The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.     

Cathedrals of the surf zone: regulating access to a space of spirituality

This paper explores the place of the surfed wave as not simply a site of human–nature relations, but also as a space of spirituality. Surfing is widely considered as a sport of hedonism and risk, but this paper suggests it can also be understood as a means to experience the transcendent. By first introducing the surf zone as a space of liminality and transformation, this paper illustrates how the surfed wave is a cathedral for surfers' ‘aquatic nature religion’ (Taylor, B. (2007a) Focus introduction. Aquatic nature religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (4): 863–874; Taylor, B. (2007b) Surfing into spirituality and a new, aquatic nature religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 75 (4): 923–951). Due to the religious nature of the surfed wave, the paper suggests that the informal (b)orders surfers use to regulate the surf zone—understood here as the codes of surfer-provenance and surfer-positioning—do not simply regulate access to the surf zone in a territorial sense, but also they effectively regulate access to the experience of relational spirituality.     

Translation and World Literature: The Perspective of the ‘Ex-Centric’

Before his death in 2003, Brazilian poet, critic and translator Haroldo de Campos had produced a robust body of work on translation theory, which consistently addressed the problem of subordination of target literatures to their source. His audacious concept of ‘transcreation’ championed that translation should be a creative re-invention instead of a mere reproduction of texts. In this article I demonstrate that De Campos’s translation theory subverts the hierarchical categories and values that have structured the field of world literature. Positioning himself as an intellectual from an ‘ex-centric’ literary culture, situated outside of the centers of global circulation, De Campos critiqued the unequal weight usually assigned to translated and original texts, author and translator, established and ascending traditions. His theory effectively illustrates how power differentials between diverse literary contexts affect the ways in which world literature is conceived. I argue that De Campos’s response to the standing inequality that characterizes translational exchanges involved a literary solution. As a creative act in its own right, imbued with the values of originality and difference, transcreation offered an aesthetic answer to the problems of authenticity, influence and literary dependence.     

Australian Indonesia-specialists and debates on West Papua: Implications for Australia-Indonesia relations1

This article explores the modes by which Australian scholars construct knowledge of Indonesia with particular reference to the debates on West Papua in the post-Suharto period. It examines their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards human rights issues with a view to analysing the underlying forces, motivations and implications of activism. This article casts doubt on a common, yet often unacknowledged, perception in Indonesia about Australian Indonesia-specialists who are categorised as: intellectuals who always see Indonesian government policies as ‘negative’.2 2. ‘Indonesia specialists’ refer to both scholars who have and who do not have formal Indonesian studies or training who get involved in the study of Indonesia and Indonesian society. Whenever I use ‘Indonesianists’, I refer to scholars who have formal Indonesia studies or training. By Australian scholars, I mean scholars who are Australian by ‘residence’. View all notes I demonstrate that the theorisation of Indonesian society has been diverse in Australia as exemplified by the West Papua debates. Australian scholars’ social positions and mobility, not government policy, shape their beliefs, attitudes and knowledge construction of Indonesia. Thus, considering Australian scholars from a monolithic perspective misses the reality that contemporary intellectual culture in Australia is no longer based on a traditional class.3 3. For an excellent discussion on contemporary intellectual culture, see Eyerman (1994 Eyerman, Ron. 1994. Between Culture and Politics: Intellectuals in Modern Society, Cambridge: Polity.  [Google Scholar]). View all notes I argue there are two major opposing groups in West Papua studies which I label as the ‘affirmative revisionist’ scholars who tend to be more optimistic towards resolution of conflicts in West Papua and the ‘sceptical reformist’ scholars who are dubious about any major changes in West Papua. This latter group believes the people of West Papua should be given the opportunity to remain integrated with Indonesia or to opt for selfdetermination. They tend to use the perceived failure of Indonesia in the protection of human rights in West Papua to attack the Indonesian government and Australian governmental agencies dealing with Indonesia. This article argues that this criticism may adversely impact on future Australia-Indonesia relations.     

The good and the bad of the same: On the political value of historical repetition in Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ historical repetitions.     

Breaking bored – negotiating spatial boredom and masculinity in the Volvo greaser culture

In this article I discuss how the experience of boredom becomes a vital part of the narratives and practices of a group of young greasers in a peri-urban community in Sweden. The ethnographic material originates from fieldwork carried out among the local ‘Volvo greasers’, aged between 15 and 19 years, at the local youth centre and the car park in a peri-urban community in Sweden in 2010. The aim of the article is to understand how place, personhood and social relations are intertwined in the greaser culture by introducing the concept of spatial boredom, which strives to illuminate the greasers' active engagement and negotiation with the experience of boredom. In light of this, the semantics of spatial boredom – the community's geographical placement as boring, reactive rather than active, static rather than dynamic – a symbolic link to femininity, domesticity, safety, routine and hence immanence is established. The orientation towards a ‘dangerous’, masculine-coded public space is reinforcing a split between both the feminine and the masculine and the public and the private.     

Writing violence in Seventeenth-Century Yucatan: Fray Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633)

Although long considered a minor work, Franciscan friar Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633) is key for understanding what the author himself termed the ‘spiritual conquest’ of colonial Yucatan. Deploying José Rabasa's concept of ‘writing violence,’ this essay shows how this text works to promote a culture of forceful spiritual conquest, reminiscent of the culture of spiritual conquest of the primitive Yucatecan church (1545–1562), in order to complete the conquest of the last independent Maya on the peninsula.     

Transnational Development on the Frontier: The FAO's Fishery and Forestry Missions in the Brazilian Amazon

In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

Space,time and history in the Polish People’s Republic: the trilogy Sami swoi,Nie ma mocnych,Kochaj albo rzuć

Abstract

The article discusses the meanings of popular culture, authenticity and history in People’s Republic of Poland. As an example it uses a popular film trilogy. The trilogy Sami swoi, Nie ma mocnych and Kochaj albo rzu? (‘All friends here’, ‘Take it easy’ and ‘Love or leave me’) was shown in Polish cinemas between 1967 and 1977. The reviews were written just after the premières. The article uses the concepts of time and space elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Doreen Massey to analyze the different chronotopes of the films. It analyses both the films and the reviews as strategies of creating authenticity and creating cultural meanings: the meaning of history and the meanings of rurality. I will show how history and present, memory and society are interwoven in the light of popular production. In addition, I will emphasize the diverse interpretation possibilities resulting from this micro-historical view and the transnational critique of modernism highlighting the small and local which emerged throughout Europe in the 1970s.     

The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been home to the most impressive urban development projects in the entire post-Soviet world. Their capitals, Astana and Ashgabat, now boast uniquely monumental architecture and local leaders have invested heavily in ‘green belt’ projects to surround the cities with lush vegetation, as well as developing green and water-laden public spaces. In doing so, elites have drawn on Soviet-era ‘garden city’ idealism, as well as more recent environmental sustainability narratives. Yet these schemes are anything but sustainable. Unfolding on the arid Central Asian steppe, they depend on heavy irrigation, with water diverted from rivers that already fail to meet regional demands. Employing a comparative approach, I ask why and with what effect state planners have sought to craft Astana and Ashgabat as spectacularly green ‘urban oases,’ when their local climates should defy the logic of sustainability. In so doing, I consider urban greening in the two countries as part of a wider phenomenon of statist schemes to green the desert, which have a long and diverse history. Extending the literature on desert greening, I argue that the structural violence they manifest and perpetuate is best understood by attending to how they operate as a form of spectacle.     

Is there a European culture?

Abstract

The article explores the historical roots of the current tensions between the local and the global in Europe, as expressed by the region's audio-visual industries. It suggests that current postures and initiatives have their origins in efforts, which began in the 1920s, to defend ‘an idea of nationhood which presumed sovereignty over culture’ (V. de Grazia), against the perceived onslaught of American cinema, jazz, radio, advertising, etc. The argument follows the evolution of these strategies of cultural protectionism and adaptation through the age of radio and television, down to the Internet. It suggests that ‘Europe’ as a cultural entity will not be formed by this experience, since although every society uses the same sort of tactics and language to face up to globalization, the impulse to cling to local identities and idiosyncracies is, if anything, getting stronger today.     

Theology,Idolatry and Science: John Williams’ Missionary Ethnography and Natural History of the South Pacific

This article contributes to the recent scholarly efforts toward a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Protestant missionaries and the practice of natural history and ethnography in the early nineteenth century. Exploring John Williams’ work in the South Pacific, I argue that not only was Williams practicing science in the form of ethnography and natural history, but that his theology was, in fact, central to his scientific work. Through a careful exploration of Williams’ account of his missionary activities in the South Pacific, I contend that Williams’ conception of idolatry served as an explanatory tool that shaped the practice of his ethnography. In the minds of missionaries like Williams, whereas Christianity’s truth was universal, idolatry was the worship of a false god: false because it was just a deification of a particular desire rather than worship of the universal God. This conception of idolatry shaped Williams’ contention, central to his ethnography, that the islanders’ religion was a product of their particular cultural needs. In this way, I argue, Williams used a theological concept to perform explanatory scientific work, contributing to the idea that religion is a product of culture, a notion that became central to nineteenth century studies of religion.     

Performing post-migration cinema in Italy: Corazones de Mujer by K. Kosoof

Following consideration of the most common representations of migrants in Italian cinema, where they are often portrayed as victimised and minor subjects, this article analyses a film by Davide Sordella and Pablo Benedetti, Corazones de Mujer (2008) as a ‘post-migration alternative’. This film considers a different way of depicting ‘foreigners’, and addresses the complex issues of gender and sexuality as they emerge at the interface between Western and Arab cultures. Within the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's ‘gender performativity’ and Rosi Braidotti's ‘nomadic subject’, this article aims to suggest an alternative way of representing migrants in Italian cinema as agents of social and gender transgressions.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

Black man's Burden: some South African parallels with North America

ABSTRACT

Muthi, intelezi and associated rituals have played an important role in the lives of Africans for many centuries. For almost everything they do, muthi and rituals are applied, more so during times of war. Controversy around the use of intelezi, muthi, ritual killing and the role of izinyanga in, prior to and during the colonial period, is well documented. This paper, first, challenges the Comaroffian analysis of the subject which purports to contextualise the ‘deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends’. They add that the discourse is entirely about ‘modernity’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Here I fundamentally disagree with this explanation; I indicate that it is a cultural continuity. The paper contends that ritual killing and muthi use continues into the present and was prevalent during the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, the paper will discuss the centrality of the use of muthi during the violence. I reason that izinyanga played a clandestine but powerful role in this violence. In this, they were at the core of the violence and of the rise of warlords to power in the region. In this paper, I will also present reasons (or offer recommendations) why historians should pay attention to these practices in the recent past, as well as in colonial times. For one thing, they are a means of understanding the present. However, in many ways, because of its reliance on oral histories and insider content, this paper is neither history nor ethnography, but could be described as historical ethnography.