Organizer: Patricia Spyer, University of Amsterdam
Chair: Webb Keane, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: John Pemberton, University of Washington
One of the characteristic forms in which the many varieties of modernity enter ordinary lives is in the transfigured values, meanings, and forms of circulation taken by material objects. Classic accounts of modernity, for example, give special attention to commodities and money, as defining what distinguished "modern" from other societies not just as economies, but as networks of interpersonal ties, forms of self-knowledge, and possibilities for action. The way objects mediate people's experience of modernity, however, is not a straightforward matter. In narratives of rapid historical change, for example, commodities can appear as both alienating and liberating. This panel is meant to explore the shapes that modernity can take by looking at the character of objects and the subjects who own, desire, interpret, or even fear them.
What are the sentiments inspired by and discourses surrounding such characteristically "modern" objects as items of fashion, household appliances, emblems of ethnicity, or works of art? These questions are of particular interest in the context of Indonesia's rapidly growing consumer cultures.
The Tooth of Time or, Taking a Look at the "Look" of Clothing in Late
19th-Century Art
Patricia Spyer, University of Amsterdam
In the late 19th century, descriptions of Aruese in "native," "national," and European styles of dress were a regular feature of both travelers and official accounts of these southeast Moluccan islands. If the former could be cast comfortably within fairly standardized genres of Otherness, what seems to have made for a distinct and-in one or another fashion-often unsettling experience for the Europeans were those moments when they felt their own gaze and turned back upon themselves, when the gaze, as it were, became a "look" as Aruese appeared before them in European guise. Made over in metropole mode, the islanders seemed to stand before the Europeans as an uncanny, slightly "off" copy of themselves.
This paper traces the fine line between mimicry and mockery that runs like a red thread through European descriptions of the dressed aspect of Aruese and that also informs the colonial obsession with things like "imaginary chiefs" and "mock heads." In so doing, the paper highlights some of the strategies that Europeans deployed to confront the troubling coevalness implicit in the confounding of colonizer and colonized. Insofar as Aruese were always already "out of date," their clothes both literally and metaphorically gnawed by what one observer termed "the tooth of time," "fashion" enabled the making and marking of crucial distinctions. Caught between the "civilizing" gesture of enclothing persons and populations and the spectre of a mimicry gone awry, such as some of the "colonial contradictions that help to reveal the cracks in modernity's mirror" (N. Dirks).
The State on the Skin: Clothes, Shoes and Neatness in (Colonial) Indonesia
Henk Schulte Nordholt, University of Amsterdam
The history of various ways of dressing has for a long time been ignored in Indonesia. If clothes were the object of study, it was in a classic ethnography describing rituals or textiles. Moreover, it appears that in many historical studies most actors go naked, because their clothes are not described. Nevertheless, clothes are our social skin and signify social relationships and identities.
In this paper I want to elaborate how the colonial state and the Indonesian nation-state affected the ways particular people dress(ed) themselves. The disappearance of so-called mestizo dress among Europeans, the rise of uniforms, as attempts to control the population, but also as a means to participate in the state, the contradictions involved in ideas about modernity, and a story on shoes as markers of state formation-cum-civilization, will be discussed.
I will also indicate that clothes should not be seen in isolation, but in the context of architecture, furniture, statues, gestures and so on, in order to understand what their meaning and significance may be or have been.
Eating the Book in Biak, Irian Jaya: The Shock of Modernity on a Colonial
Frontier
Danilyn Rutherford, Cornell University
For Protestant missionaries on the eastern edge of the Netherlands Indies, the turn of this century marked the dawn of an age of awakening. As steamships and soldiers reached New Guinea's shores, Biak's heathens seemed ready-even eager-to embrace Christianity. Thirty years later, when messianism again swept the island, the reports to Holland were bleaker. In a movement that mimed modernity's dreams, Christian Biak seemed ready to explode.
Elsewhere in the Indies, the uncanny "fit" of the modern self gave way to a taken-for-granted subjectivity. From a jolt of recognition arose a new sort of subject, oriented to an interiorized object of desire. But on Biak, moments that might have marked an accession to modernity opened different horizons. This paper will explore the role of objects in the subversion of efforts to engender a modern Biak subject. It will show how Biaks, in fetishizing the foreign, have deferred modernity by incorporating its shocks. It will do so by charting the pursuit of authority through practices and fantasies involving foreign writing. It will focus on Biak notions of the Bible as an eroticized figure of messianic power. By "swallowing" the Book instead of the "truth" of salvation, Biak society has kept divine potency at large. Confounding the spatial and the spritual, Biak repeats its conversion on modernity's frontier.