Wasteland Ecologies: Undomestication and Multispecies Gains on an Anthropocene Dumping Ground

On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has since changed in response to new EU waste management regulations, as well as the unexpected proliferation of non-human life in the area. Based on field research at this site—an Anthropocene landscape in the heartland of an EU-configured welfare-state—this article is a contribution to the multispecies ethnography and political ecology of wastelands. We argue that “waste” is a co-species, biopolitical happening—a complex symbolic, political, biological, and technological history. We combine ethnographic fieldwork, social history, wildlife observation, and spatial analysis to follow what we call “undomestication,” the reconfiguration of human projects by more-than-human forms of life into novel assemblies of species, politics, resources, and technologies. Waste landscapes, this article argues, are the result of unheralded multispecies collaboration that can be traced empirically by attending ethnographically to multispecies forms of “gain-making,” the ways in which humans and other species leverage difference to find economic and ecological opportunity

Warriors of the Hornbill, victims of the Mantis : history and embodied morality among the Buli of Central Halmahera

This thesis is an ethnographic account of the Buli, an Austronesian-speaking and predominantly Christian group numbering some 3,500 people who live on the central east coast of Halmahera in the northeastern comer of Indonesia. The study focuses on the Buli category of gua, a cannibal spirit that possesses particular people and forces them to attack and devour the liver of fellow villagers. Such attacks cause serious illness and often death. Taking the events that surrounded gua attacks and gua deaths as my point of departure, I attempt a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the gua, its characteristics and its actions. I argue that the gua is a real social agent whose significance speaks to fundamental aspects of Buli ontology and whose presence is latent in most domains of Buli everyday life and world-view. I begin by analysing the symbolism of gua violence and propose that it is intimately related to Buli conceptions of the body and to the general corporeal construction of the world. This embodied conception of the world includes notions about how to secure the integrity of the human body and how to comport oneself properly, but also extends to rules of house and canoe construction as well as to ideas about space and topography. In all these areas, the gua constantly intervenes in a disconcerting fashion. Similarly, the actions of the gua, said to be motivated by envy, greed, aberrant hunger and lechery, are deeply entangled with Buli moral behaviour. This is especially clear in exchange behaviour which I divide into two related types: ceremonial exchange and everyday forms of food sharing. Exchange etiquette harbours an inherent tension, a tension of which the gua is the most cogent manifestation. I describe the other main spirit agents in Buli: the ancestors (smengit), the guardian spirits (suang) and the mythical hero Ian Toa. After analysing the myths and rituals associated with these spirit agents, I conclude that they, despite their strong moral opposition to the gua, each share significant features with it. None of these spirit agents nor the role they perform for Buli people can be understood without reference to the gua. The same ambivalent relationship with the gua also pertains to the Sultan of Tidore, once the political sovereign of central Halmahera. The Sultan is regarded as the bringer of customary law (adat) to Buli society and much of Buli cultural identity is tied up with their position vis-ä-vis Tidore and its place among the other three original kingdoms of the ‘Spice Islands’. The figure of the ruler of Tidore was central to the rebellions in which Buli was involved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Sultan is still today an important symbolic presence in Buli ceremonial life. The embodied moral conception of the world that I describe for Buli contrasts with the Christian theology which they, like most Halmaherans, have adopted from a succession of Dutch missionaries up to the Second World War. I trace the history of conversion in Halmahera and argue that millennial ideas as well as concerns about sickness and death were powerful motivations for conversion. I propose that concerns with the gua or the suanggi (as it is glossed in Malay) have played a significant, if subterranean role, in the acceptance of Christianity in Buli and Halmahera. The importance of the gua in contributing to the creation of Buli history is not only restricted to the past, it is also detectable in the present. Conflicts ensuing from gua attack are thus often at the heart of confrontations between Buli communities and representatives of the Indonesian nation-state. In addition to serving as a medium for describing Buli society and ontology, the gua, in other words, also provides a perspective on the engagement of Buli society with modernity and its multi-faceted relationship to the Indonesian state. The gua is not, therefore, an isolated phenomenon of belief and I eschew use of the term ‘witchcraft’ to describe it because of the universalism and reductionism that it often implies. Rather, the gua stands in a complicated relationship to the whole of Buli society. It is an ambiguous reflection of Buli experience and ontology that highlights the other, unsettling, side of all social and cultural processes, including exchange, personhood, sociality and group identity. It emphasises that feelings of unease and dread are as much part of cultural experience as are feelings of certainty and comfort

DYREVELFÆRDSSTATEN: Grisens krop, velfærdens historie og selve livets politik i Danmark

Denne artikel er et forsøg på at koble analysen af velfærdsstatens historie sammen med dyrevelfærdens historie. Vi tager etnografisk udgangspunkt i den danske produktionsgris og demonstrerer, hvordan grisens velfærd, i stalden og i den offentlige debat, historisk afspejler udviklingen og afviklingen af den nordiske velfærdsmodel. Med udgangspunkt i grisen som en „figuration“ –en narrativ figur, der accentuerer aspekter af livet, som ellers ignoreres – forfølger vi historisk dyrevelfærdens og velfærdsstatens parallelle opståen og viser etnografisk, hvordan dyrevelfærdens paradokser, skabt af spændingen imellem økonomiske målsætninger og moralske overvejelser, foregriber velfærdstatens aktuelle transformation til konkurrencestat. Overordnet hævder vi, at en analytisk sammentænkning af human welfare og animal welfare kan bidrage væsentligt til den biopolitiske og historiske forståelse af velfærdsstaten. Ved at fokusere etnografisk på produktionsdyret og den animal capital, der skabes ud af deres liv i højteknologiske, overbelånte og statskontrollerede stalde i Danmark, åbner vi for en diskussion af, hvad man antropologisk kan lære af dyr om politik. Søgeord: multispecies etnografi, grise, produktionsdyr, dyrevelfærdens historie, dyrevelfærdsstat &nbsp

Tiltrædelsesforelæsninger: Tre professorer

Nils Bubandt. Demokrato som selvfølge: Hvad kan antropologi sige om globaliseringen af folkestyret? Andreas Roepstorff. Eksperimentel AntropologiRane Willerslev. Det guddommelige blik: En analyse af „Den Dansende Troldmand“

Menuju Sebuah Politik Tradisi Yang Baru? Desentralisasi, Konflik, dan Adat di Wilayah Indonesia Timur

The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralization, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call 'the new politics of tradition' in Indonesia. In 1999 under the President Jusuf Habibie, the Indonesian parliament (DPR) voted in favour of two laws, No. 22 and 25 of 1999, which promised to leave a significant share of state revenues in the hands of the regional governments. Strongly supported by the liberal ideologues of the IMF and the World Bank, the two laws were envisaged within Indonesia as a necessary step towards devolving the centralized power of New Order patrimonialism and as a way of curbing separatism and demands for autonomy by giving the regional governments the constitutional and financial wherewithal to maintain a considerable degree of self-determination. Decentralization was in other words touted as the anti-dote to communal violence and separatist tendencies-an anti-dote administered or at least prescribed by multi-national development agencies in most conflict-prone areas of the world. This paper wishes to probe this idea by looking at the conflict and post-conflict situation in North Maluku. The conflict illustrates how local elites began jockeying for political control in anticipation of decentralization. The process of decentralization is in other words not merely an anti-dote but in some cases an implicated part in the production of violence. One reason for this is simply that the decentralization of financial and political control after three decades of centralization entails a significant shift in the parameters of hegemony-a shift towards which local political entrepreneurs in the regions are bound to react. The new 'politics of tradition' currently emerging in Indonesia is the combined result of changes in global forms of governance, a strong political focus on ethnic and religious identity in the 'era reformasi' and a local willingness to employ these identities to garner support in the new political landscape of decentralization

Timber plantations in Indonesia: approaching the predicaments of a modern utopia

The plantation is, I believe, an excellent prism for looking at the politics of society. Because the plantation is about the administration of a community, I feel it gives me an opportunity to look at the specific and often highly exotic workings of government bureaucracy in Indonesia as well as its way of implementing ‘development’, a key term in Indonesia politics, on the one hand, while continuing my interest in the local conditions of life in Halmahera, on the other. In the plantation one gets a digestible serving of the national and the global cooked to the specifications of a local cuisine. The suggestion I would like to make here is, quite simply, that the plantation as a form of social organisation is uniquely modern. I see the plantation as a model for administrative, bureaucratic modernity. With apologies to Philip and a recent British movie, I think that in the plantation one can see modernity ‘go the full monty’. It is a place where the dreams and hopes for a particular kind of society have been able to evolve. The plantation expresses the utopian ideas inherent in modernity and may be seen as a concerted institutional attempt to implement these ideas. The utopia, however, always recedes as the implementation proceeds because ‘something’ seems to transform the process of ordering into disorder at another level. With examples from the plantation in Halmahera, I will describe the forever frustrated and unfinished process of ordering in modern institutions. By looking at the plantation ‘from below’, from the perspective of those managed by the institution - in the case of the timber estate, transmigrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds - one can see that the attempts of social ordering continuously fail because the transmigrants navigate the rules and structures according to a multifaceted array of cultural strategies aimed at optimising their own livelihood on the estate according their varied perception of ‘the good life’. In order to highlight the plantation as a modern utopia, I will concentrate my talk on one kind of Indonesian timber estate in which the utopian ideas are most clearly expressed, namely the so-called HTITrans (integrated timber estates). There are roughly 200 timber plantations in Indonesia today, by far most which are located in the Outer Islands. When they are built to their full extension, they will cover well over 7 million hectares (70,000 square kilometres, almost twice the size of Denmark). The process of converting forest into plantations continues at a rate of about 400,000 hectares a year. To date about 2 million hectares have already been established, not a mean feat considering that the plantation effort in the form of HTIs only began in earnest in 1990. In that same year (1990), the total area of plantations in the world was estimated at 135 million hectares, 90 % of which are timber plantations for industrial use. Like those in Indonesia, the timber estates of the rest of the world supply the wood industry, predominantly the paper and pulp industry as well as plywood factories and the sawn wood industry. Indonesian plantations may account for only a small proportion of the global plantation area, but the pace of plantation build-up in Indonesia is one of the highest in the world

Conspiracy Theories, Apocalyptic Narratives and the Discursive Construction of ‘the Violence in Maluku’

Dalam mengulas kekerasan di Maluku, penjelasan-penjelasan yang beredar di media cetak dan eletronik cenderung memfokus pada upaya pelaku-pelaku politik nasional dan regional dalam melakukan pemanipulasian dan penghasutan untuk melakukan kekerasan. Teori-teori ini, yang disebut penulisnya dengan 'instrumentalis' (instrumentalist), menyarankan bahwa kekerasan di Maluku dipandang sebagai hasil dari 'instrumen' permainan dan tipu daya politik. Motif-motif untuk menghasut atau memulai terjadinya kekerasan di Maluku dideskripsikan secara beragam sebagai megalomaniak politik atau keserakahan ekonomi. Membongkar dimensi ini, yang disebut dengan 'organisasi politik', merupakan tugas yang amat penting. Akan tetapi teori 'instrumentalis', menurut penulisnya, tidak dapat menjelaskan mengapa kekerasan di Maluku Utara dan Maluku Tengah berlanjut hingga lebih dari dua tahun, dan mengapa kekerasan berakar serta bertahan di tingkat lokal. Penjelasan itu dinilainya mempertahankan pandangan yang elitis tentang tindakan sosial, serta gagasan yang disederhanakan tentang kekuasaan. Penulis mengajukan sudut pandang yang lain, yakni suatu pendekatan 'dari bawah' yang memandang proses dikodifikasikannya konflik itu dalam narasi setempat sebagai sesuatu yang 'agamawi' (religious) setelah awal tahun 1999. Secara khusus, penulisnya memfokuspada salah satu narasi, yakni narasi 'millenarian'. Dalam narasi ini, dibayangkan terjadinya pertarungan besar-besaran (an up-coming apocalyptic battle) antara umat Kristen dan Islam sebagai tanda tibanya dunia kiamat. Penulis berargumentasi bahwa narasi itu berperanan dalam mempertahankan terjadinya kekerasan di Maluku Tengah dan Utara, karena ia membakar dan sebaliknya, diperkaya oleh nada yang konspiratif dari banyak laporan media massa tentang kekerasan. Walau didorong oleh imajinasi politik yang berbeda, penjelasan instrumentalis dan gagasan tentang 'millenarian' itu memiliki kesamaan nada bersifat konspirasi. Kedua narasi itu saling menyuburkan dan keduanya, menjadi pelaku dalam 'kerusuhan Maluku'

Towards a New Politics of Tradition? Decentralisation, Conflict, and Adat in Eastern Indonesia

The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralization, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call 'the new politics of tradition' in Indonesia. In 1999 under the President Jusuf Habibie, the Indonesian parliament (DPR) voted in favour of two laws, No. 22 and 25 of 1999, which promised to leave a significant share of state revenues in the hands of the regional governments. Strongly supported by the liberal ideologues of the IMF and the World Bank, the two laws were envisaged within Indonesia as a necessary step towards devolving the centralized power of New Order patrimonialism and as a way of curbing separatism and demands for autonomy by giving the regional governments the constitutional and financial wherewithal to maintain a considerable degree of self-determination. Decentralization was in other words touted as the anti-dote to communal violence and separatist tendencies-an anti-dote administered or at least prescribed by multi-national development agencies in most conflict-prone areas of the world. This paper wishes to probe this idea by looking at the conflict and post-conflict situation in North Maluku. The conflict illustrates how local elites began jockeying for political control in anticipation of decentralization. The process of decentralization is in other words not merely an anti-dote but in some cases an implicated part in the production of violence. One reason for this is simply that the decentralization of financial and political control after three decades of centralization entails a significant shift in the parameters of hegemony-a shift towards which local political entrepreneurs in the regions are bound to react. The new 'politics of tradition' currently emerging in Indonesia is the combined result of changes in global forms of governance, a strong political focus on ethnic and religious identity in the 'era reformasi' and a local willingness to employ these identities to garner support in the new political landscape of decentralization

When in doubt . . . ? A reply

Response to HAU Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press