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T he notion of a “culture of terror,” developed by ethnographers of Latin America and given wider currency through the writing of Michael Taussig, resonates powerfully with conditions around the world’s richest mining operation , Freeport’s Grasberg mine in the Indonesian province of Papua or Irian Jaya.1 Taussig (1987) described how a climate or culture of terror, the perpetual imminence of the threat of death, can create a “space of death,” an imaginary zone in which fear blocks the senses as violence and representations of violence achieve a near-perfect circle of mirrors reflecting terror back upon both perpetrators and victims. Neither cultures of terror nor spaces of death, however, have been explored in any depth in terms of their topographic arrangement, the nature of their inscription in a specific landscape. How does death—or, more accurately, the terror of an unfamiliar, unexpected, or violent death—come to inhabit a landscape? How is the land itself marked, manipulated, and deployed in the orchestration of terror? And if landscapes, by definition, invoke perspective and the scope for different readings, how are these markings received by different audiences? I address these questions by considering the his13 two The Signature of Terror Violence, Memory, and Landscape at Freeport Chris Ballard tory of violence around the Freeport mine, in an attempt to understand the operation of a technology of terror through the deployment of a particular iconography. The manipulation of a layered series of images and other prompts for the memory allows the very meaning of the landscape for a community , and thus the literal base of its identity, to be reconfigured. These images both record and recall violent events, conferring upon those who have the power to inscribe the landscape in this way a degree of control over the summoning of memories of the past and the heightening of terror and uncertainty about the future. In a companion paper (Ballard 2000), I considered the performative aspects of violence at Freeport and elaborated upon the relationship between violence and terror. Here I focus on the manner in which death and the terror of dying are implanted in the landscape and rendered perpetually present for its inhabitants, as an echo of violence that persists through the intervals between episodes of murder, torture, and disappearance.The manner in which bodies become absent and are then re-presented is mediated by an iconography of violence , which introduces signs that stand for these absences (Graziano 1992:73). Recent studies of political iconography in violent contexts have tended to focus on the symbolism of community resistance and sectarian distinction. The graphic and political sophistication apparent in the graffiti and murals of Northern Ireland and Palestine has required that close attention be paid to the identity of the intended audiences for these images and slogans. Although Catholic murals in Belfast, often restricted to clearly defined workingclass neighborhoods, are at one level emblems of resistance to Protestant domination and British rule (Sluka 1992), they are also, and perhaps just as powerfully , a means of policing community will, “part of an inwardly focused propaganda which largely ignores debate” (Jarman 1993:118). Murals have multiple audiences, but consideration of their location , their content, and their immediate historical context yields a much richer sense of their reception and their efficacy as interventions in relations of power, both between and within communities. Of particular relevance to the Freeport case is Peteet’s (1996:140) observation that an analysis of the way in which graffiti are read forces enquiry to extend beyond the simple binary of domination and resistance . Palestinian graffiti have provided the community with a voice, a means of access to communal memory, and a public affirmation of allegiance to different Palestinian factions; but the fact that most graffiti are rendered in Arabic means that Israeli soldiers, although keenly aware of the role of graffiti as a challenge to authority, remain largely ignorant of their content (Peteet 1996:150). Local historical context, relations of power, and the positions of image makers and image readers are thus vital to an adequate analysis of what, following Poole (1997), we might think of as a “visual economy” of political violence. The notion of visual economy introduces the sense of a systematic production, exchange, and reproduction of images and interpretations in whose organization the relations of power feature prominently. Around the Freeport mine, the more obvious iconography of murals and graffiti has been overwhelmingly that of the state and its armed forces, and the multiple interpretations...

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