![]() | Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country's widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god. Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000). She has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Images That Move (SAR Press, 2013), Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2006, pbk 2013), and Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998). |
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