Politics of Action and Theories of Power in Eastern Indonesia
Politics of Action and Theories of Power in Eastern Indonesia
My postdoctoral project is grounded on the ethnographic research I undertook in Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia) between 1999 and 2004. My aim now is to use my previous analyses of political language and linguistic interaction in Toraja to carry out an ethnographic enquiry of the political dimension of human action.
Focusing on ethnographic, historical, and linguistic fieldwork, my postdoctoral project analyses interplays between these contrasting theories of agency, power, and political personhood, emerging both in contemporary era and in recent colonial past. In order to grasp culturally specific forms of political theories and practices, I will focus my analysis on how social actors conceive their own capacity to act and to assign responsibilities and intentions, both with respect to themselves and to others.
Focusing on ethnographic, historical, and linguistic fieldwork, my postdoctoral project analyses interplays between these contrasting theories of agency, power, and political personhood, emerging both in contemporary era and in recent colonial past. In order to grasp culturally specific forms of political theories and practices, I will focus my analysis on how social actors conceive their own capacity to act and to assign responsibilities and intentions, both with respect to themselves and to others.
Estatuto:
Proponent entity
Financed:
No
Keywords:
Indonesia
Verbal Interaction
Action
Power
Verbal Interaction
Action
Power
My postdoctoral project is grounded on the ethnographic research I undertook in Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia) between 1999 and 2004. My aim now is to use my previous analyses of political language and linguistic interaction in Toraja to carry out an ethnographic enquiry of the political dimension of human action.
Focusing on ethnographic, historical, and linguistic fieldwork, my postdoctoral project analyses interplays between these contrasting theories of agency, power, and political personhood, emerging both in contemporary era and in recent colonial past. In order to grasp culturally specific forms of political theories and practices, I will focus my analysis on how social actors conceive their own capacity to act and to assign responsibilities and intentions, both with respect to themselves and to others.
Focusing on ethnographic, historical, and linguistic fieldwork, my postdoctoral project analyses interplays between these contrasting theories of agency, power, and political personhood, emerging both in contemporary era and in recent colonial past. In order to grasp culturally specific forms of political theories and practices, I will focus my analysis on how social actors conceive their own capacity to act and to assign responsibilities and intentions, both with respect to themselves and to others.
Objectivos:
The main objectives of the project are the following: <br />1) The analysis of local theories of action and power enriches our understanding of how humans reproduce or contest cultural and political meanings. In addition to providing contextualised ethnographic analysis, this enterprise aims at refining theoretical understanding of categories (such as "agency" and "power"), which are crucial in social theory, political philosophy, and anthropological thinking. <br />2) The development of a comparative description of Southeast Asian systems of knowledge. The objective here is to explore disjunctures and overlaps between the data collected in Toraja with other material from the neighbouring regions. This will entail working on the literature on power and charisma concerning insular and peninsular Southeast Asian and the Pacific, as well as a supplementary period of fieldwork in Toraja, Java, Bali, and East Timor.
State of the art:
Combining linguistic and sociocultural anthropological analysis of the ways through which humans interact and produce meaning, the aim of my past and future research is to explore every-day social life and communicative practices as a privileged site for the study of broader political and sociocultural processes of conflict and change. <br />Earlier studies by Anderson (1966), Errington (1998, 2000), and Keane (1997b) suggested the relevance of ethnographic exam of political language for study of the relationship between the local and the national. In the past five years, my research in a peripheral area in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago (Toraja, South Sulawesi) has been concerned with the process of decentralisation started by 1999 regional autonomy legislation and focused on local political language and practice. <br />This ethnographic work on political language led me to an interest in the local political philosophy and in the local concept of agency. The issue of agency has recently gained prominence within social theory and anthropological thinking in Europe and North America (Giddens 1979, 1984; Ortner 1996; Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Anthropological inquiries on the subject of agency contribute to critical understanding of this notion. Ethnographic explorations of how people in other places conceive action, responsibility, and intentionality enrich both theoretical consideration and empirical analyses of agency. <br />Particularly relevant to this enterprise are the works by Webb Keane (his ethnographic studies on the semiotics of power and on the concept of agency in ?Sumba-), Joseph Errington (his analysis of linguistic etiquette and practices of self-construction in Java), Jane Hill (her insight on the metapragmatic encoding of ideologies of personhood in political discourse), Alessandro Duranti (his theoretical and ethnographic analysis of agency in language). Benedict Anderson?s classic analyses on the concept of power in Java, and Keane?s reading of these theories in a new perspective centered on agency particularly inspire my reflections. <br />For the work on archival documents from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, the historiographic approach developed by Pemberton (1994) seems very interesting and promising. John Pemberton (1994: 77) studying colonial Java has highlighted ?the appropriation of ?Dutch style? into an emerging catalog of ?Javanese? fashion ?, thus showing the mimetic attitudes dysplayed by the Dutch colonisers. Pemberton?s insight could be interestingly applied to the area of easter Indonesia where I conducted my research. In this perspective, my work is interested in describing socio-cultural change due to missionarisation and translocal political agents as a process of double mimesis rather than as a ?hexogenous phenomenon? imposed from without. <br />Starting from these premises, my plan is to elaborate a more articulate investigation of the local theories of action and power, both in a micrological and synchronic perspective, as well as in a historical one. On the one hand, the focus will be on a microanalysis of every-day social life and political practices connected to the regional autonomy debates I participated in between 2002 and 2004. On the other hand, the research will concern the historical process of sociocultural change and conflict occurred in the colonial period.
