Modernity at the Fringes

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	• Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier Danilyn Rutherford Princeton University Press, 2002 - 360 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Modernity at the Fringes

In Danilyn Rutherford's Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier, the author seeks "to make sense of the strange combination of complicity and resistance with which her informants in Irian Jaya in the early 1990s dealt with the New Order" (112). In so doing, she posits a recursive application of what she terms a fetishization of the foreign (4), such that "Biaks pursued the foreign as a source of value, prestige, and authority, [yet] they managed to participate in national institutions without adopting national points of view" (4). This seeming contradiction, producing a situation often erased in the wider literature on Indonesia, is made possible by the way in which Biaks assimilate or rather domesticate the foreign into their own value system, according to their own cultural logic. Rutherford argues that "to act, Biaks have had to alienate themselves from the sources of their agency that provides an entry into the subversive side of their complicity" (107). This recognition of the gaze by another, what may be called the hail in the language of Althusser's theory of interpolation, is deflected by means of "interpretive strategies...[that] were not the product of isolation but the outcome of a long-standing tendency to fetishize the foreign. Social relations on Biak fueled a stance on distant authorities that was sometimes subversive, sometimes openly supportive, but always corrosive of a lasting submission to their power" (134-135). By seeking to understand the Biak category of foreign, Rutherford seeks to explain based on several domains of interaction how it is that among the Biaks "the truly foreign would be unthinkable, utterly resistant to categorization. The foreign, in whatever language, is already domesticated, from the moment it enters discourse in the local terms" (22).
Of key importance to Rutherford's understanding of the foreign among the Biak is their kinship system, wherein "those `alien' to the patriline were key to its reproduction-and key to the reproduction of a fetishized outside world" (39). That is evidenced in the way in which mothers, derived from a line other than one's own, nurtures her children who in turn aspires to become a local amber, one who has achieved the prestige of a foreigner through employment as a civil servant, traveling great distances and returning, or other exploits. Because of the kinship organization and specifically the practices of exchange marriage marriage, "the transactions between affines ensured that marriage generated an infinite debt; no one could adequately compensate wife-givers for the trouble of raising a woman or the descendents she would produce" (60). Thus it came to be that "the irredeemable offerings of an `alien' mother and the inexhaustible plentitude raided from distant worlds" (61) dominated the world of the Biak. This "excessive character of foreign value" (114), such that raiding the foreign served as an inexhaustible source to repay the debt owed to one's mother, constitutes the first core aspect of the foreign.
In addition to its surplus of prestige and value, "the startling character of foreign acts" (114) was emphasized by the Biak. Rutherford examines how "fishing magic, wor, and yospan did more than respond to shock; they recreated it in the very act of tapping the pleasure of surprise. In the early 1990s, Biak audiences and performers fetishized the foreign...In their conventional efforts to capture the unexpected, they ensured that the foreign remained strange" (106). In maintaining the foreign, Biaks then had to distance themselves from it, keeping the source of their own prestige and value surprising and always new through their narrative reconstruction of events. For this reason, "wealth could only become a source of authority when it indexed one's access to absent sources of value and power" (117). The power of one's action, like one's mother, was not of one's own type.
A final characteristic of Biak fetishization of the foreign is their recognition of "the opaque, inscrutable character of foreign words" (114). The premiere example Rutherford offers is that of Holy Writ: "the biblical text appears as the fount of truths that can be evoked but never adequately conveyed" (126). Appearing excessive in character, the Bible was seen by Biaks to be impossible to gloss. This, however, was not limited to the Bible, as other texts were constructed as foreign. "Biak translators confirmed the `foreignness' of foreign texts, even as they transformed them into a source of local truths" (124). Through this process of translation and entextualization, "Biaks learned to speak the languages of church and state without irreversibly acceding to the identities that these institutions are said to promote" (136).
Rutherford argues that the Biak fetishization of the foreign, provides a unique case to exploring the responses to modernity. "Modernity is commonly considered from two perspectives; the first takes it as a novel apprehension of time, the second as a novel structuring of identity and authority. In both cases, modernity is often said to represent a rupture from the past...a break with the notion of doomsday...breaking of the bonds of kinship...the break with magic through the division of religion, science, and art...[and] a break with the gift as a 'total social phenomenon'" (144).
Through her analysis of the revivification of the singing of wor and the millennial Koreri practices, Rutherford argues that a rupture did not take place. In fact, by "embracing foreign practices, yet rejecting foreign domination, the prophets appealed to dreams that long outlived their own demise" (190). Not only can the Koreri and the revival of wor be seen as a continuous tradition, rather than a rupture with all that came before, it can further be understood as a deflecting of the gaze outsiders, a gaze that might otherwise be seen as requiring the Biak to answer the hail and thus acquiesce to the hegemonic ideology. Thus the Biak are able to take in elements of the foreign, yet not support the ideology or assume the identity of the purveyors of such foreignness. Rutherford is able to explain why these particular practices are seen as being revived, given their reliance on surprise and an absent source of power. "Given that Koreri promises reunion with the origin of foreignness, it should not be surprising to find that the apocalyptic longings associated with Manarmakeri have arisen at times when colonial and postcolonial authorities have pressured Biaks to see themselves through outsiders' eyes" (27). Thus Rutherford argues that the revival of the Koreri tradition is itself a further example of the fetishization of the foreign. Yet, the very notion of a tradition that could be restored is itself a modern idea. "Even as he embraced a modern notion of tradition, [Kaisiepo] remained a Biak amber" (202). Through the revitalization of wor, absent as the source of power was and also distinctively Biak, conceiving of "tradition as a vanishing yet forever retrievable store of national value was central to the discourse that made traditional culture such a compelling focus of New Order interest" (214). While for the Biak, "wor's heyday was colored by an understanding of the genre as a powerful mechanism for accessing the potency of distant worlds" (217), wor also served to integrate Biak into the Indonesian state through a process of commodification of such cultural traditions as wor. In this way Rutherford is able to explain the seeming contradiction of how Biak are able to at one and the same time, through certain practices, maintain such a "strange combination of complicity and resistance" (112).

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What are the limits of national belonging? Focusing on Biak--a set of islands off the coast of western New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya--Danilyn Rutherford's analysis calls for a rethinking of the nature of national identity.

With the resurgence of separatism in the province, Irian Jaya has become the focus of fears that the Indonesian nation is falling apart. Yet in the early 1990s, the fieldwork for this book was made possible by the government's belief that Biaks were finally beginning to see themselves as Indonesians. Taking in the dynamics of Biak social life and the islands' long history of millennial unrest, Rutherford shows how practices that indicated Biaks' submission to national authority actually reproduced antinational understandings of space, time, and self. Approaching the foreign as a focus of longing in cultural arenas ranging from kinship to Christianity, Biaks participated in Indonesian national institutions without accepting the identities they promoted. Their remarkable response to the Indonesian government (and earlier polities laying claim to western New Guinea) suggests the limits of national identity and modernity, writ large.

This is one of the few books reporting on the volatile province of Irian Jaya. It offers a new way of thinking about the nation and its limits--one that moves beyond the conventions of both scholarship and recent journalism. It shows how people can "belong" to a nation yet maintain commitments that fall both short of and beyond the nation state.

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