Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god.
Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world.
Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Table of Content
Introduction : Violence, Visuality, and Appearance | 1
Image, Appearance, Figuration, 8 • A Christian
Town, 11 • The Appearance of Crisis, 15 • Matters
of Perception, 18 • Orphaning the Nation, 20 •
Orphaned Landscapes, 23 • A Symptomatology
of Crisis, 28
1 Fire without Smoke | 33
War’s Fog, 36 • Fire without Smoke, 40 • The Thick
of Things, 45 • Soundtracks of War, 52 • Amplifications, 54 •
Anticipatory Practices, 58 • Official Peace, 63
2 Christ at Large | 67
Christ at Large, 76 • The Canon in the Street, 79 •
Guardians of the Neighborhood, 88 • Streetwise
Masculinity, 96 • This Face Wants you, 104 • Sighting
the Street, 109
3 Images without Borders | 113
Painting Christianity, 116 • Landscape I: Christian Enclave,
127 • Landscape II: Pancasila Jesus, 132 • Landscape III:
Sidewalk Citizenship, 136 • Landscape IV: Witnessing
the End-Time, 146 • Frames at War, 152 • A Frenzy
of the Visible, 154
4 Religion under the Sign of Crisis | 157
Times Rich in Demons, 158 • Conversion’s Unstable
Alchemy, 161 • Religion under the Sign of Crisis, 163 •
Simplifications, 166 • Terms of Coexistence, 170 •
Symptomatology: Treacherous Things, 176 • Symptomatology:
Treacherous Persons, 180 • Neighbors and Neighborhoods, 184
5 Provoking Peace | 191
Spectacles of Reconciliation, 193 • The Child in the Picture,
199 • Peace Journalism, 214 • Scrolling for Peace, 222
Conclusion : Ephemeral Mediations | 229
Acknowledgments | 233
Notes | 239
Works Cited | 281
Index | 299
About the author
Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000). She has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Images That Move (SAR Press, 2013), Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2006, pbk 2013), and Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998).
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