Art as Politics

Chapter 7. Carving New Conceptions of Community in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Violence

On a brisk morning in 1997, some time after the anti-Chinese rioting, a convoy of trucks rumbled into Rantepao. The trucks screeched to a halt at the town’s dusty main intersection, where villagers awaited public transport to the buffalo market and unemployed Toraja guides lingered alongside snoozing Makassarese becak drivers. The ordinariness of the morning was abruptly shattered, as fierce-looking “young men in sturdy shoes”1 poured out of the trucks in front of the Chinese-owned businesses lining the main street. The Toraja souvenir vendors in adjacent shops, bank tellers at the imposing People’s Bank of Indonesia, and the cluster of people catching up with friends in front of the post office all snapped to attention. All had heard radio reports or seen televised images of violent anti-Chinese outbursts on Java and in their provincial capital of Makassar, and all had a framework for imagining what appeared to be on the verge of happening in their own homeland. Hurling anti-Chinese curses, these strangers began to move menacingly towards the largest Chinese-owned business, as frightened Chinese shopowners snatched up their outdoor displays and frantically yanked down heavy metal security doors. However, the sequence of events that unfolded next did not follow the same path of violence and destruction that had seemed so inevitable and uncontrollable elsewhere in Indonesia. This chapter explores the ramifications of growing violence, ethnic, and religious tensions in Indonesia on Toraja lives and arts. In considering the political backdrop to this chapter, it is important to underscore the complexity of discussing “identities” in Indonesia. Although Christianity and Islam have become increasingly salient definers of identity in Indonesia in recent years, and are often reported to be prime motivators in current situations of conflict, it pays to remember the myriad, constructed nature of identity (as discussed in Chapter One). By this, I mean not only that each 7 Carving New Conceptions of Community in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Violence 194 : chapter 7 Indonesian has a variety of entwining and sometimes competing religious, ethnic, political, and regional residential identities that must be considered in any discussion of ethno-religious strife, but also that these identities are not inert, primordial, or formed in isolation. Rather, as many social scientists have established, religious and ethnic identities are dynamic: they are shaped in particular historical and political circumstances (see Clifford 1988; Keesing 1989; and Handler 1988, 1994). As John Sidel (2001:48) recently cautioned, far too many popular commentators on Indonesian riots and church-burnings have pointed to essentialist categories as explanations for the violence. That is, they have based their explanations on relatively simplistic stereotypes. Such media commentators have painted Indonesia as a volcanic hotbed of ethnic and religious resentments, or as a nation composed of cultures programmed to run amok, or as land of devout Muslims rebelling against the forces of globalization and Westernization.2 Sidel suggests such explanations are erroneous. Instead, he traces the ways in which historical processes of capitalist development , class relations, and religious sociology in Indonesia underlie the recent eruptions of violence.3 In a similar vein, in discussing the religious conflicts in Maluku (eastern Indonesia), Nils Bubandt (2001:228) also raises the question of how we can look at violence without essentializing or culturalizing it. Drawing on observations made by Mary Steedly (1999), Bubandt argues that we can accomplish this by localizing it.4 That is, we need to address how violence is locally produced, deployed, represented, and imagined (see Steedly 1999:445 and Bubandt 2001:228).5 In this chapter I examine the ramifications of the threat of violence for Toraja arts and Toraja ideas about themselves and their community. Before I discuss these issues in more detail, however, we need to return to the arrival of menacing anti-Chinese agitators in downtown Rantepao, the Toraja response, and its aftermath. ASSORTED TALES OF NARROWLY AVERTED CONFLICT IN THE HIGHLANDS As the strangers made their way towards one of the largest Chineseowned businesses in Rantepao, dozens of Toraja men quickly locked arms, forming a human barricade between the invaders and the Chinese businesses . As I was later told by various Toraja friends and acquaintances, these new conceptions of community : 195 Toraja were unfazed by the rocks and sticks the men were brandishing. Instead, they resolutely declared, “You cannot harm the Chinese in Tana Toraja, for these are our...