subject in Motion

Edited by

Kathryn Robinson

Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

This page intentionally left blank

Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans Self and Subject in Motion

Edited by

Kathryn Robinson Australian National University

Foreword by

Richard Werbner

Selection and editorial matter © Kathryn Robinson 2007 Chapters © their authors 2007 Foreword © Richard Werbner 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–01330–8 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–01330–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword: By Richard Werbner

x

Notes on Contributors

xvii

1 Introduction: Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion Kathryn Robinson Part I

1

Representation, Self-recognition and Self-discovery

2 ‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ in Southeast Asian Literature in the Global Age Tony Day

19

3

Art and Identity Politics: Nation, Religion, Ethnicity, Elsewhere Kenneth M. George

37

4

Moving Stories: Beyond the Local in Ethnography and Fiction Kirin Narayan

60

5 Wounds in Our Heart: Identity and Social Justice in the Art of Dadang Christanto Caroline Turner

77

Part II

Religion, Cosmopolitanism and Subjectification

6

Billy Graham in the South Seas Richard Eves

7

A Cultural Revival and the Custom of Christianity in Papua New Guinea Alison Dundon

128

Sufi Regional Cults in South Asia and Indonesia: Towards a Comparative Analysis Pnina Werbner

145

8

103

v

vi

Contents

Part III

Identity and Displacement

9 The Dragon Dance: Shifting Meanings of Chineseness in Indonesia Melani Budianta

169

10 Identities in a Culture of Circulation: Performing Selves in Filipina Migration Deirdre McKay

190

11

209

Transporting Culture Across Borders – the Hmong Nicholas Tapp

Index

230

List of Figures 3.1 Surat Ikhlas, A. D. Pirous, 1970, 40 ⫻ 50 cm, color etching 3.2 White Writing, A. D. Pirous, 1972, 100 ⫻ 180 cm, marble paste, acrylic on canvas 3.3 And God the Utmost, A. D. Pirous, 1978, 30 ⫻ 30 cm, marble paste, gold, acrylic on canvas 3.4 Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother, A. D. Pirous, 1982, 80 ⫻ 54 cm, serigraph 3.5 The artist and They Who are Buried without Names, A. D. Pirous, 2001, 122 ⫻ 122 cm, marble paste, sand, acrylic on canvas 3.6 Detail from The Shackling of the Chronicle of the Holy War II, A. D. Pirous, 1999, 72 ⫻ 77 cm, mixed media on canvas 5.1 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, Api Bulan Mei/Fire in May, 1998/1999, installation and performance at Third Asia-Pacific Triennial Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (Australia) 5.2 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, For Those Who Have Been Killed (detail), 1992, Bamboo, metal, 110 ⫻ 80 ⫻ 335 cm (irreg., approx.). The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (Australia) 5.3 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian/They Give Evidence, 1996/1997. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan). Fibreglass, brick powder, stone and clothes Dimensions variable. Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia) 5.4 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957. 1001 Manusia Tanah/Earth (Soil) People, 1996. Installation at Marina Beach, Ancol, Jakarta (Indonesia). Fibreglass, 1000 life-size figures vii

45 49 50 52

54

55

78

83

85

90

viii List of Figures

5.5 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, Litsus/Portrait of a Family, 15 August 2004. Performance by Dadang Christanto, Tukgunung Tan Aren (right) and Kilau Setanggi Timur (left). Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra (Australia) 5.6 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957. Performance at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (Australia), in association with the work ‘Heads from the North’, 2004 8.1 Sufi myths in Morocco and Indonesia (after Geertz 1968) 11.1 The new Hmong Cultural Centre in Chiangrai province

92

94 150 220

Acknowledgements The chapters in this volume were originally presented at the conference Cultures, Nations, Identities and Migrations, held at the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the Australian National University (ANU) in April 2004. The HRC sponsored the conference under its 2004 theme, Asia Pacific. The HRC Director, Professor Iain McCalman identified this theme and his successor, Professor Ian Donaldson enthusiastically supported this particular conference. Deputy Director Dr Caroline Turner and Research Project Officer Ms Christine Clark were unstinting in their assistance in bringing the programme to fruition, and Program Manager Leena Messina gave all of her extraordinary organizational skills, assisted by Judy Buchanan. Additional funding was provided by the ANU National Institute of Law and Social Sciences, and Christine Debono facilitated a smooth collaboration. In preparing the papers for publication, Belinda Henwood (Rent-a-Writer) gave meticulous attention to editing, and Fritha Jones coordinated production of the final manuscript.

ix

Foreword: Oceanic Visions, Situated Practices and the New Cosmopolitanism Richard Werbner

The worlds within worlds in these chapters are never at rest. Their people are on the move; their selves, subjects and identities in becoming; their stories, driven by uncertainties; and even the contributors are caught up reflecting upon their own self-development through cosmopolitan engagement with their subjects. Yet, taken as a whole, the chapters reflect the current force of confidence in the growing intellectual movement which is the new cosmopolitanism. It is already well known that the new cosmopolitanism represents a cross-disciplinary movement of intellectuals, mainly liberals, who since the mid-1990s have been seeking a mid-way between extreme doctrinal positions. Of these, one is overcommitted, David Hollinger argues, to universalism and its appeal to identification with humanity as a whole, to moral obligation without borders and the same treatment for all (2002, p. 230). Martha Nussbaum’s approach – her manifesto being the focus of debate in a landmark special issue of The Boston Review (1994) – is the leading example. At the other extreme, again emerging within liberal philosophy, is a communitarian form of pluralism which, in Hollinger’s view (somewhat of a caricature, in my own view) disregards multiple, overlapping identities, ‘is likely to ascribe to each individual a primary identity within a single community of descent … [and is] more concerned to protect and preserve the cultures of groups that are already well established’ (2002, p. 231). For Hollinger, the leading exponent of such pluralism is the Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka (on Kymlicka’s ideas, see also Werbner 2004a, p. 34, 2004b, pp. 262, 267), although it is in my view Charles Taylor who has contributed even more to what I call ‘the new dialogue with post-liberalism’ through which the political theory of liberalism, above all its concern for equal rights, is being rethought, repositioning it in history and society (Werbner 2004b, p. 261, see also 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, passim). x

Foreword xi

Largely neglected in debate within and about the new cosmopolitanism, however, is the positioning of what Hollinger rightly labels ‘perhaps the closest thing to a classic text yet generated by the new cosmopolitanism’ (2002, p. 230), namely Kwame Anthony Appiah’s, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ (1998 [1997]). In fact, this classic text is written by one of Africa’s foremost diasporic intellectuals, it is a product of a diasporic imagination, it is very much in the mainstream of postcolonial studies, and it makes the vanguard of the new cosmopolitanism distinctively postcolonial and diasporic (on Africa, the diasporic and the postcolonial, see Werbner 1996, p. 7). Perhaps most importantly for the advance in the present chapters, it makes the new cosmopolitanism intellectually indebted to comparative theoretical reflection on cultural and political struggles in very different parts of Africa. Carrying the new cosmopolitanism’s comparative thrust forward for Asia and the Pacific is the major challenge the present chapters address. It is a striking departure from the first waves of globalization studies, which endlessly rehearsed the global–local opposition, its conflations and inversions. Against that, here the new cosmopolitanism reaches a further stage of analytic sophistication through much theoretical care for the historic importance of migration over an unstable multitude of zones and regions across the states and empires of Asia and the Pacific. The new cosmopolitanism, these chapters prove, is a situated cosmopolitanism (on this point for social anthropology, see P. Werbner, in press). Part of the rethinking comes not, as globalists might argue, from an ostrich-like denial of the obvious – that ours is a ‘global age’, in many ways novel – but from a deeply considered regard for what has been the historicity, the longue durée in the fluid Asia Pacific, of cosmopolitanism itself. Oceans and archipelagos, inviting long sea journeys across a wealth of islands, surge powerfully in the perspectives of these chapters’ contributors, as they do in the people’s own endless quests, perhaps throughout history, for moral, political and economic – and, indeed, religious – interconnection within a larger world. What draws the imagination of people and contributors alike – including contributors from the Asia Pacific – is, above all, the sea’s horizon, not the island unto itself. In no way, however, does that lead these chapters to an unqualified obsession with boundlessness, as if that were the essential truth of the new cosmopolitanism, after all. Instead, the primary engagement is with what elsewhere Pnina Werbner calls ‘conjunctural dialectics’ (in press), the changing tension in cosmopolitanism between the bounded and the boundless, the rights of humans and the special obligations within specific relationships, the universal and the particular. The immediate

xii Foreword

interest in the Asia Pacific yields broad insights into cosmopolitan consciousness along with cosmopolitan practice, into the struggles over both inclusion and the wider value of the cultural means by which people assert, yet, paradoxically, transcend their distinctiveness – surprisingly and sometimes controversially, they find the cosmopolitan in and through their identities of origin or descent. Even further, these chapters avoid any master narrative of encompassed difference – as if the cosmopolitan comes in a linear trajectory and after the local or the national – by revealing how people have negotiated and renegotiated the relativity of their wider horizons, while they recreate themselves in encounters with strangers and others more or less unlike themselves. The analysis is highly topical. It comprehends disparities in the consciousness and practice of transnational migrants, often heirs to ancient diasporas, who use the latest network technology on the Internet not merely to communicate with their fellows around the world but also to locate and reconstitute their kinship relations. But, strikingly, even their appeals to global unity turn out to be as much at odds with each other as the transnational migrants themselves are opposed and diverse. On the Internet, from the ashes of ancient diasporas and little communities arise, phoenix-like identities, old in labels and boundaries and yet globally revitalized in their newness. It is a hallmark of our own reflexive moment that this collection, in addressing the aesthetic representations of such encounters, pays close attention to contributors’ own cross-cultural art, in the writing of a novel, in performance and painting. Their contributions, like those of their subjects, are seen to be made dialectically as they move between home and the places where they are strangers. This perception owes much to a moving performance given at this book’s conference by the Indonesian Chinese artist Dadang Christanto, whose work, memorializing his family’s suffering in ethnically targeted riots and mass slaughter, arouses our human compassion and thus speaks forcefully in a cosmopolitan voice to an international audience. His performance at the conference is represented on the cover of the book. There is, of course, a globalist cliche – the now well-worn truism about familiarity with the exotic in many more varieties than ever as an increasingly worldwide phenomenon. But what about the rediscovery of the once familiar as it is revitalized in conjunction with – or alternatively, in opposition to the exotic? Even more, what about the rediscovery of the familiar or local, perhaps formerly translocal, as cosmopolitan, when people resituate that, or its signifiers of identity, in a cosmopolitan space?

Foreword xiii

After all, reprise is always a complex reaction, often full of unexpected even unpredictable possibilities, and never a mere turning back of the clock or a halt to all new breaks with the past. For example, an outstanding case study traces the changing moments of self-recognition by the contemporary Islamic/Acehnese/Indonesian painter, A.D. Pirous. His interlocutor, the anthropologist Kenneth George, unfolds Pirous’ story from his moment of consciousness, being an alien stranger in a cosmopolitan space away from home. After seeing an exhibition of Qur’anic calligraphy in New York, Pirous began to use calligraphy and to regard his ethnic heritage as part of a globalized Islamic civilisation; at home in Indonesia in his later phase, after statesponsored riots in Aceh, he reintroduced human figuration along with century-old non-Qur’anic texts on holy war. These changes, George argues, are ‘materials through which we may discern a split, or a gap, in Pirous’s political and aesthetic subjectivity, a disruption to his artistic identity’ (Chapter 3, p. 53). More broadly, a good number of the chapters open out the problematics of reprise, especially in the face of complex, multiple and unstable conjunctions, by bringing a series of questions – and very prominently, postcolonial questions, sometimes involving the debris of empire or of early nation-state formation – to bear on the fashioning of the self, subjectivities and identities (for a comparable treatment for postcolonial Africa, see Werbner 2002d). The representative coverage for the Asia Pacific brings cosmopolitanism in our present ‘global age’ into perspective in relation to earlier ages perceived also, perhaps in different ways, to be global. It would be a mistake, however, to leave the impression of a chorus of harmony, rather than passionate, even fierce debate within the new cosmopolitanism. Perhaps most important for this book are the arguments about what Appiah (2006) incisively calls counter-cosmopolitanism. The arguments turn on these questions: Who, especially among globalists, migrants and other boundary-crossing travellers, is or is not a cosmopolitan? On what grounds and by which definition of cosmopolitanism can a fundamentalist, say Islamic or Pentecostal, be a cosmopolitan? If ever merely academic, the answers, like the questions themselves, have ceased to be so, partly under the impact of global securitization, the runaway world representations of personal and public security in arbitrary danger on the edge of terror. With global securitization in mind, Appiah identifies the new religious globalists as countercosmopolitans, and he is well aware that only a minority are violent and

xiv Foreword

the rest, non-violent. He builds on Olivier Roy’s insightful passage in Globalized Islam: Of course, by definition Islam is universal, but after the time of the Prophet and his companions (the Salaf) it has always been embedded in given cultures. These cultures seem now a mere product of history and the results of many influences and idiosyncrasies. For fundamentalists (and also for some liberals) there is nothing in these cultures to be proud of, because they have altered the pristine message of Islam. Globalization is a good opportunity to dissociate Islam from any given culture and to provide a model that could work beyond culture. (Roy 2004, p. 25, cited in Appiah 2006, pp. 138–139) Roy himself draws a parallel to Christians as religious globalists who pursue the same ‘quest for a universal community beyond cultures and nations’ and similarly insist on ‘a move toward the individualization of religion’ (Roy 2004, p. 149, cited in Appiah 2006, p. 140). Where Appiah locates such religious globalists and their countercosmopolitanism – and in my view, convincingly – is on the short side of universal ethics. The thing that matters most to the new religious globalists is building a community open to all who share their faith across the world. But if universalists in that they share ideals of human dignity, they fall short when it comes to tolerance. So great is their intolerance – and their break with the past extends from intolerance of religious difference to cultural intolerance in attacks on practice ‘embedded in given cultures’ and locally constitutive of self and subject – ‘that they exemplify the possibility of a kind of universal ethics that inverts the picture of cosmopolitanism I’ve been elaborating’ (Appiah 2006, p. 140). It might be argued, however, that the same was not true of some of Islam’s old globalists. Thus Sufi cults, which Pnina Werbner considers comparatively in this book, stand Appiah’s picture of cosmopolitanism upright again, because the Sufi cults are embedded in local cultures yet foster much boundary crossing and ethics of tolerance. In this book, none of the contributors on Pentecostalism or Christian evangelism applies Appiah’s concept of counter-cosmopolitanism explicitly to their observations of fundamentalism in Papua New Guinea. Instead, one focus is on the internal moral dilemmas – the soul searching among themselves – of a Pentecostal community that would be truly Christian. What is seen to be fraught, Richard Eves observes, is a shift in the sense of self from one that is thoroughly social in nature to an interiorized and individualized sense of self.

Foreword xv

An alternative focus, which Alison Dundon uses acutely, is more on extraversion – the reaching out towards greater connection with a wider world – through politicized debate about culture, identity and Christianity. The account discloses cultural phases, demonised or morally valued, in the changing reception of evangelical Christianity. A brief retelling of the story is useful, because it brings into relief a conclusion about the historical possibilities in the opposition of cosmopolitanism and counter-cosmopolitanism. Missionary driven intolerance – the break with the past, the rejection of cults and things ancestral as heathen, the identification of Christianity with the imported, modern model of living even in family residences instead of longhouses – came first. The iconoclasm culminated in the burning of the wealth of initiation cult carvings and ornaments: objects of ‘idol worship’. There followed phases of attempted revival, at the start inspired by an Australian Commonwealth Art Advisory Board member (a latter-day missionary for the arts, carving and cultural heritage) and marked passionately by fierce inter-village dispute over what from the ancestral past is compatible with Christianity. Such dispute was itself locally politicized, a part of communal expansion and village federation around the centre of the revival. Presently, a new encompassment is being worked out. Although still contested, it is being culturally grounded within practices believed to be customary and yet now felt to be in harmony not only with Christian principles but with new opportunities for reaching beyond the local world. The new extraversion, if still for connection with global Christianity, is now importantly for the sake of desired development, wealth and links to an international community of art dealers and also national and regional cultural institutions. Out of counter-cosmopolitan evangelical Christianity, with its intolerance and anti-cultural bias, local villagers are now forging an alternative – Christian country, in their terms – more tolerant, culturally open and productive of wider social exchange. Arguably, and this is the conclusion I would myself reach following Appiah’s lead (Appiah 1992), the tide has for once been turned, more in favour of cosmopolitanism and against counter-cosmopolitanism. The prospect must give heart to all of us who share in the promising debates of the new cosmopolitanism.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1992) In My Father’s House. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1998 [1997]) ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in Cosmopolitics, eds Peng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.

xvi Foreword Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2005) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (2006) Cosmopolitanism – Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Allen Lane (Penguin Books). Hollinger, David (2002) ‘Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, eds Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 227–239. Nussbaum, Martha (1994) ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, The Boston Review 19, no. 5. Roy, Olivier (2004) Globalized Islam. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Werbner, Pnina (In press) ‘Introduction’, in Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, ed. Pnina Werbner. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Werbner, Richard (1996) ‘Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas’, in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, eds Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger. London: Zed Books. —— (2002a) ‘Conclusion: Citizenship and the Politics of Recognition in Botswana’, in Minorities in the Millennium, ed. Isaac Mazonde. Gaborone: Lightbooks, for the University of Botswana and the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research, University of Manchester. —— (2002b) ‘Introduction: Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 4, pp. 671–684. —— (2002c) ‘Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 4, pp. 731–754. —— (2002d), ed. Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. —— (2004a) Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —— (2004b) ‘Epilogue: The New Dialogue with Post-Liberalism’, in Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa, eds Harri Englund and Francis Nyamnjoh. London: Zed Books.

Notes on Contributors Melani Budianta is an activist and cultural studies scholar, and Professor in the Department of Literature, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Indonesia. She has an MA in American Studies from the University of California and a PhD in English from Cornell University (1992). She is also a prominent political activist. Some of her recent English language publications include: ‘The Blessed Tragedy: The Making of Women’s Activism during the Reformasi Years (1998–2003)’ in Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Malaysia and Indonesia (2003), edited by Ariel Heryanto and Sunit Mandal; ‘In the Margins of Capital: From Tjerita Bingoeng to Si Doel Anak Sekolahan’ in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings in Modern Indonesian Literature (2002), edited by Keith Foulcher and Tony Day. Tony Day is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of History, Yale University. In 2006–2007 he was Visiting Professor of History, Wesleyan University. He graduated in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University (1981). He formerly taught Indonesia and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Key publications include: Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (2002), Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings in Modern Indonesian Literature (2002), edited with Keith Foulcher and Identifying With Freedom: Indonesia After Suharto (ed.) (2007). His current book projects are Empty Chest in a Glass House: Literature in Java, 1800–2000 and Identity and Freedom in Southeast Asia. Alison Dundon is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Australian National University, Australia, who works in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Recent publications include ‘Dancing Around Development: Crisis in Christian Country in Western Province, Papua New Guinea’, Oceania (2002); ‘Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province, Papua New Guinea’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA) (2002); ‘Tea and Tinned Fish: Christianity, Consumption and the Nation in Papua New Guinea’, Oceania (2004); ‘The Sense of Sago: Motherland and Migration in Papua New Guinea and Australia’, Journal of Intercultural Studies (2005). She is the co-editor of ‘HIV and AIDS in Rural PNG’ in a special issue of Oceania (in press); and author of a chapter in The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific (2007), edited by N. Stanley. xvii

xviii Notes on Contributors

Richard Eves is an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in the Gender Relations Centre at the Australian National University, Australia. He has held Research Fellowships at the University of East Anglia and at Cambridge University. Current research concerns the interface between life worlds and modernity in Papua New Guinea. His books include The Magical Body: Power, Fame and Meaning in a Melanesian Society (1998), co-authored with Nicholas Thomas and Bad Colonists: The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke (1999). Kenneth M. George is Professor of Anthropology and a specialist on Indonesia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America. He is editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and his 1996 monograph, Showing Signs of Violence: the Cultural Politics of a TwentiethCentury Headhunting Ritual, won the Harry J. Benda prize in Southeast Asian studies. His most recent work on art and violence in Indonesia includes Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2005), co-edited with Andrew Willford and ‘Violence, Culture, Performance and the Indonesian Public Sphere: Reworking the Geertzian Legacy’ in Violence, Culture, Performance and Expression (2004), edited by Neil Whitehead. Deirdre McKay is a Research Fellow, in the Department of Human Geography, Australian National University, Australia. She researches Filipino migration. Key publications include ‘Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations’ in International Feminist Journal of Politics (2001); ‘Filipinas in Canada: Deskilling as a Push Toward Marriage’ in Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration (2003), edited by N. Piper and M. Roces; ‘Cultivating New Local Futures: Remittance Economies and Land-use Patterns in Ifugao, Philippines’ in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2003); ‘Migration and the Sensuous Geographies of Re-emplacement in the Philippines’, in Journal of Intercultural Studies (2005). Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology and Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kirin is a published novelist and anthropologist. Significant publications include Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989) which won the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing; Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997), written in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood, a Kangra storyteller; and Love Stars and All That (1994), a novel. She is also co-editor of Creativity/Anthropology (1993) and editor, with a new

Notes on Contributors xix

introduction, for a reissue of a nineteenth-century classic of Indian folktales, Mary Freres Old Deccan Days (2002). Her latest book is a memoir of spiritual seeking, My Family and Other Saints (2007). Kathryn Robinson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She is editor of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Her own research has been principally on Indonesia, on issues of development based on mining and resource extraction, gender relations, international migration and Islam. Key publications include Women in Indonesia: Gender Equity and Development (2002) (Indonesia Assessment Series), edited with Sharon Bessell; Living Through Histories: Culture History and Social Life in South Sulawesi (1998), edited with Mukhlis Paeni; Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of Development in an Indonesian Mining Town (1986). Her recent articles include ‘Idioms of Vernacular Humanism: the West and the East’ in Anthropological forum (2006) and ‘Chandra Jayawardena and the Ethical “turn” in Australian Anthropology’ in Critique of Anthropology (2004). Nicholas Tapp is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He is a foremost scholar of the Hmong of southern China and Southeast Asia. Key book publications include Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (1989); Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China (1989), edited with Chien Chiao; The Hmong of China: Context, Agency and the Imaginary (2001). Caroline Turner is an art historian and curator, currently Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University, Australia. In her former position at the Queensland Art Gallery, she was Director of the Asia-Pacific Triennial Project, showcasing new art works from Asia and the Pacific. Key publications include Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific (1993); Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights (2003), edited with Nancy Sever; Humanities Research Centre: A History of the First 30 Years of the HRC at the Australian National University (2004), co-written with Glen St. John Barclay; and Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific (2005). Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University, United Kingdom. She is well known for her work on Muslim South Asians in Britain. Her book publications include Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (2003); Imagined Diasporas among

xx

Notes on Contributors

Manchester Muslims (2002); The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings Among British Pakistanis (2002); Women, Citizenship and Difference (1999); and Embodying Charisma (1998). Richard Werbner is Emeritus Professor in African Anthropology and Research Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Director of the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research. Key publications include Tears of the Dead (1991); Postcolonial Identities in Africa (1996) with Terence Ranger; Memory and the Postcolony (1998); Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (2002); Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey (1999); and Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana (2004). He produced and directed two ethnographic films, Séance Reflections with Richard Werbner (2004) and Shade Seekers and the Mixer (2007), and is working on a third, Eloyi, After Excorcism.

1 Introduction: Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion Kathryn Robinson

The contemporary Asia-Pacific is a region characterized by contested identities and emergent subjectivities. As in other parts of the world, over the past two decades, ‘the acceleration of global economic restructuring … new transnational media, increasing flows of migrants, and proliferations of civil wars and humanitarian crises in the wake of the cold war’ have ‘set the stage for the revitalization of cosmopolitanism’ (Calhoun 2002, pp. 885–886). The migrant figures as the quintessential image of the new cosmopolitan, and this is reflected in the immense scholarly interest in diasporas and cultural hybridity. Cosmopolitanism can have diverse meanings – as political discourse and cultural practices – ‘Yet it recognizes something important: worldly productive sites of crossing; complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments’ (Clifford 1998, p. 362). The authors in this book take up questions of subjectification and selfhood in the context of ‘sites of crossing’, exploring the consequences for processes of identification in parts of the world beyond the West. These sites exemplify the ‘sticky materiality’ (Tsing 2005) of the ‘friction’ of local/global encounters. Such encounters can be revealed in the context of globalization, the ‘designs to manage the world’ and the realm of ‘planetary conviviality’ and human compassion in which cosmopolitanism is given expression as political discourse (Mignolo 2000, p. 721). Migration also exposes the self to wider horizons and curiosity about the world, and the cultural richness which characterizes cosmopolitanism as cultural practice. The papers collectively question the novelty of the ‘global age’ in the Asia Pacific region, exemplified in the expansion 1

2 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

of Sufi networks into island Southeast Asia, as examined by Pnina Werbner, or literary works of the first millennium analysed by Tony Day. Sufi spirituality is an element of the subjectivity of a mid-nineteenthcentury Javanese writer discussed by Day; the Acehnese painter Pirous, in Kenneth George’s words, asserts ‘civilizational status’ for Islamic arts of the Indonesian archipelago. The end of the Cold War has evoked public discourse framed in the simplistic logic of the ‘clash of civilisations’; this is posed as a challenge to the cosmopolitan values of ‘planetary conviviality’ (such as human rights discourse). The breakdown of the Cold War ‘master narrative of bi-polar super powers’ (Wilson and Dirlik 1995, p. 3) has created new contours of international political space fraught with danger for those caught up in labour flows. At the same time, local political contestations often express counter-cosmopolitan communitarian values (Appiah 2006) and discourses that affirm universalism, but with uniformity, as opposed to the pluralizing discourses of cosmopolitanism. In this context, there is an urgency to attempts to understand senses of identity and location in the world (Calhoun 2002, p. 893), and how these are linked with issues of subjectivity: old forms are being contested and often radically reconstructed, even when seemingly revived, while new ones, if temporarily recognized, in turn appear to be dislodged or reconstituted in ways that are hard to predict in the light of past practice. The Filipina labour migrants support their families back home and embrace a form of subjectivity that owes more to local class practices than it does to global cultural forms; New Ireland villagers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) adopt Pentecostalism which demands a new form of subjectification that requires a fundamental shift in the material practices that previously constituted selves and social relations; while the Gogodala in Western Province PNG have settled on a quite different response to evangelical Christianity, one which integrates Christian values with the animated terrain of their ancestral world, and a commodified artistic practice. Narayan fictionally reconstructs the reflexive response of Indian villagers to the white woman who transgresses their ideas of morality. Much of the political rhetoric of identity and difference (such as the use of ethnicity as an ‘independent variable’ in explanations of political conflict) carries implicit assumptions of ‘real’ ontological distinctions. Identities, however, involve processes of recognition and imagining, of construction and contestation, of self-recognition and the dynamic constitution of identities (Clifford 1998, p. 365). These are key issues in this book.

Introduction 3

The chapters in this book address issues of subjectification and identity in the sticky materiality (Tsing 2005) of cosmopolitan spaces: artistic and literary production; new and old migrations; religions not only in their guise of strategies for global domination but also as designs for ‘planetary conviviality’ (Mignolo 2000). The Indonesian artist, Dadang Christanto, expresses the tragedies of his own family’s unique history in his art, while evoking sorrow for universal suffering from his international audience; a long-term friendship with the anthropologist and writer Kirin Narayan energizes a woman in India to imagine in literary form the lives of the people from elsewhere who in fragmentary ways transect her own life; Indonesians of Chinese descent find an opening literary space for the expression of their formerly forbidden subjectivities and identities. As Kenneth George notes in Chapter 3: ‘identification, as a process of self-recognition … [is] … a ceaseless, even restless encounter with objects, signs and social others that emperils, relocates, or throws off balance one’s sense of self’ (Chapter 3, p. 38). Most of the encounters recounted in this book are engagements in cosmopolitan spaces; and as noted by Clifford (1998, p. 365) the idea of cosmopolitanism ‘points toward alternative notions of “cultural” identity’ and ‘undermines the “naturalness” of ethnic absolutisms, whether articulated at the nation-state, tribal, or minority level’. The authors in this book explore from first-hand experience the ways in which identities are recognized and contested, and subjectivities dislodged and reconstituted in the contemporary world. As Day points out, ‘subject’ has become the ‘key word in debates about the identity of the self in the global (post) colonial contemporary moment’, but it carries a double meaning of ‘interior subjectivity and political subordination’ (Chapter 2, p. 20). (On this duality, see Werbner 2002). The individual papers represent crossovers of anthropology into art and literature, literature into politics and politics into performance. No single discipline is adequate to address these complex cultural, economic and personal interconnections. Such hybrid approaches, interrogating disciplinary assumptions, reach the subjects’ own questioning of identity, their recourse to fantasy, to artful imagination, their self-fashioning and rediscovery of who they are in movements of cultural nationalism, renewal and revival: the Acehnese artist Pirous (re)discovering his identity in a New York art gallery; Hmong refugees refreshing kinship ties on a global scale through the Internet; Gogodala carvers in Papua New Guinea transcending both the adopted forms of subjectification of evangelical Christianity and scholarly disparagement of ‘invented tradition’ to reimagine their dwelling place as ‘Christian country’.

4 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

Asia and Pacific as locations Collectively, the chapters consider the contiguous and interconnected locations of Asia and the Pacific, a regional grouping most frequently found in economics and global security discourses. ‘If such a region did not exist, it would have to be invented by policy planners and social scientists along the East–West axis to figure forth an integrated source of boundless markets, wondrous raw materials and ever-expanding investments’ (Wilson and Dirlik 1995, pp. 1–2). It takes its significance in the economics and geopolitics of a post-Cold War era, and in this context, the region has been conceptualized as a passive recipient of economic progress originating from outside but with the motor of growth progressively shifting to the ‘East Asia Tiger economies’: indeed at this moment global politics and economics discourse are especially concerned with the (re)emergence of China as a global economic power. ‘The all-but-reified “Asia-Pacific” formulated by market planners and military strategists is inadequate to describe or explain the fluid and multiple “Asia/Pacific” of social migration and transcultural innovation’ (ibid., p. 6); the slash signifying linkage yet difference, a counter-hegemonic ‘space of cultural production’ (ibid.) which they see comprising ‘staggering complexity, discrepant hybridity, and nomadic flux that fascinates, and more strategically undoes arboreal formations of the post-Cold War geopolitical imaginary …’ (ibid., pp. 1–2). In considering the Asia Pacific, this book takes up a ‘scalar’ perspective between local and global, a way of conceptualizing an economically and culturally diverse region that nonetheless has commonalities in historical experience and cultural practices even if these by no means exhibit a linear trajectory – from communal to individual subject, or from localized subject to cosmopolitan. The assumed emplaced cultures of the Asia Pacific have been regarded as ‘exemplars of the self-generating nature of culture itself. However, it has become increasingly clear that all human cultures are shaped and transformed in long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade and meaning’ (Tsing 2005, p. 3). The historical and geographical depths of these networks, including the Sufi practices that accompanied the conversion of island Southeast Asia to Islam extend well before the colonial era entry of Christianity into the region; the complex politics in the mountains of southern China and mainland Southeast Asia that pre-date the modern borders of nation states; and the relationships that have developed between local populations and Chinese migrants in the islands of Southeast Asia that have been constructed and reconstituted in relationships of trade, national politics and geopolitics. The title of Epeli Hau’ofa’s influential

Introduction 5

essay, ‘Our Sea of Islands’ indexes his counter-hegemonic vision of the Pacific. For the ancestral Oceanians, it ‘was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers. From one island to another they sailed to trade and to marry, thereby expanding social networks for greater flows of wealth’ (1995, p. 92). The island societies of Oceania were not ‘functionally self-contained worlds’ (Tsing 2005, p. 7) as conventionally represented by anthropology of the early to late twentieth century. Hau’ofa contrasts this Oceanic understanding with the hegemonic perspective of Western observers, men who entered the Pacific after long sea journeys and who later drew the imaginary lines and boundaries of nation states. They saw the world of Oceania as tiny, as ‘islands in a far sea’ – but the people of Oceania did not see it that way. Their universe comprised not only land surfaces, but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their ways across the seas … There is a gulf of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’. (1995, pp. 90–91) Imperialism meant boundaries and confinement. The authors in this book take on the spirit of this Oceanic vision, finding similar expanded social networks and counter-hegemonic imaginings in the Asia-Pacific region, whether it be the regional, rhizomatic expansion of Sufi cults, the identification of Gogodala territory in PNG as ‘Christian country’ or the re-imagined and re-valorised ‘Chineseness’ in Indonesia associated with geopolitical power shifts. Twenty-first century migrations might not have the free-flowing character of the Oceanic voyages Hau’ofa describes, but contemporary migrations share the qualities of ‘moving and mingling’, of ever-moving horizons, the flow of ideas, contracting long-distance marriages and finding resources elsewhere beyond the confines of localities of birth. The links are social, cultural, economic and religious, and transcend the political boundaries of the nation-state, the product of that vision-shrinking grip of nineteenth century imperialism that originated the discursive formation of centres and peripheries. Alongside the sites of localized and particularistic identities, the Asia-Pacific region has historically embraced many older forms of cosmopolitanism – including that of global religions such as Islam and

6 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

Christianity, and European universalizing philosophies like MarxismLeninism and Liberalism. All of these informed anti-colonial nationalist movements. The popular embrace of the ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse by Western politicians and media, throwing up a stereotype of Islam as the source of threat to all that is precious to so-called Western civilization, immediately draws our attention to a counter-hegemonic and nuanced understanding of Islam as a rival cosmopolitanism to that associated with the post-Enlightenment ‘West’ (Zubaida 1999). ‘In history and anthropology … the idea that global interconnections are old has only recently been revitalized, muffled as it was for much of the twentieth century by the draw of nationally contained legacies, in history, and functionally contained social worlds, in anthropology’ (Tsing 2005, p. 7). What kinds of global imaginaries and practices are embraced and generated in the Asia-Pacific region? In this book, cosmopolitanisms from modernism to Sufism and through to Pentecostalism are seen comparatively and in a perspective that reveals the reworking of the old and the new in distinctive local and translocal contexts extending the critique of assumptions that contemporary forms of globalization efface formerly emplaced identities (see Pieterse 1992). This perspective illuminates the political force of rhetoric in discursive strategies, because it keeps in view the appeals to primordialism and particularism by people who also embrace broadly ‘imagined’ communities (of not only citizens and co-religionists but also of artists and writers). In Chapter 7 Dundon takes up the artistic renaissance of the Gogodala people of Papua New Guinea, one of the ‘case studies’ in the controversial ‘invention of tradition’ paradigm, and her analysis illuminates the troublesome nature of the presumed binary that informed that debate. The chapters are organized in three parts. The first group deals with practices of ‘representation, self-recognition and self-discovery’ and the ‘making’ of the subject through self-fashioning. The focus is on fantasy and imagining, and processes of self-recognition are shown to be significant in forms of subjectification which also involve movements between the local and the global. Through attention to not only creative processes of writing, performance and painting, but also curatorial practice and scholarship as sites of ‘friction’ between global and localized or personalized practice in self-fashioning and self-discovery (including ethnographic writing), the authors address issues of questioning identity and (re)discovering the self, and their association with political contestation, cultural nationalisms and revival/renewal.

Introduction 7

Representation, self-recognition and self-discovery Tony Day sets the stage in his chapter, which originated in a search for the origins of the idea of freedom in Southeast Asia. He draws on early modern literary texts from Southeast Asia enabling him to question the novelty of self-recognition and self-fashioning in the region; whether the normative ‘self’ is the individuated ‘property in one’s person’ type of self of liberal social philosophy. He examines the ways in which ‘self’ and ‘subject’ (two opposing terms, he argues, from the Anglo-American and French intellectual traditions) are expressed and represented in these literary texts, as interconnected but distinct concepts. Taking a deep historical perspective, Day challenges the assumption that the individuated self, the subject that is hailed by universalizing cosmopolitan discourses, is a product of modernity, of post-Enlightenment discourse (Giddens 1991; Pechesky 1992). Discussing the self-fashioning in these texts, he recounts works in which the self ‘takes possession of and exploits landscapes, languages and religions in order to express herself’, whose identity is ‘both local and cosmopolitan’, whose subjectivities are ‘intrinsic to sexual, political and religious identities’. That is, we can distinguish ‘public selfhood’ and ‘interior states of subjectivity’ in these works. These literary texts reveal that the question of ‘freedom’ in Southeast Asia is not a post-colonial novelty, and that ‘it is possible to attain subjective freedom in social worlds where the self is anything but free’ (Chapter 2, p. 34). The moment of self-recognition by the Islamic Acehnese Indonesian painter, A. D. Pirous when he encounters an exhibition of Islamic calligraphy in New York is the subject of Kenneth George’s chapter. In a world where people, culture and capital are on the move, we are mindful of the need to avoid depicting subjects and localities as distinct from or even opposed to globalization. Paradoxically, Pirous ‘discovers’ his locally emplaced identity in an encounter with art in a cosmopolitan space. It is in that context that the artist understands that ‘If you want to be cosmopolitan, you have to be Indonesian first’. He emerges with a ‘distinctly modernist, international and Muslim vision of art that wed abstraction with calligraphic renderings of Qur’anic Arabic and Jawi’ (Chapter 3, p. 39). George links the artist’s self-discovery and the aesthetics of reprise for subjectivity, with ethnic consciousness and nationalism. The politics of artistic subject-making, in which a critical issue is the artist’s relation to culture, is mediated through his mother. The expression of his identity cannot be divorced from the political relations between Aceh and the Indonesian state.

8 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

The imbrication of Islam in Pirous’s personhood and his artistic production challenges the idea of Islam as the ‘bad other to globalization’ (Calhoun 2002, p. 870). That it is an alternative global and cosmopolitan discourse is also exemplified in Pnina Werbner’s chapter in this book, on the inherent networking tendency of Sufism. As George argues, ‘The strain between aspiring to a unique painterly subjectivity and to an identity as a representative of a nation, in Pirous’s work, now could be distended, rethought and resolved through the mediating practices and discourses of Islamic art’ (Chapter 3, p. 48), ‘to be a modern “Indonesian Islamic artist” one needs first to feel the currents of a globalized world of modernity and its discourses of nationality, art, religion, and ethnic location’ (Chapter 3, p. 57). Another contemporary Indonesian artist, Dadang Christanto, is the subject of Caroline Turner’s chapter. Dadang, like many of his peers, engages with political issues and human rights in his domestic arena, and brings these concerns into the international art world. His art practice is a kind of witnessing; he speaks for the victims and claims social justice on their behalf. His work has had a powerful impact on audiences in many countries. At the Asia-Pacific Triennial Exhibition in 1999, for example, his performance entailed burning 47 life-sized papier mâché human figures, referencing the riots in May 1998 which brought down the Suharto regime. His corpus of work represents a very personal account of the events of recent Indonesian history, and the invocation and specific attribution of a Chinese identity. Since the 1998 violence in which Indonesian Chinese were targeted and scapegoated by the regime (which is also the subject of Chapter 9 in this book), he has publicly discussed his own part-Chinese heritage and revealed that his father was killed in the mass slaughter after the 1965 coup that ushered in the Suharto regime. Dadang’s performance at the conference that gave rise to this book, and which is pictured on its cover, memorialized this family political history. Whereas the aspect of Pirous’ story that George recounts has him recognizing his rooted identity in a cosmopolitan encounter, Turner gives an account of the manner in which Dadang’s visual telling of his personal story, grounded in violent and traumatic events in recent Indonesian history, evokes strong emotional responses from international audiences who experience his work as expressing universal humanistic values and truths. His exhibit at the 1993 Asia-Pacific Triennial evoked an extraordinary response from visitors to the Queensland Art Gallery who left personal testimonials and flowers at the installation. However, as Turner comments: ‘while Dadang Christanto is shaped by this terrible family experience in

Introduction 9

Indonesia his work is not in any way confined or limited to his personal experiences. He is not the subject of his own art’ (Chapter 5, p. 81). His works transcend local or national contexts and ‘resonate in both aesthetic terms and in content to individual and private suffering’ (Chapter 5, p. 84). Like Pirous, his subjectification as an artist is recursively linked to Indonesian national discourse and the authoritarian politics of the Suharto period. Narayan, a novelist and ethnographer, recounts the dynamic relationship between self-discovery and the capacity to embrace the world of the ‘other’ through the practice of writing, giving form to Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) insight that contemporary globalization provides the circulation of images and experiences for new kinds of fantasy. Global flows expose different sorts of lives through migration and allows the experience of different places through media. ‘What, as anthropologists, might we learn from the kinds of imagined lives and stories that people in the field consider worth elaborating …?’, asks Narayan (Chapter 4, p. 61). Like the artistic work of artists Pirous and Dadang, the creative process of writing provides a way into the subjective worlds of the other and their experience of globalization, in some cases their cosmopolitan subjectivities. The agony of the anthropologist as the agent of ‘othering’ is neatly overturned by Narayan’s confidante/informant who makes her the subject of fiction. In her presentation at the 2004 conference that originated this book, Narayan recounted the ironic manner in which invoking an imaginative realm for cosmopolitan subjects in the United States has facilitated the revelation of personal stories. The process of subjectification as a source of fictional stories, is apparently more palatable to her interlocutors than that of an informant for the sake of social science research. Is anthropology a kind of cosmopolitan practice? (Kahn 2003; Rapport 2006). The chapters in Part I exemplify that – just as the artist or the author is involved in a complex process of identity formation in a global cosmopolitan context – the modern transcultural scholar too cannot separate their scholarly practices from the processes of subjectification and identity formation in a global world. ‘Narayan (chapter 4) raises the question of the way that cultural typifications of ethnographic writing, the striving for authenticity, mutes cosmopolitan tendencies in anthropology’s subjects. Kenneth George comments that his publications on Pirous ‘have played a small part in marketing his painterly identity’ (Chapter 3, p. 40) and that their conversations over a period of time have ‘given [him] the opportunities to reflexively refigure his identity’ (ibid.). In the case of Caroline Turner’s relationship to Dadang, her scholarly

10 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

practice as a curator and art historian and the artists’ work and reputation are intimately connected; indeed her work as curator of the Asia-Pacific Triennial has been significant in the constitution of the global category of Asian and Pacific art.

Religion as cosmopolitan practice Part II engages religion as cosmopolitan practice and forms of subjectification. In contemporary post-Cold War discourse, religion is an important terrain of struggle over values and political posturing on ‘morality’, and this appears to define different blocs. Eves comments that ‘Christianity [which Mignolo (2000, p. 722) labels the first “global design” of the modern world, constitutive of its “darker side” colonialism] has been marked by endless campaigns of penetration and conversion to fulfil its global ambitions’ (Chapter 6, p. 104). But religion can also be a source of ‘solidarity and care for strangers as well as … persecution of heretics’ (Calhoun 2002, p. 893). That is, religion can also manifest values of cosmopolitanism as ‘a set of projects towards planetary conviviality’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 721). Eves and Dundon, in Part II, describe very different responses to evangelical Christianity in the Pacific. Eves’s chapter is concerned with the global flow of fundamentalist Christianity to the Pacific region and its effects on indigenous conceptions of self. In the Lelet community in New Ireland PNG that was already Christianized, the new wave of Pentecostalism demands a radical re-fashioning of self, which challenges the common bases of identity. This is in a context in which local identities had already been radically reworked, ‘on the basis of fixed geographical location’ (Chapter 6, p. 107) in the colonial period. The tropes of ‘sharing’ versus ‘greedy’ symbolize the shift in personhood and forms of self-fashioning required by conversion. The ‘property in one’s person’ type of self seems to be a more radical form of difference in the Pacific, than in Southeast Asia. The Gogodala of the Western Province of PNG, the subject of Dundon’s chapter, have had a different recomposition of subjectivity in their response to evangelical Christianity, just one of the modern identities hailing them. An artistic revival of ‘heathen’ art practices has interleaved neatly with their identities as Christians and as PNG nationals to produce a new form of subjectification anchored in the idea of Gogodala territory as ‘Christian country’. Here, Christian values overlay the emplaced ancestral trails that animate their home landscape – truly a form of rooted cosmopolitanism. Eves notes that the Gogodala public

Introduction 11

debate over custom versus Christianity is very different from the language of personal struggle to maintain a Christian identity that characterizes Lelet public discourse. However, the Gogodala people have iconic status in the ‘invention of tradition debate’ of the 1980s (see Jolly and Thomas 1992); in what can now be seen as a counter-cosmopolitan argument, the ‘value’ of Gogodala’s artistic production was questioned because of the role of a white outsider in championing their cultural creativity, and providing an alternative discourse to that of the church in their self-fashioning of their ancestral skills and beliefs associated with them. Taking a different standpoint, Dundon provides a connection to the earlier invented tradition debate, which overstated the inner-outer/ local-other distinctions. The Gogodala revival of artistic production in the 1970s is bound to their expression of their perceived new identities as citizens, and their involvement in national and transnational development discourses through idioms such as ‘customary ways’, ‘ancestral travels’ and ‘Christian country’. In a trajectory not unlike that of Pirous, they were beckoned away from traditional forms of artistic production by modernist discourses but have embarked on a process of rediscovery where traditional forms are reassimilated with new meanings related to subjectification in the modern world. Just as for Pirous, Islamic art mediates subject and nation, for the Gogodala carvers, ‘Christian country’ mediates their PNG citizenship (Chapter 7, p. 139). Pnina Werbner’s large corpus of work on Muslim South Asians in Britain interrogates the translocation of culture – its dislocation, transplantation and translation in the course of migration. In Chapter 8 she turns her well-honed comparative eye to the literature on Sufism in Indonesia. The analysis is framed by her scholarly engagement with challenges presented by Sufism as a local tradition within a global movement. Through the lens of Sufi practice and nodal organisational networks, she is able to present a fresh analysis of the Indonesian pesantren (Islamic residential school) tradition – well known to scholars through Clifford Geertz’s Religion of Java (1960) and a succession of scholars after him – as a symbolic and organizational form not radically different from that of the classic Sufi lodge found in South Asia and the Middle East. So too Islamic pilgrimage in Indonesia bears resemblance in ritual devotional practices and sacred exchanges to global forms of Sufi pilgrimage to saints’ shrines and lodges. Werbner’s analysis is grounded in the anthropology of regional cults, a model that explains comparatively the sociocultural processes at pilgrimage shrines and oracles viewed as sacred centres for boundary

12 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

crossing movement and cosmopolitan sharing extending beyond the local. She notes that ‘to compare Sufi regional cults across different places separated by thousands of miles of sea and land and by radically different cultural milieus is in many senses to seek the global in the local, rather than the local in the global’ (Chapter 8, p. 145). In this sense her analysis challenges the model of ‘religious syncretism’ that underlay Clifford Geertz’s studies of Javanese Islam, which emphasized the ‘domestication’ of Islam in Indonesia. Instead, she proposes that everywhere a global Sufi ‘grammar’ informs the moral fables of charismatic Sufi sainthood to explain the possibility of human perfection. Contra Geertz, she argues that religions that travel gain in reflexivity, losing the ‘taken-for-granted doxic transparency they once possessed’ (Chapter 8, p. 149). A travelling religion (like other cosmopolitan ideologies) necessarily inserts itself into a contested ideological field, she points out. The task of the analyst is thus to explain the taken-for-granted embedding of religious belief and practice while recognizing at the same time its contested nature. In Sufi Islam the subjectivity of a saint is regarded by followers as exceptional and unique. He is a friend (wali) of God. But this perception must be defended against reformist critics. Hence, Werbner shows, although the legends and miracles of North African, Indonesian and South Asian saints are set in quite different historical and ecological contexts, they contain a similar hidden structural logic while at the same time their local moral authority is underpinned by the overt concreteness of local detail about the life and miracles of a local saint. This quality of Sufi narratives and the similarity of its organizational networks throughout the Muslim world, means that despite the fact that the veneration of saints has come under attack from reformist Islam, it continues to be a living, vital tradition, though often – as in Indonesia – in its reformist modes.

Migration, identity and displacement Part III engages migrant subjects and processes of identity and displacement. Budianta in Chapter 9 discusses the renaissance of Chinese Indonesian identity in the political climate of reform in post-Suharto Indonesia, whereas McKay in Chapter 10 and Tapp in Chapter 11 deal with migrating subjects in the political and economic flows of the contemporary world, and associated forms of global domination. The Hmong in Tapp’s research were the ‘collateral damage’ of the Indochina war, and McKay’s agentic Filipinas are cashing in their social capital in the global labour market; truly ‘working class cosmopolitans’ (Werbner 1999).

Introduction 13

Melani Budianta’s scholarship is seamlessly interwoven with her political activism and subjectification as a woman and as an Indonesian Chinese. This very old migrant population, bearers of earlier forms of cosmopolitanism that have marked the cultures of Southeast Asia in ways that have become naturalized, were treated as pariahs and scapegoats – but also deployed as cronies – by the Suharto regime. In the first part of her chapter she reflects, as an organic intellectual, on the debates raging amongst Indonesian intellectuals of Chinese descent about the meaning of the post-1998 cultural renaissance, expressed in a public display of Chinese language and ritual, and in the second part she critically examines the literature and film produced by a new generation of voices expressing Chinese subjectivity. The contemporaneous rise of the ‘sleeping tiger’, China as the new regional force cannot be divided from these personal forms of expression (just as prior repression in part took its meaning from Cold War identification of Chinese and communism). Nicholas Tapp in Chapter 11 began his research on transnational Hmong communities with the expectation of finding a transnational Hmong identity mediated through the Internet and other related forms of global communication. He found instead that a variety of very different appeals were being made to an imaginary unity, while borders and nation states still have extraordinary power in relation to Hmong subjectivities. The Internet is used as much in a rediscovery of relations forged in an idiom of (real and fictive) kinship, and language is a factor which unites (in the case of English) or separates (in the case of French). But for the Hmong, like the Filipino labour migrants discussed by McKay, the crucial result for individual subjects of their global encounters relates to the ‘sending locations’. Describing migration as a ‘culture of circulation’ involving ‘imagining, recognition and interaction’ as well as the flow of people, commodities and ideas, McKay discovers a ‘dynamic interplay between identities, economy and cultural fields’ in which migrant identities shift over time (Chapter 10, p. 192). There is a complex interplay between subjectivities and available identities for the overseas labour migrant women, including, that of the self-sacrificing mother, community stalwart, stingy returnees, and Filipina – the latter indexing a middle class urban identity and cultural style normally unavailable to rural working women. Culture and economics, prestige and honour, are intimately linked in the creation of ‘identity spaces’.

Conclusion The chapters in this book in a metaphorical sense address the case studies in ‘a sea of islands’, refusing assumptions of homogeneity of the

14 Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans

planet in the ‘geopolitical imaginary nourished by the terms and processes of globalization’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 721). They add to a growing literature on vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism (see Werbner 2006), the dialectical relation between rooted commitments and global universal sensibilities. The authors interrogate the lives of their subjects as exemplifying regional and international preoccupations and sensibilities, different forms of encounter, negotiation and multiple affiliation rather than simply different ‘cultures’ or ‘identities’ (Clifford 1998, p. 365). Clifford invokes the term discrepant cosmopolitanism which he argues ‘allows us to hold on to the idea that whereas something like economic and political equality are crucial political goals, something like cultural similarity is not’ (ibid.). These truly are new kinds of selves in the making (Beck 2000): the discrepant cosmopolitanisms engaged in this book represent selves who are not merely acted upon, ‘subjected to’ global processes, but are active agents in self-fashioning in the culturally, politically and economically expansive social fields of the cosmopolitan world we live in.

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, Anthony (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Beck, Ulrich (2000) ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology 15, no. 1, pp. 70–105. Calhoun, Craig (2002) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4, pp. 869–897. Clifford, James (1998) ‘Mixed Feelings’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Phenh Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 362–369. Geertz, Clifford (1960) The Religion of Java. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Polity Press. Hau‘ofa, Epeli (1995) ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, eds Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 86–98. Jolly, Margaret and Nicholas Thomas (1992) The Politics of Tradition in the Pacific, Special Issue of Oceania 62, no. 4. Kahn, Joel (2003) ‘Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Practice?’, Anthropological Theory 3, no. 4, pp. 403–415. Mignolo, Walter G. (2000) ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture 12, no. 3, pp. 721–748.

Introduction 15 Pechesky, Rosalind Pollack (1992) ‘The Body as Property: A Feminist Revision’, in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 387–405. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1992) ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in Global Modernities, eds Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. London: Sage Publications, pp. 45–68. Rapport, Nigel (2006) ‘Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Study’, Anthropology Today 22, no. 1, pp. 23–24. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Werbner, Pnina (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology 7, no. 1, pp. 17–35. —— (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Special issue of Theory Culture and Society 23, no. 1–2, pp. 496–498. Werbner, Richard, ed. (2002) Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Wilson, Rob and Arif Dirlik, eds (1995) Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zubaida, Sami (1999) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East’, in Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, ed. Roel Meijer. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press, pp. 15–33.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Representation, Self-recognition and Self-discovery

This page intentionally left blank

2 ‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ in Southeast Asian Literature in the Global Age Tony Day

The topic of this chapter reflects several interests and projects. In working on my book on state formation in Southeast Asia (2002) I became interested in the question of human agency in the making of both states and history, and I am still considering it. What do we mean when we talk about a human ‘agent’ and in what sense is he/she ‘free’ to act? In that book I also questioned the way historians and others structure Southeast Asian history chronologically. Is the ‘global age’ a recent or ancient temporal unit in the case of this region of the world? Does it help us to understand the long duration of social and cultural change in globalized and globalizing Southeast Asia today if we confine ourselves within the parameters of very recent technological change discussed in Manuel Castells’s study of the ‘information age’ (2004), for example? As far as literature is concerned, I am a freelance writer about Southeast Asian literature and history who is continually looking for ways of generating interest in the importance of literature as a form of cultural expression where historical realities are represented and social problems are debated. Also in the background is my work with Keith Foulcher, which we are pursuing in a long-term, long-distance collaboration, on the question of postcoloniality and interpretive strategies for reading modern Indonesian and Southeast Asian literatures (Foulcher and Day 2002). We are still looking for answers about the identity of the (post)colonial ‘subject’. Finally, in a book I am writing on literary form and world literature in Java in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the question of the self/subject is clearly central, in every possible way, to understanding how Javanese, Indonesian and Dutch colonial literary forms represent social reality. This chapter is an outgrowth of all these activities and preoccupations. It is very much a work in progress, uneven in its coverage of genres, eras and places, still focused on interpretive readings of 19

20 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

texts, which will lead eventually to broader reflections on society and history. My interest here is to examine the question of identity in relation to literature. At the outset I want to draw a distinction between the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘subject’, although it is not always easy to maintain. In the context of Western critical writing about Southeast Asia and elsewhere, my impression is that I have not been alone in my tendency to use the terms ‘self’ and ‘subject’ more or less interchangeably. I am more concerned to draw a distinction between them now, however, thanks to the literary critic Barbara Johnson and her introduction to a collection of papers delivered as the Oxford Amnesty Lectures in 1992 (1993). The speakers at this gathering were asked ‘to consider the consequences of the deconstruction of the self for the liberal tradition’ in pursuit of the questions: ‘Does the self as construed by the liberal tradition still exist? If not, whose human rights are we defending?’ (Johnson 1993, p. 2). Johnson points out that the concept of the ‘self’ comes from AngloAmerican tradition, with its stress since John Locke on the notion of property (and, following the Oxford English Dictionary, on the wholeness and integrity of the individual) and on the inseparability of self, property and rights. Yet increasingly, for writers like the sociologist Anthony Giddens, who uses the term ‘self’ to talk about ‘self and society in the late modern age’ (1991), the subjective and plural dimensions of the interiority of selfhood, rather than its public integrity, ownership and rights, is now the focus of analysis. The term ‘subject’, with its double meaning of interior subjectivity and political subordination has become the key word in debates about the identity of the self in the global, (post)colonial contemporary moment. As Johnson observes, it was the French philosopher Descartes in his famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, who inaugurated the ‘subject’ as the thinking agent of human events (1993, p. 3). By the nineteenth century, however, the dominant position of the autonomous, reflective and subjective self in history was being challenged by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In its most recent avatar, the subject as theorized by Lacan possesses neither the centrality or integrity of the Freudian ego, nor the utopian, liberating potential of either the Marxian proletarian or the Nietzschean Superman. In the words of The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (Macey 2000, p. 368): ‘For most theories of the subject, the “individual” is a product rather than a source of meaning. The concept of the subject is thus frequently invoked to undermine the notion that an innate sense of “self” can provide a stable personal identity or be the focus of experience.’ It is

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 21

easy to see why ‘subject’ rather than ‘self’ would become the concept of preference in feminist and postcolonial studies of the individual in her struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds, for autonomous selfhood, identity and freedom. The fact that, in English (but not in Indonesian or Javanese, for example) there is a single word ‘subject’ that has both active and passive, grammatical as well as political and legal meanings, also makes it a more multivalent term than ‘self’ (Macey 2000, p. 369). And yet, as my discussion will show, it is important to maintain the difference between the notion of ‘self’, with its connotations of rightful, public integrity, and the fluid, equally significant realm of interior ‘subjectivity’. Both aspects of what I am going to call ‘personhood’, the degree to which each is present and the manner of their interaction in the making of a person, are crucial to gaining an understanding of what ‘freedom’ means at any given historical moment. I have also begun writing about the meanings of freedom in everyday life in Southeast Asia in terms of the ‘tactical’ uses of time in literature and film (see Day 2004). The two essays are stepping stones toward a book on identity and freedom in Southeast Asia. I turn now to the question of self and subject in Southeast Asian literary texts. I will move chronologically through time and give examples from around the region, with an emphasis on Indonesian materials. Although my remarks are structured chronologically, my thinking about the issues raised is not. History is not linear, teleological or simple. In Western historical terms, it is conventional to think of the emergence of the autonomous individual, possessed of both a self and subjectivity, at the end of the eighteenth century. According to this historical model, gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the autonomous person was transformed into a subject who appeared ‘as the empty, ideological image of mass culture’ and a self who was but ‘a disintegrating play of selves’, to quote from the introduction to a book on ‘autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought’ (Heller et al. 1986). This evolutionary progression from simple to complex, from self to subject, was governed by a historical process we call ‘modernization’, which through colonization and globalization has now encompassed the entire world. As seemingly universalistic as this historical model may be, however, is it one that applies in every respect to Southeast Asia? I ask you to join me in keeping an open mind about possible answers to this question as my discussion proceeds. In the early stages of the global age in Southeast Asia during the first millennium of the common era, when the region was already an integral

22 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

part of a global economy and subject to cultural flows emanating from India and China, literary texts suggest the lively presence of both selves and subjectivities in the making. In his studies of the vernacularization of the translocal ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, one that extended all over India and Southeast Asia until roughly the end of the first millennium, Sheldon Pollock may well have had Stephen Greenblatt’s study of the literary ‘fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ in sixteenth-century England in mind (Greenblatt 1980, p. 2). He notes the emergence of a ‘new self-fashioning through the vernacular distinction of persons and places’ in local literatures of the period (Pollock 1998, p. 32). In the case of early Java, where the literary record for the process Pollock describes is very rich, the public self possessing a clearly defined gendered and status identity, moves in an appropriative and confident way through a realistic, recognizably Javanese landscape (Zoetmulder 1974). Although the representation of emotions in most Old Javanese poetry is conventional, an individualistic, subjective dimension to personhood, expressed through the depiction of sorrow and suffering, appears in the poetry of the late-fourteenth century. It has been suggested that Hindu and Buddhist poems from the period examine the subjective experience of death, suffering in the afterlife and redemption in vividly emotional terms in order to counter Islam and its novel claims of authority over life after death (Teeuw and Robson 1981, p. 49). In another text from this period, a Buddhist religious official, Prapanca, chronicles, in realistic fashion, the life of the Majapahit court of his day, and includes his own activities and emotional reactions in the account (Prapanca 1995). From the ninth through the eighteenth century, when Old Javanese works were still being written in Bali, literature is explicit about the connection between the fashioning of male and female identities, a connection which is examined by means of what Helen Creese felicitously calls a ‘poetics of control’ (2004, p. 246). Men are represented as learning to control their own sexuality and loyally serve the ideals of Indic religious and political dharma (Day 2002, pp. 236–251). Women are represented as ‘passive and fragile, submissive and obedient’ (Creese 2004, p. 246). The emphasis in this newly vernacular literature is on the ‘public and political nature of gender interactions and masculinist concepts of prowess and power’ (Creese 2004, p. 247). The representation of gender interactions in ancient Java is inscribed in the way ‘person’ is defined grammatically in Old Javanese, an Austronesian language. As the linguist A. L. Becker shows, power and intimacy are intertwined in the definition

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 23

of the person in these languages: In Kawi [i.e., Old Javanese] to treat someone as intimate or close who is not properly in that relationship is to insult him – unless one were a ruler, all of whose subjects are ipso facto servants and may be treated as intimates. It is interesting that both power and intimacy are expressed in the same way in Kawi, and many other languages. This may well be because both give one essentially the same rights over another – his person, his services, his productivity, etc. When these rights are reciprocal, then the relationship is truly intimate. When the rights are not reciprocal, then the relationship is based on power. (2000, p. 112) Sanskrit literary models were as crucial as indigenous Austronesian grammatical forms to this process of self-fashioning. These models served as a mirror in which new Javanese selves could contemplate both their similarities to and differences from their Indian cultural and linguistic Other. O. W. Wolters has examined a similar cross-cultural self-fashioning in his studies of Vietnamese poetry in the fourteenth century (Wolters 1999, pp. 71–78, 96–98). In this case, Chinese written characters, vocalized as Vietnamese, and Chinese literary conventions, applied to descriptions of Vietnamese landscapes and emotions, allowed for a much more ‘nationalistic’ act of male self-definition to take place than the one we can observe in early Java. In one late fourteenth-century poem written by the future emperor Nghe-ton to farewell a Chinese Ming envoy, for example, the poet vividly highlights the presence of Mt Tan Vien nearby, an emotive symbol of the protective spirit who, according to folklore, lived on the mountain and protected the capital city of Thanglong from flooding (Wolters 1999, p. 73). As Wolters comments, this and other late fourteenth-century Vietnamese poets ‘were celebrating their landscape by adorning what they wrote with all the Chinese literary devices available to them. They may have seen themselves as subordinating Chinese poetic forms, for they were living in the century after the Vietnamese victories over the Mongols’ (1999, p. 72). Subject to Chinese literary culture and frequently subjected to Chinese military occupation, the Vietnamese poets described by Wolters asserted autonomous public identities in possession of a land of their own by mastering Chinese literary techniques, so that even subjective feelings that were conventional in classical Chinese poetry acquired nuanced, Vietnamese meanings.

24 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

In a third example of self-fashioning from early Southeast Asia, the early-fifteenth-century Pali Camadevivamsa from northern Thailand, the author translates a vernacular history of the founding of Haripunjaya by a woman, Queen Cama, into a cosmopolitan language, Pali, in order to enhance the story’s translocal, universalistic significance for the reader/listener. The author fashions the Buddhist self in the text by following the teachings of the Buddha and the example of a Buddha-like woman, without regard to gender, ethnicity or social class (Swearer and Sommai 1998, p. 13). Today, Camadevi is the guardian spirit of the northern city of Lamphun, where devotees make offerings to the statue of Queen Cama in search of ‘material wealth and protection from danger’ (Swearer and Sommai 1998, p. 26). When we read literature from early Southeast Asia, I am suggesting, we need to pay attention to representations of both public selfhood and interior states of subjectivity. The fashioning of identity, made-up out of both aspects of personhood, is taking place in these texts. The person that emerges from the text takes possession of and exploits landscapes, languages and religious beliefs in order to express himself/herself. Identity is both local and cosmopolitan. These texts also describe interior emotional states which, even though they do not express the characteristics of a modern subjectivity, are nevertheless clearly intrinsic to sexual, political and religious identities. The physical body and its sensations are also examined in representations of identity in early Southeast Asia, but let’s move forward in time to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for two examples of the way identity is imagined in gendered and physical terms. The late-eighteenthcentury Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong examined her own sexuality in poems in which she displayed her mastery of local folk as well as borrowed Sino-Vietnamese classical idioms and poetic techniques (Huynh Sanh Thong 1996; Balaban 2000). In the following poem she imagines herself as a jackfruit: My body’s like a jackfruit on the tree. The skin is rough – the pulp is nice and thick. If you love me, drive into it your plug. Don’t fondle it or sap will stain your hand. (Huynh 1996, p. 212) Huong’s prickly, brilliantly literary, sexually explicit and demanding female subjectivity is also outspoken in her condemnation of the public fate meted out to women like her mother and herself. The following

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 25

poem is entitled ‘On being a concubine’: One wife gets quilts, the other wife must freeze. To share a husband – damn it, what a fate! I’d settle for just ten, nay, just five times. But fancy, it’s not even twice a month! I take it all for rice: some musty rice. I labor as a maid: a wageless maid. Had I but known I should end up like this, I would have sooner stayed the way I was. (Huynh 1996, p. 214) Today Huong’s irreverent commentary on her sexual and social situation seems entirely modern and familiar. She lays claim to both a private subjectivity and an independent, public self, although the latter is hardly achievable. In her own time, when social disorder was increasing and Confucian orthodoxy was on the rise, her poems are said to have been ‘shocking and personally risky’ (Balaban 2000, p. 4). A poem that continues to cause scandals and raise eyebrows, at least in Indonesia, is the mid-nineteenth century Javanese Sufi mystical work, the Suluk Gatholoco (Anderson 1981 and 1982). This poem, which like those of Ho Xuan Huong draws attention to the resources of vernacular language and folk wit through the use of puns, is also about sexual identity, since its hero is an opium-smoking, ambulatory penis, with a faithful servant-like scrotum in tow. Most of the poem consists of debates between Gatholoco and groups of pious Muslims and most of these encounters concern definitions of the person in a physical, economic, legal and spiritual sense, as suggested by the following exchange: 20. … Ki Gatholoco said to them: ‘How very fortunate indeed you santri [pious Muslims] are, 21. For all of you have eyes, I see, Two eyes per santri, if I’m right. But do you dare to take an oath Asserting that you own two eyes?’ Replied the santri three: ‘Of course we dare to take this oath! In this world and the Next These eyes will always be our own.’

26 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Ki Gatholoco answered them impatiently: 22. ‘You take this much too much for granted; They’ll read the talkim [graveside prayer] over you For claiming what you do not own. The state police will hear from me! They’ll chain you up for sure For claiming what you do not own! But if those eyes are yours, Then bid them function separately, Let one keep watchful guard, the other soundly sleep! 23. ‘Then never, all your livelong lives, Will you be victimized by thieves!’ To this, they said: ‘It’s only you Who uses your eyes alternately!’ Ki Gatholoco said: ‘If those things really are your eyes And you have full control, Then have them do what you command! But if they don’t obey, you clearly do not own them.’ (Anderson 1981, p. 138) The Suluk Gatholoco is about the definition of a Javanese male self in a colonial situation in which the Other is not only a colonial ruler but also a form of conservative, Middle Eastern-style Islam. The self, its body, its rights and its property are all very much at issue in this doubly colonized situation. The subjectivity that is also hinted at in the poem consists of a mixture of Sufi spirituality and anticolonial Javanese cultural assertiveness, expressed through a masterful display of Javanese folk etymology and poetic expression. The self-conscious use of Javanese poetry and punning is a dimension of a culturally specific, Javanese ‘national’ identity that is set in opposition to both Islamic doctrine and Dutch colonial rule in the poem. The colonial period in Southeast Asia extending from the early nineteenth century up to World War II, and beyond, was a phase in the globalization of Southeast Asia in which questions about self, subjectivity and identity proliferated in literary texts written in both indigenous and European languages. Take ‘The Story of Njai Dasima’, published in Malay in Batavia in 1896, for example. Authored by an Indo-European journalist, the story is an exemplary tale of the precariousness of new identities and of the lingua franca, Malay, which was increasingly coming into use as an expression of an emerging national ‘Indonesian’

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 27

identity in the late-nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies (Siegel 1997, pp. 54–93). Dasima is a new kind of person in the colonial situation, a white man’s native concubine with some access to legal rights and considerable economic independence and social status. The question posed by the story is: Does Dasima have a ‘self’ even though she does not have full, legal possession of it? The challenge to her identity comes, not from her colonial lover and master, but from the native Muslim world that seeks to repossess and subjugate her. The story largely reproduces Dutch colonial discourse of the time because it demonizes Islam and blames it, rather than European colonialism, for Dasima’s downfall and murder. Although written in the ‘cold’, ‘objective’ style of journalistic Malay of this period (Siegel 1997, p. 62, quoting Tsuchiya Kenji), the story does however hint at Dasima’s subjective and proto-nationalist inner turmoil as she is persuaded to choose between a Native over a Dutch identity. ‘You are taken care of by Tuan [white master]’, insinuates an old woman sent to lure Dasima back to the Native neighbourhood where she will eventually marry and then be murdered by the unscrupulous Samioen for her wealth, but you are not his wife and not a slave. It is impossible that you would want to stay here like that. At this moment you are not Dutch, not Chinese; you are a Muslim and you must do your duty so that you are secure in this world and the next. Don’t let things go so far that you have nothing on this side and nothing on the other. (quoted in Siegel 1997, p. 57) Dasima can be identified as a vulnerable, colonial, gendered self in a legal, sexual and religious sense. Her ‘Indonesian’ subjectivity is only just beginning to develop. The hero of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 1980s novel This Earth of Mankind, Nyai Ontosoroh, a character based on Njai Dasima and other concubine characters in early twentieth-century Malay fiction, on the other hand, transforms herself from abject colonial Javanese self to a modern, cosmopolitan person endowed with a fully developed subjectivity (Pramoedya 1996). The crucial difference between the colonial Dasima and the nationalist Ontosoroh is not one of selfhood, since both are legally defined as natives and suffer accordingly, but of subjectivity. Pramoedya creates a character that is free inside her own subjectivity, using the stylistic resources of Malay that has been ‘Indonesianized’, in Pramoedya’s authorial hands, to become an authoritative, autonomous national language capable of exploring subjective dimensions of personal identity.

28 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

We get a vivid sense of this transformation by comparing a passage from a typical nyai story, Kommer’s Nji Paina, published in 1900, and a scene in Child of All Nations, the second novel in Pramoedya’s tetralogy. Nji Paina tells the story, said by the author to have really taken place in East Java, of the beautiful daughter of a Javanese bookkeeper who works in a Dutch sugar factory. Paina is noticed by the lustful Dutch administrator Toean Briot, who threatens Paina’s father with prison unless he forces her to become Briot’s concubine. At first Paina refuses: ‘Her heart was full of confusion, as if a wave was violently flinging her person to the ground (seperti ombak membanting dirinja)’ (Kommer 1982, p. 327). Later, she relents in order to save her father from being sent to prison, but she resolves to save her honour by visiting the house of a family who are ill and dying from smallpox, in order to infect herself with the disease. Thereupon Nji Paina made a decision. She had often heard her father and others say that if a healthy person went and had contact with someone who was sick with smallpox, the disease would subsequently infect and spread to that person. The disease was easily carried from one person to another. So Nji Paina made the decision to kill Tuan Briot by following this course of action. (Kommer 1982, p. 328) Paina kisses the mouths of an infected child and woman, before submitting to Briot’s caresses. Four days later Briot is dead. Though scarred for life, Paina marries and lives a happy and prosperous life to a ripe old age. Pramoedya weaves the Paina tale into the tapestry of his story about his hero Minke’s Bildung (formation, development) as a writer and nationalist. Paina is now Surati, the daughter of Nyai Ontosoroh’s brother, whose story offers Minke his first opportunity to write about social conditions in Java in Malay rather than in Dutch. Surati/Paina now possesses a fully developed self-agency and subjectivity, which Pramoedya explores by means of the narrative technique of free indirect discourse. Had to finish herself [sendiri] what was her own problem [persoalnya sendiri]. Because: it was also she herself [ia sendiri] who had to carry it out. And none of this would be happening if Plikemboh [‘Swollen penis’, nickname for the Dutch Briot-figure in Pramoedya’s telling of the Nji Paina tale] didn’t exist in this world. Plikemboh – he made her shudder. (Pramoedya 1980, p. 143, my translation) We are inside Surati’s mind and emotions as she resolves to carry out her plan. The four lines of third-person description of the night and

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 29

dawn as Paina journeys to the infected village in Kommer’s story become nine pages of melodramatic narrative in which the terrors of the night serve to highlight Surati’s courage and inner resolve. Then she enters a hut where a family lies dead or dying. The child convulsed for a moment and quickly exhaled her final breath. Surati wasn’t able to learn her name. She had never witnessed a person in her death agony. She did not tremble, encircled by death. She felt so close, such a friend to them all, and in a little while she would become a part of all who are here. Death? What lies on the other side of death? In any case, she will not be meeting up with Plikemboh, not with anyone. Why are people afraid of it? Why aren’t I? When the smallpox begins to enter my body and death surely arrives … no, she isn’t trembling with fear. To be cursed by my parents is in any case a more terrible calamity than death. Heh you there, smallpox, come inside, come inside my being [diriku]. (Pramoedya 1980, p. 148, my translation; see also Pramoedya 1984, p. 114) Pramoedya writes this passage in such a way, shifting repeatedly from the third to the first person, as to make the scene the pivotal moment in Surati’s act of becoming an independent person, liberated as both an acting self and a thinking subject, both of which can be translated by the Indonesian words diri and sendiri. With the death of the child, Surati is reborn as a free human being. This kind of personhood reflects how Pramoedya himself conceived of his own creative freedom as an individual and as a writer during his long years of incarceration (Pramoedya 1983). It is important to remember that Pramoedya wrote his novels about the birth of nationalism in Indonesian while he was in prison during Soeharto’s New Order, a time in Indonesian history that was in reality still colonized by rather than liberated from the colonial past. As Razif Bahari argues, the four novels Pramoedya wrote in prison about the history of early Indonesian nationalism, known as the Buru quartet, reclaim Indonesian history for the Indonesian self. That self is the subject of history, but it is also an agent of its making (Bahari 2003). Hugh Clifford’s early-twentieth-century novels and short stories, as analysed by Philip Holden (2000), offer us a perspective on colonial subjectivity from the Other side. Clifford was a colonial administrator as well as a writer of fiction in Malaya and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holden shows how, through his fictional writings, Clifford defined himself as a man and as a colonialist. In a short

30 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

story published in 1923, ‘The Fate of Leh the Strolling Player’ (Clifford 1993, pp. 143–154), Saleh or Leh is a Malay character that embodies gentlemanly British ideals from a lost feudal past. He is also an object of interracial, homosexual desire and a colonial subject in need of control and rehabilitation as a modern, Westernized Malay individual (Holden 2000, pp. 57–64). In the following passage, the narrator’s gaze hovers possessively yet ambivalently over the figure of Leh. The gaze is suffused with desire, revulsion and paternalistic solicitude: Of all the Actor-Managers who were then roaming up and down Pahang, none were more successful both with the play-goers and with the women, as Saleh or Leh, as he was usually called, for Malay energy is rarely equal to the effort necessary for the articulation of the whole of a proper name … Leh was a man of many accomplishments. He played the fiddle, in most excruciating wise, to the huge delight of all the Malays who heard him; he was genuinely funny, when he had put his hideous red mask, with its dirty sheepskin top, which stood for the hair of his head, over his handsome, clever face … Leh was able to go abroad among his fellows lavishly clad, from the waist downwards, in a profusion of gaily-coloured silk sarongs and sashes … It was not long before the best-favoured half of the ladies of Kota Bharu … were, to use the Malay phrase, ‘mad’ for Leh. The natives of the Peninsula recognize that Love, when it wins a fair grip upon a man, is as much a disease of the mind as any other form of insanity … When they were not occupied in waylaying Leh; in ogling him as he swaggered past their dwellings, cocking a conquering eye in the doorways; the ladies of Kota Bharu were now often engaged in shrill and hard-fought personal encounters with another … [Finally, a group of jealous husbands decides that Leh must be murdered.] As soon as Leh had passed them, the Committee of Three stepped noiselessly out of the shadow, and sounding their sorak, or war-cry, into which they threw all their pent-up hatred of their victim … plunged their spears into his naked brown back. (Clifford 1993, pp. 147–153) As we can see from these excerpts, Leh is depicted as a subject, but not as a self. Yet the subjectivity evoked in the story is not really Leh’s, but the narrator’s own, consisting of conflicting desires and impulses. Leh exists in the story to be discovered, possessed, adored, reformed, but ultimately cast aside. The English colonial gentleman in Malaya could never permit himself to fully identify with the beautiful, brown-skinned Malay dandy, as much as he may have wanted to return, by means of

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 31

such identification, to a world of knightly valour and unbridled male passion. Holden argues that, through his stories, Clifford both indulged his subjective fantasies about male sexuality and feudal aristocracy and disciplined these fantasies, thus fashioning a self that was proper to a modern, married, English, imperialist gentleman. This ideal was also transmitted to English-speaking Straits Chinese readers and authors who became acquainted with Clifford’s writing. I want to conclude by talking briefly about four short stories published between the 1970s and the 1990s, a period in which earlier phases of the long-global era in Southeast Asian history overlapped with later ones. Kon Krailat’s ‘In the Mirror’, first published in 1978, examines the question of sexuality and subjectivity against the backdrop of the commercialization of the sex trade in Thailand during what Ben Anderson calls the ‘American Era’ in Thai history (Anderson 1985, p. 68). Like Clifford’s Leh, Kon’s Chiwin is the male object of sexual fantasy. But now the gaze originates from within the story, from the Thai audience that watches Chiwin perform live sex with a female partner in a Bangkok club. Sociologically speaking, as Anderson points out in his commentary, the story offers a critical take on the localization of the international sex trade within Thai society itself and on the economic plight of countless provincial youths who left the countryside in the 1970s to seek their fortune in the big city. The story connects sex to power and class in an unmistakable way (Anderson 1985, pp. 69–70). It is also a subtle exploration of the relationship between sexuality, self and subjectivity. As the third-person narration about one of Chiwin’s performances unfolds, the reader is drawn into Chiwin’s inner thoughts as he has sex on stage with a female employee of the club, Wanphen. As he mechanically engages in sex with her on a stage surrounded by intently gazing, sexually aroused spectators, all fellow Thais, he thinks about Wanphen and her economic situation, one that closely resembles his own. The ‘endless, indolent cycle’ of the canned music accompanying their act also reminds him of another ‘endless, indolent cycle’, his past life with his father and mother in the midst of rice fields and the revolving seasons of planting and harvesting in the village back home (Anderson and Mendiones 1985, p. 211). As he nears his climax, Chiwin comes to a new understanding of himself as both a victim of others’ oppression and as the oppressor of the woman he bestrides. After it is over, he looks at himself in the mirror in the bathroom. Unlike the scene in Lacan’s description of the young child’s first encounter with his own image in the mirror, a moment of triumphant jubilation but also the beginning of a recognition that the self is forever non-identical to the

32 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

mirror-image it sees (Macey 2000, p. 255), Chiwin discovers ‘his real self’ and it makes him sick (Anderson and Mendiones 1985, p. 215). The story ends as he vomits repeatedly until there seems to be nothing left inside himself to expel. ‘In the Mirror’ describes a different kind of mirror-stage and subjectivity than the one theorized by Lacan or that Homi Bhabha derived from Lacan to analyse cultural mimicry in colonial situations (Bhabha 1994, pp. 85–92). In Kon’s mirror, the infantilized male Thai grows up and recognizes himself for what he really is. The protagonist and narrator of Malaysian writer Shahnon Ahmad’s short story ‘Delirium’ from 1973 is also the object of oppressive, lustful eyes, but these are inside the character’s own head. The story begins with the following exchange: A thousand eyes seem to blink in every curve of my skull. Damn them all! I have told you, over and over again: I am not a slave. I am not a slave. I am not a slave. But those damn eyes keep blinking at me. They demand to know: ‘Well then, who are you?’ (Ahmad 2002, p. 137) The speaker is a Malaysian academic living temporarily in Canberra with his wife and children. But his identity crisis is far from temporary. It is the end of Ramadan. The ‘I’ remembers his natal village and the customary Hari Raya celebrations there. This village world is part of his identity and the voices of his relatives, including his great-grandmother, speak to him from inside his vivid memory of them. But the problem with being ‘I’ in the story has to do with eyes, including his own, which cannot help looking at the disturbing suburban sprawl of modern Australia. His eyes also cannot keep themselves from leering voyeuristically at a young couple ‘writhing in each other’s arms’ across the street. Thousands of other leering, satanic eyes inside his own head tell him to rape a young woman passing by the window, which he imagines doing. When his wife and children appear before him dressed in traditional clothing for their Canberra Hari Raya outing, their ‘childish eyes’ stare at him and emotions of loss, belonging and guilt well up even as the rain storm outside, which has been mirroring his inner turmoil, abates. But before the story ends with the family’s painful, imagined ‘homecoming’ to a source of unitary selfhood in a Malay village faraway and long dead, the narrator has one last nightmarish daydream in which village and suburb, church and mosque, naked young women and revered relatives, white people and brown are all jumbled together in a vision of confused cross-cultural identity and unstable subjectivity. ‘Well then, who are you?’

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 33

In my last two examples, both written by women, the textual exploration of subjectivity reveals identities that, even though subjugated or physically destroyed, live on as somehow indestructible in the reader’s mind. In both stories the issue of identity transcends individuality and even gender. In Leila Chudori’s ‘The Purification of Sita’, published in 1988, the protagonist is a student in Canada waiting anxiously for her fiancé, whom she has not seen in four years, to arrive. Will he doubt her fidelity? A night or so before his arrival is stifling. ‘God, it’s hot, she thought, as she wrestled with the flames that were about to consume her’ (Chudori 2002, p. 97). The reader knows from the title that the Indic legend of Sita, abducted by Rawana, then rescued by her husband Rama, who forces her to throw herself into a burning pyre as a test of her purity, is on the woman’s mind as she attempts to cool herself in the oppressive summer heat in anticipation of another kind of test by fire. In the end, it is her Indonesian husband who hints that he has been unfaithful, thus bringing a centuries-old superstructure of sexist cultural assumptions in Indonesia crashing to its knees. As another night falls, the darkness that at the beginning of the story had seemed so masculine and masterful, now crawls ‘slowly and politely forward’ (Chudori 2002, p. 102). Chudori’s story recalls an earlier stage in the fashioning of identities in Java, strips that identity bare and begins to make a new one. Torrid heat, in California-based Filipino Marianne Villanueva’s ‘The Mayor of the Roses’, written in 1999, is associated in the author’s mind with everything about her country that stinks, like rotting garbage, male sweat, political corruption and violence. This is a story about violent rape and murder, which is graphically described. On a visit ‘home’ to the Philippines, the narrator hears the gruesome story, reads about it in the papers, and goes to the trial of the perpetrators, who eventually escape punishment. Learning more about the case becomes, for the narrator, an attempt to ‘know’ the woman involved, which she does by putting herself in the victim’s place, so that the story of the abduction, rape and murder is told as if it is happening to her, the expatriate Filipina, in all its full physical and psychological horror. The story rejects what every Filipino woman has been told at Sunday Mass, that ‘the body is nothing but a vessel. Not holy in and of itself, but holy when imbued with a spirit …’ (Villanueva 2002, p. 257, italics in the original). Villanueva shows that, contrary to the church’s politically accommodating pieties, nothing is holier than the human body and the self and subjectivity that dwell within it. But the ‘self’ at issue is no longer that of a woman or even all women. The crime in the story has been committed by us all, against

34 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

us all. The story takes us beyond issues of individual selves and subjectivities to raise questions of collective rights and common identity. In this chapter I suggest that ‘self’ and ‘subject’ are interconnected but necessarily distinct concepts that help us understand how literary texts from Southeast Asia represent the formation of identity. Literature is a primary source for understanding identity formation because of the way in which it reveals the nexus between self-fashioning, language, cultural identity and social reality. From the earliest times, we see that identity formation by means of and as represented in literary self-fashioning is a ‘globalized’ and globalizing social event. The growing complexity of the inner ‘subject’ over time and its importance in shaping identity, as represented in Southeast Asian literature, does not correspond to the emergence of an increasingly holistic and well-defined sense of a public ‘self’, however. The nationalist and socialist realist literary explorations of legally entitled ‘selves’, joined together in communal struggles for independence in Southeast Asia, gives way to modernistic and postmodernistic explorations of inner identities and individual freedoms. The history of literary identity formation in Southeast Asia reveals that it is possible to attain subjective freedom in social worlds where the self is anything but free.

References Ahmad, Shahnon (2002) ‘Delirium’. Trans. by Harry Aveling, in Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia, ed. T. S. Yamada. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 137–145. Anderson, Benedict (1981–1982) ‘The Suluk Gatoloco’, parts 1 and 2, Indonesia 32, pp. 105–150; 33, pp. 31–88. —— (1985) ‘Introduction’, in In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era, eds B. R. Anderson and R. Mendiones. Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamoi, pp. 9–87. Anderson, Benedict and Ruchira Mendiones, eds. and trans. (1985) In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era. Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamoi. Bahari, Razif (2003) ‘Remembering History, W/Righting History: Piecing the Past in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Tetralogy’, Indonesia 75, pp. 61–90. Balaban, John (2000) Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. Becker, A. L. with I Gusti Ngurah Oka (2000) ‘Person in Kawi: Exploring an Elementary Semantic Dimension’, in Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 109–136. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Castells, Manuel (2004) The Power of Identity, 2nd edn. Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing.

‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ 35 Chudori, Leila S. (2002) ‘The Purification of Sita’. Trans. by Claire Siverson, in Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia, ed. T. S. Yamada. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 96–102. Clifford, Hugh (1993) At the Court of Pelesu and Other Malayan Stories. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Creese, Helen (2004) Women of the Kakawin World: Marriage and Sexuality in the Indic Courts of Java and Bali. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe. Day, Tony (2002) Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. —— (2004) ‘Everyday Life and Freedom in Southeast Asian Literature and Film’. Paper presented at the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, 14 May. Foulcher, Keith and Tony Day, eds. (2002) Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature. Leiden: KITLV Press. Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Polity Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Heller, Thomas C., Morton Sisna, and David E. Wellbery, eds. (1986) Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Holden, Philip (2000) Modern Subjects/Colonial Texts: Hugh Clifford and the Discipline of English Literature in the Straits Settlements and Malay 1895–1907. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press. Huynh Sanh Thong, ed. and trans. (1996) An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems from the Eleventh Through the Twentieth Centuries. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Johnson, Barbara, ed. (1993) Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992. New York, NY: Basic Books. Kommer, H. (1982 [1900]) ‘Tjerita Nji Paina’, in Tempoe Doeloe, intro. and ed. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, pp. 317–329. Macey, David (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin Books. Pollock, Sheldon (1998) ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1, pp. 6–37. Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1980) Anak Semua Bangsa [Child of all Nations]. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra. —— (1983) ‘Perburuan 1950 and Keluarga Gerilya 1950’. Trans. by Benedict Anderson. Indonesia 36, pp. 25–48. —— (1984) Child of All Nations. Trans. by Max Lane. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books. —— (1996) This Earth of Mankind, Trans. by Max Lane. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books. Prapanca, Mpu (1995) Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama), ed. and trans. by Stuart Robson. Leiden: KITLV Press. Siegel, James T. (1997) Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swearer, Donald K. and Sommai Premchit (1998) The Legend of Queen Cama: Bodhiramsi’s Camadevivamsa, a Translation and Commentary. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

36 Self-recognition and Self-discovery Teeuw, A. and S. O. Robson, eds. and trans. (1981) Kunjarakarna Dharmakathana: Liberation Through the Law of the Buddha, An Old Javanese Poem by Mpu Dusun. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Villanueva, Marianne (2002) ‘The Mayor of the Roses’, in Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia, ed. T. S. Yamada. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 254–262. Wolters, O. W. (1999) History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, NY and Singapore: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Zoetmulder, P. J. (1974) Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

3 Art and Identity Politics: Nation, Religion, Ethnicity, Elsewhere Kenneth M. George

Twenty years ago, Ulf Hannerz nudged cultural anthropologists to consider the places most in need of ethnographic work. ‘Where are the least-understood cultures now?’ he asked. ‘In Lagos or Paris, San Francisco or Bombay’, replied Hannerz, ‘[in] cities with slums and skyscrapers. … They are the cultures of cities, nations, and the world system, rather than of villages or bands.’ Work in these places, Hannerz continued, should help us see in all their haziness the views people have of other people’s views, and offer some indication of the significance of that metacultural sensibility which may build up when people are aware of cultural alternatives. [It] should offer some insight into what happens when the connection between culture and locality is attenuated, so that someone may be more linked through his ideas to an individual living thousands of miles away than he is to his neighbor next door. (Hannerz 1986, pp. 363–364) In the years that have passed since Hannerz helped redirect our disciplinary energies, we have ceased to think of subjects as formed solely, or even paradigmatically, in tightly circumscribed hearths of ethnic, social and cultural practice. In this era of intense globalization and its accompanying multi-modernities, people, culture and capital are on the move. For this reason, we have been careful to avoid depicting subjects and localities as social phenomena distinct from or opposed to the effects of globalization (cf., Appadurai 1996; Giddens 1990). By the same token, writing about ethnicity and religion and their impact on identity in this era obliges us to see how locality and agency emerge in historically specific discourses, in widely dispersed social situations, and 37

38 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

within the shifting and overlapping fields of national and transnational cultural politics. That said, we should remember that ethnic and religious identifications pose locational questions and predicaments for everyone. All subjectivities emerge in and through the open-ended play, conflict and positionality of social life; that open-endedness and sociality are what make subjectivities historical, political, provisional and uncertain. Part of that open-endedness, snared as it is in the conditions of modernity and globalization, puts into question matters of a subject’s ‘whereness’. In other words, being someone, somewhere, and at some time, is an ongoing question for a subject in his or her exercise of human agency in light of identity concerns. It may be that one’s identity looks stable and resolved, even in the plurality of situations that inflect it, but identification as a process of self-recognition, strikes me as a ceaseless, even restless, encounter with objects, signs and social others that imperils, relocates or throws off balance one’s sense of self. The perils are not just existential, but political. In these times, virtually everyone has a fragile, fraught and hybrid identity derived from conflicting narratives and images of affiliation, allegiance and betrayal. Because individuals are as susceptible to the forces of globalization and modernity as any other category of social-theoretical discourse (Robertson 1991, p. 79), we can ask how such forces pervade the social life of individuals and their self-identifying encounters. With this sort of project in mind, I want to tell a story about an Indonesian Muslim painter, Abdul Djalil Pirous, who at age 38, found himself elsewhere, recuperating his ethnic, religious, national and artistic identity, not in the galleries of the ‘East’ – for example, in Bandung or Jakarta – but in the museums of the ‘West’, specifically, in New York. Following this encounter, Pirous would help pioneer an explicitly Islamic form of Indonesian modern art. Pirous, I want to emphasize, was in no way rootless before his visit to New York. Yet his New York experience led him to refigure his Acehnese ethnic heritage, his identity as an Indonesian artist and his subaltern status in a globalized art world dominated by Western institutions, markets and discourses.

Conjuring an artistic identity Best known for his paintings that combine Qur’anic calligraphy with modernist abstract aesthetics, Pirous has had a lifelong involvement in the arts, and with the sort of cultural hybridity and movement that are key topics in this book. He was born in 1932 to a prosperous trading-class

Art & Identity Politics 39

family in Meulaboh, Aceh. His father was of Sumatran-South Asian background and headed the local Asia Muka or South Asian community in colonial Meulaboh. Pirous recalls spending his childhood helping his Acehnese mother prepare Qur’anic embroidery, listening to her stories about the life of the Prophet, going to Muslim and Dutch schools, reading Karl May novels in translation and watching Flash Gordon films at his uncle’s theatre. During the Indonesian revolution, young Pirous joined the student army and used his talents to make propaganda posters for the nationalist guerrilla forces. While attending high school in Medan, North Sumatra, in the early 1950s, he further developed his drawing skills and caught the eye of an art teacher who encouraged Pirous to study art at an advanced level. In 1955, at the age of 23, he left home for the Bandung Institute of Technology to study with Dutch cubist, Ries Mulder. He has remained in Bandung ever since. Trained in formalism and abstraction, but intimidated by growing ideological pressures to conform to socialist realism, the artist refrained from exhibiting his paintings during the late Sukarno years (George 1997). Following the collapse of the Indonesian left and the violent birth of the Soeharto regime in 1965–66, Pirous became a rising star in the Bandung and Jakarta art circles. Upon returning from two years of study in the United States in 1971, he emerged with a distinctly modernist, international and Muslim vision of art that wed abstraction with calligraphic renderings of Qur’anic Arabic and Jawi.1 He has been at the forefront of contemporary Indonesian Muslim art ever since, exhibiting both at home as well as abroad in Japan, Korea, Bahrain, Jordan, India, the United States, throughout Europe and in several Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. In addition to his success as a painter, he has taught Islamic art history at the Bandung Institute of Technology, overseen mosque restorations and helped produce a national Qur’anic arts contest in Aceh. With respect to the national scene, he has often been featured as spokesman for the arts in magazines and newspapers, and has served as an expert on art within government circles. During the last decade of Soeharto’s rule (1988–98), he helped produce the Istiqlal Indonesian Muslim Art Festivals of 1991 and 1995 (George 1998), and served as the Southeast Asian curator for an exhibit of contemporary Muslim art at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Since the collapse of the Soeharto regime, Pirous has become an increasingly vocal artist-citizen vis-à-vis the culture of state and separatist violence in his home province of Aceh. I began collaborative work with Pirous about 12 years ago. I have watched him change over the years, just as I have watched our friendship

40 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

deepen, and my ethnographic work take on unforeseen dimensions and directions. I have been convinced all along, however, that his unfolding story can help us understand something about the way postcolonial subjects emerge in the context of the globalized discourses informing ethnicity, religion, nationalism and aesthetic modernism. In bringing Pirous centre stage in my ethnographic work, I run the risk of producing yet another study that privileges male artists or that again draws away attention from the diversity of actors and forces that shape contemporary art worlds. I am also aware that my work does not stay within the orbit of anthropology or art history alone. The monograph, catalogue and short essays that I have published about him do count as publicity and have played a small part in marketing his painterly identity.2 More interestingly for me, our conversations, ramblings, disagreements and interviews over the past 12 years have given Pirous opportunities to reflexively refigure his identity. Globalized art discourses and globalized art markets are for him the more important arenas for the narrative politics of artistic identity,3 but ethnography is one too.4 I would not go into them here, but the ethical, methodological and political aspects of our conversations cannot help but have bearing on what Pirous has divulged or kept from me. On a more theoretical note, I think we need to be mindful that my friend’s artistic subjectivity has been formed and glimpsed through a mediating relationship with material works that have been brought into public. If that sounds like a bit of modernist ideology, it is. But I take seriously, and as worthy of ethnographic concern, the artist’s understanding that his self is tied up with objects he calls work of art. The trick is not to debunk this ideology as fetishization or false consciousness. Rather, I think we should assume that this ideological view is true, and then decide what it is true of. In addition, Pirous’s subjectivity is one that is founded in a complex identity as artist and citizen. To be a postcolonial artist-citizen, like Pirous, is to be subject to the nation-state and to a field of cultural production – to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) term – and thus vulnerable and yet attracted to the forces and discourses that organize nations and their art worlds. Complicating the picture, too, are his Muslim religious faith and his imagined cultural and familial ties to Aceh. In Pirous’s case, religious and ethnic identifications play a significant role in the way he sees himself as a modern Indonesian artist. I once asked him whether a person is ‘born Muslim’ or ‘becomes Muslim’. He replied that one is ‘born Muslim’. Though I have not asked him about it, I suspect he feels, too, that a person is ‘born Acehnese’ or else misses out on the opportunity. While we do not want to overlook the fact that

Art & Identity Politics 41

some identities may be ascribed to people at birth, I disagree with Pirous. There is, of course, the matter of conversion, which makes it possible to assume a Muslim religious identity; and we know that people can also make claims, albeit limited ones, to new ethnic identities. Yet in another sense, religious and ethnic identities are never in the clear; people need to work at sustaining them with particular social purposes in mind. What is interesting about Pirous is that his ethnic and religious identity was not of paramount importance to him as he became subject to both the fervent nationalism of the Sukarno years and the appeal of aesthetic modernism. Writing about another postcolonial nation – India – Geeta Kapur (1996) has portrayed the early postcolonial artist-citizen like Pirous as a figure formed by two very modern and contraposed modes of political and aesthetic will: To aspire not only to a unique and innovative artistic subjectivity, but also to an identity as a representative of a people and a nation. Grasping the tension between these two poles leads us to appreciate how deeply nationalism and aesthetic modernism have been intertwined within Indonesia’s art world. In an important sense, art-for-the-nation’s sake and art-for-art’s sake were not opposed pursuits so much as required attitudes that emanated from a postcolonial desire to be modern and anti-imperial. As subjectivity came to the fore in aesthetic modernism, the anxiety of influence became central to painterly consciousness. That is to say, as painting became ‘more subjective, the shadow cast by precursors [became] more dominant’ (Bloom 1973, p. 11). In the context of post colonialism, anxieties about painterly originality were worked out in the politics of emergent nationhood. In fact, achieving a modern artistic subjectivity, and having a place in an international art world typically demanded that an artist claim a national identity and location. Being subject to a nation, of course, meant acknowledging a set of imagined political and social differences that when refracted through the discourses and techniques of art production would yield a recognizable Indonesian art. For modern painters during the Sukarno years (1945–65), then, the effort to assert a subjectivity distinct from that of precursor artists, inevitably had to do with colonial subjection and anti-colonial struggle and with producing work that could be representative of the modern young republic. What most Indonesian painters sought at this time was an identity both modern and secular, and for this reason they largely avoided working with any medium that could be construed as traditional, ethnic or religious – categories excluded from the modernist mainstream as popular, low or backward, and which might be deemed to pre-empt originality or otherwise constrain the painter’s expressive

42 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

freedom. Though experienced in drawing and in the religious decorative arts of his homeland in the devoutly Muslim province of Aceh, Pirous quickly became a ‘modern’ through an embrace of the abstract and masculinist styles that typified the modernist and international approach of the academy at Bandung. Indeed, for artists like Pirous, aesthetic innovation and subjectivity were largely personal matters, the management of which would allow them to be effective Indonesian participants in a global art world.5 Pirous did not see Islamic aesthetics as a resource during his early years as a modernist painter. The diversity of Islamic art and Islamic art discourse is too vast for me to convey in a short chapter like this, but some general remarks seem apposite. For many Muslims, art does not stand outside of faith but should be subordinate to it or part of it. In this sense, making art may be regarded as a religious concern, and one good example would be using art in the context of dzikir, or mindfulness of God.6 The Qur’an, however, is rather silent and ambiguous about pictorial art and how to evaluate it (Sura 5, verse 90, tells believers to keep away from idols or similar images). It is the hadith traditions that show an uncompromising attitude against figurative art and against painters in general (Arnold 1965, pp. 5–10). That has not stopped the production of art by Muslims, of course, but it has inclined clerics and religious teachers to take a dim view of painting. Within the Muslim world, Qur’anic calligraphy customarily stands as the pre-eminent high art, and decorative arabesques and geometric designs hold special place; figurative arts are often greeted with suspicion or condemnation, or viewed as a distraction from the mental dispositions needed for dzikir. Not surprisingly, the privileged genres of Islamic art invert some of the emphases of modernism. In much of Islamic art, reinscription, repetition and submission to tradition are part of a mimetic pursuit of divine form and message; originality is not so much missing as beside the point. Here artistic subjectivity aspires to being ‘subject to’ rather than to achieving autonomy through a revolt against precursors. A different sort of identity politics thus comes into play than the one to which the contemporary art world is accustomed. But these are quite general points. I should remark that Islamic art at this historical moment has become so thoroughly diversified, pluralized and contestatory, so frequently recruited for struggles against Western cultural imperialism, and yet so often demonized by Islamist regimes, that I would caution against thinking of Muslim aesthetics as a settled matter, especially in a world of such varied nationalisms, transnationalisms and travelling cultures.

Art & Identity Politics 43

Pirous’s immersion in abstract modernism in Bandung produced a bias and near-rupture in his artistic life. Islamic art, and more particularly, the Islamic arts of his Acehnese homeland and personal past, were recognizable to him as little more than the sort of craft or tradition from which the modernist wants to escape: They were not art at all. What beckoned him away from Islamic art was a glimpse of a globalizing art world, the horizons of which were largely set by Euro-American institutions and ideologies. Oblivious to the Orientalist hierarchies within Euro-American discourse that would dismiss Indonesian modern art as ‘derivative’ and ‘inauthentic’, Pirous pursued an unconstrained subjectivity even while mimicking – in ways charted for us by Albert Memmi (1991), Ashis Nandy (1998) and Homi Bhabha (1994) – the emergent trends of the Euro-American avant-garde. What, then, led him to Islamic art? Pirous’s own embrace of Muslim aesthetics antedates the global Islamic resurgence of the late 1970s as well as Soeharto’s courtship of the Indonesian ummat (or Muslim community) in the early 1990s. It was in Manhattan’s museums and galleries, not in Indonesia’s own art circles, that Pirous found himself drawn to Islamic art. Pirous arrived in the United States as a modernist star on the rise, the recent recipient of a prestigious two-year Rockefeller Fellowship to study graphics at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Every time he went to New York City to visit museums, he would ask his sponsor where he could see contemporary Asian art, especially Indonesian contemporary art. As Pirous tells it, he would get the same answer every time: ‘No way. There is no category for that yet. If you are talking about folk art, traditional art, primitive art, ethnic art, okay. But if you are talking about modern, contemporary art, no way.’ Indonesia, and indeed, most other countries in Asia had yet to be acknowledged by Western curators and art writers as nations capable of producing modern art. ‘If you went door to door in the galleries,’ remembers Pirous, ‘you could see modern paintings from Japan, from India, but displayed as personal works, not as a category or classification in art. So, I felt very bad at the time.’ Indeed, Pirous must have felt tricked: The West had given Pirous and other Asian artists a new and supposedly universal visual language of modernism, but did not want to listen when these artists used it to join in the conversation. The painful and growing realization that modern Indonesian art did not count for much in the galleries and museums of the West plunged Pirous into a period of brooding search and reflection. Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early winter of 1970, he experienced what he has described as a moment of intimate self-recognition upon seeing the Museum’s collection of Islamic art (Buchari and Yuliman

44 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

1985; Spaanjard 1988; Wright 1994; George 2002). Let me use his words to describe what happened just beforehand. The story begins with him feeling the currents of a globalized modernity: At the time I went to America, I already had an attitude. ‘I am one of this world’s artists!’ My outlook in Indonesia was like that. I wanted to be a modern painter. I studied with Americans, with Dutch, with French. I was already a world painter. I liked abstract expressionism. I liked Paul Klee. I felt close to Jackson Pollock, very close to Willem de Kooning. But when I got to New York and as I walked along Fifth Avenue or along Madison Avenue, I suddenly felt: ‘Now Pirous, who are you? Yes, you are a modern painter, but are you a modern Indonesian painter? What’s the proof that you are a modern Indonesian painter?’ When I was in Indonesia I never asked questions liked that. Really, my belief until then was that making art didn’t need to be discussed that much. You just did it with an open mind, and invited the world into yours. You didn’t have to be worried about whether you were Indonesian or not. It turned out that that wasn’t completely true. If we want to become cosmopolitans, we have to become Indonesians first. If you want to be an internationalist, you have to be a nationalist first. You have to prove you are an Indonesian, your Indonesian characteristics. So I didn’t have an answer at the time. When I asked him what prompted his self-questioning, Pirous replied, ‘Distance, distance, not just physical, but a way of thinking.’ Yet he also let on about an exhibit that led him to further self-questioning: What I still remember very well is an exhibition from Japan. Modern contemporary Japan. Very abstract. I felt the blood of the Japanese very strongly in their works. So I asked myself, ‘Well, Pirous, do you have such blood we can call Indonesian blood?’ There wasn’t any! Then I started groping. I went again to New York City, visiting galleries. There, quite unexpectedly, I got the answer! The Islamic works of art at the Metropolitan, and also at other small commercial galleries: sometimes plates, sometimes ceramic fragments, sometimes manuscripts, miniature paintings, or calligraphic writings. Suddenly I thought, ‘Well this is very close to me!’ This actually was around me when I was born. It was in Aceh. It was in my village, in my mother herself. This is my own … a part of my own body … part of my own blood. Why didn’t I see it before? How come I didn’t feel it before?

Art & Identity Politics 45

I asked why not. Because of my education! I studied at the school in Bandung. My teachers were Dutch. They taught about Jacques Villon, not about this. And that’s what I got. I didn’t know it was something that would harm me. This was the consequence for the whole Indonesian nation under colonialism. And not only for Indonesia, but for all Asian nations that were subject to colonialism. When I was there in New York, and I happened to see and encounter that Islamic heritage, I said, ‘Wah! This is it!’ Suddenly it came back again. This, this, is my property, this is my treasure. Brimming with excitement, he hurried back to his studio at school and set about making a stunning calligraphic etching, Surat Ikhlas (Figure 3.1) in which he has inscribed all of Q.S. 112 Al-Ikhlas (Pure Faith) and a verse from Q.S. 2 Al-Baqarah (The Cow).

Figure 3.1 Surat Ikhlas, A. D. Pirous, 1970, 40 ⫻ 50 cm, color etching. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

46 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Pirous’s story is in many respects typical of those told by other postcolonial painters. As Albert Memmi put it (1991, p. 140), ‘the colonized [painter] always considers the colonizer as a model or as an antithesis. He continues to struggle against him. He was torn between what he was and what he wanted to become, and now is torn between what he wanted to be and what he is making of himself.’ I am not surprised by the selfrecognition and creative ardour that Pirous experienced in 1970. Oncefamiliar possibilities of expression, long ignored during his training in modernism, returned to enthral him. They re-oriented his eye and his imagination, and suggested a way to express a self-conscious ‘Indonesianness’ in his art. Already an Indonesian Muslim who made modern art, he began down the road of becoming a Muslim who made contemporary Indonesian Islamic art. A new set of questions had to be answered: What made an object or a set of practices ‘Islamic’, ‘art’ and ‘Indonesian?’ What made them ‘Acehnese?’ What made them ‘modern’? It is clear that the museum exhibit succeeded in overturning the modernist hierarchies of value to which Pirous had grown accustomed. This was the first time he had encountered Islamic art in the very sort of institution that bestowed value and legitimacy to modern painting. Here he saw Islamic art elevated to the same civilizational plane as Western painting and grasped that it need not be treated as a subordinate form of aesthetic expression. This moment of self-recognition and creative possibility thus came as a potential form of emancipation from the language of Euro-American modernism, the aesthetic and political ideology that had led him away from the arts of his upbringing and yet had marginalized or excluded Asian modernisms. Looking back on his story of that winter in New York City, we see Pirous searching for a distinctiveness that would help him grasp a more secure place in a global world of art and its commerce of ideas and objects. It is a story of essences and identity, and yet the terms of the search appear consonant with modernist ideas about nationality, ethnicity and authenticity. A national visuality mattered most to Pirous. After all, he did not ask his sponsor where he could find contemporary ‘Acehnese’ art, but rather ‘Indonesian’ art. Wanting to feel ‘Indonesian blood’, he instead feels emptiness, an absence of authenticity. The recuperative transfusion comes with the museum visit and feeling a kinship with some of the arts that he associates with his youth and with his mother. The sources of authenticity lie in the past and in his Acehnese birthplace, whose Islamic religiosity and romantically conjured communitarian values sets it off from the West. But modernist discourses of authenticity such as this dated back as far as the early Cubist period and

Art & Identity Politics 47

before. It is not a surprise that authenticity is conflated in Pirous’s mind with the figure of his mother. Modernist discourse usually gendered alterity in a way that would feminize localized authenticities, and so reserved modern art as a refined, masculine pursuit with global aspirations and horizons. From Pirous’s vantage point in 1970, Acehnese art looked neither ethnic nor primitive, but civilizational and museum-class, a local expression of something global in scale. Although Aceh is a culturally and politically distinctive region in Indonesia, it is certainly easy to see that for Pirous, and many others, Acehnese-ness (ke-Aceh-an) is an expression of Indonesian-ness (ke-Indonesia-an). Indeed, as James Siegel (2000, p. 366) has explained, there was for the longest time ‘no contradiction between being Acehnese and being Indonesian’. For Pirous, expressions of Acehnese-ness were already expressions of Indonesianness, especially in light of their Islamic foundations. Indeed, Islamic arts found throughout the country’s provinces could be construed as a significant part of Indonesia’s national heritage, no less important than that shaped by the Hindu–Buddhist traditions of Java and Bali. Asserting a civilizational status for the Indonesian-Muslim arts of the past (even though ‘Indonesia’ did not predate 1945), meant that there was an indigenous heritage worth recuperating for the purposes of the present. We see then how Pirous’s views meld nationalism, religion and ethnicity together. Looking at Al-Ikhlas, however, we may not see anything either ‘Indonesian’ or ‘Acehnese’ about such art. This was, Pirous tells me, a complaint from an art critic in a Singapore newspaper 20 years later: ‘Where is Indonesia in such work?’ The dilemma is a persistent one, because national or ethnic identities are not ready-mades in the visual language of modernism or Islamic aesthetics. Since 1970, Pirous has routinely resorted to iconographies and narratives to keep his painterly identity ‘Indonesian’. He has been ‘possessed’, if you will, by a nationalist ethnoaesthetics. The epiphany in New York was, perhaps, nothing other than his being hailed by the nation-state and by a global art market that was – at the time – obsessed with the national iconographic traditions and regional identities of the postcolonies. Meanwhile, Pirous’s story is also interesting for leaving unmentioned what did not happen in that moment of recognition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: He describes his artistic blood as a national substance, Indonesian, and even as a religious substance, Muslim, but at no time as the transnational substance of dar-al Islam, the worldwide Muslim community. A pan-Islamic identity did not yet flow in his veins, and judging

48 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

by his story, it was irrelevant to his place as a world artist, or else posed a threat too dangerous to acknowledge in a story told to me. In finding possibilities for his own artistic subjectivity in Islamic aesthetics, Pirous helped put a new twist to the principal tension Kapur saw in Indian postcolonial art, and which I similarly see in Indonesian work. The strain between aspiring to a unique painterly subjectivity and to an identity as a representative of a nation, in Pirous’s work now could be distended, rethought and resolved through the mediating practices and discourses of Islamic art. To embrace Islamic art at the moment he did was to revolt against the modernist precursors with whom he was familiar. It allowed him to find an innovative space within the terms of modernism by adhering to an aesthetic tradition that expected him to submit to, reiterate and reinscribe the Islamic art canon. The gesture was at once a revolt against Western-dominated modernism and also a submission to Islam. This revolt, I should be careful to point out, did not involve a wholesale rejection of aesthetic modernism in favour of Islamic art principles but resulted in a hybrid genre of painting incorporating something of both. At the same time, his embrace of Islamic art was for him nothing less than an embrace of the Indonesian nationstate. It was a shift in moral and civic vision that led him to claim an Islamic heritage for the nation at large, a move that politically and aesthetically links the transcendental discourses of nation and faith. Pirous adapted into his abstract modernist work two gestures or features – one ending in an absence, the other in a presence – commonly associated with Islamic visual culture: the abandonment of human figuration, and the celebration of calligraphy. Fusing calligraphy – Islam’s most privileged and sacred art form – with abstraction, happened to coincide with Pirous’s first experiments with high viscosity etching techniques in printmaking, and his initial explorations with acrylics and modelling paste in painting. A tension resulted: the discipline and self-surrender associated with the precincts of calligraphy and Islam met the impulse and self-assertion associated with abstract modernism. Not surprisingly, discipline and self-assertion achieve different ratios in his earliest paintings, done between 1971 and 1974. These paintings featured deformations of Arabic or Arabic-like characters worked up in modelling paste and acrylics. All bore titles that referred to inscribed objects of considerable antiquity – plaques, pillars, tombstones, manuscripts – or to textual genres or styles of writing. A good example is Tulisan Putih, or ‘White Writing’ (Figure 3.2) in which characters are deformed beyond legibility, a style that Pirous today calls ‘expressive calligraphy’ (kaligrafi ekspresif). Differences between legible and illegible

Figure 3.2 White Writing, A. D. Pirous, 1972, 100 ⫻ 180 cm, marble paste, acrylic on canvas. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

50 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Arabic may have been lost on Western or non-Muslim viewers, who generally are unable to read Arabic, and can only see such writing as image. For many Indonesians, however, ‘White Writing’ was a disturbing deformation of sacred orthography, and indeed the painting brought criticism from Muslim clerics. By 1975, Pirous moved closer to what we might call a ‘Qur’anic aesthetic’. For his calligraphic works of 1975 and after, Qur’anic verses enjoy special focus; orthographic clarity, wholeness, immutability and an emphasis on moral reflection and vision usually prevail over self-expression. Untethered self-expression gives way to a contemplative and harmonious abstract iconography aimed at illuminating Qur’anic passages that appear in the paintings. Dan Dia Yang Maha Segala (1978), ‘And God the Utmost’, is a good example (Figure 3.3). This is a small canvas done in acrylics, modelling paste and gold leaf. Symmetries and triangular forms surround a turquoise

Figure 3.3 And God the Utmost, A. D. Pirous, 1978, 30 ⫻ 30 cm, marble paste, gold, acrylic on canvas. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Art & Identity Politics 51

field in which is inscribed the 189th verse of Q.S. 3 Al-‘Imran, which reads: ‘For God’s is the kingdom of the heavens and earth, and God’s is the power over all things.’ By the early 1980s, Pirous’s work began to include explicit visual reference to Aceh, specifically to emblematic forms of the region’s traditional material culture – cloth, embroidery, nisan (tombstones), Qur’anic Arabic and Jawi (Malay written in Arabic orthography). One effect of incorporating calligraphy and Acehnese iconography into his painting and graphic work was to locate and thus indigenize his religious sentiments and reflection within an Indonesian framework. Let me dwell on one particular work (Figure 3.4). Pirous’s enchanted reverence for the artistry of his mother and Aceh more generally found its most explicit expression in a 1982 serigraph called Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother (Sura Isra II: Penghormatan buat Ibunda). It features brightly coloured vertical borders patterned directly after Acehnese ceremonial curtains called tabir; an image of the winged bouraq, the Prophet Muhammad’s legendary mount and a two-dimensional reproduction of a red and gold heirloom kasab cushion, made by Pirous’s mother in 1941, and inscribed with the Qur’anic verse revealed at Mecca and traditionally associated with the Prophet’s night journey and ascension to Heaven on the bouraq (QS 17 Bani-Isra’il:1). The serigraph erases the gold arabesque that his mother embroidered into her kasab’s central diamond of blue, and replaces it with Qur’anic calligraphy. This gesture, in my view, does two things – it defaces and replaces the visual centre of an originary, remembered and revered heirloom object. It substitutes writing for the arabesque image, and at the same time, turns writing into image – writing not just to be read, but writing at which one will contemplatively look. The orthographic form of ‘Allah’ resides as an icon of divinity at the top of the blue diamond. The image is that of revealed writing. What that writing signifies – when read – is the initial line of the Qur’an’s story of the Prophet’s night journey. It is paired with the iconic image of the bouraq, taken from his mother’s oral versions of Muslim legend. The serigraph thus pictorially renders Qur’anic scripture and religious legend as iconic forms of Aceh’s Islamic visual culture. Indeed, Pirous’s subsequent explorations of Aceh until the late 1990s involved a folkloric line-up of visual icons.7 Following his first journey on the haj in the late 1980s, Pirous helped launch the first national festival of Islamic arts in Indonesia, the Istiqlal Festival, a pioneering attempt to summon forth an Indonesian Muslim public around a civic and cultural project, and to alert that public to its own spiritual and artistic activity. I have written about the national and

Figure 3.4 Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother, A. D. Pirous, 1982, 80 ⫻ 54 cm, serigraph. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Art & Identity Politics 53

transnational cultural politics of the Istiqlal Festivals elsewhere (George 1998). What I should underscore here is Pirous’s desire to promote a discourse of culture in the national Muslim ummat and to thereby help fashion an Indonesian Muslim art public that would include him as one of its elite practitioners, critics and supporters. His four-year effort heading up a design team in producing an illuminated national Qur’an, the Al-Qur’an Mushaf Istiqlal, shows Pirous working hard to bring Islam and the nation together in a grand and emblematic work of art. It is in such work that we perhaps best see how his artistic subjectivity has been motivated and disciplined by the powerful circulating discourses of modernism, nationalism, ethnicity and Islam.

Identity refigured Whatever else it might be, however else it may be conjured, Aceh was for a time a sign of dislocation for the artist, the social, political and cultural home he left behind in 1955. Pirous’s rediscovery of ‘Aceh’ as the path to being ‘Indonesian’ was more than a postcolonial artist’s sincere but self-mystifying and nostalgic search for lost roots. His effort to recuperate an Acehnese-ness in his art was a calculated way to assert a distinctive identity within the art publics and art markets of Indonesia, the West and the Islamic world. Pursued during a time of authoritarian rule, this project lacked overt oppositional or critical expression and resulted in a largely acclamatory art. Following the Soeharto regime’s collapse in 1998 and revelations of state-sponsored atrocities in Aceh, Pirous took direct steps to depict the tragedies of state and separatist violence. That effort, on the one hand, included a re-embrace of human figuration, something that Pirous had largely abandoned after 1970. The faces and the bodies of the Acehnese dead became central images. On the other hand, the paintings he came to call his ‘Aceh Series’ also involved a reworking of the word-image emblematics that he had articulated in his 30-year exploration of Qur’anic themes and Qur’anic calligraphy. Qur’anic passages have gone missing in these new paintings, replaced by passages from the Hikayat Prang Sabil (the Chronicle of the Holy War), the century-old Acehnese text that recounted and sanctified anti-colonial struggle as jihad. These changes, I would argue, are materials through which we may discern a split, or a gap, in Pirous’s political and aesthetic subjectivity, a disruption to his artistic identity. For someone of such creativity, good will and national pride, the culture of violence in Aceh has been very hard to bear. For Pirous, it seems, the visual culture of violence in Aceh cannot or should not be rendered

54 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

‘Islamic’. That violence is the very antithesis of the peace and harmony he has sought in his faith. It is not the violence of a holy war. It is the violence of a nation splitting apart, unhealed by common faith. Thus, anguish is the mood of many of the paintings in the ‘Acehnese Series’. In them we see the human figure brought back as an anonymous ghost or corpse. Take for example, They Who are Buried without Names (Mereka yang Terkubur Tanpa Nama, 2001), shown in Figure 3.5. A mood of grief and anger haunts the painting. Yet identification with the murdered Acehnese might provoke someone to seek vengeance against the nationstate. Consider, then, The Shackling of the Chronicle of the Holy War II (Pemasungan Kitab Prang Sabil II, 1999), shown in Figure 3.6. This work impresses me as an expression of Pirous’s own restrained anger. Pirous’s recent paintings make visible his troubled national self, and remind us that an individual does not have a singular and univocal political self, but a hybrid one that relies on shifting images and narratives of affiliation. The ‘and’ in ‘being Acehnese and being Indonesian’ is now a conjunction far more fraught and uncertain than it has been in

Figure 3.5 The artist and They Who are Buried without Names, A. D. Pirous, 2001, 122 ⫻ 122 cm, marble paste, sand, acrylic on canvas. Source: Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by the author.

Art & Identity Politics 55

Figure 3.6 Detail from The Shackling of the Chronicle of the Holy War II, A. D. Pirous, 1999, 72 ⫻ 77 cm, mixed media on canvas. Source: Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by the author, 2002.

the past. For the time being, Pirous has located himself rather squarely in the space of the Indonesian nation-state, and so the culture of violence in Aceh is seen and depicted by him from the precincts of Indonesian visual culture. Part of the reason for my saying so is that Pirous has not exhibited his ‘Acehnese Series’, as such, beyond Bandung and Jakarta in Indonesia.8 In fact, the Acehnese Series was placed in the gallery hall that served as entry to Pirous’s 2002 career retrospective show in Jakarta’s Galeri Nasional. In exhibiting and talking about this series as he has, Pirous seems intent on displaying his outrage and anguish before an Indonesian art public, rather than before an Acehnese one, where such display might incite violence. Pursuing a national artistic identity has brought Pirous critical and commercial success over the years. As I have argued, the globalizing art discourses of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s played no small role in summoning Pirous to think of himself as an Indonesian cosmopolitan. His encounter with modernism and his experiences in the United States did much to stir him into rethinking his cultural heritage. Pirous’s 30-year exploration of national iconographies rooted in ethnicity and religion served both that country’s art public and his career. It gave him, too, a potential point of entry into international markets. Ironically, political

56 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

circumstances in Aceh at the close of the Soeharto era led to the dilemma of his asking Indonesia to see, recognize and acknowledge its own selfwounding and self-negating culture of violence. A global art public, meanwhile, has not done all that much to stabilize his identity. On the one hand, the global art world has shown increasing interest in transnational culture, the features of which typically call into question particular identities pertaining to ethnicity and nation. Such currents made it possible for Pirous to serve as a curator of contemporary Islamic art at the 1997 Venice Biennial. On the other hand, an interest in ethnic, national or religious ‘difference’ persists in museums and galleries. That interest has brought Pirous opportunities to exhibit in East and Southeast Asia, and in some small galleries in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. Yet within European and American precincts, Pirous’s own work frequently has wound up as an ethnographic artefact, the otherness and distinctiveness of which earns more attention from anthropologists, like myself, than art historians and art writers.

Closing remarks As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, ethnic, religious, political and artistic subjectivities are no longer so neatly formed and sustained within fixed and homogeneous cultural settings. The social construction of identities is both intimate and global in dimension, and a subject’s encounters with objects, signs and social others makes identification a risky, if promising, sort of revisionary work. In talking with Pirous about his experiences and in looking at his paintings and prints, I am impressed by how these material images have been circumstanced by a subject making his way through the terrain of postcolonial art and politics. In describing this journey, I have put emphasis on the way he has responded to the counterposed calls of postcolonial art, to the tensions between finding a unique artistic subjectivity and yet producing something emblematic of national identity. In negotiating these counterclaims on his subjectivity, he sought refuge and inspiration in Islamic visual culture, and so began to see his ethnic Acehnese heritage as part of a globalized Islamic civilization. It took a border crossing – literally across the borders of a nation-state – for him to grasp how his Indonesianness, his nationality, could be worked out within the context of globalized religious and artistic worlds. With his most recent paintings, however, some troubling questions return, especially in his efforts to make Indonesians acknowledge their culture of violence.

Art & Identity Politics 57

An anthropology of art oriented to subnational ethnoaesthetics would lead us to see Achenese art as a highly localized field of works, symbols and styles belonging to a distinct and homogeneous ethnic community. Within that framework, we might have looked for an ‘Acehnese’ influence on Pirous’s painting – a certain sort of localized ethnic artistic habitus – and perhaps even gone on to claim that a historically prior and culturally primordial ethnic affiliation with Aceh has shaped his encounter with modernity. Yet the story of Pirous’s effort to assert a national Indonesian identity in a transnational world of art suggests a different approach. It shows that developing an ethnographic feel for the predicaments faced by Indonesian Muslim artists does not fruitfully begin with an exploration of ‘Acehnese’ or ‘Javanese’ views on art, or with any non-modern indigenous tradition. Indeed, to be a modern ‘Indonesian Islamic artist’ one needs first to feel the currents of a globalized world of modernity and its discourses of nationality, art, religion and ethnic location. One needs to feel cosmopolitan aspirations, even as the discourses of an international art world push artists to rethink their heritage. Yet our globalized art world and its discourses keep changing. As Néstor García Canclini (1998, p. 503) has put it, ‘Identities are constituted now not only in relation to unique territories, but in the multicultural intersection of objects, messages, and people coming from diverse directions.’ Precisely because they arise out of a transnational and transcultural religion, Islamic aesthetics might appeal to some artists as a means of transcending ethnic and national identities. Others – and here I would include Pirous – would explore Islamic aesthetics as a way to shore up national and ethnic belonging. Oscillation between these two approaches reflects nothing less than the working out of political and aesthetic opportunities posed by the metropolis, the museum and the mass grave.

Notes 1. The term ‘Jawi’ refers to the diverse forms of Malay that have been written or printed in Arabic or modified Arabic orthographies. 2. See, in particular, ‘Conversations with Pirous’ (George 2002) and ‘Visual Surpirse and Visual Dzikir in the Work of A. D. Pirous’ (2003), both written with a broad public in mind. My anthropological and art historical essays about Pirous (George 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2005) have a more ‘disciplinary’ feel. 3. See Pierre Bourdieu (1993, pp. 260–261) about the role of biographical discourse in art markets and art publics.

58 Self-recognition and Self-discovery 4. Pirous has gained the attention of a few art historians and art journalists in Europe and the United States since the mid-1980s (e.g., Spanjaard 1988; Wright 1994). That said, my status as an anthropologist and ethnographer rather than as an art historian hints at how Pirous has been kept at the margins of Euro-American art discourses and markets. Our ethnographic collaboration serves him, but perhaps not all that well when it comes to capturing the eye of a global art public. On the intermingling of ethnographic and art discourses, see: Price (1989); Marcus and Myers (1995); Fabian (1996); Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998); Meyers (2002). 5. Of course, ‘aesthetic innovation and subjectivity’ are not strictly personal matters, but get worked out between an artist and an art public. See the arguments of O. K. Werckmeister (1989) in discussing Paul Klee’s career. 6. See George (2003, 2005). 7. See George (1998, 2005). 8. A few selections from the Aceh Series were displayed in Pirous’s 2003 solo show at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, held as a special programme in conjunction with the Organization of Islamic Countries Summit (11–17 October 2003).

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, Thomas (1965) Painting in Islam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Bloom, Harold (1973) The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Buchari, Machmud and Sanento Yuliman (1985) A. D. Pirous: Painting, Etching, and Serigraphy 1960–1985 Retrospective Exhibition. Bandung: Galeri Decenta. Fabian, Johannes (1996) Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. García Canclini, Néstor (1998) ‘Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. D. Preziosi. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 498–506. George, Kenneth M. (1997) ‘Some Things That Have Happened to “The Sun After September 1965”: Politics and the Interpretation of an Indonesian Painting’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 4 (1997), pp. 603–634. —— (1998) ‘Designs on Indonesia’s Muslim Communities’, Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (1998), pp. 693–713. —— (1999) ‘Signature Work: Bandung 1994’, Ethnos 64, no. 2 (1999), pp. 212–231. —— (2002) ‘Conversations with Pirous’ in A. D. Pirous: Vision, Faith, and a Journey in Indonesian Art, 1955–2002, eds Kenneth M. George and Mamannoor. Bandung: Yayasan Serambi Pirous, pp. 1–124. —— (2003) ‘Visual Surprise and Visual Dzikir in the Work of A. D. Pirous’, in Words of Faith: A Catalogue Prepared for the Solo Exhibition By A. D. Pirous. Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, pp. 8–21.

Art & Identity Politics 59 —— (2005) ‘Picturing Aceh: Violence and the Politics of Word and Image in Indonesian Islamic Visual Culture’, in Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, eds Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George. Southeast Asian Publications Series. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, pp. 185–208. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1986) ‘Theory in Anthropology: Small is Beautiful? The Problem of Complex Cultures’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 2 (1986), pp. 362–367. Kapur, Geeta (1996) ‘Dismantling the Norm’, in Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia. New York, NY: Asia Society and Harry N. Abrams, pp. 60–69. King, Anthony D., ed. (1991) Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Binghampton, NY: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghampton. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marcus, George and Fred Meyers, eds (1995) The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Memmi, Albert (1991) The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Meyers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nandy, Ashis (1998) Exiled at Home. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, Sally (1989) Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Roland (1991) ‘Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Problem of Globality’, in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. A. D. King. Binghampton, NY: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghampton, pp. 69–90. Siegel, James T. (2000) The Rope of God, 2nd edn. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Spanjaard, Helena (1988) ‘Free Art: Academic Painters in Indonesia’, in Kunst uit een Andere Wereld (Art from Another World), eds P. Faber, L. van der Linden, and M. Tulmans. Rotterdam: Museum voor Volkenkunde Rotterdam, pp. 103–132. Werckmeister, O. K. (1989) The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Astri (1994) Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

4 Moving Stories: Beyond the Local in Ethnography and Fiction Kirin Narayan

When Charity comes to the village there can be a woman sitting separately. Little kids are always told ‘Kah chhoi giya’ – a crow touched her – when a woman sits aside. Charity can start frantically looking around. ‘What crow? Where’s the crow?’ Brown eyes fizzing with mischief, a giant smile creasing her angular face, Vidhya twisted from side to side. She mimed Charity’s search for the crow, scanning the courtyard; the whitewashed stand for the sacred basil plant, the plastic chair and the low orange rim of marigold bushes. Then she laughed, throwing out a palm towards me. I touched her palm, sharing in the joke. This was 1994, and I had been visiting the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, Northwest India, for almost twenty years: long enough to know that mentioning a crow’s polluting touch was a euphemism for menstruation among high-caste women. Charity, though, the fictional blonde anthropologist of Kangra whom I was trying to imagine into being, was for Vidhya clearly a misguided outsider, both childlike and earnest. Speaking rapid Hindi, Vidhya went on to share other ideas. The head of the family with whom Charity lived would be named Pratap Singh (a name that indexed the area’s dominant Rajput caste). The family’s cow – clearly an important character – was, like most local cows, likely to be named either Surabha or Kamadhenu after the wish-granting celestial cow. In the days that followed, Vidhya periodically shared dramatic narrative sequences from the settlement around her that she thought were novel-worthy, whether the story of her husband’s misanthropic and miserly granduncle, or the astonishing tale of an Australian woman 60

Moving Stories 61

who sought a genuine village experience by renting an old adobe house. I listened intently, taking notes, glad to have this raw material for fiction but aware too how useful it was for ethnography. As Renato Rosaldo pointed out in an essay on Ilongot hunting narratives, by attending to the stories that people choose to narrate as interesting and pleasurable, ethnographers learn ‘more about what can make life worth living than about how it is routinely lived’ (1986, p. 98). What, as anthropologists, might we learn from the kinds of imagined lives and stories that people in the field consider worth elaborating in writing projects? Such exchanges are part of a larger project of the ethnography of the imagination. I borrow this term from Appadurai (1996). Briefly, Appadurai observes that with more and more images coming from distant places through the media, with more and more exposure to different sorts of lives through migration, ‘the biographies of ordinary people are constructions (or fabrications) in which the imagination plays an important role’ (1996, p. 54). He goes on to state that ‘fiction, like myth, is part of the conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies … (P)rose fiction … is central to a more general ethnography of the imagination’ (1996, p. 58). Reversing Appadurai’s words, one might also say that an ethnography of the imagination is, for anthropologists so inclined, richly generative of prose fiction. Yet fiction aside, paying attention to the ways that people conceptualize what’s story-worthy about their own and others’ lives is to glimpse at the ways they shape meaning from experience. In anthropological methodology, narratives – whether oral or written, personal or collective – have tended to serve as windows into culture, but here I explore how narratives might also provide glimpses into cosmopolitan subjectivities. Cosmopolitanism – which can be pluralized as cosmopolitanisms to span diverse times and places – has now generated an enormous literature, as a recent interdisciplinary bibliography shows (Beck and Sznaider 2006). With characteristic clarity, Ulf Hannerz points out that cosmopolitanism might be best seen as ‘a cluster of ideas at the center of a field of arguments’ (2004, p. 21) but with two central senses: a politics of cosmopolitanism and a culture of cosmopolitanism. While the political sense evokes ‘responsibility beyond the nation-state’ and ‘tends to favor more inclusive arrangements of compassion, human rights, solidarity and peacefulness’ (2004, pp. 20–21) the cultural sense, in Hannerz’s formulation, involves ‘an awareness and appreciation of diversity in modes of thought, ways of life, and human products and the development of skills in handling such diversity’ (2004, p. 21). Hannerz points to the role of the news media, and particularly foreign correspondents,

62 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

in brokering images between different parts of the world, and fostering a cosmopolitanism that brings together both senses of the word in a way that he elegantly summarizes as ‘wider horizons, a curiosity about the world, and some sense of a wider civic responsibility and human compassion’ (2004, p. 23). I use cosmopolitanism here primarily as an attitude of openness to other cultural possibilities (cf. Hannerz 1996, pp. 102–111), and a practice of thinking beyond the local (cf. Pollock et al. 2000, p. 586). I draw on this concept as I attempt to depict my exchanges with Vidhya, and the questions these raise about representing complex subjectivities in ethnography and in fiction.

Thinking beyond the local in Kangra Kangra – once referring to a hill state, now to an administrative district – lies in the Northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. A lush valley bounded by the tall Dhauladhar mountains to the Northeast and the parallel ripples of the Shivalik hills to the south, the area may at first encounter seem idyllically removed from the heat and bustle of the plains. Certainly, that was my impression when, in April 1975, I arrived in Kangra with my American mother. The snow peaks, ripening wheat, adobe farmhouses enclosing courtyards, hedges of blooming roses, and intonations of the mountain dialect all gave me, a shy teenager, the sense of an enchanted, set-apart world. Yet our host was a Delhi-based Sikh potter trained long ago in Japan. He had been given his land in Kangra by an Irish woman interested in assembling an artists’ colony on her estate: a sure and daily reminder that village life was shot through with complex connections beyond the horizons framed by mountains and hills. That first summer, I learned that despite the sense of green abundance, most village-based families were actually supported by men’s migrant labour, and that military employment was especially prized. A few years later, reading about Kangra as a graduate student with access to libraries, I was able to better understand Kangra’s long history of interaction with adjacent hill states, empires based in the plains, and routes for travel and trade. The hill state was brought under Mughal domination in the mid-sixteenth century, survived a Gurkha invasion in 1805, submitted to Sikh rule in 1809 and became part of the British colonial state in 1846 (Parry 1979, pp. 11–14). Kangra also includes important sites of pilgrimage, particularly Goddess temples that draw Hindu pilgrims from elsewhere in India and abroad. After the Dalai Lama was forced from Tibet by Chinese invasion

Moving Stories 63

and established a base in Mcleod Ganj, Dharamshala, his presence has served as a powerful magnet for other Tibetans, and also people from all over the world with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism, including celebrities like Richard Gere. Dharamshala is a site for emerging transational Tibetan cultural forms (Deihl 2002) and is also a destination for tourists, hippies, backpackers and other kinds of international travellers who may sometimes be more interested in the ‘scene’ than Tibetan Buddhism. Further afield, village life continues, measured partly by the progression of crops – rice and maize in the rainy months, wheat in the winter – and the comings and goings of men employed elsewhere. Some women travel to the plains with their husbands; some women are employed locally. Yet in the majority of village households I have encountered, women live at home, looking after the different generations and forming networks of reciprocal help with other neighbouring women of equivalent castes (for everything from farming to auspicious singing sessions to preparing piles of breads or sweets for celebrations). Women are also responsible for hospitality which is key to a household’s standing. While Vidhya herself had never lived outside villages, her love of reading, her fascination with television, and perhaps even her friendship with me – and my mother, too – gave her a reflexive awareness of life beyond the local. Thinking about her in the framework of this book, I wondered: is she a cosmopolitan of sorts? While I, the outsider who came and went, was fascinated by local oral traditions in the regional dialect of Pahari, Vidhya, who remained within the valley was more intrigued by the horizons opened out to her through Hindi literature and media. (She knew some English too, but was generally uncomfortable with speaking or reading it: ‘Behold the gloaming!’ she once mockingly proclaimed at a sunset when we were in our teens.) Vidhya prided herself on being educated and modern and so not enmeshed in women’s oral traditions (cf. Narayan 1996); she humoured my research and even served as research assistant on occasion, but clearly was not much interested. Though Vidhya loved to read, she had little access to Hindi novels, for the bookstores in town mostly favoured textbooks, and anyway, books were expensive. Here are my notes on a conversation about reading we had in 1991: Once I start [reading], I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to cook or wash clothes or anything. I have to read the last page first, just to assure myself that the hero and heroine are still alive, that

64 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

everything is all right. After that, I read every page. I like romantic novels best, better than detective novels or anything else. I ask him [her husband] to bring me books from the school library. In between, I take any old book from the shelf and read it again. I also read the entire paper. Vidhya’s imaginative life, then, constantly included other lives and places and gave her an ironic view of village life and expected choices within it. She did all that was expected of her as a female member of society, yet with a sort of amused twinkle. For example, village sociality required that she attend songfests, even if she personally had no interest in local songs; she confessed her abiding fantasy of borrowing my tape recorder and lip-synching to songs I had recorded at a woman’s songfest, astonishing everyone. It was this ability to propel herself out of the set parameters of life as it was, to life reshaped in amusing ways, that I believe made her such a rich resource for seeing absurd potential in my fieldwork encounters and also for thinking fictional possibilities aloud. Vidhya offered me the story of Lizzie, the Australian, as inclusion in a possible novel, it seemed, partly because the encounter was dramatic and strange – a novelty in her circumscribed village routines, as though characters from a book or television show had burst into the courtyard. Since Lizzie became connected to Vidhya because of my mother, I supplement Vidhya’s story of Lizzie with my mother’s comments. Born in America to German (Bavarian) and American (Midwestern) artist parents, my mother has lived in India since 1951 and in Kangra villages since 1978, embodying a kind of bohemian intellectual cosmopolitanism. My mother had moved to Kangra partly because it reminded her of her teenage years in Taos, New Mexico, and she longed to live with the open spaces, traditional aesthetics and serenity of a village. Yet by the early 1990s, the time in which Lizzie visited, Kangra villages were themselves undergoing rapid changes. Access to national television since the late 1980s and satellite television soon after had brought the outer world loudly into village homes. The Indian government’s push for economic liberalization after 1991 was already making accessible a greater range of goods than had been previously available in the valley. Local people’s desire to align with a ‘modern’ life associated with cities meant that almost anyone who could afford to was abandoning an adobe house in favour of the sharp angles of cement. The political crisis in Kashmir, a well-established tourist destination, had rerouted tourists to other areas of the Himalayas, like Kangra. Lizzie was one such tourist. Vidhya told me the story of Lizzie on a November afternoon when the rice had been harvested, and golden hummocks of hay lay about on the

Moving Stories 65

fields. I had wandered over from my mother’s house in the late afternoon, passing boys out playing cricket on level stretches of open space. Vidhya herself was indoors, watching cricket on television, but when I arrived she switched off the television, and made hot tea. We sat out on the front porch, enjoying the sun, and companionably sipped tea from steel glasses. According to Vidhya, Lizzie was a very old woman, a woman probably even older than my mother. (My mother, then in her 60s, countered this statement when I reported it back to her: Lizzie, she said, was actually in her 40s, but her faded blonde hair and weathered skin gave locals a mistaken impression.) Lizzie had arrived at Vidhya’s house, saying that she had been sent by my mother. (My mother agreed, saying Lizzie had ‘wandered in, sent by someone or the other’, to say that she wanted the experience of living in a village; my mother had recalled that since Vidhya’s family had moved into a cement house, their older adobe home was unoccupied. Most crucially, my mother said, Vidhya’s family had an outhouse at a time that most villagers continued to trek long distances to squat in forests and ravines.) Vidhya and her husband agreed to rent to Lizzie for a few weeks, and Lizzie said she would go fetch her things from Kulu, a tourist destination a day’s bus ride away. When Lizzie returned, she had not only brought her things, but a young Indian man too! Lizzie said that this man, her tour guide Rinku, had come to help her settle in. According to Vidhya, he was about 25, ‘At least half her age!’ Speaking as someone whose children were both born before she was 20, Vidhya commented, ‘Even between mothers and sons there isn’t usually 25 or 30 years!’ She assumed Lizzie’s grandmotherly concern, but wondered: ‘One mattress, two people?’ and offered more bedding, which they refused. Most doors in Kangra villages are open soon after dawn, but the next morning, Vidhya observed that the door was locked, and stayed locked as the sun grew higher. She grew fearful. Her brother-in-law who worked in Delhi had told her that even in five-star hotels, foreigners were sometimes murdered. Also, this was a time when there had been several strange deaths in the area, including a husband shooting his wife in a nearby village, and everyone was tense. She worried that Lizzie had been murdered, and she went closer to the house to see if she could hear any signs of life. When she heard them talking indoors, she was glad to learn they were still alive. They finally emerged around 10 a.m. The situation became clearer when Lizzie later confided that she wanted to marry Rinku and have children (‘At that age?!’ exclaimed Vidhya, bewildered). Rinku separately confessed that he hoped for an Australian passport.

66 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Through the years that I had known Vidhya, her empathy for other people’s points of view had always impressed me; perhaps it was even a core ingredient to our friendship across our own different background and life trajectories. I could see that, as Vidhya spoke with some agitation a year after these events, she was still struggling to make sense of the odd situation that the connection through my mother had placed her in. As a prelude to explaining what happened next, Vidhya expressed her concern for her family’s izzat – their honour. She felt sorry for Lizzie. But how did it look to be hosting this couple? She feared that her family would lose their honour and good name. ‘We live in society after all’, Vidhya said, as though underlining that no matter how broad-minded they might attempt to be, they were, after all, moored in a particular context. ‘What will people say? To us, honor is the most beloved thing. Once honor is gone, you can never get it back.’ So she and her husband asked Lizzie to leave, and Lizzie left amid many tears, taking her young friend with her. (My mother later added, shaking her head at Lizzie’s obliviousness to local norms that actually, Vidhya and her husband were too polite to ask Lizzie directly, but rather asked my mother to ‘come and read her the law’.) I remember being mildly bored by the story as Vidhya told it. To me, this seemed yet another rendition of the worn dichotomy between the Western woman of lax morals and the chaste Indian woman that I, as a person of mixed ancestry, was always uneasily trying to negotiate. I dutifully wrote down this account, though, and my notes end with the observation, ‘The pervasive sense of watching, gossiping. The sport of speculation on other people’s lives. Amid this honor, reputation as sacred.’ Vidhya was describing an encounter beyond her usual horizons, while I was looking through the story towards some deeper truth about bounded life in villages. Indeed, the emphasis on familial honour – called izzat or laj – pervades upper castes in Kangra as in much of North India. The honour of a household is tied partly to the comportment of its women, whether daughters or in-marrying brides. This was why, though Lizzie was clearly not a local woman bound to the same norms, her open relationship with the younger man to whom she was not married threatened to compromise the honour of the family renting her a space to live in.

Thinking beyond the local in fiction I just did not know how such a story fit with the life of Charity, the green-eyed, flaxen haired anthropologist whom I had decided would be the protagonist of my next novel. Born and raised in India as a child of

Moving Stories 67

American missionary parents, Charity was unhappily attached and underemployed. But she, I thought, would surely know better than to have a relationship with a tour guide half her age in the home of her Kangra host family. And yet, from Charity’s very inception in my imagination, she had been corresponding with a male anthropologist who did fieldwork in the same village, the disappointments in her career making her especially vulnerable to his admiration for her thesis (Narayan 1995). At first I wondered if this male anthropologist might be someone older, who had perhaps previously been a journalist, but at some point it became clear to me that he was Indian American graduate student, though since he used ‘Nick’ rather than ‘Nikhil’, Charity did not know this from his letters. In the years after Vidhya shared Lizzie’s story, as I wrote my way towards Charity’s return to the village, and the building attraction between her and the younger man, Nick, I realized that Charity would have to contend with disapproval very much like Lizzie did. In my novel, Charity lives – as Vidhya suggested – with the family of a man called Pratap Singh. Pratap Singh is a schoolteacher employed in a different part of the state and he returns home on leave to his wife, Mangala, his mother, Bibi, and children. Pratap Singh loves to read, but was only enrolled in college for one year because his father, a political activist, had been mysteriously shot by someone allegedly cleaning a rifle. At one point in the novel, Pratap Singh comes home at a time that Nick has travelled south to visit his mother’s brother. Charity, though, continues to make daily treks to the outhouse that adjoins the old house that Nick has been renting and which once belonged to Professor Kohli, an English professor who had been displaced from Lahore by Partition. Here, from an unpublished manuscript, is Pratap Singh, Charity’s host, reflecting on her behaviour. * * * Pratap Singh sat on the cot in the half-light of his room. Unless he was reading he did not like to waste electricity. On the shelf before him were the books he had managed to collect through the years. The most precious, like Shakespeare’s Collected Plays, and The Concise Oxford New English Dictionary, were wrapped in cloth. The few others, like Far From the Madding Crowd and Selected English Poetry, which he had read in that glorious first year of college, were covered in brown paper with their titles written along the spine. The paperbacks which he had picked up at railway stations, and the edition of Tolstoy’s short stories that he had

68 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

found cheap at a Russian book fair in Delhi were not covered in any paper at all. The odd book here, wrapped in plastic, was The One Straw Revolution, about organic Japanese farming techniques that an Australian he had once met on a bus coming from Dharamsala had pressed upon him. In a separate, precisely aligned stack, were some of the thick books from Professor Kohli’s library that Nick had made available since occupying the long-abandoned house. Pratap Singh sat before all these books as though invoking all the different worlds and ways of being that they contained. He was wondering what action he should take with Charity. He considered her his ward. She might do what she liked in other parts of the world, but in Kangra, she was his family’s responsibility. She had been trained in women’s customs by his own mother and wife, and when she spoke their dialect it was with some of the old-fashioned idiosyncrasies of his mother’s way of speaking. Charity’s behaviour reflected on the honour of this household. Of course there had been slips in the past, like the time she mixed up her vowels to invite a little boy to have intercourse with her instead of sit on her lap, but everyone understood that her language was not perfect. Speaking was one thing; actions were another. This business of her spending all that time with an unrelated man like Nick, though, placed Pratap Singh in a quandary. He preferred such situations taking place in nineteenth-century England, Russia or France, or at least on Star TV in someone else’s sitting room. In a village, everybody made it their business to watch what other people did. You would think that since television came, people would have other ways to divert their minds from the dullness of routines, but they still relished spotting scandals close to home. Allowing Charity to stay with them, he knew he had opened himself up to gossip about his own intentions towards the foreign woman. It had been years since his father had taken up that unpopular cause, years since he had briefly been enrolled in college, yet people still thought he put on airs. He knew that they would take pleasure in finding fault with him. Whatever his wife Mangala’s faults were – her love of sugary things, naughty double-meanings, film dances on television – he knew that her arrival in this household had helped him. She kept good relations with other women in the village, and she helped him feel that he belonged. It was Mangala too who had taken Charity around, presenting her as ‘Bahenji’ to other women, Mangala who had reassured everyone in the wider village that there was nothing amiss in bringing an Angrezin to live with them. That first year and a half, seven years ago, that Charity had lived in their home, everything had been fine. Even though she had

Moving Stories 69

already been past her prime, a spinster in her late twenties, Charity had acted with all the modesty befitting an unmarried girl. Why now, when she was finally respectably married had she left her husband to come live with them again and stir up trouble? Pratap Singh did not understand what Charity thought she was doing. Going every day to the Snowview Villa, even in Nick’s absence, she acted as though she had made some vow to a temple. He had tried to delicately ask why she had to visit every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and she always said it was for the latrine. She did not understand that she was shaming Pratap Singh himself for not having provided a guest with such a facility. She had gone with everyone else to the ravine or the forest before having access to the Professor’s house. But now, solely on account of Charity’s bathroom needs, Mangala was winning her argument about the need for cement in their lives: he had been inquiring into the cost of building a cement latrine near the vegetable garden, and then it was only a matter of time before Mangala insisted they also needed a new house with a satellite dish on the roof. His mother Bibi had always protected Charity. ‘This is her custom,’ she said if Charity did something unusual. But the matter was now spreading outside their household. When Pratap Singh went over to Kalyan Singh’s house recently, the men in front of the television had cut short their own conversation as he entered. Amid the clearing of throats, he knew that they had been discussing something that concerned him. Kalyan Singh’s younger brother Dharminder, the one who had bought a truck since retirement from the army, later asked some sly question about the research of ‘that foreign women, always going here and there, is it not the nature of foreign women to stay inside the house?’ Someone else had hinted that Charity and Nick had been going up to the forest on the hill together, which Pratap Singh did not believe: whatever her obliviousness, Charity surely knew better. Then another man suggested that Charity was spending all her time with low castes rather than noting down the proper songs and rituals among Rajputs, Brahmans and Soods. Pratap Singh had defended Charity, speaking about the need to document local culture as new values flooded to the valley. ‘Aren’t the young girls singing film songs now?’ he asked. ‘Is it not a service for us that a foreigner has taken the trouble to record the wisdom from the past?’ Inside, he had been shaken and shamed. With Nick due to return any day, the honour of this household propelled Pratap Singh to confront Charity. But how? What would he say that did not make him appear as tradition-bound as the neighbours? When he looked at the spines of books on his shelf, none of them gave him an answer.

70 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Cosmopolitan subjectivities in ethnography and fiction Drawing on ethnographic materials for fiction, I stand in a long lineage of other anthropologists who, since Adolph Bandelier’s 1890 book The Delight Makers, have sometimes turned to fiction to express insights gained through fieldwork. I have detailed this history elsewhere, and attempted to describe some of the generic landmarks that orient a border between ethnography and fiction (Narayan 1999). In pointing towards this largely hidden history of fiction-writing anthropologists, I invoke the practice of thinking beyond local disciplinary convention to other literary genres whose production and consumption tend to be linked, like ethnography itself, with cosmopolitan modalities. I anchor the following discussion around Elsie Clews Parsons’s American Indian Life ([1922] 1967) because I see this as the earliest group endeavour in which anthropologists self-consciously tried their hands at short stories. The collection includes contributions from such illustrious ancestors as Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Alfred Tozzer and even Franz Boas. In his introduction to the volume, Alfred Kroeber pointed out that the shift to fiction allows for a greater exploration of subjectivity. As he wrote: The fictional form of presentation devised by the editor … allows a freedom in depicting or suggesting the thoughts and feelings of the Indian, such as is impossible in a formal, scientific report. In fact, it incites to active psychological treatment, else the tale would lag. At the same time, the customs depicted are never invented. Each author has adhered strictly to the social facts as he knew them. He has merely selected those that seemed most characteristic, and woven them into a plot around an imaginary Indian hero or heroine. ([1922] 1967, p. 13) Looking more closely at the contributions, we see that Kroeber’s overview is not strictly accurate. Certainly, some of the stories – particularly those that reconstruct vanished cultures known through archaeology and legend – are about a purely imaginary hero or heroine, but many of the stories in fact appear to be transcriptions or modelled on transcriptions of tales told to anthropologists in the field. T. T. Waterman, for example, starts his story ‘All is Trouble Along the Klamath: A Yurok Idyll’ with the parenthetical aside ‘Mrs. Oregon Jim, from the house Erkiger-I or “Hair-ties” in the town of Pekwan, speaking’ (Waterman [1922] 1967, p. 289). A. M. Stephen, identified as ‘a sometime resident among the Navajo and Hopi’ conveys an almost Borges-like sense of

Moving Stories 71

authors within authors with his story ‘When John the Jeweler Was Sick’ footnoted as a ‘manuscript contributed by Mr. Stewart Culin’ and beginning ‘Told at St. Michaels, Arizona, by one of the Franciscan Fathers’ (Stephen [1922] 1967, p. 153). One of Elsie Clews Parsons’s contributions is co-authored with T. B. Reed, an Alaskan native, and starts, ‘You ask me to tell you the story of somebody’s life at Anvik, my home in Alaska. I will tell you the story of the woman who gave me the moccasins I showed you …’ (Parsons and Reed ([1922] 1967), p. 337). Amid all these authors, Robert Lowie displays the most literary flair. While he too possibly derived his stories from oral testimonies, he develops vivid scenes and characters. ‘Behind the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at Fort Herane, they were wrestling for wives’ begins his fourth story (Lowie ([1922] 1967, p. 325). American Indian Life appeared the same year as Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific with its famous exhortation that anthropologists ‘grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’ (Malinowski 1961(1922), p. 25). Through stories, American Indian Life seemed to offer a different way of achieving the natives’ point of view. Yet, as Marcus and Cushman have brilliantly argued, looking back from the vantage of the early 1980s, just what it meant to achieve the native’s point of view has varied considerably: in early realist ethnography the doctrine took the form of simple unexamined assertions that a given account does or should present the native perspective (as in Malinowski’s ethnographies); to the use of native statements with translations in order to ‘let them speak’ but only under the ethnographer’s close editing (as in Firth’s ethnographies); to a long period of a presumed but unexamined notion that the functionalist account embodied within itself or was at least true to the native point of view; to a shift toward a distinctly mentalist view of social structure and native viewpoints due to the influence of Levi-Strauss; to the systematic but naive project of ethnosemantics; to the latest phase in philosophical legitimation framing interpretations in ethnographic accounts by a meditation on translation and problems of meaning. (Marcus and Cushman 1982, p. 34) Though Marcus and Cushman point to a reflexive awareness of translation in experimental writing trends, translation, with the anthropologist as mediator, is assumed through all the different ethnographic strategies they list. In writing fiction, however, an author can take the liberty of speaking from within a particular point of view, ‘native’ or otherwise, without the frame of translation. So, while the conventions

72 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

of ethnography lead me to represent Vidhya as observed, interpreted and translated by me into English as well as the conceptual framework of this chapter, the conventions of fiction allow me to get right into Pratap Singh’s head without establishing the basis from which I surmise that he gets these opinions. What does this insight about fiction’s greater flexibility in perspective have to do with cosmopolitans as selves and subjects? As anthropology moves from an assumption of natives being neatly contained by a singular culture associated with a particular place (cf. Appadurai 1988) does fiction allow for more leverage than ethnography in presenting people’s wider horizons and responsibilities beyond the local? American Indian Lives, for example, personalizes, but mostly in terms of the most typical of cultural types, subjectively bounded within locales (though Lowie’s evocation of the rough inequalities and cultural-mixings of a Hudson Bay trading post stands out as the exception (Lowie [1922] 1967)). As Oliver La Farge, a contemporary of these Boasians, noted, audience expectations of cultural types constrained writers of fiction too. La Farge won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for literature for his novel Laughing Boy (1929), that derived partly from his fieldwork among the Navajo. Yet as he ruefully acknowledged in the 1940s, after Laughing Boy, none of his later novels met with the same success. The general audience, he surmised, sought ‘Indians long-haired, beautiful and unspoiled’ and was simply not interested in more complex (cosmopolitan, and ethnographically accurate) characters like ‘a young Navajo adjusting to the changing worlds which involves Hitler, soil erosion, and the conquest of Hitler and poverty’ (1945, p. 189). That ethnographers have historically tended to downplay the more cosmopolitan subjects they encounter through field research is linked to old disciplinary habits of seeking cultural authenticity, and yet, the very people they have tended to become close to often display the capacity to stand outside the apparent boundedness of cultural forms, with an incipient or full-fledged cosmopolitan attitude. Some sociologists (e.g., Roudotemeff 2005) have proposed a local-cosmopolitan continuum (though what exactly all the defining vectors of this continuum might be are open to debate). Within this continuum, does Vidhya’s curious engagement with the outer world, alternate cultural realities and peculiarly different people (like myself) render her a cosmopolitan? I am certainly aware that Vidhya is less cosmopolitan, say, than my mother’s and my friend based in a Kangra town who, as the wife of a high-ranking army officer had lived in many different places in India and even England; whose recipes span delicious mustard-oil spiced local dishes to

Moving Stories 73

Chinese food, ratatouille and puddings; and whose grandchildren have gone to graduate school in the United States and Britain. Yet, I also see Vidhya as more cosmopolitan than my collaborator, Urmila Devi Sood, who shared her extensive knowledge of local folktales for a book (Narayan 1997), yet was regularly instructed on the conventions of television viewing by her children and grandchildren. Though a fictional character, Pratap Singh is also an aspiring cosmopolitan, struggling, as Vidhya does, between welcoming a foreign woman and being made deeply uncomfortable by the foreigner’s transgressive behaviour. (While the subject of opposing pulls between the forces of cosmopolitanism and anti-cosmopolitanism around issues of women’s sexuality around the world is well worth elaborating on, it is beyond the scope of this chapter.) And as for Lizzie, the Australian, that she is a tourist and traveller does not necessarily imply that she has a cosmopolitan perspective, for, as Hannerz points out tourists often do not contend with alien systems of meaning (see Hannerz 1996, p. 105). Juxtaposing Vidhya’s tale of Lizzie with Pratap Singh’s inner debate about how to deal with Charity, I am clearly not making a direct translation from ethnography to fiction. I am aware, though, how in embroidering Pratap Singh’s musings, I was taking up threads from Vidhya’s tale: the suspicion of an inappropriate relationship, issues of female chastity and family honour, the outsider’s desire for an outhouse, and the perspective of an onlooker caught awkwardly between the sense of relativity of village norms and their own vulnerability to the judgements emerging from these norms. Other parts of my novel are written from the perspective of Charity, following a literary device exemplified by Eleanore Smith Bowen’s Return to Laughter (1954), where an anthropologist (or anthropologist-like character) tells her story of encounter in the field. In these sections, Charity’s cosmopolitan movement between cultural worlds is familiar to me, and I write with the authority of a professional anthropologist with friends who are anthropologists (young women friends in particular, I found, identified strongly with Charity, offering me stories to outfit her). Moving from an anthropologist’s point of view into the perspectives of people an anthropologist encounters is a riskier leap towards what the anthropologist and skilled short-story writer John Stewart has referred to as ‘an anthropology of the inside’ (1989, p. 13). To Stewart, ‘an anthropology of the inside’ is opened up through literary renditions of people’s inner lives with stories that involve ‘people in dialogue with themselves, other people, the things and events which give order and meaning to everyday life’ (1989, p. 13). While Stewart points to the value of such writing in representing how

74 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

individuals negotiate plural cultural frameworks in a place like Trinidad (1989, pp. 220–221), this insight appears to hold also for the sorts of dialogues generated by the plurality of meanings opened out in the horizons of cosmopolitan individuals. Acknowledging Vidhya’s contributions to my fiction, I hope to more generally highlight the value of attending to stories that have captured other people’s imaginations. Indeed, in a review of American Indian Life, Sapir recommended that for anthropologists writing fiction, there is much to learn from ‘transcribing, either literally, or in simple paraphrase, personal experiences and other texts and have been written down or dictated by natives’ (1922, p. 571). Carefully listening to the stories people choose to tell – whether orally or through their own writing – is key to entering their subjectivity whether through our own ethnography or fictional elaborations. That such stories can inform both ethnography and fiction is beautifully demonstrated in Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991), where she intersperses ethnographic chapters in which this charismatic Haitian voodoo healer tells of her life with vivid rewritings of Mama Lola’s family stories of encounters with the voodoo spirits. By attending closely to people’s stories, then, and engaging the complexities of the real and imagined worlds they invoke, an anthropologist is best enabled to represent subjectivities, whether of locals, cosmopolitans and everyone in the spectrum between.

Closing remarks ‘So Lizzie has come to good use,’ laughed Vidhya, speaking Hindi over the phone in 2006 when I told her that I was polishing this chapter. ‘It’s okay with you, right, that I wrote about you too, calling you Vidhya?’ I asked, a little apologetic and awkward as always when I confess to representing someone through writing. ‘Well why just “Vidhya” [Wisdom]?’ she joked. ‘You might as well name me “Saraswati” [Goddess of Wisdom].’ In contrast to the early 1990s, Kangra now has phones installed in most homes, and cell phones are easily available too. This has allowed for ongoing conversations with many of my Kangra friends. In an earlier phone conversation a few years ago, Vidhya told me that with her children grown, she had more time on her hands and was starting to write Hindi stories – kahaniyann. ‘What kind of stories?’ I asked. ‘You’ll see,’ she said evasively. I began to imagine that perhaps Charity’s crow and the adventures of Lizzie, the Australian tourist, would live on in her fiction. But one of them, she told me, was about two women friends.

Moving Stories 75

‘They met when they were both unmarried,’ Vidhya began. ‘One of the girls was from Bombay, and then she did well in her studies and went to live in America and then for a long time she didn’t get married’ I was smiling in recognition. ‘What did you name this friend?’ I asked. ‘Kirin,’ said Vidhya nonchalantly. ‘And how did you end the story?’ I pressed. ‘It’s still unfinished,’ said Vidhya, still seeming a little embarrassed. ‘I have to work out an ending.’ Vidhya’s writing about me even as I write about her is a humbling reminder that though I have always been the one travelling to visit her, she has for many years been making the imaginative journey into the circumstances of my own life. For all anthropologists whose fieldwork brings them closer to other people, a friendship spanning very different life choices and constraints allow us to stretch empathetically beyond our received notions of both self and subject towards more cosmopolitan perspectives.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Ken George, Maria Lepowsky, Joanne Mulcahy, Kathy Robinson, Richard Werbner and all the participants at the Canberra conference ‘Cultures, Nations, Identities, Migrations’ for their comments on this chapter in this and earlier incarnations.

References Appadurai, Arjun (1988) ‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’, Cultural Anthropology 3, pp. 36–49. —— (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bandelier, Adolph ([1890] 1971) The Delight Makers: A Novel of Prehistoric Pueblo Indians. Reprint, with an introduction by Stefan Jovanovich, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. Beck, Ulrich and Natan Sznaider (2006) ‘A Literature on Cosmopolitanism: An Overview’, The British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1, pp. 153–164. Bowen, Elenore Smith [Laura Bohannan] (1954) Return to Laughter. New York, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Brown, Karen McCarthy (1991) Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deihl, Keila (2002) Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. —— (2004) Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

76 Self-recognition and Self-discovery Kroeber, Alfred ([1922] 1967) ‘Introduction’, in American Indian Life, ed. Elsie Clews Parsons. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 5–16. La Farge, Oliver (1929) Laughing Boy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —— (1945) Raw Material. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Lowie, Robert ([1922] 1967) ‘Windigo: A Chippewa Story’, in American Indian Life, ed. Elsie Clews Parsons. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 325–336. Malinowski, Bronislaw ([1922] 1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton. Marcus, George E. and Dick Cushman (1982) ‘Ethnographies as Texts’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11, pp. 25–69. Narayan, Kirin (1995) ‘Participant Observation’, in Women Writing Culture, eds Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 33–48. —— (1996) ‘Songs Lodged in the Heart: Public Culture and the Displacement of Regional Women’s Culture’, in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, eds Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 181–213. —— (1997) Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. —— (1999) ‘Ethnography and Fiction: Mapping a Border’, Anthropology and Humanism 24, pp. 1–14. Parry, Jonathan (1979) Caste and Kinship in Kangra. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Parsons, Elsie Clews, ed. ([1922] 1967) American Indian Life. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Parsons, Elsie Clews and T. B. Reed ([1922] 1967) ‘Cries-for-Salmon, a Ten’a Woman’, in American Indian Life, ed. Elsie Clews Parsons. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 337–361. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture 12, no. 3, pp. 577–590. Rosaldo, Renato (1986) ‘Ilongot Hunting as Story and Experience’, in The Anthropology of Experience, eds V. W. Turner and E. M. Bruner. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 97–138. Roudometoff, Victor (2005) ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Glocalization’, Current Sociology 53, no. 1, pp. 113–135. Sapir, Edward (1922) ‘A Symposium of the Exotic: Review of Elsie Clews Parsons, ed. American Indian Life’, The Dial 73, pp. 568–571. Stephen, A. M. ([1922] 1967) ‘When John the Jeweler was Sick’, in American Indian Life, ed. Elsie Clews Parsons. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 153–156. Stewart, John O. (1989) Drinkers, Drummers, and Decent Folk: Ethnographic Narratives of Village Trinidad. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Waterman, T. T. ([1922] 1967) ‘All Is Trouble Along the Klamath’, in American Indian Life, ed. Elsie Clews Parsons. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 289–296.

5 Wounds in Our Heart: Identity and Social Justice in the Art of Dadang Christanto Caroline Turner

On 10 September 1999 at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibition in Brisbane, Australia, I was part of a large crowd of around 1000 who gathered to watch a performance by Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto. The event took place in front of his artwork, Api di Bulan Mei 1998/Fire in May 1998 (Figure 5.1) an installation of rows of 47 larger-than-lifesized male and female papier mâché sculptural figures, their hands raised in supplication, which were to be ritually burned as part of the performance. The artist had dedicated this work to the victims, mainly Chinese – those who died and the women who were raped – when businesses and homes were destroyed in the Indonesian riots that occurred in Jakarta and Solo in May 1998, during popular protests that brought down the Suharto regime (Turner and Clark 1999). A fact-finding team appointed by the Indonesian Government, Tim Gabungan Pencari Fakta (TGPF) reported that nearly 1300 people had died in the riots, many of them burned to death when trapped by demonstrators in supermarkets (People’s Daily Online 2000).1 The artist began the performance by weaving slowly among the figures, in his characteristic performance state of semi-trance, kneeling in respect to each figure as if to a parent or in prayer before, with great reverence, setting the figures alight one by one. As the flames took hold, the audience remained in almost complete silence, many in tears as the television documentary (ABC 1999) revealed. The heads of the figures remained fixed on the poles as the bodies melted and collapsed in the flames. The appeal of the hands raised in supplication thus remained unanswered. The artist had earlier said that he expected that the performance might prove shocking for the audience but he hoped that it would be a 77

78 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Figure 5.1 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, Api bulan Mei/Fire in May, 1998/1999, installation and performance at Third Asia-Pacific Triennial Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (Australia). Source: Photo by Andrea Higgins.

shock illuminating our sense of humanity (Eccles 2000). The May 1998 riots, as Melani Budianta (Chapter 9), Kathryn Robinson (2000) and Abidin Kusno (2003) have suggested, proved a turning point both for Indonesians of Chinese descent and for activists seeking political change in Indonesia, particularly women who were horrified by the organized rapes of Chinese women associated with the riots. For Dadang Christanto, however, Fire in May was a continuation of his commitment over nearly two decades as an activist–artist protesting human rights abuses in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Wounds in Our Heart 79

Dadang had indicated in other forums that the 1999 performance was also to honour all the victims of the twentieth century, a century in which more than 200 million people had died in violent conflicts and systematic violence: ‘I’m concerned with suffering anywhere in the world’ he had stated, ‘yesterday Kosovo, today East Timor’ (Vignol 1999 and Christanto 1999 statement at Third Asia-Pacific Triennial conference regarding East Timor; author’s notes). The specific reference to East Timor was particularly pertinent. The world was waiting for international intervention in the troubled province – the United Nations (UN) action was not to come until 20 September. An Australian academic in the previous week had demanded that the exhibition be closed because Indonesian artists were participating, in protest against the devastation being wrought in the former province by pro-Indonesian militia following its vote for independence in August 1999. Yet Dadang Christanto and other Indonesian artists taking part in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial had for many years put themselves at grave risk, personally and professionally, by publicly challenging their own government on issues of human rights.2 While the events in Jakarta, Solo and East Timor were very much in the minds of those viewing the performance, as with Dadang’s other eloquent works on the subject of human suffering, this was not the only human tragedy that the audience – including myself – contemplated as the figures burned. The circumstances of the performance were also an emotional experience for the artist and marked a moment of transition in his life and work. He had moved to Australia in February 1999, six months before the triennial, to take up a teaching position at the University of the Northern Territory. In the months after the performance he was to bring his family to Australia and, for the first time, reveal details of his life history, ethnicity and connection to certain political events, all of which have impacted on his journey as an artist and activist. While Dadang Christanto is seen as an ‘Indonesian’ artist, his art is informed not only by his personal Indonesian identity but by a complex multicultural and transnational identity. His art is also informed by world events and has been performed to a very great degree on an international stage. The interconnections between his art and life are explored in this essay. Kenneth George (Chapter 3) makes the point in his illuminating account of the great Islamic-Indonesian artist of an older generation, A. D. Pirous, that ‘in these times, virtually everyone has a … hybrid identity, derived from conflicting narratives and images of affiliation, allegiance and betrayal’ (Chapter 3, p. 38). He observes, with particular reference to Pirous, that ‘to be a postcolonial artist-citizen like Pirous, is

80 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

to be subject to the nation-state and to a field of cultural production’ (Chapter 3, p. 40). All this is certainly true of Pirous, born a Muslim of ‘Sumatran-South Asian background’ in the Islamic and passionately independent region of Aceh. Pirous was born in 1933 and is thus of an age to be part of the generation of the War of Independence against Dutch colonial rule, serving in the student army of the Indonesian Revolution, where he ‘used his talents to make propaganda posters for the nationalist guerilla forces’, as George recounts (Chapter 3, p. 39). Dadang Christanto’s birth and upbringing were at a very different time and his career has been undertaken in very different circumstances, revealing complex historical, regional and intergenerational distinctions in Indonesian society. There is no question that Dadang Christanto’s art is deeply informed by his Indonesian upbringing and personal history. He was born in Tegal, a village in Central Java, in 1957, too late to have any personal involvement in an anti-colonial revolution. He and his family were indeed to be the victims of repression enacted by the successors of such a revolution, albeit in ‘a time in Indonesian history that was in reality still colonized by rather than liberated from the colonial past’, as Tony Day states (this volume Chapter 2, p. 29). He was also of Chinese descent and hence a member of a minority in terms of both ethnicity and religion, which suffered significant discrimination in Indonesia in the period before Reformasi (as Indonesians label the post-Suharto period). His father Tak Ek Tjiu was a small businessman. He was also caught up in a series of events that his son would later refer to as ‘the unspeakable horror’ and which Dadang only began to speak of publicly in the months after September 1999. Dadang was eight-years-old when soldiers came to his village of Kamantran in Central Java in October 1965 and took away his father. Dadang, his mother and his four siblings never saw him again. He was one of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as two million, real or alleged Communist sympathizers, victims of a killing time that followed a failed coup in Jakarta in September 1965. The 1965–66 massacres in Indonesia have been called in a CIA assessment ‘one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century’ (Anderson and McVey 1978). The victims have never been counted, individual fates have rarely been known, very few graves of victims have ever been found and the killers never identified, let alone punished. It was a horror inflicted by Dadang’s own government, not by a foreign oppressor, and inflicted not on the basis of race, religion, class or region (as with the extensive violence employed by the Suharto regime against moves for independence in particular in the regions of Aceh and East Timor)

Wounds in Our Heart 81

but one of alleged ideology. Robert Cribb (1990) in his authoritative study of the era has pointed to local factors determining the scale and scope of the violence in each region. Many of those killed, including Dadang’s father, were not members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia). Others would have been associated with some of the PKI’s many civic activities approved by President Sukarno. The PKI was at that time one of the largest communist parties in the world. While it also seems that Chinese were not the ‘primary’ targets (Heryanto 2006, p. 140), many ethnic Chinese died in the carnage. Some sources suggest this may be because of a simple identification of Communism with China, or their economic status may have been the subject of local envy. ‘This “65 incident”’, Dadang later told his old friend and fellow-artist Hendro Wiyanto, ‘carries permanent wounds in our heart and memory … it is fresh in our memory because it holds bitterness so very deep’ (Christanto 2002). But while Dadang Christanto is shaped by this terrible family experience in Indonesia, his work is not in any way confined or limited to his personal experiences. He is not the subject of his own art. His art has indeed resonated with audiences in many countries in an astonishing way, including with those who have little or no knowledge of Indonesia or of the circumstances and events that inform his work and who do not even necessarily connect his works specifically to his country of birth. Dadang’s work has been consistently praised by international art critics and curators and shown to considerable acclaim in many countries: Australia, Japan, the United States, Canada, Cuba, Thailand, Italy, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and Korea. He is one of the most internationally exhibited of Indonesia’s contemporary artists, and now one of the two or three best known outside Indonesia. While currently living in Australia, he retains ties to his country of birth, exhibiting both there and in official Indonesian representation in international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 2003. I met Dadang Christanto when I was directing the curatorial teams for the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993, an exhibition of 76 artists from 13 Asian and Pacific countries. It was a revelation to Australian audiences who knew almost nothing of contemporary Asia. There were nine Indonesian artists including the older generation of senior artists such as Srihardi Sudarsono, a lyrical painter whose work incorporates the subject matter and lines of classical Javanese art, dance and music and A. D. Pirous, whose work is inspired by profound belief in Islam. The Indonesian selection also included a younger generation of artists.3 Dadang’s large installation in the 1993 Triennial was acclaimed

82 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

as one of the strongest artworks in the exhibition and subsequently bought by the Queensland Art Gallery. It is composed of a series of hanging pieces created from bamboo and palm leaf. While the content of the work is undoubtedly linked to his later series entitled Testimonies of the Trees (Christanto 2002), in which the trees bear silent witness to hidden graves in the forest, there is no immediate suggestion of this. The work suggests a quiet grove of trees in nature, a place to go for contemplation and meditation. The hanging pieces with their rounded tops have a roughly human form and can be seen in retrospect to suggest bodies hanging in trees, but the main clue to their meaning in 1993 was the title: For those Who have been killed (Figure 5.2), Who are poor, Who are suffering, Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe. This work evoked an extraordinary response from Brisbane audiences, even though the symbolism was wholly Indonesian, drawing on Indonesian folklore and traditional Javanese legends as well as contemporary events, and the immediate points of reference – the killings of 1965–66 in Java and Bali and the 1991 Santa Cruz cemetery massacre in East Timor when Indonesian troops opened fire on a procession – were not revealed by Dadang until almost a decade later and indeed could not be revealed at that time.4 When asked about references to Indonesia, Dadang answered in 1993 that the work was about ‘universal’ human suffering. The largely Australian audience (the exhibition attracted 60,000 visitors from Queensland, an Australian state known for its strong and close links to Asia but also in some areas for a conservatism which was to produce key supporters for the anti-immigration, and particularly anti-Asian, politician Pauline Hanson) interpreted the work as the artist had suggested it should be interpreted: as a memorial to suffering ‘in every time and place’. The floor beneath the installation was covered throughout the three months of the exhibition with flowers and notes, left by people who must have seen the work, responded to its message and then returned to leave their personal testimonials – one does not normally carry flowers when visiting an Australian art gallery. These notes generally had nothing to do with Indonesia, but reflected the private pain of the donors or their personal grief over events at home or abroad. Many referred to the brutal violence raging at the time in the former Yugoslavia, others with sadness to a local event – the recent tragic death in police custody of a young Aboriginal dancer, Daniel Yok. The fact that came home to me vividly witnessing the response to his art from audiences at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial, is that the impact of Dadang’s artworks transcends local or national contexts.

Figure 5.2 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, For those who have been killed 1992, Bamboo, metal, 110 ⫻ 80 ⫻ 335 cm (irreg., approx.). The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (Australia). Source: Photo courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.

84 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

They resonate in both aesthetic terms and in content to individual and private suffering as well as to communal and world events. The installations serve as a shrine or memorial but he invites audiences to react on both a ‘universal’ and an intensely personal level. The appeal is not only to curators who select the work on artistic grounds. They profoundly affect very diverse audiences. This empathetic response has been repeated wherever Dadang’s works have been shown. In 1996 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo I witnessed Japanese visitors – who also spontaneously left flowers and poems – in tears when viewing his installation Mereka Memberi Kesaksian/They Give Evidence (Figure 5.3). The work was representational – a group of larger-than-life-size sculptures, terracotta figures standing in formal lines holding in their outstretched arms bundles that suggest the bodies of victims, perhaps children. The figures in Mereka Memberi Kesaksian/They Give Evidence are highly stylized, broad shouldered, heavy limbed, without clothes or hair as if the heads are shaved, without adornment. I wondered at the time if there may have been some connection in the Japanese response with images of the victims of the atomic bombs with clothes burned from their bodies – the work was shown in Hiroshima as well as Tokyo. The figures have a faint resemblance to archaic sculpture from Europe or classical Buddha sculptures such as those at the ninth-century monumental stupa Borobudur in Central Java or even the ancient statues lining the ‘spirit roads’ leading to tombs in China. But they are different from all of these. They defy interpretation in terms of time or place or race. They are not there for a religious purpose or to show reverence to an emperor but are engaged in a task of great simplicity – bearing witness on behalf of humanity. They are manifestly representations of ordinary people, they include men and women, united and without hierarchy, representing a vast body of suffering humanity, equally silent but eloquent witnesses. There is a spiritual component to Dadang’s art (and indeed there is generally a significant spiritual dimension in South East Asian art), but the basis of his art is not religious: it is community grief and communal suffering, pain inflicted by human beings on other human beings. The works are not in themselves horrific, although the subject matter is so. The figures could be anyone or all of us. The performances associated with the works, ‘to bring the works to life’ as Dadang says, including moments that resemble silent prayer, again are not religious, but they inspire offerings such as flowers; they preserve a sense of dignity in the face of suffering; and they provoke a respectful, usually silent, response from the audiences.

Figure 5.3 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian/ They Give Evidence, 1996/1997. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan). Fibreglass, brick powder, stone and clothes Dimensions variable. Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia). Source: Photo courtesy the artist.

86 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Dadang Christanto’s art bears little direct stylistic resemblance to that of other Indonesian artists of his own or earlier generations, but an art related to themes of social justice has been important in Indonesia for more than 60 years. Anthony Reid (1998) has shown how the concept of merdeka or freedom has a long and enduring history in Indonesia. Modern Indonesian art was informed by the struggle for independence against the Dutch. The emphasis of the father figures of Indonesian art, in particular Sudjojono and Hendra Gunawan (the latter imprisoned under Suharto) and Affandi, in depicting the lives of ordinary Indonesians, provided a focus for a national art. Raising painful issues through literature, theatre and visual art has also been significant throughout South East Asian culture. I have argued elsewhere (Turner 2005a) that social justice has also been a critical concern in the last two decades in contemporary Asian art, particularly in Indonesia but also in countries where the art is usually thought to be divorced from social protest, as in Thailand where Buddhist philosophy and an acceptance of one’s earthly fate dominate artistic expression. It is not possible to give a history of Indonesian modern and contemporary art in this essay but a brief background is necessary to set Dadang’s work in context.5 The centres for modern art in Indonesia, an art which intersected with Western modernism, were from the 1950s elite art schools in Bandung and Yogyakarta. Highly intellectual art with a strong connection to international art in the West and with an emphasis on abstraction characterized the work of Bandung graduates, while the rival art college in Yogyakarta concentrated on expressionist painting (see Wright 1994). Contemporary Indonesian art is seen as beginning in the mid- to late 1970s with the founding of the ‘new art movement’ by a group of young artists (themselves graduates of the major art schools) who led a rebellion which, among other targets, critiqued concepts of nationalism or national identity as a form of ‘official’ art, criticized the dominance of international art in Indonesia and advocated an art connected to issues of social concern and utilizing new approaches such as installation. As artist Jim Supangkat, one of the founders of the ‘new art movement’, points out, this movement in one sense only initiated a limited debate as the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the continuing popularity and economic success of decorative painting (Supangkat 1993, 2005a). Over the past 20 years, however, a small group of activist–artists, mostly born in the 1950s or later, have also produced a body of work related to human rights. Much of this work spoke for groups marginalized in the era of development and globalization. Some of the art was

Wounds in Our Heart 87

community based, engaging with whole communities confronting trauma from issues such as land resumption. Politically difficult topics have been the subject of artworks by activist–artists shown both outside and inside Indonesia in the 1990s, often testing the limits of tolerance in Indonesia (Sinaga 1996). This group included F. X. Harsono, Arahmaiani, Heri Dono and Moelyono (the latter a community artist who among other subjects treated the rape and murder of female trade union leader Marsinah). Images drawn from diverse sources including popular culture – or even in the case of female artist Arahmaiani, Western pornography (Turner 2005b) – have been used to make bitingly political comments. Much of the art contradicted the hierarchical nature of Indonesian society. Much drew on local Indonesian traditions and in the process the artists put forward a concept of democracy in contrast to the political vision espoused by the ruling elite of the Suharto regime. Some of the art was undoubtedly anti-Western. Yet there is an apparent contradiction here in that the artists were mostly middle-class and trained in Western art at the elite art schools in Indonesia, their work connected to developments in international art by employing new approaches such as installation and performance, and the largest audiences for their work have been in the West, although it should be noted that there was also an audience in Indonesia. From the 1990s Indonesian artists, along with other Asian artists, particularly from Japan, Korea and China, were included in major international exhibitions, although not on a scale reflecting the strength and diversity of art emanating from the Asian region (Turner 2005b). More recently in the immediate lead up to and aftermath of the fall of Suharto, many more Indonesian artists have directed their work to political forums and to the streets, not only documenting but also engaging in protest through banners, street performance and direct action, often eschewing aesthetic considerations as their art becomes more directly political (Wright 2000, Supangkat 2005a). But there is now, as many commentators have noted, a confusion of targets: the perennial postrevolutionary problem of knowing what to confront in an era of revolution and reform. This has, however, not been a problem for Dadang Christanto as it has for many artists in Indonesia because his work has always transcended borders, time and place. He has indeed produced some of his most powerful artworks since he left Indonesia in 1999. Dadang’s gravitation to an art informed by social activism is revealing. He attended the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts in Yogyakarta from 1975 to 1977 after graduating from high school, and the Painting Study Program at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Indonesian Institute of

88 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Art in Yogyakarta from 1980 to 1986. He was lucky to be accepted into art college, however, because application to proceed to the university level required presentation of a dossier, revealing his relationship with the 1965 events, and also his Chinese descent. The policy of the Suharto government imposed a quota for Chinese students. The regime also continued to discriminate against all those who were any way negatively connected with the events of 1965–66 (pers. comm. with the artist). The official figure given in 1985 for those directly condemned to pariah status was 1.7 million but Heryanto (2006, pp. 16–18) considers that it is Safe to speculate that we are talking about the plight of several million people … the number of victims multiplied as a result of a 1982 official measure that discriminated against those who had any relationship either by marriage or blood … it declared the stigma to be socially contagious and hereditary. While in Yogyakarta, Dadang became involved with the Bengkel theatre company founded in 1967 by poet and activist W. S. Rendra. Rendra himself was in a military prison at the time, having been arrested in 1978 for reading his poetry in public (Cohen 1999). There is no doubt that the experience of working with the company, which crossed boundaries of theatre and activism, reaching out to ordinary people through creative performance, was profoundly inspiring for the young artist from a village background. After university Dadang worked with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Yogyakarta, including a Catholic NGO that employed popular art forms and low-cost media as a means of social advocacy. His employer, Father Ruedi Hoffman, was a Swiss Jesuit who had been in Latin America and involved with Liberation Theology. Hoffman sent Dadang on a trip to West Timor and from there he crossed into East Timor. Dadang’s references to East Timor, therefore, are based on personal experiences of the suffering in the former province. Hoffman’s concern, as Dadang states, was always to seek collaboration rather than opposition, asking, ‘Why not justice?’ (Author interview with the artist, Brisbane, May 2006). The Catholic link came at a formative stage of his life. Religion is important in Indonesia, a multi-faith society despite having the largest Muslim population in the world. Despite renewed sectarian conflict in recent years, Buddhism, Hinduism and indeed Christianity are significant religious and cultural influences along with Islam. Dadang Christanto, as his name suggests, was brought up as a Christian after 1965 when any association with Chinese religion or ceremonies was problematic. He was to convert to

Wounds in Our Heart 89

Islam some years later at the time of his marriage to a Muslim. The Indonesian Government did not allow intermarriage between persons of different religions. Dadang became associated with the Indonesian ‘new art movement’ in the 1980s. This was the turning point in his life as an artist. In their famous 1987 exhibition Fantasy World Supermarket at Ismail Marzuki Cultural Centre, Jakarta, his work Ballad for Suparkal was based on the suicide of a becak (pedicab) driver who had lost his livelihood when becak were banned in the West Java city of Bandung. The work was thus a form of memorial to the poor and oppressed. Works by other artists in the exhibition included several dealing with environmental pollution. Dadang’s first exhibition overseas was at the Daimaru Shopping Center in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1992 and he was also selected for the prestigious Fukuoka Asian Art Show in 1994. It is interesting to note the role that Japanese art institutions (despite the conservatism of the Japanese art establishment) and official organizations such as the Japan Foundation have played in sponsoring the work of young artists from South East Asia over the past 20 years. He also exhibited in Cuba in 1994 at the renowned Havana Biennale, in the 1990s a key force for ‘Third World’ art. The Fukuoka and Cuban experiences, combined with his selection for the 1993 Asia-Pacific Triennial in Australia, were the major events first bringing him to international attention. A work from the early 1990s was Golf Ball, showing a man hitting a golf ball which turns into an evil demon, a critique of the resumption of productive farming land for the pleasure of the wealthy. A highly political work was Bureaucracy 1991. A row of two-dimensional heads, like a stand of traditional Indonesian wayang shadow puppets, each lick the back of the head in front. The foremost head wears a soldier’s helmet. Another key work was Kekerasan I/Violence I created for the important exhibition Traditions/Tensions at the Asia Society in New York in 1996/1997. It consisted of piled terracotta heads, their mouths gaping open as if screaming, suggesting to North American audiences, as Alexandra Munroe pointed out in her penetrating review, skulls from the Cambodian killing times (Munroe 1997). One of his most widely seen and influential works was shown in 1996 in Indonesia: 1001 Manusia Tanah/Earth (Soil) People (Figure 5.4) displayed at the Ancol Marina Beach amusement park near Jakarta. The 1000 life-size male and female figures (the artist himself was 1001), again heavily stylized and unclothed, simply stand in the sea, arms dangling helplessly at their sides, facing the beach, confronting the beachgoers, amusement park visitors and fishermen with the symbolism of human beings displaced and the environment

90 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Figure 5.4 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957. 1001 Manusia Tanah/Earth (Soil) People, 1996. Installation at Marina Beach, Ancol, Jakarta (Indonesia). Fibreglass, 1000 life-size figures. Source: Photo courtesy the artist.

destroyed in the interests of the bourgeois beneficiaries of globalization, ‘the modern condition’, in the words of Gadi Algazi, (2003, p. 10) ‘of millions of men and women who, in the name of globalization, are no longer worth the trouble of being exploited’. Dadang says that ‘ordinary people identified with it immediately’, as is the consistent experience of his work, although perhaps hardly surprising in an island like Java, afflicted with ‘terrible demographic problems’ (pers. comm. with the artist, Canberra, August 2004). There had been no problem with censorship, however, Dadang explained: ‘the military bureaucracy gives permission, because they have no notion of art symbolism and they’re not sophisticated enough to make sense of it’ (Vignol 1999). He had insisted that the figures be left in the surf as a memorial to the villagers dispossessed by the construction of the Kedungombo Dam, who had surrounded the dam, ‘fretting and suffering’ (pers. comm.). And the ultimate symbolism of the dispossessed as truly rejected of the earth came as the fibreglass figures eventually disintegrated and disappeared in the surf, vanishing as hundreds of thousands of Indonesians had vanished in the ‘killing times’ of 1965–66 and as millions have vanished in human and natural disasters in the world since. Dadang moved to Australia in 1999 under the official immigration scheme for ‘distinguished talent’, supported in this by a large number of Australian art colleagues. It was obviously a difficult decision. In Australia, he says, he enjoys a greater artistic freedom.6 Despite living

Wounds in Our Heart 91

abroad, Dadang was asked to represent Indonesia at the Venice Biennale 2003. Indonesia returned to Venice after 50 years (Affandi’s work was shown there in 1952) with its own pavilion and the theme Paradise Lost: Mourning the World. The title was taken from a reference by Nehru on a visit in the 1950s when he called Bali ‘the morning of the world’. It also referred to the Bali bombings of October 2002, which killed 202 people. That event had a disastrous effect on the tourist industry and destroyed the island’s reputation for tranquillity, although that reputation had also been shaken in 1965–66, as I. Ngurah Suryawan (2005) states. The other Indonesian artists were Arahmaiani, Tisna Sanjaya and Balinese Made Wianto, who created a harrowing installation related to human corpses and the physical effects of the bombing. Dadang’s work Raining Tears was about mourning violence but most especially about reconciliation with the past and his country. His original concept, which is still the work referred to on the official website (Sidharta 2003), had been to display ceramic models of human body parts pierced by satay sticks and called Cannibalism. He abandoned this project because of official opposition (interview with the artist, Canberra, August 2005). Dadang had already in his Count Project, begun in December 1999, set out to count those killed by violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He felt, with reason, ‘worried about what has happened in the twentieth century. In the past century there have been massacres everywhere, bloodshed everywhere. Violence just to make people suffer’. And ‘we have always failed to stop violence, instead we have more violence: September 11, 2001, the War in Afghanistan, the Bali bombing and the War in Iraq all were ‘actual global evidence that violence is becoming the solution to problems. This is a strong sign that we are living in the barbarian age’ (Charles Darwin University Newsroom 2003). He had accordingly been ‘counting the victims of violence’ (Gray 2003 and interview with artist). Dadang had not told his own two young children of their grandfather’s fate until the family moved to Australia. Then he felt he must tell them, that he could not evade their right to know their own history, or that he could lie to them when they asked about their grandfather. In the performance Litsus or Portrait of a Family Dadang worked with his young son Tukgunung Tan Aren. When the work was first performed in 2003 his son was eight-years-old, the same age Dadang had been when his father disappeared. The title refers to the screening process for those who carried the stigma of association with those arrested in 1965–66. The work was again performed in 2004 at the conference at the Australian National University from which this volume originates.

92 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Figure 5.5 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia, b. 1957, Litsus/Portrait of a Family, 15 August 2004. Performance by Dadang Christanto, Tukgunung Tan Aren and Kilau Setanggi Timur. Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Source: Photo by Darren Boyd.

(His performance at the conference is represented on the cover of this book.) Dadang’s son and his son’s young friend Kilau Setanggi Timur also took part. In Litsus the audience must either stand by or participate in the violence by throwing missiles, small rice flour filled ‘bombs’ at the seated, still and silent figures, who were dressed in black but by the end of the performance were covered in white dust, looking like ghosts. In the second part of this work, performed in 2005, Searching Displaces Bones, the audience witnessed a shrouded body slowly unwrapped as in an archaeological excavation and subjected to forensic examination by a young girl, Kilau Setanggi Timur, who represents the new generation searching for the past but also another generation of possible victims (Figure 5.5). The work was inspired, the artist has said, by seeing the bodies carried out from the excavations at Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia, but also by the thought that one day his father’s body may also be found (interview with the artist, Canberra, August 2005). It is significant that Dadang’s experience as an artist living away from his homeland in Australia should have had the effect of liberating the

Wounds in Our Heart 93

expression of his full identity as an Indonesian of Chinese ethnicity and identity. He has begun using Chinese joss paper in his work for the first time, he draws faces with some Chinese, certainly Buddhist, characteristics and uses paint in a manner recalling Chinese calligraphy, although he does not know Chinese characters and he and his mother (who still lives in their home village in Java) never learned to speak Chinese. In February 2006 he returned to his village for the newly reinstated Chinese celebrations of the New Year which he had memories of as a small child prior to the events of 1965. Public display of Chinese culture and tradition had been banned from the late 1960’s. Since 2000 and the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid, discrimination is greatly reduced and celebration of Chinese culture and heritage now takes place (see Budianta’s chapter (Chapter 9) and also Heryanto 2006, pp. 28–9, 156). In 2003 in the Art and Human Rights exhibition at the Australian National University, Dadang displayed a work using some of these Chinese elements (Turner and Sever 2003). Originally shown in Indonesia in 2002 (Wiyanto 2002), Hujan Merah/Red Rain was bought by the National Gallery of Australia and is a meditation on the events of 1965, but is also about reconciliation – as to some extent have all his recent works been. President Abdurrahman Wahid (2002–04) had officially forbidden any further discrimination over the events of 1965–66 and opened the possibility of reconciliation (Heryanto 2006, pp. 44–45). Red Rain was allusive, a universal memorial, intended to make people think about their own humanity. Like so many of Dadang’s artworks it has a haunting presence. Red threads fall like a shower of rain from the ceiling. They are attached to 1965 small very beautiful drawings of heads encased in plastic, a reference to identity cards (Clark 2003). Dadang has recently created another installation for the National Gallery of Australia which continues the theme. Entitled Heads from the North, it consists of 66 bronze heads – the number reflecting the events of the year 1966 just as Red Rain related to those of 1965 (Figure 5.6). The killings started on 30 September 1965 and continued until May 1966. On a physical level the heads in the installation, and the associated performance, also represent the heads of decapitated bodies which would be seen at evening floating in the rivers flowing by villages in Java (Wicaksono 1999). Yet, the heads are not horrific and in fact represent portraits of his parents. Dadang is here using the head, rather than the whole body, because the head is the site of memory. Trauma can only be cured and reconciliation achieved, the artist believes, by recollection.

94 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

Figure 5.6 Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b. 1957. Performance at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (Australia), in association with the work ‘Heads from the North’, 2004. Source: Courtesy Sherman Galleries.

The purpose of the installation Heads from the North is to evoke memories of the killing times in Indonesia and yet, like all his works, it is interpreted by people who view it as a ‘universal’ memorial to suffering in any time and place, which it is as well. Until recently the National Gallery had no explanation of the installations in the accompanying labels, but this has not diminished their impact on viewers. Dadang’s recreation of the great installation They Give Evidence, bought by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, continues the theme of human suffering and trauma in every place and time. It represents figures of the dead who have returned to bear witness to the wrongs inflicted on them and on others. They constitute in the artist’s words ‘a picture of the continuity between the old and new violence’, reminding us of our complicity in allowing such atrocities to occur over the centuries of human existence (interview with the artist). They Give Evidence transcends the specifics of time and place to evoke and testify to the continuously unfolding tragedy of systematic injustice everywhere.

Wounds in Our Heart 95

The only occasion on which Dadang’s work appears to have been subject to real censorship, at least in recent years, was ostensibly on religious grounds in Jakarta on 15 July 2002 when the local mosque demanded that his work be removed from public viewing because of the ‘nude’ figures. In fact, the figures are highly stylized and the sexual characteristics are barely suggested, with the intention of making clear the equal suffering of both women and men. The figures were removed to the foyer of the gallery. At the time it was suggested that the real problem was that the exhibition had been sponsored by the newspaper Kompas, which had in the past been associated with the Catholic Church. However, events related to the Jakarta CP Biennale in 2005 with protests by a radical Islamic group about work by another artist showing very different ‘nude figures’ and the subsequent cancellation of further Biennales also indicates a potentially new climate in Indonesia.7 There is no question that Dadang Christanto’s work is in one sense deeply informed by specific historical Indonesian experiences and his personal family experiences, nor is there any question that his art evokes its intended emotional response from audiences who may have no comprehension whatever of the circumstances to which it refers. It may even be true that Dadang’s art is appreciated best by audiences which have no such comprehension of the exact circumstances of his life or work, because the personal and ‘universal’ impact is not diluted for them by reference to specific local events and conflicts, between religions or peoples. In Dadang Christanto’s art there is no ideology, unless it is the simple ideology of pleading for social justice. This has been a critical factor in his ability to communicate with audiences in many cultures as an international artist. It has also undoubtedly had the effect of rendering him independent of politics and political change in Indonesia as a source of continuing inspiration because his work is not only about Indonesia. The experience of suffering and tragedy, he believes, is universal, transcending nation, culture or religion. He speaks for victims, without regard for class, creed, ethnicity, region or country and his art poses the question: ‘Why not justice?’ I do not mean by focusing in this chapter on the ‘message’ in the works to diminish the appeal of Dadang Christanto’s art in artistic and aesthetic terms. Curators and art historians such as myself have selected his work for exhibitions because of its powerful formal and aesthetic qualities and what Stephen Greenblatt (1999, p. 42) in his seminal essay on resonance and wonder, in defining ‘wonder’, called the power of a displayed object ‘to stop the viewer in his or her tracks … to evoke an exalted attention’. Dadang’s art not only mourns and commemorates

96 Self-recognition and Self-discovery

the cruelty of humans to humans and at times, of nature and of life,but it also provides a way through personal pain that reflects our empathy with other human beings and reinforces the humane in the human. There is no politics in his recent Tsunami painting depicting the departing souls of victims of nature’s treachery against humanity. There is only a call for compassion. And for the realization that all people have their real value as human beings, which is the theme of all his work.

Notes I would like to thank Dadang Christanto and Dr Glen St. J. Barclay for help in preparing this essay. 1. The People’s Daily Online also reported that Komnas HAM, Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission, was to investigate the report of the governmentappointed Joint Fact-Finding Team (TGPF). 2. The other Indonesian artists in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial were Tisna Sanjaya, Mella Jaarsma, S. Teddy D, Heri Dono and Moelyono. 3. The other Indonesian artists in this exhibition were: Heri Dono, Nyoman Erawan, F. X. Harsono, Sudjana Kerton, A. D. Pirous, Ivan Sagito, Srihardi Sudarsono, and Dede Eri Supria. 4. On 12 November 1991, ‘Indonesian troops fired upon a peaceful memorial procession to a cemetery in Dili, East Timor that had turned into a pro-independence demonstration.’ Lists of casualties finally compiled by the Portuguese Solidarity group A Paz e Possiovel em Timor-Leste (Peace is possible in East Timor) counted 271 killed, 278 wounded, 103 hospitalized and 270 ‘disappeared’ (ETAN 2001). The event was filmed and photographed by Western journalists, two of whom were beaten by Indonesian police during the fracas. 5. For a discussion on Indonesian contemporary art see Turner (2005b). 6. In a speech (13 May 2005) to open the Arafura Craft Exchange at the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, Dadang Christanto said that some of his artist friends from Indonesia – including F. X. Harsono in Perth, Western Australia, in the early 1990s and Heri Dono in 1996 in Townsville, Queensland – had suffered from those who identified all Indonesians with human rights abuses associated with the Suharto Government. These include human rights abuses in East Timor, West Papua and Aceh, provinces with strong independence movements as well as issues related to internal control of dissent. 7. Interview on 11 October 2005 by Hendro Wiyanto with curator Jim Supangkat on the CP Biennale held from 6 September to 5 October 2005 (Supangkat 2005b), http://www.universes-in-universe.de/islam/eng/2005/032/index.html. According to this, the installation Pinkswing Par (2005) by artists Agus Suwage and Davy Linggar drew protests from a group calling itself the Front Pembela Islam or ‘Front of the Defenders of Islam’ (FPI). Five hundred protesters demanded the work be removed because it was pornographic and disrespectful to Islam. It portrayed celebrities, including the film star Anjasmara, nude but genitalia were covered by white circles. As a result Supangkat made the

Wounds in Our Heart 97 decision to terminate the CP Biennale and hold no further exhibitions. This provides an interesting contrast to the controversy surrounding Supangkat’s own work Ken Dedes for the ‘new art movement’ in 1975, in which the head of a famous classical sculpture was placed on a pillar that had the outline of a female wearing jeans with the front zip underdone and showing pubic hair drawn on it. For an account of this earlier controversy see Wright (1994, pp. 211–212).

References Algazi, Gadi (2003) ‘Un mur pour enfermer les Palestiniens’, Le Monde Diplomatique 592, Juillet, p. 10. Anderson, Benedict R. and Ruth McVey (1978) ‘What Happened in Indonesia?’, The New York Review of Books 25, no. 9 (1 June), http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/8144 (accessed 14 December 2005). Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (1999) Beyond the Future, Producer and director Jack King. Brisbane: ABC. Video recording. Charles Darwin University Newsroom (2003) 28 April, http://www.cdu.edu.au/ newsroom/stories/2003/april/count/ (accessed 5 June 2005). Christanto, Dadang (2002) Kengerian tak Terucapkan/The Unspeakable Horror. Darwin: N.p., p. 29. Clark, Christine (2003) ‘Dadang Christanto: Keeper of Memories’, in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, curated by Caroline Turner, Nancy Sever and Christine Clark, Drill Hall Gallery and Canberra School of Art. Canberra: Humanities Research Centre and Drill Hall Gallery, The Australian National University. http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/research/ahr.php (accessed 25 June 2005). Cohen, Matthew Isaac (1999) Timely Art: An Interview with Rendra, 22 March 1999, http://www.iias.nl/iiasn/19/regions/se1.html (accessed 15 December 2004). Cribb, Robert, ed. (1990) The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, No. 21. Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Eccles, Jeremy (2000) ‘Not for Thin Skins’, Asiaweek 26, no. 5 (11 February), http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/magazine/2000/0211/as.triennial.html (accessed 26 June 2005). ETAN (2001) ‘The Santa Cruz Massacre November 12, 1991’, http://www.etan. org/timor/SntaCRUZ.htm (accessed 26 June 2005). Gray, Allison (2003) ‘Dadang Christanto: A Calling to Account’, RealTime 56 (August/September), http://www.realtimearts.net/rt56/gray.html (accessed 5 February 2006). Greenblatt, Stephen (1999) ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 42–56. Heryanto, Ariel (2006) State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Kusno, Abidin (2003) ‘Remembering the May Riots: Architecture, Violence, and the Making of “Chinese Cultures” in Post-1998 Jakarta’, Public Culture 15, no. 1, pp. 149–177.

98 Self-recognition and Self-discovery Munroe, Alexandra (1997) ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Asia Society – art exhibit’, Art Forum April 1997, http://www.24hourscholar.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/ is_n8_v35/ai_19416264 (accessed 7 December 2005). People’s Daily Online (2000) ‘Indonesia’s Human Rights Body Welcomes May Riots Probe’, 26 July, http://english.people.com.cn (accessed 20 March 2006). Reid, Anthony (1998) ‘Merdeka: The Concept of Freedom in Indonesia’, in Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia, eds David Kelly and Anthony Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 141–160. Robinson, Kathryn (2000) ‘Indonesian Women from Orde Baru to Reformasi’, in Women in Asia: Tradition, Modernity and Globalisation, eds Louise Edwards and Mina Roces. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 141–165. Sidharta, Amir (2003) Press Release, La Biennale di Venezia – 50th International Art Exhibition, http://www.artecommunications.com/upload/PRESS%20RELEASE% 20Indonesia%20SHORT.pdf (accessed 6 July 2004). Sinaga, Dolorosa (1996) ‘The Role of the Contemporary Artist in Indonesia’, in Present Encounters; Papers from the Conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial, eds Caroline Turner and Rhana Devenport. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, pp. 59–61. Supangkat, Jim (1993) ‘A Brief History of Indonesian Modern Art’, in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, pp. 47–57. —— (2005a) ‘Art and Politics in Indonesia’, in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner. Canberra: Pandanus Books, pp. 218–227. —— (2005b) ‘Tolerating the Intolerant’. Interview by Hendro Wiyanto, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World 32, November 2005, http://www.universes-in-universe.de/islam/eng/2005/032/index.html (accessed 26 June 2005). Suryawan, I. Ngurah (2005) ‘The Politics of Representing Bitterness: Not to Get Killed Twice’, in Di Ujung Kelopak Daunnya Tetap ada Airmata: On the Edge of the Petal There are Still Tears. Yogyakarta: Buku Baik, pp.145–177. Turner, Caroline (2005a) ‘Art and Social Change’ in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner. Canberra: Pandanus Books, pp. 1–13. —— (2005b) ‘Indonesia: Art, Freedom, Human Rights and Engagement with the West’, in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner. Canberra: Pandanus Books, pp. 196–217. Turner, Caroline and Christine Clark (1999) ‘Dadang Christanto’, in Beyond the Future: Catalogue of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, exhibition catalogue, scholarly editors Caroline Turner, Rhana Devenport and Jen Webb. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, pp. 200–201. Turner, Caroline and Nancy Sever (2003) Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights. Canberra: Humanities Research Centre and Drill Hall Gallery, The Australian National University. Vignol, Mireille (1999) ‘APT3 Asia-Pacific Triennial, MAAP Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific [Day 5]’, Headspace 16, http://www.abc.net.au/arts/headspace/postcards/ vignol/vig_day5.htm (accessed 18 May 2005). Wicaksono, Adi (1999) ‘Moelyono’, in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue, scholarly editors Caroline Turner, Rhana Devenport and Jen Webb. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery.

Wounds in Our Heart 99 Wiyanto, Hendro (2002) ‘The Meaning of Memory’, in Kengerian tak Terucapkan/ The Unspeakable Horror, ed. Dadang Christanto. Darwin: N.p., pp. 24–32. Wright, Astri (1994) Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2000) ‘Red and White Reconfigured: Indonesian Activist Art in Progress’, Art AsiaPacific 26, pp. 60–65.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II Religion, Cosmopolitanism and Subjectification

This page intentionally left blank

6 Billy Graham in the South Seas Richard Eves

Introduction In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, evangelical Christians in the United States expressed their eagerness to enter the ruined country to proselytize among the population. Foremost among them was the outspoken Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, and heir to his father’s evangelical dynasty. Previously, Franklin Graham had condemned Islam as a ‘wicked religion’ and had made other inflammatory statements which enraged Muslims in the United States and elsewhere. During the Gulf War, he had orchestrated campaigns to distribute Arabic New Testaments in Saudi Arabia through supporters and chaplains in the US military, evoking the ire of General Norman Schwartzkopf (Cajee 2003). Under the guise of distributing humanitarian aid through his organization, the Samaritan’s Purse, Graham aimed to use Iraq as a field in which to spread the Christian message: ‘I believe as we work, God will always give us opportunities to tell others about his Son … We are there to reach out to love them and to save them, and as a Christian, I do this in the name of Jesus Christ’ (Waldman 2003).1 Thirty years earlier, in the 1970s, under the auspices of Graham’s father, a ‘crusade’ was undertaken among the people of New Ireland and New Britain in Papua New Guinea. Far from being unfamiliar with Christianity, this audience was already informed, having been converted many years earlier by Methodist missionaries. Here, as in other parts of Papua New Guinea, missionaries had been remarkably successful in winning converts, so that today the vast majority of the population is Christian.2 Known to the people in New Ireland and New Britain as the ‘revival’, Billy Graham’s crusade placed great stress on the radical experience of 103

104 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

being ‘born again’, and this remains a feature of evangelism. Recently, the Lelet of central New Ireland, the subject of this chapter, have added beliefs and practices to their revivalism that are more quintessentially Pentecostal, including the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, which bestows certain gifts, such as speaking in tongues, healing and other powers (see Hollenweger 1972, pp. 291–296). Their beliefs have also been heavily inflected with the apocalypticism of premillennialist Christianity, with its emphasis on the imminent return of Christ and its intense search for signs of the end times. The global spread of Pentecostalism has been one of the most dramatic developments in Christianity during the twentieth century, and now, according to Martin, includes one in eight of the Christian ‘constituency’ of nearly two billion (2002, p. 1). Though it is difficult to calculate figures for Papua New Guinea, the spread there has been equally dramatic. There has been a proliferation of Pentecostal or closely allied evangelical and charismatic groups, and many of the established churches have also adopted Pentecostalism or similar beliefs.3 In contrast to the Papua New Guinea constitution’s support for tradition alongside Christianity, Pentecostals eschew local customs in favour of a form of Christian modernity. This differs markedly from what Lehmann has characterized as the cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church, which recognizes cultural ‘differences, legitimises rather than denigrates them and responds to them by creating mechanisms of accommodation or coexistence, for example by co-opting “other” practices, symbols and rituals’ (1998, p. 610). Catholicism relates to the cultural context by accretion and absorption, in recent years pursuing ‘acculturation’ (Martin 2002, p. 5) or ‘inculturation’ (Orta 1998). Pentecostal globalism, on the other hand, has no such proclivity, making no effort to create forms of syncretic Christianity in which local tradition sits comfortably with the imported religion (something I return to later). Scholars such as Mintz (1998) have pointed out that globalization is not a new phenomenon and this is especially so with religion.4 As Lehmann has commented, ‘[t]o speak of globalization in the religious field, is hardly to speak of something new: the spread of systems of religious belief, ritual and authority across ethnic, national and linguistic boundaries is as old as religion itself’, and so the history of Christianity has been marked by endless campaigns of penetration and conversion to fulfil its global ambitions (1998, p. 607). That the Methodists shared fully in this is demonstrated in John Wesley’s statement that the world is his parish.5

Billy Graham in the South Seas 105

There are, though, some qualitative differences between the globalization of old and more recent globalization.6 Globalization theory has developed in a search for tools to help understand and explain this stage in history when the speed and the scope of movement of commodities, capital, ideas and people are redefining how the world is conceived (Mintz 1998, p. 118). For anthropologists, at least, the interest in globalization is partly a response to the recognition that the remote local communities we study have not remained as isolated as we had imagined or perhaps hoped. Many critiques of such nostalgia have been made and it is unnecessary to reiterate them (see Alonso 1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Tsing 1994). Suffice to say, Levi-Strauss’s cold societies are now decidedly lukewarm, if not hot (1966, pp. 233–234). Anthropological studies have problematized the concept of globalization, recognizing its various manifestations, and recording its novel local effects.7 Generally, it has come to be seen not as the crushing of the local by the global, but as a highly contested and negotiated process. Global flows have always been subject to creative refashioning as they are incorporated into local worlds and, of course, they are often resisted or rejected. My interest is in the cultural dimensions of globalization, or what Appadurai (1996) in his recasting of globalization theory has termed global cultural flows. I see Pentecostalist Christianity as one form of global cultural flow and Lelet Pentecostalism as a ‘local manifestation of global culture’ (Casanova 2001). Though Lelet Pentecostalism does resemble Western Pentecostalism, it differs from that practised in, say, Sydney or Pensacola, because it is constructed within a very different way of conceptualizing the world and through different memories, histories and cultural traditions. What the Lelet extract from Pentecostalism and the meanings they give it reflect these differences. In short, like most importations, Christianity is particular to the local and, further, the moral, social and cultural problems it faces are different from those of the West (Eves 2000). My interest here is in the production of locality and how, in the context of the globalism of Pentecostalism, with its antipathy to cultural difference, that locality continues to be sustained (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Particularly, I want to examine the effect that this stress on rupture is having upon the Lelet’s conceptions of self, and whether their criteria for establishing a common identity are changing. Given the increasing prevalence of these forms of Christianity throughout the world, the ethnographic case examined here has relevance for general understanding of the processes of globalization, the local

106 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

instantiations of modernity and how locality is produced in the context of the global.

Situating the Lelet The Lelet plateau in central New Ireland was until quite recently one of those paradigmatic sites of anthropological investigation – one of those isolated places Tsing denotes as: ‘the rural, the Third World, the tribal, the traditional, the out-of-the-way’ (Tsing 1994, p. 282). The Lelet are approximately 1000 people, and are rural (largely subsistence agriculture supplemented by cash cropping of vegetables), relatively isolated (living in a mountainous area in the interior of an island) and relatively poor (no piped water, no mains electricity). Their lives are quite similar to the 85 per cent of the Papua New Guinea population who live in rural communities and whose everyday life is dominated by the rhythms of subsistence agriculture, cash cropping and regular church attendance. Along with colonization and conversion to Christianity, there has been a marked increase in the spatial and ideational horizons of the Lelet. Compared to today, the Lelet world of the past was certainly circumscribed, though by no means as limited as the world of the Gnau described by Lewis (1995). For the Gnau, the geographical limits prior to the Europeans’ arrival comprised a rough circle with a radius of about 10 miles (15 kilometres) (1995, pp. 166–167). Their world was bush, garden and forest, and the Gnau did not know of the coast or the huge Sepik River that dominates their province. In contrast, from the heights of a plateau on top of a mountain range on the narrow island, the Lelet world afforded a view of the sea, dotted with large islands, including the Tabar Islands. Their travels and migrations incorporated most of the central part of New Ireland which comprises the Mandak language group (a radius of about 60 kilometres), and they also imported things from elsewhere in New Ireland, including foods, rituals and magic. Today, however, their spatial horizon has been extended into previously unknown worlds, encompassing not only the whole of New Ireland and other parts of Papua New Guinea but overseas as well. Probably more importantly, expansion has occurred in the domain of ideas. These include the obvious intrusion of ‘Western’ practices and beliefs, such as capitalism, centralized government, Christianity and bio-medicine, and also new forms of knowledge from within Papua New Guinea itself, such as forms of magic and sorcery. In many ways, theirs is now a globally interconnected world.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 107

According to my informants, the people who now identify themselves as the Lelet did not identify themselves as such prior to contact, the name having been conferred by the German colonial government. During the colonial period, the peoples who inhabited the interior mountains of New Ireland were ordered to relocate to the coast, for ease of administration. For similar reasons, people living in dispersed hamlets were ordered to relocate to larger centralized villages, where they were to build houses in neat rows. Unlike many others who lived in the mountains, the Lelet never really abandoned the interior, though they established some settlements at the coast. These movements had the effect of creating an enclave in the mountains, where previously there had been numerous scattered hamlets. Thus, the constitution of identity on the basis of fixed geographical location has been the result of colonialism. As Ranger has noted, ‘one has to accept that colonialism not only imagined localised religions and communities but also created them’ (1993, p. 72, his emphasis). A similar point has been made by Kelly who suggests, in relation to Fiji, that colonial officials also took steps to establish and maintain categories of difference: ‘the maintenance of boundaries between categories of people asserted to be fundamentally different was a continuing constitutive modality of colonial social practice’ (Kelly 1995, p. 65).8 Among the Lelet, demographic shifts and movements were part of the lived world prior to contact. Rather than being based merely on a geographical locale, identity was founded more on the narratives of origins and dispersals, shared kinship and how particular collectivities such as clans and lineages came to occupy certain places. Tutelary beings were (and still are) particularly important to notions of shared identity and attachment to particular places, but again these were never completely fixed since these beings could move. Even the clans and lineages that formed the local basis of identity were subject to reorganization, as groups took flight and dispersed during times of warfare. Conceptualizing selfhood and body In order to chart the effects that Pentecostalism is having on Lelet conceptions of selfhood, a description of their previous conceptualizations of body and personhood are necessary, since these are integral to the realization of their agency in the world. The Lelet divide the live human being into two constituent parts, a body and an animating force, that together define the person (cf. Biersack 1990, p. 65). As in other parts of Melanesia, there is no generic term for the body as such, and when people refer to the body they speak of the skin (labantuxu) (Mandak)9

108 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

(cf. Bercovitch 1989; M. Strathern 1979, p. 249). The nature of the animating force (loroang (M)) cannot be considered entirely nonmaterial, because it is often seen after death, and embodies properties such as weight. During life, however, this animating force is invisible. While usually contained within the spaces of the living body, the animating force is not irrevocably joined to it, but can leave it and travel separately, though only for short periods. This occurs in sleep, fainting or trance states and if prolonged, death results. If the animating force leaves the body in a waking state, through fright or by contact with a non-human being, then the person loses his or her perceptual faculties and becomes dumbfounded. In this state the person’s body wanders around aimlessly, as a mere shell, until the animating force returns or the body dies because of its absence. The animating force gives the body its capacity to experience, to perceive and to communicate10 – that is, together they make the person. Thus, the Lelet conceive of the person in a way that goes beyond the Cartesian mind/body dualism that privileges the inner self, or consciousness, which is what ‘really’ experiences, perceives and communicates, while the body is a mere (though necessary) container. The interdependence of body and animating force is further illustrated by sorcery beliefs and practices that can destroy humans either by utilizing personal leavings from the body or by attacking the animating force, for to destroy one is to destroy both. Upon death, the body decomposes and the animating force separates permanently from the person. It now exists outside the realm of the everyday world of people, but can be drawn closer to it and participate in it indirectly through magical invocation. However, its relationship to humans is only occasional and does not entail the constant dialogical interactions of a social and linguistic kind which characterize and define humanness. The interconnectedness of the body and the animating force indicates the particularity of Lelet notions of the person and the embodied nature of that personhood. The person is very much a body-subject whose consciousness of self as acting subject in the world is integrally connected to the corporeal component of existence. However, without the loroang (M) the Lelet person cannot exist as an agent in the world and cannot articulate the subject pronouns which enable it to engage in intersubjective communication and dialogue with others. It is the person as a bodysubject who occupies the deitic ‘I’ which sets it apart from the ‘you’ or other, and this is dependent on the body having a requisite animating force.11 Thus the body becomes the medium through which people

Billy Graham in the South Seas 109

construct their personhood and identity in the world and the means by which people discern the otherness of others. Although the Lelet see a human person as constituted by a body and an animating force, they also stress that the person is a plural and relational composite of others, in contradistinction to Western ideas of the solitary individual. For them, while the person is individuated in terms of the name borne and the body occupied, he or she is conceived of as the product of social relationships. ‘As a microcosm of social relationships’, Marilyn Strathern has argued, ‘a Melanesian person is a composite, multiple entity, constituted by the acts of others’ (1992, p. 178). This is true for the Lelet, where it is continually stressed that people are the sum total of the contributions of those others who have contributed things such as food, labour or knowledge to their upbringing, and are indebted to them as a result. In the process of labouring and producing food used to nurture and feed others, people are detaching and giving up parts of themselves for the sake of others (cf. M. Strathern 1984, 1987a, b, 1988, p. 15). Following the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1990), I see Lelet concepts of selfhood in dialogic terms.12 Rather than a unitary and self-constituting subject who exists solely in and for itself, the subject is thoroughly social. It is thus a relational theory in which no one self exists separate from others. Understanding comes not from an individual’s observation and knowledge construction but through human interactions (Bandlamudi 1994, p. 462). Meaning is thus not located within the individual but in the intersubjective or social realm. Sociality and morality of giving The Lelet define themselves by their ability to share and give to others. People are judged on their willingness to engage in sociality, and the moral status of a person depends on this. Different levels of sociality exist, ranging from the everyday informal sharing of food (and other comestibles such as areca nut) to the more formal and large-scale public exchanges that accompany mortuary feasts. Such acts of sociality are ‘outward, self-extending acts’, which allow comestibles to circulate beyond the limited spatiotemporal confines of one person’s body (Munn 1986, p. 13). Through acts of hospitality, people escape ‘the immorality and self-closure of nurturing only one’s self’ (Lattas 1990, p. 87). Through such expansive acts, products that must be consumed before they perish, such as cooked food, are transformed and given value that reaches the temporal limits normally imposed by that perishability.

110 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

The good person is one who engages in these forms of sociality and there is a strong public ethos to that effect, although out of the view of others private practice does not necessarily mirror public moral discourse. The morality of sharing is bound up with whether others have knowledge of the items or not, something I return to below. If someone has let it be known that they have some food and they do not share it, with, say, a visitor, he or she will probably be subject to scornful gossip. Despite this disjuncture between the seen and the unseen, there is, nonetheless, a strong ethos of sharing. During my fieldwork, it was constantly stressed to me that a good person is one who calls out to the passer-by and invites them into their house to eat (cf. Fajans 1985, p. 379, see also 1983). The archetypal greedy person is labelled a lantupe (M), a man or woman who lives alone in the bush. The greedy person is like the bush dweller who partakes of food solitarily without recourse to the acts of sociality that constitute the (moral) person. This image has allusions to the non-human bush being, the tambaran (Tok Pisin)13 or lagas (M), a powerful, monstrous being, anthropomorphic but antithetical to humans.14 These beings are beyond the realms of sociality that are integral to the definition of the human person. The imagery of the lantupe is particularly important to ideas of personal identity and of communal identity. Such imagery is not only central to Lelet notions of the good person, but indeed to what it is to be human.15 Instead of engaging in the sociality of the generous person, the selfish person, as Munn suggests, is the paradigm of the incorporating individual who holds back food for their own consumption (1986, p. 49). I am also reminded here of A. Strathern’s discussion of Melpa women who wanted to consume the pork that men preferred to give away (1982, p. 115). In this interpretation, women become the consumers of the pork that men wish to use to transact with others; while men want to create society through acts of sociality and exchange, circulating food beyond the spatiotemporal confines of the person, women wish to negate this by doing the opposite. Incorporation is ultimately an extreme act of withholding in which ‘food that is caught inside the body, in turn, epitomises what is not only consumed, but also cannot be released’ (Munn 1986, p. 49). In contrast to acts of giving and exchanging that initiate and sustain social relationships, selfish ungenerous persons incorporate food into their own bodies to the exclusion of others. To engage intersubjectively in the sociality of sharing and exchanging of food with others is to create one’s humanity.16 To resile from those acts is to forsake one’s humanness. Through exchange, whether through

Billy Graham in the South Seas 111

everyday acts of sociality or the more formal presentations that characterize mortuary feasts, one immerses oneself in social relationships and such exchanges create webs of indebtedness and obligation. To suggest that selfhood among the Lelet is dialogical or relational is not, however, to suggest that it is not individuated in some circumstances.17 Certainly it is, but not quite as the detached, self-sufficient and autonomous individual, bounded and unique, that we take for granted (Morris 1994, p. 16). Like the Gahuku-Gama described by Read (1955), or the Rawa described by Dalton (2002, p. 129), the Lelet place heavy emphasis on self-assertion and rivalry, particularly among men, and they desire to make a name for themselves or to lift up their names (i xip aurut lasen teren (M) – he/she carries his/her name upwards), as it is referred to. Thus, people are aware of themselves as individuals (although even here, lifting up one’s name also lifts up the name of one’s clan). The social nature of selfhood is evident in relation to the acts of others. People are loath to speculate on the reasons or motivations for another’s actions.18 Numerous times when asking informants as to why someone did something, I was greeted with the same response – ‘Husat i save long en’ (TP) or ‘who knows what the other person had in mind’. Concern for mental intentions is marginal to Lelet ideas of what is significant; it reflects, rather, the Western concern for the individual as the origin of meaning where the truth is to be found in the individual.19 This is not so much the philosophical question of solipsism – how one knows the other, but more particularly a cultural understanding that actions take their significance in the social arena. The paramount concern is not the motivation for an action but, rather, the results and their location in an intersubjective milieu (Eves 2000, p. 463, 1998). This kind of logic also permeates Lelet ethics, which are decidedly social, and I was often surprised by the way some of my close male informants unashamedly revealed to me some of their quite serious wrongdoings. Like the Gahuku-Gama described by Read, the Lelet are strangers to contrition in the Christian sense (1955, p. 272). Rather than being thrown into moral turmoil over a particular wrong, the perpetrator is most concerned about whether the wrongdoing will be brought to public attention and the shame this would bring. This is not to suggest an absence of an ethical framework governing behaviour or that the Lelet are devoid of ‘moral sensibility’ (Read 1955, p. 282). This would be far from the truth. An ethos of respect, lokngao (M), permeates how a person should relate to others. There are also many normative rules, which regulate a person’s conduct mainly in relation to certain categories of kin. As I mentioned earlier, people are also judged by their capacity to

112 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

give, with the stingy person being singled out for deprecation. There are also injunctions against adultery, stealing and killing, though some of these bear the imprint of a long colonial history. That people do not always abide by these is not to suggest some notion of inauthenticity or insincerity, where there is a disjuncture between one’s beliefs and actions, rather this indicates that moral frameworks governing behaviour remain social. A similar situation is described by Fajans among the Baining of East New Britain (1985). She comments that among the Baining the individual as an entity with interiorized conscience, feelings, intentions and aspirations is underemphasized and that concepts referring to personal feelings, affective relationships and expressive behaviour are embedded in accounts of general cultural patterns and social events (Fajan 1985, pp. 367, 370; see also Morris 1994, p. 168).

Born again – Pentecostal conversion Having sketched the most significant aspects of the ethnographic background, I shall turn to the localization of Christianity. As I said earlier, the evangelism of the Billy Graham crusade in the 1970s has now been transformed into a form of Pentecostalism. Undoubtedly, the reception of Billy Graham’s message and the subsequent emergence of Pentecostalism were facilitated by the Methodism the Lelet had already adopted, with its concentration on the ‘spirit,’ on personal morality and the conversion experience. Much as elsewhere, Lelet Pentecostals view the world in dualistic terms, as a contest between God and Satan, good and evil, Christian and unbeliever. This Pentecostalism is a form of fundamentalist Christianity, in that, in addition to its dualism, it places strong emphasis on Biblical inerrancy, or what Lawrence has referred to as ‘scriptural absolutism’.20 One consequence of this is a focus on the need for a radical break with one’s past ‘sinful’ life, an essential component of the conversion process. For many years, particularly during the colonial period, Christianity and many Lelet cultural practices coexisted, much like the Catholic cosmopolitanism mentioned earlier. While conversion at that time required converts to abandon the use of sorcery, the consumption of alcohol and illicit sexual relations, the Methodists accepted much indigenous culture, including many forms of magic, so long as they were not considered destructive. Dundon reports similarly that the Gogodala also retain aspects of their ancestral past in their Christian practices, though this is increasingly condemned today, much as it is among the Lelet (see Chapter 7). Now, Pentecostals demand that all

Billy Graham in the South Seas 113

magic be abandoned and they are also increasingly deprecating other forms of cultural practice. Mortuary feasts, which are emblematic of ‘tradition’ and accordingly labelled ‘kastam’ (TP), are referred to as ‘wok lus’ (TP), a wasted effort or a waste of time. For example, when I was last in the field during 2000, the preacher at a church workshop saw attending mortuary feasts, along with several other things such as young men drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, arrogance and dancing, as a sign of the spreading apostasy or sinful times preceding Christ’s imminent return. Thus, as reported elsewhere, Lelet Pentecostals emphasize a break from local tradition (Meyer 1998, p. 183). The radical change in lifestyle demanded of them is idiomatically expressed as ‘changing one’s life’ (senisim laip (TP)) or ‘turning one’s stomach’ (tanim bel (TP)), and is equivalent to the common fundamentalist Christian expression of being ‘born again’, a term also occasionally used. Sometimes this is expressed as taking on a ‘new life’ (nupela laip (TP)) and leaving behind the ‘old life’ (olpela bel (TP)). Changing their life means that converts must characterize their previous life as evil, and renounce it, before making a commitment to a new life, fully dedicated to Christ (see Threlfall 1975, p. 226; also Cucchiari 1988, p. 422; Scott 1994, p. 234). If the convert is a magician, this may involve the dramatic destruction of his magical paraphernalia, which is either burnt or buried in the church grounds. It is only when one has undergone this radical change and become morally pure that one can be possessed by the Holy Spirit, a process that may bring the conferment of certain gifts, some of which I mentioned earlier.21 Reforming selfhood Pentecostal conversion requires that Christians must take control of their lives and live righteously or follow stretpela pasin as it is called in Tok Pisin. Wresting control of one’s life requires a form of selfscrutiny and a recognition that forms of behaviour considered wrong by Pentecostals must be banished from one’s moral personhood. Christianity, as Rose has noted, brings with it new modes for evaluating the self, diagnosing its ills, and calibrating its failings (1997, p. 244). To illustrate this I will briefly turn to the conversion narrative of a man, Joseph, who I had first met during my doctoral fieldwork in 1990–91. Like many of the young men I was familiar with at this time, Joseph was not faithful to his wife and was occasionally given to spectacular bouts of drunkenness, including one that involved disrupting a church service on Christmas Eve. When I interviewed him in 1997, he had changed his

114 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

life a few years earlier in response to the prolonged illness of a child, and was now the village pastor. Here is his story: When I was 18 I finished my grade six and then continued at high school for another four years. Following this, I returned to the Lelet, where I wanted to run a farm. I wanted to live with my parents. I wasn’t a very good son and wasn’t very good in the family. I was the last-born and there was a great deal of the lifestyle of the teenager in my life. My life wasn’t very good at all. When back at the Lelet I tried my best to find some work, but I didn’t obtain any. In 1993 the church marked me as a likely candidate to become a missionary and then a pastor. At this time I hadn’t changed my life. I was already married and had my first-born, who was disabled. He was not very healthy when his mother gave birth to him and he nearly died. For five years there were repeated trips to hospital. This was enough to convince me that I should examine my life. Following this, the church appointed me, and I started work in the ministry, becoming a missionary in 1993. During the first year of my work in the church there were still [bad] things in my life and I had not yet fully given my life to God. There were all kinds of things in my life – such as being angry with my wife, thinking ill of her, lying, chewing betel nut, and smoking. All these things brought my life down and I was very ashamed that these things still characterized my life. He went on to say that when he changed his life, his son, who was five years old and had not previously crawled or talked, started to walk and talk. Like conversion narratives more generally, this account does not constitute a full life story, but is a selection of events and descriptions of a lifestyle that highlights the narrator’s fallen state and his redemption, as well as the healing power of the Holy Spirit. His conversion narrative, for example, does not mention that he had previously attributed his failure to pursue further studies to having been sorcerized while at school. Joseph also speaks rather euphemistically of his sexual encounters, as is common more generally with discussions of sexuality. Thus, though he does not explicitly state it in the initial part of the conversion narrative, he attributed his son’s illness to the sinful life he was leading. It was only when I questioned him that he stated that it was his treatment of his wife, saying somewhat cryptically, ‘I didn’t stay too much with my wife’, meaning that he was committing adultery. The act of ‘tanim bel’ is a process of severance in which, through a process of self-fashioning, people try to reposition themselves in relation

Billy Graham in the South Seas 115

to their past. This is not what van Dijk has called cultural de-mnemonization, a form of cultural forgetting (1998). Rather, it is a selective process of severance, in which those practices deemed satanic are abandoned. Of course, there can never be a total turning away from the past nor can that past be totally erased. Though customs may be abandoned, the past endures in other ways, for it is realized not only in rituals or magic, but through memory, which is embodied, through habit, through reflection, through narratives, attachment to place, dreams and through interactions with the spirit world, which remains an enduring feature of Lelet life. This bears some similarity to the Gogodala’s characterization of their land as a form of Christian country, emplaced in ancestral places (see Chapter 7). Though the Lelet do not articulate this so self-consciously, their spirit beings and ancestral places comprise an important, if taken-forgranted, aspect of their world. The past, in any case, has to be continually evoked, not only as a means of encouraging people to become ‘born again’, but also as a reminder for those who have changed their life not to relapse. People must remember constantly what links them with their past in order to overcome its hold on them (Meyer 1998, pp. 201–202). As Meyer has suggested, the notion of rupture inherent in the separation from one’s traditions enables ‘Pentecostals to draw a rift between “us” and “them,” “now” and “then,” “modern” and “traditional” and, of course, “God” and the “Devil”’ (1998, p. 183). The rejection of the past is not only an act of severance, but, more importantly, makes space for the creation of a new ‘born again’ self, a process of self-fashioning in which the convert seeks to cultivate a new Christian way of being.

Cultivating the new Christian style Particularly germane to my analysis here is James Ferguson’s alternative to the cultural dualism (e.g. primitive/civilized, traditional/modern, precapitalist/capitalist) that has dominated approaches to urban culture in Africa (1999, p. 86).22 His alternative is the concept of ‘cultural style’ which includes all those modes of action through which people place themselves, and are placed, in social categories (1999, p. 93). Cultural style, thus, refers to those practices that signify differences between social categories. These, he notes, do not refer to total modes of behaviour but rather poles of social signification, which cross-cut other such poles and are cross-cut by them. He gives the example of masculinity and femininity as stylistically opposed to poles of signification in contemporary American society, but stresses that this does not imply a

116 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

unitary ‘masculine’ mode of behaviour (1999, p. 95). Further, Ferguson suggests that other stylistic axes may cross-cut these categories, so that masculinity and femininity may take different forms, depending on sexual orientation. Cultural style, thus, unites across differences, so that those who enact a particular form of style may, nevertheless, have divergent motives, values or views of the world (1999, p. 97). Pentecostal conversion is not simply a process whereby a person makes a conscious decision to adopt a particular religious worldview, or to change from one religion to another, as the word ‘conversion’ implies. It is this, but also goes much further. Being ‘born again’ entails embracing a particular style, which includes adopting a specific demeanour and particular modes of personal hygiene and dress. This style requires a careful process of self-fashioning or self-cultivation, through acts of severance from the past style and narrative reconstructions. Thus, like Ferguson, I see style as needing to be actively and purposefully cultivated, rather than being received or adopted. It is not simply a matter of knowing how to act, but the new style must become internalized as a form of embodied practice, naturalized and enacted without reflection – that is, it must become habit. The embodiment of style entails a kind of knowing that is inseparable from doing (Ferguson 1999, p. 98). Despite the Pentecostal emphasis on radical rupture, this form of Christian style is unlikely to be achieved abruptly. While people may readily enough adopt the outward markers of style, such as donning the appropriate clothes and giving up betel nut and smoking, the self-fashioning needed to develop the new style, to make it ‘second nature’, requires time. Certain forms of demeanour, such as a non-confrontational attitude or the control of desires, which are seen as a key to the Christian style, and as signs that the convert has embodied the Holy Spirit, cannot be achieved overnight. It also takes time to erase old habits that are now frowned upon. Similarly, it is not so easy to move from a sense of self that is thoroughly social in nature, as I have described, to an interiorized and individualized sense of self, in which they are ashamed of their failings and so seek to overcome them. Indeed, considering the great degree of backsliding that occurs, it appears highly unlikely that this has in fact occurred. In his pioneering work Mauss made the point that the self is not innate or primordial but historically developed (1985; see also Burke 1997; Smith 1997).23 Selfhood is not a finished project, rather it is a work in progress – as Rose has remarked, it is ‘variable, historical, situational – not an originary “being” but a mobile becoming’ (1997, p. 234; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). However, while it is a work in progress, it should also not be seen as following a predetermined path of development or the narrative of linear progress.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 117

Some constraints impinge on the process of self-fashioning for the Lelet, particularly the natural and social world in which they live. Their remote rural context requires that they labour hard at subsistence agriculture and cash cropping for their survival and, having no piped water or electricity, they must carry water and collect firewood. Forests have to be cleared and gardens planted, arduous work in the tropical climate. In these circumstances, the forms of dress iconic of the Christian style can be worn, and afforded, only for church. The social world, and especially the kinship and affinal relationships in which they are enmeshed, also conflicts with church requirements. There are longstanding obligations to kin, whether in everyday contexts or for special occasions such as funerals, but, more discomforting, these obligations also involve supporting one’s kin in conflicts or customary rituals, both of which the Pentecostals represent as satanic. Further, just as there are social pressures to become a ‘born-again’ Christian, there are other social temptations which tend to undermine the adoption of the new Christian style: the betel nut or beer proffered, the ‘parti’ invitation, the seductive note passed or sign given. Contesting Christian identity The dominance of Pentecostalism has brought much debate among the Lelet about the forms of behaviour required for one to be a genuine Christian. Although the changing of one’s life may decide the right to claim this designation, questions are always arising whether a certain behaviour is legitimate or not. Thus, while the Pentecostals seek to apply a morally unambiguous dualism, in reality the boundary line is never so clear and remains subject to contest. Pentecostals may hold that one is either a committed Christian subject to the power of the Holy Spirit, or a non-Christian subject to the power of Satan, but in reality constant struggle is needed by the former to maintain a righteous Christian identity. The language of these conflicts is markedly different from Dundon’s Gogodala example, where the revival of tradition is debated, and there is a strong discourse on custom versus Christianity (Chapter 7). For the Lelet this kind of debate is largely absent and argument focuses on individual lifestyle, and whether a person upholds the new Christian identity. Others will scrutinize the behaviour of a convert to see whether the stated conviction is truly being realized in practice (see also Maynard 1993, p. 247). Often the suspicion is whether they are worshipping false Gods, such as money, or whether they have really given up their old evil ways. Failing to contribute properly to the Church calls into question one’s commitment as a born-again Christian. People will gossip (‘toktok plenti’ (TP),

118 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

lavapase solo (M)) about someone who markets a great deal of produce but is not seen to contribute either money or time to church activities, questioning that person’s commitment and saying that he or she knows about Christianity, but others do not see the ‘fruit’ – that is, the knowledge is not reflected in the lifestyle. Similarly, when preparations for market means people miss a church workshop, or their late return from the Saturday market means they miss the Sunday service, they are subject to criticism. Such people are increasingly being accused of making a god of money, which, as one preacher remarked in his sermon, is a ‘false god, which will not save you’ (Moni em i God giaman, i no inap savim yu (TP)). Properly, people should put Christianity first in their thinking, not money making (Eves 2003). There is also much gossip about the sexual indiscretions of those purporting to be ‘born again’, sometimes revealed through dreams and visions. The Lelet minister, who is renowned for his prophetic visions, had one in which a member of the church youth group or ‘ministri’ slapped him, meaning he was involved in a problem. Later, it emerged that this member had been sleeping with one of the minister’s daughters. The informant who related this to me also mentioned the actions of another church leader who despite his position, continues his old lifestyle, particularly when he is away from the Lelet. Thus, while he may have embraced the new ‘born again’ style, his old self continues to intrude into his life. In such circumstances, people say that a person has only given half their life to God and they have half returned to their old life. As is to be expected with a form of fundamentalism, there are no half measures, one must give oneself totally to the new life. These examples suggest that while many have undergone the process of being ‘born again’ (and some have done so several times), there has not yet been that transformation in self that means that the kinds of customary situational ethics I mentioned earlier have been replaced by Christian ethics in which behaviour is regulated through a direct relationship with God. This sort of dilemma was alluded to in a discussion I had with two members of the local church youth group, including the informant cited above. After hearing that the youth group chairman continued to get drunk even though he was in a position of authority, I asked why he had not been removed from his position, which is usually what happens in such circumstances. Both commented that each person should judge their own actions, and that had he been disciplined he would have asked the discomforting question, ‘Are you all righteous?’

Billy Graham in the South Seas 119

Epilogue – here comes the rain again The arrival of Billy Graham in the South Seas, and the subsequent emergence of Pentecostalism, is part of a long history for the Lelet. From colonial times to the present, forms of evangelism aiming to heighten spiritual awareness have been a feature of Christianity in New Ireland. From the late 1930s intensive campaigns, often held over Easter and sometimes referred to as ‘Crusades’, were instituted by Methodist missionaries and became a regular feature of the Christian calendar. This suggests that these campaigns have been a way of renewing Christian belief and that the acceptance of Christianity has been an alternation between tradition and Christianity. Thus, rather than transition from tradition to Christianity being an irrevocable either/or process, tension between the globalizing trajectory of Christianity and the localizing trajectory of tradition has persisted. If we take Pentecostal Christianity to be one form of global cultural flow, as I have suggested, it is a flow that is, nevertheless, not continuous. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor is to see it as an ebb and flow, in which some things take hold, while others do not. This is not to suggest that there have not been profound changes, which would be patently false; rather it is to suggest that while some proscribed features of Lelet life have been easily and readily discarded, others have persisted. As I have explained, the past endures in many ways, both imperceptible and perceptible. Moreover, many of the Lelet’s pre-existing ideas, beliefs and understandings remain congruent with Pentecostalism, especially ideas about the spirit world and sorcery. I conclude by giving an example of how cultural beliefs endure, apparently in the face of Pentecostalism. Weather magic, like other forms of magic, is frowned upon by Pentecostals, with the result that practitioners have either abandoned it or else practice it in secret. However, despite being forbidden and largely curtailed, there remains an almost universal belief in its efficacy, a belief that extends even to the church hierarchy. The decline in use of magic but persistence in belief is best illustrated through an example that occurred when I was in the field in 1991. When cyclonic winds destroyed a new classroom at the community school, accusations were immediately and widely directed at the local weather magician, who was believed responsible. He had been hosting a mortuary feast for his deceased wife at the time and had been seen uttering spells late in the day in an attempt to prevent rain from falling and spoiling the feast. To prevent rain, a weather magician

120 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

employs wind magic which aims to blow the clouds away and thus disperse the rain, and this magician’s overzealous manipulation of the wind was believed to have caused the cyclone. A further example occurred prior to a church opening in 1998, when church leaders discussed whether a weather magician should be hired to make sure rain did not spoil the celebration. Mainly due to the influence of the local minister, the precaution was decided against, though the fact that it was discussed suggests a widespread belief in its efficacy. Despite the decision, a number of people suggested to me that some of the church leaders went ahead and hired a number of weather magicians anyway, just to make sure the opening was not spoiled. Much as Dundon describes for the Gogodala, the distinction between the ancestral past and the Christian present is often blurred and ambiguous. It may be tempting to dismiss this persisting belief as simply inconsistent, illogical, disingenuous or at least equivocal on the part of the Lelet, but I suggest that the truth of the one belief does not cancel the truth of the other. As I have said, the two are not inharmonious. As my examples suggest, for many Lelet, although the use of magic is prohibited and seen as rivalling the church’s power, there is not mutual exclusivity between belief in Christianity and belief in magic (see also Tuzin 1997, p. 21). The latter is believed to be a powerful force for changing situations in which people find themselves, much as Christianity is also believed to be.

Notes 1. Having delivered the invocation at the inauguration of President George W. Bush, he is both a family friend and a political ally. Along with the Southern Baptist Convention, he and his supporters are probably the largest and the most loyal voting bloc in Bush’s re-election strategy (http://slate.com/id/ 2081432 and http://www.worldnetdaily.com/). 2. According to the 2000 census, the population of Papua New Guinea was 5,190,786. However, it is only possible to work out the religious affiliation of the 5,158,083 people living in ‘private dwellings’. Of these, 4,948,441 (95.93 per cent) were identified as Christian and 57,468 as other religions, though this included Church of Christ and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When the latter two groups are included, the total population of Christians in private dwellings was 4,989,750 (96.73 per cent). A total of 31,327 (0.607 per cent) indicated they had no religion and 1,04,275 (2.02 per cent) were unstated. 3. Thus the figures for Pentecostals in central New Ireland cited previously belie the fact that the United Church is Pentecostal.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 121 4. Accordingly, he warns about becoming too enthusiastic about the concept of transnationalism and its new lexicon, since huge flows of people and ideas also characterized the nineteenth century (1998, p. 119). He suggests that we need to ask more pertinent questions in order to specify what is new rather than taking it as given (1998, p. 128). We need, he says, to be respectful of history, particularly the history of exploration, conquest and the global division of labour (Mintz 1998, p. 131). 5. ‘I look upon all the world as my parish.’ John Wesley, Journal, 3 July 1759. 6. Thus while globalization is continuous with the world capitalist system, as Casanova comments, it frees it from its territorial-juridical embeddedness in state and national economies (2001, p. 423). 7. See Foster (1991); Friedman (1994 and 1997); Hannerz (1996); Kearney (1995); Meyer (1999); Meyer and Geschiere (1999) and Miller (1995). 8. Of course, this is not to suggest that there were no differences prior to colonialism, but merely to point to the historical constitution of particularly localities. 9. Mandak is hereafter referred to as M. 10. This life force, I would argue, differs from the concept of the soul, a term I avoid because it is synonymous with the Western and Christian idea of an interiorized moral conscience which regulates a person’s ethical orientation and actions in the world. 11. Like many other cultures, the Lelet have subject pronouns which indicate an individuated or egocentric personhood. The English ‘I’ is nenia or nia, while the second person pronoun ‘you’ is translated as nenu or nu. 12. I have drawn on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue, polyphony and heteroglossia to counter tendencies in anthropology which homogenize complex world views and portray them in monologic and singular terms, free from ambiguous, contradictory and subaltern voices. See the following for the utilization of Bakhtin in anthropological contexts: Bruner and Gorfain (1984); Crain (1994); Gottlieb (1992, pp. 13–14 and 1989); Hill (1985); Heath (1992); Limon (1989); and Trawick (1988). 13. Tok Pisin is hereafter referred to as TP. 14. In many stories the lagas is an archetypal negative Other, a cannibal being who devours unsuspecting inhabitants and whose insatiable appetite threatens communal viability. While predation by these beings appears not to constitute the grave threat it did in the past, people can still be made ill or be kidnapped by lagas should they wander in the forest unprepared. 15. See also Biersack (1990, p. 69), where the solitary person is considered less than human. See Modjeska (1982, pp. 90–1), Montague (1989, p. 27) and Thune (1980, p. 197) for discussion of the stingy and selfish person. The significance of food and sociality to the constitution of society is illustrated in the mythology of the Avatip (Harrison 1988). 16. Though Christianity gave a strong impetus to the indigenous sharing and exchange, such apparently traditional features are not modernities, as some have suggested (Piot 1999, p. 1). Rather, the emphasis on Christian sharing is a reinscription and an expansion of local sociality.

122 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification 17. Morris is correct when he suggests that there is no mutual exclusivity between the sociocentric conception of the person and an equal emphasis on the idiosyncratic self or on the individuality of the human subject (1994, p. 193). See also Comaroff and Comaroff for a discussion of personhood in Africa, in which they suggest that African societies (each in their own way) did have a place for ‘individuality, personal agency, property, privacy, biography, signature and authored action upon the world’ (2001, p. 276). 18. This is not unique to the Lelet, having been noted by many scholars working in PNG. See, for example, Fajans (1985, p. 367); Strathern (1987a, p. 23). 19. There is considerable debate about the historical development of the Western conception of the self. See, for example, the essays in Porter (1997), especially Burke (1997), Shaw (1997), Smith (1997) and Taylor (1989). 20. Both are considered to be defining characteristics of fundamentalism (Lawrence 1989, p. 5; see also Ammerman (1991) and Caplan (1987)). On the usefulness of the term, see Nagata (2001). 21. Baptism by the Holy Spirit, or ‘indwelling’ as it is sometimes called, is extremely important for Pentecostals. See, for example, Ackerman (1981, p. 93); Austin (1981, p. 235); Cucchiari (1988, p. 419 and 1990, p. 688); Garrison (1974, pp. 303–304); Gerlach (1974, p. 674); Saunders (1995, p. 326), Scott (1994, p. 234) and van Dijk (1995, p. 179). 22. Ferguson, however, is in danger of reinscribing the dualism with his ‘localist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ conceptions (1999, p. 86). The difficulty is that those pervasive dualisms are articulated by the ethnographic subjects themselves, as Ferguson notes when he asks: ‘how are we to square a well-founded suspicion of dualist models of society and culture with the ethnographic fact of a persistent sort of cultural bifurcation – one, moreover, that informants insisted on conceptualizing in terms of tradition and modernity, the old and the new, the rural and the urban?’ (1999, p. 93). 23. In discussing whether there is a distinctive Western sense of the self, Smith suggests we need to clarify the type of question we ask. As he writes: If we step back, we can ask what notion of the individual and of the self there was in this age, as we can ask this question of every age, rather than seek the origins or invention of individuality or the self, as if reference to ‘the individual’ or ‘the self’ denotes only one kind of thing. This does not imply acceptance of a trans-historical self. It merely suggests there are different notions of the individual and the self, with the implication that there can be no one origin, development or invention. (1997, p. 50)

References Ackerman, S. E. (1981) ‘The Language of Religious Innovation: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in a Malaysian Catholic Pentecostal Movement’, Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 3, pp. 90–100. Alonso, A. M. (1994) ‘The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 23, pp. 379–405.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 123 Ammerman, N. T. (1991) ‘North American Protestant Fundamentalism’, in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby. Chicago, Il: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–65. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Austin, D. (1981) ‘“Born Again … and Again and Again”: Communitas and Social Change among Jamaican Pentecostals’, Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 3, pp. 226–246. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. —— (1990) ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, M. M. Bakhtin, eds M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, trans. V. Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 4–256. Bandlamudi, L. (1994) ‘Dialogics of Understanding Self/Culture’, Ethos 22, no. 4, pp. 460–493. Bercovitch, E. (1989) ‘Mortal Insights: Victim and Witch in the Nalumin Imagination’, in The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, eds G. H. Herdt and M. Stephen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 122–159. Biersack, A. (1990) ‘Histories in the Making: Paiela and Historical Anthropology’, History and Anthropology 5, no. 1, pp. 63–85. Bruner, E. M. and P. Gorfain. (1984) ‘Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada’, in Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. E. M. Bruner. Washington, DC: The American Ethnological Society, pp. 56–79. Burke, P. (1997) ‘Representations of the Self from Petrach to Descartes’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 17–28. Cajee, M. (2003) ‘Franklin Graham: Spiritual Carpetbagger’, Counterpunch, April 11, http//www.counterpunch.org (accessed 1 April 2004). Caplan, L., ed. (1987) Studies in Religious Fundamentalism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Casanova, J. (2001) ‘Presidential Address: Religion, the New Millennium, and Globalization’, Sociology of Religion 62, no. 4, pp. 415–441. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff (2001) ‘On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from Africa’, Social Identities 7, no. 1, pp. 267–283. Crain, M. M. (1994) ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: A Plea for Discursive Heteroglossia’, American Ethnologist 21, no. 1, pp. 205–210. Cucchiari, Salvatore (1988) ‘ “Adapted for heaven”: Conversion and Culture in Western Sicily’, American Ethnologist 15, no. 4, pp. 417–443. —— (1990) ‘Between Shame and Sanctification: Patriarchy and its Transformation in Sicilian Pentecostalism’, American Ethnologist 17, no. 4, pp. 687–721. Dalton, D. (2002) ‘Spirit, Self, and Power: The Making of Colonial Experience in Papua New Guinea’, in Power and the Self, ed. J. Mageo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–140. Eves, R. (1998) The Magical Body: Power, Fame and Meaning in a Melanesian Society. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. —— (2000) ‘Sorcery’s the Curse: Modernity, Envy and the Flow of Sociality in a Melanesian Society’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 3, pp. 453–468.

124 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification Eves, R. (2003) ‘Money, Mayhem and the Beast: Narratives of the World’s End from New Ireland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 3, pp. 527–547. Fajans, J. (1983) ‘Shame, Social Action, and the Person among the Baining’, Ethos 11, no. 3, pp. 166–180. —— (1985) ‘The Person in Social Context: The Social Character of Baining Psychology’, in Person, Self and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, eds G. M. White and J. Kirkpatrick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 367–397. Ferguson, James (1999) Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foster, R. (1991) ‘Making National Cultures in the Global Ecumene’, Annual Review of Anthropology 20, pp. 235–260. Friedman, J. (1994) Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage. —— (1997) ‘Simplifying Complexity: Assimilating the Global in a Small Paradise’, in Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, eds K. F. Olwig and K. Hastrup. London: Routledge, pp. 268–291. Garrison, V. (1974) ‘Sectarianism and Psychosocial Adjustment: A Controlled Comparison of Puerto Rican Pentecostals and Catholics’, in Religious Movements in Contemporary America, eds I. I. Zaretsky and M. P. Leone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 298–329. Gerlach, L. P. (1974) ‘Pentecostalism: Revolution or Counter-Revolution’, in Religious Movements in Contemporary America, eds I. L. Zaretsky and M. P. Leone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 669–700. Gottlieb, Alma (1989) ‘Hyenas and Heteroglossia: Myth and Ritual Among the Beng of Côte d’Ivoire’, American Ethnologist 16, no. 3, pp. 487–501. —— (1992) Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (1992) ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1, pp. 6–23. Hannerz, Ulf (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harrison, S. (1988) ‘Magical Exchange of the Preconditions of Production in a Sepik River Village’, Man 23, no. 2, pp. 319–333. Heath, D. (1992) ‘Fashion, Anti-Fashion, and Heteroglossia in Urban Senegal’, American Ethnologist 19, no. 1, pp. 19–33. Hill, J. (1985) ‘The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar’, American Ethnologist 12, no. 4, pp. 725–737. Hollenweger, W. (1972) The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches. London: Augsburg Publishing House. Kearney, M. (1995) ‘The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 547–565. Kelly, J. (1995) ‘Threats to Difference in Colonial Fiji’, Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 1, pp. 64–84. Lattas, A. (1990) ‘Poetics of Space and Sexual Economies of Power: Gender and the Politics of Male Identity in West New Britain’, Ethos 18, no. 1, pp. 71–102. Lawrence, B. (1989) Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 125 Lehmann, D. (1998) ‘Fundamentalism and Globalism’, Third World Quarterly – Journal of Emerging Areas 19, no. 4, pp. 607–634. Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lewis, G. (1995) ‘Revealed by Illness: Aspects of the Gnau People’s World and their Perception of It’, in Cosmos and Society in Oceania, eds D. de Coppet and A. Iteanu. Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, pp. 165–188. Limon, J. (1989) ‘“Carne, Carnales” and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian “Batos”, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses’, American Ethnologist 16, no. 3, pp. 471–486. Martin, D. (2002) Pentecostalism: The World their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Mauss, M. (1985) ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy and History, eds M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25. Maynard, K. (1993) ‘Protestant Theories and Anthropological Knowledge: Convergent Models in the Ecuadorian Sierra’, Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2, pp. 246–267. Meyer, B. (1998) ‘“Make a Complete Break With the Past”: Memory and Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse’, in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. R. Werbner. London: Zed Books, pp. 182–208. —— (1999) ‘Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana’, in Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, eds B. Meyer and P. Geschiere. Oxford: Blackwells, pp. 151–176. Meyer, B. and P. Geschiere (1999) ‘Introduction’, in Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, eds B. Meyer and P. Geschiere. Oxford: Blackwells, pp. 1–15. Miller, D., ed. (1995) Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. London: Routledge. Mintz, S. W. (1998) ‘The Localization of Anthropological Practice: from Area Studies to Transnationalism’, Critique of Anthropology 18, no. 2, pp. 117–133. Modjeska, N. (1982) ‘Production and Inequality: Perspectives from Central New Guinea’, in Inequality in New Guinea Highlands, ed. A. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 50–108. Montague, S. (1989) ‘To Eat for the Dead: Kaduwagan Mortuary Events’, in Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring, eds F. H. Damon and R. Wagner. DeKalb, ILL: North Illinois University Press, pp. 23–43. Morris, B. (1994) Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective. London: Pluto Press. Munn, N. (1986) The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagata, J. (2001) ‘Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of Fundamentalism’, American Anthropologist 103, no. 3, pp. 481–498. Orta, A. (1998) ‘Converting Difference: Metaculture, Missionaries, and the Politics of Locality’, Ethnology 37, no. 2, pp. 165–185. Piot, C. (1999) Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

126 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification Porter, R. (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Ranger, T. (1993) ‘The Local and the Global in South African Religious History’, in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. R. W. Hefner. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 65–98. Read, K. (1955) ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person Among the GahukuGama’, Oceania 25, no. 4, pp. 233–282. Rose, N. (1997) ‘Assembling the Modern Self’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 224–248. Saunders, G. R. (1995) ‘The Crisis of Presence in Italian Pentecostal Conversion’, American Ethnologist 22, no. 2, pp. 324–340. Scott, S. (1994) ‘“They Don’t Have to Live by the Old Traditions”: Saintly Men, Sinner Women, and an Appalachian Pentecostal Revival’, American Ethnologist 21, no. 2, pp. 227–244. Shaw, J. (1997) ‘Religious Experience and the Formation of the Early Enlightenment Self’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 61–71. Smith, R. (1997) ‘Self-Reflection and the Self’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 49–57. Strathern, A. (1982) ‘Witchcraft, Greed, Cannibalism and Death’, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, eds M. Bloch and J. Parry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111–133. Strathern, M. (1979) ‘The Self in Self-Decoration’, Oceania 49, no. 4, pp. 241–257. —— (1984) ‘Marriage Exchanges: A Melanesian Comment’, Annual Review of Anthropology 13, pp. 41–73. —— (1985) ‘Knowing Power and Being Equivocal: Three Melanesian Contexts’, in Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches, ed. R. Fardon. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, pp. 61–81. —— (1987a) ‘Introduction’, in Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, ed. M. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–32. —— (1987b) ‘Conclusions’, in Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, ed. M. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 278–302. —— (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (1992) ‘Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange’, in Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach, eds C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–191. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Threlfall, N. (1975) One Hundred Years in the Islands: The Methodist/United Church in the New Guinea Islands Region. Rabaul: Toksave na Buk Dipatmen/The United Church. Thune, C. E. (1980) The Rhetoric of Remembrance: Collective Life and Personal Tragedy in Loboda Village, PhD thesis, Princeton University. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.

Billy Graham in the South Seas 127 Trawick, Margaret (1988) ‘Spirits and Voices in Tamil Songs’, American Ethnologist 15, no. 2, pp. 193–215. Tsing, A. L. (1994) ‘From the Margins’, Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3, pp. 279–297. Tuzin, D. (1997) The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. van Dijk, R. A. (1995) ‘Fundamentalism and its Moral Geography in Malawi: The Representation of the Diasporic and the Diabolical’, Critique of Anthropology 15, no. 2, pp. 171–191. —— (1998) ‘Pentecostalism, Cultural Memory and the State: Contested Representations of Time in Postcolonial Malawi’, in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. R. Werbner. London: Zed Books, pp. 155–181. Waldman, S. (2003) ‘Jesus in Baghdad: Why we should keep Franklin Graham out of Iraq’, April 11, 2003 (available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2081432) Wesley, J. (1759), Journal, 3 July (available online at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ wesley/journal.html)

7 A Cultural Revival and the Custom of Christianity in Papua New Guinea Alison Dundon

I was sitting on the floor of a large and crowded church in Uladu village in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in early 1995, listening to a sermon by an expatriate missionary from the Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM). She was addressing a women’s conference held by the Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG). I had been in the area for only a couple of months, living in a village to the south of Uladu called Tai, and had been invited to attend by both the women in Tai village and the female hierarchy of the church. The missionary began by stating that ‘false idols’ in God’s church were to be destroyed; then she proffered to the large group of women: ‘Why don’t we have Aida?’ When none of the women gathered responded to her question, she continued saying firmly, ‘Because we are God’s people and cannot have false idols in God’s church’. Throughout the sermon, she derided unbelievers like those to the north, who, she said, had heard the Christian message but had not acted upon it: these people, she argued, were as stubborn and ignorant as those who still practised Aida Gi. I remember being surprised by this reference to Aida Gi, particularly in this context, as I had heard scarcely a murmur about Aida since coming to the area. The Gogodala term, Aida Gi, encompasses the complex set of male initiatory cycles that culminated in the integration of initiated men into village, clan and kin relations of the Gogodala longhouse community. The ceremonies associated with Aida Gi have not been practised since the late 1930s, only a few years after the Unevangelised Fields Mission (UFM), later the APCM, established itself in the area. Why, then, the reference to ceremonies and practices that had ceased some 60 years before? And why in the context of a Christian women’s 128

A Cultural Revival 129

conference organized by the church that was established by the APCM in the 1960s? These questions can be explored through the events of a ‘cultural revival’ that occurred among the Gogodala in the 1970s, the results of which still resonate in local discourses about Christianity and what is referred to as iniwa ela gi or in English as ‘customary ways’. In the early 1970s, Anthony Crawford of the Australian Commonwealth Art Advisory Board of Australia, travelled around various Gogodala villages in search of what he believed was a unique and elaborate ‘art style’, exemplified in early colonial records and photographs of Gogodala artefacts.1 Bearing over 100 photographs of Gogodala carved objects, taken by early explorers and administrators, Crawford wrote that he found not only a dearth of cultural artefacts but ‘suppression, confusion, despair, self-pity and even tears’ (Crawford 1976, p. 4 see also 1975; 1981). Crawford attributed such feelings of fear and ambiguity towards these carvings, and the ‘destruction’ of Gogodala ‘culture’, to both the difficulties of travel and communication in such an environment and the influence of the UFM (Crawford 1976, p. 1). The revival culminated in the establishment of a Gogodala Cultural Centre (GCC), built in the form of a traditional longhouse, and the revival or renewal of carving expertise and techniques. The centre, built to house and display these carvings, was opened in 1974 by then chief minister, and later the first and current (2007) prime minister of PNG, Sir Michael Somare, and had become a momentary focus of nationalistic fervour for national agents and institutions in the wake of the country’s independence. Among the Gogodala, Crawford’s overt interest in pre-colonial carvings, objects painted with clan designs central to personal and social identification that had been targeted by early missionaries and Christian converts as symbols of ‘evil spirits’, gave rise to what had been, to that point, a marginal debate. This developed into a very public, and often vitriolic, inter-village discussion about the relationship between the ancestral past and evangelical Christianity. The building of the cultural centre, the display of cultural artefacts within it, and the formation of dancing groups who specialized in ‘traditional’ dances like the Aida Maiyata, brought this discussion to the fore. Before the revival, the distinction between Gogodala Christianity and the practices and objects of the preChristian past had been largely defined by the words and actions of resident expatriate missionaries as well as local pastors and deacons of the ECPNG. In many ways, the form of evangelical Christianity adhered to by the Gogodala had been predicated on the overt denial of the significance of ancestral objects and practices and the ceremonies and knowledge

130 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

associated with Aida Gi. Yet, in reality, Gogodala life and the Christianity that arose out of the relationship between the missionaries and village communities was based on the daily interaction with the ancestral presence, inherent in the land, water, animals and plants of the area. The original ancestral beings or iniwa luma mapped, created and named the local landscape as they moved across it, places still marked by trees, rocks and other animate beings referred to as ugu. The ancestors also established the moieties, clans and clan canoes that structure the lives of contemporary Gogodala (Dundon, 2002b, 2004). Thus the distinction between the ancestral ‘past’ and the Christian ‘present’ was always blurred. The Gogodala cultural revival had a significant impact on broader debates about self-reflexive articulations of culture, tradition and custom in the postcolonial Pacific. Despite this, local public articulations about the past, tradition, or a unitary notion of culture, were largely undeveloped at this time. What arose out of the revival in the local context was a reconsideration of the distinction between custom and Christianity, cast by some as a contest between the past and the present, as well as a reconstitution of the central axioms of both sets of beliefs and practices. The villages, clustered around the peri-urban centre of Balimo where the GCC was built, began to negotiate the significance of ancestral objects and dances. Some argued, as they do still, that these carvings were God’s way of assisting the Gogodala, who have attracted little development from the provincial or national capital. The revival became a vehicle through which a group of Gogodala sought to establish new regional, national and international links, particularly with the global Christian community. In the process, it became the site of the examination of re-existing relationships, such as that between expatriate missionaries and the Gogodala, as well as between customary ways and evangelical Christianity.

A revival of culture The Gogodala live in villages between and along the Aramia River, a tributary of the Bamu River, in the north, and the Fly River in the south, in Western Province, PNG. According to the census conducted in 2000, Gogodala speakers number some 25,800 people situated in 30 villages and five mission and/or government stations. The environment they inhabit is dominated by water, primarily in the form of lagoons, creeks and rivers. Because of the difficulties of travel between villages, communication and movement between them on a regular basis is unusual unless people are related through marriage and land. Villagers usually maintain links with three or four neighbouring villages, with whom

A Cultural Revival 131

marriages are made that cement land-owning relationships and other ties. For up to nine months of the year the lagoons and waterways that encircle the smaller tracts of land, on which villages, gardens and sago swamps are situated, are inundated and full of still or sluggish water. Canoes not only enable travel and communication between villages, but they are also the primary social group into which people are born – udaga gawa or ‘clan canoes’. Gogodala people ‘stand or sit inside’ these metaphorical or clan canoes much as they do in the narrow canoes they use on a daily basis. A person is born into a particular clan canoe and given specific names, which connect them to land and water. Each clan canoe has a name and a distinctive design called gawa tao, a term that is referred to in English as ‘canoe design’. In the pre-Christian past, such designs were painted on canoes, drums, dance masks, ancestral figures and inscribed on men’s bodies for ceremonial occasions. Canoe designs were the focus of ancestral practice and power for they were animated by a force referred to as ugu, which was imbued in the local landscape at the time of the original ancestral beings through their movements across and actions within the environment. The force that they brought with them became a part of the water, land, animals and plants. The environment and certain ceremonial and more mundane objects, canoes and bodily decorations were rendered magical by this force. Some of the earliest images of the Gogodala in the colonial era were the carvings inscribed with ugu-infused canoe designs. Local people were characterized as having an ‘artistic’ nature and descriptions of artefacts prefaced many of the early accounts.2 These images of the Gogodala retained a strong influence over outsiders’ perceptions, and when the UFM established itself in the area in the early 1930s, the drums, masks, canoes and other ceremonial objects, particularly those associated with male initiations, came to represent the worship of evil spirits and signified a heathen community. From the outset, the staff of the UFM and their early converts to Christianity focused on male ceremonies called Aida Maiyata, which were founded on ancestral narratives about the acquisition of magical knowledge and powers and their transmission through generations of men and boys. Integral to these rituals were carved and painted objects, including plaques, animal and ancestral effigies, canoes, paddles, drums and masks. These objects were known collectively as Aida lopala, or Aida ‘things’, sacred objects kept hidden from the eyes of women, children and the uninitiated. Aida Gi – the ceremonies and feasts associated with the periodic arrival of Aida in Gogodala villages – was based on the invocation of the powers of ugu

132 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

and the magical prowess of the Aida figure. Aida came to a village at the culmination of a series of male initiatory rites and activities, at which time the young male initiates were sequestered from their female relatives and living exclusively among the initiated male community of the longhouse. Whilst in the village, Aida taught these young men the secrets of his yam medicine, gagaga, which had the capacity to bring the dead back to life, as well as various other closely guarded secrets associated with male activities and knowledge. The carved objects and dancing ornaments that were an integral part of the Aida experience were stored in the lofts above the komo or central hall of the men of the village before Aida’s arrival, and returned after his departure a few days later. Such Aida lopala characteristically consisted of the Aida itself, a rattle made from the seed pods of the kulumusu tree set on a short pole; a metre-long drum called diwaka; several ancestral figures; gi gawa (small decorated canoes), intricately carved paddles, tobacco, water vessels and lime gourds. A figure of Aida was carved and adorned with the grass skirts and large mask that he wore when he visited the village. In the 1930s and 1940s, during periods of intense evangelization among Gogodala villages, UFM missionaries and several prominent local Christian converts were present at the public display and burning of Aida lopala. At this time, adherence to Christianity was based on the rejection of such objects and the knowledge and rituals from which they derived their power. The practical and ceremonial significance of canoe designs was undermined; their capacities weakened by claims that ugu were little more than evil spirits. Although there was resistance to the changes wrought by the UFM and local Christians, the public display and destruction of the Aida objects became an increasingly common way of signifying a readiness on behalf of the Gogodala to hear the Christian message. This conveyed to the missionaries a convincing level of commitment to the transformation of village and practice; from the establishment of small family dwellings in place of traditional longhouses that housed the village population, to the cessation of ceremonial feasting and activities like Aida Gi.3 Prior to Crawford’s arrival in the area in the early 1970s, only plain, undecorated objects, and a limited range of pigmented canoes and anthropomorphic figures, continued to be made on a regular basis. Crawford was particularly interested in the pigmented pieces with the canoe designs. He produced the photographs he had brought with him, and encouraged the creation of carvings from these images, many of which had not been made for 40 years. Crawford (1976, p. 5) discussed history and culture with those willing to listen, pointing out to them

A Cultural Revival 133

that the carvings could be incorporated into Christian life and practices. After 18 months, young men began to produce ‘high quality carvings’ (Crawford 1981, p. 164). Meetings were held between village leaders and artists to decide on an arena for the continued production and display of these carvings. After K7000 was allocated by the newly established National Cultural Council (NCC) in Port Moresby, land was set aside in Balimo by the Local Government Council and people organized to collect bush materials for the longhouse. In October 1973, construction began and, by December, the structure was complete. In June 1974, the cultural centre was opened by then Chief Minister Michael Somare (Crawford 1976, p. 6; 1981, p. 164). Elderly and knowledgeable men and women were employed to teach local schoolchildren about cultural practices and ancestral narratives during weekly visits to the longhouse, while carvings made by men from neighbouring villages were brought to the centre, purchased and buyers found for them by the centre’s staff. Eighteen months after the longhouse was built, Crawford left the area. Internal wrangling between the new Gogodala director and the carvers marred the centre’s promotion of the carvings. Many carvers stopped bringing their work there and went back to selling unpigmented artefacts to the missionaries who had created a market for them in the Highlands through their Christian bookshops. In 1982, the longhouse was demolished. Another centre was built after Sir Julius Chan, then prime minister, visited Balimo in 1982 and promised support from the Rural Improvement Fund (RIF) (Weymouth 1984, pp. 214–215). The new director of the centre, an artist himself, had trouble persuading others to help him gather the bush materials necessary to fix the longhouse, despite an injection of some K4000 from the RIF. He recalls that many people told him that the ‘white man [Crawford] has gone, so leave it’, and that neighbouring village people began to suggest that the Cultural Centre was promoting the ‘worship of idols’. In the face of growing opposition and disapproval, the centre closed.

A cultural workshop The Gogodala cultural revival became part of a discussion about the politics of identity and indigenous objectifications of ‘culture’ in the Pacific in the 1980s and early 1990s. The establishment of the GCC provoked debate about the revitalization of so-called traditional ceremonies, artefacts and identities in the context of Papua New Guinea’s Independence and construction of a national culture. At the opening ceremony, Michael Somare stated that the GCC was an example of the

134 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

capacity of Papua New Guineans to ‘preserve our culture’, and urged urban ‘sophisticates’ to embrace the revival of culture as the basis of their newly independent country. His speech appealed to all to recognize and uphold the uniqueness of PNG’s cultural heritage and to realize its importance for a united national identity (Pacific Islands Monthly 1974). In accounts of the revival, whether academic, journalistic or political, much was made of the role of the NCC, the national body for cultural projects, in the establishment of the centre, as was the importance of the interaction between national cultural institutions and the GCC. Crawford published several books and papers on the Gogodala, during and after the revival including the 1981 monograph Aida, Life and Ceremony of the Gogodala.4 Andrew Strathern (1981, p. 13) wrote an introduction in which he suggested that, even if the life of the Gogodala cultural revival was short and its future uncertain; ‘its story is an inspiration for those concerned with the true development of indigenous culture in Papua New Guinea’. In the foreword to Sakema, Gogodala Wood Carvers (another of Crawford’s publications), Ulli Beier (1975) noted that there was much talk in PNG about cultural revivals but ‘[t]here is hardly another case in which a genuine revival has been more dramatically achieved than among the Gogodala’. The interest shown by international and academic commentators was not all enthusiastic, however, Babadzan (1988, p. 217), for example, argued that the cultural revival was a prime example of ‘cultural folklorization’. He noted that the construction of the GCC and performances of previously forbidden Aida Maiyata dances at regional festivals had a significant impact on other groups. Gogodala dancing and art exhibitions were particularly appreciated during the fourth Festival of New Guinean Art held in Moresby in 1974, and when Queen Elizabeth visited PNG, she was entertained by a group of Gogodala dancers. Thus, he argued, the GCC was a prototype, which had given rise to numerous small cultural centres all over the Pacific, ‘half folklore museums and half workshops’ (Babadzan 1988, p. 219). In this context, culture had become a ‘political stake’ around which people mobilized in order to gain access to a new source of income (Babadzan 1988, p. 220). Babadzan’s inference, based on a distinction between an invented ‘tradition’ and lived unselfconscious ‘custom’, was that the cultural revival was a self-conscious reconstruction of the past and somehow inauthentic; ‘a folkloricist revival legitimated by the State, Australian art-aid, and purveyors of traditional (rather than touristic) art works’ (Jolly 1992, p. 54).5 Babadzan argued that despite claims of continuity with the past, the politicization of discourses about tradition and kastom in the Pacific instituted practices that carried out ‘modernist

A Cultural Revival 135

development projects’ (Babadzan 1988, p. 204) and were thus inseparable from nationalistic and state ideals of unity. Babadzan’s discussion of the Gogodala cultural revival and similar events in the wider Pacific, contributed to a growing body of literature on the politics of tradition and kastom or kastam in the Pacific (see for example Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Hanson 1989; Keesing 1989, 1993; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Linnekin 1992; Lawson 1997). As Jolly and Thomas (1992, p. 241) suggest, several questions arose in the wake of this literature: including the usefulness of the notion of tradition, particularly in the Pacific context; the significance of the colonial experience in the objectification of culture and articulations of tradition; the validity of the language of invention – particularly in terms of the ‘invention of tradition’; and the often problematic relationship between notions of tradition at the local, regional and national levels.6 Since then, the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘invented’ traditions, between culture as ‘simply living’ and a self-conscious way of life, has been challenged including the argument that the notion of an authentic tradition assumes the unitary and somehow essential nature of Pacific people and cultures and is based on the assumption that until Europeans became involved in these areas there was little or negligible social and cultural change (Jolly 1992, p. 49). The assumption that ‘authentic’ tradition is unselfconscious renders cultural revivals, like that of the Gogodala, and articulations of kastom, as inauthentic and problematic and assumes that elite national and state ideologies that value ‘tradition’ are primarily cynical and manipulative attempts at maintaining power.7 The interaction between national, regional and local agendas and notions of custom and tradition remains a central issue in the countries of the Pacific, and the relationship between local cultural projects, like the Gogodala cultural revival, and nation making are not straightforward (see Foster 1995; Hirsch 1995; Jacobsen 1995). Local traditions do not easily fit into nationalist programmes even though at some levels there seems to be a great deal of congruence between them and ‘even a further continuity with regional values about the Melanesian or the Pacific Way’ (Jolly and Thomas 1992, p. 243). The state’s nationalist agenda and drive towards economic development were an integral part of the construction and constitution of the GCC. However, when Crawford initiated interest in reviving techniques of and knowledge about certain carved and painted objects, stimulating regional, national and international interest in their sale and display, many in the Gogodala community became involved. Some of the earliest images of the Gogodala were based on detailed descriptions of elaborate carved

136 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

and pigmented canoes, masks, headdresses and other ceremonial objects. In the process of constructing an image of themselves to others, both internationally and locally, many Gogodala took this image as their own. Those who became involved in the establishment and maintenance of the GCC, as dancers, carvers, knowledgeable elders and teachers or administrators, had access to experiences not possible for those in home villages. Dancing troupes were selected to participate, from national and regional celebrations to international performances as far afield as Australia. Likewise, carvers gained some status both in the local context, through the demonstration of skills and ancestral knowledge as well as through access to monetary recompense, and outside; one artist in particular went on to show his works in Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany. It was not surprising, then, that many Gogodala saw in the revival, the GCC and revitalization of certain dances and objects a potential basis for community development. The revival came to be referred to by some as the ‘selling days’, the time that ‘their own things’ became a significant source of wealth and prestige for this Western Province community.

A Christian country From the outset, the revival and the establishment of the GCC centred on a group of Gogodala villages situated around Balimo, the headquarters of the Middle Fly District, sparking conflict between these villages and others aligned along the Aramia River to the north. Many people, particularly from Tai, Dogono, Kotale, Aketa and other Aramia River villages, argued that the carvings constructed at the Cultural Centre were ‘evil’ and contravened teachings of the pastors and missionaries. They believed that those involved in the cultural revival and the GCC aimed to undermine the practices and principles of Gogodala evangelical Christianity. Crawford originally came to Balimo village, and set up house in the town where the longhouse was also subsequently constructed. The people he first approached were those communities living in Balimo town and village. Later, he became increasingly involved with villages linked to Balimo through land and marriage, relationships that define ties between neighbouring Gogodala village communities. Thus the people from Balimo, Saweta, Kini and Kimama villages came to be involved in the activities of the revival, and the building and maintenance of the centre. The centre was fashioned as a ‘traditional’ longhouse or saida genama whose posts and joists were carved and painted as ancestral figures and which became the site of the

A Cultural Revival 137

storage and display of carved and painted objects and ornaments. Many believed that the longhouse was instigated by Crawford and were opposed to the continuation of the centre’s activities once he left the area, seeing the revival as an expatriate dispute between Crawford and influential missionaries like Dudley and Majorie Deasy. Those assisting Crawford were encouraged to ‘leave it, they [white people] are fighting among themselves’. The departure of Crawford and the installation of a Kini man as director of the centre clearly aligned it with the villages around Balimo. From the beginning, then, the revival was based on division and dispute. This became a defining characteristic of the GCC and had a significant impact on the viability of carving and dancing practices after the initial fervour of the 1970s. The divide between villages around Balimo and those on the Aramia River began to revolve increasingly around a distinction between Christians and carvers. In 1977, Murray Marx, the head of the APCM, stated that Christian and ‘traditional’ sides of Gogodala life were incompatible and he discouraged local Christians from participating in any of the revival or GCC activities (Owens 1977). The revival of ‘traditional’ dancing styles was one of the primary reasons that missionaries and local pastors opposed the establishment of the centre. Ross Weymouth (1984, p. 283), an APCM commentator, argues that it was not the renewal of artistic or carving techniques that the Church or APCM objected to; rather, what disturbed Church leaders was the revival of the Aida Maiyata, the dances associated with male cult activities (Weymouth 1984, p. 283).8 Early missionaries had discouraged Gogodala from participating in ceremonial dances like Aida Maiyata once they became Christians, introducing dances from a neighbouring group instead as these were less overtly sexual. Crawford encouraged his local associates to learn about and perform Gogodala dances like Aida Maiyata. Local pastors were generally opposed to the centre and its promotion of carvings associated with the Aida ceremonies, and the subsequent performances of these carved objects in dancing displays. Accordingly, Gogodala concerned about the revival of dancing and carving techniques began to articulate their continuing opposition to such activities in terms of degrees of Christianity, constituting themselves as ‘more Christian’ than the revivalists. Thus they sought to reinstate the distinction between custom and Christianity implicit in the teachings of local ECPNG pastors and expatriate missionaries. Those involved in the promotion of the centre, however, expressed concern over this definition of Gogodala Christianity, and argued that the ancestral past already inhered in local Christian practices. They argued that broadening the

138 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

basis of local Christianity would only enhance Gogodala opportunities in postcolonial PNG, particularly in terms of community and regional development. In the 1970s, during ‘cultural patrols’ undertaken by staff at the centre once a month to outlying villages, passages of the Bible were read aloud and certain practices previously seen as non-Christian were seen to be ‘in actual fact tolerated by God and not at all condemned’. At the same time: [o]n a blackboard a square was drawn representing the Gogodala tribal boundaries; to the north they have the Kamula tribe, in the south the Kiwai, to the east the Bamu, and in the west the Suki, all encircling the Gogodala with their life of traditional ceremony, therefore why should not the Gogodala, for all those neighbouring groups are also Christians. (Crawford 1976, p. 14) Although in many ways the debate between Gogodala villages over the revival and establishment of the GCC was characterized as a dispute between custom and Christianity, then, it presaged a fundamental redefinition of the practices and tenets of the local form of evangelical Christianity to which both ‘carvers’ and ‘Christians’ adhered. The revival stimulated interest in the boundaries of Gogodala Christianity. Crawford’s encouragement of traditional dances, particularly those associated with Aida and other male rituals, and the display of pigmented objects complete with previously forbidden canoe designs, presented a public challenge to the rather conservative ECPNG Christianity in the 1970s. In the early 1980s in Kimama village church, a group of elders, pastors and deacons from several villages met to debate the possible contiguities of Christianity and customary ways. On a blackboard in the church, two columns were drawn: one representing Biblical characters, events and places, and other detailing ancestral ones based on iniwa olagi or ancestral narratives. Over several days, similarities were drawn between Christian and ancestral places, people and events. The implications of this local analysis of the confluence of Christian and Gogodala typologies and spaces, reached far beyond Kimama church and village within a relatively short time, these comparisons became common in the negotiation of Gogodala Christianity in village churches throughout the district. In the process, a notion of ‘Christian country’, characterized as a form of Christianity emplaced in Gogodala ancestral practices and places, entered into the local lexicon. Christian country acknowledged the reality of the blurred distinctions between custom and Christianity in quotidian practice, and, over the ensuing years, has come to indicate

A Cultural Revival 139

various elements of lived and past practices associated with iniwa ela gi, customary ways, as well as institutionalized and lived Christian practice. It is predicated on the consumption of certain substances or foodstuffs, like sago or tea and tinned fish, or its prohibition, as in the case of alcohol, tobacco or betel nut, as well as the prevalence or absence of particular practices like dance (Dundon 2002, 2004). It is based on the Gogodala ela gi or lifestyle of Gogodala village communities, from the production and consumption of foodstuffs native to the area, to the perpetuation of clans and clan canoes through marriage and land-owning practices and principles. For the Gogodala, Christian country demarcates Gogodala Christianity from others in the region and nation, and sets them apart as saelena luma – the ‘chosen people’ originally acknowledged by the early missionaries to the area. The revival, then, was not about making absolute distinctions between custom and Christianity, although formulations of these two categories of practice and experience were integral to the debate in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, it stimulated an examination of the central precepts of evangelical Christianity and brought to the fore a central problem: how to integrate two overtly distinct ways of life or ela gi, already lived as one for some 40 years, in public articulations of Christian country. The debate between different villages was framed in terms of practices considered appropriate for Gogodala Christians, with Christianity as the basis of differentiation between Gogodala practices and those in other parts of the region and country. Although, then, the revival was structured by national agents and institutions, and influenced by appeals for an allegiance to a national community in light of PNG’s Independence, what arose out of it challenged some central ideas and practices of the new nation. For Christian country is exclusory; it creates boundaries within the nation between the Gogodala and other PNG communities, while articulating an enduring connection with a transnational community of Christians.

The custom of Christianity The recognition that objectifications of culture and tradition are politically contested is integral to understanding articulations of tradition in the Pacific. Thomas (1992, p. 64) notes that [a] ceremony that is named, and thus can be conceived of as an entity separable from particular enactments, can be a vital element in the self-expression or regeneration of a group, and especially may state

140 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

and mark its differentiation from other groups. Attitudes towards it, or competing constructions of it, may also register crucial lines of disagreement or conflict within a particular society. The revival initiated by Crawford’s arrival in Balimo and his interest in the carved objects associated with past Gogodala practices, objectified certain customs, ceremonies, dances and objects as ‘cultural’. These practices and objects were represented as traditional, as central facets of Gogodala custom exemplified in practices, artefacts and spaces of the past. As such, the carvings and dances became the site of considerable contestation and dispute – both in the local context and further afield. In his publications, Crawford (1981) represented the cultural centre as an ‘environment of the past’, the vehicle through which Gogodala culture would come ‘alive’. Other expatriates, particularly the resident missionaries, were affected by the establishment of GCC but united in opposition to its construction. Crawford, and many of the church leaders and missionaries, saw the contest as one between ‘culture’ and Christianity and framed arguments in these terms. Regional and national representations of the Gogodala revival and the establishment of the GCC also focused on the reconstitution of the past in the present, and argued that such local events could be significant for the unification of country and region. Many Gogodala were aware at the time of the ways in which these events were utilized by outsiders, from Crawford and the expatriate missionaries, to Michael Somare and the NCC, and urged locals to let them fight over it amongst themselves, unconvinced by the possibilities evinced by the revival and GCC. The revival initiated a very public, inter-village debate about the relationship between Christian country and customary ways, however, rather than pit customary ways against Christianity it resulted in the crystallization of Christian country. Some 30 years later, negotiations continue over the terms and boundaries of such categories of experience and objectification. Indeed, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this was precisely how I came to understand the significance of the revival and the events of the 1970s. Currently, customary ways and Christian country are interchangeable terms that can refer to anything from the use of kerosene lanterns and the singing of Christian hymns in village churches, to the telling of ancestral stories in land mediation meetings, or the sale of Gogodala carvings to tourists. And, apart from general comments about iniwa ela gi or customary ways, most Gogodala do not attempt to articulate a unified notion of Gogodala culture. When talking about ancestral stories or past practices or pre-Christian

A Cultural Revival 141

ceremonies, people use terms, in English, like ‘our custom’, ‘Gogodala life’ or ‘our past ways’ or ‘being Gogodala’, or ‘our way of living’. Most express a strong sense of shared identification with other Gogodala, based primarily on common village experiences and links with the ancestral past, as well as clans and canoes, names, blood and places. The primary term used to articulate or encapsulate a sense of unified Gogodala communities has increasingly become Christian country. Yet, uneasiness persists, as the conflation of Christian country and the ways of the ancestors is by no means unproblematic. Foster (1992, p. 287) has noted that custom in Melanesia is often set up in opposition to business and/or the church. I suggest that expressions of Gogodala customary ways that arose out of the revival, and increasingly Christian country, seek to encompass business, Christianity, and development within its framework. In the 1970s, leaders and factions of the ECPNG defined their Christianity through the rejection of ceremonial carvings and performances. Absolute distinctions were made between Christian practices and objects, and those associated with the ancestral past. And, although many Gogodala were involved in the building of the longhouse, the production of carvings, as well as the teaching of school children, in present recollections of the 1970s and 1980s the revival has not been objectified as a singular event. Rather it is talked about as the ‘selling days’, when carvings were made and sold, and when there were public and inter-village discussions about the efficacy and significance of carvings and custom. In this discussion, which continues in various stages of intensity today, the notion of Gogodala ‘art’ has become a central one, which, it is hoped, will aid the process of communal development. I have argued elsewhere that the idea of development is salient among the Gogodala, as it is with many groups in PNG, and is conceptualized as apela gi or ‘growing up’. Thus development is ‘linked to the attainment of adulthood’ and the maturation of gardens or bodies, which results eventually in the acquisition of a lifestyle that combines customary ways, Christian principles and practices, as well as monetary and material wealth (Dundon 2002, p. 222). Like the growth of bodies and gardens, development implies agency and forethought. In the context of the revival, villagers from Balimo and its surrounds argued that Gogodala could be significant agents in their own communal maturation; that they could wrest an advantage from the ancestral experience of village life and use it to bring about their own development, envisaged not only in terms of money but through links to an international community of art purveyors, as well as national and regional cultural

142 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

institutions. Crawford had pointed to the possibilities of combining Christianity with custom, particularly in terms of the sale and promotion of Gogodala carvings in national and international markets. The significance of the revival for many contemporary Gogodala, then, lies in its initiation of a peculiarly Gogodala way of gaining access to money through the production and sale of their ‘own’ carvings, thereby basing development in local terms and grounding it within the custom of Gogodala Christianity.

Notes 1. The Art Advisory Board provided advice and information about artworks for collection and display in Australia from various parts of the world including PNG. 2. Beaver (1914, p. 412) notes in one of his articles on the Gogodala in 1914 that the Gogodala are ‘decidly artistic, perhaps almost more artistic than that of any other people I have met with in New Guinea, but I am inclined to think that their art is associated in some degree with a phallic order’. 3. Some communities, like those in Balimo and Dogono, hid their ceremonial objects in the bush (Crawford 1981, pp. 41–42). Similarly, the men at Aketa village sent their diwaka down the river to protect it from the evangelical zeal of the missionaries and their local converts (see also Dundon 2006). 4. In the Land and People series, Crawford published Sakema, Gogodala Wood Carvers in conjunction with the NCC also in 1975; presented a discussion paper for the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies entitled ‘Artistic revival among the Gogodala’ in 1976; and wrote The Gogodala of the Western Province published by the NCC in 1979. 5. Hobsbawm (1983, p. 1) set up a dichotomy between ‘invented’ and ‘genuine’ or authentic traditions in the early 1980s, in which ‘invented’ traditions were ‘responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition’ (Hobsbawm 1983, p. 2). Hobsbawm posited ‘tradition’, which he associated with rituals and symbols and repetition, in contradistinction to ‘custom’ that he suggested dominated traditional societies. His assumption was that where customs were lived by communities, traditions did not need to be either revived or invented (Hobsbawm 1983, p. 8). In the politics of tradition in the Pacific, this kind of analysis led to a distinction between ‘the innocent villager as opposed to the cunning national politician, the romance of the natural village community as opposed to the unnatural claims of the state’ (Jolly 1992, p. 51). 6. Hanson’s 1989 article ‘The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic’ incited a heated debate about the notion of invention and ensuing discussions about the authenticity of indigenous claims of cultural identity. Linnekin (1992, pp. 249–250) noted that the language of invention had been problematized in public debates about the politics of identity in the Pacific, as it connoted inauthenticity and was thus offensive to many social and political groups in the Pacific (cf. Toren 1988). 7. However, some, such as Keesing (1989, 1993) and Lawson (1993) have argued that the approach posited by Linnekin, Thomas, Jolly and others allows

A Cultural Revival 143 mythic narratives to be given equal validity in the political arena of the Pacific (Keesing 1993, p. 587; see also Lindstrom and White 1994). Keesing (1993, p. 587), for example, argued that the process of mythologizing history is an integral part of every political system and critical analysis of this process of mystification should be primary in academic analysis. 8. Weymouth argues that by 1977, interest in the cultural revival had waned and the cultural centre had fallen into disrepair. He claims that ‘[w]ithout the incentive of an immediate cash return for their efforts’ and because the carvings no longer had any religious significance, men stopped carving and teaching in the Cultural Centre (Weymouth 1984, p. 284). By 1984, he suggested, interest in the cultural revival was the property of a minority ‘keen to demonstrate its prowess’ (1984, p. 285).

References Babadzan, A. (1988) ‘Kastom and Nation Building in the South Pacific’, in Ethnicites and Nations: Processes of Interethnic Relations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, eds R. Guidieri, F. Pellizzi and S. J. Tambiah. Housten, TX: Rothko Chapel, pp. 199–228. Beaver, W. N. (1914) ‘A Description of the Girara District, Western Papua’, Royal Geographical Journal 43, pp. 407–413. Beier, U. (1975 ) ‘Foreword’, in Sakema: Gogodala Wood Carvers, ed. A. Crawford. Port Moresby: The National Cultural Council. Crawford, A. L. (1975) Sakema: Gogodala Wood Carvers. Port Moresby: The National Cultural Council. —— (1976) ‘Artistic Revival Among the Gogodala’, Discussion Paper No. 14. Port Moresby: The Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. —— (1981) Aida, Life and Ceremony of the Gogodala. Bathurst, Australia: The National Cultural Council of Papua New Guinea in association with Robert Brown and Associates. Dundon, A. (2002a) ‘Dancing Around Development: Crisis in Christian Country in Western Province, Papua New Guinea’, Oceania 72, no. 3, pp. 215–229. —— (2002b) ‘Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province, Papua New Guinea’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13, no. 2, pp. 139–154. —— (2004) ‘Tea and Tinned Fish: Christianity, Consumption and the Nation in Papua New Guinea’, Oceania 75, no. 2, pp. 73–88. —— (2007) ‘Moving the Centre: Christianity, the Longhouse and the Gogodala Cultural Centre’, in The Future of Indigenous Museums in the Pacific, ed. N. Smith. London: Berghahn. Foster, R. J. (1992) ‘Commodization and the Emergence of Kastom as a Cultural Category: A New Ireland Case in Comparative Perspective’, Oceania 46, no. 4, pp. 284–294. —— (1995) ‘Introduction: The Work of Nation Making’, in Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia, ed. R. J. Foster. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–30. Hanson, A. (1989) ‘The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention and Its Logic’, American Anthropologist 91, pp. 890–902.

144 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification Hirsch, E. (1995) ‘Local Persons, Metropolitan Names: Contending Forms of Simultaneity Among the Fuyuge, Papua New Guinea’, in Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia, ed. R. J. Foster. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 185–206. Hobsbawm, E. (1983) ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Honolulu, HI: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–14. Jacobsen, M. (1995) ‘Vanishing Nations and the Infiltration of Nationalism: The Case of Papua New Guinea’, in Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia, ed. R. J. Foster. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 227–249. Jolly, M. (1992) ‘Specters of Inauthenticity’, The Contemporary Pacific 4, no. 1, pp. 49–67. Jolly, M. and N. Thomas (1992) ‘Introduction’, Oceania, Special Issue, The Politics of Tradition in the Pacific 62, no. 4, pp. 241–248. Keesing, R. (1989) ‘Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific’, The Contemporary Pacific 1, pp. 19–42. —— (1993) ‘Kastom Re-examined’, Anthropological Forum 6, no. 4, pp. 587–596. Keesing, R. and R. Tonkinson, eds (1982) ‘Reinventing Traditional Culture’, Mankind, Special Issue, The Politics of Kastom in Island Melanesia 13, no. 4, pp. 297–301. Lawson, S. (1993) ‘The Politics of Tradition’, Pacific Studies 16, no. 2, pp. 1–29. —— (1997) ‘The Tyranny of Tradition: Critical Reflections on Nationalist Narratives in the South Pacific’, in Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific, eds. T. Otto and N. Thomas. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 15–31. Lindstrom, L. and G. M. White, eds (1994) Culture–Kastom–Tradition: Developing Cultural Policy in Melanesia. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Linnekin, J. (1992) ‘On the Theory and Politics of Cultural Construction in the Pacific’, Oceania, Special Issue, Politics of Tradition in the Pacific, eds M. Jolly and N. Thomas, 62, no. 4, pp. 249–263. Owens, C. (1977) Gogodala – A Cultural Revival? (film) Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Pacific Islands Monthly (1975) ‘Towards Independence or Something’, October, pp. 7–8. Strathern, A. (1981) ‘Introduction’, in Aida, Life and Ceremony of the Gogodala. Bathurst, Australia: The National Cultural Council of Papua New Guinea in association with Robert Brown and Associates, pp. 11–13. Thomas, N. (1992) ‘Substantivization and Anthropological Discourse: The Transformation of Practices into Institutions in Neotraditional Pacific Societies’, in History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology, ed. J. Carrier. California: University of California Press, pp. 64–85. Toren, C. (1988) ‘Making the Present, Revealing the Past: The Mutability and Continuity of Tradition as Process’, Man 23, pp. 696–717. Weymouth, R. (1984) ‘The Gogodala Society: A Study of Adjustment Movements since 1966’, Oceania 54, no. 4, pp. 269–288.

8 Sufi Regional Cults in South Asia and Indonesia: Towards a Comparative Analysis Pnina Werbner

Introduction To compare Sufi regional cults across different places separated by thousands of miles of sea and land, and by radically different cultural milieus, is in many ways to seek the global in the local rather than the local in the global. Either way, charting difference and similarity in Sufism as an embodied tradition requires attention beyond mystical philosophical and ethical ideas to the ritual performances and religious organizational patterns that shape Sufi orders and cults in widely separated locations. We need, in other words, to seek to understand comparatively four interrelated symbolic complexes: first, the sacred division of labour – the ritual roles that perpetuate and reproduce the cult; second, the sacred exchanges between places and persons, often across great distances; third, the sacred region, its catchment area and the sanctified central places that shape it; and fourth, the sacred indexical events – the rituals – that coordinate and revitalize organizational and symbolic unities and enable managerial and logistical planning and decision making. Comparison requires that we examine the way in which these four dimensions of ritual sanctification and performance are linked, and are embedded in a particular symbolic logic and local environment. The Sufi cult I studied in Pakistan (see P. Werbner 2003), was in many ways remarkably similar organizationally to other, non-Muslim regional cults and pilgrimage systems elsewhere (e.g. see R. Werbner 1977). It also fitted the model of Sufi orders analysed by Trimingham (1971), which was mainly based on his extensive knowledge of Sufi orders in the Middle East and Africa. 145

146 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

The difficulty, of course, in trying to understand Sufism and comprehend its systematic ritual and symbolic logic and organization, is that in any particular locality, there is a wide range of Sufi saints, from major shrines of great antiquity, managed by descendants of the original saintly founder and guardians of his tomb, to minor saints with a highly localized clientele (see Troll 1989; Werbner and Basu 1998). In any generation, only some outstanding living saints succeed in founding major regional cults which extend widely beyond their immediate locality. My own study was about one such Sufi regional cult whose founder, Zindapir, the ‘living saint’, had established his central lodge, a place of enchanting loveliness and tranquillity, in a small valley in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. During the saint’s lifetime, his cult extended globally: to Britain and Europe, the Middle East and even South Africa. Established during the 1940s, in the dying days of Empire, Zindapir began his career as an army tailor contractor for the seventh Baluch regiment, and his cult membership expanded through the recruitment of army personnel. These in turn recruited members of their families and, when they retired to civilian life, their co-villagers or townsmen. The cult expanded further as these soldiers went to work as labour migrants in the Gulf or Britain. Disciples were also recruited from among the stream of supplicants coming to the lodge to seek blessings and remedies for their afflictions from the saint, and from among casual visitors curious to see the saint and the lodge itself, a place renown for its beauty. Some disciples joined the cult after meeting Zindapir or his vicegerents on the annual Hajj to Mecca. Zindapir’s disciples and messengers met regularly to perform zikr, the repetitive recollection of God’s name, at the lodge branches of the order, located throughout Pakistan. They gathered at the central lodge of Zindapir weekly, monthly, and in most cases, annually, at the ‘urs, the three-day ritual festival commemorating the mystical ‘marriage’ of a deceased saint with God. Some pilgrims arrived for the festival as individuals, but most came in convoys of trucks and buses from particular cult branches, travelling in some cases for over 24 hours, bearing with them sacrificial offerings of grain, butter and animals. They returned bearing gifts from the saint – gowns or caps, and in some instances, the sacred soil of the lodge itself. During their three-day stay at the ‘urs, all the participants were fed and nurtured by the saint himself. The hundreds of beasts sacrificed, the hundreds of thousands of baked chappatis and nans, the enormous cauldrons of sweet and pilau rice distributed during the ‘urs, feed some 30,000 people over three days, a major logistical challenge. But the saint also feeds pilgrims to the lodge throughout

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 147

the year, in what may be conceived of as a form of perpetual sacrifice. The lodge itself has been built with voluntary labour, usually in the weeks preceding the annual ‘urs. The crowds depart following the final du’a: the supplicatory prayer enunciated by the saint himself on behalf of the whole community. These are the bare outlines of Sufi regional cult organization. The Sufi cultural concept which best captures the idea of a Sufi region is wilayat. Wilayat, a master concept in Sufi terminology, denotes a series of interrelated meanings: (secular) sovereignty over a region, the spiritual dominion of a saint, guardianship, a foreign land, friendship, intimacy with God and union with the Deity. As a master concept, wilayat encapsulates the range of complex ideas defining the charismatic power of a saint – not only over transcendental spaces of mystical knowledge but as sovereign of the terrestrial spaces into which his sacred region extends. ‘Regional cult’, a comparative, analytic term used to describe centrally focused, non-contiguous religious organizations that extend across boundaries, seems particularly apt to capture this symbolic complexity.

Sufi orders and saintly charisma in the Middle East and Pakistan Sufi ta’ifas, focused around a single living saint or his shrine, are comparable to other regional cults in their basic central place organization. The shaikh, a living saint or his descendant, heads the ta’ifa by virtue of his powers of blessing. Under the shaikh are a number of khalifas appointed by him directly to take charge of districts or town centres. Trimingham reports that in a large order each regional khalifa may have sectional leaders under him (1971, pp. 173–174, 179). The sacred centres and subcentres of the cult, known as zawiya in North Africa, and darbars or dargahs (royal courts) in Pakistan and India, are places of pilgrimage and ritual celebration, with the tomb of the founder being the ‘focal point of the organization, a centre of veneration to which visitations (ziyarat) are made’ (ibid., p. 179). The centre is regarded as sacred (haram), a place of sanctuary for refugees from vengeance. The word ‘ta’ifa’ was not used by members of Zindapir’s regional cult (and appears unknown even in some parts of the Middle East). They spoke of the cult as a tariqa, but to distinguish it from the wider Naqshbandi order to which it was affiliated, it was known as tariqa Naqshbandiyya Ghamkolia. By appending the name of the cult centre, Ghamkol, to their regional cult, they marked its distinctiveness as an autonomous organization. The saint at the head of the order, Zindapir, (the living saint), was by the time of my study the head of a vast,

148 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

transnational regional cult, stretching throughout Pakistan to the Gulf, Britain, Afghanistan and Southern Africa. He had founded the cult centre in 1948, when he first secluded himself, according to the legend, in a cave on the hill of Ghamkol. At the time the place was a wilderness. A key feature of Zindapir’s cult organization was the way in which the exemplary centre has replicated itself throughout the saint’s region through scores of deliberate and conscious acts of mimesis. In different parts of the Punjab important khalifas of the saint reproduce in their manners, dress and minute customs the image of Zindapir, along with the ethics and aesthetics of the cult he founded. In their own places they are addressed, much as Zindapir himself is, as pir sahib. Such mimesis, I want to suggest, creates a sense of unity across distance: the same sounds and images, the same ambience, are experienced by the traveller wherever he goes in the cult region. Along with this extraordinary mimetic resemblance, however, each khalifa also fosters his own distinctiveness, his own special way of being a Sufi. In other ways, too, Trimingham’s account accords with regional cult theory. He makes the point that ta’ifas ‘undergo cycles of expansion, stagnation, decay, and even death’ (1971, p. 179), but that since there are ‘thousands of them, new ones [are] continually being formed’ (ibid., p. 172). It seems clear that to understand processes of Sufi regional cult formation, the need is to look at the way cults are founded and expand during the lifetime of an originary, living saint. Linked to this is the need to disclose what endows some men with extraordinary charismatic authority and hence the power to found new Sufi regional cults and expand their organizational ambit. To comprehend how the charisma of a living saint is constructed during his lifetime and underpins his authority requires a comparative analysis of the poetics of travelling theories; that is, the way that such myths tell, simultaneously, both a local and a global tale about Sufi mystical power everywhere, and the settlement of Sufis in virgin, barren or idolatrous lands, such as the lodge valley in Pakistan or industrial towns in Britain. Each Sufi cult is distinctive and embedded in a local cultural context. But, against a view of the radical plurality of Islam proposed, for example, by Geertz (1968), I want to suggest in this chapter that Sufism everywhere shares the same deep structural logic of ideas. These shape the ecological and cultural habitat and local habitus wherever Sufi saints settle. Such beliefs persist, I show, despite internal inconsistencies and evidence to the contrary, and remain powerfully compelling.

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 149

Sufi myths and legends: teasing out comparisons between Morocco and Indonesia In a groundbreaking essay, Clifford Geertz (1968), comparing Moroccan and Indonesian Islam, proposed that global religions are necessarily embedded in the taken-for-granteds of local cultural milieus. In criticizing Geertz, I am not suggesting that he is entirely wrong. It is quite likely that Moroccan Islam and Indonesian Islam are in many ways very different in their feel, their style, their religious emphases, the emotions evoked by particular symbols and rituals, the centrality of ritual and religion in the society, its symbolic importance and so forth. Against Geertz, however, I want to argue that Sufi Islam as a travelling religion may change radically but in a way that seems almost the opposite to that suggested by him. In theory, and often in practice, when a world religion encroaches into an already charged social field, both religious practice and scriptural exegesis are likely to be politicized and to lose the taken-for-granted, doxic transparency that they once possessed. Instead, such religions become highly self-conscious, reflexive ideologies. Intertextuality, in other words, relativizes all knowledge. Recognizing the intertextual dimensions of locally appropriated global religious texts is a critical theoretical advance for an understanding of the global and local politics of religion and its thrust towards greater reflexivity. Two related questions are implied by the argument that travelling theories gain in reflexivity: first, if global religious knowledge, locally contextualized, is produced within a charged political field, in what sense can it still be said to be commonsensical, taken-for-granted and embedded unreflectively in a local cultural ethos and world view, as Geertz proposed? Second, in what respect do travelling theories which change, also stay the same? In what respect is Sufi Islam one rather than many? To address these questions, I want to follow Geertz in the first instance by shifting the focus to locally told narratives about saints and away from published sacred texts. Unlike Geertz, however, my aim is to explore the underlying structures – the moral fables – animating such narratives. The structural logic of these fables, being implicit, is rarely questioned or challenged, even in politicized contexts. It provides believers with their sense of naturalized, taken-for-granted certainty. So much so that such fables, rather than being modified in travel, once adopted are a symbolic force reshaping the cultural environments they invade. This is so because, as Becker has argued, in most cultures: ‘knowledge of plot constraints is unstated background knowledge, like

150 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

the knowledge of grammar and syntax. It is learned indirectly, first through fairy tales and nursery rhymes (and their equivalent in other cultures), and then from the various media that have access to children’ (Becker 1979, p. 217). Hence, going against the anthropological tendency to stress the local, I propose that Sufi Islam, despite its apparent variety and concrete localism, embodies a global religious ideology within a social movement that everywhere fabulates the possibility (if not the actualization) of human perfection. Its shared implicit logic is revealed in the structural similarities between Sufi legends and modes of organization in widely dispersed localities, separated in time as well as in space. The very same myths told about an Indonesian and a Moroccan saint could both be told about Pakistani saints, or even about the very same saint. This is because the myths represent two important and linked dimensions of Sufi Islam – the inner jihad and the outer jihad. Jihad means struggle or battle. For Muslims there is an inner battle with their desires and appetites and an outer battle with infidels and non-believers (Figure 8.1). The two myths in both localities, Indonesia and Morocco, tell a story of an ordeal overcome through faith in the Sufi teacher. In Morocco the hero washes the clothes of the teacher, covered in smallpox, and then washes in the dirty water. This ordeal, which is an act of faith, endows him with divine blessing from the teacher who, as a charismatic holy man, is an intermediary with God, and inevitably also with divine knowledge. In the Indonesian myth the hero undergoes a typical Sufi ordeal – he stands in a river for 15 years waiting for his teacher to return, and is endowed with divine knowledge for his patience. In both cases,

(1) Inner Jihad: Overcoming Inner Desires/Total Submission Morocco: Saint Washes with Smallpox-Infested Water Indonesia: Saint Stands in a River for 15 Years RESULT: DIVINE KNOWLEDGE (2) Outer Jihad: Overcoming External Evil/Lack of Faith Morocco: Triumph Over the Evil Sultan Indonesia: Conversion of the Exemplary Centre RESULT: SPIRITUAL POWER OVERCOMES TEMPORAL POWER

Figure 8.1 Sufi myths in Morocco and Indonesia (after Geertz 1968).

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 151

according to Sufi doctrine, the heroes kill their nafs, their personal selfish and bodily desires or carnal self. The Indonesian hero’s myth ends here, except that we know that the hero went on to Islamicize the centre of the state. In the Moroccan myth, the hero has a confrontation with a powerful but evil monarch. This is the external jihad – the fight against evil or religious backsliders. My own interpretation of the message of this latter myth is different from that suggested by Geertz who interprets the myth as implying that the ruler proves his credentials as a descendant of the Prophet. I propose that the moral of this myth is that spiritual power is always above temporal power – the house of God and his dweller, the saint, is more powerful than the palace of the monarch and its dweller, the worldly ruler. Both may be descendants of the Prophet, but one is superior to the other by virtue of his spirituality and the monarch must therefore bow to him. The moral of the tale is that the rule of God is above the rule of man. Man does not make the law, he simply administers it.1 This principle is exemplified by Zindapir in a series of morality tales about his encounter with secular authority: Once an uncle of the Minister of Finance Mian Muhammad Yasin Khan Watto came to Pir Sahib. He was seriously ill, and had returned from England, diagnosed as suffering from an incurable illness. Pir Sahib cast dam (blow a blessing for healing purposes) on him and said: ‘Let him eat from the langar’s food and he will be cured’.2 Once healed, the Minister asked the Pir if he could make him, the Minister, his disciple, allow him to cast dam, and provide the food for the langar for three days. Zindapir said: ‘You will provide for the langar for three days but what will happen after that? I cannot make you partner, sharik, with God. Nor will I make you my disciple or allow you to cast dam.’ (First told to me by the Shaikh in October 1989) The tapestry of legends, myths and morality tales told by and about Zindapir objectify the saint’s divine grace and power through concrete images and remembered encounters. At the same time, the powerful validity of the legends and morality tales springs dialectically from the observed ascetic practices of the saint, which embody for his followers fundamental notions about human existence and sources of spiritual authority. This dual basis for legitimized truth – saintly practice and concrete image – makes the legendary corpus about the saint impervious to factual inconsistencies. The ‘myths’ and ‘legends’ are conceived of as historically

152 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

accurate, true, exemplary narratives about an extraordinary individual. If the myths contain self-evident truths that transcend the mundane and are not amenable to quotidian common sense evaluation, this is because the subject of these tales, the living saint, is perceived to be an extramundane individual, a man outside and above the world, rather than in it. This returns us to the question raised at the outset: to what extent is Sufism as a world religion differentially embedded in the common sense notions of specific cultural environments? I want to argue, against Geertz’s relativist position, that the religious rationality and common sense values implicit in Sufism transcend cultural and geographical boundaries. The underlying logic of the fables constituting this religious imagination is the same logic, whether in Morocco, Iraq, Pakistan or Indonesia. It is based on a single and constant set of equations, starting from the ultimate value of self-denial or asceticism: ‘World renunciation (asceticism) ⫽ divine love and intimacy with God ⫽ divine “hidden” knowledge ⫽ the ability to transform the world ⫽ the hegemony of spiritual authority over temporal power and authority. ’ The legends about powerful Sufis from Indonesia and Morocco which Geertz argues exemplify the contrastive localism of Islam contain, in essence, the same fable or plot: (1) initiation through a physical and mental ordeal overcome; (2) the achievement of innate and instantaneous divine knowledge; and (3) the triumphant encounter with temporal authority. The same legends can be found in Attar’s ‘Memorial of Saints’ which records the lives of the early saints of Baghdad (Attar 1990). What differs are merely the ecological and historical details: a flowing river and exemplary centre in Indonesia, desert sands and a fortress town in Morocco, the Baluch Regiment, an anti-colonial brigand’s valley and corrupt politicians in Pakistan. A single paradigmatic common sense upholds this legendary corpus, while its local concrete details – regiments, rivers and desert sands – embody this common sense and suffuse it with axiomatic authority. But the symbolic structure underlying this common sense is as unitary as it is inexorable.

Indonesian Sufism: teasing out comparisons This brings me finally to a comparison of South Asian and Indonesian Sufism. One of the difficulties of drawing such a comparison relates to the different terminology used to describe Sufi regional cults in Indonesia. The key elements – places, actors and rituals – that sustain Indonesian regional cults are described by their indigenous names even

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 153

in anthropological texts, and this makes comparison difficult to tease out. Nevertheless, the basic building blocks of the cults – saints, shrines, annual rituals, sacred exchange, central lodges and their hierarchically ordered branches – all seem to be present in Indonesia. Let me consider each of the different building blocks comprising Indonesian Sufi cults, before exploring how they are interrelated. I draw on published texts, but there are three doctoral theses and one masters thesis submitted to the Australian National University that are also crucial ethnographic documents in this comparative endeavour.3 As in South Asia, so too in Indonesia, there are famous ancient Sufi shrines of celebrated wali (friend of God, saint) which are places of pilgrimage for persons coming from the whole of Indonesia. As in South Asia, these major shrines often have associated with them whole villages of descendants who service the grave and its festivals, each with its own clientele. Such a village is described by Jeffery (1979) and by Pinto (1995) in their studies of the shrine of Nizam-uddin Auliya located in Delhi, and for Indonesia by Muhaimin (1995) in his description of the Buntet shrine complex in Cirebon, Java. My own focus here, however, is on the smaller Sufi regional cults whose extension is far more limited and local, focused on either a living saint or his shrine, which rise and fall periodically, waxing and waning over time. The other point which needs to be made in advance of the comparative analysis is one established clearly by Mark Woodward (1989) and a range of other Indonesian scholars: namely, that Sufi mystical theosophy in Indonesia, along with the practice of zikr resemble practices and beliefs elsewhere in the Muslim world. The basic ideas of taking the oath of allegiance to a saint (bai’at), initiation and ‘travel’ through different mystical stages on the Sufi path, self-denial, asceticism, control of the vital, selfish soul (nafs) and mystical epiphany are found in Indonesia as they are in the Middle East or South Asia. Second, as in South Asia, Sufism in Indonesia, known locally as ‘traditional’ Islam, has been under attack by Islamic and modernist reformists, who accuse it of unlawful syncretism and polytheism (shirk). While such highly politicized attacks are found throughout the Muslim world, and are often defined as an opposition between ‘doctor’ (‘ulama) and ‘saint’ (see Gellner 1981), in Indonesia, as in South Asia, it seems the resistance to this attack has involved an alliance of both saints and learned religious scholars or clerics (‘ulama), a point to which I return below. Following from this, like in South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world, a tendency to distinguish in Indonesia between practising Sufis and the

154 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

superstitions that surround the cult of saints’ shrines has obscured the intrinsic interdependency of these two. In Indonesia, saints are known honorifically as kyai, but also by a range of other titles: wali (usually reserved for big saints, including the nine founding saints in Java), muqaddam, mursyid, serepah (elder) and syeikh. Important kyai, founders of their own lodges (pesantren) are regarded as charismatic figures, imbued with blessing, and this charisma is transmitted from father to son, much as it is in other parts of the Muslim world. Woodward acknowledges that ‘for many traditional students, relationships with kyai are elements in the zuhud (ascetic) complex. They see kyai as much as living saints as teachers, as much as sources of blessing as of knowledge’ (Woodward 1989, p. 144). As in South Asia, in Indonesia high value is placed on asceticism even in the case of wealthy saints (ibid., p 145). Saints prepare amulets for supplicants and engage in healing, blessing and exorcism as they do in South Asia (ibid., p. 146). Indonesian saintly lodges or pesantren (ibid., p. 135) are most often rural, and they often own large tracts of land donated as religious endowments (waqf), by royal patrons (ibid., p. 146) or through purchase. If the lodge is an old one, it usually includes the graves of the founders and their sons and grandsons. These are known as keramat and are the focus of an annual festival commemorating the death of the saint, usually called khaul or kaul in Indonesia. The lodge doubles as a religious seminary for youth, mostly young men, which teaches a standard course in religious studies, with a traditional Sufi inflection. The centrality of teaching in the Indonesian lodges seems often to overshadow the centrality of saintly charisma and pilgrimage (ziarah) to a Sufi shrine characteristic of Pakistani and Middle Eastern central lodges. In Pakistan, Barelvi, Sufi-oriented schools and seminaries are kept separate from saints’ lodges (on the growth in the number of these schools in Pakistan see Malik 1998). Several ambiguities arise in the literature from the educational role of the pesantren Sufi lodges in Indonesia. The saint or his deputies (khalifa, khulfat, known in Indonesia also as badal murshid) who head the lodges are often described in English as ‘teachers’. More usually in Sufi parlance, the saint as religious guide on the Sufi path is called a murshid. Saints in South Asia never officiate as religious officials in the mosque or in weddings and funerals. Unless they are minor saints, they never teach young children. These are tasks allocated to learned religious clerics who respect saintly traditions. The saint’s role is confined to guiding his initiates (murid), healing supplicants, advising his flock and pronouncing

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 155

du’a, a supplicatory prayer or blessing. In addition, the saint organizes the feeding of the multitudes in rituals, festivals and weekly zikr meetings at the central lodge. So who is the kyai in Indonesian Sufi Islam? Is he a teacher of young men and small children or a murshid, initiating and guiding his disciples? The second ambiguity in the literature arises in relation to the organization of pesantren Sufi lodges in Indonesia. Woodward, following Dhofier (1980), describes the rise of a major Indonesia kyai saint, Hasyim Asy’ari, born in 1881, scion to a saintly family (Woodward 1989, p. 136). He began ‘teaching’ in his father’s lodge at the age of 13 and later studied in Mecca. Returning to Java in 1899, he ‘taught’ briefly at his older brother’s lodge before founding his own lodge, Pesantren Tebuireng at Cukir in East Java. Woodward says that ‘within ten years it was a major supplier of teachers to other pesantren’. He reports that according to Dhofier (1982, pp. 95–96), Asy’ari’s students were sent to found their own lodges, many of which became institutions with over a thousand students. The question is, were these so-called student-turned-teacher disciples promoted by the saint as his deputies and messengers (khalifa), being in some cases even aspiring kyai saints in their own right, or were they merely learned ‘ulama? One possibility is that in Indonesia two regional cult systems overlap, but only partially: one system is that of learned scholars, the ‘ulama, who remain connected to a major centre of learning such as Tebureng in East Java, described by Dhofier (1999). Dhofier says that in its heyday there were 500 madrasah linked to this lodge with 200,000 students, and it was the centre of the NU (Nahdatul ‘Ulama), an association of ‘ulama, with its circuit of meetings and conferences (see Hefner 2002, p. 144). Alternatively, one might look at the regional cults of the kyai or saints as comprising the sacred centre along with its khulafa, sent by the saint to found new lodges, who continue to recognize their allegiance to their saint–guide, and to regard his lodge as the cult centre. This view is lent support by Jamhari’s (2002) discussion of the central lodge in Buntet of a Tijanniya saint studied by Muhaimin (1995, p. 346). Kyai Abbas acting as murshid, Jamhari (2002, pp. 19–20) says, ‘organized and centralized’ this Sufi order widely through the establishment of new lodges centred on Buntet. Van Bruinessen (2003, p. 9) reports on an ‘alim who ‘succeeded his father Romly as the major Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbandi teacher of East Java and inherited a vast network of hundreds of local, mostly rural, groups of followers led by local deputies that went on expanding, and he established close contacts with members of the military and political establishment in Jakarta’. He

156 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

further reports that ‘in West Java, there was a rapidly expanding Qadiriya wa-Naqshbandiya network too, centred upon the pesantren of Suryalaya and its chief teacher, Abah Anom’. Sila (2003, p. 3) reports on a popular order in Bandung which had 318 places of manaqiban (Sufi circles practising collective reading of saintly hagiographies), with the number of students extending to tens of thousands throughout the city. Another order, Kadisiyya, was said to have founded four branches, spreading in several large cities in Indonesia, including Jakarta, with Cilegon as the headquarters (Sila 2003, p. 9). This particular founding saint claims direct inspiration from a hidden companion (Uways) of the Prophet. In one case, reported by Azra (2003, p. 5) a newly founded Sufi centre which treated drug users through zikr, had developed a transnational network throughout South East Asia. In other words, it had developed a new regional cult around the centre. How is such a far-flung regional cult coordinated in Indonesia by the centre? We know nothing about these particular cults as regional cults, but the literature contains some clues about the coordination of other Sufi regional cults in Indonesia. First, it seems that many saints are related to one another by kinship or marriage, and trace their origin as Sayyids to the Prophet’s line of descent, as well as through a sacred genealogy (silsila) of teacher–disciples (Woodward 1989, p. 145). In his own study of Jatinom, another lodge, Jamhari reports on a traditional celebration, named Angkawiya, commemorating the life of a dead saint, to which people walked on foot some 30 kilometres to obtain apem, a pancake-like cake made of rice flour, coconut milk, sugar, salt and oil (Jamhari 2000, p. 228). The festival is also known as apenam (ibid., pp. 205–215; 2002, p. 29). The festival culminates in a ritual struggle by the attendant crowd for the pancakes, regarded as endowed with powerful blessing (baraka), thrown from a tall tower. As many as three tons of flour are donated by surrounding villagers, and the apem itself can only be baked by direct descendants of the saint (Jamhari 2000, pp. 217, 226). The apem is arranged in a mountainous shape, in two types, one male, one female, representing the saint, Kyai Ageng Gribig and his wife (ibid., p. 226). Before its distribution a supplication (do’a) is made over it and during its distribution the crowds chant dhikr and address God, the Almighty and most powerful (ibid., p. 227). Exegesis Jamhari obtained highlighted the spiritual aspect of the scramble, the ‘striving’ for apem. ‘This means that if in the slametan you obtained apem’, one informant told Jamhari, ‘this indicates that you have obtained a spiritual blessing from Kyai Ageng Gribig’ (the departed saint) (ibid., p. 39). The apem, containing baraka, is not eaten but can be

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 157

used in various ways: as a ‘fertilizer’ scattered over fields, to get rid of pest attacks, to protect a house (ibid., p. 229). We see here parallels with the ‘urs in Pakistan as an annual ritual festival to which all the branches of a regional cult make pilgrimage. This is a moment of sacred exchange: the saint feeds the multitudes, slaughtering hundreds of animals in sacrifice, while disciples return from the lodge with gifts of white caps and cotton scarves. The moment of du’a, supplication, is a breathless moment of sacred communitas. Indeed, I have argued that the ‘urs is the organizational hub of Zindapir’s and other Sufi regional cults. Woodward reports on the royal Sufi rituals at Yogyakarta, in which the sultan is said to attain mystical union with God and tens of thousands of people gathered are offered ‘mountains’ of sticky rice, highly charged with blessing (Woodward 1989, p. 179). Like the King of Morocco, Indonesian royals also claim direct descent from the Prophet. Dhofier (1999) reports that in the minor lodge at Tegalsari, at its heyday, during the annual kaul, 5 cows, 40 goats and hundreds of chickens were slaughtered for the festival. Jamhari reports that in the annual kaul akbar ceremony at the shrine of Sunan Tembayad, which lasts for a whole week, the cloth on the grave, the pasang singep, is changed and the old cloth is cut into handkerchief shapes and distributed to visitors, sometimes for a fee (Jamhari 2000, pp. 127, 218). In Pakistan, dupatta, green, red or black shawls, are carried through the lodge and laid on the saint’s grave, much as they would be held over the bride’s head at a mehndi, pre-wedding ritual, symbolizing his union, ‘marriage’ with God (Werbner 2003, pp. 252–254, 269). Van Bruinessen tells us that from 1950 to 1970, traditional tariqa such as the Naqshbandi, Qadri and Tijani, ‘expanded considerably and built up enormous rural followings, that had turned umbrella organizations into significant political actors’ (2003, p. 13) with many top-level army officers and politicians. This is very like the following built up by Zindapir. But what are these so-called umbrella organizations? Is he referring here to the regional cults formed around particular living saints, or are they the associations that joined these cults together? Once again the absence of analytic terms means that comparative theoretical and conceptual clarity are lost. For example, according to van Bruinessen (ibid.) among the living saints that emerged were antinomian characters, but we are not told whether they were able to build regional cults, or whether they simply had a high-level clientele who believed in their magical powers of blessing. A further weakness in this literature is that no distinction is made between disciples, supplicants to a saint seeking blessing or healing, and

158 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

‘groups’ of disciples, whether merely forming a zikr circle, or focused on an alternative lodge. Second, we know little about how students are recruited to study at the lodge. How can a Javanese lodge attract young students in their teens from as far afield as Bali or Malaysia? Such recruitment from a vast catchment area implies connections – whether via key individuals or lodges located in peripheral areas. Muhaimin (1995) contains the best ethnographic detail on the connections between different lodges. He reports on the many instances in which a saint sends delegates to found new lodges, much as Zindapir did in Pakistan and beyond it. The career of a saint usually begins as a young man, with travel for learning, in which he may spend time in many different lodges, and often in the Hijaz, before returning to his original lodge and ultimately founding his own lodge. Over time a network of lodges emerges, linked through discipleship to the central lodge (see in particular Muhaimin 1995, pp. 311, 351). There is a tendency for saints to recruit talented sons-in-law by marrying them to their daughters, and many lodges are connected by intricate kinship relations, since saints tend to marry endogamously with families tracing descent to the Prophet (ibid., pp. 317, 320). Lodges often celebrate the eleventh of the month (known in Pakistan as gyarvi sharif) much as they do in Pakistan, and Muhaimin reports regular visits from other branches to such celebrations. This, in addition to the annual ritual commemorating the saint’s death, the kaul, celebrated in most central lodges in Java, although we are told little about the delegations from other lodges attending such festivals. It is also evident from the ethnography that most big saints go on regular circuits to visit outlying branches of the lodge. As in other regional cults, large Sufi regional cults in Indonesia encompass a wide catchment area, including followers on other islands (Bali, Kalimantan, Sumatra) and beyond, in Singapore and Malaysia. They are thus inter-ethnic and transnational. This is a distinctive feature of central place organizations and pilgrimage centres, which do not respect administrative and territorial boundaries. According to Richard Werbner, regional cults are, distinctively cults of the middle range – more far-reaching than any parochial cult of the little community, yet less inclusive in belief and membership than a world religion in its most universal form. Their central places are shrines in towns and villages, by cross-roads or even in the wild, apart from human habitation, where great populations from various communities or their representatives, come to supplicate, sacrifice, or simply make pilgrimage. They are cults which have a topography of

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 159

their own, conceptually defined by the people themselves and marked apart from other features of cultural landscapes by ritual activities. (R. Werbner 1977, p. ix) Like other regional cults, Sufi cults are transregional, transnational and transethnic. They interpenetrate with one another rather than generating contiguous, bounded territories. They leapfrog across major political and ethnic boundaries, creating their own sacred topographies and flows of goods and people. These override, rather than being congruent with, the political boundaries and subdivisions of nations, ethnic groups or provinces (ibid.). Regional cult analysis aims to disclose hidden structural interdependencies and ruptures between different domains of action: economic, ritual and political. Like other regional cults, Sufi ones are both linked to centres of political power and are in tension with them. Various historical studies have highlighted the pragmatic tendencies of Sufism in South Asia which have enabled Sufi saints to accommodate to a variety of different political regimes and circumstances, over many centuries of imperial and postcolonial rule.4 The relationship between the political centre and the sacred centre is a changing, historically contingent one, and in this sense, as in others, regional cults are historically evolving social formations.5 In a landmark study of sacred peripherality, Victor Turner defined pilgrimage centres as ‘centres out there,’ beyond the territorial political community, and in doing so opened up a whole new set of questions regarding ritual journeys as transformative movements (Turner 1974, ch. 5). Turner conceptualized pilgrimage centres as alternative loci of value within feudal-type societies. Like the rites of passage of tribal societies, he argued, the ritual movement in pilgrimage culminated in a liminal (or liminoid) moment of ‘communitas’ which was anti-structural and anti-hierarchical, releasing an egalitarian sociality and amity. Pilgrimage centres thus embodied an alternative ethical order, one uncircumscribed by territorially defined relations of power and authority. In critiquing the series of dichotomous contrasts generated by Turner’s theory – inclusive versus exclusive relations, peripherality versus centrality, generic versus particularistic sociality, egalitarian or homogeneous relations versus hierarchical or differentiated ones – regional cult analysis aims to highlight the dialectic resulting from the complex conjuncture of these apparently opposed types of relationships, coexisting in a single cult (R. Werbner 1977, p. xii passim). As the history of Sufism in South Asia shows, Sufi regional cults are inextricably intermeshed in regional politics. This is because Sufi cults

160 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

are not simply inclusive. They foster an exclusive membership, and yet the sacred centre and the major festivals around it are open to all. Relations between initiates are said to be (generic) relations of love and amity, stripped of any prior status, idealized as beyond conflict or division, yet the organization of regional cults is based around the ingathering of elective groups from particular, defined political and administrative communities – villages, towns, city neighbourhoods – while cult relationships are often, as I show in my book (P. Werbner 2003), marred by interpersonal rivalries and jealousies. The egalitarianism between initiates comes alongside internal relations of hierarchy, and all disciples, whatever their rank, are subject to the absolute authority and discipline of the saint or his successors at the cult centre. Indeed, worldly status, class and caste are implicitly recognized at the central lodge, while saintly descendants often vie bitterly for the succession after the death of the founder.6 If there is a moment of experienced communitas during the annual ritual at a Sufi regional cult centre, it is the product of complex logistical planning, a highly disciplined division of labour, and constant vigilance on the part of the organizers. In the face of criticisms levelled against Turner’s theoretical model (R. Werbner 1977; Sallnow 1987; Eade and Sallnow 1991; and for India see Fuller 1993, pp. 212–213), it seems more accurate to say that sacred pilgrimage creates not ‘anti’-structure but ‘counter’-structure. Nevertheless, Turner’s key point, that pilgrimage centres and the cults they generate produce sacred geographies where alternative, nontemporal and non-administrative ethical orders are ritually embodied and enacted, still seems valid. In this spirit, regional cult theory aims to conceptualize the dynamics of spatially alternative focal organizations to those centred on bounded, territorially based states or administrative units. The literature also makes clear the extent to which Sufi cults and orders are intermeshed with the politics of Indonesia, first with the politics of the court – royals claimed descent from the Prophet and officiated at major Sufi rituals – and later with the colonial and postcolonial governments. At the same time, most Indonesian saints guard their autonomy and refuse to be fully co-opted by any regime. This too is a widely found feature of Sufi saints and their cults.

Conclusion Sufism always has its concrete, local manifestations. Without an adequate analytic terminology, however, and a conceptual framework

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 161

linked to central place theory allowing for comparisons, the study of Indonesian Sufism seems doomed to remain locked in fragmentary descriptions and often fruitless debates about syncretism. Metaphors such as ‘networks’ are inadequate to describe the complex organizational logistics of Indonesian Sufi regional cults, especially because these networks are not documented ethnographically in detail and are sometimes said to consist of individuals, sometimes of groups or (in rare cases) of lodges (pesantren). Without serious consideration of hierarchy and authority relations within each regional cult or order, one has no sense of how such networks are constructed and maintained. Without serious attention to ritual performance as indexical event, the management of cult organization remains obscure, and no serious comparative analysis with South Asia or the Middle East is possible. Above all, we know very little about the kinds of sacred exchanges occurring at a central lodge – how are relations between saint and disciple or saint and khalifa embodied? What are the rituals that connect distant places? We do, however, get a hint of the prevalence of such sacred exchanges in accounts of the distribution of apem, sticky rice and sacrificial meat. It is evident that, as in Pakistan and North Africa, in Indonesia Sufi centres rise and fall, wax and wane (see Dhofier 1980, pp. 172, 235) as they do elsewhere. But the literature on Sufism in Indonesia lacks serious attention to the indexical dimensions of the annual saints’ ritual, the kaul or its equivalent which, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, revitalizes the charisma of a saint and his dominion over an extensive catchment area, or wilayat. Too much attention, it seems to me, is paid to the educational, scholarly and intellectual dimensions of Indonesian Sufi cults, or the mapping in space of genealogical connections or chains of authority in the case of Sufi orders. These may not reflect actual organizational connections on the ground, but are often merely a way of mapping space. To understand the charisma of a Sufi saint, and the cult he creates, sometimes expanded by his descendants, the need is to study contemporary Sufi regional cults, apart from the major global Sufi orders to which they recognize allegiance. The need, in other words, is to plot the actual relationships between branches and their disciples, and how these are sustained and revitalized through periodic ritual performance. In Trimingham’s view, the larger orders were never viable organizations; their expansion took place, and continues to do so, via the ta’ifas. This was true of the Suharwardiyya order which was never, he says, a unified order but merely a ‘line of ascription from which derived hundreds of

162 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification

ta’ifas’ (Trimingham 1971, p. 179). He continues: Similarly with the Qadiriyya; the descendant of ’Abd al-Qadir in Baghdad is not recognized as their superior by an Arab Qadiri ta’ifa. Even the nineteenth-century Tijaniyya, as it expanded, has tended to lose its centralized authority. The shaikh of the central Darqawi zawiya has no control over the many offshoots. (Ibid.) Only very small, parochial orders are coherent, he says, maintained by tours undertaken by the shaikh and his emissaries (ibid.). Although lodges often imitate royal courts, the Weberian opposition between bureaucratic and charismatic authority still holds true for autonomous Sufi lodges in South Asia.7 The capitalist, commodity economy is converted at a saint’s lodge into a good-faith, moral economy through altruistic giving to the communal langar, a form of perpetual sacrifice. More generally, the site of the saint’s lodge is set apart as a space of voluntarism, expressive amity and emotional good will, of sukun, tranquillity and harmony. The state and its politicians, by contrast, are seen as menacing, corrupt, greedy and unfeeling. They are not truly ‘rational’ in the Weberian sense since they bend the rules to their selfish interests; but they use the instruments of patriarchal domination to achieve their goals. Theirs is a charisma of unbridled power. By contrast the saint’s charisma – and his achievement of subjective autonomy and freedom – is the product of his perceived (and projected) self-denial and self-mastery, of love and generosity. But at the same time, as regional cult theory proposes, social structure is not effaced in Sufi regional cults, just as the mundane realities of politics, economics and social ranking cannot be made to disappear; instead, these structural and ordering elements are incorporated in new combinations, and negotiated in practice. Experientially, nevertheless, the lodges of Sufi saints are for supplicants and pilgrims a fleeting sanctuary from the ‘real’ world, a place of self-discovery and self-fashioning. A comparative analysis between Sufi cults in widely separated localities, using the range of analytic tools outlined in this chapter, enables us to begin to explore these complex interrelationships between power, authority, economics and religious experience in the contemporary world.

Acknowledgements This chapter was first presented at the conference on ‘Cultures, Nations, Identities and Migrations’, 15–16 April 2004. I would like to thank participants at the conference, and particularly Kathy Robinson, for

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 163

their insightful comments. In writing the chapter, I benefited from a three-week fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University (ANU), which enabled me to read some of the theses lodged in the ANU Library.

Notes 1. A similar message in contemporary Morocco is enunciated by Abd al Yasin, founder of the Justice and Charity Society, who rejects the authority of the king, according to Paul Heck, in a paper presented to the conference on ‘Exile and Tradition’, Copenhagen, September 2006. 2. Langar: Cooked food, usually regarded as blessed and containing healing qualities, given to pilgrims at a saint’s lodge free of charge. 3. These are: Dhofier (1980), Zulkifli (1994), Muhaimin (1995), Jamhari (2000). For a survey of studies of Islam, see Jamhari (2002) and for further references see the brief survey by Fox (2002). 4. See, for example, Gilmartin (1984, 1988); Eaton (1978, 1984, 1993); Mann (1989); Liebeskind (1998); on North Africa see Evans-Pritchard (1949); Eickelman (1976, 1977). 5. An example of the complex, historically unstable relations between Sufi regional cults and indigenous political rulers in South Asia is highlighted in Susan Bayly’s study of South India during the volatile pre-colonial period from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries (Bayly 1989). Initially following the trade routes into the hinterland, Sufi regional cults drew extensive patronage from a wide variety of Muslim and Hindu petty kings and rulers who struggled to legitimize their rule by claiming spiritual dominion via important Sufi shrines or Hindu temples. The sacred networks of individual shrines extended well beyond a ruler’s administrative territory and were thus perceived to be a source of power, so that displays of generosity towards a famous dargah became ‘important touchstone[s] in the competitive acts of state-building pursued by professing Hindu and Muslim rules’ (ibid., p. 221). 6. Caste is even more in evidence in the complex regional cult organization of the Swaminarayans of Gujarat who divide ascetics from lay followers and recognize divisions by caste among the ascetics (Williams 1984). 7. For a discussion of Weber’s (1948) notion of charisma, see Eisenstadt (1968), and for the debate as to whether charisma is located at the centre or periphery see Shils (1965), Turner (1974), and Geertz (1983).

References Attar, Farid al-Din (1990) Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat AlAuliya (Memorial of the Saints) , trans. A.J. Arberry London: Arkana. Azra, Asyumardi (2003) ‘Transnational Network and the Transformation of Indonesian Islam’ Paper presented at the International Conference on Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, Bogor, 4–6 September 2003. Bayly, Susan (1989) Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

164 Religion, Cosmopolitanism & Subjectification Becker, A. L. (1979) ‘Text-building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre’, in The Imagination of Reality, eds A. L. Becker and Aram A. Yengoyen. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. van Bruinessen, Martin (2003) ‘Sufi Orders, Indigenous Mystical Traditions, and Islamic Reformis in Indonesia: Some Counter-Intuitive Developments. Paper presented at the International Conference on Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, Bogor, 4–6 September 2003. Dhofier, Zamankhsyari (1980) ‘The Pesantren Tradition: a Study of the Role of the Kyai in the Maintenance of the Traditional Ideology of Islam in Java.’ PhD thesis, The Australian National University. —— (1982) Tradisi Pesantren: Studi tentang Pandangan Hidup Kyai. Jakarta: LP3ES. —— (1999) The Pesantren Tradition: The Role of Kyai in the Maintenance of Tradtional Religion in Java. Arizona, AZ: Arizona State University. Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow (1991) ‘Introduction’, in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routlege, pp. 1–29. Eaton, Richard W. (1978) Sufis of Bijapur, 1204–1760. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (1984) ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid’, in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 333–356. —— (1993) The Rise of Islam on the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eickelman, Dale F. (1976) Moroccan Islam. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. —— (1977) ‘Ideological Change and Regional Cults: Maraboutism and Ties of “Closeness” in Western Morocco’, in Regional Cults, ed. Richard P. Werbner. ASA Monographs No. 16. London and New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 3–28. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1968) Max Weber and Institution Building: Selected Papers. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1949) The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fox, James J. (2002) ‘Towards a Social Anthropology of Islam in Indonesia’, in Islam in Indonesia: Islamic Studies and Social Transformation, eds Fu’ad Jabali and Jamhari. Montreal and Jakarta: Indonesia-Canada Higher Education Project, pp. 73–81. Fuller, C. J. (1993) The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Princeton, NJ: Princton University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1968) Islam Observed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —— (1983) Local Knowledge. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gellner, Ernest (1981) Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilmartin, David (1984) ‘Shrines, Succession, and Sources of Moral Authority’, in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 221–240. —— (1988) Empire and Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Heck, Paul (2006) ‘The Politics of Sufism. Is there One?’ Paper to the conference ‘Exile and Tradition: Transnational Contemporay Sufism’, Copenhagen 20–23 September 2006. Hefner, Robert W. (2002) ‘Varieties of Muslim Politics: Civil vs. Statist Islam’, in Islam in Indonesia: Islamic Studies and Social Transformation, eds Fu’ad Jabali and Jamhari. Montreal and Jakarta: Indonesia-Canada Higher Education Project, pp. 136–151.

Sufi Regional Cults – India and Indonesia 165 Jamhari (2000) Popular Voices of Islam: Discourse on Muslim Orientations in South Central Java. PhD thesis, The Australian National University. —— (2002) ‘Javanese Islam: The Flow of Creed’, Studia Islamika 9, no. 2, pp. 3–45. Jeffery, Patricia (1979) Frogs in a Well. London: Zed Books. Liebeskind, Claudia (1998) Piety on its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Malik, Jamal (1998) Colonisation of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan. Delhi: Manohar. Mann, Elizabeth A. (1989) ‘Religion, Money and Status: Competititon for Resources at the Shrine of Shah Jamal, Aligarh’, in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 145–171. Muhaimin, A. G. (1995) The Islamic Traditions of Cirebon: Ibadat and Adat among Javanese Muslims. PhD thesis, The Australian National University. Pinto, Desiderio (1995) Piri-Muridi Relationship: A Study of the Nizamuddin Dargah. New Delhi: Manohar. Sallnow, Michael J. (1987) Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Shils, Edward A. (1965) ‘Charisma, Order and Status’, American Sociological Review 30, pp. 199–230. Sila, Muhammad Adlin (2003) ‘Tarekat Kadisiyyah: An Example of Neo-tariqat Searching for Sympathy of Urban People in Bandung.’ Paper presented at the International Conference on Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, Bogor, 4–6 September 2003. Trimingham, J. S. (1971) The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press. Troll, Christian W. (ed.) (1989) Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor (1974) ‘Pilgrimages as Social Processes.’ Chap. 5 in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 166–230. Weber, Max (1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Werbner, Pnina (2003) Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. London: Hurst Publishers and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Pnina and Helene Basu (1998) ‘Introduction: The Embodiment of Charisma’, in Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, eds Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu. London: Routledge, pp. 3–27. Werbner, Richard (1977) ‘Introduction’, in Regional Cults, ed. Richard Werbner. London and New York, NY: Academic Press. Williams, Raymond B. (1984) A New Face of Hinduism: The Swaminarayan Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodward, Mark R. (1989) Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Tuscon, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Zulkifli (1994) Sufism in Java: The Role of the Pesantren in the Maintenance of Sufism in Java. MA thesis, The Australian National University.

This page intentionally left blank

Part III Identity and Displacement

This page intentionally left blank

9 The Dragon Dance: Shifting Meanings of Chineseness in Indonesia Melani Budianta

Indonesia in the twenty-first century has witnessed a change in state policy towards the Chinese Indonesian. An official ban against Chinese language and culture, which lasted for almost three decades during the New Order period (1966–98), was lifted in 2000. In 2004 Chinese New Year was formally declared a national holiday, and in 2006, the state officially acknowledged Confucian marriages. These official gestures have not only welcomed Chinese culture and arts into public life, but also generated euphoria of the open celebration of Chineseness. These moves mark a reversal of the assimilationist policy adopted by the New Order in the wake of the communist cleansing of 1966 (following an alleged coup that brought a violent end to the Sukarno presidency). Initiated by Chinese Indonesian intellectuals, assimilationist policies were intended to cut the cultural and political ties between Beijing and Jakarta that had been promoted by Sukarno, and to erase marks of difference. Assimilation was used by the New Order to discriminate, however. In 1968 Chinese Indonesians were coerced to drop Chinese names, and Chinese ritual and tradition, including Chinese language and characters were banned in public. Official identity cards marked their difference as ‘citizens of foreign descent’, a term reserved for Indonesians of Chinese descent and applied without discrimination to the diverse population of Chinese Indonesians including the Peranakan, the group descended from a long history of migration and assimilation to local cultures, and the Totok, relatively later migrants who retain Chinese cultural orientation. The fall of the New Order government in 1998 opened a path for recognition of cultural difference. The barongsai, a Chinese traditional 169

170 Identity and Displacement

dance performed by a group of acrobatic players wearing lion and dragon costumes, has become fashionable nationwide. Mandarin language courses have mushroomed in anticipation of China as the emerging regional economic force. New Chinese political organizations have sprung up. Topics related to Chineseness are on the rise in publishing and media. Reactions to this euphoria have been mixed. For many, the festive 2004 celebration of Chinese New Year was a milestone in the struggle for cultural rights, in line with the aims – advocated since Indonesian independence – as the ‘integrationist agenda’. This group wished to consider Chinese Indonesians as an ethnic group, like the Javanese or Sundanese. Harry Tjan Silalahi, one of the architects of assimilationist policy, expressed concern that the celebration of Chineseness ‘has gone too far’ (Tempo, 1 February 2004). Junus Jahya, a Chinese Moslem leader, worried about the possibility of ‘resinization’, of already assimilated Chinese to reaffirming Chineseness (2004). Ariel Heryanto (2004), a staunch critic of the New Order’s repressive cultural policies, spoke of ‘unintended racism’ beneath the public acknowledgement of Chinese culture. This chapter locates these diverse responses to the public display of Chineseness after 1998 in the historical roots of heterogeneity.1 Beneath the fascination and anxiety about Chineseness is an unsettled account with history as well as the urgent need for change.

Chineseness as history Ien Ang (2001, p. 37) asks ‘Can One Say No to Chineseness?’ The autobiography of William Yang, ‘a third-generation Australian Chinese’, illustrates ‘the all too familiar experience of a subject’s harsh coming into awareness of his own, unchoosing, minority status’. At school, Yang was called ‘Ching-Chong Chinaman, Born in a jar, Christened in a teapot’. Yang, who did not see himself as a Chinese, asked his mother and his brother, who confirmed his Chineseness in a tone which suggested that ‘Chineseness was some terrible curse’ (Ang 1998, p. 37). For many assimilated Peranakan Chinese, the experience of coming to Chineseness as an unpleasant surprise is all too familiar. In 1968 my father, a staunch pro-assimilationist Catholic, gathered his seven children to make them understand why they had to change their Chinese names. He explained away the racism that we encountered daily as a historical legacy; not exactly a curse but a cross to bear. Having no cultural affiliation with Chineseness, I was then only too eager to abandon my Chinese name. One generation later, my youngest daughter,

The Dragon Dance 171

born just a few years before the Reformasi of 1998 – and spared its trauma – was only too glad to know that she had Chinese background. Growing up in a global era, where a foreign language was an advantage, she demanded to learn Mandarin, and took a Chinese name. The process of self-identification as Chinese (or the acknowledgement that Chineseness is an issue that one has to deal with) differs from one generation to another, from one individual to another. The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug of war between self-positioning and being positioned by others. Studies about the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia have pointed to the diversity within this group and the shifting nature of identity formation. Aimee Dawis (2005) discovers that young people of Chinese descent from the 1970’s generation, growing up in different localities give different meanings to their identity due to the differing sociocultural positions of the Chinese minority. One does not acquire Chineseness only from what is handed down (descent), or by pure choice of affiliation (consent). The dominant structures of power – state policies and socio-historical forces – contribute significantly in shaping one’s social identity and subjectivity. The assimilation of Chinese migrants to Indonesian local cultures that characterized the pre-colonial era was disrupted by the divide et impera strategy of the Dutch colonial policy (Ong 2005). Ariel Heryanto (1998) sees the origin of Chineseness in Indonesia in the administrative engineering of Dutch colonial government that reduced the heterogeneity of Chinese into a single category. Chinese were required to live in segregated areas, to obtain travel permits if they left their compounds, and to attend Dutch–Chinese schools, all of which shaped Chinese identity as separate from the local population. They were classified as lower than the Dutch but higher than the indigenous population, and Chinese businessmen were used as tax collectors, nurturing negative stereotypes (Suryadinata 2002, pp. 69–80). The earliest Chinese massacres occurred during the colonial era (the 1740 massacre in Batavia, and later the 1916 anti-Chinese riot) (Pramoedya 2000). After Indonesian independence in 1945, anti-Chinese sentiment was manifested in a state regulation called PP10 issued by the Sukarno government in 1957, which forbade foreigners from conducting retail business in villages and remote areas: it was applied to Chinese Indonesians and resulted in an exodus to mainland China. In the mid-twentieth century, the Totoks, who were oriented culturally and politically towards China, divided between those who sided

172 Identity and Displacement

with the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Taiwanese Republic of China (ROC). Peranakan organized themselves into the pro-Dutch, the neutral, and the pro-Indonesian (Suryadinata 1981). Following Indonesian independence, Peranakan Chinese politics were divided between the assimilationists and the integrationists. Assimilationists largely consisted of people with no cultural links to China, who believed in assimilating with indigenous cultures. Integrationists had stronger cultural links with China, and considered ‘Indonesian Chinese’ as an ethnic group (rather than a ‘race’). Their closer links with China brought them under suspicion as communists and many were killed or jailed. The assimilationist group supported the erasure of Chineseness in an effort to avoid the leftist label and later ‘protect’ the Chinese minority from the 1965 massacre of those affiliated with communism. However, many were disillusioned to see the New Order government enforce assimilation in a repressive way (Budiman 2000). From 1965, ‘Cina’ was officially used by the state and the mass media to refer to both the PRC as well as the Chinese people. The term had been widely used in the Malay-speaking world up to the end of the nineteenth century, but accrued a negative connotation post-1965, when the act of naming was intended as an act of Othering. It is in this context that an alternative term, Tionghoa – first adopted by the Chinese Indonesian organization Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan in 1900 – became more acceptable to many Chinese Indonesians. This act of Othering was followed by the bans on cultural displays and the coercive practices mentioned above. Restricted from participating in formal politics and state affairs, the Chinese Indonesians found a place in business and economic ventures, thus strengthening their stereotypical image as ‘economic animals’. The Suharto government used the financial support of successful Chinese businessmen and state power was employed to ease bureaucratic procedures or provide trade monopolies. The stereotype of the Chinese as a wealthy minority close to power makes them a susceptible scapegoat in anti-government riots, a postcolonial continuation of the ‘buffer role’. The act of Othering does not come only from outside. Arief Budiman (2000) notes that one of his reasons for siding with the assimilationist policy was the racist attitude of those inordinantly proud of their Chineseness. Chineseness is a product of history. Government policies in the past, traumatic events, cannot but shape the notion of being marked collectively as ‘Chinese’. To write that history – be it in a critical, alternative way – is to participate in the creation of Chineseness. One can confront it, challenge it, redefine it, but it will always haunt. One of the most

The Dragon Dance 173

haunting events in the history of the Chinese Indonesian was May 1998, the climax of the Reformasi movement that was spurred by the economic crisis of 1997. The May riots occurred when pressures against Suharto was mounting, creating suspicion that it was an engineered havoc to show the need for the militaristic security offered by the status quo. There was burning and looting of shops, malls, vehicles and thousands of people were killed. Chinese-owned properties were targeted, women and girls of Chinese descent were violated, harassed and mass raped.2 The democratization that followed cleared a more liberal space for expression of Chineseness. A number of Chinese political and social organizations have been founded (Setiono 2003, p. 1065). The question remains whether this new era marks the making of new history of Chineseness in Indonesia, and whether the troubled past can be exorcized from today’s Indonesia.

Public display of Chineseness and its mixed response Ien Ang (2001) suggests that ‘depending on context and necessity, it may be politically mandatory to refuse the primordial interpellation of belonging to the largest race of the world, the family of the Chinese people’. Ariel Heryanto has pushed the diasporic paradigm to the limit by suggesting that Chineseness – as any other racial category – is nothing but a colonial construct. In a newspaper article published in Jakarta in 2004, he wrote, ‘From an objective, scientific, or biological perspective, there is no such thing as a Chinese person, as there is no such thing as an indigenous person. A person is made to become Chinese by social processes’ (2004). Heryanto’s article could not come at a more critical time: directed to an Indonesian audience witnessing the first public display of Chineseness since 1969. Chinese New Year was celebrated in a jubilant, celebrative mode in 2004. Main streets in the Chinatown area of Jakarta, for example, were closed for the dragon dance parade attended by the mayor and other state dignitaries and there were similar celebrations in other cities with significant Chinese populations. Yunita Winarto (pers. comm. 2004), an anthropologist, was moved by the excitement with which the proprietors of one Chinese temple in Jakarta replaced the Indonesian script on the Chinese New Year candle with previously forbidden Chinese characters. The mood of freedom of Reformasi had already liberated some hidden practices. In November 2000, when invited to perform at a wedding reception, a Chinese Yang Kiem player told Debra Yatim (pers. comm. November 2002), the event

174 Identity and Displacement

organizer, how meaningful that opportunity was. For 30 years she had hidden her musical instrument under her bed. She would steal the opportunity to play her classical melody at midnight, so softly so that no neighbours would hear. A younger generation does not generally attribute sentimental value to the open display of Chinese culture. But as Chineseness is absorbed into the market, it becomes a part of urban life style. Sending Gong Xi Fa Cai (Happy Chinese New Year) SMSs to friends, has become a trend. Hypermarkets and malls make a marketing opportunity of Chinese New Year as they do with Christmas and the Muslim Id holiday (a commoditization of culture that some call mallticulturalism). The popularity of Taiwanese TV series and popular music have made things Chinese agreeable to national youth culture. Eagerness to participate in this Chinese euphoria, if it can be so called, comes from many directions. The dragon dance parade is performed by people from varied cultural backgrounds. Jakarta residents of Betawi background put up the red angpao envelopes (red envelope used for gifting money), so the passing barongsai can take it and bring them good luck (Herlijanto 2004). Political parties and state dignitaries during the presidential election campaign in 2004 expressed respect for Chinese culture in their effort to win votes. The former head of the major modernist Muslim organization, Amien Rais, then a presidential candidate, appeared on TV in a Chinese outfit in front of a Chinese temple, sending Gong Xi Fa Cai greetings to the audience. Chinese candidates urged the minority Chinese population to choose candidates with a Chinese background. The term ‘ethnicity’ was used, rather than race, echoing the position of the integrationists in the previous era. The celebration of Chineseness in contemporary Indonesia thus encompasses a wide range of meanings that cannot simply be reduced to the paradigm of racism. Yet, as Ariel Heryanto (2004) indicates, there is a strong tendency to essentialize Chineseness as a set of characteristics, traditions and abilities, such as speaking Mandarin, following certain traditions or looking Chinese. Ariel Heryanto is not alone in criticizing the Chinese euphoria. Harry Tjan Silalahi, a Peranakan Chinese intellectual and a member of the group that had offered the assimilationist model, was interviewed in a leading news weekly magazine, with the headline, ‘The Chinese New Year celebration has almost gone too far’ (Tempo, 2004). He explains that too far means overdose. If everyday until midnight people perform the barongsai and lion dance, that is … going too far. Revelry amidst

The Dragon Dance 175

people who have recently suffered floods [in Jakarta] is going too far. Slaughtering pigs in the middle of Islamic settlements is going too far. I am very worried. (Tempo, 2004) His comments elicited wide reaction. Another assimilationist, the Chinese Muslim leader Junus Jahya (2004), expressed concern that the extravagance in the celebration shows ‘the gap between the rich and the poor in our country, which can be seen as parallel to the racial difference’. Like Heryanto, he is wary that the display of Chineseness will reinforce the negative stereotype of Chinese. Chinese Indonesians swamped Internet discussion groups with angry reactions to Harry Tjan Silalahi’s comments (Tjhin 2004b). The ghost of the past haunts the present: what returns is not only past conflict between the integrationist and the assimilationist camps. Behind Silalahi’s fear is the trauma of the anti-Chinese riots, the spectre of May 1998, the looming of bleak collective memory. This fear is explicit in Silalahi’s warning, ‘If a stone is cast when barongsai is performed, stop playing. If people protest when Mandarin is spoken in public place, stop speaking’ (Tempo, 2004). Younger Chinese scholars are more strategic in their approach. Juliawan, a graduate student (2004), argued that although both Ariel Heryanto and Harry Tjan Silalahi are fighting racism, they in fact ‘can be accused of racism, as they overlook the facts of discrimination’. Ariel Heryanto’s postmodernist perspective is seen to intersect with the assimilationist perspective. Manneke Budiman, a cultural studies scholar, argued that ‘by reducing everything to racism, [Heryanto’s] framework precludes people’s agency to empower themselves and does not appreciate people’s solidarity. Racism should not be used as an ahistorical, universal norm, but should take into account local context and condition in which such acts take place’ (Budiman 2004). Silalahi’s proposition could be turned against all expressions of cultural identity, an erasure that could help to turn the clock back to assimilationist policy of the New Order era. In a similar vein as Budiman, Johanes Herlijanto (2004), a young sociologist, spoke of ‘strategic essentialism’ – in which people who have undergone discrimination need to use identity for selfempowerment or fighting discrimination. Both Budiman and Herlijanto express uneasiness with communitarian political activism amongst the Chinese, and prefer more universalist, issue-based activism. Herlijanto, who is of mixed Padang–Chinese background, will feel Padangese when talking to people from Padang, and Chinese amongst people of Chinese

176 Identity and Displacement

orientation. In this aspect, Herlijanto and others share similar theoretical groundings with Ariel Heryanto’s postmodern stand. However, they stress the importance of providing a space for understanding and appreciating the multiple meanings of Chineseness that are expressed in the ‘Chinese euphoria’. The debate about Chinese New Year celebration reminds us of the post-structuralist assertion of the impossibility in securing a place unmediated by language, free from history and ideology, from which to analyse phenomena. Whatever one says about being Chinese in Indonesia, one cannot avoid confronting the burden of history and one’s subjective positionality. Even to discuss the subject, for example, one has to choose between the divisive terms ‘Cina’ or ‘Tionghoa’.

Naming and subjectivity The Cina/Tionghoa controversy has a long history going back to the colonial era. The determining moment occurred when the term Cina, laden with derogatory connotations, was officially declared to replace Tionghoa in the mid-1960s. Many of the generation that experienced this silencing moment would prefer the term Tionghoa: the sociologist Melly G. Tan (pers. comm. 2000) believes that ‘one cannot use the term Tionghoa for name-calling as one could with the word Cina’. Yunita Winarto was of high school age when Suharto imposed the term: ‘It was Suharto’s discourse. The term “Cina” refers to Nation-State, whereas “Tionghoa” is cultural. It has an emic quality, an emotive self identification.’ Those who grew up after the 1960s, however, are used to hearing only one term for Chineseness, and do not mind it. The word ‘Tionghoa’ is alien to their ears: many of them are irritated and baffled by the seriousness with which some people argue for its readoption. They feel that the pressure to use one politically correct word is equally repressive. To use one or the other in the wrong company, however, runs the risk of alienating oneself. Manneke Budiman and Johanes Herlijanto, who were born between the 1960’s and 1980’s, choose to be oppositional to the dominant mode of address. They would use Tionghoa when the term Cina is enforced, and the other way round. Dede Oetomo, a sociologist of Chinese descent, prefers ‘Cina/Tionghoa’ (Oetomo 2004). My interviews with younger Chinese Indonesian scholars suggest a shift to a more relaxed, cosmopolitan attitude towards identity. Exposure to critical thinking through academic studies has also provided a significant turning point, in Dede Oetomo’s words, relieving the ‘burden of identity’ (pers. comm. 2004).3 Young people of Chinese

The Dragon Dance 177

descent, who have lost their ability to speak Mandarin, or those coming from non-Chinese-oriented background show interest in studying Mandarin, not because of cultural identification, but for practical purposes in the context of the emergence of China as a regional and global power. The May riots of 1998 haunt this seemingly more relaxed attitude towards cultural identity. Many children of Chinese background grew up without identification or realization of being Chinese. As with William Yang quoted by Ien Ang (2001), some of them learned about their Chineseness from racist remarks, and many experienced a frightening realization during the shock of the May riots. It is important to note, however, that the impact of the riots transcended age, and ethnicity. Many scholars and activists, including myself, acknowledged that that incident served as the turning point of their lives. Amongst women activists, it inspired nationwide solidarity movements (Budianta 2003). Scholars of Chinese background said they became more political, and more critical of the dominant ideological constructions around them.

Literary and cultural representation of Chineseness A few years prior to Reformasi, a student asked me why Indonesian writers of Chinese descent – unlike Asian-American writers – rarely brought up issues of identity. The class speculated that when being Indonesian is a precarious matter for Chinese Indonesian writers, foregrounding Chineseness would not be desirable. Wibowo (2003) noted that one year after Reformasi, a short story, ‘Panggil Aku Peng Hwa’ by Veven Sp. Wardhana, broke the silence (Wardhana 2002). The story depicts a Chinese character struggling with his identities – those interpellated by the state, his social circles and his own family. The post-Reformasi Chinese euphoria has seen a mushrooming of textual and artistic production – paintings, installation art, monuments, films, theatre, novels, short stories, memoirs, history books and non-fiction – produced by Indonesians of Chinese and non- Chinese descent. Critical perspectives on identity had been curbed for three decades through the policy on ‘SARA’, an abbreviation for Suku, Agama, Ras, dan Antar golongan (ethnicity, religion, race and class), which had been internalized by the mass media and publishing industries to filter materials that might provoke controversies or intergroup conflicts. Behind New Order censorship was anxiety over history: the government-sponsored history books, created monuments and produced films to install a collective memory that saw the regime as the gate to the

178 Identity and Displacement

future. Dark pages, the mystery of the 1965 killings and other untold stories were erased. Among books banned during the New Order was Slamet Muljana’s historical study on the fall of Hinduism and the rise of Islamic kingdoms (published in 1968, banned in 1971) which documents the role of Chinese Muslims in spreading Islam. Post-Reformasi, discussion on this taboo subject (Chinese Muslims in Java) emerged again.4 A television feature showcased the Chinese-style Muhammad Cheng Zheng He mosque in Surabaya, named after the devout Muslim Chinese admiral, known popularly as Cheng Ho. The 600th anniversary of his visit to Semarang was commemorated in 2005. In this process of rewriting of history, old texts by Chinese Indonesian authors have been reproduced, such as Malay Chinese literature from the pre-independence era; Ong Hok Ham’s essays on assimilation from the 1950s (2005); a historical piece on the city of Malang by a Chinese Indonesian with the pen name of Tjamboek Berdoeri (2004); and the discovery of the identity of the author by Benedict Anderson, Arief W. Jati and Stanley. The quest for history is exemplified in Beni Setiono’s 1137-page Tionghoa dalam Pusaran Politik (2003).5

The new order’s legacy In spite of the euphoria, many works written in sympathy with the Chinese nonetheless carry the legacy of racialist ideology. Remy Sylado’s romantic play, Siau Ling (2001), published and produced by the Catholic cultural community, most of them of Chinese descent, contains elements that can be seen to ‘ridicule Indonesians of Chinese descent’ (Kwa 2002, p. 1). In Ca Bau Kan, the film version (2002) as well as the novel by Remy Sylado (1999), ‘Chinese Indonesian, as a group, remain in the film – as in New Order popular and official discourse – demeaned and disenfranchised’ (Sen 2006, p. 182). Alwi Shahab’s anthology of essays Robinhood Betawi (2001) reflects these conflicting tones. On the one hand, his essays reaffirm the strong contribution of Chinese language and tradition in the making of Betawi culture and in the history of Jakarta. He shows solidarity between the Betawian people and the Chinese in their daily lives in the colonial era, welcomes the Chinese New Year as a national holiday and, during the time when the Chinese rituals were still banned in 1997, suggested that the tradition of celebrating Pehcun (100 days after the Chinese New Year) be readopted to promote tourism. He describes the horror of the Chinese massacre in 1740, the ‘darkest page in the history of Jakarta’. On the other hand, the essay, ‘Kapiten Souw Beng Kong’ is a reductive political

The Dragon Dance 179

history of the Chinese in Indonesia which affirms negative stereotypes of the Chinese. During the New Order era a number of institutions, which built relations with the government, like CSIS (Centre for Strategic and International Studies), were used to channel the aspiration of the Chinese minority. As a result, there was a derogatory pun that spelled out the acronym of CSIS as Cina Senang Indonesia Susah (Chinese Smile, Indonesia Sad). ‘Eksekutif magazine (August 1995) made a list of 100 Indonesian conglomerates, 79 of which were Chinese, one Indian, and the remaining 20 were indigenous, most of which were Cendana cronies’ (Shahab 2001, p. 19).

Naming and erasure Many art works try to challenge the negative stereotyping of the Chinese. Wilson Tjandinegara organized a travelling photo exhibition of poor Chinese communities in West Kalimantan and Tangerang to dispel the myth of Chinese economic domination (Liang, Chen and Wilson 2004). Similar motivation drove Lan Fang to write her novel Pai Yin: The idea for Pai Yin came after I saw the real life of Chinese villagers. They are farmers, workers, snack sellers, road workers. Young women work as city bus conductors. In Hong Kong I met very old women, still working in roadside cigarette kiosks. Frankly, this is rarely seen in Indonesia. The common stereotype of the Chinese in Indonesia is the successful businessman, so Chinese is assumed to be identical with wealth. (Lan Fang 2004, p. 19) Lan Fang aims to show that Chinese – in Indonesia or China – is not singular or homogeneous through the characters Pai Yin (a young woman from a village in mainland China) and Niko (a Chinese Indonesian with Western cultural orientation) (Lan Fang 2004, p. 21). Non-Chinese authors also are challenging stereotypes. In ‘Mama Chen-Chen’, Esti Nuryani Kasam (2005) describes the encounter of an indigenous narrator with a 60-year-old Christian Chinese who lives in a Yogyakarta village. Her character is the reversal of the common stereotype: she is generous, tolerant and supportive of Islamic believers; she is active in social and environmental work. K. Usman’s short story, ‘Si Ong’, follows a similar formula. Ong, a shop owner, is generous and kind-hearted towards his customers, neighbours and the needy, including orphans. He performs kerja bakti (community labour) and siskamling (voluntary night patrol). He is loved by his employees and neighbours,

180 Identity and Displacement

who all promise him – when he is terrorized during a riot – that they will make sure everything is safe for him: ‘Insya Allah, aman, kok’ (God willing, you will be safe) (Usman 2006, p. 99). We notice here the use of New Order propaganda (the forms of voluntary labour, for example) to critique racism. The repeated emphasis of the good traits of these Chinese characters betrays the shadow of the undesired Other. These representations of Chinese as ideal citizens in recent works employ benign Othering. To dispel the existing negative stereotype, one needs, first of all, to show the mark of difference on the subject, in the form of racialized identity, in order to demonstrate that this subject of difference is actually not an Other to be discriminated against, but is indeed a member of the same sisterhood or brotherhood of a nation state, or humanity. In Usman’s ‘Si Ong’ (2006), Kasam’s ‘Mama Chen’ (2005), Naning Pranoto’s Miss Lu (2003), S. Satya Dharma’s Lie, Jangan Bilang Aku Cina (2000), the basic form of benign Othering is describing physical difference. The first sentence of ‘Si Ong’ gazes on the mark of difference: ‘His smile captivating. His eyes slanted. His skin fair. His stature tall and thin’ (Usman 2006, p. 92). In S. Satya Dharma’s novel (2000), Lie, a dedicated wife and a devout Moslem Chinese, is seen through the eyes of her husband: ‘Slanted with clear eyes, a pair of eyes that can see farther away than the perfect eyes of other beautiful girls’ (p. 19). Slanted eyes are seen both as being imperfect, and having better insight. Lie is further differentiated from both Chinese and Indonesian women: ‘Lie is indeed a Chinese woman. But she is actually not a prototype of the majority of women, who have their roots in Uncle Deng’s country. She is even more Indonesian than most other Indonesian women. In her speech, and also in her attitude’ (Dharma 2000, pp. 135–136). Being a Muslim, Lie is different from the majority of Chinese Indonesian; being a self-sacrificing woman, she is a rarity among urban, modern women. She is pure difference. In Naning Pranoto’s novel (2003), Bella Margarita Alexandra Gomez-Lu is known as Miss Lu, her other Western names subsumed under this Chineseness (despite the fact that her father is Brazilian). The Chinese name serves as the source of attraction – and at the same time the point of erasure (as in the case of Lie, by making her unlike other Chinese). Miss Lu, does not even look Chinese because of her Brazilian father (and – unlike the stereotypical Chinese in Indonesian comedies – can pronounce ‘r’ perfectly). At the same time, her queenly, polite and graceful demeanor distinguishes her from the other women characters. Adding another circle of naming and erasure, Esti Nuryani Kasam’s character, Mama Christina, is first identified as Chinese by her looks,

The Dragon Dance 181

and is then shown to be atypical of her kind, only to be given back her Chinese name in the end of the story: ‘Suddenly I was driven by an obsession to call you Mama Chen-Chen, which is not only more natural, but also enriching for Indonesian people … So, am I wrong to call you as Mama Chen-Chen?’ (Kasam 2005, p. 148). The narrator’s obsession in naming Mama Christina with a Chinese name, Mama Chen-Chen, which she considered to be more ‘natural’, is as strong as the wish for erasing the pejorative name ‘Cina’ – which brings back the collective memory of racism. This obsession as well as anxiety over names, apparent in the controversy over Cina/Tionghoa, is ingeniously played out in Veven Sp. Wardhana’s ‘Panggil Aku Peng Hwa’ (2002). In this story, the character called himself and was called by different names according to different context of (power) relations: Peng Hwa, Effendi Wardhana, Ping An or Waniktio (acronym for Warga Negara Keturunan Tionghoa, Citizen of Chinese descent). Finding a liberating global haven in Paris, where he could absolve himself of this obsession with naming and being named, the character comes home only to find a country which was glued in the past – which is 15 May 1998 (the date of the traumatic riots).

Rewriting history To mention May 1998, or the year 1965, is to point to traumatic moments in collective memory which, once repressed, have begun to creep back through the literary imagination. A number of stories confront such historic moments awkwardly, fleetingly, not full on. In Naning Pranoto’s novel, Miss Lu, Putri Cina yang Terjebak Konflik Etnik dan Politik (2003), the plot unfolds as the narrator and his Javanese family try to help Miss Lu accomplish her mission to honour the wish of her Chinese Indonesian grandmother, who left Indonesia for mainland China after the implementation of the PP10 policy in 1959, only to be persecuted by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The mentally disturbed old woman longs to return to die in the place she calls home – Kebun Jepun, Surabaya. Historical events are recalled as Miss Lu explains her mission. She remembers the 1965 violence as the cause of the brutal death of her grandfather, who unlike his wife, stayed in Surabaya and remarried a local. The novel presents the impact of history on the grandmother, who appears towards the end of the novel as a deranged and suicidal woman who dies before her wish is fulfilled. History, represented by the beloved grandmother, comes back in the form of a jar of ashes brought by her charming granddaughter, the main object of the narrative gaze.

182 Identity and Displacement

The 1965 upheaval receives more sustained treatment in the 2005 film Gie (2005) which evokes the politically alert campus environment of the 1960s and 1970s. The film is based on the diary of Soe Hok Gie, an unambiguously nationalist student activist, who fought to overthrow Sukarno’s authoritarian power, only to be disillusioned by the abuse of power by the Suharto government. (Soe Hok Gie died at the age of 27 climbing Mount Semeru.) Yet the appeal of Gie is not as much in its historical theme as in the depiction of this platonic, sad, but ‘cool’ young man, unlucky in love and uncontaminated by the struggle of political power. He appears as an idealistic, sensitive person who remains emotionally alone in the crowd of his friends and supporters. Gie was followed by a TV documentary of his life, and two books written by two adoring writers of younger generation: Agus Santosa’s biographical essay of Soe Hok Gie, Memoar Biru Gie (2005), and Herlinatiens’s imaginative novel, Malam untuk Soe Hok Gie (2005). Santosa’s essay reads like student notes in the margin of Gie’s diary, comparing it with other texts, marring it with teardrops or poetry. Herlinatiens’s novel has a female narrator, Kalsita, who can weave herself in and out history any time, to eavesdrop, interact, flirt or make love with the key political figures of 1965 mentioned in Soe Hok Gie’s diary: President Sukarno, Untung and General Ahmad Yani. She is the femme fatale, who concocts a plan to make Soe Hok Gie a hero by provoking both Untung and Yani against each other. Kalsita, the alter ego of Herlinatiens, is playing with history. In different ways, these young writers make history their own through their personal dialogue with the historic Soe Hok Gie. The representation of Gie transcends Chineseness, because his persona escapes being framed in one category of identity.

Confronting trauma: the May tragedy May 1998 changed the lives of many Indonesians, especially Chinese Indonesians. The violence was so horrendous, occurring simultaneously in different cities with a similar pattern – victims disappearing, dead or hiding, in shock and trauma; followed by speculation, sensational representation in the mass media and denial from the authorities. The May tragedy also became the site of solidarity across race, class, religion and ethnic divisions: in 1999, Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s short story on the May Rape, ‘Clara’, in his collection entitled Iblis Tidak Pernah Mati (1999) was read in the campuses in many cities in Java as a form of consciousness-raising against racism and violence against women.6 In July 1999, theatre workers organized the first public discussion

The Dragon Dance 183

on the topic of Chinese Indonesians at the Jakarta art centre, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), where – for the first time in three decades – frank arguments fuelled by unaddressed prejudice and hurt feelings were aired in a peaceful way. Poems and prayers were read in front of a painting commemorating the tragedy. Discrepancies between what was known to humanitarian activists and what could be said in public (because of the need to protect victims and witnesses), the scepticism in the mass media, the circulation of provocative stories on the Internet and the official denial of the rapes turned the May tragedy into a black hole in Indonesian history. It is invisible and at the same time a source of highly charged gravitational energy. Unwritten in official history, the blank pages have been filled by imaginative literature. Nozuma III by Marga T. (2006), a woman writer of popular romantic fiction and The Pathfinders of Love by Richard Oh (1999), put into writing what was whispered and circulated among friends and activists. Like a journal of May 1998, Nozuma III replays the unacknowledged horrid scenes: the brutal gang rapes experienced by Chinese Indonesian women, the murder of a witness about to testify in New York, and the inhumane testimony of a psychologist – pressured by authority – to abuse the victim as a sexual deviant and terrorize their family by portraying the victim’s father as the perpetrator of domestic sexual abuse.7 All these events, taken like raw materials of a news summary, are the backdrop of a romantic love story. Marga T’s signature is obvious: light dialogue, the use of medical vocabulary to inject realistic description of hospitals and doctors, and triangular love in the intricacies of relations between relatives and friends. Her detailed matter of fact description of the rapes and the May events, set against the light romantic style produces the effect of anesthetic numbness, food for thought that is yet to be digested. Richard Oh’s Pathfinders of Love is ‘a story about doomed love’ played out against the setting of the May riot, with ‘good deeds misconstrued … [and] genuine caring in the face of blatant inhumanity’ (1999, front cover). The story depicts photojournalist Jailudin, embroiled in the risky activities of the humanitarian groups against rape, encountering the clandestine activities of fundamentalist terrorists and revealing the behind-the-scene construction of a utopian world of an idealistic conglomerate. Richard Oh’s novel gives literary form to the conspiracy theories and rumours about the puppet master behind the May terror. By contrasting the bad guys who make use of the Muslim fundamentalist groups with the patriotic conglomerates, the novel inadvertently subscribes to the existing dichotomic construction of Muslim versus

184 Identity and Displacement

Chinese. Given the tenacity of negative stereotypes of the Chinese businessmen in the popular imagination, the novel employs utopian fantasy in proving the patriotism of Chinese Indonesian conglomerates. Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s ‘Clara’ (Ajidarma, 1999) and Yusrizal KW’s ‘Imajinasi Buruk’ (1999) deal directly with the elusive nature of truth and representation through their narrative strategy. Ajidarma’s story plays two narrators against one another: the first is Clara, a victim of the May mass rape, who reports her case to a police officer; the second is the police officer, who types the incident report and spits out in his asides, all his scepticism and prejudice against her, and his beastly desire to commit a second rape. The juxtaposition of these two perspectives results in irony, exposing power relations and problems of representation. In Yusrizsal KW’s ‘Imajinasi Buruk’, the 17-year-old Mei Lan, upon receiving a gun as a birthday present from her fiancée (called Gun) for self-protection, remembers ‘the hellish event’: People were hitting the iron gates, pulling them apart, throwing stones and burning. Looting. A molotov cocktail was thrown through the windows. There were no police. No military. A country of mobs. Cold faces, with devilish features, gang raped women inside the house, on the threshold, on the street, watched by onlookers. The flames of the wild fire dance in the rhythm of hell. (Yusrizal 1999, p. 85) The gun and the memory of the mass rape triggered a story in Mei Lan’s imagination: amidst the burning shops, she was approached by six fierce looking men, identifying her as amoy.8 What follows? The author gives seven versions. In the first, Mei Lan shoots three of the attackers, driving the other three away. In the second version, Mei Lan tries, but is unable to shoot. She faints and is gang raped in front of onlookers. In the third version, the attackers are driven away by fear of the gun, and Mei is advised by Gun to leave for Singapore. The fourth version is a continuation of the first; after she kills the three attackers, Mei Lan’s house is burned and looted, Mei Lan and the female members of the family raped, and Mei Lan shoots herself with the gun. The fifth version, continues on from the second. Mei Lan, becomes traumatized, loses faith in herself and Gun, forcing him to take her case to the Human Rights Commission and the mass media. In the sixth version, Mei Lan is saved by a group of young men, who call her ‘sister’. Mei Lan puts the gun in her bag and returns it safely to Gun. Gun is not happy with the stories, and Mei Lan comes up with a romantic filmic version, in which the two lovers act like a hero and heroine, bravely facing the six rapists,

The Dragon Dance 185

driving them away with the gun, leaving them happily in each other’s arm. Imaginatively playing with words and making symbolic use of ‘gun’, Yusrisal KW’s story digs up the many faces of the May tragedy and diverse possibilities for responding. Chavchay Syaifullah, the author of a novel called Sendalu (2006), confessed that he was obsessed by the ‘hellish event’, especially when years after the tragedy he met a man who proudly bragged of his involvement as a paid rapist. Syaifullah was unable to make himself write from the perspective of the victims, so instead he wrote a story about the making of a rapist. Beginning in a realistic manner, the story takes a bizarre turn as the man accumulates a portfolio of rapes, culminating in the violation of his own mother. Unable to go any further, the rapist kills himself by cutting his own genitals. The novel points to patriarchy, the protagonist symbolically ruining the motherland, only to castrate his own phallic power. Chavcay has only one aim, however: ‘I want to make the readers so disgusted with this hellish crime’.9

Conclusion Democratization resulting from the 1998 Reformasi has cleared a public space for Chineseness, after three decades of repressive New Order assimilationist policies. Produced by Indonesians of Chinese and non-Chinese descent, the cultural representation of Chineseness displays polyphony. Some of the voices are prompted by political and cultural aspirations long denied, some by the guilt and anger sparked by the May 1998 mass rapes of Chinese Indonesian women. The rise of China as an emerging economic power, the business advantage of the Chinese euphoria and the revival of multicultural expression also play a part. The cultural production of Chineseness cannot but conjure up the past, the traumas in the collective memory of Chinese Indonesians: PP10, the 1965 communist cleansing and the May 1998 mass rape. Old differences are expressed in present controversies: naming the Chinese Indonesian ‘Cina’ or ‘Tionghoa’; whether it is proper or improper to have festive Chinese New Year celebrations; or whether it is sound to channel political aspirations under the banner of Chinese identity. These controversies are rooted in the differences between the integrationists and the assimilationists in the 1950s, even in the cultural orientation of Chinese Indonesians in the Dutch colonial period. But the new generation of writers also engage in a fresh manner with historic figures, whether from the recent past, like Yun Hap, the student who was fatally

186 Identity and Displacement

shot in the 1998 uprising, or from the more distant past, like Soe Hok Gie of the 1960s generation. The new cultural production of Chineseness shows uneasiness in engaging with history. One text touches the subject of history fleetingly; another swallows the historical past raw and undigested. Yet another is consumed by anger, guilt and its own violence, or repetitively churns out old dichotomies. Some creatively transcend the ideological battles to look at deeper problem of representation in narration and in history, while some texts (like Herlinatiens’s), revel in the past in order to have fun. These various strategies betray an unresolved anxiety, deriving from the still-insecure political position of Chinese Indonesians in the nation. While we have seen consistent progress in securing the cultural rights of the Chinese Indonesian, in practice, on the streets and in the petty officials’ desks all over Indonesia, prejudice and discrimination are still rife. With social jealousy against the rich few, strongly characterized with their Chinese features, we can understand the fear of ‘backlash’ from Chinese Indonesians who have strived to assimilate and erase the marks of difference. According to A. Dahana (2000) and Christine Tjhin (2004a, c), this is where this symbolic celebration of Chineseness stops short of addressing real structural change: empowerment of the poor, advocacy for equal political rights and against discrimination, a stronger civil society and intercultural solidarity. The main thrust of the cultural production discussed here is to gaze at Chineseness in oneself, in others, in the history of the nation, and to rethink one’s attitude towards this subject vis-à-vis the existing stereotypes, or one’s ideological and cultural positions. How long will this fascination with Chineseness last? A new generation of Indonesians, living in the global era, has shown more relaxed attitude towards the issue of racial or ethnic identity, as seen in the film Gie and the responses to it. If democratization and economic and social justice succeed, we might see new forms of cultural expressions and identity formation. While Indonesia keeps on redefining itself in the face of globalization and democratization, the process of negotiating the meaning and construction of Chineseness in Indonesia will not reach a closure: one cannot say no to Chineseness for an indefinite future.

Acknowledgements I thank Johanes Herlijanto, Manneke Budiman, Christine Susanna Tjhin, and Yunita Winarto, Debra Yatim, Clara Bianpoen for sharing their views; I am indebted to Edwina Satmoko, and Lilawati Kurnia, who

The Dragon Dance 187

assisted me in collecting the literary material, and my students from the undergraduate seminar on multiculturalism for their input.

Notes 1. I drew responses to these critical responses from several Chinese Indonesian scholars, namely, Manneke Budiman, Johanes Herlijanto, Christine Susanna Tjhin, Thung Yu Lan, Yunita Winarto and Carla Bianpoen. 2. See further discussion on the media representation of the rape in Ariel Heryanto’s ‘Rape, Race, and Reporting’ (1999). 3. See also Dede Oetomo (2002). 4. Read the discussion of Slamet Muljana’s book, Runtuhnya Kerajaan Hindu-Jawa dan Timbulnya Negara-Negara Islam di Nusantara (1968) in Stanley, ‘Kecinaan Yang Berserakan di Sekitar Kita’ (Stanley 2000, p. 31). 5. An example is Asvi Warman Adam’s essay ‘The Chinese in the Collective Memory of the Indonesian Nation’ (Adam 2003). See also the documentary film by Ariani Darmawan that shows the acculturation of the Chinese in the Betawian culture, called ‘Anak Naga Beranak Naga; Gambang Kromong: Akulturasi Budaya Tionghoa Betawi’ (Darmawan 2006). 6. See Sumit Mandal’s in-depth discussion on the use of art for political and social activism during the Reformasi years in his essay ‘Creativity in Protest: Arts Workers and the Recasting of Politics and Society in Indonesia and Malaysia’ (2003). 7. The case of Ita Martadinata, murdered in 1999 at her home by unidentified ‘robber’, the night before she was supposed to leave with Karlina Leksono for a public testimony of the mass rape in New York. 8. As I have discussed earlier in Budianta (2003), amoy is a word in a Chinese dialect, referring to an unmarried young woman. During the New Order, this word was often used derogatorily by men in the street to tease or harass women of Chinese descent, thus acquiring in this kind of usage its sexist and racist connotation. 9. From a discussion after the book launch of the novel at Faculty of Humanities (FIB), Universitas Indonesia, 8 March 2006.

References Adam, Asvi Warman (2003) ‘The Chinese in the Collective Memory of the Indonesian Nation’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 03 (March), http://kyotoreview. cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/issue/issue5/index.html (accessed 20 April 2006). Ajidarma, Seno Gumira (1999) ‘Clara’, in Iblis Tidak Pernah Mati, Yogyakarta: Galang Press, pp. 69–79. Ang, Ien (2001) ‘Can One Say No To Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm’, in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 37–51. Berdoeri, Tjamboek (2004) Indonesia Dalem Api dan Bara, with introduction by Benedict O. R. G. Anderson, Arief W. Jati and Stanley, 2nd edn. Jakarta: Elkasa. Budianta, Melani (2003) ‘The Blessed Tragedy: the Making of Indonesian Women’s Activism during the Reformasi Years’, in Challenging Authoritarianism

188 Identity and Displacement in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, eds Ariel Heryanto and Sumit Mandal. London: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 145–177. Budiman, Arief (2000) ‘Siauw Giok Tjhan yang Tidak Saya Kenal’, in Sumbangsih Siau Giok Tjhan & Baperki dalam Sejarah Indonesia, eds Siaw Tiong Djin and Oey Hay Djoen. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, pp. 76–185. Budiman, Manneke (2004) Interview, 16 March. Ca Bau Kan (2002) film Director: Nia Dinata, Performers: Ferry Salim and Lola Amaria. Jakarta: Kalyana Shira Film. Dahana, A. (2000) ‘Cina vs Tiongkok dan Tionghoa’, Mitra 04 (March), pp. 32–34. Darmawan, Ariani (2006) Anak Naga Beranak Naga; Gambang Kromong: Akulturasi Budaya Tionghoa Betawi, http://www.anaknagaberanaknaga.info (accessed 10 September 2006). Dawis, Aimee (2005) ‘The Indonesian Chinese: Their Search for Identity and Development of Collective Memory Through the Media’, unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University. Dharma, S. Satya (2000) Lie Jangan Bilang Aku Cina. Jakarta: Titik Terang. Gie (2005) film Director: Riri Riza. Performers: Nicolas Saputra and Wulan Guritno. Jakarta: Miles. Herlijanto, Johanes (2004) Interview, Jakarta, 24 March. Herlinatiens (2005) Malam Untuk Soe Hok Gie. Jakarta: Galang Press. Heryanto, Ariel (1998) ‘Ethnic Identities and Erasure: Chinese Indonesian in Public Culture’, in Southeast Asian Identities, Culture and Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, ed. Joel S. Kahn. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 95–114. —— (1999) ‘Rape, Race, and Reporting’, in Reformasi, Crisis and Change in Indonesia, eds Arief Budiman, Barbara Hatley and Damien Kingssburry. Clayton: Monash Institute, pp. 299–334. —— (2004) ‘Rasisme Tak Sengaja’, Kompas, 6 February. Jahya, Junus (2004) ‘Mahathir’, Republika, 7 February. Juliawan, Hari B. (2004) ‘Memang Susah Melawan Rasisme’, Kompas, 28 February. Kasam, Esti Nuryani (2005) ‘Mama Chen-Chen’, in Resepsi Kematian, ed. Muhammad Yahya. Yogyakarta: AdiWacana, pp. 136–148. Kwa Kian Hauw, David (2002) ‘Tentang Ca-Bau-Kan Karangan Remy Sylado’, suplemen, Kita Sama Kita, th. 2, no. 5 (January), pp. 1–12. Lan Fang (2004) Pai Yin. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama. Liang Xinyu, Chen Donglong and T. Wilson (2004) Merajut Harapan Anak Pinggiran. Jakarta: PT Indonesian Printer. Mandal, Sumit (2003) ‘Creativity in Protest: Arts Workers and the Recasting of Politics and Society in Indonesia and Malaysia’, in Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, eds Ariel Heryanto and Sumit Mandal, London: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 178–210. Marga T. (2006) Nozuma III. Jakarta: KPG. Muljana, Slamet (1968) Runtuhnya Kerajaan Hindu-Jawa dan Timbulnya NegaraNegara Islam di Nusantara. Jakarta: Bhratara. Oetomo, Dede (2002) ‘Bersentuhan dengan Prasangka dan Diskriminasi Kita’, in Antara Prasangka dan Realita, Telaah Kritis Wacana Anti Cina di Indonesia, ed. Andreas Pardede. Jakarta: Pustaka Insp. —— (2004) Interview, 27 March. Oh, Richard (1999) The Pathfinders of Love. Jakarta: Gamelan Press.

The Dragon Dance 189 Ong Hok Ham (2005) Riwayat Tionghoa Peranakan di Jawa. Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu. Pramoedya Ananta Toer (2000) ‘Rasialisme Anti-Tionghoa’ Mitra 4 (March), pp. 3–6. Pranoto, Naning (2003) Miss Lu, Putri Cina yang Terjebak Konflik Etnik dan Politik. Jakarta: Grasindo. Santosa, Agus (2005) Memoir Biru Gie. Yogyakarta: Gradien Book. Sen, Krishna (2006) ‘Chinese Indonesians in National Cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (March), pp. 171–184. Setiono, Beni (2003) Tionghoa dalam Pusaran Politik. Jakarta: Elkasa. Shabab, Alwi (2001) Robinhood Betawi. Jakarta: Republika. Stanley (2000) ‘Kecinaan Yang Berserak di Sekitar Kita’, Mitra 04 (March), pp. 30–31, 69–72. Suryadinata, Leo (1981) Peranakan Chinese Politics in Java. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Suryadinata, Leo (2002) Negara dan Etnis Tionghoa, Kasus Indonesia. Jakarta: Pustaka LP3ES. Syaifullah, Chavchay (2006) Sendalu. Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas. Sylado, Remy (1999) Ca-Bau-Kan, Hanya Sebuah Dosa. Jakarta: KPG. —— (2001) Siau Ling. Jakarta: KPG bekerjasama dengan Komunitas Titil. Tempo, 1 February 2004 ‘Wawancara Harry Tjan Silalahi: “Perayaan Imlek Hampir Kebablasan”’. Tjhin, Christine Susanna (2004a) ‘Ethnic Chinese & Indonesian Democratic Stage: A Personal Note’, in Budi dan Nalar: 70 Tahun Harry Tjan Silalahi, eds Hadi Soesastro, J. Kristiadi and Arief Priyadi. Jakarta: CSIS. —— (2004b) Interview, 31 March. —— (2004c) ‘More Chinese-Indonesians Become Actively Engaged in Politics’, The Jakarta Post, 29 March. Usman, K. (2006) ‘Si Ong’, in Pengantin Luka. Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas, pp. 92–99. Wardhana, Veven Sp. (2002) Panggil Aku Peng Hwa. Jakarta: KPG. Wibowo, Ignatius, ed. (2003) Harga yang Harus Dibayar, Sketsa Pergulatan Etnis Cina di Indonesia. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, Pusat Studi Cina. Winarto, Yunita (2004) Interview, Jakarta, 13 March. Yusrizal, KW (1999) ‘Imajinasi Buruk’, in Gonjong 1, ed. Ismet Fanany. Padang: Pusat Kajian Humaniora, Universitas Negeri Padang and Program Bahasa Indonesia, Universitas Deakin, Australia, pp. 83–92.

10 Identities in a Culture of Circulation: Performing Selves in Filipina Migration Deirdre McKay

Introduction: migration and Philippine identities Migration has arguably been the definitive feature of Philippine experiences of globalization. Beginning with the adoption of a labour export policy by the government during the 1970s, by the end of the twentieth century the nation had the largest flows of migrant workers in the global economy (Tyner and Donaldson 1999, p. 217) and the largest per capita number of female contract workers overseas (Boyle 2002; Mills 2003). This export of female workers on a temporary basis exemplifies a historic trend for labour markets across Southeast Asia. While rural women have moved to relatively nearby urban centres for work since the colonial era (mid-1800s–1930s), the global economic restructurings of the 1970s saw this practice extended across national borders. Throughout the region, significant numbers began to move between countries on short-term contracts, taking advantage of the relatively higher returns for labour offered by uneven development (Hugo 2002). Women from the poorer nations, particularly the Philippines and Indonesia, went to Singapore, Hong Kong and urban Malaysia. Female migrants from the Philippines used these Southeast Asian cities as entry points for global labour markets, with many moving on to work as domestics in Europe, Israel and North America. By the late 1990s, domestic worker migrants from the rural Philippines had spread around the globe. These migrants created complex longdistance household networks in which they remitted their foreigncurrency earnings home to support local livelihoods, shoring up the failing Philippine economy. 190

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 191

Sending and receiving governments and sending households alike tend to see contract migrants as short-term sojourners. However, many return home only briefly before leaving for a subsequent contract. Without citizenship status in their host nations, it appears inevitable that these migrants will have to return home for good, if only in retirement. However, for most contract migrants from rural areas, local economies do not offer the possibility of a permanent return. The International Labor Organization estimates cash remittances from migrants and emigrants to be equivalent to the annual interest payable on the nation’s substantial foreign debt (Rodriguez 1998; Puri and Ritzema 1999); individual workers send much of this money home to provide the daily needs of household members. In Manila, approximately 11 per cent of households receive their main source of income from overseas (Tyner and Donaldson 1999, p. 220). In rural areas, where there is no manufacturing sector, service sector or significant government employment, the percentage of households dependent on migrant remittances is likely much higher. For instance, in a Northern Luzon village surveyed in the early 1990s, 13 per cent of the adult working population was overseas. Of those migrants, 70 per cent were female, and 62 per cent of households reported migrant workers (Pertierra 1994, p. 67). In 2003, I visited a village with approximately 300 households; local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) estimated that 85 per cent of these households depended on a female member working as a domestic helper in Hong Kong as their principal wage earner, a situation unlikely to change in the immediate future.1 Here, migrant daughters and granddaughters support the first generation of contract domestic workers in their retirement. Who are these women? According to data gathered before workers depart from the Philippines, female migrants are typically single, comparatively well educated and in their early twenties at the time of their first overseas contract.2 Over their life course, large cohorts of migrants will spend most of their reproductive years and midlife working on contract away from their communities and households. Women and their household members usually identify remuneration as the definitive aspect of the migration experience. Research findings report migrants remit a maximum of 75 per cent to a more common 30–50 per cent3 of salaries that currently range between US$200 and US$500 per month, with most households receiving about US$150 per month. Beyond reports of earnings remitted, research with Filipina migrants overseas has shown that they often face exploitation and alienation in receiving nations.4 In the Philippines, studies of left-behind household members

192 Identity and Displacement

document the reconfiguration of household and community relations in the absence of wives and mothers and attempts to manage flows of remittances.5 On their return, many migrants find it difficult to take up their former lives.6 Working between migrants overseas and households at home, my current projects explore how the values – both cash and symbolic – generated by migration are invested and managed, and how migrant identities shift over time. By mapping the dynamic interplay between identities, economy and cultural fields in what is a highly gendered form of transnationalism, I explain who it is that these migrants and communities are becoming. Here, I theorize Filipina migration as a ‘culture of circulation’ (Lee and LiPuma 2002), extending their conception of circulation as more than simply the movement of people, ideas and commodities from one culture to another. Circulation is, instead, a cultural process with its own forms, produced by processes of imagining, recognition, and interaction that work to mediate between notions of tradition and modernity with forms of value. Lee and LiPuma (2002) identify the elements of a culture of circulation as (i) practices of evaluation – or the assessment of authenticity; (ii) constraint – limiting of action or interpretation; (iii) consociality – the formation and maintenance of social ties; and (iv) resubjectivation – the production of new subject positions. In this chapter, after examining narratives collected from overseas workers and sending communities, I locate each of these elements in interactions between circulating migrants, broader Philippine society and receiving nations overseas. Migration puts value into circulation – in the form of cash sent home – through the appropriation and redistribution of the surplus labour produced by women’s work elsewhere. My analysis, however, reveals money is not the only form of value produced and moved through these transnational circuits; forms of cultural and social capital generated by migration are equally important to the ‘culture of circulation’.

Circulation and identities in women’s work abroad The resubjectivations that create distinctively migrant identities for Filipinas provide a useful starting point for theorizing the circulation arising with long-term, long distance and place-based flows of female migrants. A partial list of identities attached to migrant women might read as follows7 – Filipina; dutiful daughter; self-sacrificing mother; global servant; domestic helper; nanny; deskilled professional; bagong bayani (national hero); unruly migrant; mail-order bride; ‘single’ (separated) woman; community stalwart; consumer; stingy returnee; political

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 193

activist; japayuki (entertainer or sex worker in Japan); entrepreneur; probynsyana (naïve provincial girl); balikbayan (returnee); ‘DH’ (domestic helper).8 Of course, many individual migrants would also identify themselves as other kinds of subjects – perhaps professionals such as doctors, lawyers, nurses; or athletes; or lesbians; or farmers – but these subject positions go unrecognized among the identities available for migrants. Each of the identities listed above is applied to migrants from a different perspective, reflecting variously the subject positions of a foreign host or employer, a Philippine nationalist, a class-conscious Filipino elite, a covillager, the members of a migrant’s own family and, perhaps, even a migrant herself. Reading the identity-names as subject positions on offer for – or applied to – migrants spreads resubjectivations across different scales. Each subject position depends on processes of evaluation, constraint and consociality that are iterated in interactions between female migrants and others living in sending localities, broader Philippine society and receiving nations and neighbourhoods overseas. The transnational economic organization of earning, remittance and redistribution of value generated by women’s work abroad produces and circulates these subject positions. For migrants, these identities are forms of subjectivation that fit individuals, however awkwardly, into the specific subject positions named. Migrants become dependent on these identities – discourses that they have not chosen – to initiate and sustain their agency in transnational cultural fields. Thus, this limited set of subject positions is the frame in which people, including migrants, comprehend and interpret migrants’ experiences. As modes of subjectivation, these identities partly constitute the tensions and entanglements of transnational households and sending localities and the conditions of employment and consociality in receiving nations. To see how these operate, we need to examine the processes of imagination and recognition attached to each identity name. My analysis highlights two forms of identity – ‘Filipina’ and balikbayan (returnee). Both identities are ideals for which real women often fall short, yet I found – in interviews with female migrants overseas, community members and returnees in the Philippines – that these identities functioned as definitive explanations for migrant women’s feelings or actions and thus served as accounts of their subjectivities. Each identity marks migration-specific practices of evaluation, constraint and consociality, and both ‘Filipina’ and balikbayan are performatives – naming practices that enable and constrain individual agency, simultaneously making selfhood possible.

194 Identity and Displacement

Sending communities and ‘Filipina’ identity Impressive houses built with migrant earnings characterize Philippine migrant sending areas. Within the sending household, a substantial amount of time and resources is devoted to leisure (Rodriguez 1998). Many households become oriented to ‘abroad’ with other family members planning their own migration. Stories circulate through sending villages and kin networks of the lucky few who have parlayed a temporary work contract into ‘permanent’ status, usually by marrying a host national or gaining a permanent residence visa. Oft-cited examples of ‘success’ are Hong Kong or Singapore domestic worker migrants who subsequently relocate their households to Canada, Australia and Britain.9 Emigrant households have high prestige in Philippine communities – evidence of a new transnational economy of status. Sending community respondents expressed hope that the successive domestic work contracts of their sisters, wives and daughters would enable their entire family to join their neighbours abroad. Those waiting to migrate depended on remitted monies for their daily needs and stayed in constant contact, usually via cell phone, with relatives overseas. If we unpack the patterns of kinship, indebtedness, distribution of remittances and the communication strategies linking migrants to these households, it becomes clear that dependency on remittances apparently intensifies relations between temporary migrants and their extended kin at home. Women’s migration restructures household economies as much as it does women’s life histories. Many migrants marry between contracts, and bear children on their ‘years off’, returning to overseas work as soon as practicable. Husbands and extended families take on the work of absent wives and daughters. This work creates new roles, relations and skills for men who share the parenting of children with a long-distance partner/breadwinner, rather than a ‘traditional’ wife. Where women leave men and children behind, mothers-in-law frequently join the households as economic managers while men tend to take up traditionally female tasks, such as childcare and laundry, as ‘solo fathers’. Migrants and their partners must renegotiate their norms for interaction and expectations of each other around remittances, investments, parenting and affection. Many women use migration to initiate such renegotiations in their household. Women are frequently more strongly motivated to migrate by issues of money and respect in the household than by their status in the community (Westwood and Phizacklea 2000). By enabling a woman to transfer value – in the forms of cash, social and

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 195

cultural capital – home from ‘abroad’, a woman’s absence can transform gender roles and household expectations. Migration enhances women’s prestige in their communities. Even where women educated in the professions – as nurses, teachers, accountants – take on domestic work overseas, communities do not see this lessskilled work as demeaning. The ‘debts of gratitude’ (utang na loob) and influence generated by workers’ transfers to kin are understood by Filipinos to more than make up for the ‘low’ nature of work abroad (Aguilar 1999, p. 125) and these debts accrue to each migrant as social and cultural capital on return home. Some returnees I met were able to parlay experiences of overseas domestic work into political influence, running for traditionally male positions in local government. One of the most satisfying social possibilities opened up through migration is enacting ‘Filipina’ identity. Being truly ‘Filipina’ is not actualizable for many women in rural villages, particularly in the indigenous communities where I have conducted most of my research. While the national femininity is constructed by the media and popular culture as available to all women in the nation, in reality, ‘Filipina’ is strongly associated with class and ethnic norms. The term itself is Spanish, and the word Filipina originally signified a female Spaniard born in the Philippine colony. It was not until the rise of nineteenthcentury Philippine nationalism that colonized women, previously called ‘indias’, were actually identified as Filipinas. This identification marked the incorporation of colonized women within a European version of upper-class female domesticity. Traditional Filipina virtues include women’s self-sacrificing maternal care, tolerance of male infidelity and embodiment of pale-skinned mestiza (mixed race) beauty. Accommodating oneself to this Filipina femininity is attractive not least because its accoutrements – light skin, formal education and conspicuous consumption – are cultural capital and have been since the Spanish era. In rural areas in the Philippines, Filipina identity is associated with being maybahay lang – expressed in English as ‘plain housewife’ – meaning a woman who does not perform manual, agricultural labour but simply cares for her home and family. Of course, this ‘true Filipina’ homemaker status is difficult to perform in localities where men have little access to regular salaried work and subsistence agricultural production is necessary to make ends meet. Identities shift with economic histories; ‘Filipina’ is no exception. The late-twentieth-century global economic restructurings saw ‘Filipina’ reidentified through labour migration. While the term continued to signify housewife and mother in the country, labour export attached the

196 Identity and Displacement

‘Filipina’ identity firmly to migrant workers who came predominantly from the lower middle classes. Lower-middle-class women typically had darker skin and less refined manners than the pale-skinned models and socialites who represented the ‘Filipina’ in the Manila media. When, in the mid-1990s, Filipino cinema began to portray migrant workers as national heroes, the class aspects of migration came to the forefront in the selection of mestiza actresses to play migrant roles. In 1995, the actor Helen Gamboa – married to a prominent Philippine senator and spokesmodel for a line of home appliances for the ‘Filipina’ housewife – took on the rather unlikely role of a migrant domestic worker. One film critic described her performance as, ‘she of the porcelain complexion playing a flat-nosed, brown-skinned salt-of-the earth’ (Ramos 1995). This comment reflects the class basis for evaluations of authentic ‘Filipina’ identity and reveals tensions over the qualities that make a woman valuable as a citizen. To negotiate these tensions, migrants and would-be migrants deploy ‘Filipina’ identity as a discursive resource. Women justify their work abroad with reference to the ‘Filipina’ virtues of self-sacrifice and caring for family. Since being household-centred is both a desirable Filipina trait and a motive for working abroad, migrants speak of ‘sacrificing’ themselves through separation from their loved ones in order to provide for the economic needs of their families. Aida, a would-be migrant from an indigenous community in rural Ifugao Province, explained her responsibilities as a ‘Filipina’ to me: ‘I am the one who was sent to school. They sacrificed, my brothers and my parents, to pay my education. Now I am the one to earn, and to make improvements for them. That is our Filipino way.’ Working overseas would reposition Aida from debtor to family patron in her household. Aida was a fresh graduate and unemployed, so sending money home, rather than remaining to do domestic chores ‘for free’, was a way she imagined she could become mobile, ‘improving’ her position in her family and village. As one Filipina migrant in Italy said, remitting money to her family at home provides an ‘emotional advantage’, ensuring that the family members who benefit from the money remain obligated to her in the future (Tacoli 1996, p. 18). This ongoing obligation, in turn, provides her with respect and social status that should entitle her to care and security in her old age. Aida, perhaps, wants the same kind of security for herself. In Aida’s language of indebtedness, we find submerged rationales directed towards acquiring social and cultural capital. Part of the lure of overseas work for rural and indigenous women – the least ‘Filipina’

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 197

within the nation – is that it presents a personal and familial ticket out of the skin-browning sun and into contact with global ‘culture’, particularly as consumed by and represented through middle-class Manila society (Pertierra 1994). To become truly ‘Filipina’ in the evaluation of her countrymen, a rural, indigenous woman like Aida might well decide to leave the Philippines rather than confront ethnic and class prejudice seeking work in local cities. By transforming her manners, demeanor and skin tone, work overseas would improve her ability to be recognized as ‘Filipina’ and thus to achieve upward class mobility in urban contexts. From the local perspective, overseas migration enacts a modern, enterprising ‘Filipina’ subject, resubjectivating women as globally mobile ‘professionals’ who should not be contained by the narrow confines of village life. In such local imaginations – often fuelled by returnees’ performances – migration offers both the potential to demonstrate one’s value as a modern worker and provides the economic means and cultural capital necessary to enact ideals of care, self-sacrifice and beauty underpinning traditional notions of ‘Filipina’ identity. Many women see their sending locality as a place that cannot provide them with the resources to perform ‘Filipina’ properly. Sally, another Ifugao migrant, had just returned from her first contract and was recruiting ‘girls’ – including Aida – for her ‘auntie’s’ maid agency in Singapore. Sally explained the lure of overseas work for young Ifugao women: What’s left for them here, anyway? They get married in high school, have their babies … There’s no money, there’s nothing here. What can they do? They are already wives, mothers but it is still kurang [lacking]. Always looking somewhere for food, for money. No nice things, no respect. So they like to go abroad. It is something new for them. There is money … but there is also new friends, new places to learn. Sally describes a local place that cannot generate the value necessary to support the performance of identities to which women aspire. In Lee and LiPuma’s (2002) terms, this local is a site of ‘tradition’, deficient in the value – in Sally’s words, ‘nice things’ and ‘respect’ – required for Filipina femininity. In sending communities, people imagine the life of migrant workers abroad to be glamorous and economically secure. While it is generally true that their paler skin, better clothes and variety of new appliances in their homes allow people to recognize returned migrants almost immediately, people do not always see the struggles that sustain these performances. Because young women in sending villages imagine migrant success as easy, they consider migration the best

198 Identity and Displacement

route towards recognition of their own abilities and aspirations in a global frame. That migration also offers a transmutation of identity – from brown-skinned salt of the earth to napudaw (pale-skinned) ‘Filipina’ – makes it all the more attractive.

Being Filipina abroad Outside the Philippines, however, ‘Filipina’ means something quite different. The perceptions of migrant receiving nations and elites have refigured ‘the Filipina’ into the ‘Filipina-as-maid’, a generalized unskilled body (Parreñas 2001; Pratt 1997 and 1998).10 In the Philippines, there is a growing perception that ‘Filipina’ identity has been debased and the nation embarrassed by the association of ‘Filipina’ with domestic work (Rafael 1997). Professional and academic women have published personal accounts of perceived discrimination against them as ‘Filipinas’ and therefore servants, despite what their visa, passport, class of travel or clothing might indicate. This global version of ‘Filipina’ justifies disparaging the skills and abilities of labour migrants while encouraging their differentiation from professional Filipino emigrants, thus frustrating their hopes of class mobility. Whilst overseas, many migrant domestic workers find themselves devalued as an embodied extension of the economic space of their sending village – the very space of limits they are attempting to transcend.11 The limits of contract domestic work are often more constraining than women in sending villages might imagine. Domestics live and work in private households in conditions that often restrict their mobility and social contacts (Mills 2003). Most tend to socialize – when permitted – with other migrants from their sending locality in kin and co-religious groups (Constable 1997, 2003; Law 2001). Even though they take successive contracts, migrants’ communication and remittance practices maintain a sense of social immediacy with sending localities. Migrants use cell phones, remittance agencies and banks to channel money home, while they interact with kin and friends through text messages, letters, phone calls, tapes, e-mail and sometimes video. Migrants also ship home ‘balikbayan boxes’, large boxes containing household goods and clothes (Szanton Blanc 1996; Rafael 1997). This sense of immediacy is also produced through consociality with migrant village-mates. Migrants organize their consociality around interacting with churches, banks, remittance and employment agents, meeting kin and friends as they send money, select consumer goods for shipping and find new employment on days off. These activities also allow for the

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 199

exchange of news items received from the Philippines. Migrants often compare notes – and photographs and text messages – with friends from the same sending village to evaluate their transnational relationships. At home, people make similar comparisons, evaluating the amounts received, the content of communication and the redistribution of gifts arriving in the balikbayan boxes. Dependents and village-mates assess migrants for their generosity, responsiveness and thoughtfulness, based on the text messages, phone calls and goods they send. Migrants, in turn, examine expressions of care made by their transnational dependents against the evidence of thrift and diligence in managing the money they remit. Everyone compares the success of sending households in pursuing the education, house-building, small enterprise and farming funded by migrants’ wages. More often than not, progress at home does not match up with the expectations of the migrant overseas. Being ‘Filipina’ as a migrant thus involves meeting obligations to those at home, internalizing external views of a colonized, ethnicized self and navigating the stereotypes produced by both a national discourse of femininity and those created by previous cohorts of Filipinos abroad. Consociality abroad, particularly shared with other Filipinos and host nationals, plays a major part in shaping individual experiences of migration. Social networks abroad can enable further economic mobility and eventually help migrants to achieve ‘permanent’ status. Consociality itself constitutes migrant subjectivities through recognition and inflects expectations for returns home with memories based on the ‘good life’ as lived by Filipino consociates elsewhere. In research undertaken in Canada, domestic worker respondents felt excluded from important forms of consociality because of their ‘Filipina’ identity. The following quotes exemplify two distinct modes of their resubjectivation as ‘Filipina’ subjects. Luz, in her forties, was working in Canada as a ‘nanny–caregiver’: Because I don’t want to be just a nanny any more, I went for evaluation and my degree wasn’t even recognized. And I became realistic about it. Even though we have a good education, it doesn’t matter to them. Because we’re Filipino we are only a domestic helper … And I became realistic about it. I’m not shy to become a domestic worker. That I’m a Filipino woman, I’m not ashamed to anybody. Everybody is the same … being a Filipino … they look at us like we’re small. Even though we have a good education, it doesn’t matter to them. Because we’re Filipino we are only a domestic helper. They only can control us because they have the money and power, of course, here in Canada.

200 Identity and Displacement

Sasha, in her twenties, was originally a caregiver, and now works with a Canadian NGO: Actually, between the Filipino community … people who came directly as landed immigrants12 – they look down on the domestic workers. There’s a very strong separation. ‘So you’re only a nanny; we don’t really communicate with you or we don’t really deal with you.’ And so the Filipinas have a tendency to stick within their domestic workers group. These quotes make clear how migrants trying to perform ‘Filipina’ identities experience deeply embedded contradictions. On the one hand, being ‘Filipina’ equates to being ‘only’ a domestic worker. Thus, Luz feels broader Canadian society devalues her because ‘Filipinas’ are thought to be incapable of other work. On the other hand, other Filipinos exclude domestic workers from their social networks, as Sasha describes, because they assume that they must come from lower-class backgrounds in the Philippines. In this situation, domestic-worker migrants find they are at once ‘too Filipina’ to move beyond domestic work and into the Canadian labour market and not ‘Filipina enough’ – meaning cultivated, well-spoken, pale-skinned, professional or upper class – to enjoy the relationships with a longstanding community of ‘professional’ Filipino migrants in Canada. Some Filipino Canadians reject ‘Filipina’ identity altogether, instead identifying themselves as ‘Filipino women’.13 In group interviews with Filipino Canadian women who were not domestic worker migrants, almost all of the interviewees described experiences of identification as ‘Filipina-as-maid’. They traded tips on performing ‘professional’ identities that distinguished them from domestic workers, including selecting certain types of haircuts, glasses, handbags and other accessories; considering the cuts, colours and quality of clothes; and adjusting their demeanor, manners and tone of voice. Their advice reveals both practices of evaluation attached to performances of class background and their own imaginations of transnational forms of status. For them, ‘Filipina’ identity now serves as the Other against which emigrants define globally mobile selves who are ‘Filipino women’ with Canadian passports. Domestic-worker migrants find these forms of evaluation, recognition and imagination exclude them from social networks that would help them to obtain other kinds of work. In Canada, they discover that ‘Filipina’ names a less-capable and valued sort of ‘Filipino woman’ as they struggle to gain recognition as ‘professional’ caregivers (Pratt 1998).

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 201

Circulation, identities and ambivalence Work overseas does open up new spaces of female freedom in migrants’ Philippine sending neighbourhoods and households. Earning abroad can provide an accepted way of buying out household obligations attached to women based on their gender, age and kin status. Families often pressure youngest or eldest daughters to remain unmarried and live with their parents, doing household and farm work to care for them in their old age. By remitting money, a daughter expected to remain the unmarried caretaker can purchase care, usually by supporting another kin member who then cares for her parents. Discharging this obligation gains the migrant familial approval for her marriage or relocation (Pertierra 1994). Sending money can likewise free migrant women from obligations to consult husbands and parents when making decisions about their own lives and work (Tacoli 1996). Moreover, migrants can decide to retain some of their earnings for their own independent investments in education, further migration and small enterprises (Gibson et al. 2001). While dependent households can resent these diversions, claiming a right to the migrant’s full salary because of her gendered maternal or filial duty, such claims are negotiable. Migrants thus use their experiences of migration and the values it generates to become other kinds of subjects – business people, investors, politicians and ‘leading citizens’. Filipinos recognize the transformations engendered through migration by ascribing a new identity – balikbayan – to returned migrants. This word combines the Tagalog for ‘return’, balik, with that for ‘town’, bayan – a term later extended to mean ‘nation’ (Szanton Blanc 1996, p. 178). Like ‘Filipina’, balikbayan identity has a genealogy steeped in colonial relations. The term initially appeared in the post-war era, naming Filipino emigrants visiting the homeland from the United States (Szanton Blanc 1996; Rafael 1997). Filipinos experienced balikbayans from America as snobbish and superior, frequently disparaging the nation they had left behind. The boxes of gifts they brought home not only offered locals a taste of the good life in America but also served to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Philippines. Though contract workers also began to bring boxes of gifts home to kin in order to gain their respect and recognition, the two categories of returnees remained distinct (Rafael 1997). By the late 1980s, however, there was a transition in the meaning of balikbayan and Filipinos began to apply the term to returning migrant workers (Szanton Blanc 1996). In 1989, the Philippine government introduced special duty-free status for boxes of

202 Identity and Displacement

gifts (as long as the items were ‘used goods’) as a combined strategy to encourage ‘return tourism’ from Filipino-American emigrants and allow contract workers to bring additional value home to their households (Szanton Blanc 1996). By effectively including migrant workers within the ‘visitor’ category of balikbayan, this government policy reflected the conflation of identities that had already occurred. One of my Ifugao respondents explained: ‘Because, here, we have no migrants in America, these OCWs [overseas contract workers], they are now our balikbayans here.’ Sending community respondents expressed pride in ‘our balikbayans’. A series of performative practices that might be described as a ‘balikbayan style’ enabled local people to recognize returned contract workers and visiting American emigrants alike. My interviewees identified these as fairer skin, a particular style of movement and presentation, distinctively imported clothes and the use of make-up. For them, these forms of balikbayan cultural capital indicated the inherent value of their locality, reflecting the quality of local abilities and resources and the economic diversity and cultural sophistication of their community. Economic positioning was another distinctive part of balikbayan identity and returned migrants in the rural, agricultural communities of my research did not return to farming. Some respondents simply wanted to ‘sit down’, feeling that they had done ‘enough’ hard manual labour while abroad. Others explained that their reluctance to return to on-farm work came from an expectation that their community would evaluate them as ‘failed’ in their plans. Instead, returnees cultivated straightened hair, polished nails, make-up, shoulder-strap purses and imported clothes, much like the ‘professional’ Filipino Canadians. In Ifugao, their neighbours described such returned female migrants as ‘very Filipina now’ and considered them to be self-made women. As with the tensions around ‘Filipina’ identity discussed above, there are similar practices of evaluation and constraint attached to performances of balikbayan. Recognition as a ‘true’ balikbayan requires economic success on return home. Such success is associated with evaluations of selfishness, self-sufficiency and a set of class differences that emerge between returned migrants and their sending communities and families. While returning migrants are happy to be close to loved ones again, they are usually apprehensive about the possibilities for economic security and new social obligations attendant in balikbayan identity. They often feel ambivalent about returning home (Constable 1999). Behind the expectations and ambivalence lie multiple imaginations and recognitions. Respondents in sending communities resisted the idea that work overseas did not necessarily provide financial security for balikbayan women.

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 203

Instead, they imagined that balikbayans who did not meet economic expectations were simply being stingy with their savings. Returnees, however, found themselves thrust into new public roles as patrons. Balikbayan respondents fielded constant requests to donate to the church, sponsor fiesta activities, host visitors and make loans to distant kin who were unlikely to repay. While some returnees were able to take on patronage roles, others found these expectations constraining. For a few, recurrent demands for money arose from within the very intimate relationships they had missed most while overseas. They experienced this as exploitation and developed strong feelings of resentment and alienation. The forms of evaluation attached to balikbayan identity also marked new practices of economic exclusion. One of my respondents, Tala, had invested her savings from work overseas to become a local distributor of Tupperware. Her in-laws, cousins and neighbours took the containers from her on credit and were then apparently unable to pay their debts. After two humiliating months of trying to collect these bad debts, Tala’s business failed. When I asked her neighbours about this, they argued that, since Tala was ‘already rich from abroad’, she did not need their money. Tupperware, for her, they claimed, was ‘just a sideline’. Tala, however, told me that she had lost her savings in the venture. She was now considering taking a loan so she could apply for another contract in Singapore, much as she disliked the idea of leaving her children again. Tala thought that her other option, to run a small sari-sari (single mixed business) store from her house might be similarly doomed: ‘If you do not give credit, they will not buy anything, but if I give credit, they say “never mind, she’s OCW [an overseas contract worker] already”, and then it is only credits and never money. People are jealous here; they don’t want to know how hard it is, abroad.’ Tala’s comments encapsulate the anxieties of many returned women; if they are unable to balance local expectations against personal success, they will fail as both balikbayan and ‘Filipina’. Tala’s experience exemplifies the new forms of recognition and imagination that comprise the culture of circulation surrounding economic migrants. In the Philippines, returnees find very limited possibilities for productive investment because their personal savings are usually not of the magnitude required for medium-to-large-scale entrepreneurial activities. Rather, like Tala, returned overseas workers frequently open small sari-sari stores, selling basic grocery items and sweets, usually on credit. Another popular option is to invest in local transport networks, putting capital into small passenger vans, taxis or

204 Identity and Displacement

motorcycles with sidecars.14 Neither investment offers the same possibility for generating income for the household, nor the same social status as work abroad. The evaluation of neighbours and family as to the ‘success’ of the balikbayan, the constraints of community expectations on returned women’s actions and exclusion from local social networks on the basis of women’s new balikbayan identity all serve to resubjectivate returned women. Being unable to live up to the expectations and become a ‘true’ balikbayan, rather than a failed one – disparaged as a ‘one day millionaire’ (see Constable 1999) – is a common reason for women to take on subsequent contracts.

Conclusion: circulation and value This chapter has shown how the ‘culture of circulation’ attached to women’s migration from the Philippines emerges from movement between two poles of identity – the yin of the ‘Filipina’ and the yang of the balikbayan. Mediating between these two poles are flows of cash and other forms of value, expressed through the cultural concepts of indebtedness and enterprise attached to both identities. Circulation – not just of money but also of cultural and social capital between the poles – creates new female subject positions and enables new feminine subjectivities to emerge. The resulting ‘culture of circulation’ changes the sociality and reproducibility of household economies and the forms of agency attached to gendered identities. As a result, the forms of value generated within the translocal cultural fields of migration encourage continual movements of women to and from sites overseas. In this process, identities do important work. As Jonathan Friedman (1994, p. 171) observes, under globalization: ‘The construction of identity space is the dynamic operator linking economic and cultural processes. It is the source of desire and the specific motivations that generate representational schemes’. In other words, the new kinds of subject positions created within the particular forms of economic organization characteristic of globalization also do the work of making culture. However, such culture can no longer be located solely within the familiar, bounded localities of traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Instead, experiences of mobility and migration transform previously place-bound subject positions into transnational identities, engaging them in new cultural processes and representational schemes. By unpacking two of the identities produced through Filipino migration and theorizing them within a ‘culture of circulation’, I have demonstrated how the particular economic relations of globalization are mutually constitutive of specific forms of meaning and identity.

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 205

Through this lens, we see migrant women as more than ‘victims’ caught up within global processes; they are revealed as innovators, actively renegotiating identities and relations.

Acknowledgements Thanks to respondents in the Philippines and Canada and to friends at the Philippine Women Centre, Vancouver, who hosted a cooperative research project from 1999 to 2001. At the Australian National University, I am grateful to my colleagues, Michelle Carnegie, Benjamin Smith and Kathryn Robinson, for helpful comments on earlier drafts and to Sandra Davenport, Department of Human Geography, for assistance in editing and formatting.

Notes 1. In this village, as elsewhere in the Philippines, female migration links specific sending places with receiving neighborhoods overseas through highly personalized relations, often of kinship (see Pertierra 1992). During my fieldwork, I met women who had spent up to 25 years working outside the Philippines, putting successive generations of their families through school and investing in land, housing and health care, only to see their well-educated daughters join them in Hong Kong, working for another generation of the same family of employers. 2. Palmer-Beltran (1991, cited in Lan 2003, note 18) reports on a survey of 3099 prospective overseas workers conducted in 1990–91 in a pre-departure orientation seminar: 61 per cent of respondents were aged 21–30, 28 per cent were 31–40: 43 per cent were high school graduates, 36 per cent had a college degree or some college education and 11 per cent had completed a vocational course. Over 80 per cent of the respondents were single, 18 per cent were married. 3. Tung (2000) reports 75 per cent remitted from a study of Filipina elder-care providers in Los Angeles, while Chin (1997, cited in Momsen 1999, p. 9) reports 50 per cent remitted for Filipinas in Malaysia and Philippine Women Center of British Columbia (1996) reports 30 per cent of salary remitted for Filipinas working under the Live-In Caregiver Program in Vancouver, Canada. 4. See Tacoli (1996); Constable (1997 and 2003); Pratt (1997, 1998, and 1999); Anderson (2001); Parreñas (2001). 5. See Banzon-Bautista (1989); Pertierra (1994); Nagasaka (1998); and Parreñas, (2005). 6. See Constable (1999) and Barber (2000). 7. I have drawn these identities from the literature on Filipina migration and my own observations. As in any ethnographic work that reflects a lived, real world, many of the identifications overlap between authors and studies, thus I have chosen not to attribute the exploration of specific identities to particular authors here.

206 Identity and Displacement 8. Filipino terms appear in italics and I define them in brackets on their first appearance within the text. Single quotes indicate terms used by respondents speaking Filipino English. 9. This usually occurs through offspring with nursing qualifications who then reunite the family, or through special migration streams such as Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program (for details of the latter, see Pratt, 1997, 1998, and 1999). 10. ‘Filipina’ identity is also associated with sex work – japayuki being the term identifying Japan-based ‘entertainers’ – but debates in the Philippine media have generally focused on the conflation of ‘Filipina’ with ‘maid’. 11. In response, several of my indigenous Ifugao respondents decided to conceal their ethnic identity from fellow Filipinos while abroad. 12. Filipinos who migrate to Canada as skilled professionals receive rights of permanent residency (landed status) on arrival while those who arrive under the Live-In Caregiver Program must do 24 months of domestic work (being a ‘nanny’) in order to qualify for permanent resident status (see Pratt 1997, 1998 and 1999). 13. This observation comes from comments made during interviews at the Philippine Women Center of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1999. 14. The growth in the number of public transport vehicles – many illicit – has led the Philippine government to make public pleas to migrants and their families to invest elsewhere.

References Aguilar, F. (1999) ‘Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labor Migration’, Sojourn 14, no. 1, pp. 109–139. Anderson, B. (2001) ‘Different Roots in Common Ground: Transnationalism and Migrant Domestic Work in London’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4, pp. 673–683. Banzon-Bautista, C. (1989) ‘The Saudi Connection: Agrarian Change in a Pampangan Village, 1977–1984’, in Agrarian Transformations: Local Processes and the State in Southeast Asia, eds G. Hart, A. Turton, and B. White. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 144–158. Barber, P. (2000) ‘Agency in Philippine Women’s Labor Migration and Provisional Diaspora’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 4, pp. 399–411. Boyle, P. (2002) ‘Population Geography: Transnational Women on the Move’, Progress in Human Geography 26, no. 4, pp. 531–543. Constable, N. (1997) Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1999) ‘At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns’, Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 2, pp. 203–228. —— (2003) ‘A Transnational Perspective on Divorce and Marriage: Filipina Wives and Workers’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, pp. 163–180. Friedman, J. (1994) Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage Publications. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001) ‘Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformation’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 3, pp. 365–386.

Identities in a Culture of Circulation 207 Hugo, G. (2002) ‘Women’s International Labor Migration’, in Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development, eds K. Robinson and S. Bessell. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 158–178. Lan, P.-C. (2003) ‘Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor’, Gender & Society 17, no. 2, pp. 187–208. Law, L. (2001) ‘Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong’, Ecumene 8, no. 3, pp. 264–283. Lee, B. and E. LiPuma (2002) ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture 14, no. 1, pp. 191–213. Mills, M. B. (2003) ‘Gender and Inequality in the Global Labor Force’, Annual Review of Anthropology 32, pp. 41–62. Momsen, J. (1999) ‘Maids on the Move’, in Gender, Migration and Domestic Service, ed. J. Momsen. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Nagasaka, I. (1998) ‘Kinship Networks and Child Fostering in Labor Migration from Ilocos, Philippines, to Italy’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 7, no. 1, pp. 67–92. Parreñas, R. (2001) Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (2005) Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pertierra, R., ed. (1992) Remittances and Returnees: The Cultural Economy of Migration in Ilocos, with contributions by M. Cabilao, M. Escobar and A. Pinggol. Quezon City: New Day. Pertierra, R. (1994) ‘Lured Abroad: The Case of Ilocano Overseas Workers’, Sojourn 9, no. 1, pp. 54–80. Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia (1996) ‘Housing Needs Assessment of Filipina Domestic Workers’. A Study conducted by the Philippine Women Centre, Vancouver, BC. Pratt, G. (1997) ‘Stereotypes and Ambivalence: The Construction of Domestic Workers in Vancouver, BC’, Gender, Place and Culture 4, no. 2, pp. 159–177. —— (1998) ‘Inscribing Domestic Work on Filipina Bodies’, in Places Through the Body, eds H. Nast and S. Pile. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 283–304. —— (1999) ‘From Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny: Discursive Geographies of Filipina Domestic Workers in Vancouver, BC’, Economic Geography 75, no. 3, pp. 215–236. Puri, S. and T. Ritzema (1999) ‘Migrant Worker Remittances, Micro-finance and the Informal Economy: Prospects and Issues’, Working Paper No. 21. Geneva: International Labor Office. Rafael, V. (1997) ‘Your Grief is Our Gossip: Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences’, Public Culture 9, no. 2, pp. 267–291. Ramos, G. (1995) ‘The Other Flor Contemplacion’, Today, 31 May, C22. Rodriguez, E. (1998) ‘International Migration and Income Distribution in the Philippines’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 46, no. 2, pp. 329–350. Szanton Blanc, C. (1996) ‘Balikbayan: A Filipino Extension of the National Imaginary and of State Boundaries’, Philippine Sociological Review 44, no. 1–4, pp. 178–193. Tacoli, C. (1996) ‘Migrating “for the Sake of the Family”? Gender, Life-course and Intra-household Relations among Filipino Migrants in Rome’, Philippine Sociological Review 44, no. 1–4, pp. 12–32.

208 Identity and Displacement Tung, C. (2000) ‘The Cost of Caring: The Social Reproductive Labor of Filipina Live-in Home Health Caregivers’, Frontiers 21, no. 1–2, pp. 61–82. Tyner, J. and D. Donaldson (1999) ‘The Geography of Philippine International Labor Migration Fields’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 40, no. 3, pp. 217–234. Westwood, S. and A. Phizacklea (2000) Transnationalism and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge.

11 Transporting Culture Across Borders – the Hmong Nicholas Tapp

Setting the scene – borders and borderlands Diasporic communities which transcend national boundaries represent a challenge not only to essentialized notions of identities separated by clear political and cultural frontiers but also to geographically bounded national sovereignty itself. This chapter considers effects of the recent diaspora of the Hmong of Laos to ‘the four corners of the world’, and endeavours to make some assessment of the significance of their attempts to renew or maintain contacts with kinship relatives across huge global barriers of time and space, political borders and modern nation-states. These findings emerge from a project on the diasporic Hmong as a global community which I conducted in collaboration with Dr Gary Yia Lee.1 Our primary aim was to examine the return visits of migrant Hmong in ‘the West’, originally cross-border shifting cultivators from Laos, to their homelands in Laos or Vietnam, the neighbouring zone of Thailand or their original homelands in southern China. What are the effects of these visits on local identities and communities? To what extent is a genuinely new kind of transnational community, a post-national collective subject, operating through a ‘diasporic public sphere’ (Appadurai 1996), emerging through international visits, marriages and new technologies of communication such as the Internet? To what extent are Hmong transmigrants forging new transnational social fields crosscutting traditional, political, geographic and cultural borders (Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994)? Fieldwork for the project took place in Laos and Thailand, China and Australia.2 We have inherited two very different models of the relationship between centres and margins, borders or peripheries; one deals with economic flows, the other with cultural influences, but both are centrifugal. 209

210 Identity and Displacement

In the first, peripheries are the sites of tradition, locations where surplus value is extracted in order to benefit modernizing, progressively developing metropolitan centres. In the second, diffusionist model, the peripheries are the places of furthest reach of an original cultural element which remains pristine; again it is the centre which is the site of change and innovation, the periphery which is the site of tradition and authenticity. If we accept both views, then the ‘borderlands’ of Indochina, comprising parts of northern Southeast Asia and southern China, are culturally rich but economically subjugated, culturally authentic but economically marginalized and peripheral, in relation to India, China or the ‘West’. Such borderlands become central to the world economy as dependency upon them grows, and they become culturally central as they become the repositories of cultural values that are the objects of desire for metropolitan nostalgics.3 The issues raised by cultures which cross-cut political boundaries in this region of northern Indochina have been dealt with by Leach (1960), who drew attention to the imposition of colonial borders on what had been unified ethnographic regions; Thongchai (1994), who described how modern political borders replaced wider amorphous spheres of traditional influences; and Keyes (2002) who argues that diasporas such as the overseas Vietnamese challenge the homogenous cultural entities assumed by territorially bounded nation-states.4 Other work on the region has shown the agency of border peoples and how crucial borders are to the mechanisms of the state (e.g. Walker 1999). Despite claiming that frontiers in this region have been culturally and socially ‘borderless for a long time’, Evans et al. (2000, pp. 2–3) argue that increased flows across the borders have led to closer state monitoring and an effective ‘closing of the frontier’. This chapter tests such assumptions and explores to what extent Appadurai’s (1996) hyphen in the bonding of the nation-state has been ‘refigured by capital mobility and migration’ (Ong 1999, p. 11). Ong’s (1999, p. 2) question has motivated much of the research described in this chapter: ‘are political borders becoming insignificant or is the state merely fashioning a new relationship to capital mobility and to manipulations by citizens and non-citizens alike?’ Cunningham and Heyman (2004) warn against conflating ‘divergent’ bodies of literature on ‘studies of borders’ and the kind of ‘border theory’ which considers borders largely in metaphorical terms. I am indeed interested in the metaphorical significance of borders and borderlands as discussed by ‘post-modern’ theorists, but contrary to Cunningham and Heyman (2004) I see this as closely related to the actual social

Transporting Culture Across Borders 211

processes by which boundaries are constructed, maintained and contested (Cohen 1986). Many writers have stressed the agency of border peoples, people who cross-cut political borders, their active participation in shaping and forming frontiers, the local construction of boundaries, and border zones as sites of cross-cultural contacts where new rapprochements take place and novel identities are formed.5 Joel Kahn (1995, p. 130) refers somewhat disparagingly (cf. Clifford 1994) to the postcolonial ‘discovery/ construction’ of diasporas, and the contemporary fascination with ‘borderlands’, as seeming to challenge what he calls the ‘the spatial metaphor in the cultural imaginary’. These borderlands are ‘areas between cultures where diverse cultural influences produce ambiguity, paradox, and cultural pastiche’. Kahn argues that this fascination with hybrid borderlands merely reasserts the fixity of a ‘pure cultural centre’, defined by contrast to the hybrid borderlands (cf. Friedman 1992). Bhabha (1994) and Spivak (1988), in different ways, have paid full attention to the notions of creolization and hybridity associated with ‘borderland’ encounters between different cultures, the harbingers of a heterogeneous modernity. Borderlands as an ‘interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorialization’ are not marginal zones, argued Gupta and Ferguson (1992), but correspond better to the ‘normal’ locale of the ‘postmodern subject’. As Robbins puts it (1998, p. 130), ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance’, and it was to examine such processes of ‘re-attachment’ that this research project was partly undertaken; an attempt to account for the realities of national deterritorialization while also grounding these ‘in specific times and places’ (Ong and Nonini 1997, p. 5). Let us consider the places where the Hmong, traditionally shifting cultivators, live, in Southeast Asia or China, as very real borderlands, in the sense that these are the crucial places, the crucibles, where national identities associated with states are forged and where their political boundaries are reinforced. Let us remember the power of agency which many of the people who live close by, travel and trade across the arbitrary borders established by colonial nation-states are likely to have and to maintain. Let us try to imagine the dangers which such intercultural passages and transgressions, from one piece of the ‘mosaic’ to the other, may pose to the construction of hegemonic discourses of national identity and try to understand something of the urgency with which states that have commandeered particular forms of nationalism need to regulate such movements of people and commodities. Finally, let us have

212 Identity and Displacement

some sense of how cultures, or a culture, may be sited in a number of different places (Hastrup and Olwig 1997), resisting the attempts of the state to fix and locate culture in particular localities (Tapp 2004).6

National constraints Research among Hmong residents in Yunnan province, China,7 revealed five main categories of overseas Hmong visitor over the past decade; those described as ‘tourists’, who came to ‘sightsee’ but also with a view to discovering their own ancestral roots and with the intention of meeting other groups of Hmong; those in search of lovers or marriage partners (often second wives); some entrepreneurs with business plans; religious missionaries, mostly Protestant; and finally a small group of political activists agitating for a separatist Hmong state, seeking support from Chinese Hmong. Overseas Hmong contacts began with a bang in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a great number of American Hmong visited China, particularly at New Year festivals. However, by the mid-1990s serious problems had surfaced in all the categories above except tourists, which led to increasing government restrictions and surveillance of overseas Hmong visitors from 1995–96 onwards. This inevitably diminished the extent, and local impact, of overseas contacts. On the ‘love’ front, American Hmong were found to have been deceiving local girls into thoughts of marriage while hiding the fact they already had wives in the United States. In one case, an American Hmong (who is married) was officially expelled from China after, it was claimed, starting affairs with two girls from two different villages. Other American Hmong have contracted local marriages in China which are illegal in that American law does not recognize polygyny, so these girls have little hope of leaving China to join their husbands overseas, but are supported and visited annually by their American husbands, particularly at festival times. In Thailand too, there have been many cases of visiting American Hmong ‘playing with’ (ua siv) local Hmong girls and then deserting them before marriage, and also in Laos. In Khek Noi (Thailand) the old headman told me how angry the local Hmong elders felt about this, but attributed part of the blame to the young girls themselves, whom he said would sometimes go with American Hmong just for the sake of what they could get out of it, knowing full well there would be no proper marriages to follow them and not caring, refusing to listen to the warnings of their parents against this.8 On the ‘business’ front, to return to China, stories abounded of how payments had never been received from the US for costumes posted

Transporting Culture Across Borders 213

there to be sold (at an average of US$150 a suit). In many cases, this may be because there are so many people producing identical costumes at the local level and the market has become glutted, but these cases have not helped local Hmong relations with those overseas. Much other business, such as that in medicines or DVDs, is private and domestic. On the ‘religious’ front, in the mid-1990s the area was visited by groups of Protestant Hmong from the US, and recently several villages along the Chinese border have fled to Vietnam, and even to Laos and Burma, inspired by the missionary broadcasts (in Hmong) from a radio station in Manila. This has led to increasing Chinese government concern about overseas Hmong visitors, particularly since the early attempts of Hmong ‘splittists’ to hire ex-People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers along the borders to fight in Laos. In China, therefore, problems with overseas trading, religious missionaries, nationalist political activists and overseas love matches, all combined in the mid 1990s to effect a serious governmental clampdown on the visits of overseas Hmong. In Laos, while the return visits of overseas Hmong refugees are certainly significant and so is their investment in individual family economies, more significant contributions are limited by the fact that the overseas refugees, who have fled the Pathet Lao, are generally mistrusted by the Lao Government and often have their visas refused. Significant economic investment is not sought by the overseas community since it would support what they see as an illegitimate regime in Laos, nor is it encouraged by the Lao Government who would prefer to see investment in less ethnically sensitive areas. In Thailand, there is a divided Hmong community: those who have settled there from Laos receive significant overseas financial support, while the more established Thai Hmong have few such contacts. In Thailand I accompanied a Hmong researcher from Chiang Mai University9 and his two cousins from the US who were visiting northern Thailand on an extraordinary tour nonetheless typical of those undertaken by visiting American Hmong. We went first to Mount Phu Chifa, on the very edge of the Lao border, where Thai Hmong go to meet their Lao relatives after sending them messages through the Radio Station at Chiang Mai, and there, indeed, we were able to meet some Laotian Hmong who had just crossed over the border to meet their relatives. My Hmong companions from the US were powerfully affected by this, noting similarities of surname and recording addresses on their video since nobody had a pencil, handing out 500-baht notes and hailing the Laotian Hmong as classificatory relatives, filming the sounds of mountain birds to listen to after they returned home and breaking off pieces

214 Identity and Displacement

of medicinal leaf and branch to take back with them. There was a genuine nostalgia here, almost more sensory than mental. Nostalgia will probably always continue to draw some overseas Hmong back to revisit their ancestral homelands in Laos, Thailand and even China, and play an important part in overseas support for the Hmong within Laos. However, it is likely that domestic, social, economic and political factors associated with particular nation-states will continue to play a determining role in facilitating or discouraging transnational Hmong flows and contacts of people, objects, signs and capital – as they also will in facilitating or discouraging Hmong integration into the countries of their new settlement (cf. Ong 2004). At the moment it is still possible to find, as we did in Melbourne, a Hmong family with close relatives settled in France, Australia and the US, all in close contact through a series of affinal connections, frequent visits and the Internet,10 and in close contact with other near relatives in Laos and Thailand.11 The head of this co-residential family of 24 was a doctor who had recently returned from a conference on the Hmong in the US. One of his brothers had married a Hmong from France, whom he had met in Australia (where he lives). Her parents had not been able to join them in Australia as they had planned; when they married, his Hmong was falling away as he was more used to speaking English, while her French was much better than her Hmong. Now, however, they usually speak Hmong to each other. Another half-brother lived in France, and another in the US. One younger brother who lived with them was a devotee of the Internet, and had made two separate visits to the US to meet Hmong girls he had met online with a view to marriage. One American Hmong girl had even visited him in Australia. In none of these cases had it worked out, and he remained unmarried. Such families are the exception, however, and very much part of a traditional elite. Another transnational case was a man who had moved recently to Australia from New Zealand, as all the Hmong originally settled there have now done (Lee 2004). We interviewed a sad couple who after enormous sufferings had managed to adopt the son of the wife’s sister from America. One family showed us a ‘United Yang Family Questionnaire’ prepared in the US which is being distributed among all Hmong members of the Yang clan globally; another spoke of a joyous reunion, earlier this year, when close relatives from France and the US joined them in Australia. From such (largely first generation) evidence, it would be pleasing to imagine the future of the Hmong as a transnational community, a post-national collective subject transcending the boundaries of

Transporting Culture Across Borders 215

traditional nation-states and forming a new kind of voluntary public diasporic community, restoring the ‘interconnections’ displaced by colonialism (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; see also Kearney 1991; Hall 1992, p. 309; Appadurai 1996, p. 19; Hannerz 1996; Cohen 1997). However, our research showed that such cases were in the minority and did not represent dominant trends among the international Hmong community. While exciting and novel transnational contacts have taken place and continue, the practical constraints even on these are too great for them to form a credible model of future trends. At every turn in the ‘current death dance between identities, nations, and states’ (Castells 1997, p. 276), the social, political and economic forces associated with particular sites in individual nation-states, had combined to curtail the mobility and emergence of a genuinely strong or powerful transnational community. As Ong (1999, p. 15) puts it, the nation-state ‘continues to define, discipline, control and regulate all kinds of populations’ – both those in residence and those in movement. The impact of overseas Hmong has been greatest in Laos, whence the majority of overseas Hmong originate. Particularly in the socialist countries, however, this impact had been curtailed by state intervention.

Virtual mobility and the Internet We were interested in Internet usage among the diasporic Hmong; some of this research took place online, and some was conducted through interviews in the places we visited. It became clear that Internet/computer usage, while significant in most Asian field sites, had not been extensive. It related directly to the developmental profile of the nation-state concerned: well established in Australia and, we believe, in other First World sites, it was least developed in China, significant but often covert and not widespread in Laos and Vietnam, and rapidly expanding in Thailand. As with return visits of overseas Hmong to their homelands in Asia, as I show below, Internet usage represents only a small proportion of the population, yet has had a significant impact on the evolution of international relations and the initiation of new contacts. We wanted to resolve the question of whether Hmong diasporic web and Internet usage signified the emergence of a genuinely globalized ‘communal diasporic voluntary public culture’ (Werbner 1996), or whether these practices should be regarded as limited and partial, virtual attempts to resurrect a sense of community which had in fact been irrevocably fragmented by global dispersal? It appeared to us that

216 Identity and Displacement

hegemonic American Hmong voices are only partly dominating the Internet; a wide diversity of Hmong voices are speaking through these media (see also Julian 2004). A range of different appeals are being made to the supposed global unity of Hmong society. Thus there are differences reflected on the Internet between messianic and rationalist Hmong, those who believe in women’s liberation and those who do not, those who support the resistance struggle in Laos and those who do not, Christian Hmong of various persuasions and those who follow traditional shamanic practices, besides the growing number of younger Hmong who have little interest in such issues. As an example of the kind of accommodations which must be made, a group of messianic Hmong who use a particular script for writing Hmong, had recently approached HLUG (the Yahoo-based Hmong Language Users Group) for permission to use their script online; this was allowed, but on condition that the romanized alphabet normally used for Hmong should remain the main medium of communication. The Internet was revealed more as a reflection of society than a means of transcending social forces (Coyne 1999). While many appeals to a global Hmong unity are made, on the Internet as in political and cultural life in reality, these emanate from different groups within the Hmong e-community and are often at odds with each other. Internet usage is limited to the educated and elite, and its popularity is related to the developmental profile of the country. While there were Internet contacts with Hmong in China, in some cases followed by visits there, most Internet contacts in Australia (email and discussion groups) took place with other Australian, or American Hmong. The need to find Hmong partners is a major factor in Internet use by younger people, and even by some of the old, but one is far more likely to find young Hmong in Cairns chatting with young Hmong in Sydney, Melbourne, or the US, than with France or any Asian location, simply because they can communicate in English. It began to seem that electronic media were more prominent in forging new relations and reattaching connections between fragmented Hmong communities in Canada, the US and Australia than between those in these countries and in Asia. The regional limits of this project forbade more extensive inquiry; however, the Australian data on homeland visits described below went some way towards suggesting that the transnational Hmong community emerging through international mobility and the use of modern means of communication is largely a community of the developed world, which to a great extent excludes Hmong from the developing countries.

Transporting Culture Across Borders 217

Return visits to the homelands Field research with Australian Hmong allowed us to enquire into what proportions and categories of overseas Hmong visit, or maintain extensive relations of a marital or economic or other nature with, their Asian homelands.12 In Innisfail, North Queensland, there are 49 Hmong families with a total population of approximately 360. Thirty-five of these families who moved up from Sydney and elsewhere in the early 1990s own banana plantations, but are now beginning to sell them off and are discussing a further relocation to Brisbane. The data collected from Innisfail were extremely accurate and meaningful and can probably be generalized to other Hmong communities in Australia.13 Out of the 134 adults over 18 years of age in Innisfail, only 31 had been back to Laos at all. This 23.1 per cent would, of course, diminish considerably against the total population (450 including children and breakaway Hmong Council members14). But it is surely significant that 19 of these, or over half, had also made visits to the US, while a further 28 had visited the US, but not Laos. That is, a total of 59 adults, nearly half the total adult population, had been either to Laos or America. Total US visitors well outnumbered total Laos visitors (47 as against 31). The figures are even clearer when one considers the number of total visits made, since individuals had often made more than one visit; total visits to the US were 66, as against 38 total visits to Laos. Ages of visitors to Laos were almost invariably over 40; only 5 out of the 31 were under 40 years of age. Young people often showed a positive antipathy towards the idea of visiting, or revisiting Laos, which they felt to be backward and ‘dirty’. However, almost all of those who still had relatives in Laos or Thailand supported them financially, estimated at an average of AUS$500 annually. The primary reason for these return visits was to visit close relatives who had been left behind; an important subsidiary reason was medical, seeking herbal medicines or in one case shamanic assistance for infertility. No visits had taken place to China; only one had taken place to France. It is clear, therefore, that only a small percentage of the overseas Hmong actually revisit their homelands in Asia. Where political reasons do not impede reunion, often economic pressures prohibit international visits or contacts. Moreover, our research in Laos and Thailand showed that Asian localities have not been substantially transformed as a result of the visits. Their impact and that of the financial support which Laotian Hmong in particular receive from their relatives overseas has,

218 Identity and Displacement

however, been significant in transforming their imaginings of the outside world, leading to radical transformations of the Hmong cultural heritage and outlook at the local level. Through regular overseas remittances and small-scale business trading opportunities, economic changes at the local level have occurred as a result of encounters and re-encounters with Hmong from overseas, but these have been largely limited to local kinship networks and domestic groups.

Kinship as a globalizing force The continuing importance of kinship in the lives of the overseas and Asian Hmong, in the kinds of ‘transnational social fields’ (Schiller and Fouron 2001) which have been formed emerged very clearly from the research. The power of kinship was shown in the many tragic tales of siblings, couples and children and parents divided from each other through the refugee exodus from Laos, and forces attention on the mechanisms these parted relatives have evolved for staying in touch. These include visits, economic cooperation, telephone calls and the Internet. Most visits overseas took place to relatives, most new contacts were initiated by appeals to classificatory kinship, or the establishment of quasi-close kin relations based on clan surnames. Although in some cases of long separation, actual kin relations had been replaced by local classificatory or virtual ones, this still testified to the power of kinship as a social idiom of community (Tapp 2003). The extension of kinship across the world, so that close kin terms could be used between a Chinese and an American Hmong who had never met before simply on account on their common surnames, is some measure of this. If kinship provides a traditional means whereby spatial distances can be overcome and vanquished, the Internet may provide a new means of mediating this, whereby separations can be overcome and new contacts established, and this inevitably plays a part in knitting together the transnational Hmong community as a community with an individual voice, or rather many disparate voices, of its own. The kinship system transcends the boundaries of place and can operate everywhere.15 The primordially experienced value of kinship as a space-challenging mechanism was expressed very clearly; a Hmong doctor in Melbourne remarked how he thought the Hmong already had virtual families, and that now they needed to establish a global ‘virtual community’ (see Pao 2004). Three girls in Melbourne had married Australians, and another had gone off to Ireland with a backpacker she had married. Another significant minority trend was for international marriages with other Hmong,

Transporting Culture Across Borders 219

more in Melbourne than in Cairns/Innisfail (where there was only one case), some of these based on previous contacts through the Internet. In one interesting case, a young woman who had just begun to enjoy the Internet and was speaking English better than Hmong, had been married off reluctantly at a very young age to a much older man from France, but had since then become an avowedly contented, fairly traditional Hmong wife (who had to give up using the Internet). ‘He is so much older than you, he teaches you everything, nws paub lus’ [lit. ‘he understands peoples’ words’, or ‘he knows stuff’, i.e. is mature]. These international Hmong marriages seemed – as in the case of the couple mentioned above who had begun to speak more Hmong to each other – to play some part in maintaining cultural traditions which were otherwise dramatically weakening. Hmong raised in Australia, or under 40 years of age, were often uninterested in culture and history; many of them could only speak Hmong with difficulty and were more at home in English. The strong preference, however, is still to marry Hmong. The Australian Hmong, it may be said, are in cultural crisis, with the elders alarmed at the loss of Hmong culture by the youth, and some of the young men in Melbourne very concerned about the lack of eligible Hmong spouses. ‘The girls are dying out!’ complained one young man of 19 in Melbourne. Many informants feared that the Hmong would ‘disappear’ (ploj) as a people within a generation if these trends continued, and there were active attempts to keep the culture alive by teaching it to younger people.

Nostalgia and reformulated tradition Nostalgia as a motivating factor in those among the elder generation who revisit their homelands cannot be entirely dismissed. At Wat Tam Krabok in Thailand, until recently a religious haven for Hmong refugees from Laos who have refused to be resettled overseas, I found considerable interest among old Hmong fighters in the new Hmong Cultural Centre in Chiangrai province. The Centre stands in the middle of a very ordinary Hmong village, a quite extraordinary structure (see Figure 11.1) which appears to have been closely modelled on the messianic temple formerly constructed in a refugee camp under the guidance of a messianic prophet named Lis Txais.16 His visions of a Hmong future have attracted large numbers of overseas Hmong visitors who dream of recovering their homelands in Laos. A common route for returning American Hmong is first to visit Wat Tam Krabok to touch the magic stone of revival, then to Khek Noi where

220 Identity and Displacement

Figure 11.1 The new Hmong Cultural Centre in Chiangrai province. Source: Photograph courtesy Aranya Siriphon.

they may find relatives, travel up to Chiangrai to see the Hmong Cultural Centre, and visit the ‘Golden Triangle’ area, a piece of Burma leased to Sino-Thai business for gambling, where it is said the new Hmong Messiah will be, or has been, born. Despite the continuing importance of the system of descent, the patrilineal descent system is often blamed, by Hmong themselves, for the divisions among them which led to civil war in Laos, and there are isolated cases of attempts to overcome and reform it – by, for example, adopting a particular family name rather than a clan surname, as one of our informants in Melbourne had done (cf. Leepreecha 2001), or in the attempts to establish new temples and centres like the Hmong Cultural Centre in Thailand and forms of worship to unite Hmong from different clans. Four Hmong families from Innisfail had retreated from the rest of the Hmong community and invented new rituals for themselves in a messianic movement much disliked by the majority of Hmong, wearing clothes they claimed to be traditional as a sign of their identity. They maintain close associations with Lis Txais in Thailand. Our case studies in Australia included a young man who has designed his own Hmong national flag and wishes to create a new movement for

Transporting Culture Across Borders 221

the Hmong globally, based on his own creative combinations of the history of the Hmong contained in funeral and wedding rituals.17 It does seem that, rather than a single or unitary Hmong community emerging internationally, a number of very different appeals are being made to that imagined sense of unity. Our research confirmed the association between overseas diasporas and the support for conservative movements of nationalism in homelands pointed to by other studies. Nationalism here is not territorially bounded, but it is oppositional to the leadership of the home countries (cf. Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994).18 While ‘long-distance nationalism’ does play a part in some of the Hmong relations with their homelands, the Lao state is a long way towards claiming the almost universally oppositional overseas Laotian population as its members. Let us reiterate that it is only a small proportion of the overseas population who can afford to make return visits to their homelands, and even less who are able to make significant investments there.19 These are not the powerful transmigrants considered by Schiller and Fouron (2001) who live simultaneously in more than one nation-state and contradict the image of the uprooted immigrant. A significant transnational public Hmong community is emerging, albeit one badly fractured through political and religious schisms, among elite members of English-speaking nations; in particular Australia and the US, and to some extent Canada. In the future it is likely that the French-speaking Hmong community will retain fewer transnational contacts with other Hmong communities in First World countries owing to the dominance of English on the Internet; the loss of Hmong language by the younger generation; and the lesser usage of computers by French Hmong. It seems possible, therefore, that the French-speaking Hmong may maintain more significant contacts with Hmong in Asian homelands than will the English-speaking Hmong community. Our research confirmed the strength of the geographically bounded nation-state in curbing the emergence of transnational diasporic communities, and the importance of local social, political and economic constraints in limiting the emergence of a powerful global public culture. As Tölöyan (1991, p. 5) pointed out almost at the outset of ‘diaspora studies’: ‘To affirm that diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment is not to write the premature obituary of the nation-state, which remains a privileged form of polity’. And as Ong and Nonini put it (1997, p. 326), ‘One should not assume that what is diasporic, fluid, border-crossing or hybrid is intrinsically subversive of power structures’.

222 Identity and Displacement

Globalization and consciousness So what kind of exchanges are taking place across Southeast Asian borders, what cultures are crossing these national boundaries and what implications are these having for the local communities? Globalization has had a lengthy history in this region, a complex relationship with various (polyethnic) states, empires and trading alliances predating the emergence of the nation-state. Hmong identity is traditionally defined through a series of contrastive oppositions with the mab-suav, or ‘others’, and this is usually understood as referring to the Han Chinese who are said to have persecuted them and driven them from their rightful homelands in China. Despite their relative isolation from other borderland minority groups, there can be no doubt that the Hmong encounter with cultural ‘others’ must have begun very early; this is reflected in tales of trickery and cheating on the part of the suav or Chinese.20 The encounter with Europe began several centuries ago, probably with the arrival of Catholic missionaries in southern China during the eighteenth century. And the missionary encounter has continued to be significant, with mass conversions to Protestant Christianity among the Yunnanese Hmong (and the related A Hmao people) at the turn of the twentieth century, succeeded by the extensive work of missionaries under French rule in Indochina. The adoption of Christianity by sectors of the Hmong may in some cases be an appeal to authority felt to be of a higher order than that of the local hostile nation-state (Tapp 1989). ‘Globalization proper’ may be said to have begun for the Hmong in Laos in the 1920s, with a split between two clans which later polarized into opposition between the communist bloc-supported Pathet Lao and the Westernsupported Royal Lao Government. This originally family conflict between a father and his daughter’s husband was exploded into the global conflicts of the Cold War. The refugee exodus from Laos after 1975 has seen an unprecedented dispersal of the Hmong people to Canada and the US, Argentina, Germany and France, Australia and New Zealand. If we can talk of the globalization of formerly emplaced communities and commodities in the same breath, you can now find Hmong in Chicago, Hobart or Paris, just as you can find Thai restaurants there – or Hmong story-cloth embroideries. An enormous change has taken place as a result in the local consciousness of identity; morality is no longer wholly relative to the contours of the kinship system, but has been extended to embrace a notion of humanity as a whole. It is often said that one should behave well towards others, whether or not they are Hmong. At the same time,

Transporting Culture Across Borders 223

the use of ‘Hmong’ as an ethnic label has become partially restricted and more consciously identified with certain customary practices and behaviours; it is possible to describe the behaviour of visiting American Hmong (or even a local Hmong who refused to help his own brother) as ‘un-Hmong’, to see they may be more like ‘others’ than ‘ourselves’, and conversely to recognize common affinities and interests with other local people, who may not be ‘Hmong’ – an expanded understanding of the humanity of others (Tapp 2002b).21 There have certainly been significant impacts of the Hmong diaspora at local levels in Asian settings – the new houses built with overseas money in Laos, or the rice fields purchased with the help of overseas relatives, the Internet shops and services started up by Hmong, the embroidery business which supplements other sources of income in Wat Tam Krabok, Thailand and the international Hmong marriages which have taken place in China and elsewhere. Yet, these do not affect the Hmong community as a whole, and differences in Laos are very evident between those who have overseas support and those who do not.22 Overseas support has not substantially altered their social position in Chinese, Laotian, Thai or Vietnamese society. The lack of citizenship rights for ethnic minorities in Thailand remains pressing, together with the insecurity of land tenure and customary agrarian practices for upland cultivators under new community forest legislation, while drugs-related killings continue to victimize innocent members of minorities including Hmong. Visas are routinely denied Hmong who have already flown into Thailand to enter Laos, particularly those with family names which resemble those of known resistance fighters. In China, Hmong businesses started up with the hopes of overseas support flounder, and government suspicion haunts the visits of overseas Hmong. The power of the territorial state, if not its legitimacy, remains strong in curtailing and regulating the free passage of diasporic cosmopolitans while some of those cosmopolitans may, as in Laos, support political movements of resistance against the current regime. Stories abound about the bureaucratic difficulties caused by global dispersal; for example, a Hmong refugee from Laos, living in Thailand, had to change his name to a Thai one in order to obtain the identity card necessary for his passport application, but then found himself unable to prove his relationship to the sponsoring Hmong overseas! These are hardly Ong and Nonini’s (1997, p. 23) flexible capitalists, who play off nation-state regimes against each other and shrug identities on and off with apparent ease, although, indeed, they form with other ethnic minorities a (largely invisible and generally overlooked) part of a greater Chinese

224 Identity and Displacement

diaspora. Nor, in general, does the Hmong diaspora as yet exemplify dual participation in the affairs of two or more nation-states (Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994). The fear of pan-Hmong movements in China, Vietnam and Laos has led to strong suppressive reactions on the parts of states, and while the traditional migratory routes and long-ranging marriage alliances of Hmong across borders and within states may represent a mute challenge to the power of the state to fix and locate cultural identities in particular locations, at the same time overseas Hmong of a certain age and disposition long for a unified territory (a ‘pure cultural centre’) to call their own. Diasporic relationship is used as a local tactic in a complex manoeuvring of identity politics; appeals may be made overseas by some families but not by others, for example in a case from Laos where the son of a family had accidentally killed a person through driving a car and had to pay a large compensation, for which he was able to ask for help from relatives living in Australia. A woman from Khek Noi, in Thailand, can take her three daughters to the US, one after the other, to find American Hmong husbands for them. But these tactics are not available to everybody and become part of a complex web of shifting alliances and identifications at the local level, in the borderlands where identity is structured around relationships which have always stretched across political borders and national frontiers, through strategies which are now global as much as they are local, and implicate the spatial demarcation of states as well as the definitions of cultural frontiers.23 We now have to think of new cultural spaces in the Southeast Asian borderlands, or new forms of locally positioned networks24 in order to take account of kinship networks which traverse the globe, rapidly travelling images and economic flows, in yet inevitably embedded local contexts. Diasporas, like cultures themselves, although multi-sited, are situated in particular locales; embodied in particular local practices; and located in specific material conditions, in hierarchalised networks of trade and travel, kinship and communication.

Notes 1. My thanks also go to our many assistants and collaborators, including Dr Prasit Leepreecha and Aranya Siriphon in Thailand, Yeu Lee in Australia, Lee Lauj and others in Laos, Prof. Yin Shaoting and Yan Enquan in China. The research was conducted in 2001 by Dr Gary Yia Lee and myself, funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation in Taiwan. 2. Since then I have conducted some follow-up fieldwork in Canada; it is hoped to extend some of this work to the US, France and Vietnam.

Transporting Culture Across Borders 225 3. See Urry (2000) on ‘centriperipherals’. 4. See also Lattimore (1968); Wijeyewardene (1990). 5. See Rosaldo (1989) on ‘cultural borderlands’; White (1991) on the ‘middle ground’; Pratt (1992) on ‘contact zones’. 6. There are clear problems with an oversimplified view of the challenges posed to national fixities and bounded cultural entities by processes of diaspora and migration. Because of the general acceptance of an image of precolonial fluidity of identity it becomes tempting to see globalizing influences leading to new hybrid identities and rapprochements (Jorgensen 1977). The image is one of waters and flows, bursting the dam of nationalism, reasserting primeval drives towards mixture and unification. However, as in the case of Thai-Zhuang relations examined by Keyes (2002), the nostalgia which brings some Hmong refugees back to Asia takes the form of an appeal to exclusively Hmong sentiments not involving those recognized as belonging to different ethnic groups. The Hmong form a bad example of the sort of history that focuses on the return of the pre-modern, perhaps because they were particularly isolated from other minority ethnic groups in the past (Tapp 2002a). 7. In China, research was undertaken in the province of Yunnan, in the County of Pingbian in the prefecture of Hong He (Red River), and in the County of Maguan and the Township of Xiaobao in the Prefecture of Wenshan. Research among urban Hmong was also conducted in Kunming and in the prefectural capital of Wenshan besides the country seats of Pingbian and Maguan and the township of Xiaobao. 8. Unfortunately we were unable to interview an elderly couple in Australia who had divorced, and each then subsequently found a new spouse from Laos (although we did meet the second wife of the man later in Cairns at Rusty’s Market, where many of the Hmong women make a good living selling fresh fruit and vegetables). 9. Dr Prasit Leepreecha of the Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, who also acted as a collaborator on this project. 10. They maintained a dedicated family Web page and information bulletin. 11. They had established regular family reunions between members in France and the US. 12. While some statistically representative data was obtained, what is really needed is a large-scale sociological survey covering the international Hmong community covering other First World countries such as France, Canada and the US, backed up by smaller focused periods of fieldwork in individual locations. It is hoped that planned future research may accomplish this. Portes (2003) comes to a similar conclusion when he calls for in-depth surveys to complement ethnography. 13. Homeland contacts in this community, however, represent the maximum of such contacts among Hmong Australian communities. 14. A breakaway Hmong Council had been formed from the local Hmong Association after a disagreement over the election of a president whose wife was Lao and who was closely involved with the national Lao Association. I do not have full population details for Council members, which is estimated at 87 people (which I have rounded up to 90) including some 40 adults, but details for returns to Laos are also included in this population. Including (as

226 Identity and Displacement

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

we should) the adult Council members of some 40 would give a percentage of returnees of 17.8 against a total of adults of 174; and against the total population of 450 the proportion would be 6.9 per cent. While confirming the realization of Schiller and Fouron (1999) that transnational connections tend to be legitimized by ‘an ideology of blood’, I do not see this as one of the factors necessarily invalidating ‘third space’ approaches (Bhabha 1994) which envisage a zone detached from any nationstate and the demise of the nation-state, as they do, since kinship here acts as a force against nation and locality. This may arise partly because of the more extended, classificatory nature of Hmong kinship, partly on account of the different orientations of an ethnic minority towards a home nation from that of its majority ethnic population, and deserves more consideration than I am able to give it here. Lis Txais has virtually invented a new religion, culture, language and music for the refugee Hmong. See also the comments on a newly designed Hmong flag on the Internet by a Hmong freshman in the US which is reported in Tapp (2003). It may be that, as Schiller and Fouron (2001) argue, successful adaptation in the host country does not rule out the emergence of long-distance nationalism in the second generation, yet Hmong examples of this are rare and in general, perhaps because of the political situation in Laos, adaptation has so far precluded the formation of strong ties with homelands. This very much confirms Portes’s (2003) conclusion that only a small minority of immigrants engage in transnational activities – but that such activities are extremely significant. There are important Sinitic influences upon Hmong culture which show that at several points in their history, they have enjoyed fairly close contacts with the Han (Tapp 1996). If ‘all cultures tend to be … hybrid’ (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996) then it could be argued that Hmong culture is already a hybrid one between Hmong and Han, and the fact that ‘hybrids often subversively appropriate and creolize master codes’ would explain much of the ‘Sinitic influences’ upon Hmong culture and society. For Castells (1997, p. 9), Hmong identity (as a form of ethnically based nationalism) would constitute a kind of ‘resistance identity’ – an ‘exclusion of the excluders by the excluded’ – which, as he says, reverses ‘the value judgement while reinforcing the boundary’ of a dominant institution or ideology. Globalization may both universalize and fragment, or localize identities, as Cohen (1997) puts it. Fieldwork in Laos was conducted by Dr Gary Lee, and these are his conclusions. Rex (1995) shows how the traditional bounding of social units by political units such as states has been superseded by a situation where social relations, networks and cultural influences tend to have global rather than merely national character. Yet these processes have local as much as global implications. Latour (1993) has remarked that the network is as local as it is global, at every one of its points and nodes (like a railway line). See also Castells (2000) on the absence of centres in networks.

Transporting Culture Across Borders 227

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Blanc (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized NationStates. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Castells, Manuel (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (2000) ‘Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society’, The British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1, pp. 5–24. Clifford, James (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3, pp. 302–338. Cohen, Anthony, ed. (1986) Symbolising Boundaries: Identity and Diversity in British Cultures. Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press. Cohen, Robin (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Coyne, Richard (1999) Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, the Romance of the Real. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Cunningham, Hilary and Josiah Heyman (2004) ‘Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11, no. 3, pp. 289–302. Evans, Grant, Christopher Hutton and Kuah Khun Eng, eds (2000) ‘Preface’ to Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Social Change in the Border Regions. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 1–6. Friedman, Jonathan (1992) ‘The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, eds Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage Publications, pp. 230–256. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (1992) ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1, pp. 6–23. Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and its Futures, eds Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press in association with the Open University, pp. 273–327. Hannerz, Ulf (1996) Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Hastrup, Kirsten and Karen Olwig (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Siting Culture: the Shifting Anthropological Object, eds Karen Olwig and Kirsten Hastrup. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Jorgensen, Anders Baltzer (1977) ‘Forest People in a World of Expansion’, in Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of Nordic Ethnographers/Anthropologists, ed. Carola Sandbacka. Helsinki: The Finnish Anthropological Society. Julian, Roberta (2004) ‘Living Locally, Dreaming Globally: Transnational Cultural Imaginings and Practices in the Hmong Diaspora’, in The Hmong of Australia: Culture and Diaspora, eds Nicholas Tapp and Gary Yia Lee. Canberra: Pandanus Books, pp. 25–57. Kahn, Joel (1995) Culture, Multiculture, Postculture. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kearney, Michael (1991) ‘Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire’, Journal of Historical Sociology 4, no. 1, pp. 52–74.

228 Identity and Displacement Keyes, Charles (2002) ‘Presidential Address: “The Peoples of Asia” – Science and Politics in the Classification of Ethnic Groups in Thailand, China, and Vietnam’, Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 4, pp. 1163–1203. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lattimore, Owen (1968) ‘The Frontier in History’, in Theory in Anthropology: A Sourcebook, eds Robert Manners and David Kaplan. Chicago, IL and New York, NY: Aldine Publishing, pp. 374–386. Lavie, Smadar and Ted Swedenburg, ed. (1996) Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leach, Edmund (1960) ‘The Frontiers of “Burma” ’, Comparative Studies on Society and History 3, no. 1, pp. 49–68. Lee, Gary Yia (2004) ‘Culture and Settlement: the Present Situation of the Hmong in Australia’, in The Hmong of Australia: Culture and Diaspora, eds Nicholas Tapp and Gary Yia Lee. Canberra: Pandanus Books, pp. 11–24. Leepreecha, Prasit (2001) ‘Kinship and Identity among Hmong in Thailand’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington. Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. —— (2004) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— and Donald Nonini, eds (1997) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Pao Saykao (2004) The Root and the Fruit: Hmong Identity. Minneapolis, Minesota: Hmongland Publishing. Portes, Alejandro (2003) ‘Conclusion: Theoretical Convergencies and Empirical Evidence in the Study of Immigrant Transnationalism’, International Migration Review 37, no. 3, pp. 874–892. Pratt, Mary L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Rex, John (1995) ‘Ethnic Identity and the Nation-State: the Political Sociology of Multi-Cultural Societies’, Social Identities 1, no. 1, pp. 21–34. Robbins, Bruce (1998) ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Rosaldo, Renato (1989) Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schiller, Nina Glick and Georges Fouron (1999) ‘Terrains of Blood and Nation: Haitian Transnationalist Social Fields’, Ethnic and Racial studies 22, no. 2, pp. 340–366. —— (2001) Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri (1988) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Tapp, Nicholas (1989) Sovereignty and Rebellion: the White Hmong of Northern Thailand. Singapore, New York, NY, London: Oxford University Press. —— (1996) ‘The Kings who Flew without their Heads’, in Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China, eds David Faure & Tao Liu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Transporting Culture Across Borders 229 —— (2002a) ‘Cultural Accommodations in Southwest China: the “Han Miao” and Problems in the Ethnography of the Hmong’, Asian Folklore Studies 61, no. 1, pp. 77–104. —— (2002b) ‘Hmong Confucian Ethics and Constructions of the Past’, in Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos, eds Shigeharu Tanabe and Charles F. Keyes. Richmond, VA: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 95–110. —— (2003) ‘Exiles and Reunion: Nostalgia Among Overseas Hmong (Miao)’, in Living with Separation in China: Anthropological Accounts, ed. Charles Stafford. London and New York, NY: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 157–176. —— (2004) ‘Hmong Places and Locality’, in Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China, ed. Stephan Feuchtwang. London: UCL Press, pp. 133–149. Thongchai, Winichakul (1994) Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Tölöyan, Khachig (1991) ‘The Nation-State and Its Others: in Lieu of a Preface’, Diaspora 1, no. 1, pp. 3–7. Urry, John (2000) ‘Mobile Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1, pp. 185–203. Walker, Andrew (1999) The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Thailand, Laos, China and Burma. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press. Werbner, Pnina (1996) ‘The Fusion of Identities: Political Passion and the Poetics of Cultural Performance among British Pakistanis’, in The Politics of Cultural Performance, eds David Parkin, Lionel Caplan and Humphrey Fisher. Providence: Berghahn Books, pp. 81–101. White, Richard (1991) The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wijeyawardene, Gehan, ed. (1990) Ethnic Groups Across National Boundaries in Mainland Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Index Page locators in italic indicate illustrations. References to notes are given in the format 123n1, in this example indicating Note 1 on page 123.

Aceh, Indonesia, 39, 44, 46–7, 51, 53–7, 182–3 activist-artists see social justice agency, 19, 28, 37–8, 141, 193, 210–11 Ahmad, Shahmon, 32 Aida (Filipina migrant worker), 196–7 Aida ceremonies, 128, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 137, 138 Ajidarma, Seno Gumira, 182, 184 American Indian Life (Parsons), 70–1, 72, 74 ancestral objects and practices see cultural practices anthropologists as fiction writers, 70–4 anthropology, as cosmopolitan practice, 9–10 APCM see Asia Pacific Christian Mission Appadurai, Arjun, 61, 105 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, xi, xiii–xiv art Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 1993, 81–2 censorship of, 90, 95, 96–7 Fantasy World Supermarket exhibition, Jakarta 1987, 89 globalization of, 38, 40, 43–4, 46, 55–7 see also contemporary art; Gogodala art and artefacts; Indonesian art; Islamic art; modern art; post-colonial art and artists artist-activists see social justice artistic identity, 38–9 Asia and Pacific as locations, 4–6

Asia Pacific Christian Mission, 128, 137 Asia-Pacific Triennial conference regarding East Timor 1999, 79 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 1993, 81–2 Australian Hmong communities, 214, 216–19, 220–1 Austronesian grammatical forms, 22–3 Babadzan, A., 134–5 Bali see Old Javanese literature balikbayan boxes, 198–9, 201–2 balikbayan identity, 193, 201–4 Becker, A.L., 22–3 body, Lelet perceptions of, 107–9 borderlands, 209–12, 222–4 ‘born again’ (Christianity), 113–18 see also Pentecostalism Brown, Karen McCarthy, 74 Budianta, Melani, 12–13 Budiman, Manneke, 175 Buru quartet (Pramoedya Ananta Toer), 29 Ca Bau Kan (film), 178 calligraphy in art see Islamic art Cama (Queen), 24 Camadevivamsa (Pali literary text), 24 canoe designs see Gogodala art and artefacts Catholic Church, and cosmopolitanism, 104 censorship, of art, 90, 95, 96–7 ceremonial dances, 129, 134, 137–8, 170, 173–4 see also Aida ceremonies; cultural practices 230

Index 231 charisma, saintly, 148 Child of All Nations (Pramoedya Ananta Toer), 28–9 China Hmong residents and visitors, 212–13, 223 Chinese literary techniques, 23, 24 Chineseness in Indonesia, 80–1, 170–87 discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, 80–1, 93, 169–73, 175, 177, 182–5, 186 identity, 170–1, 174, 176–7, 185–6 literary and cultural representation, 13, 177–86 public displays of, 169–70, 173–6 Chiwin (fictional character), 31–2 Christanto, Dadang, xii, 3, 8–9 art and activism, 77–97 biographical details, 78–81, 87–91 ethnicity, 80, 93 international exhibitions, 81, 89, 91 works: 1001 Manusia Tanah/Earth (Soil) People, 89–90, 90; Api di Bulan Mei 1998/fire in May 1998, 77–9, 78; Ballad for Suparkal, 89; Bureaucracy, 89; Cannibalism, 91; Count Project, 91; Golf Ball, 89; Heads from the North, 93–4, 94; Hujan Merah/Red Rain, 93; Kekerasan I/Violence I, 89; Litsus or Portrait of a Family, 91–2, 92; Mereka Memberi Kesaksian/They Give Evidence, 84, 85, 94; Raining Tears, 91; Searching Displaces Bones, 92; For those who have been killed, 82, 83 ‘Christian country’, xv, 3, 10–11, 115, 136–42 Christian style and identity, 115–18 Christianity, xiii–xiv, 10, 103–5, 120n2 among the Hmong, 222 and local practices, xv, 104–5, 112–20 see also evangelism; Pentecostalism

Chudori, Leila, 33 Cina (term), 172, 176, 181, 185 circulation see ‘culture of circulation’ ‘Clara’ (Ajidarma), 182, 184 Clifford, Hugh, 29–31 Clifford, James, 14 colonialism, and identity, 107 communitas, 155–7, 159–60 consociality, 192, 193, 198–9 contemporary art, 43–4, 46 contemporary Indonesian art, 86–7 social justice themes, 81–97 ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ (Appiah), xi cosmopolitanism, 1–6, 13–14, 72–3 and anthropology, 9–10 counter-cosmopolitanism, xiii–xv, 11 discrepant, 14 new cosmopolitanism, x–xi, xiii, xv, 1–2 and religion, 5–6, 10–12, 104 Crawford, Anthony, 129, 132–8, 140 ‘crusades’ see evangelism cults (Sufi cults) see Sufi regional cults cultural beliefs, endurance of, 119–20 cultural folklorization, 134 cultural practices and Christianity, xv, 104–5, 112–20, 128–43 see also Chineseness in Indonesia; ethnic identification; Sufi regional cults cultural revival, of Gogodala people, 129–43 cultural style, 115–17 ‘culture of circulation’, 192, 204 Cushman, Dick, 71 custom versus Christianity see cultural practices ‘customary ways’, 140 see also ‘Christian country’ ‘Delirium’ (Ahmad), 32 Dharma, S. Satya, 180 diasporas, 209–11, 221, 223–4 see also migration discrepant cosmopolitanism, 14

232 Index discrimination against Chinese in Indonesia, 80–1, 93, 169–73, 175, 177, 182–5, 186 against Filipinas, 198 see also ‘Filipina’ identity domestic-worker migrants (from the Philippines) see Filipina migrant workers East Timor, 82, 88 economic migrants see migrant workers ECPNG see Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea educational role of Sufi lodges see pesantren (Sufi lodges) ethics, of Lelet people, 111–12, 117–18 ethnic identification, 2, 37–8, 40–2, 53–7 see also Chineseness in Indonesia; ‘national’ identity ethnography and fiction, 60–75 Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea, 128, 137, 138, 141 evangelism, 103–4, 112, 119 and Gogodala culture, xv, 10, 129–30, 132, 136–42 see also Pentecostalism extraversion, xv Fantasy World Supermarket exhibition, Jakarta 1987, 89 ‘The fate of Leh the Strolling Player’ (Clifford), 29–31 female and male identities in Southeast Asian literature, 22–34 see also gender relations; gender roles in Philippine households; sexual identity female migrants (from the Philippines) see Filipina migrant workers Ferguson, James, 115–16 fiction, 61 and ethnographic insights, 60–1, 70–5

by K. Narayan, 9, 66–9 Vidhya’s stories, 60–1, 63–6, 73, 74–5 see also literature ‘Filipina’ identity abroad, 198–200 in the Philippines, 193–8 Filipina migrant workers characteristics, 191, 205n2 consociality, 192, 193, 198–9 identities (labels), 192–3 see also ‘Filipina’ identity and Philippine household economies, 191–2, 194–5, 196, 201, 204 returning (balikbayan), 201–4 ‘Filipino women’, 200 freedom (concept), 7, 21, 86 see also social justice fundamentalism Christian, xiv–xv, 10, 112 see also evangelism; Pentecostalism Muslim, 183–4 see also Islam Gatholoco, 25–6 Geertz, Clifford, 11–12, 149–52 gender relations Hmong descent system, 220 Hmong marriage alliances, 212–14, 218–19 in life and stories, Kangra, India, 60–9 portrayed in literature, 22–34, 180–5 violence against women (May riots 1998), 77–8, 87, 173, 180–5 gender roles in Philippine households, 194–5, 201, 204 see also Filipina migrant workers George, Kenneth, 79–80 Giddens, Anthony, 20 Gie, Soe Hok, 182 global communication, 13, 198–9 see also Internet global cultural flows, 105, 119 globalization, 104–5, 204–5 art world, 38, 40, 43–4, 46, 55–7

Index 233 globalization – continued global age in Southeast Asia, 1–2, 19, 21–2, 31 global-local opposition, xi of the Hmong, 222–4 Philippine experiences of, 190–1 of religion, xiii–xiv, 10–12, 105, 149–52 Globalized Islam (Roy), xiv Gnau people, Papua New Guinea, 106–7 Gogodala art and artefacts, 129, 131–3 Gogodala Cultural Centre, 129, 133–8, 140 Gogodala people, Papua New Guinea, xv, 10–11, 112, 115, 117, 129–43 Graham, Billy, 103–4, 112 Graham, Franklin, 103, 120n1 Hannerz, Ulf, 37, 61–2 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 5 Herlijanto, Johanes, 175–6 Heryanto, Ariel, 173, 174, 175 Hmong communities, 13, 212–19 Hmong visits to homelands, 212–15, 217–21 transnational, 13, 209, 214–19, 221 Hmong Cultural Centre, Thailand, 219–20 Hmong diaspora, 209–26 Ho Xuan Huong, 24–5 Hoffman, Father Ruedi, 88 Hollinger, David, x–xi human agency see agency human suffering influence on contemporary art, 81–97 Huong, Ho Xuan see Ho Xuan Huong identity, 2–3, 12–13 artistic, 38–9 balikbayan, 193, 201–4 Chineseness in Indonesia, 170–1, 174, 176–7, 185–6 Christian style and identity, 115–18 and colonialism, 107 ‘Filipina’, 193–200

Hmong, 222–3 Indonesian ‘national’, 26–7, 41, 46–7, 53–7 sexual, 7, 22–34, 115–16 see also gender relations see also self identity formation represented in Southeast Asian literary texts, 21–34 by those of Chinese descent, 171 ‘Imajinasi Buruk’ (Yusrizal KW), 184–5 ‘In the Mirror’ (Krailat), 31–2 ‘indias’ (Philippine women), 195 individual Lelet awareness of, 108, 111, 121n11 Western conception of, 21, 111, 116, 122n23 see also identity; self Indonesia discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, 80–1, 93, 169–73, 175, 177, 182–5, 186 May riots 1998, 8, 77–9, 173, 175, 177, 181–6 New Order period, see below Suharto regime politics and political unrest, 77–81, 82, 88, 95–7, 173, 182–3 Reformasi, 173, 177, 185 regional politics and Sufi cults, 159–60 religion in, 88–9 see also Sufism Suharto regime, 8–9, 13, 29, 39, 53, 77, 80–1, 86–8, 169, 172–3, 176–9, 182, 187n8 Sukarno regime, 39, 41, 80–1, 169, 171, 182 Indonesian art, 39–42, 43–4, 179 contemporary Indonesian art, 86–7 ‘new art movement’, 86–7, 89, 97 social justice themes, 86 works by A.D. Pirous, 45, 48–55 works by Dadang Christanto, 77–97 see also Islamic art Indonesian Chinese see Chineseness in Indonesia

234 Index ‘Indonesian’ identity, 26–7, 41, 46–7, 53–7 Indonesian literature, 177–86 Indonesian nationalism, 26–9, 39, 41 Indonesian Sufi cults see Sufi regional cults Internet, 175, 183 and transnational Hmong community, 13, 214, 215–16, 221 intolerance, xiv, xv invention of tradition, 134–5 Islam, xiii–xiv, 6 Moroccan and Indonesian compared, 149–52 Sufi see Sufi regional cults; Sufism ‘traditional’ Indonesian, 153 see also Sufism Islamic art, 39, 42–53 Jamhari, 156 Javanese literary works, 22–3, 25–6 jihad, 150 Johnson, Barbara, 20 Jolly, M., 135 Joseph (Lelet man), 113–14 Kahn, Joel, 211 Kangra, Northwest India, 62–3, 64–6, 74 Kasam, Esti Nuryani, 179 kastom in the Pacific, 134–5 see also cultural practices Kawi see Old Javanese literature khalifas (Sufi regional leaders), 147–8, 154–5 see also Sufi regional cults kinship, 224 among Sufi saints, 156, 158 among the Hmong, 218–19 and Filipina migrant workers, 191, 194, 205n1 Krailat, Kon, 31–2 Kroeber, Alfred, 70 Kymlicka, Will, x La Farge, Oliver, 72 labantuxu (skin), 107–8

labour migration see migrant workers labour migration (Filipinas) see Filipina migrant workers Lacan, 20, 31–2 lagas (monstrous being), 110, 121n14 Lan Fang, 179 lantupe (greedy person), 110 Laos Hmong communities, 213–14, 215, 217, 221, 222–3 Laughing Boy (La Farge), 72 Leh (fictional character), 30–1 Lelet community, New Ireland PNG, 10, 106–12 conceptualization of selfhood, 107–9 identity, 107 Pentecostalism, 105, 112–20 sociality, 109–12 Lie, Jangan Bilang Aku Cina (Dharma), 180 Lis Txais, 219–20 literature, 21–34, 177–86 see also fiction local customs see cultural practices locality, 105–6 locations, Asia Pacific, 4–6 lokngao (ethos of respect), 111 loroang (animating force), 108–9 Luz (Filipina migrant worker), 199–200 magic see cultural practices Malay literary texts, 26–9 male and female identities, in Southeast Asian literature, 22–9 see also sexual identity ‘Mama Chen-Chen’ (Kasam), 179–81 Mama Lola (Brown), 74 Marcus, George E., 71 Marga T., 183 marriage alliances among Hmong people, 212–14, 218–19, 223, 224 May riots, Indonesia 1998, 8, 77–9, 173, 175, 177, 181–6 ‘The Mayor of the Roses’ (Villanueva), 33 Mei Lan (character), 184–5 merdeka see freedom (concept)

Index 235 Methodism, 103, 104, 112, 119 migrant workers Filipina see Filipina migrant workers and global economy, 190–1 and Philippine household economies, 191–2, 194–5, 196, 201, 204 migration, xii, 1, 5–6, 12–13, 190–2, 204 see also diasporas; Hmong diaspora Miss Lu (Pranoto), 180–1 missionaries, xv, 222 see also evangelism; Methodism; Unevangelised Fields Mission modern art, 43–4, 46 modernization, 21 Moroccan Islam, 149–52 Muslim art see Islamic art Narayan, Kirin, 9 National Cultural Council (PNG), 133–4 ‘national’ identity, 26–7, 29, 41, 46–7, 53–7, 210–11 nation-states, 214, 215, 221, 222–4 and cultural entities, 209–12 ‘new art movement’, Indonesia, 86–7, 89, 97 New Guinea see Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea; Gnau people, Papua New Guinea; Gogodala people, Papua New Guinea; Lelet community, New Ireland PNG; Papua New Guinea New Ireland see Lelet community, New Ireland PNG New Order period, Indonesia see Suharto regime, Indonesia Njai Dasima (fictional character), 26–7 Nji Paina (fictional character), 28–9 novels see fiction; literature Nozuma III (Marga T.), 183 Nussbaum, Martha, x Nyai Ontosoroh (fictional character), 27 nyai stories, 28–9 Oceanic vision vs Western perspective, 5

OCWs (overseas contract workers) see migrant workers Oh, Richard, 183–4 Old Javanese literature, 22–3 Ontosoroh (fictional character), 27 the Other, 26, 121n14, 172, 180, 200 ‘Our Sea of Islands’ (Hau’ofa), 5 overseas contract workers see migrant workers Pacific as location, 4–6 Pai Yin (Lan Fang), 179 Paina (fictional character), 28–9 Pali literary texts, 24 Panggil Aku Peng Hwa (Wardhana), 181 Papua New Guinea religion (statistics), 120n2 see also Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea; Gnau people, Papua New Guinea; Gogodala people, Papua New Guinea; Lelet community, New Ireland PNG Parsons, Elsie Clews, 70–1, 72, 74 The Pathfinders of Love (Oh), 183–4 Pentecostalism, 104–6 and Lelet people, 10, 105, 112–20 see also evangelism Peranakan Chinese, 169, 170–2 personhood, 21, 22, 24, 27–9 Lelet notions of, 107–9 see also identity; self pesantren (Sufi lodges), 11–12, 154–5 see also Sufi regional cults; Sufism Philippine migrant workers see Filipina migrant workers Philippines household economies, 191–2, 194–5, 196, 201, 204 national economy, 190–2 pilgrimage, 11–12, 147, 154–7, 159, 160 Pirous, Abdul Djalil, xiii, 7–8, 55, 79–80 biographical details, 38–9, 51, 53 and Islamic art, 39, 42–6 religious and ethnic identifications, 40–8, 53–7

236 Index Pirous, Abdul Djalil – continued self-recognition, xiii, 7, 43–6 works: And God the Utmost (Dan Dia Yang Maha Segala), 50, 50–1; The Shackling of the Chronicle of the Holy War II (Pemasungan Kitab Prang Sabil II), 54, 55; Sura Isra II: Homage to Mother (Sura Isra II: Penghormatan buat Ibunda), 51, 52; Surat Ikhlas, 45; They Who are Buried without Names (Mereka yang Terkubur Tanpa Nama), 54, 54; White Writing (Tulisan Putih), 48–50, 49 ‘poetics of control’, 22 political borders see borderlands; nation-states politics and political unrest in Indonesia, 77–81, 82, 88, 95–7, 173, 182–3 regional politics and Sufi cults, 159–60, 163n5 Pollock, Sheldon, 22 post-colonial art and artists, 41, 46, 48, 53, 56, 79–80 post-Suharto period in Indonesia see Reformasi Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 27–9 Pranoto, Naning, 180 ‘The Purification of Sita’ (Chudori), 33 Reformasi, 173, 177, 185 refugees see diasporas; migration from Laos see Hmong diaspora religion as cosmopolitan practice, 5–6, 10–12 cosmopolitanism of Catholic Church, 104 global religions, xiii–xiv, 10–12, 105, 149–52 ideology of, 150 in PNG (statistics), 120n2 poetics of travel, 12, 148–9 see also Christianity; Islam; Sufism Religion of Java (Geertz), 11–12

religious identification, 37–8, 40–2, 53–7 Rendra, W.S., 88 resubjectivation, 192, 193, 199–200, 203–4 returned migrant workers (Philippines) see balikbayan identity ‘revivals’ see evangelism Robinhood Betawi (Shawab), 178–9 Roy, Olivier, xiv saints (Sufi saints) see Sufi regional cults Saleh see Leh (fictional character) Sally (Filipina migrant worker), 197 Sasha (Filipina migrant worker), 200 self, 7, 20–1, 34 selfhood perceptions among the Lelet, 107–9 self-fashioning, in Southeast Asian literary texts, 21–34 self-identification, as Chinese, 170–1 self-recognition, xiii, 3, 6–7, 38, 43–6 Sendalu (Syaifullah), 185 sexual identity, 7, 22–34, 115–16 see also gender relations sexuality, self and subjectivity, 24–32 sharing, among the Lelet, 109–12 Shawab, Alwi, 178–9 ‘Si Ong’ (Usman), 179–80 Siau Ling (Sylado), 178 Silalahi, Harry Tjan, 174–5 Sita (fictional character), 33 social justice, and contemporary art, 81–97 sociality, of Lelet people, 109–12 Soeharto see Suharto Soekarno see Sukarno Southeast Asian literary texts self and subject in, 21–34 Stewart, John, 73–4 stories see fiction; literature ‘The Story of Njai Dasima’, 26–7 subject, 3, 7, 9, 20–1, 34, 204 in Southeast Asian literary texts, 21–34

Index 237 Sufi legends and myths, 150–2 Sufi literary works, 25–6 Sufi regional cults, xiv, 145–63 in Indonesia, 152–8, 161 Sufi shrines, 153, 154 Sufism, 11–12, 146–52 Moroccan and Indonesian compared, 149–52 South Asian and Indonesian compared, 152–60 terminology and titles, 153–6 Suharto regime, Indonesia, 8–9, 13, 29, 39, 53, 77, 80–1, 86–8, 169, 172–3, 176–9, 182, 187n8 post-Suharto period see Reformasi Sukarno regime, Indonesia, 39, 41, 80–1, 169, 171, 182 Suluk Gatholoco (literary work), 25 Supangkat, Jim, 86, 96–7 Surati (fictional character), 28–9 Syaifullah, Chavchay, 185 Sylado, Remy, 178 ta’ifas (Sufi orders), 147–8, 161–2 see also Sufi regional cults Tala (Filipina migrant worker), 203 tambaran (non-human bush being), 110 Tapp, Nicholas, 12–13 tariqas (Sufi orders), 147–8, 157 Taylor, Charles, x teaching, and Sufi lodges see pesantren (Sufi lodges) Thai Hmong, 213–14, 217, 219–20, 223 This Earth of Mankind (Pramoedya Ananta Toer), 26–7 Thomas, N., 135 Tionghoa (term), 172, 176, 181, 185 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta see Pramoedya Ananta Toer Totoks (Chinese Indonesians), 169, 171–2

tradition invention of, 134–5 notions of, 135–6 traditional beliefs, and Christianity, 104–5, 112–20, 128–43 traditional dances see ceremonial dances transnational communities, xii, 13, 209, 214–19, 221 transnational identities, 204 Trimingham, J.S., 148, 161–2 Turner, Victor, 159, 160 Unevangelised Fields Mission, 128, 129, 131–2 ‘urs, 146–7, 157, 158 Usman, K., 179–80 Vidhya (Kangra woman) stories and imaginative life, 60–1, 63–6, 73, 74–5 Vietnamese poetry, 23–5 Villanueva, Marianne, 33 Wardhana, Veven Sp., 177, 181 weather magic see cultural practices Weber, Max, 162 Werbner, Pnina, 11–12 Werbner, Richard, 158–9 Western perception of the individual, 21, 111, 116, 122n23 versus Oceanic vision, 5 wilayat, defined, 147 Wolters, O.W., 23 women see Filipina migrant workers; gender relations; sexual identity Woodward, Mark, 153–5 world religions see religion Yusrizal KW, 184–5 zikr, 147, 153, 156 Zindapir (Sufi saint), 146–8, 151, 157