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The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia Author(s): Danilyn Rutherford Reviewed work(s): Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 312-339 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/647175 . Accessed: 02/12/2012 21:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Sun, 2 Dec 2012 21:28:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Page 1: Rutherford2000IrianJayatextualauthority AE

The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, IndonesiaAuthor(s): Danilyn RutherfordReviewed work(s):Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 312-339Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/647175 .

Accessed: 02/12/2012 21:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to American Ethnologist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Sun, 2 Dec 2012 21:28:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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the white edge of the margin: textuality and authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia

DANILYN RUTHERFORD University of Chicago

In Biak, Irian Jaya, in the far east of Indonesia, foreign slogans, narratives, and books are considered a crucial source of authority. In this article, I examine how amber beba (big foreigners), the Biak term for respected leaders, harness the potency attributed to distant lands by presenting their words as transla- tions of an alien text. I explore the implications of this strategy for pursuing authority by examining the worldview expressed in big foreigners' transla- tions of the Bible and other imported works. The case of Biak calls into ques- tion scholarly treatments that have taken literacy and Christian conversion as setting the stage for the emergence of postcolonial forms of hegemony. In val- orizing the textual aspects of outsiders' words, Biaks reproduce a boundary between local and national structures of meaning, keeping foreign orders at a distance even as they tap them for authority and power. [leadership, literacy, translation, Christianity, intercultural relations, postcolonial societies, modernity]

It has long been an anthropological commonplace that the introduction of read- ing and writing can transform local conceptions of authority. A range of scholars have drawn connections between literacy and the new conceptions of space, time, and self associated with Christian conversion, on the one hand, and the rise of national con- sciousness, on the other (see Anderson 1991 [1983]; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Gewertz and Errington 1993, 1996; Henley 1993; Steedly 1996; see also Chatterjee 1986, 1993). Goody (1986:10-13) attributes the development of a "universalism" crossing the boundaries of race, kinship, and place to the influence of the "religions of the book" (see also Goody and Watt 1963; Ong 1982).1 His view of writing as facili-

tating an "emptying" of space and time reappears in Anderson's (1991 [1983]) depic- tion of the development of national identity. Anderson suggests that reading the news- paper ("the modern substitute for daily prayers") causes individuals to view themselves in solidarity with a collective of anonymous contemporaries, inhabiting a world made imaginable through the medium of print (1991[1983]:39). While this commonplace is compelling, it dodges a crucial question. Is there really only one way to read?

In this article, I suggest that the answer to this question may be no. In doing so, I cast doubt on approaches that posit universal responses to the modernizing projects of Christian missionaries and the colonial state. As such, this article is less about liter- acy than it is about hegemony and its vicissitudes, pointing as it does to factors that limit the grip of state ideologies and disciplinary regimes. My evidence is drawn from Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia, an island group off the northwestern coast of New Guinea with high reported rates of literacy in Indonesia's national language and a compli- cated colonial past (see de Bruyn 1948).2 In particular, I examine the practices of

American Ethnologist 27(2):31 2-339. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association.

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amber beba (big foreigners), the term used on Biak for important leaders. Amber is a Biak language word meaning Westerner, civil servant, or non-lrianese Indonesian, but above all it refers to men and women who have gained recognition and respect. It also appears in the term, Sup Amber(the Land of the Foreigners), which refers to alien

spaces fraught with danger and promise, ranging from the Moluccan sultanates that once claimed sovereignty over Biak to sites associated with the New Order, Indone- sia's recently deposed authoritarian regime.

With the modernization of colonial institutions, there seems little doubt that in

parts of the Dutch East Indies, of which Biak and the rest of Indonesia were once a

part, the rise of a "native" reading public led to dramatic changes in consciousness (see Adam 1995; Kenji 1986; Shiraishi 1990). Yet my findings provide a reminder that the recruitment of national subjects entails recognition and not simply reading: peo- ple suddenly must come to see themselves through a new Other's eyes (see Althusser 1971; Anderson 1990[1979]; Ivy 1995; Sakai 1989; Siegel 1997). By stressing the alien character of outsiders' speech and writing, the people I describe in this article have avoided assimilating outsiders' points of view. Their interpretive strategies, which I approach as a practice of translation, have enabled them to satisfy national authorities with compliant rhetoric while playing to a local audience. One might say that Biaks have avoided swallowing other societies' truths by insisting on savoring their texts.

In the following pages, I focus on the implications of performances that index

specific junctures in Biak's history of contact and exchange between themselves and those they label as "foreign." While my examples are drawn from my fieldwork in the early 1990s, they reflect a dynamic with roots in a more distant past. Consider this ex- cerpt from an article by the first anthropologist to write about Biak. The Dutch Protes- tant missionary, F. C. Kamma, has just described how he must lock up his library to keep the natives from stealing his books.

And so I came upon a badly battered copy of the principle work of Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica in Spanish. Someone had obtained it from a ship's captain in ex- change for a chicken. From that time on, this book has been used to summon the spirit of the author (sic!). People call the book: Mon Blanda (the Dutch Shaman).... When- ever someone is sick and the shaman wants to know if the patient will get better or not, he goes to work in the following fashion.

It is said that the man calls the author and that the spirit of the latter speaks through him; it is even said that he uses the author's language .... This spirit indicates the sign of the patient's soul. . . with the shaman's finger. This mark is one or another of the let- ters. When the letter is located close to the margin, this means his life is in danger; if the mark is far from the edge, that means that people need not worry. The white edge of the margin is the line of death. [Kamma 1940-41:125]3

The 50 years that have passed since the Dutch missionary described this treatment of foreign writing have not erased colonialism's deathly white margin: the border of in- commensurability that Biaks both negotiate and reproduce in their dealings with pow- erful outsiders.4 It remains at play in the practices of the leaders I describe in this article, in their ongoing efforts to capture what is strange. At the very least, their prac- tices should create questions as to whether the assumption of postcolonial or, indeed, any identity can ever be seamless, all-encompassing, or complete.5

authority and textuality

The divination described by Kamma was doubly subversive. At the same time it deflected what the missionary understood as the meaning of Aquinas's text, it displaced

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the locus of intention from the shaman to the book and the supernatural powers it served to access (cf. Du Bois 1992; Keane 1997a:688). In contemporary Biak, where the Protestant church founded by the missionaries is firmly entrenched, it appears at first glance that this shaman's mode of appropriating foreign discourse has become a thing of the past. But a closer look reveals curious parallels. During my fieldwork in the early 1990s, I often encountered Biak leaders voicing faithful renditions of govern- ment rhetoric. These performances were surprising, given the fact that Irian Jaya in general, and Biak in particular, are sometimes seen as hotbeds of opposition to the In- donesian state. By virtue of a complicated politics of decolonization I can only allude to here, the western half of New Guinea became part of the Republic of Indonesia at a later date than the rest of the former Dutch East Indies (see Campo 1986; Haga 1884; Klein 1937; Lijphart 1966; Rutherford 1997, 1998b). Since the early 1960s, when In- donesia took control of what is now Irian Jaya, a sporadically active separatist move- ment has fought for the founding of an independent West Papuan state. Educated Biaks have played key roles in the development of West Papuan nationalism. But they have also filled leading positions in the local and provincial bureaucracy, positions that have required them to don the uniforms and usages of the Indonesian regime.

The fact that Biaks and other Irian Jayans were choosing careers in the military and civil service was not surprising in the early 1990s; the state was the major em- ployer in the province. What was surprising was the way that those with a connection to the New Order government, no matter how tenuous, would deploy it to their ad- vantage to impress Biak audiences who, on other occasions, might have denied that they were Indonesians at all. Sometimes, the evocations were subtle: they lay in the formal register of Indonesian with which a teacher or church elder might greet a visi- tor who came to his home with a request. At other times, the references were blatant: a village chief's speech at a dispute resolution would be peppered with Indonesian platitudes on the value of custom (adat), progress (kemajuan), and security (keamanan), key words in the lexicon that legitimated Suharto's repressive rule for well over thirty years (see Pemberton 1994).

The mobilization of New Order rhetoric intensified the bigger the players and the higher the stakes, as I observed in marriage negotiations involving elite Biaks. In one particularly sensitive negotiation I attended, the prospective bride's family recruited a lieutenant colonel stationed in Jakarta to speak on their behalf. This big foreigner ar- rived, in full uniform, on a Sunday afternoon to deliver a monologue filled with refer- ences to his experiences outside the island. His speech ended with a classically New Order flourish: "Without custom, there can be neither nation nor state." The officer managed to persuade the prospective groom's family to accept special conditions on the union despite his disclaimer that he had been abroad too long to be acquainted with the islands' customs or the facts of the particular case. His strategy rendered ex- plicit what was implicit in the other performances I have mentioned. His rhetoric qualified him to pronounce on local conflicts because, like his uniform, it indexed his encounters in other places and times. Even though the groom's family later criticized the outcome of the meeting, they did not reject the basis of the officer's claim to power. It was not the lieutenant colonel's logic that they called into question, but the validity of his foreign credentials. To borrow Baker's terms, these listeners' "comprehension" of the officer's speech-their ability to restate and evaluate his message-was overshadowed by their "apprehension" that what they were hear- ing derived from a distant center of power (1993:108).6

In varying ways, the leaders I discuss in this article appeal to the textuality of out- siders' discourse: its seeming autonomy from the speaker's interests and the matter at

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hand. Recent scholarship has highlighted the authority achieved through entextuali- zation and recontextualization: processes entailing the translation of autonomous

segments of discourse from one context of performance to another (see Bauman and

Briggs 1990:74; Keane 1997c:133; Kuipers 1990:4-7, 1997b:62-63; Silverstein and Urban 1997). Here, I attend to the tendency of these processes to insinuate differ- ences into the contexts they serve to constitute and connect. This potential for

estrangement rests on two related aspects of signification. On the one hand, significa- tion depends on the iterability of representations: the fact they are "detachable from

particular speakers and acts of speaking" (Keane 1997c:25; see also Derrida 1973, 1981, 1982b). It is not only when one writes that one finds oneself alienated from one's signs, but, potentially, every time one speaks. It is not simply that it is impossible to express oneself fully in language. Rather, without the process of objectification that

accompanies mediation by a code, there is no recognition of a self. On the other hand, representation, in general, like writing, in particular, embodies a structure of

delay and distancing (see Derrida 1982a). The meaning of a particular segment of dis- course is the product of movement through a chain of negatively defined distinctions.

Along the axes of selection and combination used in writing or speech, the signifi- cance of a sign can be grasped only in relation to what it is not.7 Words, sentences, and narratives are only legible through a process of anticipated retrospection: mean-

ing only emerges in relation to what will have come before. As the basis for these in- terrelated qualities of the trace, the problematically material character of discourse opens the possibility for divergent readings and renderings. Even official pronounce- ments can run astray.

The stress that Biaks place on the indexical character of certain instances of dis- course-taking words as impressions left by the impact of absent worlds-fore- grounds aspects of signification suppressed in settings where language is taken as a transparent instrument to communicate facts and ideas. But one would be mistaken to take Biak perspectives as simply the inversion of some monolithic Western view. Work in the ethnography of speaking and writing points to the diversity of local treat- ments of the written word (see Boyarin 1993; Ewald 1988; George 1990; Gewertz and Errington 1991; Kulick 1992; Kulick and Stroud 1993; McKenzie 1987; Messick 1989; O'Hanlon 1995; Silverstein and Urban 1997; Street 1984, 1993). Other re- search has revealed the divergent ways in which spirit mediums and orators displace the source of agency from the speaking self (see Bloch 1975; Boddy 1989; Brenneis and Myers 1984; Cannell 1999; Duranti 1988; Keane 1997b, 1997c; Lindstrom 1984, 1990; Myers 1986; Siegel 1978; Steedly 1993; Watson-Gegeo and White 1990). One can only make sense of these varied discursive practices by placing them within the context of a wider social world.

In Biak, the pursuit of authority gives rise to a distinctive form of translation that stresses the textuality of foreign slogans, documents, and books. I use the term transla- tion in an expanded sense to refer to the varied ways that Biaks offer evidence of their encounters with the spoken and written words of outsiders. The practices I explore in this article emphasize aspects of translation cast in shadow by approaches that aspire to the seamless transfer of meaning from one language to another (see Venuti 1992; see also Benjamin 1968b; Jacquemond 1992; Mehrez 1992; Niranjana 1994).8 The Biaks described below seek renown by presenting themselves as having access to texts with no true equivalent in the vernacular. Their translations create their own im- petus and object: an external realm of meaning that provides Biak leaders with an avenue to power and prestige.

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To show how this form of translation at once responds to and reproduces so- ciocultural difference, I begin by considering the role of writing in contemporary Biak in relation to older notions of value, status, and authenticity. Then, in three related sections, I focus on differing, yet interconnected, representations of a particularly sig- nificant foreign original: the Bible, which for Biaks has long been a sacred text. The first set of practices portray the Bible and other texts as treasured possessions; the sec- ond as founts of inexhaustible truth; and the last, cast in the genre of Biak prophecy, as fragments of a Biak master text. What makes these different meanings of reading pos- sible is the potential for alienation that is a feature of every signifying act. In the con- clusion, I hint at the implications of these efforts to appropriate the authority of foreign writing in relation to the recent resurgence of separatism in Irian Jaya. Although Biaks turn the words of powerful outsiders to unexpected and sometimes subversive ends, their confounding of foreign meanings is more than the outcome of self-conscious op- position. It is the paradoxical product of a historical dynamic that has made the for- eign into the medium that defines persons and groups.

language, literacy, and the making of big foreigners

With 100,000 inhabitants, Biak-Numfor is the most densely populated regency in Irian Jaya and the only one with a single local language (Biak-Numfor Dalam Angka 1992). This language, which falls in the South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (see Blust 1988:29; see also Bellwood 1995), is spoken by roughly three quarters of the population, which also includes non-Biak Irian Jayans and non-lrian Indonesians from Ambon, Sulawesi, Java, and many other parts of the archipelago. Close to half of Biak-Numfor's inhabitants live in the re- gency's multiethnic capital city, site of government offices, military barracks, a size- able harbor, movie theaters, markets, supermarkets, and countless small shops. Biak City is also the home of an international airport, which, until recently, served as a re- fueling stop on the route between Bali and Los Angeles. While the residents of Biak City work as civil servants, soldiers, or laborers at the local plymill, the majority of the island's indigenous inhabitants earn their living in more or less remote rural villages as subsistence farmers, fishermen, and hunters. While they seem worlds apart, rural and urban Biak are tightly linked. Rural women travel frequently to town to go to mar- ket and bring food to urban relatives, who often take in students from their home vil- lages. In turn, town-dwellers work to maintain a good reputation back home by sup- porting village undertakings, such as the building of new churches. Most villages feature one or two concrete houses in early stages of construction: retirement homes being built by big foreigners from the community. The audience for the achievements of the leaders I depict is a heterogeneous population of rural and urban Biaks with shared values, yet divergent lifestyles and skills.

Although the islands' integration into wider social worlds has accelerated in recent years, Biak speakers were scarcely isolated in the past. My friends and ac- quaintances tended to take pride in their group's long history of relations with rul- ers in the Moluccas, an early center of global trade to the west of New Guinea. As early as the 1 5th century, their forebears delivered a tribute of forest products and slaves to the Spice Islands sultans of Tidore in return for honorific titles, porcelain, beads, iron, and cloth (see Andaya 1993; Kamma 1947-49, 1 982b). On long voy- ages in enormous, seafaring canoes, Biak-speaking people traded and raided along the shores of northwestern New Guinea and further afield. Their travels brought them into contact with European explorers, traders, and soldiers, as well as the Protestant missionaries who settled on the Bird's Head, not far from Biak, in the

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mid-1 9th century, and the colonial administrators who founded a post in the same vi-

cinity in 1898 (see Beekman 1989; Kamma 1976; Smeele 1988). By virtue of their early exposure to the mission and colonial administration, peo-

ple from Biak played an important role in Dutch New Guinea, first as teachers and

evangelists, then as coolies and ship hands, and finally as soldiers, officials, and poli- ticians. One can trace their fortunes in the changing meanings of the word amber, which, according to mission sources, was once an expletive (foreigner!), which like

wonggori! (crocodile!), was used to express wonder and surprise (see van Hasselt 1868:35). The term no longer refers only to traders, teachers, and officials from out- side New Guinea, for now Biaks can become foreigners themselves. Yet in spite of these changes, the way that Biaks describe the production of valued persons reflects continuities that find expression in their treatment of outsiders' texts.

Not surprisingly, given Biak's history, big foreigners fail to fall squarely within Melanesian models of leadership, including Godelier's (1986) typology, which fo- cuses on tribal societies supposedly isolated from the impact of state-based forms of hegemony.9 Godelier locates "great men," who exercise ascribed authority in warfare and ritual, in societies where restricted sister-exchange, marriage, and blood feuding follow the principle that a life must be given for a life. Found in societies with bridewealth and the payment of death indemnities, "big men," by contrast, achieve authority by monopolizing the media of social reproduction. On Biak, one finds named, patrilineal, patrilocal kin groups, called keret, and a system of marriage that traditionally included both the use of bridewealth and the occasional exchange of sis- ters. Unions are not permitted between first and second cousins, giving rise to a pat- tern of "scattered alliance" (cf. Liep 1991:38). While Biaks occasionally refer to inher- ited prerogatives, one tends to find a downplaying of lineage-based claims to authority. Biak leaders resemble what Wolters (1982, 1994), writing of early South- east Asia, has called "men of prowess," individuals whose goal is less to follow their forebears than to become ancestors themselves (see also Atkinson 1989; Reid 1988; Tsing 1990, 1993).

Biak leaders both gain and demonstrate prowess by mobilizing the matrilateral relationships that cross-cut their patrilineal groups. Crucial to the success of particular individuals are their relationships with their mothers' brothers, on the one hand, and their sisters' offspring, on the other.10 The foreign valuables given to a woman's family as bridewealth are returned in the form of prestations from the woman's brothers to her children. Biaks view the porcelain, clothing, money, titles, and magical skills that a brother gives his sister's offspring as evidence of his mastery of exogenous sources of value. The children who receive these offerings at life-cycle feasts or in informal set- tings are seen as gaining the bravery and strength they will need to venture out to for- eign realms. Motivated by a brother's "love" for his outmarried sister, and financed by his imported foreign wealth, this reversal of the flow of bridewealth provides a basis for my informants' insistence that marriage creates a debt that is impossible to repay. Supplementing the clan names, land, and trees that a child automatically inherits from the father's keret, this system of exchange destabilizes inherited distinctions. As- piring leaders must look beyond the patriline for what will set them apart.

Encouraging individuals to seek novel ways to stand out above their peers, Biak kinship once served to validate authority derived from an array of spheres, from dis- tant entrepots to the invisible world of the spirits. Dutch observers listed an array of Biak leaders, from clan elders (adir), to warriors (mambri), to shamans (mon), to vil- lage chiefs, appointed in Tidore (mananir menu) (Kamma 1972:12-13; see also Feuil- letau de Bruyn 1920). Today's Biak leaders range from government officials to pastors

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to traditional musicians, blacksmiths, and healers."1 One can measure their authority as much from their success in constituting an audience for their performances as from their ability to shape the course of events (cf. Anderson 1990[1972]; Atkinson 1989; Geertz 1980; Tsing 1990, 1993). Authority in Biak, as elsewhere in the region, is a function of being known by distant others (see Munn 1986). Having a name entails recognition of one's skills, status, and right to pronounce on matters of collective con- cern. This acknowledgement derives from relatives, fellow villagers, acquaintances, and strangers, who produce and confirm the fame of leaders by repeating stories about their exploits abroad. Besides marriage negotiations, the planning of church construction projects and other community events provide arenas for the exercise of authority, as do land disputes and court cases on the village and district level. Big for- eigners with connections to the military or government can also prove themselves by interceding on others' behalf.

Faced with the diverse forms of leadership found in other Autronesian-speaking parts of Melanesia, scholars have divided newly emerging figures, who control the flow of valued objects, from older notables, who control the ritual production of val- ued persons (see Jolly 1991:77). Biak descriptions of the prestige gained through the bestowal of foreign valuables suggest that one should be cautious in imposing such a distinction. In Biak, wealth can only become a source of authority when it indexes ac- cess to absent sources of value and power (cf. Helms 1988, 1993). The gifts that circu- late on Biak embody different histories, connecting the alien with the past and the an- cestors in varying ways. A Tidoran title or an antique Chinese vase refers not only to a far land and a long history of trade, but also to the forebears who brought them to Biak. A T-shirt or radio recently acquired in Jakarta evokes a less layered sense of dis- tancing in space and time. Yet, however it is configured, a displaced origin is crucial to the allure of such objects and the prestige earned in giving them. Just as warriors made their names by bringing home alien heads, traders earn renown by importing alien goods.12 Likewise, clan elders distinguish themselves from competitors through narratives that confirm their access to the ancestral origins of the group. Blurring the line between words and things, both titles and trade goods serve as booty marking an encounter in an alien realm.

Intrinsic to the dynamics of Biak kinship, this long history of raiding provides the setting for contemporary appropriations of foreign speech and writing. Elsewhere, I have described how a tendency to treat outsiders' words as booty shaped Biak rela- tions with the early evangelists (see Rutherford n.d.). The word for the Gospel in Biak is refo, from the Tidoran lefo (written text), indicating an exposure to foreign writing that dates to well before the missionaries' arrival in 1855 (see van Hasselt and van Hasselt 1947:190). The presence of loanwords in wos Biak (Biak language) should come as no surprise. Spoken by the interpreters who accompanied foreign expedi- tions to the region, and by the Dutch and German missionaries who settled on the Bird's Head, Biak once served as a lingua franca along the coasts of northwestern New Guinea. When the colonial administration expanded in northern New Guinea in the late 19th century, Biaks were quick to master new languages of rule, including Dutch and Malay, which were used in commerce and administration throughout the Netherlands Indies (see Maier 1993).

An interest in the languages of powerful others has persisted on Biak. During fieldwork, I met virtually no one unable to converse with me in Indonesian, the national language that grew out of Indies Malay. Codeswitching is common in con- versations among adults, who embellish their Biak anecdotes with Indonesian, Dutch, and English words. Friends told me that "children's language" (wos romawa)

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was "foreign language" (wos amber), as people call Indonesian. Mothers often ad- dress toddlers in the national language, leaving the mother tongue for conversations

amongst themselves.13 Given the prestige women gain from raising famous "foreign- ers," this tendency makes a certain sense. Some of my informants bemoaned the im-

pending demise of wos Biak; one man, half-joking, forecast the day when his grand- children would have to go to Holland for lessons from the successors of the Dutch

pastors who had been so fluent in the language. Although the prevalence of Indone- sian in lessons, sermons, and official speeches supports this gloomy view, Biak re- mains the language of singing, storytelling, and scolding. It plays a key role in popular genres of performance and in the bustle of everyday life.

The ascendancy of Indonesian is evident in one highly valued arena: it is the main language in which Biaks read and write. Thanks to the islands' long tradition of education, literacy is not new to Biak. In 1947, Dr. J. V. de Bruyn, a Dutch official as-

signed to govern Biak after World War II, called the islanders "the most cultivated and therefore most progressive Papuans in Netherlands New Guinea, among whom illit-

eracy is relatively scarce and even among men under thirty-five completely absent" (1947:1; see also de Bruyn 1965). With most villages tracing their Christian conver- sion to the 191 Os and early 1920s, even the oldest of my informants had completed three years of school. Some middle-aged men and women benefited from training programs launched in the 1950s and now hold the equivalent of a college degree. In line with national policy, children on Biak are guaranteed six years of primary educa- tion; many go on to junior and senior high school, for which their families pay nomi- nal fees. While de Bruyn's estimate may well have been inflated, literacy is an impor- tant value among contemporary Biaks. Even if they do not use their own skills frequently, they show a clear respect for those who do.

Religious works make up the majority of reading materials one finds in Biak resi- dences (cf. Kulick and Stroud 1993:36). Families keep bibles and Indonesian lan- guage hymnals, stored in fancy leather cases by more affluent urbanites or tucked in woven bags and hidden in the rafters of a rural home. While many households might include little else in the way of texts-a marriage license or birth certificate slipped between the pages of the Bible, an outdated newspaper stapled to the wall-I was sometimes shown more exotic treasures: certificates of honor from the Dutch army, Biak language lesson books dating from well before the war, identification cards is- sued by the colonial government. Among the newer publications that people col- lected were Indonesian language pamphlets based on Dutch writings on Biak culture and the history of the mission. A newly translated Biak New Testament was a popular item among pastors and elders. As I discuss below, a few of my informants boasted collections of Dutch and English books.

But it was not only published texts and documents that friends on Biak were eager to show me; people also kept collections of their own writings. A college drop- out presented me with a poster-sized map of his family's genealogy, which illustrated the special prerogatives supposedly enjoyed by his particular line. A retired school- teacher let me borrow his "life history," which listed the communities where he had served and some of the incidents that had occurred during his tenure. Some of the rec- ords I was shown served a pragmatic purpose: people saved requests for bridewealth and lists of contributors in order to keep track of the debts that connected relatives who provide and divide each other's bridewealth. The same was not obviously true of the thick collection of notes that I was shown by Utrecht Wompere, an aging evangel- ist widely known as an expert on adat (custom). Interviews with Mr. Wompere often began with me and my informant taking out our respective notebooks: mine was

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empty; his was full of descriptions that he read aloud for me to write down. It was al- most as if the old man had kept these meticulous records in hopes of someday meet- ing someone like me.'4

It was not simply in the name of science that these authors sought me out. They wanted their "data" to enter the book I would write about Biak, so that someday their descendants could come to America to find the "truth" about their history and cul- ture.'5 No doubt, part of their enthusiasm for my efforts reflected the fact that young Indonesians study about custom in school. But their eagerness to show me written documents also corresponded to a wider conception of the nature of authenticity. The written word was considered evidence of the veracity of a narrative, like the old songs that some informants sang to me or the named rock formations that others showed me in order to validate their versions of local myths. The most reliable sources were old foreign monographs, Biaks told me, because their authors knew the "old people" be- fore they all died. Experts on custom were delighted, not embarrassed, when I recog- nized why their stories seemed so familiar: often we had read the same Dutch books. Those who spoke without proof were said to be subject to whims that could lead them to add or detract from the truth. Whether they appealed to inscriptions on the land or evidence "written in their heads," my informants tried to support their words with the authority of the written trace.

Outside of conversations with an ethnographer, reading is also presented as a crucial source of unusual knowledge. To become a "foreigner," one must demon- strate one's privileged access to the truths contained in texts that are difficult to obtain or understand. But while literacy is an important component of the repertoire of Biak leaders, they reach the realm of foreign meanings by varied means. While teachers are typical foreigners, well-known healers, hunters, and singers also claim the title based on their ability to translate a dream, the landscape, or the events of everyday life. Biaks do not draw a sharp divide between these traditional figures and their West- ernized contemporaries-often the teacher and singer are the same man or woman. Nor do they valorize one mode of reading over another. One healer boasted that he had been called to the hospital to help with tough cases and to brief the doctors on his special brand of skills.

Clearly, the Pietist missionaries who served on Biak had an impact on local no- tions of writing and authority. Nevertheless, Biaks have incorporated Protestant con- ceptions of the "power of the Word" in highly specific ways (Rutherford n.d.). In the next section of this article, I tease out three of the meanings implicitly ascribed to reading when particular leaders translate foreign texts. Although these interpretive strategies can and do overlap, I approach them separately by highlighting aspects of the words and works of two local historians and a contemporary prophet. I do not mean to imply that these men are typical Biak characters. Their practices merely serve to illustrate some of the myriad ways in which Biaks register and reproduce difference by positioning themselves as monopolizing a key source of truths from afar.

the meanings of reading

Mr. Fakiar and the possession

I can illuminate one meaning of reading by pondering the activities of Mr. Fakiar, a former colonial official in his early sixties. An early participant in Dutch experiments with limited self-rule, Mr. Fakiar belongs to the first generation of Biaks to be educated by the colonial government. He now resides in his home village, not far from the regency capital, where he dispenses advice on matters relating to the land

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disputes that have been smoldering in the subregency of South Biak since the dis-

placement of coastal communities during World War II. In 1993, when I ran into Mr. Fakiar at the Biak City port, he gave me a good

dressing down. I had first encountered the retired official in 1990, when I was re-

searching a case study on land disputes. Since returning for fieldwork, I had seen him once on the street with his wife, who was an acquaintance from the women's group in town. He had spoken proudly then about his writings on Biak history and culture, tell-

ing me all about his interview with an American "expert"-a person who turned out to be me. Now he asked, in mock anger: why was it taking me so long to come and collect his valuable texts?

And so I found myself, two days later, in a sunny beach-front village, sheltering in a cool sitting room while Mr. Fakiar rummaged for books. He had greeted me with de-

light, quickly changing into a government party T-shirt before launching into a mono-

logue. I was not the first to seek him out-the regent, the mayor, and various foreign visitors all had his manuscripts-in fact, most had been borrowed, although he would see what he could find. Every day, from dawn until dark, Mr. Fakiar did nothing but write. When he was not writing, he was consulting his library of rare foreign texts. By way of proof, he rattled off a list of explorers-Ortiz de Retes, Jacob de la Maire, Willem Schouten. He had read about them in Dutch in a very old book, "probably the

only copy outside of Spain." Like his own works, this book was in very high demand. After sending a child scampering through the neighborhood to look for his writ-

ings on Biak culture, Mr. Fakiar ducked into his bedroom. A moment later, he emerged with K. W. Galis's Papua's van de Humbolt Baai (1955), opened to the Eng- lish summary. I perused the disquisition on Tobati kinship and ritual, while my in- formant looked for more materials. "I bet you haven't seen this!" he chuckled, placing before me a glossy guidebook to Netherlands New Guinea, dated 1956 (see Vade- mecum voor Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea 1956). Flipping past the pictures of smiling tribesmen and immunized babies, he directed me to a list of important historical dates.

When I pulled out my pad and began to ask Mr. Fakiar some questions, he stopped me. "Don't write!" he commanded. "Where is that boy?!" To occupy me while we waited for his corpus on culture, he read aloud from some of his other manuscripts: "The Papuan Volkskarakter" (a portrait of the native's temperament), "The Government of the Dutch East Indies" (a history of Old Batavia), and "Biak in the War Years" (a military description of the island's defenses during World War II). When I asked Mr. Fakiar about his own history, he pulled out another handwritten document and showed me his name on a list of delegates to the New Guinea Council. Mr. Fakiar never found the manuscripts he was looking for that day, but he urged me to take the others when I left.

Mr. Fakiar treated me the way a senior faculty member might treat a first-year stu- dent: he loaded me up with references and sent me on my way. But I would not want to take for granted Mr. Fakiar's performance simply because it calls to mind some- thing that I think I know. Like scholars elsewhere, Mr. Fakiar offered his manuscripts as valued objects that he was eager to put into circulation. His writings were transla- tions in Indonesian from Western texts, which he wanted his Western visitors to take away. In fact, I would argue that the foreign books in the library of the retired civil ser- vant-some so rare that they were not even there-played the role of what Weiner (1992) calls "inalienable possessions": highly valued objects removed from circula- tion in an attempt to stabilize debt and generate hierarchy (see also Weiner 1985). Weiner has described how the production of facsimiles of precious heirlooms, such

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as Samoan fine mats, enables their owners to claim them as a medium of identity, rep- resented within transactions yet absent from exchange. Realized in a combination of

practice and rhetoric, Mr. Fakiar's strategy had similar effects. Letting him give while

keeping his precious originals, Mr. Fakiar's ceaseless production and bestowal of brief translations allowed him to assert privileged access to a hidden foreign source.

Inalienable possessions, Weiner argues, do more than embody the past; they promise immortality to those who seek to reproduce differences against the flux of time and the threat of loss (1992:3). Their value resides in their association with cos- mological sources of authentication. If the ownership of a treasured heirloom strengthens the position of particular kin groups or persons, it is by virtue of its para- doxical ability to bring an ancestral past into the present while marking this realm's eccentric relationship to the everyday world (see also Benjamin 1968a, 1968b; Helms 1993). Where Weiner's model tends to downplay differences in the ways that people conceptualize the cosmological, my encounter with Mr. Fakiar brought home a sim-

ple truth: just as objects gain meaning through their embeddedness in broader con- texts of social discourse, transcendence and ancestrality are created in locally distinc- tive ways. Reflecting a tendency common among Biak leaders, Mr. Fakiar used his mastery of the foreign in an imaginative effort to act as a future ancestor himself. On one level, he proved this mastery by structuring the aura of an elsewhere into his per- formance. By reading aloud from his works, Mr. Fakiar suppressed his unreliable voice and made himself into the conduit for his own writing. In a sense, he let himself be possessed by these traces of his possessions, his foreign books, and thus accessed their alien power. On another level, he asserted the ancestral character of this un- canny auto-inspiration by defining his texts as a legacy for his son. Transforming the foreign into the origin of a new genealogy, Mr. Fakiar tried to turn the textuality of his writings to his advantage in his quest for the recognition of future generations. By turning his books into heirlooms and his translations into a bequest for his children, he provided social figures for the absences that constitute every document in the form of an author and addressee who are never exhaustively known.

Turning from Mr. Fakiar's library to the Bible, one gets an even clearer sense of the role that writing can play as an inalienable possession on Biak. With their leather cases and woven coverings serving as markers of social standing, particular bibles are closely associated with particular persons. Along with eyeglasses, medals, important documents, and most of their clothing, these texts accompany their owners to the grave. At once specific to individuals and associated with Biaks as a group, the Bible not only harbors the aura of an elsewhere; it provides people with access to magical powers. Bibles are used to make prayer water by Biak healers. Holding a glass of water over the Scriptures, they breathe a prayer onto the surface, then give the liquid to their patients to drink. The protective character of the Scriptures is well known to Biak travellers, who never set out without a bible in their bag. The Bible appears as the protagonist in hymns and myths describing the vanquishing of heathen darkness by Christian light. Instead of praising the missionaries for challenging heathen beliefs, these narratives credit the Bible for "breaking the warrior's spear." The magical and the ancestral come together in a story an old man told me about an encounter be- tween some bibles and his forefather's korwar. The word korwar usually refers to the reliquaries that Biaks once carved to hold the skulls and spirits of recently deceased relatives (see van Baaren 1968). But the korwar in this tale were enormous, hilltop boulders that marked the boundaries of the clan's land. The narrative presented the bibles as taking the place of the boulders, which vanished upon their meeting with the Book (see Rutherford n.d.).16 Like my meeting with Mr. Fakiar, this clan history

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illuminates a moment when the foreign and the ancestral converge to found a geneal- ogy. But the ancestors remain encompassed by the foreign, which remains beyond anyone's control.

My encounter with Mr. Fakiar revealed just one of a repertoire of strategies for

translating foreign texts into a source of authority. The next big foreigner illustrates an- other approach. Once again, the seemingly idiosyncratic practices of an individual find a parallel in collective treatments of the Bible. With Mr. Senyenem, the focus shifts from the foreign text as an absent heirloom, which serves as the origin of valued

gifts, to the foreign text as an alien, yet all-encompassing narrative, which serves as the origin of surplus meaning. Like Mr. Fakiar, Mr. Senyenem views his translations as an inheritance for future generations. But here, the foreign original is not only an inac- cessible source of value; it is an inexhaustible source of truth.

Mr. Senyenem and the model

The outlines of a second meaning of reading are discernible in the practices of Mr. Senyenem, a slightly older man than Mr. Fakiar, who was trained by the Protes- tant mission to serve as a teacher and evangelist. Mr. Senyenem spent his career

teaching in primary schools across the island, before retiring to his East Biak home vil- lage to serve as a member of the East Biak church council. In addition to his work with local congregations, he is widely known as a promoter of wor, a nondiatonic song genre formerly sung at Biak feasts (see Rutherford 1996; Yampolsky and Rutherford 1996). Mr. Senyenem is as proud of his ability to remember old wor songs as he is of his knowledge of Dutch texts on Biak's past.

"Gouden Avond! Ik heb U wachten!" [Good evening! I've been waiting for you!] A voice rang out as I climbed a rocky path to a cliff-top house in the village of Opiaref. This was my fourth trip to see Mr. Senyenem, and I was used to being welcomed in Dutch. The short, expressive man led me to his spacious back room, where I took a seat at a table stacked with ledgers and stencils. A small manual typewriter sat before me, ready for use.

I often went to Mr. Senyenem for help transcribing wor. Before we began, he usu- ally gave me a progress report on his village history, which he had been working on for several years. Unlike Mr. Fakiar, who was eager to offer me samples from his opus, Mr. Senyenem kept his masterpiece under tight wraps. Whenever I asked to see it, Mr. Senyenem sighed; his book was "not yet perfect." But finally one day, the old man handed me a bulky volume, which was opened to a page of Biak poetry. What was this? Wor lyrics! To show me what had inspired them, he directed me to another page, where I found a complete register of every teacher who had ever served in Opiaref. Further on, I found five or six additional wor, including several that Mr. Senyenem had created as he was writing. The history also contained a hymn by a well-known Dutch missionary on the birth of Irian Jaya's Evangelical Church. "Every- thing will go in," Mr. Senyenem promised me. "Had to start in the beginning. In Ger- many." I looked at the opening chapter; indeed, Opiaref's past began in Berlin with the theologian who trained New Guinea's first evangelists. Mr. Senyenem grinned. "If I don't include everything, then the grandchildren won't know!"

By starting his story with a discussion of the Utrecht Mission Society's Pietist founders, Mr. Senyenem had organized his text on the model of F. C. Kamma's (1976) history of the New Guinea mission. But the fact that local history began in the Land of the Foreigners was not the only remarkable thing about this manuscript. Filled with editorial comments and creative compositions, Mr. Senyenem's hefty text was unlike Mr. Fakiar's succinct translations. Both men viewed their translations as a source of

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genealogical continuity. But here, the parallel ends. Mr. Fakiar's ongoing transactions enabled him to "give-while-keeping" a treasured object. Mr. Senyenem's endless epic referred less to a treasured object than a treasured narrative, overflowing with data and meanings that could never be adequately glossed. In both cases, the copy, put into circulation, produced a particular image of the original. Mr. Senyenem's manu-

script exemplifies how Biak translators confirm the "foreignness" of foreign texts, even as they transform them into a source of local truths.

It is not only in encounters with local historians that one catches a glimpse of the model that takes shape at the beginning of Biak's works. The foreign original looms large in the church history quiz contests that are a popular component of congrega- tional celebrations. Held on a local or regional level, these panel games engage small teams of men, women, and youths in a battle of wits. In the course of my fieldwork, I found myself, along with three Biak friends, representing South Biak in a contest with a women's group from the mainland. Luckily, my hostess had a fine collection of rele- vant materials. My teammates and I poured over the booklets and grilled each other on mission lore. To little avail, it turned out. Despite my months of research in the Netherlands, I was easily stumped.

I should not have been surprised by my poor performance in the contest. As the inquiries of rural acquaintances confirmed, the Dutch archive of the Biak imagination was not the same archive that I consulted in Holland. As seen by Biaks, the distant re- pository contains an unlimited supply of information, from the middle names of the missionaries' children to the accurate dimensions of a particular village's clan land. Quiz masters can ask anything of contestants, given their putative access to an ar- chive that tells all. The impression that local knowledge is simply the tip of an iceberg of foreign data is perpetrated by the wide dissemination of abridged Indonesian ver- sions of the most famous foreign works: A Miracle in Our Eyes (Kamma 1981, 1982a), Ottow and Geissler: West Irian's Apostles (Mamoribo 1971 b), A Brief History of the Irian Jaya Evangelical Church (Mamoribo 1965), The Fort at Yenbekaki and the Koreri Movement (Mamoribo 1971 a). Many of these booklets were written by distinguished "big foreigners," such as the Biak founding fathers of the native church.

But the foreign original holds more than a surplus of information; it also holds a surplus of meaning, as one learns when one turns to Biak glosses of the Bible. The Bi- ble is the most fertile site of translation on Biak. It circulates in languages national and local, written and spoken, in story books, sermons, and songs. Whether or not they used the word translation, my informants made it clear that they traced their sermons and compositions to privileged encounters with the Holy Writ. One lay preacher de- scribed the fear and exhilaration she felt when she mounted the pulpit. "This is God's Gospel," she informed me gravely. "It's not just any old book!" Biak descriptions of the impossible, yet imperative, mission of conveying God's word portray witnessing as a process of unending translation. Confronted with the task of interpreting the Scriptures, the faithful experience the same sense of the sublime as Mr. Senyenem did, with his interminable village history. Translation appears as an infinite process, since no local rendering can fully capture the truth.

Elsewhere, I have analyzed Biak-language hymns describing the Bible and its contents (see Rutherford 1997). Here, as well, the Biblical text appears as an inex- haustible fount of truths that can be evoked but never adequately conveyed. The songs capture the challenge of translation on various levels; in some, the Bible is the delectable object of an unending process of consumption; in others, the repository of sublimely unspeakable meaning. Significantly, in light of the strategies of the prophet described below, the lyrics often include phrases associated with Koreri, a messianic

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movement that has recurred throughout Biak's colonial and postcolonial history (see Kamma 1972). In 40 outbreaks over the past 138 years, coastal people have gathered to open Koreri, a utopian state without suffering, aging, or death that will begin with the return of Manarmakeri (The Itchy Old Man), the Biak ancestor who created for-

eign wealth. Some hymns translate heaven as Koreri, which means literally "We

Change Our Skin"; others repeat phrases like k'an do mob oser [we will eat in one

place]. Despite their use of these locally resonant terms, the composers I interviewed

presented their hymns as indebted to a foreign original. But their texts set the stage for a final mode of translation, which brings the origin of truth and power back home.

Uncle Bert and the fragment

A third meaning of reading emerges vividly in the performances of a prophet whom I will call simply "Uncle Bert," following the lead of his nephew, who was sen- sitive to the subversive nature of his kinsman's activities. While Mr. Fakiar and Mr.

Senyenem were widely regarded as authorities, Uncle Bert, who was a younger man, commanded a smaller sphere of influence. Uncle Bert was a relatively uneducated fisherman whose renown derived from his leadership of one of a number of "prayer groups" founded on Biak in recent years. These innocuous sounding organizations are watched closely by church officials and the military, for they are believed to be

dangerous pockets of syncretism and Papuan separatism. Above all, the authorities

worry about the prayer groups' association with Koreri. Ranging from women healed in miraculous encounters with the ancestor to elders passed over when the govern- ment appointed village chiefs, colonial-era Koreri prophets exerted remarkable influ- ence over their followers, especially in the early 1940s, when Biaks destroyed their gardens and gathered by the hundreds, sure that utopia was about to begin (see Kamma 1972). Under Indonesian rule, Koreri imagery and rhetoric have found their way into the Operasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Operation), a scattered yet tena- cious armed resistance movement seeking independence for the province of Irian Jaya (see Kapissa n.d.; Osborne 1985; Sharp 1994). While the ritual drinking and dancing associated with Koreri do not occur during prayer group meetings, members do take part in ecstatic bouts of hymn singing and praying. Heralded as prophets, leaders like Uncle Bert claim to owe their foresight to direct encounters with Manar- makeri, who is also sometimes known as Jesus or God.

I met Uncle Bert during a visit to a small atoll off Biak's coast. I had come to see him with his nephew, who had promised that his uncle had many stories to tell. Ac- companied by Edith, another friend, we made the trip by motorized outrigger on a stormy day with two Dutch tourists who told me that they were testing a guidebook. They seemed quietly pleased to discover that the entry on the atoll was inaccurate. In- deed, our destination was scarcely an "unspoiled paradise." First a command post, then a supply dump during the Allied invasion of Biak, the tiny island where we landed was strewn with wreckage. Its inhabitants had made their homes from the marks of spent aggression. The house where we stayed was representative: the ce- ment foundation of an abandoned warehouse formed the floor and porch; the walls were iron of roughly the same vintage; one of the tables was an old refrigerator; one of the chairs, a fighter pilot seat; a shining airplane wing provided a bench in the back. The Dutchman returned from snorkeling to report that the sea was "full of things"-in- cluding old bulldozers. The rubble also offered lodging for the fish.

On the edge of progress, among the husks of history, the tiny island seemed to epitomize Biak's marginality. Yet for the man I came to interview, it was a center. The World War II ruins covered over an older set of tracks, those left by the Itchy Old Man.

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Biaks widely agree that the most important episodes in the long and complicated myth of Manarmakeri took place on this site. The island is where the old man cap- tured the Morning Star, who gave him secret powers of production, and where he re- juvenated himself by jumping into a fire. In 1992, the government announced plans to take advantage of the atoll's past to develop its potential for cultural tourism. Bert saw no coincidence in this conjunction of local lore, world history, and national plan- ning. Where Mr. Fakiar and Mr. Senyenem, in differing ways, presented their texts as indebted to a foreign original whose full meaning and value lay beyond their grasp, Uncle Bert claimed to know the truth behind alien narratives. No less a handyman than his neighbors, instead of cobbling together rusting equipment, Bert worked with words.

Bert said that in the late 1980s, God (Manarmakeri) began sending him signs. As soon as Edith and I were seated, he disappeared into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a bible. Wordlessly, he pulled a laminated card from its pages and flipped it on the table. On one side was written, in English:

Independence Day 1943 Independent of Spirit

Depend on God.

On the other side was a black and white drawing. In the foreground were two figures in soldiers' caps. One was General MacArthur, Bert told us; the other was General Haig. Behind them, against the backdrop of what looked like an American flag, stood Jesus Christ. That was the Koreri flag, Bert corrected me: blue and white stripes, red and white stars.

Bert pulled out another card, a hologram of Christ standing atop a golden pedes- tal. In the clouds above his head was a white-bearded figure; below his left arm, a

spiked ball, below his right arm, a crescent moon. All the components of the myth of Manarmakeri were there, Bert told us: the old man, his son, the small yellow fruit, the

Morning Star-which was really the angel Gabriel. Bert brought out a bronze box

"just like the gold pedestal" and showed me its contents: a rock, a corroded brass ear-

ring, and another yellow fruit. We turned to the last two cards that Bert kept stored in his bible, which looked

like they belonged to a tarot deck. The first showed an old man with a cane, who was escorted by two dogs. The second showed a young man who was carrying a child and a shepherd's staff and leading several sheep. That was the Old Man, Bert told us, pointing to the first picture. The second picture revealed him in his other guise, that of the handsome young man he became after his baptism in fire.

Bert asked me to translate the English language prayer printed on the back of the first card, which I did to his satisfaction. He let me copy the verses on the back of the second, which he told me was in "Dutch." He did not ask me to translate these lines, which only served to highlight the significance of his possession of this seemingly un- translatable text.17 Written in Dutch, English, Biak, and a language Edith and I did not

recognize, the poem read:

Jesus from deh langeh jou de vis Shoupekh efendi long S. werden

grai firmen and webek kahat ende wile: From Sue laidmen di patnia

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ai tibk draits Manseren Kayan Biak Daite from Shop

According to Bert, Manarmakeri told him where to find the first card-in a Biak

City copy shop; he gave Bert the other cards on the small island.18 Bert was not alarmed to learn that I had seen these pictures in other peoples' possession; he claimed that relatives made photocopies, which quickly got passed along. Bert had other evidence to prove that he was the initial recipient. He brought out a green plastic flashlight, which he had received on November 11, 1991, when Manarmakeri came to tell him about his second coming. Bert told me that the brand name, "Technosub," meant "The Cleverness of the Irianese." He pointed to an enormous wooden cross mounted in the rafters above his head. Bert said that Manarmakeri first told him to look for this object suspended in the sky; when Bert returned the next day, it was planted in the sand. The last item that Bert showed me was a foot-long iron plate embossed with the words, "White Freightliner." Bert said that Manarmakeri told him that this object was a "travel permit" for voyages around the world.

Manarmakeri sent the flotsam and jetsam to confirm the predictions that he com- municated to Bert. Bert's other source of proof was the Bible. According to Bert, Manarmakeri informed his messenger where to search in the Scriptures, in the same

way that he told him where to look on the beach. Bert kept his Bible close at hand

throughout his long monologue on Biak's history and the times ahead. At various

points in his narrative, he cited chapters and verses, repeated them by heart, then showed me the pages for good measure. The Bible was a gift from Manarmakeri, Bert told me, no less than the other evidence. It was Manarmakeri who ordered Gutten- berg to print the Gospel. Bert explained that Manarmakeri wanted his people to know their history, and so he sent them the Book.

Bert's representation of the Bible superseded the images of the Scriptures de- picted above by repositioning the origin of foreign meaning. Bert's Gospel was nei- ther an heirloom nor a model; it was an abridged edition of Biak myth. No less than the signs that washed up on the small island's shores, it had to be reconciled to an original mythic text. The Land of Canaan was really this island, Bert told me, and the Israelites were really the Biaks.19 The island was also really Bethlehem, the birth place of the Lord. Manarmakeri's second coming would be revealed in Bert's village, where the world would gather to face him. From his Throne of Justice, Manarmakeri would sort the believers from the sinners: the saved would go to heaven, Bert explained; the rest, straight to hell.

Along with the Scriptures, Manarmakeri's messages incorporated the official nar- rative of development. According to Bert, everything that the government told the Biaks confirmed a master scheme. This year's tourists belonged to the first wave of Westerners who would come to Biak. Next year, a national women's conference would attract delegates from 99 nations. In 1995, all of Bali's visitors would flock to Biak for a festival to celebrate the opening of a seven-star hotel. In the years that fol- lowed, the non-lrian Indonesians would leave, replaced by "white people" like the Allies and the Israelis. At the end of the century, Bert told me, the world would "leave the launching pad"-a popular New Order cliche-and Manarmakeri would appear. Articulating the New Order's futurist rhetoric, Bert contained the Indonesian govern- ment's current schemes within his prophecy. He validated his predictions by identify- ing Manarmakeri with the powerful others who backed the New Order regime. As Bert saw it, the Biak hero had obviously scripted the government's plans and projects-

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why else would they be financed by Western loans? What was returning to Biak now was simply the "dregs," merely a trace of the riches to come.

Given the all-encompassing scope of his prophecies, very little had the power to

surprise Bert. He predicted my visit days in advance; as soon as he heard our outrig- ger, he knew that I had arrived. As the earthly medium of Manarmakeri's messages, Bert said that he was the first to learn of all events.20 Yet in another sense, Bert's prox- imity to what he took as the true source of foreign knowledge and power only intensi- fied the alien character of what Manarmakeri revealed. In order to convey miraculous

predictions, Manarmakeri had to motivate unintelligible signs. Bert told me that he did not immediately recognize the codes that flowed from his pen when Manarmakeri inspired him to write in other languages. According to Bert, Manarmakeri had to tell him that a text was "Greek" and explain how to read it before the traces disappeared. In the same way, Manarmakeri helped him pair proper names with secret denota- tions: Biak was really "Bangun Ikut Anak Kristus" (Rise and Follow the Child of Christ), "Bila IngatAkan Kembali" (If Remembered, Will Return), and "Berbiak-biak- lah kau menutupi dunia" (Be fruitful and multiply). Proper names are said to be what passes between languages without transformation (cf. Baker 1993). A powerful ances- tor had given Bert access to the true message behind these seemingly untranslatable

signs (cf. Becker 1995:56). It is worth noting the difference between Bert's claim to authority and the strate-

gies of Mr. Fakiar and Mr. Senyenem. Mr. Fakiar took foreign books as an absent site of surplus objects, signifying his proximity to the alien original by flooding the "mar- ket" with his circulating translations. Mr. Senyenem took foreign narratives as an ab- sent site of surplus significance, cranking out pages in an attempt to be complete. In Bert's prophecies, the foreign source of surplus was interiorized in the guise of a se- cret meaning. Instead of beckoning on the horizon, the truth became autochthonous: it lay within the parameters of Biak myth. This transformation of the foreign text im- plied a reconfiguring of the relationship between mobility and authority posited in the practices of most big foreigners. Where others spoke on the basis of their privileged access to distant places and times, Bert claimed to be recognized where he stood. He bragged that he never left his home. He did not need to, for the tourists knew where to find him; even Western faith healers came asking him to be blessed.

Bert's radical reframing of outsiders' discourse drew on the authority of Manar- makeri, a figure who explicitly embodies the connections between the alien and the ancestral (see Rutherford 1997:424-461). Although Bert saw signs that outsiders were coming to recognize Biak's true importance, the prophet's predictions would only be confirmed in the impossible event of Manarmakeri's return. Just as Manarmakeri's ar- rival would spell the end of the world, it would also spell the end of Biak's big foreign- ers. As Bert envisioned it, the utopian future had no room for local aliens: only "Papuans," white people, and the Indonesians whose removal would satisfy all de- sires. Koreri, defined as the final encounter with the foreign, would put an end to the practices through which Biaks create their identities. No longer in the distance, the foreign would be present, closing the quest for value and prestige. The alien and the ancestral would be as one.

Given the cost to other aspiring leaders, it has taken rare talents and special con- ditions for prophets like Bert to attract a broad-based following. Even though she shared Bert's desire for Koreri, my educated friend Edith, for instance, had her doubts. As this bin amber (female foreigner) saw matters, Bert was not misled about Biak's se- cret place in the world; he was mistaken about the Bible. "What about Herod?" she mused, when we were alone. Bert's attempt to encompass the Bible in Biak myth had

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failed, given his inability to find a meaning for all the Gospel's strange details. With this simple question, Edith restored the untranslated to the foreign text, thus reinstat-

ing the grounds for her own pursuit of status. Without discrediting the dream of Koreri, she undermined Bert's predictions (c.f. Kermode 1967:8). Edith did not doubt the divinity of Manarmakeri. She simply wanted to keep him in the distant Land of the

Foreigners, where no one interpretation could pin him down.

conclusion

Kept at the distance, the Land of the Foreigners offers Biaks multiple sources of

authority. By closing the gap between Biak and the alien sources of local power, Un- cle Bert quite explicitly sought to displace big foreigners like Mr. Senyenem and Mr. Fakiar, not to mention the government employees with whom I began this article.21 Bert's prophecy undermined claims to authority that posit access to an inscrutable surfeit of significance. His rhetoric reduced the strange character of alien texts by demonstrating his mastery of the local meanings of foreign words. But as I hope I have made clear in the preceding pages, Bert and his opponents are not mutually exclusive characters. His messianic practices took to an extreme the logic that orients the nor- mal pursuit of power. While I am not concerned with millenarianism per se, my find-

ings call into question the view that such movements necessarily signal a radical break with "earthly authority" (see Bloch 1992:91). In their recourse to the foreign, of- ficials who seemingly support the status quo anticipate prophets who openly opposed the state.

The affinity between elite Biaks and leaders of an openly rebellious bent illumi- nates the complex nature of resistance in Indonesia's "out of the way" places. In re- cent years, Indonesianists have examined the varied ways that people in marginal communities respond to the incursions of global capitalism and an authoritarian state (see George 1996; Spyer 1996, 1997; Steedly 1993; Tsing 1993, 1994). In Biak, it is not self-conscious "back-talk" that undermines the state's authority; what matters is a dynamic relationship to outsiders that both shapes and is shaped by a local competi- tion for prestige. Across periods of great change, what has persisted in Biak history has been a form of sociality that valorizes the very forces of disruption. Grounded in his- tory and the practices of everyday life, social relations on Biak fuel a stance on distant authorities that is sometimes subversive, sometimes openly supportive, but always corrosive of a lasting submission to their power.

It is with this stance in mind that I consider the pro-independence protests that occurred in Biak and elsewhere in Irian Jaya in 1998 during the months following Suharto's resignation (see Rutherford 1999). I do not mean to imply that the practices I describe in this article served as a veil for the true sentiments of the individuals in- volved. Yet, I cannot help but note the fact that the separatist movement has found support among individuals who seemed as pro-Indonesian as anyone I met in the field. In the early 1990s, the men and women I describe in this article managed to submit to present demands, while remaining open to alternative futures. The lessons to be learned from their practices should lead analysts to rethink the limits of differ- ence in a seemingly "modern" Indonesia. The particularities born of differing histories of contact and conquest may well have persisted within the borders of the most cen- tralizing of regimes. In an age with little room for distance, one corner of the New Or- der may have been saving a frontier.

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notes

Acknowledgments. The research on which this article is based was undertaken during dissertation fieldwork supported by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, a Predoctoral Grant from the Wenner-Gren Founda- tion for Anthropological Research, and a grant from the Joint Committee on Southeast Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Earlier versions were presented on December 12, 1995, at "Border Fetishisms," a conference of the Research Centre for Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam; on April 12, 1996, in "Materializations of Modernity," a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Asian Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii; and on Octo- ber 28, 1996, at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. I would like to thank Fenella Cannell, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth George, Frances Gouda, Michael Herzfeld, Webb Keane, John Pemberton, James Siegel, Patricia Spyer, G. G. Weix, and three anonymous re- viewers for their many helpful comments on an evolving manuscript.

1. Goody's argument recalls Durkheim's depiction of Christianity's role in initiating a path to modernity that follows a gradient from the concrete to the abstract:

It is only with Christianity that God finally goes beyond space; His Kingdom is no longer of this world. The dissociation of nature and the divine becomes so complete that it even de- generates into hostility. At the same time, the notion of divinity becomes more general and abstract, but it is formed not of sensations, as it was in the beginning, but from ideas. [1984(1893):230-231]

See also Bataille 1992 and Derrida 1995. On the relationship between modernity and new con- ceptions of "space-time," see Giddens 1990 and Habermas 1990.

2. To locate themselves in the broader population of orang Papua (Papuans) or orang Irian (Irian Jayans), people autochthonous to these islands refer to themselves as orang Biak (Biaks). I have followed their convention in this article. See Rutherford 1998a:257 for a discussion of the origins of this ethnic label.

3. This quotation comes from the missionary-anthropologist's description of the shamanic practices that he encountered in the 1930s among the Besewer, a Biak migrant community in the Radja Ampat islands.

4. See Bhabha 1998:124 on "the ethical need to negotiate the incommensurable, yet in- tolerable" in the context of minority writing.

5. For a definition of postcoloniality, see Appiah 1991:438: "Postcoloniality is the condi- tion of what we might ungenerously call a compradorintelligentsia: a relatively small, Western- style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery." Miyoshi (1993) argues that in the context of a homogenizing, neocolonial global order, dominated by transnational corporations, the term can be misleading. My goal in stressing continuities with the colonial period is not to address the structural questions Miyoshi's essay raises, but rather to illuminate the historicity of a par- ticular mode of mediating between audiences.

6. Discussing Koran recitation in the Moluccan village of Kalaodi, Baker depicts a process the logic of which resembles that described in this article. "What is blocked from the Kalaodi by the foreignness of the language is semantic meaning. This without question blocks comprehen- sion. But, the foreignness of the language does not impede the apprehension of words as names-in particular, words recognized as proper names" (see Baker 1993:110). Baker goes on to argue that the Kalaodi's focus on the indexical character of what they are hearing allows for a "joining together of Islamic scriptural traditions and local ancestral ones" that undermines a "lit- eral and lawful minded reading" (1993:1 31). It is worth noting that the case that Baker analyzes comes from Tidore, a place with a long-standing historical relation to Biak (see Andaya 1993).

7. See Jakobson 1987:71 on selection and combination as "the two basic modes of ar- rangement used in verbal behavior." While this approach to signification is generally associated with Saussure, who focused on semantic meaning, the broader functional modes of speech ad- dressed by pragmatic analysis are no less dependent on conventional distinctions, in the form of what Silverstein (1976:25) refers to as "rules of use" (see also Benveniste 1971).

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8. On the possibility of multiple linguistic ideologies concerning translation, see Rafael 1993(1988). On translation, untranslatability, and authority, see Benjamin 1968b and Derrida 1985. On the difficulties of translating Christian texts, see Renck cl 990.

9. For the results of efforts to apply the model in Austronesian-speaking parts of Melanesia, see Battaglia 1991, Jolly 1991, and Liep 1991; for a critique based on comparisons among southern New Guinea societies, see Knauft 1996. I consider Biak social organization in the con- text of Southeast Asian and Melanesian models in Rutherford 1998a.

10. While these individuals are often men, women can also become "big foreigners," as the following paragraphs suggest, not simply through education, but through participating in domestic exchanges in the role of brothers. Biaks still tell stories about snon bin (male women) who were renowned warriors and highly prized wives. For more on snon bin and bin amber(fe- male foreigners), see Rutherford 1997:162.

11. Unlike in Papua New Guinea, "business" is not an important sphere of action for con-

temporary Irian Jayans. While Biaks were renowned as traders in the past, in contemporary Biak, cash-cropping and the wholesale and retail market sector is dominated by western Indo- nesian migrants (see Rutherford in press).

12. It is telling that the most valuable component of the porcelain used in bridewealth is called the "head" (see Rutherford 1997:153).

13. Those who reflected on the tendency described the need to prepare youngsters to talk with visitors and to give them a head start at school.

14. Mr. Wompere was one of several Biaks I met who told me that they had served as in- formants for F. C. Kamma (1972) when he was conducting research on Biak during the early 1950s. Mr. Wompere's notebooks may have dated from this work.

15. They had personal reasons as well. An acquaintance who served as a driver under the Dutch could scarcely contain himself when he learned that I had read de Bruyn's (1978) autobi- ography, which happened to mention his name. "That book! That book! It's me!"

16. The potency associated with the Bible in this story recalls the agency that Biaks some- times attribute to antique porcelain and ancestral skulls (see Rutherford 1997:309-317; see also Hoskins 1993:127).

17. Benjamin (1 968b:70) refers to the dual nature of the question of whether a work is translatable: "Either: Will an adequate translator ever be found among the totality of its readers? Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the sig- nificance of the mode, call for it?" But he also notes in the same essay that it is the "hallmark of bad translation" when the translator's goal is to do nothing but transmit information. For Ben- jamin, it is the "nucleus of pure language" that is the ultimate target of translation; what calls for translation and at the same time resists it is a kernel of untranslatability, residing in the bond be- tween content and code. In Bert's poem, the resources of linguistic difference provide a figure of incommensurability: the historically situated, fetishistically elaborated site through which claims to authority in this society are made.

18. Bert told me to disregard the Biak names scribbled on two of them; Mr. Fakiar and Bert's cousin had somehow managed to sign these signs. Mr. Fakiar had taken the first card from Bert's aunt, along with a letter that Manarmakeri had written to Bert's ancestor. Scratching out the name of this 19th-century Koreri leader, Mr. Fakiar had replaced it with his own. Bert had found the card in a Biak City copy shop, where Manarmakeri sent him to find evidence that would help him retrieve the letter.

19. The original inhabitants of the small island were like the original inhabitants of Ca- naan, who were chased away by the Israelites. Others would say that the Land of Canaan was really Biak as a whole. A slippage between local and global versions is very common when it comes to the myth of Manarmakeri. Uncle Bert is, of course, not the first to identify his group with the Israelites (see, e.g., Markowitz 1996).

20. According to Bert, Manarmakeri had made the "smart bombs" that won the Americans the Gulf War. Closer to home, he had his hand in destruction as well as development. When a merchant refused to take an old villager's money, Bert explained, his shop and many others burnt to the ground (see Rutherford in press). Visits to the small island were never without sig- nificance. An Italian had a dictionary that listed the first Bethlehem as this place, Bert told me.

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An Israeli whose surname sounded like Bert's turned out to be "Grandfather" in disguise. Bert had been ready for my visit well in advance. When he heard the noise of our outrigger, Bert knew that "Grandmother" had arrived.

21. See Rutherford 1997:548-549 on the animosity of earlier Koreri prophets toward teachers, church leaders, and government officials. Bert did, in fact, mention one well-known

"big foreigner" dismissively during our conversation.

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acceptedJuly 26, 1999 final version submitted August 11, 1999

Danilyn Rutherford

Department of Anthropology University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street

Chicago, IL 60637 drutherf@midway. uchicago. edu

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