Population Anxiety in Black Papua: The Politics of Reproduction and Racialization in Peripheral Indonesia by Maryani Palupy Rasidjan DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Medical Anthropology in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO AND UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Approved: ______________________________________________________________________________Vincanne Adams Chair ______________________________________________________________________________Donald Moore ______________________________________________________________________________Sylvia Tiwon ______________________________________________________________________________Nancy Burke ______________________________________________________________________________ Committee Members Copyright 2019 by Maryani Palupy Rasidjan ii “I go forth along, and stand as ten thousand.” –Our Grandmothers, Maya Angelou This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmothers, Rosa María Lopez and Sarvi, their mothers, Mami Pancha and Kasih, and to the mothers whose names I do not know, but whose legacy I carry, and for the people of Tanah Papua. Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the love and support of so many. I am deeply grateful for the care and encouragement I have received throughout this journey. Finding my authorial voice has been as much about asserting my legitimacy in the academy as about asserting my interests at the intersection of race and racism(s), gender and global health. This journey has been marked by setbacks and struggles particular to my position as the daughter of a working class immigrant family of color, who did not have the opportunity to pursue higher education. I want to recognize this struggle as well as the constellation of mentors and friends who pushed my thinking, propped me up and partnered with me as I continued along my path. I am forever grateful to all of you. I would like to extend an enormous thank you to my dissertation committee members for their profound generosity, sustained enthusiasm, insightful critiques and careful mentorship of my scholarship and academic development. Vincanne Adams has been a fierce advocate and committed mentor— with tireless close readings and editing of my work, offering insight and provocations to tighten my arguments and consider my broader contributions to medical anthropology. I have deep gratitude for her dedication to her students and the ways in which she models a mentoring and teaching ethic that pushes her students to form their own definition of the discipline. Thank you for your guidance and advice, and for sharing some of the life lessons iii you have learned throughout your career. Donald S. Moore has pushed me to speak in my own voice, while recognizing the rich history of the contributions of others who came before me. His indefatigable attention to my writing and intellectual development, commitment to a dialogic practice, and tremendous care with which he treats my work and the scholars on which I draw has taught me much about the integrity of the process of writing and of one’s intellectual labor as a whole. Thank you for creating space for these conversations and provocations over cups of Rooibos tea. I am thankful for Sylvia Tiwon’s creativity, vast expertise and encouragement to pay attention to subtlety in the field and in my writing. Her imploring to resist the urge to immediately translate ethnographic encounters has taught me to stay in uncomfortable intellectual spaces and to allow for unexpected insights to grow. I thank Nancy J. Burke for her support and care, working with me early in my graduate career to expand my understanding of the anthropology of global health and women’s reproductive health, especially while serving as chair of my qualifying exam. I am thankful for the generous opportunities she has afforded me to expand my fieldwork experience and learn about the dynamism of applied anthropology through participation in two of her field research teams. I cannot fully express how deeply grateful I am to my parents who have offered their love, and emotional and spiritual support unconditionally. Their expertise and insights—outside of any academic setting—have driven me to ask the questions I ask and to keep pushing. To my mother, Migdalia Rasidjan, I am so lucky to be your daughter. You move through the world with such grace and compassion. Thank you for always having my back and reminding me to hold my head high. To my father, Sutisna Rasidjan, no words can express how much gratitude and respect I have for your sacrifices and perseverance. Terima kasih, dad, for all the ways you have iv sustained and supported me—I am here because of you. And thank you for introducing me to Indonesia, where I have found another family and another home. I extend my sincerest gratitude for the many faculty members, colleagues, friends and other family members who have supported me and served as my teachers throughout this journey, especially Ian Whitmarsh, who always stressed thinking and writing at the edge, Leslie K. Dwyer, Danilyn Rutherford, and Nelly Paliama, who mistook me for a saudara when we first met gara-gara keriting. To my “other” mother, Gladys Gonzalez, no words can express how much gratitude I have for you in my life. To my sisters and brothers Elena Jimenez (SSS), Naomi Fotovich, Melody Lopez, Antonio Gonzalez, Nestor Lopez, and Ediberto Jimenez, thank you for being so excited for my journey. To my sisters in this program, Adeola Oni-Orison and Ugo Edu, one of the greatest gifts of this program was being in partnership with you. Thank you for your brilliance, humor and love. Thank you to Rachel Ceasar, Steven McIsaac, Colin Cahill, Annie Moss, Keisha M. Josephs, Anna Pulley, Ari Kistiwi, Ribka Alphania, Bi Mimin and Mushim Ikeda for your support and friendship. To (MSL) Louise Ly, what a privilege it is to know you and your work, let alone be your sister-friend. Thank you for all the ways you have seen me through. I look forward to next year when it is your turn. This dissertation would not have been possible without each of these folks and others I am not able to name. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my best friend and fiancé, Robin Weinert. Thank you for reading and offering feedback on my writing, at all hours of the night, for cooking and taking care of our home while I wrote and rewrote throughout the years. Thank you for your questions and for your unfailing support. This work is the product of the support, love and care of all those mentioned here, as well as that of the ancestors I carry with me. Finally, I extend my sincerest gratitude to the women and men of Tanah Papua, also called West Papua. Thank you v for affording me the opportunity to share space, break bread, and learn from you. Thank you to the scholars who took time to speak with me out of their busy schedules. Thank you to my friends in Papua whom I cannot name here, but who cared about my work and well being and introduced me to others who contributed to this dissertation. Terima kasih dari lubuk hati saya. Wah wah wah. And thank you to the University of California, Pacific Rim Research Grant and to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their financial support of my fieldwork. Thank you to the University of California, Berkeley Foreign Language and Area Studies Grant for support of my preliminary fieldwork. Thank you to the Fulbright IIE for support of post-undergraduate fieldwork prior to my PhD program. Finally, thank you to University of California, San Francisco, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine for their financial support of my pre-doctoral studies and post-field writing. vi Abstract Population Anxiety in Black Papua: The Politics of Reproduction and Racialization in Peripheral Indonesia Maryani Palupy Rasidjan My dissertation focuses on black subjectivity and indigeneity in relation to family planning in Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost province, and the site of over fifty years of contested sovereignty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a women’s empowerment center, government health clinics at the interface between family planning and Papuan pronatalist projects, and in-depth interviews with Papuan women, providers and activists, I explore how black Papuan women are both the targets and agents negotiating the political technologies of family planning. Population emerges as a “problem” in this setting where anxieties over population are addressed through Indonesia’s national family planning program—rooted in a history of development and population control—and local Papuan pronatalism programs that seek to address the social fact of a steady depopulation of black indigenous Papuans. The simultaneous surveillance apparatuses of the Indonesian family planning program and Indonesian security structures are political technologies in which Papuan women are distorted into hypervisible victims, patients or potential insurgents and invisible in the realm of legitimate and agentive Indonesian citizenry. The coupling of these biopolitical and necropolitical projects are the conditions under which antinatalist and pronatalist women’s reproductive health programs unfold in Papua. Women’s reproductive health brings into high relief how indigenous black Papuan women have become the critical site for state and global health interventions that are governed by anxiety and uncertainty. One of these anxieties has to do with Indonesia’s stellar global health