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227 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 10 Building a Monument Intimate Politics of “Reconciliation” in Post-1965 Bali LESLIE DW Y ER What are the politics of speaking the violent past, of investing it with social form and force in the search for a different kind of future? How are ideas of justice evoked in motion, apprehended in their travels across national, cultural, gendered, and generational divisions, and made to speak to particular kinds of experience? And where might anthropology position itself in the contested aftermath of violent conflict, where weighty terms like “history,” “victimization,” and “reconciliation” occupy the horizons of political attention? In this essay, I draw upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork with survivors of the 1965–1966 state-sponsored anticommunist massacres in Bali, Indonesia, to think through these issues. Describing some of the heated debates provoked by a project to memorialize the violence, I explore how globalizing discourses of truth, peacebuilding, community, and social repair are shaping intimate practices of narrating personal and familial histories in Bali, and how these localized contests might speak to broader efforts to counter the long-term effects of conflict. Since the fall of former president Soeharto’s thirty-two-year-long dictatorship in 1998, Indonesia has joined the growing ranks of nations seen to require transitional justice efforts. Dubious of the ability of Indonesia’s judicial system to hold figures of the former regime to account, national and international organizations have called upon Indonesia’s government to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to revise the national history curriculum to acknowledge political abuses during the Soeharto era, and to restore the civil rights of former political prisoners and those with familial ties to alleged communists. Across the archipelago, nongovernmental organizations have also promoted programs to collect oral histories from survivors of violence, to create support groups where experiences of suffering can be shared, and to enact conflict resolution initiatives in regions 228 LESLIE DW Y ER with legacies of bloodshed.1 As an anthropologist conducting research on the charged aftermath of violence in Bali, both my fieldwork trajectories and the political concerns I shared with many of my interlocutors brought me into close engagement with these emergent discourses of transitional justice and the relationships between anthropology and powerful globalizing frameworks for knowing and doing. Working in partnership with a Balinese anthropologist/human rights advocate, and building ties with both Indonesian activists and survivors of violence, I have grown increasingly supportive of intellectual work in solidarity with social justice claims—of what the late Pierre Bourdieu called “a scholarship with commitment” (2003, 17). Yet at the same time, I recognize that such a pathway is not always clear. Postconflict social landscapes frequently tend to be fraught and treacherous , marked not only by lingering wounds of violence but also by competing interpretations and interests, making solidarity a necessarily partial alignment . Aftermaths of violence are also often arenas organized by what I think of as deflective terms—key words such as “peace,” “justice,” “reconciliation,” and “healing” that possess a potent ability to divert critical engagement with their premises, genealogies, and uses. Yet it is precisely the power of such terms to resist analysis by painting it as cynical, undermining, and (over) intellectually elitist that I suggest needs to be more rigorously examined, and where I believe anthropology can provide especially relevant insights. These deflective terms flourish in the field of transitional justice, and it is perhaps unsurprising that anthropology’s position vis-à-vis its discourses— including the ideological assumptions and institutional habits encoded in calls for democratization, postconflict reconciliation, psychosocial repair, recovery from trauma, capacity-building, and civil society development— has been a complex and often troubled one (see Hinton, this volume). Although there is by now a vital and growing stream of anthropological work explicitly committed to an “engaged” (Bourgois 2006; Sanford 2006; Smith 1999; Warren 2006) or “public” (Borofsky 2004) stance, transcending older disciplinary dichotomies between theoretical and applied work, intellectual and political rapprochement between anthropologists and those professionals charged with programming social change is still often tenuous and hesitant. Anthropologists have frequently been suspicious of the onesize -fits-all character of programs that assume, for instance, that truth commissions based on the 1994 South African model (Coxshall 2005; Shaw 2005, 2007) or clinical interventions to treat post-traumatic stress disorder among victims of violence (Breslau 2004; Dwyer and Santikarma 2007; Kleinman 1995) are necessary or beneficial in all settings, showing little regard for local understandings of...

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