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Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia

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Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology ISSN: 1444-2213 (Print) 1740-9314 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtap20 Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia Christian S. Hammons To cite this article: Christian S. Hammons (2016) Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 17:5, 399-418, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2016.1208676 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2016.1208676 Published online: 20 Oct 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 218 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtap20 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2016 Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 399–418, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2016.1208676 Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia Christian S. Hammons Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imaginaries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space. This article offers an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary and thus reflects a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs in the second half of the twentieth century focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan villages and on converting people from the indigenous religion to Christianity. Recent changes in the national, regional and local political contexts have led many of the Christians in the villages to reclaim the indigenous religion by invoking the figure of the shaman, whose special skill is the mobility that village dwellers do not have—a mobility that produces and reproduces a spatial, social and cosmological continuity between home and forest. Many people who live on their ancestral land and practice only the indigenous religion argue that the Christians’ hybrid religious practice is not culturally ‘authentic’ because the indigenous religion requires a mobility that is not possible in the government villages. In this view, the shaman is a surrogate, and his ‘substitute mobility’ arises from a sedentarist metaphysics. Keywords: Indigenous Religion; Christianity; The State; Mobility; Indonesia; Shamanism; Authenticity Christian S. Hammons is Instructor of Anthropology and Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado- Boulder. His research and media practice focus on indigeneity, the state and capitalism in the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. He is a Fulbright Scholar and Founding Editor of Mimesis: The Journal of Documentary and Ethnographic Media. Correspondence to: Christian S. Hammons, Instructor of Anthropology & Critical Media Practices, University of Colorado-Boulder Hale 342, 1350 Pleasant St. Boulder, CO 80309-0233. Email: [email protected] © 2016 The Australian National University 400 C. S. Hammons History is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history. (Deleuze & Guattari, cited in Malkki 1992, 31) Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imagin- aries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space (Chio 2011;Chu2010; Greenblatt 2009; Salazar 2010, 2011; Salazar & Smart 2011; Smart & Smart 2011; Vivaldi 2011). In these studies, because movement can be partly or entirely imagined, people can be mobile without moving. In this article, I offer an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary, and thus reflects what Malkki (1992, 31) calls a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs have focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan vil- lages. One clan in particular has consistently refused to participate in these programs for more than three decades. The clan’s reasons for refusing are diverse and complex, but they are often expressed in terms of authenticity, indigeneity and religious practice. The indigenous religion, clan members say, requires a mobility that is only possible on the clan’s ancestral land. In the government villages, this mobility is not possible, and the clans who live there have become Christian as a result. These clans are now attempting to reclaim the mobility they have lost, not by leaving the villages and returning to their ancestral lands, but by appealing to the figure of the shaman, who was once reviled by both the government and Christians precisely for his mobility. This ‘substitute mobility’ arises from the sedentarist metaphysics of village dwellers. Malkki’s(1992) concept of a sedentarist metaphysics has been influential in the anthropology of mobility. Writing about refugees and displacement, Malkki (1992, 31) originally used the term to mean a metaphysics that naturalises the relation between people, culture and place—the ‘territorializing conceptions of nation and culture’ that root people in the soil of their homeland, enable a world order that con- sists of mutually exclusive national geographies and render the refugee displaced, uprooted and pathological. In place of a sedentarist metaphysics, Malkki proposed ‘a new “sociology of displacement”, a new “nomadology”’ that recognises the proces- sual nature of identity, the constructedness of its relation to place and the value of deterritorialisation (38). ‘To plot only “places of birth” and degrees of nativeness’, she concluded, ‘is to blind oneself to the multiplicity of attachments that people form to places through living in, remembering, and imagining them’ (38). In the years since Malkki first introduced the concept, the sedentarist metaphysics that legiti- mated the world order of the twentieth century has been rejected in favour of a ‘nomadic metaphysics’ that better describes the globalised world of the twenty-first century (Cresswell 2006). The refugee and exile have become normal, and as Salazar and Smart (2011, i) contend, mobility has become a vital ‘concept-metaphor’ for thinking about the contemporary world.1 Everything is now on the move, ‘not only The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 401 people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, media, images, infor- mation, and ideas’ (i). So many things are on the move, in fact, that people no longer need to move themselves. Mobility can be imagined. Salazar, Smart and other leading figures in the anthropology of mobility have been explicit in their effort to push the concept-metaphor of mobility as far as possible beyond the actual, physical movements of people. In the Introduction to a special issue of the journal Identities, Salazar and Smart (2011, v) write: we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as socio-cultural constructs, are experienced and imagined. How are various forms of movement made meaningful, and how do the resulting ideologies of mobility circulate across the globe and become implicated in the production of mobile practices? How do people envision their potential for mobility (or motility), under what conditions do they enact that perceived right, and under what con- ditions is that right denied to them in practice? In his contribution to the issue, Salazar (2011, 576) draws on ethnographic studies of transnational tourism in Indonesia and Tanzania to argue that ‘historically-laden ima- ginaries’ are at the root of travel and mobility. People have to be able to imagine other people and places before they can travel to them, and in some cases, the ensuing move- ment need not or cannot occur. Movement can begin and end in the imagination. For Salazar, the brute fact of mobility is less important than how it is experienced and ima- gined. The main contention of this article is that the privileging of imagined mobility reflects a sedentarist metaphysics—the very problem that the anthropology of mobility was designed to solve—and that a truly nomadic metaphysics privileges actual, phys- ical movement. Despite the effort to push the concept-metaphor of mobility as far as possible, in the anthropology of mobility, there are far more cases studies of refugees, exiles, cosmo- politans and the like than there are of people who appear to be more ‘sedentary’ and ‘rooted’.2 One important exception to this pattern can be found in case studies from Southeast Asia, where mobility has been recognised as a political tactic in relations between states and the peoples who live on their margins. Scott (2009), for example, famously featured mobility in his portfolio of techniques in ‘the art of not being gov- erned’ in upland Southeast Asia. If the first principle of state evasion is location, the second principle is mobility: the ability to change location. The inaccessibility of society is amplified if, in addition to being located at the periphery of power, it can easily shift to a more remote and advantageous site. Just as there is a gradient of remoteness from state centers, so also might we imagine a gradient of mobility from a relatively frictionless ability to shift location to a relative immobility. (184) For Scott, virtually every other technique in the portfolio of upland peoples is designed to ensure the principle of mobility. In a study of Manggarai place and mobility in West Flores, Indonesia, Allerton (2013, 176) notes that people travel so often in their daily lives, moving from home to garden and back, and from village to village, the issue is 402 C.
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