University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

On the limits of not being scripted: video-making and discursive prositioning in coastal southeast Sulawesi

(USC Thesis Other)

On the limits of not being scripted: video-making and discursive prositioning in coastal southeast Sulawesi

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content ON THE LIMITS OF NOT BEING SCRIPTED:
VIDEO-MAKING AND DISCURSIVE POSITIONING
IN COASTAL SOUTHEAST SULAWESI
by
Jennifer Lee Gaynor
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
In Visual Anthropology
August 1995
Copyright 1995 Jennifer Lee Gaynor
U N IV E R SITY O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This thesis, written by
Jen n ifer Lee Gaynor
under the direction of AfiJC Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre~
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Masters o f Arts in Visual Anthropology
DtOM
Date 1995
THESIS COMMITTEE
Contents
Preface iii
Introduction 1
Enter: Media 4
Mediating Theory 6
From Spectacle to Spectatorship 8
Theory: Stage Left 10
Within and Beyond the Frame 13
On- and Off-Camera 15
Then and Now 24
Concluding Re-marks 27
Notes 30
Bibliography 36
ii
Preface
It depends what you mean by scripted. If there seems to be
something faked by a script, the real does not manage to escape it.
There is no absolutely privileged space of the real or the authentic
except that created as such by and through language and perception.
Similarly there is no social position that is not in part constituted
by or against the discourses available to describe it.
This thesis is an attempt to move between the tensions of, on
the one hand, efforts not to script or be scripted, and on the other,
the limits of such efforts. This theme is first explored in relation
to documentary, in particular with the methods and form of the video
project shot as a component of this thesis. Secondly, this movement
between the tensions of not-scripting and its limits is transposed to
a discussion of discourses and is followed by an analysis of the
discourses in the interview material presented from Southeast
Sulawesi.1
Introduction
On a good day with only a light breeze at your back, it takes
most of a morning to traverse the Straits of Tiworo, the long way
across, in a small motorized craft. Bordered on the north by
Southeast Sulawesi’s main peninsula and on the south by the large
island of Muna, the Straits of Tiworo flow, depending on the seasons
and tides, toward other bodies of water in the northeast and
southwest. In the summer prevailing winds from the Banda Sea in the
east blow over the island of Buton and through the Straits of Wowoni,
across Tiworo’s coasts and scattered islands and out to the great
Gulf of Bone. There are Sama settlements on many of these small
islands and here and there along these coasts. In distances measured
in days and nights, by the winds, currents, and diesel fuel, there
are other Sama villages on the coasts and offshore islands of other
parts of Sulawesi, as well as across the waters in other parts of
Indonesia. North of Sulawesi is the Southern Philippines, and to the
northwest Eastern Malaysia; there are Sama people in these places
too.2
I returned to the Straits of Tiworo last summer with the aim
of exploring Sama conceptions of the past there and the shape of the
current local political-economy. I expected, somehow, to hear more
about idealized kinship connections with former regional kingdoms
than seem relevant to current realities, and to learn a bit about
boat ownership, captains, crews, and catches. Perhaps, I thought,
these could be connected by looking at how labor organization and
catch distribution relate to kinship and patronage, or by examining
how trade in certain goods depends on the position of Buginese
bosses, the merchants of Bone-based businesses. As it turned out,
however, other analytical approaches impressed their relevance upon
me.
1
In addition to the past and political-economy, I also returned
to Tiworo attuned to the ways that the capital-intensification of
fishing has in many places of the world caused dramatic stock
depletion (Bailey 1988a; McGoodwin 1990). In the rush to compete
commercially, capital-intensified fisheries have not only led to the
depletion of fish stocks past the point where they can renew
themselves and still be fished ("over-fishing"); in the process,
capital-intensification has also marginalized and literally
threatened the labors of small-scale fishers (Bailey 1988a&b).
Depending on extraction methods, intensities, and the ways these
articulate with existing and "emergent" local political-economies,
capital-intensification of fisheries may contribute not only to
"over-fishing," but also to a region’s coastal and inshore ecological
degredation, thereby undermining the very conditions of
"production."3 With this in mind I kept an eye out for the ways in
which environment and political-economy affect each other.
I kept my eye out in another way too, repeatedly asking
myself, "What, visually, is going on here?" My use of a video camera
in "the field" literally opened my eyes to a particular intersection
of political-economy and environment I might otherwise have
overlooked, so interested was I in the sea. Deceptively everyday,
and with the frightening potential of becoming cliche, my attention
turned to wood. Throughout the village where I spent most of my
time, a large majority of people, some local estimates say ninety
percent, were engaged in splitting mangrove logs for eventual sale as
firewood.
In this thesis I am partly concerned with examining what role
video played and continues to play in my understanding of local
circumstances. In contrast to documentary in a narrative mode,
either "fictionalized" or voice-over expository, "observational
cinema" (in the English-speaking world) constructed a "reality" less
it seems by trying not to script, than by an overwhelming stylistic
preoccupation with wanting not to "corrupt," as it were, some reified
event or thing in front of the camera. The particular "realism"
portrayed as a result of this desire was an effect of effacing what
was not in front of the camera— in other words, the circumstances of
production— from the production of representations. Are there, I
wonder, ways to be "up front" about the circumstances of production,
without just re-presenting them as the conditions for constructing
another authority ever more "real" or "authentic"? Can video be
useful in dashing the curious but related illusion that theory
happens in academic centers of northern metropoles, while theory’s
"object" is somewhere else? For surely they interpenetrate, and with
video or without, the presumptions and the methods of our work should
be affected by our explanations of how they do so.
In much of what follows I examine things said by "Ilham" {a
pseudonym,) one of the people I interviewed on camera, and the one
whose comments I finally used in the video. There are two major
discourses conveyed in his interview. The first concerns post
independence nationalist struggles and the second concentrates on a
series of Sama fishing practices, means of livelihood which are on
the one hand in transformation, and on the other increasingly
untenable in the face of the broad expansion and capital-
intensif ication of fishing and its ecological consequences. What the
video tries to illustrate is a specific instance of the effects of
"development" on local circumstances and how they are described. I
use this situation to demonstrate that discourses, and specifically
discourses of "development," not only have material effects, but may
mask effects that are not explicitly intended (Yapa 1995). More
precisely, it is not simply unintended effects that are obscured, but
also how the discourse functions in part to reproduce the material
conditions upon which its more explicit "logic" depends.4
3
Enter: Media
The role that visual media have played in my understanding of
local circumstances is not simply encompassed by the study of
"ethnographic film1 ' and the camera in my own hands. A series of
encounters involving media production in Southeast Sulawesi has left
its impression on me, repeatedly pushing me to consider how the
production of such representations can subtly reverberate in
unwitting ways.
When friends in Tiworo asked what I wanted to video tape, I
told them that I was interested in daily life, especially what people
do to get by, their livelihood. While this did not stir fantastic
enthusiasm, a few seemed interested and eventually offered their
help. Perhaps they expected something else. Both generators and
televisions had become more common since I had last been there in
1990. At that time I recall a Japanese TV crew came through the
village where I stayed. It was a whirlwind visit since they didn’t
find what they were looking for: the remaining "original" f"asli")
Bajo people. To them this meant people who, as "primitives," still
lived on their boats noraadically.
This perception of what is "authentically" Bajo is widely held
by other groups in the region. It is something I have also heard
Bajo people say, with various and usually vague temporal referents.
Whether or not it is the case that Bajo people in Sulawesi have gone
from being boat-dwellers to shore-dwellers, and I have my doubts
about the simplicity of this construction, still, there is now a kind
of paradox. There are lots of Bajo villages, but they are filled
with people who are seen as no-longer-genuinely Bajo.
While I prefer the self-ascribed ethnonym "Sama," I
intentionally use the exonym "Bajo" here since it carries the weight,
categorically, of how Indonesian-speaking non-Bajo groups position
Bajo as different. Although in Tiworo "authentic" Bajo seem to exist
no more, (one wonders if they ever did,) still their descendants are
marked not as being "modern," but merely as having fallen from their
"genuine" state. So the Japanese TV crew was disappointed.
In 1993 an Australian film crew5 visited Tiworo, accompanied
by a government official and a former resident with a distinct knack
for positioning himself as a guide to foreign nationals interested in
the region’s Sama villages. At the urban office of this man's "self-
help" NGO, friends indicated to me, in a good-natured manner, the
cultural inaccuracies in portions of the Australian crew’s
technically flawless production. They also shared with me some work
of their own.
This NGO, established within the past five years, and staffed
mostly by young Sama men, has set up a branch of itself as a low-
budget video production unit with a name that indicates an
environmental concern. They are an explicitly non-political outfit:
to be otherwise at the moment in Indonesia is practically
organizational suicide. A fictional narrative piece by them,
produced with the participation of one village’s members as actors,
dramatizes conservation themes in relation to sea-turtles. There are
plans to translate the audio into thirteen of the local languages, a
task that I am sure they are capable of executing, and then touring
it, with generator and monitor if need be, to various villages. At
some moments however, the piece was tactfully described as "a
learning experience."
They were also engaged in a project relating to mangrove
cultivation, about which there was some vague avoidance because it
didn’t seem to be going as well as expected. There were probably a
number of projects in planning stages of which I was unaware. In any
event, much of their time seemed to be engaged in gaining more audio
visual experience, mostly by taping and editing short segments for
TPI, Indonesian Educational Television; an accomplishment which I
viewed with some irony as a production of the "margins" sent to
Jakarta for consumption and broadcast/redistribution.
Admittedly, when about halfway through my tape-stock, I
learned of their use of video and visited their office, I did
5
contemplate making their work the focus of this Masters project.
After all, indigenous media is a current hot-topic. It was tempting
to turn the term on it’s ear, to comment on the authenticity-value of
how "indigenous media" is constructed; tempting to show in contrast
the appropriation of their labor by the government of Indonesia.
Imagine an image: traipsing around the dusty city of Kendari taping
camera-yielding urban migrants crowned not by feathers but by Dodgers
caps.6 But I was asked not to catch in-frame the "TPI" emblem on
their camera, a difficult charge which also would have weakened the
point visually. Besides, as a project it struck me as a little too
close to theoretical solipsism: the theory that theory is the only
thing that can be known and verified.
Mediating Theory
In these encounters with media production in Southeast
Sulawesi, it was the relations of production and questions of
potential audience that encouraged me to rethink the possible effects
of my own videomaking. These are not new issues. Observational
cinema had been in part a reaction to earlier works which had imposed
narrative structures and plots in order to present subject matter to
story-trained audiences. In observational cinema filmmakers were
thought to just select what to frame, in the hopes of catching what
occurs "naturally and spontaneously" in front of the camera
(MacDougall 1975:118). There was in other words, an effort to get
away from the heavy-handed techniques of scripting which, in order to
generate interest for a consuming audience, put thoughts into
people’s heads and gave them motivations they probably didn’t have.7
The unscripted was thought to be more real than the carefully
wrought. But if there seemed to be something faked by a script,
"reality" has not managed to escape it. The overriding concern that
what was in front of the camera be natural and spontaneous led to an
6
especially event-centered approach in which a "reality" was
constructed by effacing the presence of the filmmakers.
Jean Rouch’s techniques of "participatory cinema" share with
other observational cinema a concern for the improvisational and
unscripted. However, rather than creating a "reality effect" by
attempting to efface the filmmakers’ presence, his works often
disrupt the mechanism of this illusion by treating the camera as a
provocateur, the acts of filming as a cine-trance, his subjects as
also actors.
Observational cinema in the English-speaking world employed a
realism which required a single perspective from which to feign
omniscience. When, as in Rouch’s work, the object of such a gaze
exposed this fallacy, the singularity of its authority was unsettled.
Even so, the mechanism of the camera, photo- or videographic
production from a single angle at any given moment, used as a kind of
witness— however reflexively or participatorily constituted—
nevertheless seems to recuperate something in a sense realistic.8
Rouch’s style and techniques do effectively undermine a simplistic
realism. Yet even as such efforts expose the limits of what realism
cannot manage to enframe because it cannot look into itself, they
rebound against the sense that these sounds and images carry traces,
a kind of evidence.
We could say that on the one hand, in observational cinema
"reality" is the effect of techniques which were developed in an
effort to pursue the real, or even to reveal its constructed nature.
In contrast, on the other hand, the narrative-related technique of
continuity cutting employs a series of match-cuts to construct the
seamless flow of a realistic appearance. Even when the former’s
devices are exposed as such within a film, or with the latter, when
we are consciously able to view the separate shots of a series of
match-cuts as disconnected occasions of filming, there is still a
strong sense of the evidentiary, however unreal it may seem. This is
7
a frankly intriguing phenomenon, very akin to something Taussig seems
to be getting at in a different context when he says:
I am often caught musing as to whether the wonder of
the magic in mimesis could reinvigorate the once-
unsettling observation that most of what seems
important in life is made up and is neither more (nor
less) than, as a certain turn of phrase would have
it, "a social construction." It seems to me that the
question of the mimetic faculty tickles the heels of
this upright posture and makes it interesting once
again." (Taussig 1993:xv.)
This "heel tickling" is I think, another way of describing
what I am trying to suggest, prodding the limits of not-being
scripted.
From Spectacle to Spectatorshin
If Jean Rouch’s exemplary filmmaking hadn’t already done so,
the critiques of Johannes Fabian had convinced me that certain styles
of theoretical exposition can result in a kind of hollow politics by
denying the shared anthropological time with "others" in "the field."
They had led me to reject the use of an expository voice over video
images, and to try something else. Voice-overs, albeit useful, have
a tendency to speak for others, not just about them, and reinforce
the effect that theory is constituted within the borders of academia
against an external "object," rather than showing how such knowledge
is constituted across those porous borders.
Collaboration in production is one way of dealing with this
issue. When however it seemed that I had chanced upon a nearly ideal
situation for collaboration, I had to think again. I had much in
common with the videomakers in Kendari: we all shared interests in
Sama people, the sea, and audio-visual production. We discussed
these things in between figuring out how to remake audio cables and
looking at each other’s footage. One of their cameramen did, as it
happens, shoot for me; technical competence was not an issue.
8
The problematic details of incompatible video formats might
have been worked out with more time and better funding. But there
was a larger concern, which turned out to be another kind of
encounter with the limits of not-scripting: the politics of the
state threw the politics of theory into a different light. There is
such a thing as too much caution, but I could hardly ignore the
possible ramifications of friends becoming directly wrapped up in a
project potentially "too" critical in the eyes of more powerful
political players. Given my methods, my own refusal to script
globally, I could not at the time know what, exactly, would come out
of the materials. But the alternative of circumscribing the
possibility of an overtly critical perspective from the making of the
video was not, for me, an option with any appeal.
This situation prompted me to reconsider: for whom was I
making this video?9 It is a question which too often remains
implicit. So-called "ethnographic films" have aimed at an audience
composed for the most part of anthropologists and their students.
Most of these films have tended to evoke (willy-nilly) an orientalist
difference of the strange and exotic, or the sadly nostalgic, or a
happy-Sameness-of-Humanity (Martinez 1992; Lutz & Collins 1993).
Aware of such effects, many recent film and video makers have tried
to clean up their political act. This has taken various forms, as
mentioned above: collaboration, improvisation, a refusal to impose an
all-knowing voice-over, attempts at self-reflexivity, messing with
the "reality-effect," in short, omniscient gaze and omniscient voice
are definitely "out." Still, such works are aimed at a primarily
academic, if not anthropological audience.
In her recent, "quirky history of political documentaries in
20th century America," Paula Rabinowitz examines how certain
"compelling" documentaries involve a different kind of spectatorship
than that understood by contemporary cinesemiotics and psychoanalytic
film theory and, I would add, by ethnographic film theory. While
admitting the gloss of "objectivity" ascribed to genres presented as
non-fiction, she traces the roots of political documentary as well to
agitprop, which functions to induce feeling, thought and action. She
argues that the performance of certain documentaries is to remake the
viewer into a subject of potential agency, an actor in history
(Rabinowitz 1994:8).
This interest in the creation of audiences as potential
historical agents is rather different from most correctives in
ethnographic film which have concerned the representation of acting
subjects on screen. While the latter is surely a concern in the
video produced for this Masters, it was the things said by "Ilham,"
as an on-screen subject, which made me realize that the piece in some
ways itself constructs potential audiences, included among them,
Indonesians.
Theory: Stage Left
Efforts not to be scripted are also met with other kinds of
limits. Below I transpose the idea of not being scripted onto an
examination of discourses. I do not mean to imply that discourses
are the same as scripts. Yet discourses do have the effect of
focusing on certain things to the exclusion of others and they
privilege the enactment of certain kinds of agency over others. The
idea of not being scripted can provide a useful analytical theme
around which issues related to discourse: resistance, hegemony,
practice, and subject-positions, may be examined. I begin with a
theoretical consideration of these matters, then discuss Ilham’s
discourses in the video in light of them.
James Scott has put forward an idea of resistance as a kind of
"hidden transcript." There are a number of problems with conceiving
of resistance in this way. To begin with, it effectively positions
resistance in the first instance as derivative of what he calls the
public transcript of the dominant. As he puts it, it is not so much
that a form of domination creates a social site for a dissenting
hidden transcript, but rather, "It would be more accurate to claim
10
that a form of domination creates certain possibilities for the
production of a hidden transcript" (1990:132). "The practice of
domination, then, creates the hidden transcript" (emphasis in
original; 1990:27). Yet not all forms of dissent and resistance
need be conceived in this manner.
Indeed, for dissent to be a transcript, the production of
which is enabled by a dominant discourse, seems a good description of
that kind of dissent which reinforces the mechanisms of domination by
its dependence on the structure of domination’s logic for its very
formation. It is a paradox of such resistance that it may be
transgressive in one sense, yet simultaneously reinforce the logic of
domination. One could say that it is resistance within a hegemonic
dynamic. The fact that it is hidden, and hidden from whom or what is
a question that must be attended to, simply makes the hegemonic
dimension appear more thoroughgoing. Conceiving of resistance as, in
part, an effort not to be scripted can throw this derivative aspect
into clearer focus.
Resistance will run up against this issue of being derivative
whenever it is simply oppositional (in a logical sense; I don’t mean
that it is necessarily easy.) If it achieves a reversal, it will
very nearly appear as an exchange of scripted positions. But
resistance does not have to be simply oppositional to be accomodated
or recuperated by a dominant discourse, as, say, the language of
sustainability, and even ecology have been by the discourse of
"development."10 This method of neutralizing resistance by
accomodating or even incorporating it is, I think, what Timothy
Mitchell gets at in his various discussions of "enframing" (Mitchell
1988, 1990).
Mitchell (1990) aptly criticizes Scott for treating hegemony
as domination merely at the level of ideas, and in turn, as ideas
which can consciously be accepted or rejected, as if one were casting
a ballot. On the contrary, unlike other ideologies which can be
openly debated, with hegemonic discourses relations are already
presented in the guise of being natural.11 Scott quotes Bourdieu:
11
"Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees
and with very different means) the naturalization of its own
arbitrariness" (Bourdieu 1972:164); yet Scott interprets this and
other discussions of naturalization dismissively, as a description of
the ways in which "Necessity becomes virtue" (Scott 1990:76). What
he is not catching is that it isn’t virtue that is being produced
here so much as "necessity" itself.
"What is necessary?" and "What needs to be done?" are the
kinds of questions that immediately call to mind the pair
discourse/practice (Foucault, inter alia 1977).12 These questions
imply objects and aims, (necessary for what, done to what); they
imply the importance of this materiality over that, to be engaged in
a particular manner. It is not unusual to be involved in a practice
and be unaware of how it is imbricated in the framework of a
particular discourse. Material practices then, may in the subtle
ways they are enmeshed with discourses, constrain what I’ve been
calling an effort not to be scripted. It is not, however, simply
that materialities set limits within which the discursive has play,
but rather, as practices take for granted certain terms, objects and
approaches, they also literally construct materialities. Put another
way, one could say for example, that discursive structures of
perception create objects of practice, so that discourse is not
simply a matter of linguistic expression about them but already
entails assumptions about, demeanors toward, and engagement with
those ojects/objectives. Discourse, then, is an element in the
constitution of materialities which seem so ordinarily manifest.13
Finally, the whole idea of not being scripted on some level
implies the perception of a role and not being cast or casting
oneself in it. The limits of not being scripted can be examined here
through questions about identity and implied subjects. How are
particular discourses and practices inflected as markers of identity?
What manner of subject do certain discourses presuppose and in part
construct?14 Rather than consider a subject as one who simply has a
voice or speaks a certain kind of discourse, I am more interested in
12
what kind of subject-positions (Spivak 1988; Young 1990:164)
different people can take up within specific discursive frameworks.
This allows one to see the constitution of subjects as, in part,
effects of discourse. It also gives one a way to trace the
disappearance of those subject-effects through, for instance, "empty"
signifieds and strategies of displacement, points to which I will
return below.
Within and Beyond the Frame
As I mentioned in the Introduction, I returned to Tiworo
interested in the ways environment and political-economy affect each
other, but it was my use of video and a refusal to script the project
globally that brought my question, "What is going on here, visually,"
to an inquiry obviously focused on wood. It could have been
different; not every village in Tiworo was engaged in this mangrove
firewood trade. In a couple of villages, for instance, purse seiners
seemed to be doing well in the more capital-intensive part of the
fisheries "industry." In other villages quite a few people used
compressors to dive for, among other things, pearls— a pursuit
plagued with unnecessarily high rates of injury and fatality. There
was, then, a degree of specialization by village, but it was clear
that in no village did people depend entirely on a single pursuit
either to raise cash or to make ends meet otherwise. This being
said, the amount of wood in various stages from log to kindling in
this particular village, while I was there, was impressive.
On the face of it, it perhaps shouldn’t be so surprising that
Sama people were relying on the mangroves; it is after all, another
resource which they use: in building houses, parts of boats and fish
traps. But this was different. You wouldn’t say to someone, "Did
you cut down lots of wood today?" in the same spirit as you might ask
how work was going on a boat, or how the catch was from an afternoon
collecting on the tidal flats.
People didn’t talk much about this pursuit, although according
to local estimates ninety percent of the villagers in Pulau Iru
relied on it. It was however, certainly within the realm of possible
discourse.15 People not only didn’t talk much about it though, they
also simply didn’t talk much during the times they were engaged in
the different parts of the process: going off to the groves, cutting
down trees, chopping these into logs, returning to the village,
stacking the wood, debarking, splitting, restacking, and finally
loading the boats to export the wood from the village. For the most
part it was a fairly labor intensive process, and where it wasn’t so
labor intensive it was usually dominated by the roar of an outboard
engine. Neither of these situations are conducive to talk.
Shooting footage in these situations curiously put me in the
position of doing my job behind the camera while they did theirs in
front of it. In other words, it effectively resulted in my doing
something very similar to observational cinema. It also in part
caused me to become increasingly invested in trying to convey what
this process was like, not just the technicalities, but the
textures, the embodied materiality of going off in boats to do this
work, the sounds and repetetiveness of chopping, debarking,
splitting, stacking; something video might at least do better than
words on a page.
The more I committed my video efforts to this business with
wood, the more seriously I construed my "lack" of audio, at least of
the vocal sort audiences expect.16 Of the interviews I did last
summer, Ilham’s was both the most compelling, and the one which best
addressed this wood-cutting practice. The video is composed of two
different kinds of scenes: excerpts from my interview with Ilham, and
scenes which are visually concentrated on the production of kindling
from mangrove trees. The interview is not indexed by the visuals,
nor does it directly explain these scenes of wood, rather it tells a
kind of parallel story until near the end of the piece when the
interview works its way around to explicitly dealing with the topic
of the mangroves. The structure of the video then, reproduces (or at
14
any rate, mirrors,) what appeared to me as a kind of ellipsis between
dicourses concerning what "Sama people" do to make a living, and what
many people in this village actually did.
On- and Off-Camera
Although he doesn’t own one, Ilham is no stranger to
television; the neighbors seem to watch theirs regularly. He is
also familiar with some of the members of the above mentioned NGO and
what they do. This is to say that a video camera wasn’t exactly a
new idea to him. The on-camera interview with Ilham starts with
early biographical information, touches on descriptions about the
1950's and early 1960’s, a period of endemic strife in much of South
and Southeast Sulawesi, and then shifts gears to consider various
means Sama people have depended on for their livelihood and how these
have changed.
In light of the earlier discussion concerning realism, it is
helpful to keep in mind an analytical distinction between "Ilham,"
the on-camera person, and Ilham, the person on camera, even though
the two are not entirely distinct. Aside from this, however, I find
the analytical distinction important because the direct address
interview is a curious mode of communication. Unless you are
intently engaged in some task or find it a common occurrence, it is
hard not to be self-conscious in front of the business end of a
camera. At the very least, people generally want to present
themselves in a favorable light. If one is not sure exactly who will
wind up watching the outcome, one might play it safe, however that is
contextually construed. Yet direct address is also a chance to
express one’s opinions. People have things they want to tell about,
and they have things they wants to convey to imagined audiences,
audiences they might not address off-camera. My own presence in the
interview footage shouldn’t be just a token show of self-reflexivity,
15
it should both indicate something about my own agendas and throw his
into greater relief.
Below I consider the discursive frameworks used by "Ilham" and
how he is situated in relation to them. I concentrate first on his
recollections of "roaming" from place to place (merantau) as a child,
then on his descriptions of competing post-colonial visions of
nation, and lastly, on the critque he gives of "modernities" from his
perspective on changes in Sama practices, economy and environment.
Ilham was born in 1933 in Pulau Iru.17 Asked if he grew up
there, he explained that as a child he had moved around from place to
place, "Not like children now, born in one place and there until
they’re adults."18 He ascribed his own childhood roaming to the fact
that he was brought along with his mother after his parents had
separated.
He said he attended, at some remove from his village of
birth, a "people’s school" during the time that the Dutch maintained
a colonial presence in Buton before World War II. When the Japanese
landed in Kendari, the capital of the present province of Southeast
Sulawesi, he was again in Pulau Iru. In talking about the war,
"Ilham" again made the point about moving from place to place with
his mother, but this time because during the war food and clothing
were scarce. After repeatedly making this point about moving around,
on reflection he considered that, "Maybe it’s too close to call it
’roaming’ (merantau) since Buton is pretty close." And he reiterated
that in any case, his mother had had the chance back then to put him
in school.
In these small portions of autobiography from the beginning of
the on-camera interview, moving about from place to place (merantau)
is a practice which he marks as something he did as a child,
something children generally did, and which they no longer do. In
effect he identified merantau as a practice (which he never
explicitly linked to being Sama; perhaps this is, as Bourdieu says,
one of those things that goes without saying because it comes without
saying.) Yet after generalizing it as a practice, noting its change
and giving some specific contexts to his own "growing up on the move"
fbesar di bepergian.) he removes himself from the category by saying
that Buton, where he went to school, is too close to call what he did
"merantau."
While it is not really possible to establish from what he said
if this "marking," as I call it, this singling out of this practice,
is also a marking linked to any "ethnic" identity, it is possible to
theorize that there is a discourse about the kinds of mobility that
may be called merantau. and that it is a practice which
differentiates— between those who do and those who don’t. What then
to do with his positioning: as one who does, does this; but on
second thought, "this" was not something he really did? A dynamic of
displacement is at work here: he uses a discursive framework with
himself already placed in it, and then, poof, it doesn’t quite fit;
he removes himself from it before it serves as something on which we
might be tempted to hang his "identity." But there's another thing
to attend to here.
"School" itself is not something about which we can trace a
discourse from the things he said, but it is certainly considered of
import. Is it merely an irony that the relatively recent and
widespread establishment of primary schools is probably the single
most important factor in the fact that children nowadays do not move
around? Or is this possibly an example of how a discourse may
actually obscure the workings of related material practices which
don’t quite suit the overt discursive logic?
Ilham was village head (kepala desa) of Pulau Iru from 1966
until he asked to be let go of this position in 1976. Before him
there had been no village head, that is, there had been no head of a
"desa." but there had in the past according to him, been a "kepala
kampung." (Both "kampung" and "desa" translate as "village" in
English.) He said that in the old days, the kampung head had broader
authority and was unimpeded (bebas), and he contrasted this with most
village (desa) heads nowadays who he considered petty tyrants.19
17
I wondered what had been involved locally in this change from
the head of a kampung to that of a desa. a change in which the latter
term explicitly differentiated the village as a territorial
administrative unit under the national government of Indonesia.
Although it isn’t clear to me how he may have been "officialized" as
village head, or, as he says he never received pay, perhaps wasn’t,
through our conversations and the on-camera interview, my interest in
the switch from "kampung" to "desa" was thrown into the context of a
broader local history. Prior to his becoming village head, he said,
no one lived in Pulau Iru for a period of eleven years because of
"gangs" fgerombolan) and "civil war" (perang saudara. literally, a
war of brothers). He said that when he returned to Pulau Iru he was
accompanied by about six-hundred people.
When "Ilham" spoke (on camera) about the period of rebellions
(pemberontakan) in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, the people involved
fell into one of three categories: the Indonesian government and its
Armed Forces, the conglomeration of armed political movements under
the hyphenated DI-TII (Darul Islam-Tentara Islam Indonesia.)20 and
the people (rakyat. masyarakat) or "little people" (rakyat kecil).
He described how there were underground movements and "gangs" already
in 1951, and that although the "legitimate" government had their men
in the villages, the leaders of the "gangs" were under the protection
of the people. They were, he soon explained, under the protection of
the people in large part by a kind of inverse protection racket.
Rather than providing "protection" to villagers and making them pay
for it in cash or kind, these "gangs," he explained, got protection
from villagers who were warned not to give away their presence to the
Armed Forces, or else they would essentially suffer for it in the
flesh. He made it quite clear that their threats were carried out.
Apparently the gangs didn’t just come to the villages.
Previously I’d spoken to a man in the town of Raha who’d said that
it wasn’t safe to leave the town at that time, and I asked Ilham if
many people ran to the towns and cities. He said:
18
There were ones who ran, were forced to run to the
city. And then there were those forced by this: the
gangs went into the forest; those people were
actually brought into the forest. At the time we
didn’t get it -what would you bring the common
people into the forest for? Later after the
completion of security, then we realized, oh, they
were just made into a fence, made into a shield, to
- ward things off. The Armed Forces of the Republic of
Indonesia, if they wanted to attack those gangs,
first they’d look below [air reconnaissance].
Whether the attack was from the Air Force or the
Navy, they looked first, they’d see the people -it’s
just the people they saw- the ones who made up a
fence. The point being so that they wouldn’t be
attacked, right? Because if the people were seen: oh
[look] lots of people who aren’t doing anything
wrong; certainly from the Air Force they’d also
think: pity on the people who’ve suffered so much.
Whereas that’s where they were being protected; yes,
the troops of the DI-TII gangs I was just talking
about.21
Ilham repeatedly bemoaned the fate the little people or common
people suffered during this time. But if DI-TII looked bad, the
government’s Armed Forces didn’t exactly smell like roses:
Sure, the Armed Forces, although perhaps they had
victims, there weren’t so many. And this DI-TII too,
perhaps even though they had victims there weren’t so
many. But in the middle of them were these people,
these people, yes? Along comes DI-TII thinking that
these simple people, who are trying to make a living
from the sea or on the land, suspecting that they’re
enemy spies they kill them. And along come the Armed
Forces, they run into these people, they have a hunch
that they're, well, maybe they’re enemy spies as
well, spies of DI-TII. Yes, arrested, you were lucky
they say, if you were only handcuffed and brought to
jail. But sometimes, you know, in order to... well,
as if they couldn’t be bothered, they just killed
you. Finished. So pity on these people, the simple
people who became cannon fodder, who sacrificed so
much then.22
Although "Ilham" mentions people who make their living from
the land and those who do so at sea, in general the different
varieties of "little people," not to mention the status differences
19
among "them," are quite homogenized in his description. It is just
this constitution of "them" that I wish to point out and will come
back to shortly.
One comes away from Harvey’s (1974) work on this period from
1950 to 1962 in South Sulawesi impressed by the intricacies of the
changing allegiances, the splits, negotiations, recuperations and new
splits going on between what is called by Ilham the Armed Forces and
Til. Obviously they are not two monolithically separate entities
throughout this twelve year span.
Ilham was aware that DI-TII had different components. He was
familiar with the names of leaders at the national level and their
explicit ideologies, as well as with local Southeast Sulawesi events
and their major players. He explained that in fact DI and TII were
phrases that didn’t properly go together (bersambung), since the
different "extremist" groups in Sulawesi, Java, and Sumatra each had
their own slogans and political aims. But, he acknowledged, they did
share the aim of wanting to establish an Islamic state.
The explicit ideological cause of the "civil war" as he
explains it, was a "contradiction" between the desire of DI-TII and
its followers to establish an Islamic state, and the "impossibility"
of doing so because of the fact that there are a number of
religions, and simply different kinds of people, in Indonesia:
Since the beginning of the establishment of this
Republic, it was already agreed upon, it already
became a national consensus that Pancasila— which we
have nowadays— that that was already a legitimate
unity, a philosophy which could unite the people of
Indonesia who are of so many hundreds of different
kinds— who knows how many. It can’t be done.
I was so used to seeing Pancasila23 as the basis for a unity
that effectively obliterates diversity, that I had to do a mental
doubletake to resituate it in the context of what Ilham was saying.
Many scholars have criticised the way that Pancasila has required all
the peoples of Indonesia to officially adopt a "world religion" by
the prescription of a faith in one god. I am utterly in agreement.
It would seem though, that Ilham takes Pancasila with (I think) a
grain of salt, emphasizing for the camera that there was a legitimate
philosophy of national unity established earlier, based on similar
principles, recognizing the "so many hundreds of different kinds" of
people in Indonesia.
There is more going on here than a simple endorsement of
"Bhinneka Tunggal Ika."24 Ilham has already lived through one long
era of armed political struggle. Although no one really talks about
it, people are aware that President Suharto can’t last that much
longer, and no one is sure what is going to happen after he is gone.
Islam remains a strong moral presence in many parts of Southeast
Sulawesi and it makes sense for it to continue to serve as a
rallying point for a variety of groups, some of which try to address
keenly felt social and economic inequities. Who could deny the
possibility that there may be some kind of political struggle again,
and who can predict what shapes it might, or might not take? Yet
Islam is only one possible focus around which authoritative dissent
could find expression. "Ilham" seems less concerned with Islam per
se or so-called extremist adherents than with addressing what he
presents as the violence of a "civil war" conducted partly, but not
exclusively, along the lines of affiliations related to social status
and economic "class," and carried out ostensibly in the name of
competing visions of nationhood.
Earlier I raised the point that potential Indonesian audiences
are constructed by things "Ilham" says in the interview. I think
that having lived through a period of intense turmoil he is sharing
his experiences with an imagined audience of Indonesians who know
little about this history and have not lived through its harshness,
with, perhaps, a concerned eye to the future.
That being said, I would like to show how Ilham actually does
relate the events of that period to the present, for it has a bearing
on the discursive framework of much of the rest of what he talks
about:
I’ll go so far as to say that in WW II, of course
there were plenty of casualties then as well. But
21
the ones who succumbed, weren’t they the ones who
were at war— the Allies and Japan then? But in this
civil war it was these little people who suffered so
many casualties. Yes. It’s as a result of that,
perhaps until now, that we have names such as the
people who are "backwards," "the poor;" it’s about
all these people. Yes, as a result of this, from WW
II as well as the civil war with... with the members
of DI-TII and... what I said about all those things
that went on.
Does he mean that it is literally the high number of
casualties that caused people to be called backwards or poor?
Possibly so many able-bodied people were killed or injured or taken
away that those who were left had trouble making ends meet. But I
don’t think this is what he means. World War II was earlier
portrayed by him as a time of great privation, yet also as a time of
far fewer casualties locally than during this "war of brothers."
In a historical narrative where the current regime emerges as
inheritors of the legacy of the victors, Ilham recognizes that the
followers of DI-TII are painted not only as former adversaries but as
the vanquished:
In the government’s version the gangs surrendered.
But if you asked them it's certain they wouldn’t say
that they gave up. They’d say that this was the
security settlement and that they were appropriately
called to participate.
The point is, there are apparently only two sides to this
narrative. The nationalists who are fighting to establish an Islamic
state, and the nationalists comprising the "legitimate" government.
The "little people" who "Ilham" portrays as compelled, manipulated,
kidnapped, coerced, suspected, and even as the "innocents" (from the
air, anyway,) are not the agents in this narrative. They are the
used and tossed off. Are they the subaltern, and is this a project
of recovery?
Ilham speaks through the terms of the dominant discourse, from
a position representative of its victims. Even though he winds up
reinforcing the logic of the discourse, this positioning as victim
ought, in part, to be viewed as strategic, for it enables him to
22
critique the effects, the violence, resulting from the terms and the
circumstances in part constructed by them. He pronounces his
criticism from a position as representative of those "little people"
who were the victims of both sides in the narrative of a struggle
over competing visions of the Indonesian nation.
Here, we are not talking about a recovery of the subaltern,
certainly not as "insurgents," because Ilham effectively denies the
possibility of a retrospective reading of insurgency by inscribing
those silenced and "necessary" others of this post-colonial
nationalist struggle as the victims of its violence. He is critical
of the perpetration of violence justified in terms of these competing
nationalisms. However, "rakvat kecil" is not a signifier that points
to some autonomous collective consciousness outside of this discourse
of nationalism. In fact it is a kind of signifier which, as the
"necessary" other to the narrative of competing nationalisms, does
not stands for anything but a negation.
The signified, indicated as a negation, is "empty." Yet the
signifier "rakyat kecil" ("little people") is still, paradoxically,
pregnant with possibilities: the possibilities of unspecified
differences, ways of viewing things, opinions and actions based on
different terms. These possibilities imply on the one hand, kinds of
agency which the dominant are fully capable of imagining. Already
victims twice-over in "Ilham’s" telling, those unspecific "little
people" play on the fantasies and fears of the powerful. As Partha
Chatterjee says: "We could argue that it is always the specter of an
open rebellion by the peasantry which haunts the consciousness of the
dominant classes in agrarian societies and shapes and modifies their
forms of exercise of domination" (1993:171). While the distinctions
"peasantry" and "agrarian" don’t quite fit the very archipelagic
conditions considered here, it does seems that the various
possibilities in the unspecific "little people" includes just that
specter.
On the other hand, these possibilities imply kinds of agency
and subject-ness which are not necessarily "scripted" by the dominant
23
discourse, for they are not merely derivative of it. These need not
be conceived as a site of deeper authenticity; rather, as different
"subject-positions" conceivable in relation to different discourses,
they may be reinforcing in their dominance, or they may be cross
cutting, and they are capable of being read against the grain.
Cross-cutting subject positions, or reading dominant discourses
against the grain may be thought of as disrupting the categories and
mechanisms which keep trying to position an other as its object while
construing agency within a specific kind of subjecthood.25
Then and Now
The link that Ilham makes between this "civil war" of the
1950’s and early 1960’s, and the use of the labels "poor" and
"backwards" now in the 1990’s might at first seem tenuous. But the
"little people," those construed as the implied others in the
narrative of competing nationalisms, bear a remarkable structural
congruence discursively and materially, to those who are now the
targets of the manipulations of both state and all manner of "non
government" organizations presenting themselves in the guise of a
benevolent "development." The "little people" who were before the
silent participants and victims in a narrative of post-colonial
struggles over different visions of the nation are now similarly
positioned as the "undeveloped," the "necessary" others, recipients
of the "aid" of all those who wish to "develop" them.26
In the latter part of the interview, "Ilham" talks about the
different ways that "Sama people" make a living, how past practices
differ from present ones. He details a series of examples of fishing
technologies and practices which are either proscribed (fish bombs,)
or are approaching defunct because of technological "improvements" or
the ecological damage wrought by them. "What is modern?" he asks.
"There is nothing new under the sky." ("Tidak ada yang baru di bawah
kolong langit.") Modern techniques (such as purse seiners, long
lines) are only an expansion he says, of what Sama people have been
using for a long time. These claims throw the traditional-modern
dichotomy, at least in fisheries technology, into a spurious light.
Fish bombs appear in his telling as the only really imported
technology. He makes a point of his observation that their use only
started after World War II and that the Japanese were initially
responsible for introducing them, even though all Southeast
Sulawesians who use them (not, he points out, just Sama people,) are
responsible for the damage they have caused. This is something
which he says might not have occurred, had they known what the
consequences would be. But fish bombs are really only part of the
problem, and I will return to the matter of why momentarily.
Ilham also talks briefly about the "old cycles of trade in
tripang* ' and says that it now appears that nearly all the tripang
have been exported. They have, to extend the phrase, been
"overfished." He counts fish bombs and trawlers (which are now
banned) as culprits of much of the visible damage done to the coastal
ecology. He also describes a time in his childhood when fish were
abundant and the coral reefs in the distance were green and alive.
Now, he says, they are yellow, dead, and the fish and other creatures
of the strand and sea are far fewer.
The dissemination of an increasingly authoritative ecological
or environmental critique has facilitated Ilham’s assessment of
certain technological changes. At the same time, the incorporation
of "sustainability" into the government’s official development policy
has brought government officials to Sama villages in an effort to
stop, among other things, fish bombing. An environmentalist
discourse, neither suspect by definition nor completely monopolized
by the state, has apparently opened a space for Ilham to critique
the government’s handling of this situation even though he does so in
the terms by which the government tries to justify its own authority.
They have known about this problem since after World War II he
claims, and they have even arrested people and put them in jail for
it (one wonders if this strict concern for the reefs on the part of
25
the government isn’t in fact overshadowed by evidence of a populace
with, one assumes, a theoretically widespread knowledge of basic
explosives.) Yet the problem goes on, so the government’s efforts
"have, it seems, failed."
Cutting mangrove trees into kindling to sell in towns and
cities was not something volunteered as a "Sama" pursuit in my
interview with Ilham. It was rather something he said that people
were "forced" to do. Earlier I pointed out how people didn’t seem to
talk much about this practice. People didn’t talk much about it
because it did not fit with ideas of what "Sama people" do to "make a
living." Yet it also involved a sense of low prestige, a sense
even, of culpability for fish scarcity, when such scarcity appeared
on the contrary to be just what has "compelled" people to rely so
much on this practice.
The institutionalization of the discourse of "sustainable
development" has also caused local Sama people to suffer the
condescension of the government’s minions "teaching" them not to
engage in cutting the mangrove trees, in effect putting them in a
position blameworthy for another "environmental problem." It is far
from certain, however, that in Tiworo mangrove trees are being
harvested in a manner that is not "sustainable."27 Most other
villages there do not seem rely on this practice to the extent that
people in Pulau Iru do, the population of Tiworo is not dense, and in
any case, "population" is unlikely to be the cause of increased
pressure on mangrove resources (Kunstadter et al. 1986:4). It is not
entirely clear, then, that in this instance the apparently recent
intensification of this "harvesting" is cause for government
intervention.
There is a larger and obvious picture being missed by
officials when they blame Sama people for an impending environmental
"problem" in a "resource base" that they have long drawn from in
various, if perhaps less intensive ways. But the point here is
emphatically not merely the liberal outcry of "blaming the victim."
Rather, the official use of the rhetoric of sustainable development
26
obscures, and by obscuring contributes to, first, how the discourse
and practices of "development" create an object of development, "the
undeveloped," and second, how development induced scarcity (in this
case of fish,) creates the material conditions for the reproduction
of such an object. In other words, development reproduces itself by
the reproduction of its object both discursively and materially.
The reasons for the intensification of extraction from the
mangroves (excluding the ability to transport the kindling to towns
where the conditions exist to sell it,) are the apparently severe
depletion of fish species,28 and an arguably greater need for or
dependence on cash, caused in part by the first reason.29 Fisheries
problems in tropical regions are often ascribed to commercial
exploitation of mangroves. (Kunstadter et al. 1986). In Tiworo, on
the contrary, the scarcity of fish is the apparent cause of the
increase in extraction from the mangroves. While conceding that the
use of fish bombs surely contributes to the fact that there are fewer
fish, the larger factor in fish "scarcity" has been policies of
export-led growth, in other words "development" itself, which has
entailed capital-intensification of the fishing "industry" and the
marginalization of small-scale fishers, not just in Tiworo but
throughout Indonesia and various parts of the "Third World" (Bailey
1988 a&b).
Ascribing the scarcity of fish to small-scale fishers is, in
this instance, much like blaming swidden agriculturalists or
"population" for large-scale deforestation (inter alia. Dove 1988;
Kummer 1991.) In this particular case, a focus on remonstrating the
primary extractors (tangan pertama) for the intensification of
cutting mangrove trees obscures other, larger factors in the
mechanisms of how this scarcity is produced, and how "development" is
reproduced through the reproduction of its object both discursively,
as the "undeveloped," as well as materially through the production of
scarcity.
27
Concluding Re-marks
At the end of his discussion of the time of civil war, a "war
of brothers," gangs and competing nationalisms, Ilham says that it is
perhaps because of the suffering of the "little people" in those
years especially, that even until now "we" have names like "the poor"
and "backwards." I pick up on this connection made by Ilham to
point out the similarities and continuities in discursive-
positioning between the terras, on the one hand in the narrative of
competing nationalisms, and on the other in his discussion of fishing
practices, what is "modern," and changes in the littoral
environment.
Not merely a matter of verbal positioning, this discursive
shift has been part and parcel of other material realities: the
capital-intensification of fishing, the dwindling capacity of
fisheries, the apparent imperative to turn to capitalistic modes of
fishing or else to non-fisheries sources of livelihood. In either
case there has been an increased dependence on the cash nexus.
Pushed, for the "lack" of fish, to rely on the mangroves and then
blamed for being the cause of fish scarcity, these objects of
"development" are obversely viewed as guilty of whatever "poverty"
they suffer. Yet the point here is not simply the argument that
could be made for incipient class-formation, but how the mechanisms
of this formation are obscured in this specific context.
In New Order (or post-1965) Indonesia the discourse on
"development," resting on the supposed importance of "modernity," has
in various guises been both the predominant mode of state
intervention as well as the justification of its authority.30 The
people in Indonesia who appear as most "undeveloped," and therefore
most "in need" of "assistance" are those who are positioned as
"backward," and "primitve" by modernist discourses, people construed
as the "isolated tribes."31
Sama people are one of a number of different kinds of people
who recognize themselves as distinct from one another in the ways
28
they have built meaningful lives in relation to the sea. Within the
master narrative of modernity however, as "orang laut" ("sea people")
these groups often become discursively homogenized, their real or
imagined past or present "nomadism," their living "secara bemindah-
pindah" (moving from place to place) fantasized and marked as
different from people who are "more Melayu," who can "roam"
("merantau") from an idealized place, a space on land called "home."
Within the framework of "development," "sea people" thus marked are
positioned as "masvarakat terasing" ("isolated tribes") who not only
need to be "developed" economically, but "raised up" to some
standard of "culture" ("kebudavaan") which they can "never" achieve
because they are positioned discursively as one of its others.
What I have tried to show is that it is not just that
development positions these others in the space where it discursively
creates "poverty" as an object (Escobar 1985; Sachs, ed. 1992; Watts
1993), nor just that poverty is a form of socially-constructed
scarcity (Yapa 1995; Yapa and Wisner 1995). As Yapa (1995) points
out, the discourse on development poses an obstacle to the
eradication of poverty because it both contributes to the creation of
scarcity and conceals how the mechanism of the production of
"poverty" functions. Yet from the situation in Tiworo I would
conclude as well that "development," a project with local historical
antecedents and extra-local social and economic contexts, not only
obscures the mechanisms producing "poverty," but actually creates
scarcity as a material condition of its own reproduction.
29
NOTES
1.Research for this project was conducted in the summer of
1994 under a grant from the Association for Asian Studies’ Southeast
Asia Council, funded by the Luce Foundation. It also draws from my
time as a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow in 1990. Funding did
not cover the costs of video production. The usual disclaimers apply.
2.A number of things have been written about Bajau St/or Sama
groups in Eastern Malaysia, the Southern Philippines and Indonesia.
The necessarily varied historical experiences of different groups of
Sama in these places quickly forces the researcher to come to terms
with a number of issues, or alternatively, to work around them.
Broadly speaking these issues fit under the purview of
spatialization. Few studies have crossed national borders. Of
course, there are practical (as well as legitimate theoretical)
reasons for this. Unfortunately, working around the issue of
national borders, or within them, has tended to reinforce the
impression that generalizations which might be made across them are
so banal as to be of little interest. I am not yet convinced that
this is necessarily the case; comparisons might be fruitful. One
exception to this not-crossing national borders is Sopher's 1965
extensive study on literature not "of," but referring to various sea
people. This work was however, based entirely on— ethnographically
speaking— secondary sources (enough to make one, momentarily, want to
throw it out the door into the receding tide.)
On a much smaller scale and pertaining to works more
"ethnographic," the "no culture is an island" critique, which after
all follows on the heels of world systems theory and its aftermath,
might be less invidious here were it not for the fact that (excepting
Ba.iau darat. urban migrants and the agriculturally settled,) being
oriented toward the water has entailed questions of mobility, even if
one wasn’t dealing with, strictly speaking, nomads. In other words,
firstly, an examination of being nomadic should also entail an
analysis of how "isolated" is construed (compare "transnational".)
Secondly, there are other obvious problems with looking at Sama
settlements as "isolated," for they are (and have been) permeated to
varying degrees by ties of extra-local kinship and trade. One could
say however, that in Tsing’s (1993) sense of the term many Sama
communities are in "out-of-the-way-places," presuming that is, one’s
"way" is on land, or at least along officialized routes.
For Eastern Malaysia see: Sather (1993a&b, 1992, 1978); in the
Southern Philippines: Allison (1984), Casino (1976), Horvatich
(1993), Kurais (1979), Nimmo (1972, 1994); on Indonesia, for a start
see Pelras (1973). For a more historical bent: Bentley (1981), Fox
30
(1977), Lapian (1987), Majul (1973), MacKnight (1976), Reber (1966),
Saleeby (1963), Sopher (1965) and Warren (1971, 1981);
archaeologically, Spoehr (1973); and linguistically, Frake (1980) and
Pallesen (1985).
3.McGoodwin (1990) argues that the use of industrial
production techniques in the absence of property rights in the
resource is responsible for the "crisis" or destruction of fisheries
around the world. The problem, however, isn’t just the lack of
property rights, but the lack of their recognition where such rights
have existed.
The analysis of fisheries as a common property resouce (CPR)
goes back to Gordin (1954). A crucial analytical axis shaping recent
debates about ownership, access, and control of CPR’s has been that
of "official" versus "informal" approaches to their "management"
(Anderson and Simmons, eds. 1993; Berkes, ed. 1989; Dove, ed. 1988;
McCay and Acheson, eds. 1987; Ostrom 1990). While the general and
welcome thrust has been to argue against earlier capitalist
assumptions that the "commons" faced certain destruction if they
weren’t a)privatized, or b)nationalized (Hardin 1968), some of these
analyses are burdened by a simplistic notion of culture as rules and
customs; others presuppose that "informal" management or "local
knowledge" always forms a "system," which merely seems to want for
literate codification and eventual use in the formulation of
benevolent paternalistic policies.
Anthropological works dealing with ownership and access in
fisheries include: Alexander (1977), Durrenberger and Palsson (1987),
Nadjmabadi (1990), and Palsson (1991). For a recent ethnographic
focus on economic change and conflict regarding fisheries see: Breton
(1991), Kurien (1992), Lim (1990), Ram (1991) and Zerner (1991).
Robben (1989) challenges the idea of a separate sphere of economy in
his analysis of economic practice and discursive conflict in a
Brazilian fishing community. Bailey (1986) and Bailey and Zerner
(1992a, 1992b) engage the topic of community management in their
critical examinations of Indonesian fisheries.
McGoodwin also argues that the recognition of property rights
of indigenous communities is a prerequisite for the formation of
Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries ("TURFs"). This is certainly
crucial, yet even if such rights were recognized, this begs the
question of the depletion of species that are highly mobile.
Bailey’s (1988a, 1988b) combined focus on the discourse and practices
of development institutions, the adoption of capital-intensive
fishing technologies, and the responses, sometimes violent, of
marginalized small-scale fishers, skillfully examines the complex
interplay between economies, environments and socio-political
processes. Zerner (1991) brings a similar perspective to the
specificity of a case study approach analyzing the raft fishery in
Mandar, South Sulawesi.
Although the following references concern specifically
Southeast Asia and Indonesia, the connections between a number of
31
more general matters crave further analysis: development and the
seas as a frontier (Sien and Mac Andrews 1981); the UN Conference on
the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the regime of extended maritime
jurisdiction it has authorized (Agoes 1991; Comitini and Hardjolukito
1983); and the rhetoric of sovereign rights over resources with the
presumption of "rational" management by the state (Kusuma-Atmadja
1991).
4.Critiques of "development" are (finally) beginning to
proliferate. For critical perspectives on the interface of
development and anthropology see: Bowen (1988), Escobar (1991) and
Hobart (1993). Quarles van Ufford (in Hobart, ed. 1993) does a kind
of practice analysis of a situation in Indonesia. Many of the
following works critical of "development" share concerns about
environmental degredation and its connections with socio-economic
inequities. This attempt at categorization admits a great deal of
overlap. Post-structuralist discourse analyses are emphasized in
Escobar (1985, 1995), Parajuli (1991), Sachs, ed. (1992), Watts
(1993), Whatmore and Boucher (1993, on a specific case of
"development" in Britain), Yapa (1993, 1995— used with the author’s
permission), and Yapa and Wisner (1995). Many of these are grounded
in the discipline of Geography. On social movements see especially
Sachs, ed. (1992) and Escobar (1995, 1992a, and 1992b); but related
works emphasizing peasant resistance and struggles include: Broad and
Cavanagh (1993), Mortimer (1984), Redclift and Benton, eds. (1994)
and Nash (1994). Other works critiquing "development" from economic
and environmental perspectives are: Amin (1992), Boyce (1993),
Monbiot (1994), Peet and Watts (1993) and Segura and Boyce (1994).
On political ecology see Bryant (1992); on the neglect of environment
in political and economic discourses see Redclift (1984); and on the
production of anti-politics in development see Ferguson (1990). On
"development" and forests see: Hecht and Cockburn (1990), Hurst
(1990), Kummer (1992) and Peluso (1992) for a start. This list is
clearly not exhaustive, but I have tried to include books and
articles which give good reviews of issues and related literature.
5.The film crew was led by John Darling.
6.This is an oblique reference to debates about the Kayapo,
their use of media, and media about their use of media. Points of
this debate are covered in P. Harvey (1993) and in the letter to the
editor which follows it by M. Frota Feitosa. See also Ginsburg
(1992) on indigenous media.
7.A classic example is Robert Gardner’s (1963) film Dead
Birds.
8.Of course, if a project is dominated by an anti-realism, (or
by gimmicks,) or by the desire to produce theory that is mostly self-
referential, then it is easy to make something not realistic.
Documentaries which do effectively get away from this backsliding to
the realistic are often autobiographical, something which, one
imagines, has to do with the nature of "documentary" (see Nichols
1991).
9."Who is your audience?" is a question Tim Asch posed
directly to his classes.
10.A demonstration of this particular accomodation can be
found in the proliferation of works advocating "sustainable
development" and "ecological economics." Segura and Boyce (1994)
have somehow managed to get their most welcome and critical last
chapter, thoroughly neglected by the volume’s introduction, into one
such work called Investing in Natural Capital.
11.This is as well the key issue with essentialisms and how
they are constituted, something dealt with by Simone de Beauvoir
(1973), among others, and discussed with reference to hegemony and
relevance to ethnography by Comaroff and Comaroff (1992, see
especially p.29).
12.Ivan Illich (in Sachs,ed.,1992) has an insightful
discussion of the creation of "needs" vis a vis the transformations
of homo sapiens to homo miserabilis. of homo miserabilis to homo
economicus, and of homo economicus to homo svstematicus. Ferguson
(1990) touches on some related points in his discussion of the
question so often posed by the compassionate researcher: "What is to
be done?"
13.Yapa (1995) and Yapa and Wisner (1995) drawing on Foucault
(1980) use the phrase "discursive materialism" to describe this
point in their critiques of the theory and practices of development.
For related critiques see: Escobar (1985, 1995), Parajuli (1991),
Sachs, ed. (1992), Watts (1993) and note 4 above.
14.The so-called Subject is the focus of reflections on
modernity, feminism, and psychoanalysis, among others, with
references far too numerous to name here. My approach is informed by
Spivak’s reading of the critical historiography of subaltern studies
(Spivak 1988).
15.This is to dispel the notion that it might be considered
within what Bourdieu (1977) calls the realm of "doxa."
16.The more I also appreciated the contingencies that drive
people to employ voice-overs in post-production.
17.Place names are also pseudonyms.
33
18.The translations are mine, with assistance which I
gratefully acknowledge, from Achmad Budiman.
19.1 unfortunately didn’t write down what he said that
translated as "petty tyrant" in my notes, but it was probably "raja
kecil." It should also be noted that he and his current wife made a
point of the fact that he quit being village head in 1976 because he
was "too" honest.
20,Darul Islam comes from the Arabic literally meaning "house
of" Islam; tentara is Indonesian for "army." On Darul Islam in
different parts of Indonesia, see Van Dijk (1981); in South (and a
bit of Southeast) Sulawesi see B. Harvey (1974). On the legacy of
the revolution and the Linggajati Agreement (1947) in the formation
and character of the rebellions in South, and, largely by extension,
Southeast Sulawesi, see especially Harvey (1985). It is unfortunate
that consideration of the rebellion(s) often excludes Southeast
Sulawesi. In part this may be due to the nature of sources which
lean, with some reason, toward the urban, hence also toward the South
rather than Southeast, and which are also limited by survivors
considered approachable, willing to talk and who are living with the
outcome. It is clear to me from conversations with people from
different suku ("ethnic" groups) that the rebellion was not felt only
sporadically in Southeast Sulawesi.
21.1 include the transcription here because it is not in the
final video.
Ada yang lari, a terpaksa ada yang lari ke kota,
ada yang terpaksa oleh ini: gerombolan ini masuk
hutan. Mereka ini sebenarnya dibawa dimasuk hutan;
ya pada waktu itu kita tidak sadari untuk apa itu
masyarakat kecil dibawa di hutan? Nanti setelah
penyelesaian kearaanan baru dipikir-pikir: o mereka
jadikan pagar saja. Dijadikan perisai saja,
penangkis saja. Sebab, Angakatan Bersenjata Republik
Indonesia, kalau mau adakan serangan kepada
gerombolan-gerombolan itu, dia lihat dulu ke bawah.
Baik dari serangan dari Angkatan Udara maupun
Angkatan Laut, dilihat dulu, dilihat masyarakat...
masyarakat saja, ini di... dijadikan pagar.
Maksudnya supaya, ya, tidak diserang, to? Kalau
masyarakat dilihat: o banyak rakyat yang tidak
berdosa ini; tentu dari Angkatan Udara juga berpikir:
kasihan rakyat yang banyak korban. Padahal di situ
berlindung; ya, pasukan gerombolan-gerombolan DI-TII
yang saya katakan tadi itu.
Robinson (1986:85) notes that in the South Sulawesi inland
village of Soroako, the rebels’ logic was understood in this way: "If
the people were living far from roads and were inaccessible to the
34
army, they could not be forced to provide food and shelter to the
government troops."
22.This portion of the interview is included in the video.
"Cannon fodder" is "umpan peluru."
23."Pancasila," the official ideology of the Indonesian state
is, succinctly put: belief in a Supreme Being, humanitarianism,
nationalism, representative government, and social justice.
24."Bhinneka tunggal ika," another official state slogan is
usually translated as "unity in diversity." As Acciaioli (1985:161)
notes, the official ideologies value diversity more at the level of
display, not belief, and performance, not enactment, Pemberton
(1994) runs with this theme.
25.Tsing (1994) discusses how Meratus point to the ways their
imagined difference has been constituted by powerful outsiders, and
how they indicate "a heritage of survival as creative living at the
edge" (pp. 285-6). In a somewhat different context, Cooper
(1994:1531) states that hegemonic projects open up spaces for
contestation among the colonized. But not, I might reiterate, as a
"transcript" created by the dominant discourse.
26.See note 4 above on critiques of the theory and practices
of "development."
27.As is clear in the video, mangroves may be harvested
without "clear cutting," and without disturbing the root systems in
many which juvenile fish species recruit.
28.See note 3 on fisheries, above.
29.This argument does not presuppose that cash was previously
not used locally.
30.It must be remembered by way of de-reification, that as
could be said of any institution, the state is, among other things, a
concatenation of practices. As Mitchell (1991) points out, its
"externality" is itself the effect of discourses and disciplines (in
the Foucauldian sense). On the concept of the "repressive-
developmentalist state" see Feith (n.d., in Nandy, in Sachs, ed.,
1992). Also see Ferguson (1990).
31.On the constitution of "isolated tribes," see especially
Acciaioli (1985) and Tsing (1993, 1994). For examples in Indonesian
anthropology, on which the following paragraph is partly based— as a
criticism— see Koentjaraningrat, ed. (1993).
35
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acciaioli, Greg. 1985. "Culture as Art: From Practice to Spectacle in
Indonesia." Canberra Anthropology 8(1&2):148-172.
Agoes, Etty R, 1991. "Indonesia and the LOS Convention: Recent
Developments in Ocean Law, Policy and Development." Marine Policy
15(2):122-131.
Alexander, Paul. 1977. "Sea Tenure in Southern Sri Lanka." Ethnology
16:231-251.
Allison, Karen J. 1984. A View From The Islands: The Samal of Tawi-
Tawi. Dallas: International Museum of Cultures; Summer Institute
of Linguistics.
Altvater, E. 1993. "Towards an Ecological Critique of Political
Economy." In The Future of the Market: An Essav on the Regulation
of Money and Nature after the Collapse of "Actually Existing
Socialism". London: Verso.
Amin, Samir. 1992. "Can Environmental Problems Be Subject to Economic
Calculations?" World Development 20(4):523-30.
Anderson, Terry L. and Randy T. Simmons, eds. 1993. The Political
Economy of Customs and Culture: Informal Solutions to the Commons
Problem. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bailey, Conner. 1988a. "The Political Economy of Fisheries Development
in the Third World." Agriculture and Human Values 5(1&2):35-48.
. 1988b. "The Political Economy of Marine Fisheries Development in
Indonesia." Indonesia 46:25-38.
. 1986. "Government Protection of Traditional Resource Use Rights
-the Case of Indonesian Fisheries." In David C. Korten, ed.,
Community Management: Asian Experience and Perspectives. West
Hartford: Kumarian Press.
Bailey, Conner, A. Dwiponggo and F. Marahudin. 1987. Indonesian Marine
Capture Fisheries. Manila: International Center for Living Aquatic
Resources Management (ICLARM).
Bailey, Conner and Charles Zerner. 1992a. "Community-Based Fisheries
Management Institutions in Indonesia." Maritime Anthropological
Studies: MAST 5(1):1—17.
36
. 1992b, "Local Management of Fisheries Resources in Indonesia:
Opportunities and Constraints." In R.B. Pollnac, C. Bailey and A.
Poernomo, Contributions to Fishery Development Policy in
Indonesia. Jakarta: Central Research Institute for Fisheries,
Agency for Aricultural Research and Development, Ministry of
Agriculture, Indonesia.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1973. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Press.
Bennett, John and John Bowen. 1988. Production and Autonomy:
Anthropological Studies and Critiques of Development. Lanham:
University Press of America; Society for Economic Anthropology.
Bentley, G. Carter. 1981. "Migration, Ethnic Identity and State
Building in the Philippines: The Sulu Case." In Charles F. Keyes,
ed., Ethnic Change. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Berkes, Fikret, ed. 1989. Common Property Resources: Ecology and
Community-Based Sustainable Development. London: Belhaven Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by
Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowen, John R. 1988. "Power and Meaning in Economic Change: What Does
Anthropology Learn From Development Studies?" In John W. Bennet
and John R. Bowen, Production and Autonomy: Anthropological
Studies and Critiques of Development. Lanham, New York and London:
University Press of America and Society for Economic Anthropology.
. 1986. "On the Political Construction of Tradition: Gotong
Royong in Indonesia," Journal of Asian Studies 45:545-561.
Boyce, James K. 1993. The Philippines: The Political Economy of Growth
and Impoverishment in the Marcos Era. London: Macmillan; Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press; and Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila
University Press.
Breton, Yvan. 1991. "Economic Anthropology and Interdisciplinarity in
Costa Rica Fishing." Maritime Anthropological Studies: MAST
4(1):1-12.
Broad, Robin with John Cavanagh. 1993. Plundering Paradise: The
Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press.
Bryant, R. 1992. "Political Ecology." Political Geography 11:12-36.
Casimir, Michael J. and Aparna Rao, eds. 1992. Mobility and
Territoriality: Social and Spatial Boundaries Among Foragers.
Fishers, Pastoralists and Peripatetics. New York and London: Berg.
37
Casino, Eric. 1976. The Jama Hapun: A Changing Samal Society in the
Southern Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press.
Castoriadis, C. 1991a. "Reflections on ’Rationality' and
'Development.'" In Philosophy. Politics. Autonomy. 175-218. New
York: Oxford University Press.
. 1991b. "The Social Historical: Mode of being, problems of
knowledge." In Philosophy. Politics. Autonomy. 33-46. New York:
Oxford University Press.
de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Churchill, R.R. and A.V. Lowe. 1985. The Law of the Sea. Manchester, UK
and Dover, NH: Manchester University Press.
Comaroff, John & Jean. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical
Imagination. Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press.
Comitini, Salvatore and Sutanto Hardjolukito. 1983. Indonesian Marine
Fisheries Development and Strategy Under Extended Maritime
Jurisdiction. Honolulu: East-West Center, East-West Environment
and Policy Institute.
Cooper, Frederick. 1994. "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial
African History." American Historical Review 99(5):1516-1545.
Djalal, Hasjim. 1986. "A Southeast Asian Perspective." In Giulio
Pontecorvo, ed., The New Order of the Oceans: The Advent of a
Managed Environment. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dove, Michael R., ed. 1988. The Real and Imagined Role of Culture in
Development: Case Studies From Indonesia. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Durrenberger, Paul E. and Gisli Palsson. 1987. "Ownership at Sea:
Fishing Territories and Access to Sea Resources." American
Ethnologist 4:508-19.
Eisenstadt, S.N. 1992. "Frameworks of the Great Revolutions: Culture,
Social Structure, History and Human Agency." International Social
Science Journal 44(133):385-401.
Eldridge, Philip. 1985. "The Political Role of Community Action Groups
in India and Indonesia: In Search of a General Theory."
Alternatives 10(1984-5):401-434.
38
Escobar, A. 1995. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
. 1992a, "Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought,
Development and Social Movements." Social Text 31/32:20-56.
. 1992b. "Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the
Study of Social Movements." Critique of Anthropology 12(4):395-
432.
. 1991. "Anthropology and the Development Encounter: The Making
and Marketing of Development Anthropology." American Ethnologist
18(4):658-682.
. 1985. "Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault and
the Relevance of. his Work to the Third World." Alternatives
10:377-400.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its
Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Feitosa, Monica Frota. 1993. "Letter to the Editor." Visual
Anthropology Review 9(1):177.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development."
Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fox, James J. 1977. "Notes on the Southern Voyages and Settlements of
the Sama-Bajau." Bi.idragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde
133(4):459-465.1980.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
. 1977. Language. Counter-Memory. Practice. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Frake, Charles 0. 1980. "The Genesis of Kinds of People in the Sulu
Archipelago." In Frake, Language and Cultural Description.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ginsburg, Faye. 1992. "Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global
Village?" In George E. Marcus, ed., Rereading Cultural
Anthropology. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Gordon, H.S. 1954. "The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource:
the Fishery." Journal of Political Economy 62:124-42.
Hardin, G. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162:1243-7.
39
Harvey, Barbara, S. 1985. "South Sulawesi: Puppets and Patriots." In
Audrey R. Kahin, ed., Regional Dynamics of the Indonesian
Revolution. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
1974. Tradition. Islam and Rebellion: South Sulawesi. 1950-1965.
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.
Harvey, Penny. 1993. "Ethnographic Film and the Politics of Difference:
A Review of Two Film Festivals." Visual Anthropology Review
9(1):164-176.
Hecht, S. and A Cockburn. 1990. The Fate of the Forest: Developers.
Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon. New York: Harper Collins.
Hobart, Hark. 1993. "Introduction: The Growth of Ignorance?" In Mark
Hobart, ed., An Anthropological Critique of Development: The
Growth of Ignorance. New York and London: Routledge.
Homer-Dixon, T., Boutwell, J., and Rathjens, G. 1993. "Environmental
Change and Violent Conflict." Scientific American (February): 38-
45.
Horvatich, Patricia. 1993. "Ways of Knowing Islam." American
Ethnologist 21(4):811-827.
Hurst, P. 1990. Rainforest Politics: Ecological Destruction in South-
East Asia. London: Zed Books.
Knauft, Bruce. 1994. "Pushing Anthropology Past the Posts: Critical
Notes on Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Studies as Influenced
by Postmodernism and Existentialism." Critique of Anthropology
14(2):117-152.
Koentjaraningrat, dkk. 1993. Masyarakat Terasing di Indonesia.
(Isolated Peoples in Indonesia.) Jakarta: PT Gramedia Pustaka
Utama.
Kummer, D.M. 1992. Deforestation in the Post-War Philippines. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kunstadter, Peter; Bird, Eric C.F. and Sanga Sabhasri, eds. 1986. Man
in the Mangroves: The Socio-Economic Situation of Human
Settlements in Mangrove Forests. Tokyo: United Nations University.
Kurais, Muhammed. 1979. The Ethnic Identity of the Sama Delaut. Marawi
City: University Research Center, Mindanao State University.
40
Kurien, John. 1992. "Ruining the Commons and Responses of the
Commoners: Coastal Overfishing and Fishworkers* Actions in Kerala
State." In Dharam Ghai and Jessica M. Vivian, eds., Grassroots
Environmental Action: People*s Participation in Sustainable
Development. London and New York: Routledge.
Kusuma-Atmadja, Hochtar. 1991. "Sovereign Rights Over Indonesian
Natural Resources: An Archipelagic Concept of Rational and
Sustainable Resource Management." Marine Policy (November):383-
412.
Lapian, Adrian Bernard. 1987. Orang Laut - Ba.iak Laut - Ra.ia Laut:
Se.iarah Kawasan Laut Sulawesi Abad XIX. Dissertation; Yogyakarta:
Universitas Gadjah Mada.
Lim Teck Ghee. 1990. "Conflict Over Natural Resources in Malaysia: The
Struggle of Small-scale Fishermen." In Lim Teck Ghee and Mark J.
Valencia, eds., Conflict Over Natural Resources in South-East Asia
and the Pacific. Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press and
United Nations University Press.
Loizos, Peter. 1993. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to
Self-Consciousness. 1955-1985. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lutz, Catherine and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacDougall, David. 1992. "Films of Memory." Visual Anthropology Review
8(1):29-38.
1975. "Beyond Observational Cinema." In Paul Hockings, ed.,
Principles of Visual Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton.
MacKnight, C.C. 1976. The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in
Northern Australia. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Majul, Cesar A. 1973. Muslims in the Philippines. Quezon City:
University of Philippines Press.
Martinez, Wilton. 1992. "Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge?
Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film Spectatorship." In P.I.
Crawford and D. Turton, eds., Film as Ethnography. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
McCay, Bonnie M. and James M. Acheson, eds. 1987. The Question of the
Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tuscon:
University of Arizona Press.
41
McGoodwin, James R. 1990. Crisis in the World’s Fisheries. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Mitchell Timothy. 1991. "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist
Approaches and Their Critics." American Political Science Review
85(1):77(20).
. 1990. "Everyday Metaphors of Power." Theory and Society 19:545-
577.
. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Monbiot, George. 1994. "The Tragedy of Enclosure." Scientific American
(January):159.
Mortimer, Rex. 1984. Stubborn Survivors: Dissenting Essays on Peasants
and Third World Development. Edited by Herbert Feith and Rodney
Tiffen. Clayton, Vic.: Center For Southeast Asian Studies, Monash
University.
Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz. 1992. "'The Sea Belongs to God, the Land Belongs
to Us': Resource Management in a Multi-resource Community in the
Persian Gulf." In Michael J. Casimir and Aparna Rao, eds.,
Mobility and Territoriality: Social and Spatial Boundaries among
Foragers. Fishers. Pastoralists and Peripatetics. New York: Berg.
Nash, June, 1994. "Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity,"
American Anthropologist 96(l):7-30.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in
Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Nimmo, Arlo H, 1994. The Songs of Salanda and Other Stories of Sulu.
Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
. 1972. The Sea People of Sulu. San Francisco: Chandler.
Noorduyn, J. 1991. A Critical Survey of Studies on the Languages of
Sulawesi. Leiden: KITLV Press.
O’Conner, J. 1988. "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical
Introduction." Capitalism. Nature. Socialism 1:11-38.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
42
Pallesen, A. Kemp. 1985. Culture Contact and Language Convergence.
Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines; Summer Institute
of Linguistics.
Palsson, Gisli. 1991. Coastal Economies. Cultural Accounts: Human
Ecology and Icelandic Discourse. Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press.
Parajuli,P. 1991. "Power and Knowledge in Development Discourse."
International Social Science Journal 127:173-90.
Peet, Richard and Michael Watts. 1993. "Introduction: Development
Theory and Environmentalism in an Age of Market Triumphalism."
Economic Geography 69(3):227-253.
Pelras, Christian. 1973. "Notes sur quelques populations aquatiques de
l’Archipel nusantarien." Archipel 3-4: 133-169.
Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1992. Rich Forests. Poor People: Resourse Control
and Resistance in Java. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford:
University of California Press.
Pemberton, John. 1994. On The Sub.iect of "Java". Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press.
Pollnac, Richard B. 1981. Sociocultural Aspects of Developing Small-
Scale Fisheries: Delivering Services to the Poor. World Bank
Staff Working Paper No.490. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Pollnac, R.B., Bailey, C. and A. Poernomo. 1992. Contributions to
Fishery Development Policy in Indonesia. Jakarta: Central Research
Institute for Fisheries, Agency for Aricultural Research and
Development, Ministry of Agriculture, Indonesia.
Prakash, Gyan. 1994. "Subaltern Studies As Postcolonial Criticism."
American Historical Review 99(5):1475-1490.
Quarles van Ufford, Philip. 1993. "Knowledge and Ignorance in the
Practice of Development Policy." In Mark Hobart, ed., An
Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance.
London and New York: Routledge.
Rabinow, Paul. 1985. "Discourse and Power: On the Limits of
Ethnographic Texts." Dialectical Anthropology 10:1-15.
Rabinowitz, Paula. 1994. They Must Be Represented: The Politics of
Documentary. London and New York: Verso.
43
Ram, Kalpana. 1991. Mukkuvar Women: Gender. Hegemony and Capitalist
Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. London and New
Jersey: Zed Books.
Reber, Anne L. 1966. The Sulu World in the Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries: A Historiographical Problem in British
Writings on Malay Piracy. Unpublished MA Thesis, Cornell
University.
Redclift, Michael. 1992. "Sustainable Development and Popular
Participation: A Framework for Analysis." In Dharam Ghai and
Jessica M. Vivian, eds., Grassroots Environmental Action: People’s
Participation in Sustainable Development. London and New York:
Routledge.
. 1984. Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green
Alternatives? London and New York: Methuen.
Redclift, Michael and Ted Benton, eds. 1994. Social Theory and the
Global Environment. New York and London: Routledge.
Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 1989. Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic and
Discursive Conflict in Brazil. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Robinson, Kathryn M. 1986. Stepchildren of Progress: The Political
Economy of Development in an Indonesian Mining Town. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Sachs, Wolfgang, ed. 1992. The Development Dictionary. London: Zed
Press.
Saleeby, Najeeb M. 1963. The History of Sulu. Manila: Filipiniana Book
Guild.
Sather, Clifford. 1993a. "Bajau." In David Levinson, ed., Encyclopedia
of World Cultures. Vol.5. East and Southeast Asia, pp.30-35.
Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.
. 1993b. "Samal." In David Levinson, ed., Encyclopedia of World
Cultures. Vol.5. East and Southeast Asia, pp.217-221. Boston: G.K.
Hall & Co.
. 1992. "The Transformation of a Boat Nomadic People: Shifting
Ethnic Identities in Pre- and Post-colonial Sabah." Paper
presented at the 1992 annual meetings of the American
Anthropological Association.
. 1978. "The Bajau Laut." In Victor King, ed., Essays on Borneo
Societies. Oxford: Hull Monographs on Southeast Asia, no.7.
44
Schwarz, Adam. 1994. A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia in the 1990’s.
Boulder and San Francisco: Westview Press.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Segura, Olman and Boyce, James K. 1994. "Investing in Natural and
Human Capital in Developing Countries." In A. Jansson, et al.,
eds., Investing in Natural Capital. Washington, D.C. and Covelo,
California: Island Press.
Sien, Chia Lin and Colin Mac Andrews. 1981. Southeast Asian Seas:
Frontiers for Development. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies; Me Graw Hill.
Sopher, David. 1965. The Sea Nomads: A Study Based on the Literature of
the Maritime Boat People of Southeast Asia. Singapore: National
Museum.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing
Historiography." In In Other Worlds: Essavs In Cultural Politics.
New York and London: Routledge.
Spoehr, Alexander. 1973. Zamboanga and Sulu: An Archeological Approach
to Ethnic Identity. Ethnology Monographs, No.l. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1992. "’In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility
and the Politics of Colonial Narratives." Representations 37:151-
189.
Stoller, Paul. 1994. "Ethnographies as Texts/Ethnographers as Griots."
American Ethnologist 21(2):353-366.
. 1992. The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alteritv: A Particular History of
the Senses. New York and London: Routledge.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1994. "From The Margins." Cultural
Anthropology 9(3): 279-297.
. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Van Dijk, C. 1981. Rebellion Under the Banner of Islam: The Darul Islam
in Indonesia. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff and Leiden: KITLV.
45
Warren, James F. 1981. The Sulu Zone. 1768-1898: The Dynamics of
External Trade. Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a
Southeast Asian State. Singapore: Singapore University Press.
. 1971. The North Borneo Chartered Company’s Administration of the
Ba.iau. 1878-1909: The Pacification of a Maritime, Nomadic People.
Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, Papers
in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series, No.22.
Watts, M. 1993. "Development I: Power, Knowledge, Discursive Practice."
Progress in Human Geography 17(2):257—72.
Weiskel, Timothy C. 1989. "The Ecological Lessons of the Past: An
Anthropology of Environmental Decline." The Ecologist 19(3):98-
103.
Whatmore, S. and Boucher, S. 1993. "Bargaining with Nature: The
Discourse and Practice of ’Environmental Planning Gain’."
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18:166-78.
Yapa, Lakshman. 1995. "Can Postmodern Discourse Theory Help Alleviate
Poverty? Yes!" Paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meetings of the
Association of American Geographers (March, in Chicago).
. 1993. "What Are Improved Seeds? An Epsitemology of the Green
Revolution." Economic Geography 69(3):254-273.
Yapa, Lakshman and Ben Wisner. 1995. "Building a Case Against
Development." Geo.iournal 35(2): 105-118.
Young, R. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West.
London: Routledge.
Zerner, Charles. 1991. "Sharing the Catch in Mandar: Changes in an
Indonesian Raft Fishery (1970-1989)." In J.J. Poggie and R.B.
Pollnac, Small-Scale Fishery Development: Sociocultural
Perspectives. Kingston, RI: International Center for Marine
Resource Development.
46
INFORMATION TO USERS
This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI
films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some
thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may
be from any type of computer printer.
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the
copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality
illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins,
and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete
manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if
unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate
the deletion.
Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by
sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and
continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each
original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in
reduced form at the back of the book.
Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced
xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white
photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations
appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly
to order.
A Bell & Howell Information Company
300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. M l 48106-1346 USA
313/761-4700 800/521-0600
DMI Number: 1376455
UMI Microform 1376455
Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized
copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI
300 North Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The dream becomes a reality (?): nation building and the continued struggle of the women of the Eritrian People's Liberation Front

PDF

The Role Of Performance And Culture In Local And National Identity Formation In Post-Soviet Estonia

PDF

A place-in-between: narratives of gender, violence and identity in a South African township

PDF

Austronesian voyaging from Taiwan: Cultivating Amis folk songs on the international stage

PDF

Meta-analysis on the misattribution of arousal

PDF

Work for the masters degree

PDF

Predictors of pretend play in Korean-American and Anglo-American preschool children

PDF

The application of Sarbin's theory of emotions as narrative emplotments to stories of two men diagnosed with cancer

PDF

Lateral variability in predation and taphonomic characteristics of turritelline gastropod assemblages from Middle Eocene - Lower Oligocene strata of the Gulf Coastal Plain, United States

PDF

The Cloisters Cross: a re-examination of date and style

PDF

Assistive technology for clients with visual impairments of the Alaska Division of Vocation Rehabilitation: a qualitative evaluation

PDF

Study Guide To The Film "Earth & Fire": The Traditional Lenca Pottery Of La Campa

PDF

Japanese pronunciation by English speaking students and English-Korean speaking students: contrastive and error analysis

PDF

Fine motor skills of two- to three-year-old drug exposed children

PDF

An investigation of the pseudohomophone effect: where and when it occurs

PDF

The house that Jack built

PDF

Children's immediate reactions to interparental conflict

PDF

A qualitative study on the relationship of future orientation and daily occupations of adolescents in a psychiatric setting

PDF

The effects of dependence among sites in phylogeny reconstruction

PDF

A modernist auteur, Edward Yang: the first decade of his film career (1982-1991)

Asset Metadata

Creator Gaynor, Jennifer Lee (author)

Core Title On the limits of not being scripted: video-making and discursive prositioning in coastal southeast Sulawesi

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Visual Anthropology

Degree Conferral Date 1995-08

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Hoskins, Janet (committee chair), Christiansen, Roger S. (committee member), Cooper, Eugene (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-1371

Unique identifier UC11357626

Identifier 1376455.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-1371 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1376455-0.pdf

Dmrecord 1371

Document Type Thesis

Rights Gaynor, Jennifer Lee

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA