Pre-marital chastity in a West Papuan city: Durkheim’s ‘ideal’ and sexual virtue. Sarah Louise Richards Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2016 School of Social and Political Sciences The University of Melbourne Produced on archival quality paper This thesis is dedicated to Darius, Benson and Paskalina b Abstract This thesis engages critically with Durkheim¹s ideas of morality in an ethnographic exploration of the reasons young women in Manokwari (West Papua, Indonesia) choose to maintain chastity prior to marriage. Based on 27 months of fieldwork with an urban, Christian, coastal community, I examine their sexual conformity through the motivating force of three emotions – love, fear and hope. Young women wanted to delay their sexual debut so as to not hurt or disappoint their beloved mothers and because they feared being beaten by kin and suffering other forms of violence that sanctioned sexual transgressions. Since pregnancy is understood to lead to school drop-out and forced marriage, hope for a future characterised by secure employment and a harmonious marriage is also a rationale for chastity. These affective logics are explored in the context of cultural constructions of sexual morality at a time of rapid socio-economic change, immoral threats and revitalised enthusiasms for being Christian, and being Papuan. My finding that sentiment structures processes of young women’s moral reasoning and chaste practice supports Durkheim’s contention that ideals – moral standards that are above and beyond individuals – are emotionally based constructs of sacred power. This ethnography thus contributes to recent anthropological discussions that conceptualise morality and ethics as a realm where actors evaluate, select and enact a range of moral options in order to fashion themselves as ethical subjects. The centrality of emotions and the social in Papuan sexual life, I argue, presents as a challenge to the cognitive and individualistic emphasis in this emergent scholarship. I will respond to these studies, many of which are often based on a critique of Durkheim as a theorist of deterministic and reproductive moral codes, by arguing for the importance of his later in life writings about morality, emotions and the sacred. Durkheim’s notion of the ideal not only offers the possibility of exploring moral agency and subjectivity, it provides a frame to understand why moral life is less, as some scholars suggest, a realm of persuasion and more a realm of constraint. As a concept that presupposes consciousness to be emergent from emotional engagement i with social life, from a Durkheimian perspective moral choice is constituted through emotions that shape, as they are shaped by, dimensions of social life considered sacrosanct. The explanatory force of moral ideals are especially apparent in the fears of negative sanctions that construct chastity as a duty and not just desire. I conclude that if reflexivity and ‘freedom’ are to find their rightful place in anthropological accounts of moral life and experience, it must be situated in an acceptance of Durkheim’s moral theory of the ideal. ii Declaration This is to certify that: (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy except where indicated in the Preface, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Sarah Louise Richards iii Prologue Arriving In and Scoping the Field If we visualise New Guinea as a Bird of Paradise,1 the head and neck of the bird belong to the easternmost part of the Republic of Indonesia, while the back and tail make up the independent nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG). This study is set in Manokwari, a city located near the northeast corner of the Bird’s Head (Dutch: Vogelkop, I: Kepala Burung) region of Papua/West Papua, Indonesia. Manokwari is affectionately known as Gospel Town (Kota Injil), homage to the western half of New Guinea’s role in hosting the first mission (see map A). Since 1963, when the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to Indonesia began, this part of the world has gone by many names – West Irian (1969-1973), Irian Jaya (1973-1999), West Papua (2000), Papua (2001-2002), and, since 2003, when the territory was split in two by presidential decree,2 Papua and West Papua. While West Papua is the preferred term of nationalists and their supporters, I use this term to specify the province where Manokwari is the capital. To designate the entire region – an expanse that stretches across swamps and jungles, glacial peaks and island atolls – I borrow the local expression Tanah Papua, the land of Papua. According to the national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Asa (Unity in Diversity), the 275 language groups in Tanah Papua (Kluge 2014, p. 2) are a slab of diversity which are woven into a nation of over 230 million people living on 6000 islands (Boellstorff 2005, p. 16). From the point of view of the 1,200,000 1 Drawing New Guinea as a bird was common among Imperial cartographers and bird imagery is often evoked in discourses of this landmass. For instance, in The Human Aviary (Holton & Read 1971), Kenneth E. Read writes that New Guinea is ‘like a prehistoric mother bird marshalling a fledgling flock that spreads behind it to the boundary of Polynesia. Its great head points toward its Asian homeland, and in the early morning, as it stirs beneath the covers of its clouds, the air seems to be filled with its rumination on the themes of men and time. It existed long before man found protection under its rainbow plumage’ (Holton & Read 1971, p. 7). 2 A third split was planned to create Central Irian Jaya (Irian Jaya Tenggah), but riots forced its postponement (Jakarta Post 2003). iv to 1,500,000 indigenous inhabitants of Tanah Papua (Elmslie 2009, paras 3, 5),3 being of Melanesian ethnicity and Christian faith is a point of incommensurability with the ethnic Malay inhabitants in a Southeast Asian nation with an 88 per cent Islamic majority (Cribb 2000, p. 44). Perceptions of racial and religious difference are a response to indigenous Papuan disappointments and sufferings since becoming part of Indonesia, and also symbolically underpin the ethno-nationalist movement that aspires to merdeka (‘freedom’ or political independence). Until 1998, the year President Suharto resigned under the weight of pro-democracy riots and the Asian Economic Crises, Papuans were included in national objectives of economic development through a blend of Java-centric programs and policies, spontaneous and official forms of in-migration from other parts of Indonesia, state censorship, and repression of local rights and cultural expression. As for other ethnic minorities within Indonesia, techniques of rule were racist and exploitative, yet any resistance risked intimidation, torture and murder by ABRI (national army and police) personnel.4 The end of Suharto’s New Order, a term coined by the President to describe his ruling regime, has heralded a new era known as reformasi (reformation). Characterised by movement ‘toward open elections ... deregulation and expansion of the mass media, far greater freedom of speech and protest, decentralisation of government, and insistent calls for improved government transparency and accountability’ (Brenner 2011, p. 478), the dismantling of the authoritarian state has had paradoxical outcomes. On the one hand, democratisation has advanced human rights and civil society agendas. On the other, freedom of speech has opened space for more conservative moral 3 The lower estimate is made by observers within Papua, including the Papuan Provincial Administration, who note the Papuan: migrant ratio has become relatively even. The higher figure, representing 68 per cent of the region’s population (where the other 32 per cent, or 708,425 inhabitants, of Tanah Papua are migrants) is based on the year 2000 national census. Elmslie disputes the validity of this data and, using his own means, extrapolates a figure that supports the Papua-based figure. 4 ABRI is an acronym for Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, or the Indonesian Armed Forces. After the New Order, the army, navy, and airforce broke off from the police to become TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, ‘National Army of Indonesia’). v agendas while decentralisation has pushed corruption and poor service delivery down to lower administrative levels. While these are the problems of a nation in Papua, ongoing military abuse frames the failures of democratisation through a particular currency. Even though dwi fungsi (dual function) – the New Order doctrine that invested the armed forces with the authority to protect the nation from internal as well as external threat – was abolished as part of military reform (Supriatma 2013, p. 96), in the last decade, the army has ‘approximately doubled their units and personnel’ in Tanah Papua. If ‘the world is a pluralism’, to quote the philosopher William James, to focus on Tanah Papua as a land of military oppression and underdevelopment is an arguably one-sided, even if understandably well-documented story (Budiardjo & Liong 1988; Osborne 1985; Elmslie 2002; Saltford 2003; Leith 2003; King 2004; McGibbon 2006; Widjojo et al. 2008; Chauvel 2005, 2011; Drooglever 2009; Braithwaite et al. 2010; King, Elmslie & Webb-Gannon 2011; Kirksey 2012). In light of ongoing fears that Papuans are subject to a ‘slow-motion genocide’ (Elmslie 2010), it is a story that continues to be told, such as in recent monographs by Kirksey (2012) and Rutherford (2012) about transformations in expressions of the enduring spirit of merdeka. A number of articles too, in response to highly politicised views of Papua, have reinforced the picture of Papuans as victims of poor and uneven development, only this time they point to Papuan and not Indonesian bureaucrats as fatally undermining service delivery (Anderson 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d; Bachelard 2015).