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  • Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier
  • Chris Ballard
Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier, by Danilyn Rutherford. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-09591-4, xxii + 296 pages, figures, maps, photographs, glossary, notes, references, index. Paper, US$25.95.

The western half of New Guinea—West Papua, Papua, or Irian Jaya, depending on your political taste—tends to fall between the two chairs of Pacific and SoutheastAsian studies; closed, politically, to most scholars of the Pacific, but also somehow alien to Southeast Asianists. The Indonesian state's often-harsh repression of West Papua calls for autonomy or independence has seen the province closed toscrutiny by foreigners,including researchers, for much of the past forty years. This ambitious and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of contemporary society on the island of Biak, which lies off the north coast of the main island of New Guinea, is the product of one of the rare windows of research opportunity that opened during this period. [End Page 243] Danilyn Rutherford has supplemented eighteen months' field research on Biak during the 1990 s with extensive archival research and interviews over the course of a year in the Netherlands to produce an account of Biak life under the New Order regime (1965 -1998) that is quite unlike anything previously published on West Papua.

Rutherford's central goal is to find a way to account for Biak"resistance" to New Order Indonesia (and to all previous foreign impositions), which is seemingly at odds with their embrace of the modern and of the trappings of the New Order, as Biak has long supplied much of the elite administration under both Dutch and Indonesian rule. She builds her case carefully, working through a series of core structural principles of Biak society to demonstrate the manner in which prestige is produced through the relationship between sisters and brothers, with the latter traveling in search of foreign wealth. Once redistributed locally through mothers and sisters, this foreign wealth is then converted into domestic renown,with the names and deeds of brothers kept alive by their sisters' children. The potency of the foreign is explained in terms of its capacity to surprise, to generate novelty, and Rutherford explores this capacity with reference to fishing magic and to skill in the local genres of wor (songs) and yospan (dances). Texts—the Bible foremost among them—supply the most striking instances of the authority accorded to foreign words and to writing more generally, and a comparison of the views of three Biak historians illuminates a continuum from apparent submission to the foreign as the source of authority and the origin of knowledge, through to amore subversive reading of foreign wealth and authority as an indigenous Biak production.

The inspiration for this latter inversion derives from the Biak tradition of Koreri myths, in which the old man, Manarmakeri, is rebuffed by his bride's family and departs for the west, taking with him the source of wealth. Successive messianic Koreri movements, which may date as far back as the mid-sixteenth century, have called on Biaks to remake themselves by renouncing their pursuit of prestige. The utopian attraction of these movements derives equally from their promise of release from social competition and affinal obligations, and from the anticipated recovery of Biak capacity to generate wealth independently and thus to truly become foreign themselves. Accordingly, Rutherford locates the inspiration of Biak "resistance" in a mutually subversive tension between the modern and the messianic, in which Biak access to a desired modernity hinges on the tradition of Koreri and its message of a Biak origin of wealth. For the modern (or the foreign) to retain any enduring value on Biak, it must be domesticated, put into local circulation, given local meaning—and this is ultimately an arena over which Biaks retain some mastery. Government attempts to revive and domesticate Biak tradition, in the form of wor and yospan, illustrate this potential for subversion through the affirmation of Biak claims to inventiveness and potency. The intended messages of the New Order government are [End Page 244...

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