Escalation: Assemblage, archive, animation

ABSTRACT

In the uncertain early 2000s when violence between Muslims and Christians racked the Malukan islands on Indonesia's eastern edge, a handful of Protestant ministers waged an iconoclastic attack on a museum collection dedicated to Seram Island's ancestral headhunting culture and centred upon statues and portraits of mythical war captains. I track the heterogeneous sites and incidents that came together in the attack, including the animation of the museum's headhunter collection, as the past exceeded the ways in which it had been previously engaged and managed materially, existentially, and in its effects. Drawing on understandings of assemblage, archive, and cinematic animation, I explore the regime of secrecy and revelation that constituted the driving force behind the museum's continually expanding collection, was embedded in the complex of buildings and artifacts of which the museum forms a part, and entailed in its aesthetic and museographic practices. Taken together, they intimate how escalation, in this ethnographic example, was an always present potentiality – one that became disclosed when headhunting's secrets burst into the world with devastating consequences. What enabled these events, among other factors, was the materiality of the collection and the matter of scale or, more precisely, the visibility of scale such that it is deemed capable of attracting the gaze – directing attention within the spiralling inter-religious violence and turmoil to the headhunter statues and portraits of the museum, triggering a ‘crisis of faith’ in its director, and leaving torn canvases and broken statues in its wake.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• animation
• iconoclasm
• Indonesia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An invitation to a workshop on ‘Colonial Nostalgia: Memories, Objects and Performances’ at the Royal Institute of Indonesian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands and a conference on ‘Archives of the Everyday’ that I organized at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in 2013 offered opportunities to begin to work through these materials. Since then I have benefited from the comments and insights of audiences at Frankfurt University, the University of Warwick, the University of Lucerne, a panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings, and the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. I would like to thank in particular Marieke Bloembergen, Christiane Brosius, Christopher Duncan, Finbarr Barry Flood, Michael Gilsenan, Faye Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, Ruth Mandel, Fred Myers, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Fridus Steijlen, Karen Strassler, and Angela Zito for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Bruce Grant and Rafael Sánchez for their insightful readings of the paper. As an external member of the University of Copenhagen's ‘Escalations’ project, I participated in and learned from the engagement and input of the project members. I would like to acknowledge especially the excellent feedback of Lars Hojer, Stine Kroijer, and David Henig on a draft of this paper. Roy Ellen and Hatib Abdul Kadir shared generously their knowledge of Soahuku, Nuaulu, and the museum and I thank them for this. Marie de Lutz prepared the photographs for publication for which I thank her. I am especially grateful to the late Pak Nus Tamaela, his late son, Chris, and Punce and their families in Soahuku and Ambon for their hospitality, generosity, and contributions to this project.

2 My knowledge of the Seram Culture museum is based on two visits to Soahuku in 2005 and 2006, in the context of extended periods of fieldwork in and around Ambon City from 2003 until 2011, and among especially Christian refugees from Central and North Maluku in camps in Manado and Bitung in North Sulawesi in 2000 and 2001. Since the Ambon project focused on Christian street painters who threw up images of Jesus Christ and Christian scenes on billboards and public walls around the city, I made my first visit to meet Nus Tamaela in this context. Rather than forming part of the book, Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality and Appearance in Indonesia (Fordham University Press 2021), the present paper is a first attempt to conceptualize some of the issues I am beginning to explore in a new research project called ‘Archives of the Everyday’.

3 I follow Roy Ellen in my use of the Ambonese term ‘Alifuru’ as a gloss for the indigenous people of Maluku, especially Seram, who under Suharto were stigmatized as ‘not yet having a religion’, subsequently classified – though not consistently, as ‘Hindu’ and, more recently have been codifying their own ‘independent religion’ known as the Nunusaku religion (Ellen 2015).

4 See Ellen (2015) for a juxtaposition of a reproduction of the cover of Sachse's book and a photograph from 2003 of the Soahuku museum in which the statues on either side of its entrance – and notably the male figure wielding a shield and machete – do recall the belligerent image from Sachse (Ellen 2015, 266), and (Sachse 1907).

5 See Roy Ellen for a discussion of the ‘Alifuru official invisibility’ under the Dutch colonizers since Nuaulu and other indigenous peoples could not be accommodated within the administrative framework, how in postcolonial times Nuaulu and other indigenous peoples were variously classified as ‘not yet having a religion’, ‘groups that are still backward’, ‘remote peoples’ although such understandings have began to change from the 1980s on, as a consequence of increased schooling, in-migration and the expansion of logging activity (Ellen 2015, 263). Even in the mid-2000s, however, when I visited Seram and, more generally, in Central Maluku stereotypes of the interior people of Seram as ‘alifuru and primitif’ were pervasive (cf. Ellen ibid). Such stereotypes may have been reenergized by the rumours and reports of headhunting in the context of the violence in the 2000s – even if these acts were not or were not said to be carried out by indigenous people. Ellen mentions two incidents of head taking in 1993 and 2005 that he characterizes equally as a ‘relapse rather than a reversion’ to the former practice but which, nevertheless, reinforced Ambonese primordialist stereotypes of Nuaulu (ibid).

6 These categories are adapted from Abidin Kusno writing on the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. He distinguishes three – the longue durée of Dutch colonial history, the developmentalist time of Suharto, and a third associated with the rakyat or ‘the poor’ which have a particular relation to political legitimacy in the history of the republic (Kusno 2013).

7 A photograph taken by Roy Ellen in 2003 that shows the government head of the Nuaulu village of Rouhua standing in front of the Soakhuku museum suggests an endorsement of the place. According to Ellen, similar statues and images have been displayed in Soahuku since at least 1986 (Ellen 2015, 266).

8 In Islamic jurisprudence, Qu’ranic repudiations of idolatry have been debated, contested, and differently drawn upon. What is pertinent here is that ‘the only near consensus among jurists is the rejection of three-dimensional imagery and statuary  … ’ (Flood 2016, 118). Not should it surprise us that such views would influence Christians in Muslim majority Indonesia, especially in places like Maluku where, historically, there has been more exchange between Muslims and Christians than elsewhere including in and around Soahuku.

9 I would like to thank Finbarr Barry Flood for pointing out this connection.

10 On the understanding of escalation as a move from quantity to qualitative change, see Hojer, Kroijer, and Henig (2018).