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Jacob Nerenberg
University of Toronto
© 2013, Jacob Nerenberg
Notes
[1] ‘West Papua’ here refers to the region including the Indonesian provinces of Papua and Papua Barat. In Indonesia, this region is usually termed ‘Papua’. In this essay these terms are used more or less interchangeably.
[2] In a related vein, the ethnographer of the Dani of West Papua, Leslie Butt, suggests (Citation2002) that ‘engaged’ anthropologists’ deployments of stories of global south suffering works to incorporate marginalised people into a disempowering global system, even as they silence their voices.
[3] A mid-range ethnographic approach to Papua, grounded in ‘ordinary’ life, while speaking to higher order ‘politics’, is evident in the work of authors such as Butt (Citation2005; Citation2007) and Munro (Citation2009).
[4] Indonesian media routinely frames conflict in Papua as resulting from meddling by foreign powers (for example, Faturahman Citation2012). Meanwhile, international advocates’ exclusive focus on human rights violations can work to obscure realms of daily life, where indigenous Papuans and Indonesian settlers participate (on unequal terms) in markets, workplaces, government affairs and so on. None of this is to deny that Papuans continue to be represented in much mainstream global and Indonesian media as backwards ‘primitives’, whose lives are unconnected to ‘politics’ (Kirsch Citation2010; Stasch Citation2012).