Three centuries of conflict (asian studies review)

Asian Studies Review

ISSN: 1035-7823 (Print) 1467-8403 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casr20

Three centuries of conflict in East Timor Gerry van Klinken To cite this article: Gerry van Klinken (2016) Three centuries of conflict in East Timor, Asian Studies Review, 40:4, 647-648, DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2016.1148549 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2016.1148549

Published online: 24 Feb 2016.

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Date: 18 October 2016, At: 23:59

Asian Studies Review

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SOUTHEAST ASIA Three centuries of conflict in East Timor, by Douglas Kammen, Singapore, NUS Press, 2015, xv, 231 pp., SG$32.00 (paperback) In this gem of a book Doug Kammen reconstructs 300 years of East Timorese history by looking through the lens of one clan in one town. He frames the long arc of his story with a murder mystery dating from the militia violence in 1999. In March, at the start of six wild months preceding the UN-supervised referendum, about 80 local members of an Indonesian military-backed gang climbed the steep mountain behind Maubara town. They converged on the house of an old man named Mau Kuru and hacked him to death. Mau Kuru was known to favour independence.

Why did they do that to their neighbour, when nearly everyone else in the region also wanted independence?

In the last chapter we learn (spoiler alert!) that Mau Kuru’s family believe the militia leader, a brutal local government official, wanted to seize a number of sacred heirlooms the old man had in his possession: “Chinese ceramics, documents from the VOC, canes of office, flags, metal gongs, small canons, bronze drums, and so forth” (p. 148). To make sense of this mysterious answer we are taken on a historical tour de force going back to the arrival of a Portuguese trading ship at Maubara in 1712.

Kammen has extracted a wealth of fascinating detail from Portuguese and Dutch colonial archives about this little coastal town. He then wove that together with oral narratives he heard from family members over the decade it took him to write the book. Doing this was not easy, since the locals had forgotten nearly everything Kammen discovered about them in the archives.

And what they did remember, they interpreted very differently. Violence, for instance, was for them never a real problem. Countless individuals come to life this way. Each was driven by motives that rarely reflect the official policy of the nation-states that somehow hovered over the murderous violence so many of them commit or suffer.

By bringing history, anthropology and political science to bear in this way, Kammen paints a picture that departs radically from the analysis of violence common in the scholarly literature on East Timor and similarly tortured places. Asking about the recurrence of violence over an extended period takes him close to the phrase “culture of violence”. To my mind it takes considerable courage to look this uncomfortably essentialist notion in the face. The reward is tangible in at least two ways. Kammen’s account of the origins of recurrent violence is more satisfactory than that usually found in conflict resolution studies. At an even more profound level, he conveys a more adequate notion of power than the familiar instrumentalist one.

Violence, such as that which killed Mau Kuru, is often read as an instance of nationalism or partisanship. In reality local events are not entirely intelligible in terms of national conflict narratives. Maubara’s mountainous territory was divided among several dynastic clans, whose solidarities and rivalries appear to have had remarkable staying power. This does not mean the local rivalries and supralocal powers existed in unrelated universes. Instead, as Kammen puts it, “local solidarities and rivalries mapped on to supralocal dynamics, which in turn intensified and magnified local differences” (p. 170). So Mau Kuru’s clan had identified with the anti-Indonesian resistance, while the militia leader’s clan had taken the collaborationist route. Each had similarly taken opposite sides during earlier Portuguese, Japanese and Dutch episodes. Political instability invariably reignited these old rivalries as one or the other seized their chance.

Kammen does not discuss the idea of power explicitly, but implicitly his account throws new light on the way political power works. Instrumental power – “power over” others – is only one modality of power, and not a very effective one. Much more common is what Hannah Arendt called associational power – “power to” get things done together. Power is usually mediated in face-to-face situations, often with unpredictable effects. This was particularly evident during East Timor’s so-called period of indirect rule. But even when the modern state began to make claims

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to rule directly shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, it had to rely on individuals with local networks of knowledge and prestige. Even the Indonesian occupiers of East Timor between 1975 and 1999 recognised this. “[T]he Indonesian state and military employed civilians to do a great deal of its dirty work. In Maubara, only civilians knew who was active in the clandestine networks and who supported the cause of independence” (p. 166). Mau Kuru’s murderers were acting out of loyalty to their military masters in Jakarta, and also out of a desire to inflict pain on a rival whose long history of intimate enmity was known only to that mountainside. Thus this microscopic study throws a marvellously clear light on an analytical problem we face in nearly every case of civil strife.

Gerry van Klinken Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies © 2016 Gerry van Klinken http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2016.1148549

Ghosts of the new city: spirits, urbanity, and the ruins of progress in Chiang Mai, by Andrew Alan Johnson, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014, 208 pp., US$55.00 (hardback); US$27.00 (paperback) In Ghosts of the New City Andrew Johnson advances an ambitious argument about the interconnections between urbanism, progress, religion and culture in contemporary Northern Thailand.

The book is based on anthropological fieldwork carried out in Chiang Mai in 2006 and 2007. It integrates reflections on historiography with an analysis of the discourses and practices of two primary sets of informants – spirit mediums and city planners, architects and artists. Johnson argues that these actors are fundamentally concerned with anxieties arising from the contemporary failures of progress (charoen) in the city, and that each group sees itself as the vehicle through which a recovered glorious past will redeem a ruinous present and secure a prosperous future. Relying on revitalised magical charisma (barami) and secular culture (watthanatham) respectively to restore the urban fortunes of Chiang Mai, both spirit mediums and city planners act as conduits for overcoming the crises afflicting a contemporary Northern Thai (Lanna) urbanism now bereft of the sacred-cum-civilising monarchic power that previously ensured prosperity for the city’s inhabitants.

A brief introduction situates Johnson’s argument in relation to prior studies of urbanism, sacred centres and theatre states in the study of Southeast Asian society. In Chapter 1, Johnson analyses stories about buildings haunted by malevolent ghosts and illegal migrants to explicate his informants’ fears about the proliferating crises of material, moral and spiritual failure that undermine globalised modernity’s promises of prosperity and progress. The next chapter examines Northern Thai history and the myths and rituals associated with spirit possession in order to explore four different conceptions of the city in Lanna thought: as Buddhist sacred centres; as founts of prosperity for the countryside; as a supernatural entity; and as the body of the royal ruler. These understandings affirm the city’s civilising and assimilatory power.

Chapter 3 examines the biographies and ritual performances of several Chiang Mai spirit mediums to show how the charismatic power of possessing royal deities is accessed and mobilised to counteract malevolent haunting and to transform urban disorder into order. Switching focus, Chapter 4 explores how Chiang Mai’s artistic and architectural professionals reinvent various forms of urban cultural and material heritage in order to resurrect an authentically indigenous