[Anthropgrad] Friday seminar, 30th of November

[nelia.hyndman-rizik at anu.edu.au]

Hi all,

 

We have a seminar this Friday the 30th of November, 3pm in the Milgate Room,
AD Hope.

 

The presenter will be Dr. Robbie Peters of the School of Archaeology and
Anthropology, ANU and the seminar will be entitled:

 

 

"Originary violence and its repercussions: consequences of the petrus
killings in Surabaya, Indonesia".

 

Abstract:

 

Beginning in late 1982, following wide media coverage of a police force
constrained in its battle against a so called criminal contagion by
regulation and low numbers and in the wake of a global recession that
spurred the advance of neoliberalism, men from the low income neighbourhoods
of Java's major cities were rounded up by the security apparatuses, shot and
dumped in public spaces. My current research into the archives of the period
for Surabaya demonstrates that this major city was experiencing a boom in
young male migrants, who often worked as ticket hustlers (calo) in the bus
terminals as part of a large gang called massa 33. I argue that his
transformation from uncontained "criminal" to lifeless corpse represented a
projection of public space as "absence" via a renewed offensive against what
James Siegel called the "unorganised massa (masses)". As absence, however,
these men were far more dangerous than the formal megaphone politics of the
"organised massa" (ormas) that took their place. Absence not only beckons a
return, but also a space where that which is absent and unseen must reside.
Such a space was the low income neighbourhood, or kampung, where I conducted
fieldwork from 1998-2000. It was here that poor residents were consolidating
a potent sense of territorial sovereignty at the same time as they were
being "cleaned" from public space to make way for the new air-conditioned
economy of hotels, plazas and nightclubs overseen by state sponsored middle
class gangs. This presentation will illustrate how the retributive violence
that targeted these sites during the New Order's collapse in May of 1998 and
the more enduring assertions of territorial sovereignty emerging since then
cannot be divorced from that important moment of "orginary violence" marked
by the killings of the early 1980s. 

 

See you all there,

 

Nelia Hyndman-Rizik

PhD Candidate

School of Archaeology and Anthropology

ANU

nelia.n at bigpond.com

nelia.hyndman-rizik at anu.edu.au

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/anthropgrad/attachments/20071126/4b89f374/attachment.html