Rutherford2000IrianJayatextualauthority AE

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
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the white edge of the margin:textualityand authorityin Biak,IrianJaya, Indonesia
DANILYN RUTHERFORD University of Chicago In Biak, IrianJaya, in the fareast 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 translations of an alien text. I explore the implications of this strategy for pursuing authority by examining the worldview expressed in big foreigners' translations of the Bible and other imported works. The case of Biak calls into question scholarly treatmentsthat have taken literacy and Christianconversion as setting the stage for the emergence of postcolonial forms of hegemony. In valorizing the textual aspects of outsiders' words, Biaks reproduce a boundary between local and national structuresof meaning, keeping foreign orders at a distance even as they tap them for authority and power. [leadership, literacy, intercultural translation, relations,postcolonialsocieties, modernity] Christianity,
It has long been an anthropological commonplace that the introduction of reading and writing can transformlocal 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 consciousness, on the other (see Anderson 1991 [1983]; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Gewertz and Errington1993, 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 facilitating an "emptying"of space and time reappears in Anderson's (1991 [1983]) depiction of the development of national identity. Anderson suggests that reading the newspaper ("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. Isthere 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 literacy 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, IrianJaya, Indonesia, an island group off the northwestern coast of New Guinea with high reported rates of literacy in Indonesia's national language and a complicated colonial past (see de Bruyn 1948).2 In particular, I examine the practices of
American Ethnologist27(2):31 2-339. Copyright? 2000, American Anthropological Association.
the white edge of the margin
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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 Landof the Foreigners),which refersto 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, Indonesia's recently deposed authoritarianregime. 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 reminderthat the recruitment of national subjects entails recognition and not simply reading: people 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 excerpt from an article by the first anthropologist to write about Biak. The Dutch Protestant missionary, F. C. Kamma, has just described how he must lock up his libraryto keep the natives from stealing his books. workof ThomasAquinas, And so I came upon a badlybattered copy of the principle Summatheologicain Spanish.Someone had obtainedit froma ship'scaptainin exthattimeon, thisbookhasbeen usedto summonthe spirit changefora chicken.From of the author(sic!).Peoplecall the book:MonBlanda (theDutchShaman).... Whenever someoneis sickandthe shamanwantsto knowifthe patient will get better or not, he goes to workin the followingfashion. Itis saidthatthe man calls the authorand thatthe spiritof the latterspeaksthrough the sign him;it is even saidthathe usesthe author's language .... Thisspiritindicates of the patient's soul. . . withthe shaman's of the letfinger.Thismarkis one or another ters.Whenthe letteris locatedclose to the margin, this meanshis life is in danger;if the markis farfromthe edge, thatmeansthatpeople need notworry.Thewhiteedge of the margin is the lineof 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 incommensurability that Biaks both negotiate and reproduce in their dealings with powerful 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 practices 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 missionaryunderstood 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 Protestantchurch founded by the missionaries is firmly entrenched, it appears at first glance that this shaman's mode of appropriatingforeign 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 government rhetoric. These performances were surprising, given the fact that IrianJaya in general, and Biak in particular,are sometimes seen as hotbeds of opposition to the Indonesian state. By virtue of a complicated politics of decolonization I can only allude to here, the western half of New Guinea became partof the Republic of Indonesia at a later date than the rest of the former Dutch EastIndies (see Campo 1986; Haga 1884; Klein 1937; Lijphart1966; Rutherford1997, 1998b). Since the early 1960s, when Indonesia took control of what is now IrianJaya, a sporadically active separatist movement has fought for the founding of an independent West Papuan state. Educated Biaks have played key roles in the development of West Papuan nationalism. Butthey 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 IrianJayans were choosing careers in the military and civil service was not surprising in the early 1990s; the state was the major employer in the province. What was surprisingwas the way that those with a connection to the New Order government, no matter how tenuous, would deploy it to their advantage 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 visitor 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 thirtyyears (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 particularlysensitive negotiation I attended, the prospective bride's family recruited a lieutenant colonel stationed in Jakartato speak on their behalf. This big foreigner arrived, in full uniform, on a Sunday afternoon to deliver a monologue filled with references 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 particularcase. His strategy rendered explicit 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 hearing 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 outsiders' 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 entextualization 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 differences into the contexts they serve to constitute and connect. This potential for estrangement rests on two related aspects of signification. On the one hand, signification 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 particularsegment of discourse 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 significance 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: meaning only emerges in relation to what will have come before. As the basis for these interrelated qualities of the trace, the problematically material character of discourse opens the possibility for divergent readings and renderings. Even official pronouncements can run astray. The stress that Biaks place on the indexical character of certain instances of discourse-taking words as impressions left by the impact of absent worlds-foregrounds aspects of signification suppressed in settings where language is taken as a transparentinstrumentto 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 treatments of the written word (see Boyarin 1993; Ewald 1988; George 1990; Gewertz and Errington1991; Kulick 1992; Kulickand Stroud 1993; McKenzie 1987; Messick 1989; O'Hanlon 1995; Silverstein and Urban 1997; Street 1984, 1993). Other research 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; Lindstrom1984, 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 translation in an expanded sense to referto 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 impetus 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 sociocultural 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, representationsof a particularlysignificant foreign original: the Bible, which for Biaks has long been a sacred text. The first set of practices portraythe Bible and other texts as treasured possessions; the second 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 possible is the potential for alienation that is a feature of every signifying act. In the conclusion, I hint at the implications of these effortsto appropriatethe authorityof foreign writing in relation to the recent resurgence of separatism in IrianJaya.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 opposition. It is the paradoxical product of a historical dynamic that has made the foreign 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 EasternMalayo-Polynesian (see Blust 1988:29; see also Bellwood 1995), is spoken by roughly three quartersof the population, which also includes non-Biak IrianJayans 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 regency's multiethnic capital city, site of government offices, military barracks, a sizeable 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 refueling 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 majorityof the island's indigenous inhabitants earn their living in more or less remote ruralvillages as subsistence farmers, fishermen, and hunters. While they seem worlds apart, rural and urban Biak are tightly linked. Ruralwomen travel frequently to town to go to market and bring food to urban relatives, who often take in students from their home villages. In turn, town-dwellers work to maintain a good reputation back home by supporting 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 acquaintances tended to take pride in their group's long history of relations with rulers 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 voyages 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 Europeanexplorers, 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 administratorswho founded a post in the same vicinity in 1898 (see Beekman 1989; Kamma 1976; Smeele 1988). By virtue of their early exposure to the mission and colonial administration, peofrom Biak played an important role in Dutch New Guinea, first as teachers and ple evangelists, then as coolies and ship hands, and finally as soldiers, officials, and politicians. 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 outside 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 focuses on tribal societies supposedly isolated from the impact of state-based forms of hegemony.9 Godelier locates "greatmen," 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 sisters. Unions are not permitted between first and second cousins, giving rise to a pattern of "scattered alliance" (cf. Liep 1991:38). While Biaksoccasionally referto inherited prerogatives, one tends to find a downplaying of lineage-based claims to authority. Biak leaders resemble what Wolters (1982, 1994), writing of early Southeast 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.10The 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 offspringas evidence of his masteryof exogenous sources of value. The children who receive these offerings at life-cycle feasts or in informal settings are seen as gaining the bravery and strength they will need to venture out to foreign realms. Motivated by a brother's "love" for his outmarriedsister, 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. Aspiring 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 arrayof spheres, from distant 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 village chiefs, appointed in Tidore (mananir menu) (Kamma 1972:12-13; see also Feuilletau de Bruyn 1920). Today's Biak leaders range from government officials to pastors
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to traditional musicians, blacksmiths, and healers."1One 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 rightto pronounce on mattersof collective concern. 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 foreigners with connections to the militaryor 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 valued 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 authoritywhen it indexes access to absent sources of value and power (cf. Helms 1988, 1993). The gifts that circulate on Biak embody different histories, connecting the alien with the past and the ancestors 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-shirtor radio recently acquired in Jakartaevokes a less layered sense of distancing 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 narrativesthat confirm their access to the ancestral origins of the group. Blurringthe line between words and things, both titles and trade goods serve as booty marking an encounter in an alien realm. Intrinsicto 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 relations with the early evangelists (see Rutherfordn.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 interpreterswho accompanied foreign expeditions 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 administrationthroughout 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 conversations among adults, who embellish their Biak anecdotes with Indonesian, Dutch, and Englishwords. Friends told me that "children's language" (wos romawa)
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was "foreign language" (wos amber), as people call Indonesian. Mothers often address toddlers in the national language, leaving the mother tongue for conversations amongst themselves.13 Given the prestige women gain from raising famous "foreigners," this tendency makes a certain sense. Some of my informants bemoaned the impending demise of wos Biak; one man, half-joking, forecast the day when his grandchildren 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 Indonesian in lessons, sermons, and official speeches supports this gloomy view, Biak remains 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 assigned to govern Biak after World War II,called the islanders "the most cultivated and therefore most progressive Papuans in Netherlands New Guinea, among whom illiteracy 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 conversion 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 primaryeducation; many go on to junior and senior high school, for which their families pay nominal fees. While de Bruyn'sestimate may well have been inflated, literacy is an important 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 majorityof reading materials one finds in Biak residences (cf. Kulick and Stroud 1993:36). Families keep bibles and Indonesian language hymnals, stored in fancy leather cases by more affluent urbanites or tucked in woven bags and hidden in the raftersof a ruralhome. 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 issued by the colonial government. Among the newer publications that people collected 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 Englishbooks. 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 dropout 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 schoolteacher 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 records 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 evangelist 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. Itwas almost as if the old man had kept these meticulous records in hopes of someday meeting 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 culture.'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 informantssang 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" before they all died. Expertson custom were delighted, not embarrassed, when I recognized 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 informantstried to support their words with the authorityof 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 demonstrateone's privileged access to the truthscontained in texts that are difficult to obtain or understand. But while literacy is an importantcomponent of the repertoireof 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. Biaksdo not draw a sharp divide between these traditionalfigures and their Westernized 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 notions of writing and authority. Nevertheless, Biaks have incorporated Protestantconceptions of the "power of the Word" in highly specific ways (Rutherfordn.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 Biakcharacters. Their practices merely serve to illustratesome of the myriad ways in which Biaks register and reproduce difference by positioning themselves as monopolizing a key source of truthsfrom 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. Fakiarbelongs 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 relatingto the land
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disputes that have been smoldering in the subregency of South Biak since the displacement 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 researching a case study on land disputes. Since returningfor 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, telling 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. Fakiarrummaged for books. He had greeted me with delight, quickly changing into a government partyT-shirtbefore launching into a monologue. 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. Everyday, from dawn until dark, Mr. Fakiardid nothing but write. When he was not writing, he was consulting his libraryof rareforeign 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, "probablythe 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 writings 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 English summary. I perused the disquisition on Tobati kinship and ritual, while my informant looked for more materials. "Ibet you haven't seen this!" he chuckled, placing before me a glossy guidebook to Netherlands New Guinea, dated 1956 (see Vademecum 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 (a portrait of the native's temperament), manuscripts: "The Papuan Volkskarakter" "The Government of the Dutch EastIndies"(a history of Old Batavia),and "Biakin the War Years" (a military description of the island's defenses during World War II). When I asked Mr. Fakiarabout 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. Fakiarnever found the manuscripts he was looking for that day, but he urged me to take the others when I left. Mr. Fakiartreated me the way a senior faculty member might treat a first-yearstudent: he loaded me up with references and sent me on my way. But I would not want to take for granted Mr. Fakiar'sperformance simply because it calls to mind something that I think I know. Like scholars elsewhere, Mr. Fakiaroffered his manuscripts as valued objects that he was eager to put into circulation. His writings were translations 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 libraryof the retired civil servant-some so rare that they were not even there-played the role of what Weiner (1992) calls "inalienable possessions": highly valued objects removed from circulation 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, represented within transactions yet absent from exchange. Realized in a combination of practice and rhetoric, Mr. Fakiar'sstrategy had similar effects. Lettinghim give while keeping his precious originals, Mr. Fakiar'sceaseless 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 cosmological sources of authentication. If the ownership of a treasured heirloom strengthens the position of particularkin groups or persons, it is by virtue of its paradoxical 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. Fakiarbrought home a simple truth:just as objects gain meaning through their embeddedness in broader contexts of social discourse, transcendence and ancestrality are created in locally distinctive ways. Reflecting a tendency common among Biak leaders, Mr. Fakiarused his mastery of the foreign in an imaginative effort to act as a future ancestor himself. On one level, he proved this mastery by structuringthe aura of an elsewhere into his performance. 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 uncanny auto-inspiration by defining his texts as a legacy for his son. Transformingthe foreign into the origin of a new genealogy, Mr. Fakiartried 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'slibraryto 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 markersof social standing, particularbibles are closely associated with particularpersons. 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 Biaktravellers, 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 "breakingthe warrior's spear." The magical and the ancestral come together in a story an old man told me about an encounter between 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 genealogy. But the ancestors remain encompassed by the foreign, which remains beyond anyone's control. My encounter with Mr. Fakiarrevealed just one of a repertoire of strategies for translatingforeign texts into a source of authority.The next big foreigner illustratesanother 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. LikeMr. Fakiar,Mr. Senyenem views his translations as an inheritance for future generations. But here, the foreign original is not only an inaccessible 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 Protestant mission to serve as a teacher and evangelist. Mr. Senyenem spent his career teaching in primaryschools across the island, before retiringto his EastBiak home village to serve as a member of the EastBiak 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 Rutherford1996; 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! Ikheb 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 transcribingwor. Before we began, he usually 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. Furtheron, 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 IrianJaya's Evangelical Church. "Everything will go in," Mr. Senyenem promised me. "Had to start in the beginning. In Germany." I looked at the opening chapter; indeed, Opiaref's past began in Berlin with the theologian who trained New Guinea's firstevangelists. 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 Landof 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'ssuccinct translations. Both men viewed their translations as a source of
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genealogical continuity. But here, the parallel ends. Mr. Fakiar'songoing transactions enabled him to "give-while-keeping" a treasuredobject. 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 manuscript exemplifies how Biak translatorsconfirm the "foreignness"of foreign texts, even as they transformthem into a source of local truths. It is not only in encounters with local historiansthat 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 congregational 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 relevant 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 ruralacquaintances confirmed, the Dutch archive of the Biak imagination was not the same archive that I consulted in Holland. As seen by Biaks, the distant repository 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 archive 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 versions of the most famous foreign works: A Miracle in Our Eyes (Kamma1981, 1982a), Ottow and Geissler: West Irian'sApostles (Mamoribo 1971 b), A Brief History of the IrianJaya Evangelical Church (Mamoribo 1965), The Fortat Yenbekakiand 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 Bible is the most fertile site of translation on Biak. Itcirculates in languages national and local, written and spoken, in story books, sermons, and songs. Whether or not they used the word translation, my informantsmade it clear that they traced their sermons and compositions to privileged encounters with the Holy Writ. One lay preacher described the fear and exhilaration she felt when she mounted the pulpit. "This is God's Gospel," she informed me gravely. "It'snot just any old book!" Biak descriptions of the impossible, yet imperative, mission of conveying God's word portraywitnessing 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 Rutherford1997). Here, as well, the Biblical text appears as an inexhaustible 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 foreign 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 sensitive to the subversive nature of his kinsman's activities. While Mr. Fakiarand 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 government appointed village chiefs, colonial-era Koreriprophets exerted remarkable influence 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, Koreriimagery and rhetoric have found their way into the Operasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Operation), a scattered yet tenacious 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 Korerido 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 Manarmakeri, 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. Accompanied 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. Indeed, our destination was scarcely an "unspoiled paradise." Firsta 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 cement foundation of an abandoned warehouse formed the floor and porch; the walls one of were iron of roughly the same vintage; one of the tables was an old refrigerator; the chairs, a fighter pilot seat; a shining airplane wing provided a bench in the back. The Dutchman returnedfrom snorkeling to reportthat the sea was "fullof things"-including 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 IIruins 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 captured the Morning Star,who gave him secret powers of production, and where he rejuvenated 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 planning. Where Mr. Fakiarand 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 rustingequipment, Bertworked with words. Bertsaid that in the late 1980s, God (Manarmakeri)began sending him signs. As soon as Edithand Iwere seated, he disappeared into his bedroom, returninga 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 of Spirit Independent Dependon 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 Koreriflag, Bert corrected me: blue and white stripes, red and white stars. Bertpulled out another card, a hologram of Christstanding atop a golden pedestal. 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 Manarmakeriwere there, Berttold 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 "justlike the gold pedestal" and showed me its contents: a rock, a corroded brass earring, 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 carryinga 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 translatethese lines, which only served to highlight the significance of his possession of this seemingly untranslatable text.17Written in Dutch, English, Biak, and a language Edithand I did not recognize, the poem read:
Jesus from deh langeh jou de vis Shoupekh efendi long S. werden grai firmen and
ende webek kahat

wile: FromSue laidmen di patnia
the white edge of the margin ai tibkdraits Manseren Biak Kayan DaitefromShop
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According to Bert, Manarmakeritold 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 broughtout a green plastic flashlight, which he had received on November 11, 1991, when Manarmakericame to tell him about his second coming. Berttold me that the brand name, "Technosub," meant "The Cleverness of the Irianese." He pointed to an enormous wooden cross mounted in the raftersabove his head. Bertsaid that Manarmakerifirsttold him to look for this object suspended in the sky; when Bert returnedthe next day, it was planted in the sand. The last item that Bertshowed me was a foot-long iron plate embossed with the words, "White Freightliner."Bert said that Manarmakeritold him that this object was a "travelpermit"for voyages around the world. Manarmakerisent the flotsam and jetsam to confirm the predictions that he communicated 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 Manarmakeriwho ordered Guttenberg to print the Gospel. Bertexplained that Manarmakeriwanted 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 depicted above by repositioning the origin of foreign meaning. Bert's Gospel was neither 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 Landof Canaan was really this island, Berttold me, and the Israeliteswere really the Biaks.19 The island was also really Bethlehem, the birth place of the Lord.Manarmakeri'ssecond coming would be revealed in Bert'svillage, where the world would gather to face him. From his Throne of Justice, Manarmakeriwould sort the believers from the sinners: the saved would go to heaven, Bertexplained; the rest, straightto hell. Along with the Scriptures,Manarmakeri'smessages incorporated the official narrative 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 followed, the non-lrian Indonesians would leave, replaced by "white people" like the Allies and the Israelis.At the end of the century, Berttold me, the world would "leave the launching pad"-a popular New Order cliche-and Manarmakeriwould appear. Articulating the New Order's futuristrhetoric, Bert contained the Indonesian government's current schemes within his prophecy. He validated his predictions by identifying Manarmakeri with the powerful others who backed the New Order regime. As Bertsaw it, the Biak hero had obviously scripted the government'splans and projects-
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why else would they be financed by Western loans? What was returningto 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 outrigger, he knew that I had arrived. As the earthly medium of Manarmakeri'smessages, Bert said that he was the firstto learn of all events.20Yet in another sense, Bert's proximity to what he took as the true source of foreign knowledge and power only intensified the alien character of what Manarmakerirevealed. 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, Manarmakerihad 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 denotations: Biak was really "Bangun Ikut Anak Kristus"(Rise and Follow the Child of Christ), "Bila IngatAkan Kembali"(If Remembered, Will Return),and "Berbiak-biaklah kau menutupi dunia" (Be fruitfuland multiply). Proper names are said to be what passes between languages without transformation(cf. Baker1993). A powerful ancestor 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'sclaim to authority and the strateof gies Mr. Fakiarand Mr. Senyenem. Mr. Fakiartook foreign books as an absent site of surplus objects, signifying his proximity to the alien original by flooding the "market" with his circulating translations. Mr. Senyenem took foreign narrativesas an absent 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 secret meaning. Instead of beckoning on the horizon, the truthbecame autochthonous: it lay within the parameters of Biak myth. This transformationof the foreign text implied a reconfiguring of the relationship between mobility and authorityposited in the practices of most big foreigners. Where others spoke on the basis of their privileged access to distant places and times, Bertclaimed 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 reframingof outsiders' discourse drew on the authority of Manarmakeri, a figure who explicitly embodies the connections between the alien and the ancestral (see Rutherford1997:424-461). Although Bertsaw 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'sreturn.Justas Manarmakeri'sarrival would spell the end of the world, it would also spell the end of Biak's big foreigners. 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 desires. 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 raretalents and special conditions for prophets like Bert to attract a broad-based following. Even though she shared Bert'sdesire for Koreri,my educated friend Edith,for instance, had her doubts. As this bin amber (female foreigner) saw matters, Bertwas not misled about Biak's secret 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 untranslatedto the foreign text, thus reinstating the grounds for her own pursuit of status. Without discrediting the dream of Koreri,she undermined Bert's predictions (c.f. Kermode 1967:8). Edithdid not doubt the divinity of Manarmakeri.She simply wanted to keep him in the distant Landof the Foreigners,where no one interpretationcould 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, Uncle 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, Bertand his opponents are not mutually exclusive characters. His messianic practices took to an extreme the logic that orients the normal pursuit of power. While I am not concerned with millenarianism per se, my findings call into question the view that such movements necessarily signal a radical break with "earthlyauthority"(see Bloch 1992:91). Intheir recourse to the foreign, officials 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 illuminates the complex nature of resistance in Indonesia's "out of the way" places. In recent years, Indonesianists have examined the varied ways that people in marginal communities respond to the incursions of global capitalism and an authoritarianstate (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 competition 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 history and the practices of everyday life, social relations on Biakfuel 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 Rutherford1999). 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 involved. 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 difference in a seemingly "modern"Indonesia. The particularitiesborn of differing histories of contact and conquest may well have persisted within the borders of the most centralizing of regimes. In an age with little room for distance, one corner of the New Order 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-HaysDoctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, a Predoctoral Grantfrom the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and a grant from the Joint Committee on Southeast Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of LearnedSocieties with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Earlierversions were presented on December 12, 1995, at "BorderFetishisms,"a conference of the Research Centre for Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam;on April 12, 1996, in "Materializationsof Modernity,"a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Asian Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii; and on October 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 reviewers for their many helpful comments on an evolving manuscript. 1. Goody's argument recalls Durkheim's depiction of Christianity'srole in initiatinga path to modernity that follows a gradient from the concrete to the abstract: Itis only with Christianitythat 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 degenerates 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 conceptions of "space-time," see Giddens 1990 and Habermas 1990. 2. To locate themselves in the broader population of orang Papua (Papuans)or orang Irian (IrianJayans),people autochthonous to these islands referto themselves as orang Biak(Biaks).I have followed their convention in this article. See Rutherford1998a:257 for a discussion of the origins of this ethnic label. 3. This quotation comes from the missionary-anthropologist'sdescription of the shamanic practices that he encountered in the 1930s among the Besewer, a Biak migrant community in the RadjaAmpat islands. 4. See Bhabha 1998:124 on "the ethical need to negotiate the incommensurable, yet intolerable" in the context of minority writing. 5. Fora definition of postcoloniality, see Appiah 1991:438: "Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a compradorintelligentsia: a relatively small, Westernstyle, 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 structuralquestions Miyoshi's essay raises, but ratherto illuminate the historicity of a particular mode of mediating between audiences. 6. Discussing Koranrecitation in the Moluccan village of Kalaodi, Bakerdepicts 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 comprehension. 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). Bakergoes on to argue that the Kalaodi's focus on the indexical character of what they are hearing allows for a "joiningtogether of Islamic scripturaltraditionsand local ancestral ones" that undermines a "literal and lawful minded reading" (1993:1 31). It is worth noting that the case that Bakeranalyzes 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 arrangement 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 addressed by pragmatic analysis are no less dependent on conventional distinctions, in the form of what Silverstein (1976:25) refersto as "rulesof 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 translatingChristiantexts, see Renck cl 990. 9. Forthe results of effortsto apply the model in Austronesian-speaking partsof Melanesia, see Battaglia 1991, Jolly 1991, and Liep 1991; for a critique based on comparisons among southern New Guinea societies, see Knauft1996. I consider Biak social organization in the context of Southeast Asian and Melanesian models in Rutherford1998a. 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 warriorsand highly prized wives. Formore on snon bin and bin amber(female foreigners), see Rutherford1997:162. 11. Unlike in Papua New Guinea, "business" is not an importantsphere of action for contemporary 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 Indonesian migrants (see Rutherfordin press). 12. It is telling that the most valuable component of the porcelain used in bridewealth is called the "head" (see Rutherford1997:153). 13. Those who reflected on the tendency described the need to prepare youngsters to talk with visitors and to give them a head startat school. 14. Mr. Wompere was one of several Biaks I met who told me that they had served as informants 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) autobiography, which happened to mention his name. "Thatbook! That book! It'sme!" 16. The potency associated with the Bible in this story recalls the agency that Biaks sometimes attributeto antique porcelain and ancestral skulls (see Rutherford1997:309-317; see also Hoskins 1993:127). 17. Benjamin (1968b:70) refers to the dual nature of the question of whether a work is Will an adequate translatorever be found among the totality of its readers? translatable:"Either: Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the significance of the mode, call for it?"But he also notes in the same essay that it is the "hallmarkof bad translation"when the translator'sgoal is to do nothing but transmit information. For Benjamin, 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 between content and code. In Bert'spoem, 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. Fakiarand Bert'scousin had somehow managed to sign these signs. Mr. Fakiarhad taken the firstcard from Bert'saunt, along with a letter that Manarmakerihad written to Bert's ancestor. Scratching out the name of this 19th-century Korerileader, Mr. Fakiarhad 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 Canaan, who were chased away by the Israelites. Others would say that the Landof 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 firstto identify his group with the Israelites(see, e.g., Markowitz 1996). 20. According to Bert,Manarmakerihad made the "smartbombs" 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 Rutherfordin press). Visits to the small island were never without significance. An Italian had a dictionary that listed the first Bethlehem as this place, Berttold me.
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An Israeli whose surname sounded like Bert'sturned 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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The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia Author(s): Danilyn Rutherford

the white edge of the margin:textualityand authorityin Biak,IrianJaya, Indonesia

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