Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

By Danilyn Rutherford

For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia. In Laughing at Leviathan, Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself—how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked players: those that make up an audience. Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power. Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226731995

Book preview

DANILYN RUTHERFORD is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2003).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73197-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73198-8 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-73197-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-73198-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73199-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rutherford, Danilyn.

Laughing at Leviathan : sovereignty and audience in West Papua / Danilyn Rutherford.

p. cm. — (Chicago studies in practices of meaning)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73197-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73198-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-73197-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-73198-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Papua (Indonesia)—Politics and government. 2. Sovereignty. 3. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. Leviathan. I. Title. II. Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning.

DU744.5.R88 2012

995.1—dc23

2011028476

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CHICAGO STUDIES IN PRACTICES OF MEANING

Edited by Jean Comaroff, Andreas Glaeser, William H. Sewell Jr., and Lisa Wedeen

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Laughing at Leviathan

Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

DANILYN RUTHERFORD

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS    CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowlegments

CHAPTER 1. Looking Like a Fool

PART I.         Geographies of Sovereignty

CHAPTER 2. Laughing at Leviathan

CHAPTER 3. Trekking to New Guinea

CHAPTER 4. Waiting for the End in Biak

PART II.       Signs of Sovereignty in Motion

CHAPTER 5. Frontiers of the Lingua Franca

CHAPTER 6. Institutional Power and Interpretive Practice

CHAPTER 7. Third-Person Nationalism

CHAPTER 8. The Appeal of Slippery Pronouns

Epilogue

CHAPTER 9. Beasts and Sovereigns

References

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures 7.1–7.7. Stills from Yorrys T. Raweyai, Mengapa Papua Ingin Merdeka. Jayapura: Presidium Dewan Papua, 2002, video compact disc. Used with the permission of Yorrys T. Raweyai.

Figures 8.1, 8.2. Stills from YouTube. Filep Karma: Freedom for West Papua Speach, 2004. Posting by westpapuaeurope. April 6, 2008. At http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=ul-wT09p9Bc&feature=related.

Figures 8.3–8.5. Stills from YouTube. obama song for west-papua. Posting by malaikat2007. February 18, 2008. At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MoJH5mGH7o.

Preface and Acknowledgments

In his wise, witty, magisterial, and depressing book on the history of the conflict between the Netherlands and Indonesia over western New Guinea, the historian Pieter Drooglever (2009) describes the following incident. The year is 1960, and the conflict is coming to a head. Leaders in the US State Department have hesitated to confirm publicly the vague promises some administration officials have made to help defend Netherlands New Guinea in the event of an Indonesian invasion, although at least one of their Dutch counterparts is wishfully acting as if they had. Indonesia’s charismatic first president, Sukarno, a champion of the nonaligned movement, is playing Cold War superpowers off of one another, reinforcing the Indonesian military with both American and Soviet arms. Even Australia, New Guinea’s other colonizer, is softening its support for the Netherlands. The Dutch foreign minister and the diplomats negotiating in Washington are calling for restraint, while the governor of Netherlands New Guinea is calling for protection in the form of fighter planes and troops.

Dutch leaders know they cannot defend Netherlands New Guinea (and maintain their commitments to NATO) without outside aid. But they also know that the international community neither accepts nor really understands why the Netherlands is wasting so much breath on the primitive territory at a time when colonialism is going out of fashion. American policymakers need to know that their Dutch counterparts trust their assurances, but they also need to know that the Netherlands will fight to keep the colony if push comes to shove. And so Dutch leaders decide to send the showcase of their navy, the aircraft carrier Karel Doorman, on a voyage to Dutch New Guinea intended, as Drooglever puts it, to show their teeth and show the flag (2009, 384).

The Karel Doorman sets out from Rotterdam in late May with two submarine chasers, a cargo of fighter jets, and an oil tanker for refueling. The trip does not go well. Indonesia breaks diplomatic ties with the Netherlands upon learning of the scheme. Uneasy about the consequences of appearing to support the Dutch, the government in Madagascar cancels a planned visit. The stevedores’ union in Fremantle, Australia, where the Karel Doorman is scheduled to dock, refuses to provide tugboat assistance. Only by using the fighter jets’ engines to create lateral thrust is the crew able to maneuver the aircraft carrier into its berth. After a brief respite in New Guinea, the squadron heads north toward Japan, where the Dutch have arranged for a fleet visit to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Dutch-Japanese relations. Indonesia pressures the Japanese government, and the trade unions in Yokohama threaten to use force to prevent the ships from mooring. The fleet visit? Canceled. The squadron turns back to New Guinea then sails home via Cape Horn, calling at New Caledonia, Australia, Chile, and Brazil on the way. The Karel Doorman reaches Rotterdam in late December, nearly seven months after setting out.

This tale comes midway through Drooglever’s exhaustive study, which the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned in 2000 to provide sound information on the subject [of the decolonization of western New Guinea and the Papuans’ right to self-determination] to a wide audience (Drooglever 2008, 7). It appears in the midst of a detailed account of the twists and turns of what Drooglever calls the dispute in international perspective (Drooglever 2009, 310). Drooglever tells us of dealings within and among the various governments with a stake in the conflict, their representatives’ constant effort to save face and save their jobs, the circulation of their utterances across genres and contexts, and the strategies they used to make one another perceive their respective countries’ interests and animosities as the same. All this unfolded without the participation of western New Guinea’s inhabitants, the putative beneficiaries of all this maneuvering, who were then known as Papuans, as they are again today. Even those caught up in what some Papuans called "gila kedaulatan, sovereignty madness," found themselves excluded from the negotiations that were sealing their fate (Drooglever 2009, 540). Drooglever’s description of this Cold War–era game of image management should have prepared me to see the voyage of the Karel Doorman for what it was: a carefully staged performance, designed with specific spectators in mind.

Yet as I read Drooglever’s description of the ill-fated trip, I was struck by the strangeness of the enterprise. Picture that aircraft carrier, floating awkwardly in an Australian harbor, the air filled with the smoke and noise of jet engines. Picture the newspaper and television coverage of the crew’s desperate efforts to turn the mammoth vessel around. One would think that a sovereign state would have the right to put its military hardware where it pleased within its own territory. But then there’s the getting there, and the impression that getting there makes on onlookers, great and small. This book is the product of my fascination with such moments—moments when sovereignty makes an appearance, and in making an appearance, puts itself at risk.

All sorts of audiences have been involved in the making of this book. I conducted some of the research for it while pursuing my doctorate at Cornell University, a task that took me from 1989 to 1997. A summer internship with the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, which included a two-week visit to Irian Jaya, as western New Guinea then was called, paved the way for my eighteen months of fieldwork in the province, where I spent most of my time on Biak, an island off the north coast of the province. Before and after my fieldwork, I also conducted nearly two years of historical work, through periodic hunting and gathering expeditions to the Netherlands from London, where I was living at the time. In addition to visiting archives, libraries, and museums, I interviewed former colonial officials, both Dutch and Papuan, as well as more recent exiles from the province. I returned to Biak for two weeks in 1998. In 2003 I spent a month and a half as a visiting lecturer at Cenderawasih University in Jayapura, the provincial capital, and conducted a field visit that took me to Biak, then Nabire, a town on the north coast, and finally Enarotali, a government seat in the Central Highlands. I returned to the Netherlands in October 2002 and March 2003 for more archival research, interviews, and participant observation at Papuan nationalist events. Between 1998 and 2010, I also interviewed Papuan activists and community leaders in Bali; Jakarta; New York; Washington; Chicago; and Montpelier, Vermont, often while participating in advocacy and policy work as a board member of the Papua Resource Center and as the principal researcher of the West Papua Study Group for an East-West Center Washington project on Internal Conflicts in Asia. My domestic situation prevented me from spending as much time as I would have liked in what was by then known as Papua, which the Indonesian government barred to foreign researchers and journalists for much of this period. I did keep up with events through telephone calls and e-mail newsgroups. The Internet is not the only home of the contemporary struggle for sovereignty in West Papua. But I found it an important place to visit, given the phenomenon I set out to explore.

In the following pages I shall describe how some would-be sovereigns react not with anxiety but with pleasure to the sense they are being seen. This was certainly the case for many of today’s West Papuan nationalists when it came to the publication of Drooglever’s book. There is something thrilling about seeing through another’s eyes and discovering something new about things one thought one knew well, including oneself. I have occasionally felt anxious about the imagined spectators who have perched on my shoulders during the many years that have passed since I began the essays collected here. But the thrill of discovery was never far behind.

Two of my teachers from Cornell have been a constant presence in my thinking. Chapter 2, Laughing at Leviathan, is an expanded version of a class presentation I gave in Ben Anderson’s remarkable course, The Plural Society, Revisited, in 1990. My dissertation chair, Jim Siegel, has never stopped helping me find something unexpected in my materials; my debts to him are great. I also still think of things I learned in Ithaca from Patricio Abinales, George Aditjondro, the late Donna Amaroso, Thanet Aphornsuvan, Coeli Barry, John Borneman, Suzanne Brenner, Meenakshi Chakrabarti, Nancy Florida, Marilyn Ivy, Audrey Kahin, Henk Maier, Rudolf Mrazek, John Norvell, Mary-Pat Olley, John Pemberton, Takashi Shiraishi, Steve Sangren, and G. G. Weix. In England, Fenella Cannell, Eva-Lotta Hedman, John Sidel, and Haru Yamada read and commented on my work in its earliest stages and remain fast friends.

At the University of Chicago, my home through some life-transforming times, I had many audiences: treasured colleagues and equally treasured students, who quickly became colleagues as well. I’d like to thank Nadia Abu El-Haj, Hussein Agrama, Andrew Apter, Gretchen Bakke, Lauren Berlant, Amahl Bishara, Rob Blunt, Dominic Boyer, John Boyer, Betsey Brada, Bill Brown, Summerson Carr, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jim Chandler, Anne Chien, Jean and John Comaroff, Shannon Dawdy, Robin Derby, Michael Dietler, Prasenjit Duara, Ben Eastman, Cassie Fennell, Jim Fernandez, Ray Fogelson, Arnika Fuhrmann, Rachel Fulton, Susan Gal, Mark Geraughty, Kate Goldfarb, Jan Goldstein, Kelly Gillespie, Peter Graith, Courtney Handman, Joseph Hankins, Mark Hansen, Nicolas Harkness, the late Olivia Harris, Jim Hevia, Brian Horne, Zada Johnson, John Kelly, Yongjin Kim, Alan Kolata, Averill Leslie, Claudio Lomnitz, Sarah Luna, Tanya Luhrmann, Saba Mahmood, Azande Mangeango, Debbie McDougall, Rob Moore, Kathleen Morrison, Sarah Muir, Nancy Munn, Shunsuke Nozawa, Elayne Oliphant, Stephan Palmie, Gretchen Pfeil, Elizabeth Povinelli, Justine Buck Quijada, Michal Ran, Malavika Reddy, Matt Rich, Rachael Rinaldo, Tracey Rosen, Jonah Rubin, Marshall Sahlins, Richard Saller, Leslie Salzinger, Eric Santner, Robin Shoaps, Marsaura Shukla, Michael Silverstein, Dan Slater, Adam Smith, Kabir Tambar, Eli Thorkelson, Gabe Tusinski, Rihan Yeh, Benjamin White, Hannah Woodroofe, and Benjamin Zimmer. While in Chicago I received aid and comfort from many others as well: the late Marcia Adler, John Affeldt, Sarah Bade, J. P. Brown, Georg Buechi, the late David Buschema, Emily Buss, Rob Carriger, Romain Clerou, Annie Cuthbertson, John Davis, Julian Dibbel, Emlyn Eisenach, Eric Goldstein, Olive Holmes, Martha Kauffman, Bob Kylberg, Laura Letinsky, Amy Levine, Xiaorong Li, Cathy Mardikes, Janis McCormick, Bill McKenney, Dan Miller, Matt Nicodemis, Maire O’Neill, Mary-Pat Perri, Eric Posner, George Pratt, Sydney Robertson, Anne Rogers, Larry Ruth, Chris and Eunju Schonbaum, Julia Segre, Suzanne Siskel, Paul Strasburg, Mara Tapp, Tobin Weaver, Melissa Weber, and Bill Wyman. I owe a special thanks to Stephen Scott, who helped me with my research. I am particularly grateful for the cheerful assistance I received from my many writing group comrades, Danielle Allen, Jessica Cattelino, Jennifer Cole, Judith Farquhar, Kesha Fikes, Jacqueline Goldsby, David Levin, Sandra Macpherson, Joseph Masco, William Mazzarella, Deborah Nelson, and Jacqueline Stewart, and from my friends and colleagues at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, including Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Leela Gandhi, Andreas Glaeser, Moishe Postone, Bill Sewell, Evalyn Tennant, Anwen Tormey, and Lisa Wedeen, whose discerning interventions along the way greatly enhanced my manuscript.

At my new home, the University of California, Santa Cruz, I’m quickly finding valuable interlocutors, including Mark Anderson, Karen Barad, Ted Biggs, Heath Cabot, Celina Callahan-Kapoor, Zach Caple, Chris Cochran, Don Brenneis, Melissa Caldwell, Shelly Errington, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Judith Haubicht-Mauche, Susan Harding, Colin Hoag, Dan Linger, Andrew Mathews, Carolyn Martin Shaw, Cameron Monroe, Megan Moodie, Olga Nájera-Ramirez, Triloki Pandey, Craig Schuetze, Noah Tamarkin, Megan Thomas, Nishita Trisal, Anna Tsing, and Matthew Wolf-Meyer. Mayanthi Fernando, Deborah Gould, and Lisa Rofel have joined me in a new writing group and provided useful advice on the introduction. In Vermont, where I spent a year and spend each summer, I received more cheerful aid from Vicki Brennan, Jennifer Dickinson, Emily Manetta, Jonah Steinberg, and Andrea Voyer, who helped me through the process of gathering up a bunch of fragments and turning them into a book.

This book would not exist were it not for the kindness and generosity of friends and colleagues in Indonesia, West Papua, and the Netherlands: Tom Beanal, Theo Bekker, Sary Burdam, Salomina Burdam, Cory Ap, Oppie Bekker-Kaisiëpo, Aryo Danusiri, Ien de Vries, Phil Erari, Sidney Jones, Nicolaas Jouwe, August Kafiar, Gershon Kaigere, Betty Kaisiëpo, Dolly Kaisiëpo, the late Markus Kaisiëpo, the late Victor Kaisiëpo, Arnold Mampioper, Willy Mandowen, Max Mirino, Arius Mofu, Sary Noriwari, Chris Padwa, Glenda Padwa, Hengky Padwa, Decky Rumaropen, Septina Rumaropen, John Rumbiak, Seth Rumkorem, Frances Seymour, Suzanne Siskel, Barnabas Suebu, Vience Tebay, Kiki van Bilsen, Frans Wospakrik, Philip and Tinuk Yampolsky, and many others. I am particularly grateful to Octovianus Mote, whose insights are scattered throughout these essays. Abigail Abrash, Steven Feld, Brigham Golden, and Ed McWilliams welcomed me onto the board at the Papua Resource Center. In the East-West Center Washington project on Internal Conflicts in Asia, I had the pleasure of working with Muthiah Alagappa, Edward Aspinall, Gardner Bovington, Kit Collier, and Carole McGranahan. Chris Ballard, Leslie Butt, Richard Chauvel, Mike Cookson, Piet Drooglever, Charlie Farhadian, Benny Giay, Paul Haenen, Karl Heider, Jelle Miedema, Mark Mulder, Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, Peter King, Stuart Kirsch, Rodd McGibbon, Titus Pekei, Mientje Rumbiak, Rupert Stasch, Agus Sumule, Jaap Timmer, Wilco van den Heuvel, David Webster, and my other fellow travelers in the field of West Papuan studies have taught me many things. I owe a special thanks to Eben Kirksey, who has generously shared his ideas, contacts, and adventures in the world of West Papua advocacy with me.

Over the years, I have also benefited from conversations with Joshua Barker, Anne Berger, Maurice Bloch, Tom Boellsdorff, Matthew Engelke, Ken George, Frances Gouda, Bill Hanks, Charles Hirschkind, Simon Jarvis, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Smita Lahiri, Bill Maurer, Fred Meyers, Rosalind Morris, June Nash, Joel Robbins, Rafael Sanchez, Bambi Schiefellin, Patricia Spyer, Mary Steedly, Ann Stoler, Eric Tagliocozzo, Mick Taussig, Matt Tomlinson, the late Annette Weiner, and Andrew Willford. I have presented parts of this book in various settings: Cornell University; Harvard University; Leiden University; the London School of Economics and Political Science; the University of Chicago; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Michigan; the University of Northern Illinois; and the University of Wisconsin. Various agencies saw fit to fund my research, including the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Program on Global Security and Sustainability, and a University of Chicago Social Sciences Divisional Research Committee Grant from the J. David Greenhouse Memorial Fund.

An anonymous reader and the indefatigable Webb Keane reviewed the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press. Their advice has improved this work immeasurably; I am grateful for their intelligent, careful interventions. David Brent not only shepherded the book through the publishing process, he also offered insightful suggestions of his own. Priya Nelson provided expert guidance in the final stages. I would also like to thank the editors of the publications where versions of some of my essays have appeared:

Chapter 2: Laughing at Leviathan: John Furnivall, Dutch New Guinea, and the Ridiculousness of Colonial Rule, in Southeast Asia over Three Generations, ed. James T. Siegel and Audrey Kahin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2003), 27–46. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Also an expanded version in Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between Anthropology and History, ed. Andrew Willford and Eric Tagliacozzo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 50–87. © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, www.sup.org.

Chapter 3: Trekking to New Guinea: Dutch Colonial Fantasies of a Virgin Land, 1900–1940, in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Frances Gouda and Julia Clancy-Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 255–71. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 4: Waiting for the End in Biak: Violence, Order, and a Flag Raising, Indonesia 67 (April 1999): 39–59. Also an expanded version in Violence and the State in Indonesia, ed. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2001), 189–212. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 5: Frontiers of the Lingua Franca: Ideologies of the Linguistic Contact Zone in Dutch New Guinea, Ethnos 70, no. 3 (2006): 387–412. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 6: Nationalism and Millenarianism in West Papua: Institutional Power, Interpretive Practice, and the Pursuit of Christian Truth, in Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, ed. June Nash (London: Blackwell, 2005), 146–68. Also an expanded version in The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Matthew Engelke and Matthew Tomlinson (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 105–28. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

Chapter 7: Why Papua Wants Freedom: The Third Person in Contemporary Nationalism, Public Culture 20, no. 2 (2008): 361–89. © 2008, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Then there is my family, some of whom have read my writings, or would if I asked them to: Brigitte Best, Karin Best, the late Dick Best, Alice Cummins, Gitta Dunn, George Fox, Jack Fox, Jo Fox, Nancy Fox Hoover, Kim Locke, Ron Rogowski, Donald Rutherford, Jim Rutherford, Marilyn Rutherford, Sandra Rutherford, Suzannah Rutherford, Tom Rutherford, Duke Spitzer, Marlis Ziegler, and Jack Ziegler. My delightful daughter, Melitta Best, has brightened my life for many years. Naima Bond, Erin Bresette, Billie Corrette, Bianca Dahl, Katie Flinn, Kate Goldfarb, Marilyn Landon, Amy Lebichuck, Iryna Martinets, Gabriella Navarrete, Chandra Rapley, Barnaby Riedel, Scott Richerson, Adriana Rivera, Tracey Rosen, Jeeranuch Sayjanyon, Deneale Steinvelt, and Helen Wang all cared for Millie; Adriana Coronado kept her busy and happy while I was finishing the revisions on this book. Finally, the men: my late husband, Craig Best, who knew how to laugh at Leviathan; our son, Ralph Best, who is quickly learning; and my dear friend, Tim Duane, who is always pulling down Leviathan’s pants. This book is for them.

CHAPTER ONE

Looking Like a Fool

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking like a fool.—George Orwell, 1950 [1936]

Each of the chapters in this book is an essay in the dictionary sense of the word: a literary composition, but also an attempt—my attempt as an anthropologist to spur political thought by examining the uneasy relationship between sovereignty and audience. Sovereignty, according to the classic formulation of the sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin (1992, 1) is the supreme and absolute power over citizens and subjects. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bodin that sovereignty implied supremacy, even as he stressed the human origins of sovereign power. For Hobbes, sovereignty began with the human capacity for what he called prudence (1998 [1651], 17–19). Before law and language, when individuals confronted one another and saw themselves being seen, prudence led them to anticipate one another’s actions by imagining the situation from one another’s point of view. According to Hobbes, prudence led first to preemptive violence then to the institution of a political order in which individuals exchanged obedience for protection against bodily harm (1998 [1651], 82–86). In this book, I both build upon and unsettle this view of sovereignty. Processes that Hobbes and others relegated to a timeless state of nature, where fear of violence reigned supreme, appear in these essays in historical encounters pervaded by a range of sentiments, encounters of the sort that anthropologists are equipped to explore. Wielding instruments developed for the anthropological analysis of sign use, I dissect the play of gazes that incites and thwarts claims to sovereignty. I stress the interdependency that sovereignty always entails in practice, as governments turn to one another for resources and recognition of their legitimacy (see Cattelino 2008). But I also argue that audience infects the very concept of sovereignty: audience is sovereignty’s basis and its bane.

I develop this argument by way of my work on West Papua, the name given by many of its indigenous inhabitants to the western half of New Guinea. A predominantly Christian corner of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation-state, West Papua is a rugged and impoverished region inhabited by 2.3 million people, roughly 35 percent of whom are settlers from outside western New Guinea (see McGibbon 2004b, 20, 25). It has long been home to people whom I call Papuans in this book, in part for convenience, in part because this is the name that most of them now use. They (and I) also draw finer distinctions among the region’s hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups. There are Dani, Lani, Amungme, and Me, from the central highlands with their snow-capped mountains and fertile valleys; Asmat, Korowai, and Merauke from the swampy southern lowlands and coastal plains; Sentani, Serui, Biak, Waropen, and Arfak from the more accessible northern hills, islands, and shores; and Sorong, Teminabuan, Ayamaru, and Kaimana from centuries-old trading communities on the island’s western edge. There are highlanders and coastal people, northerners and southerners, Catholics, Protestants, and a handful of Muslims: different people (Indonesian/Malay: orang), who trade, intermarry, speak in the Papuan dialect of Indonesian with one another, cooperate, and sometimes compete. Their homeland has gone by many names: Dutch New Guinea, West Irian, Irian Jaya, Papua, and, more confusingly, the adjoining provinces of Papua and West Papua, also known as West Irian Jaya. The Netherlands and Indonesia coined these terms in claiming sovereignty over this resource-rich region; West Papua is the term preferred by Papuan nationalists and the one I use in this book. The times covered by these essays span from the early nineteenth century to the present. I draw on historical and ethnographic research undertaken between 1990 and 2009. Many of the essays focus on Biak, an island off the north coast of New Guinea, where I conducted fieldwork from 1992 to 1994. Others range farther afield. This is not a definitive history of West Papua. My aim in each of these chapters is rather to use the analysis of episodes in West Papua’s distant and recent past to illuminate how the pursuit of sovereignty inevitably entails an encounter with spectators: audiences in all their myriad forms.

West Papua is a setting that has forced me to expand my understanding of sovereignty beyond the limits set by Bodin, Hobbes, and other European thinkers. If the term, sovereignty, always speaks of supremacy, this supremacy can signal not only domination but also other, more generative forms of power. English speakers once spoke of medicines as sovereign—efficacious or potent in a superlative degree (Oxford English Dictionary 1991, 1839). Some Biaks envision the achievement of what they call full sovereignty (Indonesian: kedaulatan penuh) for their homeland as bringing them efficacy and potency. They imagine this achievement as occurring at a moment when the world’s eyes turn to their homeland and they gain access to powers from afar. When their homeland is liberated from Indonesian rule, they will enjoy greater security and control over their livelihoods. Some go as far as to say that they will eat in one place, the phrase they use to describe how they will live without toiling or traveling in a utopian world where desire and satisfaction merge into one (see Rutherford 2003). Speaking in their local language, they name this state Koreri (We Change Our Skin), an expression that derives from a myth recounting the transformation of Manarmakeri, The Itchy Old Man, a despised and downtrodden figure, into a beautiful youth, Manseren Manggundi, The Lord Himself. Biaks also refer to this state in Indonesian as national sovereignty (kedaulatan bangsa) or independence (kemerdekaan), the state of being free (merdeka), a word with multiple meanings (Giay 2000; Golden 2003; Kirksey 2012). Sovereignty in all these senses is a more or less unattainable ideal. Yet people like my Biak informants continue to reach for it. So do Indonesian diplomats, who have mounted a tireless campaign to ensure that other governments recognize Indonesia’s territorial sovereignty throughout the enormous island nation. Near and distant spectators, including rivals and potential friends, have long figured prominently in the schemes of West Papua’s would-be sovereigns. The value of these essays lies in the attention they draw to this aspect of the unending quest for sovereign power.

The sensibility that cuts across these essays—studies of topics ranging from colonial state building to the use of pronouns in nationalist texts—boils down to a preoccupation with a dimension of the quest for sovereignty that is blindingly obvious, when one thinks about it, yet infernally complicated in its workings and effects. International recognition is a key component of successful assertions of political sovereignty, and yet this dependence on others undercuts the supreme and absolute power to which a would-be sovereign, in the classic sense, lays claim. In the course of declaring independence, nationalists everywhere have found the force of imagined spectators impossible to evade. This is not to say that all imagined spectators hold equal weight. As Papuan activists know well, recognition from Vanuatu is one thing; recognition from the United States is another; recognition from Papuan friends and family for one’s accomplishments is something else still. The West Papuan people would need the acknowledgment of powerful foreign allies to gain entry into the community of sovereign nation-states. Only some international actors have the economic and military muscle to act as binding arbiters in disputes.

But this dimension of the quest for sovereignty taps deeper springs. Sovereignty not only implies mastery over others; it also implies an exemption from the constraints of social relations—an ability to stand above the fray. But no one can command without anticipating a response, just as no one can give without getting some kind of return. As the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1977 [1807]) famously showed, the mastery gained through recognition is chimerical: the Lord is even more dependent on the Bondsman for self-certainty than the Bondsman is on the Lord. Like social action more generally, the assertion of sovereignty unfolds before the eyes of imagined others; every bid for power entails a confrontation with audiences of various sorts. I am using the term audience in an extended sense as shorthand for the varied kinds of interlocutors that social actors identify with or react to as they go about the business of social life. Audiences consist of others who elicit a response, even as they draw one into their ranks. Audiences participate in the conversation of gestures described by the philosopher and sociologist George Herbert Mead (1965, 210): the delicate dance of actions taken in anticipation of what others will think and do. One’s dance partner is also one’s looking glass, as social psychologist Charles Cooley argued: the mirror in which one sees oneself and sees oneself being judged (1983 [1922], 184). Audiences, strictly speaking, are never transparently available. One never exhaustively inhabits another’s point of view, even when this other is standing in the same room. Preexisting expectations, categories, and frames shape one’s response to interlocutors and, indeed, to every dimension of life.¹ Interlocutors identify with one another, yet never completely. Without a merging of perspectives, there could be no interaction, but if this merging were seamless, there would be no incitement to interact.

What’s more, audiences always travel in more than pairs. What interests me most in these essays is the proliferation of audiences that elicit a response from would-be sovereigns, engaging them in a conversation of gestures that speaks to multiple interlocutors, yearned for or unwelcome, sequentially or all at once. Audiences are both imagined and imaginatively joined as people shift between perspectives. Audiences appear in various instantiations, from the more or less proximate interlocutor to the absent supervisor to the transcendent God, who holds the entire universe in His gaze. Audiences assume different stances on one’s actions, from disinterest to critique. They are what sociologist Erving Goffman (1981, 146) called ratified hearers, but they are also overhearers, witnesses to performances designed for other eyes. Size matters when it comes to audiences, as the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988, 325, 337) implies in her reflections on Melanesian gift economies. When it comes to eliciting an exchange of perspectives, agents standing for collectives exert a more keenly felt force than agents standing alone. Evoked in informal conversations, represented in speeches, films, and books, embedded in bureaucracies and other institutions, audiences of different sorts and scales both enable and bedevil the political projects described in this book.

Some audiences, as we shall see, seem to possess a spectral sovereignty: an intangible ability to reframe a situation without actually appearing on the scene. Brought to mind through symbols, oratory, and the brandishing of cameras and microphones, such audiences can turn supposed criminals into dissidents and their arrest into a violation of international law. The spectral sovereignty associated with such audiences has haunted and inspired officials, bureaucrats, and activists in West Papua. The conjuring of such audiences has validated their claims to authority, but it has also brought into play what appear to some Papuans as transcendent—and hard to control—seats of power. One thinks of the role of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, United States foreign policy, and global corporations and investors in today’s political struggles. In West Papua, as elsewhere, some of these international actors loom large in activists’ conceptions of their struggle. Other international actors create the economic, social, and political conditions that impinge in less evident, if equally forceful ways on local worlds. But this situation has roots in the more distant past. Even Bodin (1992, 59) admitted that sovereignty was not entirely indivisible: earthly rulers still had to bow to God (see also Engster 2001).

The proliferation of such audiences gives rise to passions, from identifiable emotions to the more elusive feeling of having a feeling that Brian Massumi (2002) has described as affect. These passions have political effects, as Hobbes argued and as my essays make clear. For those in pursuit of sovereignty, the sense that others are watching can spawn not only anxiety and embarrassment but also pleasure and hope. Much depends on where an audience is situated in relation to a would-be sovereign: audiences watching from beyond the borders of the Netherlands Indies or Indonesia have inspired the most dramatic responses among the territory’s rulers, as well as the ruled. It should come as no surprise that Papuan nationalists have responded with enthusiasm to the proliferation of audiences appearing to possess a spectral sovereignty, while Dutch and Indonesian politicians and bureaucrats have shied away from outside scrutiny. Outgunned and underfunded, Papuan nationalists are eager to recruit friends in high places who are willing and able to bring their adversaries to heel. But these passions are not just a side effect of political strategies—they are factors that can motivate the violent exercise of power. This is especially the case in colonized places, where the interplay between foreign and native gazes has proven discomfiting to would-be sovereigns. The ideal of popular sovereignty has sat uneasily with the conquest of peoples deemed incapable of being citizens, at least in their present benighted state (see Bhabha 1983; Mehta 1999).

In the chapters that follow, I describe how the uneasy relationship between sovereignty and audience has shaped the history of colonialism and nationalism in West Papua. I show how this uneasy relationship has played a direct and active role in the territory’s colonial history and postcolonial fate. I focus on the multiple audiences sought out and confronted by would-be sovereigns, who are often caught off balance when the power they seek suddenly appears as dispersed across a shifting political terrain. The proliferation of these audiences opens opportunities for new claimants to partake in the dream of sovereignty, but, as we shall see, it also makes it difficult to sustain the illusion of being in charge. In the remainder of this chapter, I consider how my essays speak to questions raised by scholarly accounts of sovereignty as a concept and a practice. I explore some of the historical reasons why West Papua has proven such a fruitful site for rethinking what sovereignty means and how it is claimed. For capturing the approach