Reflections on Indonesian violence: two tales and three silences.
2008. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Eds.) 2009 Socialist Register VIOLENCE TODAY: Actually existing barbarism Pontypool: Merlin Press, pp163-180.
Abstract
The three major rounds of violence in Sulawesi from 1998-2001 were, sadly, not unique cases in Indonesia during this period: violence and mass evictions along ethnic or religious lines broke out in five provinces following President Suharto's ouster in 1998, after 32 years of military-inflected rule. How can such violence be explained? I would argue, accounts of violence need political economy to counter the simplifying culturalism of so much popular analysis. An emphasis on culture and meaning, on the other hand, is needed to counter the crude materialism of neo-Malthusian accounts, both popular and academic, that attribute conflict to the pressure of people on resources, radically under-specifying the diverse forms and mechanisms of this 'pressure', and failing to account for populations under extreme economic stress who nevertheless establish conditions of tolerance and peace. While polemical encounters sometimes require a simplifying emphasis on the cultural or the material, the risk of such polemics is to re-establish a dichotomy that scholars building on the legacy of cultural Marxism have worked hard to dissolve. In a conflict zone such as highland Sulawesi, a form of analysis which attempts to grasp the materiality of cultural understandings, and the simultaneity of material and symbolic struggles seems especially important. The causes of violence are unlikely to be reducible to either material or cultural, and much is obscured by a crude binary framing. To delve deeper, we need to break three silences which cloud popular understandings of violence: a silence about history, about geography, and about agency.