tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45166730779836124942024-03-14T02:50:45.735-07:00Eben KirkseyEben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-41977467382674102002017-04-23T17:45:00.000-07:002020-05-28T10:56:33.847-07:00404 PAGE NOT FOUND<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Visit: <a href="https://eben-kirksey.space/">https://eben-kirksey.space/</a></div>
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<br />Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-68489410981745984002015-05-08T08:34:00.002-07:002017-04-23T01:45:56.915-07:00Emergent Ecologies<br />
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A praisesong for the possibilities of bricolage, <i>Emergent Ecologies</i> is a postmodern natural history in which displaced ants, macaques, frogs, and flies tumble with philosophy, performance art, science, and adventure story. Eben Kirksey takes us on a wild ride through a funhouse of risky and ironic entanglements.”<br />
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—ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING, coeditor of Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon<br />
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Buy on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Ecologies-Eben-Kirksey/dp/0822360357" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a><br />
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<b>Forthcoming: November 2015, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/duke-fall-2015" target="_blank">Duke University Press</a>.</b><br />
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In an era of global warming, natural
disasters, endangered species,
and devastating pollution, contemporary
writing on the environment
largely focuses on doomsday
scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests
we reject such apocalyptic thinking
and instead find possibilities
in the wreckage of ongoing disasters,
as symbiotic associations of
opportunistic plants, animals, and
microbes are flourishing in unexpected
places. <i>Emergent Ecologies</i>
uses artwork and contemporary
philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems
in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction,
environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of
capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes
of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how
chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have
shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations
of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological
assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys,
people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them,
and ultimately letting go.<br />
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<a href="http://tinyurl.com/duke-fall-2015" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt=" Duke: Fall Catalog" border="0" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWBkXxkQFBDL2GWLiPOzSV4netpuTEh9RO1aRNuvyOFe6x4r0WPfPNNsEoEEIRzwRkhmvi6Uzknfk2jBDOnEDe4c6Cfhnk2uxiiUsfmA_I3Nq_-y-4XPA5TW0LlGOp33yq3STae-qW6i8l/s200/duke-up-408x231.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br />Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-1189314538350880692015-05-01T23:57:00.000-07:002017-04-23T02:01:02.773-07:00Select Publications<div style="background-color: white; color: orange;">
<a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/kirksey-lively-multispecies-communities_deadly-racial-assemblages/" target="_blank">KIRKSEY, S. E. (2017) "Lively Multispecies Communities, Deadly Racial Assemblages, and the Promise of Justice" <i>South Atlantic Quarterly </i>116 (1): 195-206.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/working/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Kirksey-Species-JRAI.pdf" target="_blank">KIRKSEY, S. E. (2015) "Species: A Praxiographic Study" <i>JRAI: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute </i>21 (4): 758-780.</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0173979J0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0173979J0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1" target="_blank">KIRKSEY, S. E. (2015) <i>Emergent Ecologies</i>, Duke University Press: Durham.</a><br /><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Multispecies-Salon-Eben-Kirksey/dp/0822356252" target="_blank">KIRKSEY, S. E. (2014) Editor: <i>The Multispecies Salon</i>, Duke University Press: Durham. </a><br />
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<a href="http://multispecies-salon.org/publications/Kirksey-Interspecies-Love-published.pdf" target="external">KIRKSEY,
S. E. (2013) “Interspecies Love” in Lanjouw and Corbey (eds)
<i>The Politics of Species</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.
164-77.</a><br />
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<a href="http://multispecies-salon.org/publications/Kirksey-et-al_Hope-in-Blasted-Landscapes.pdf" target="external">KIRKSEY, S. E., N. Shapiro, M. Brodine (2013) "Hope in Blasted Landscapes" <span style="font-style: italic;">Social Science Information</span>, 52 (2): 228-256.</a><br />
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<a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=J7blt9UJy_cC&lpg=PA37&ots=Z33r-zaB5S&dq=messianic%20multiple%20war%20and%20peace&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q=messianic%20multiple%20war%20and%20peace&f=false" target="_blank">KIRKSEY, S. E. 2013 “A Messianic Multiple: West Papua, July 1998” in Bryan Turner (ed.) <i>War and Peace: Essays on Religion and Violence</i> (Anthem Press), pp. 37-59. </a><br />
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<a href="http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol1/EH1.3.pdf" target="external">KIRKSEY, S. E. 2012 "Living with Parasites in Palo Verde National Park" <i>Environmental Humanities</i>, 1: 23-55.</a><br />
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<a href="http://multispecies-salon.org/publications/Kirksey_Thneeds-Reseeds_Biocultural-Hope.pdf" target="external">KIRKSEY,
S. E. 2012 "Thneeds Reseeds: Figures of Biocultural Hope in the
Anthropocene" in G. Martin, D. Mincyte, and U. Münster (eds.) <i>Why Do We Value Diversity? Rachel Carson Perspectives </i>vol 9: 89-94.</a><br />
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<a href="http://ebenkirksey.blogspot.com/2012/04/freedom-in-entangled-worlds-west-papua.html">KIRKSEY, S. E. 2012 <i>Freedom in Entangled Worlds</i>, Duke University Press: Durham. </a><br />
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<a href="http://web.mit.edu/anthropology/pdf/articles/helmreich/helmreich_multispecies_ethnography.pdf%22">KIRKSEY, S. E. & S. HELMREICH. 2010 "The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography", Cultural Anthropology, 25 (4): 545-576</a>. Full <a href="https://www.blogger.com/href=%22http://multispecies-salon.org/publications/Multispecies-Ethnography_CA-Special-Issue.pdf">Special Issue</a> (48.8 MB)</div>
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<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=j6y42Idh-h8C&pg=PP1&dq=anthropology+off+the+shelf&client=firefox-a#PPR5,M1">KIRKSEY, S. E. 2009. "Don't Use Your Data as a Pillow" in M. Vesperi and A. Waterson (eds.) <i>Anthropology Off the Shelf </i>(Wiley Blackwell), pp. 146-159.</a><br />
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<a href="http://skyhighway.com/~ebenkirksey/writing/Kirksey-Harsono_Timika.pdf">KIRKSEY, S. E. & A. HARSONO. 2008. "Criminal Collaborations: Antonius Wamang and the Indonesian Military in Timika", <i>South East Asia Research</i>, 16 (2): 165-197.</a><br />
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<a href="http://multispecies-salon.org/publications/Kirksey-van-Bilsen_A-Road-to-Freedom.pdf">KIRKSEY, S. E. & K. V. BILSEN. 2002. The Road to Freedom: Mee Agency and the Trans-Papua Highway. <i>Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkundespan</i>, 158 (4): 837-854.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article223564.ece">KIRKSEY, S. E. & J. GRIMSTON. 2003. Indonesian troops for BP gas project. <i>The Sunday Times </i>July 20, 2003. Back page lead story.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/anthropology-and-colonial-violence-west-papua" target="external">KIRKSEY, S. E. 2002. Anthropology and Colonial Violence in West Papua. <i>Cultural Survival Quarterly </i>. Fall: 34-8. </a></div>
Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-75651730962181344532014-11-28T08:48:00.001-08:002014-11-28T09:10:10.756-08:00Joshua Oppenheimer at AAA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiySHHtPBUBqI3AwoidSg-7HvgjavfZ-zFmuh97dKErhQSha5XJqlRCNkuiaaP_Nm2TVJ_yD2ZgMkxvzALmUFV8UqivFb2lRNMreNBFGPRtyFe0uOIx_tCBbs5JVXcyVbJJQtL-Soa7HlF1/s1600/frontpage-23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiySHHtPBUBqI3AwoidSg-7HvgjavfZ-zFmuh97dKErhQSha5XJqlRCNkuiaaP_Nm2TVJ_yD2ZgMkxvzALmUFV8UqivFb2lRNMreNBFGPRtyFe0uOIx_tCBbs5JVXcyVbJJQtL-Soa7HlF1/s1600/frontpage-23.jpg" height="191" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The Oscar-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer
will be attending the AAA Annual Meetings to screen two films and discuss his
tactics of challenging Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their
real-life mass-killings in the style of the American movies they love. The Act of Killing, his first major film, is "an important
exploration of the complex psychology of mass murderers" in the words of
Chris Hedges. "It is not the demonized, easily digestible caricature
of a mass murderer that most disturbs us. It is the human being." </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;">"The hallucinatory result is a cinematic fever dream, an unsettling journey deep into the imaginations of mass-murderers and the shockingly banal regime of corruption and impunity they inhabit," in the words of critics.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Oppenheimer will be showing the Director's Cut of this film, which is
rarely screened in the U.S., and will be offering an exclusive advanced preview
screening of his latest film, The Look of Silence. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;">Free screenings will take place at the <a href="http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/wasdt-washington-marriott-wardman-park/" target="_blank">Marriott Wardman Park</a>, 2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background: white;">THURSDAY, December 4th</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">4:30 PM - 7:30 PM (Marriott Ballroom): Exclusive
Screening: The Act of Killing Director's Cut (159 min) followed by Q&A with
director Joshua Oppenheimer. Free and open to the public.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background: white;">SUNDAY, December 7th</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">9:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Marriott Thurgood Marshall
Ballroom North and East) Advanced Preview Screening of The Look of Silence (99
min) followed by Q&A with director Joshua Oppenheimer, Joseph Saunders
(Human Rights Watch), and Max White (Amnesty International), facilitated by
Eben Kirksey. Open to AAA members. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-look-of-silence-qa-with-director-joshua-oppenheimer-tickets-14561990305" target="_blank">RSVP required</a> for members of the public.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">SUNDAY, December 7th</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">12:00 PM-1:45 PM (Marriott Thurgood Marshall
Ballroom North and East) AAA Panel: Ethnographic Tactics</span><br />
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<span style="background: white;">The Act of Killing</span><br />
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<span style="background: white;">Nominated in the “Best Documentary” category for
the 2013 Academy Awards, The Act of Killing (2012) has generated extensive
debate across a multiple fields for its troubling subject matter, uncanny
approach, and uncomfortable conclusions about memory, filmmaking, as well as
the human capacity for empathy. This special event will feature a screening of
the film followed by a Q&A session with the director, Joshua Oppenheimer.
The Act of Killing poses unique questions and challenges to
anthropologists, including the role and function of fiction in ethnographic and
documentary productions (whether textual or visual), approaches to
understanding memory and traumatic experience, and the critical distances (or
closeness) between engagement and collaboration. The film itself has generated
much praise and criticism since its release, particularly regarding reenactment
as a mode of reflection and response in documentary film. This special
screening of the Director's Cut, the uncut version of the film as it was
released in almost all countries apart from the US, "gains in depth,
taking you into a vortex of fever dreams, pulling you deep inside the
nightmares of the protagonists," according to Werner Herzog. "You
find yourself drawn irrevocably into the darkest souls, and time acquires a
different role, as if you and the world had stopped breathing. The shorter
version is trimmed down mostly to emphasize its political content, but Joshua
Oppenheimer's film is much more than a political documentary. It is a
masterpiece of filmmaking, full of depth, surrealism, and stunning silences
that will outlive the political message." The Q&A session,
facilitated by Eben Kirksey, will explore anthropological concerns on the
complicated nexus of fiction, reality, and representation. Joshua Oppenheimer
will also present an exclusive advanced preview screening of his new film, The
Look of Silence, and participate in a panel discussion about "Ethnographic
Tactics" on Sunday. Screening presented in partnership with Film
Platform and with support from the Committee on World Anthropologies.</span><br />
<br /><br />
<span style="background: white;">The Look of Silence <br />(Open to AAA members. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-look-of-silence-qa-with-director-joshua-oppenheimer-tickets-14561990305" target="_blank">RSVP required</a> for members of the public)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">"One of the greatest and most powerful
documentaries ever made," according to Errol Morris. "A profound
comment on the human condition.” "The Act of Killing was about the
mechanisms of moral delusion, mass-murderers escaping the implications of their
pasts by turning them into performance," writes The Telegraph, "but
The Look of Silence connects the dots back up, and turns the focus back on
culpability and complicity...while Oppenheimer's Oscar-nominated 2013 picture
showed the death squads’ leaders gleefully re-enacting the butchery in a series
of surreal, ghoulish theatrical tableaux, this second film zooms in close,
finding unfolding fractal patterns of horror-within-horror in the story of a
single victim’s plight." A family of survivors discovers how their
son was murdered and the identity of the men who killed him. The youngest
brother is determined to break the spell of silence and fear under which the
survivors live, and so confronts the men responsible for his brother's murder –
something unimaginable in a country where killers remain in power.
"The Look of Silence," writes the director, Joshua Oppenheimer,
"is a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of
breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is
broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives
destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows." The Look
of Silence has not yet been released in US theaters and this exclusive screening
will be followed by a Q&A session with Joshua Oppenheimer and a panel
discussion on "Ethnographic Tactics" (12:00 PM-2:00 PM) featuring
comments by Natasha Myers (York University) and Andrea Ballestero (Rice
University). Screening presented in partnership with Film Platform and
with support from the Committee on World Anthropologies.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Ethnographic Tactics</span><br />
<br /><span style="background: white;">Ethnographers are stealing tricks and tools from
lawyers, artists, historians, film makers, and biologists. We are also
pushing the bounds of the political with performative interventions. In
order to study elusive facets of power, anthropologists and allied culture
workers are adding new tactics to the tool kit of ethnography. Tactical
interventions for Michel de Certeau (1984), involve using texts and artifacts
in creative and rebellious ways, constantly manipulating events and seizing
opportunities on the wing. The Tactical Media movement of the 1990s in
the arts, whose heroes included the prankster, the hacker, and “the camcorder
kamikaze,” drew on de Certeau’s ideas to develop an aesthetic of poaching and
tricking (Garcia and Lovink 1997). Cheap Do It Yourself (DIY) media—consumer
electronics and laboratory equipment—enabled artists in this movement to
interrogate political, economic, and ethical questions by designing video
games, setting up elaborate hoaxes, and even creating their own genetically
modified organisms (Marcus 2000, da Costa and Philip 2008, Raley 2009, Fortun
2012). Ethnographers have become infected by the DIY ethos and are
dabbling in new fields as amateurs (de-skilling) and acquiring new specialized
training (re-skilling) to responsibly enter new domains (Bishop 2011).
This panel will showcase a range of new tactics available to
anthropologists by bringing ethnographers into conversation with scholars in
allied disciplines as well as creative practitioners. Dehlia Hannah, a
philosopher, will chronicle her participation in a “performative experiment”
which involved staging an outdated pregnancy test (involving a live Xenopus
frog) to get us thinking and speaking differently about gender, multispecies
entanglements, and the social epistemology of laboratory protocols. Eben
Kirksey will depart from insights about “tactical biopolitics” gleaned from
bioartists at The Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit, to reframe anthropology’s
engagements with the natural sciences. Nicholas Shapiro will talk about
the ethnographic tactics he developed at the intersection of chemistry, art,
and biology to track toxic domestic ecosystems from the FEMA trailers after
Hurricane Katrina to tightly-sealed high-end green homes in Silicon Valley.
The Oscar-nominated director, Joshua Oppenheimer, will discuss how he
had perpetrators of mass murder reenact their crimes for his film, the Act of
Killing. Ryan Shapiro, a historian and transparency activist, will
describe how he has used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as a tactic
to learn about FBI surveillance practices of animal rights advocates and
environmental activists. If anthropology was once in an “experimental
moment” with cultural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), the presentations on
this panel will describe emergent modes of experimental practice at the
intersection of art, science, and politics.</span></span>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-36918383283589379292012-11-15T19:03:00.001-08:002013-03-26T06:27:44.329-07:00What is the Environmental Humanities?<br />
<i>A conversation with Thom van Dooren originally published in the new electronic journal, http://environmentalhumanities.org/ </i><b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>What kind of research and teaching do you do in the Environmental Humanities?</b><br />
I am trained in the traditions of anthropology—a discipline that
Alfred Kroeber regarded as “the most humanistic of the sciences and most
scientific of the humanities.” In dialogue with lively conversations
in the environmental humanities, my research is aimed at pushing
animals, plants, and microorganisms from the margins of
anthropology—where they were once just treated as part of the landscape,
as food, or as symbols—into the foreground, alongside humans. <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Along
with Stephan Helmreich, I have chronicled the emergence of multispecies
ethnography—a new approach to anthropology centering on how a multitude
of organisms’ livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic,
and cultural forces. Lately my own research has focused on modest
biocultural hopes that are emerging amidst apocalyptic tales about
environmental destruction. I study nomadic creatures that are
constantly getting inside and disrupting the worlds of others, and then
escaping into the cosmos, into the unknown beyond particular worlds. <br />
<br />
Currently I have an appointment in Environmental Humanities at UNSW
so all of my current teaching is situated in relation to this emerging
transdisciplinary field. My course on “Tactical Biopolitics” explores
how bioartists, who use living matter to grow works of art, are
beginning to expose and rework dominant approaches to managing life.
The phrase “tactical biopolitics” is a creative misappropriation of
terms by these practitioners. Drawing on the traditions of “tactical
media”, which combines cheap devices and diverse apparatuses with a
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos, bioartists are tinkering with technoscience
to make surprising ecological interventions. Another course that I am
teaching, on “Environment, Sustainability and Development”, considers
entanglements among political, economic, and ecological systems.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Why does the world need the Environmental Humanities?</b><br />
The Environmental Humanities promises to break down the foundational
divide between nature/culture that has partitioned off different domains
of scholarship in the contemporary academy. Earlier approaches to
understanding natural-cultural hybrids, along the lines outlined by
Bruno Latour, were relentlessly anthropocentric—they privileged the role
humans in building networks. Non-human agents and actors, in Latour’s
lexicon, only joined society when they were locked into place by
humans—entrepreneurial agents of <i>interessement</i> (enlistment).
Up and coming Environmental Humanists are pushing past the human
exceptionalism underpinning Latour’s Actor Network Theory. Following
Susan Leigh Star, this new generation of scholars is recognizing that
“non-human” is like “non-white”, it implies the lack of something.
Approaches to Environmental Humanities are pushing past the
anthropocentrism of earlier generations, moving beyond human
exceptionalism, while avoiding the trap of anthropomorphism.<br />
Developing ways of knowing that are appropriate to specific species
promises to move past flat conceptions of the environment. Previous
generations of anthropologists, environmental historians, and students
of cultural studies have treated the landscape as a backdrop for human
agency and action. Engaging in this sort of work is necessarily <i>partial</i>
in the double sense of this word—it is limited in its scope of
knowledge and also situated with respect to the existential struggles of
the individual organisms and populations that are concerned. Rather
than promoting an awareness of “the environment”, writ large, work in
the Environmental Humanities is engaging in culture jamming—disrupting
popular conceptions of “natural harmony” to think about the messy
tactics and ethics of living with significant others in the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>What role do you see this journal playing in the emergence of this field of scholarship?</b><br />
The <i>Environmental Humanities</i> journal is well situated to
play a curatorial role in gathering together emergent scholarship in the
field. Curators inherit their tactics from the Latin word <i>curatus</i>,
they are the “ones responsible for the care.” “Thinking care,” in the
words of María Puig de la Bellacasa, is “a vital affective state, an
ethical obligation and a practical labour.” Responsible care for
Environmental Humanities might look towards the recent past and the
future. Looking towards the past might involve taking inventory of
inherited intellectual resources so that the journal might serve as a
portal and a clearing house. A good place to start with this curatorial
project might be with the Editorial Board—asking key members to offer
up links to electronic copies of their existing publications that are
relevant to Environmental Humanities. Caring for younger scholars,
looking towards the future in cultivating a new generation of
researchers who will come to publish their work in the journal, will
involve much more practical labour. Periodic virtual events,
Environmental Humanities Salons, might be opportunities to bring the
past and the future into the present—to bring senior scholars into
conversation with emerging intellectuals.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-77450600585562689992012-10-17T16:24:00.002-07:002012-10-17T16:28:46.130-07:00What is Indonesia Trying to Hide in West Papua?<i>Originally published in the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/indonesia-west-papua_b_1652245.html" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a> </i> <br />
<br />
West Papua is one of the most difficult places to access on the
planet. Still a steady trickle of adventurous travelers is being drawn
there by images of highlanders wearing penis sheaths and birds of
paradise. In the words of <i><a href="http://www.lonelyplanet.com/indonesia/papua-irian-jayahttp://" target="_hplink">Lonely Planet</a></i>
this place has a mystique that "piques the imagination of the
explorer... The diversity in lifestyle and culture of the indigenous
people, who speak more than 250 languages, is matched only by [the
area's] biodiversity and geography." Part of this mystique has been
created by the Indonesian government. <a href="http://www.embassyofindonesia.org/consular/visitvisa.htm" target="_hplink">According to the website</a>
of their embassy in Washington D.C., West Papua is one of the "regions
in Indonesia that the foreign national is not allowed to visit without
special written permission and approval... Visitors who enter these
restricted regions without permission are subject to arrest, detention,
and will be prosecuted according to Indonesian law." <br />
<center>
<img alt="2012-07-05-Figure01.JPG" height="600" src="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-07-05-Figure01.JPG" width="400" /></center>
<center>
A man in a penis sheath from West Papua's highlands (Photograph: Eben Kirksey)</center>
<br />
It took me years of writing letters and making repeat visits to the
Indonesian Embassy in Washington, before my application to be an
undergraduate exchange student was approved in 1998. Weeks after
receiving a much-coveted visa stamp, I found myself in the middle of a
peaceful demonstration on the streets of West Papua. I stumbled upon an
event that government officials tried to hide. Fourteen years ago
today -- on July 6th, 1998 -- I was a bystander at a massacre.<br />
<br />
The protest was led by Filep Karma, a Papuan leader who wants
independence from Indonesia. As the attack started, Karma roused his
followers, all unarmed civilians, with a hymn. They held hands, sitting
in a circle, under a water tower where their outlawed banner, the
Morning Star flag, flew. During the initial assault by Indonesian
police, military, and navy forces, Karma was shot twice -- once in each
leg -- but he survived the incident. Many of his followers were not so
fortunate and were killed instantly. A truck came to cart away the
bodies of the dead and dying. "I counted fifteen people in the first
load," one eyewitness told me. "The truck came a second time and I
counted seventeen people inside. When they opened up the truck bed I
could see lots of blood, in that small truck there was lots of blood,"
[Quoted from Kirksey, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Entangled-Worlds-Architecture-Global/dp/082235134X" target="_hplink">Freedom in Entangled Worlds</a></i>,
49-50]. Human rights investigators could not determine what happened to
the dead and wounded people who were transported in this truck. Filep
Karma, who is now an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, told
me about how to find one mass grave. But, forensic archaeologists have
not yet visited this site. <br />
<center>
<img alt="2012-07-05-FilepKarma.JPG" height="416" src="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-07-05-FilepKarma.JPG" width="312" /></center>
<center>
Filep Karma (Photograph by Eben Kirksey)</center>
<br />
At the time I was hiding in Hotel Irian, a colonial era building, and I
heard gun shots as security forces killed people. From my hotel window I
saw Navy ships docked out in the harbor. Survivors of the initial
assault were loaded onto these ships, taken out to open ocean, and
dumped overboard to drown. One group investigating the incident
concluded that "one hundred thirty-nine people were loaded on two
frigates that headed in two directions to the east and to the west and
these people were dropped into the sea," [Quoted in Kirksey, <i>Freedom in Entangled Worlds</i>,
48]. At least 32 decaying bodies later washed ashore. Elsham, an
indigenous human rights organization, produced a 69-page report in
Indonesian about the massacre titled "Names Without Graves, Graves
Without Names." The report called for an international investigation,
but no one has since followed up.<br />
<br />
Indonesian officials routinely stymie human rights research in West
Papua. Amnesty International researchers were expelled from West Papua
in 2002 while <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2002/02/05/amnesty-officials-expelled-papua.html" target="_hplink">investigating a separate massacre</a>.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary, or
Arbitrary Executions formally asked to visit West Papua in 1994. This
request was denied. In 2004 the government also <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Executions/Pages/CountryVisits.aspx" target="_hplink">rejected the Rapporteur's follow-up request to visit Indonesia</a>. Even the <a href="http://www.etan.org/issues/wpapua/2012/1206wpap.htm" target="_hplink">International Committee for the Red Cross</a>, a moderate organization that is renowned for negotiating access to wartorn regions, has been banned. <br />
<br />
Rather than wait in vain for help from the outside, help which might
never arrive, many Papuans are doing the work of human rights
themselves. Indigenous activists used the Internet to <a href="http://video.ahrchk.net/AHRC-VID-012-2010-Indonesia.html" target="_hplink">circulate a video in 2010</a>
that showed the brutal torture and murder of a highland villager.
Last November, when thousands of West Papuans came together to declare
independence in a peaceful Congress, local human rights researchers used
their cell phones to give <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eben-kirksey/obama-new-guinea_b_1357196.html" target="_hplink">real-time updates and send video footage abroad</a>.
Brave action on the ground by these activists helped prevent a
massacre on the scale that I witnessed in 1998. Last November,
Indonesian authorities knew that influential international leaders were
watching from afar.<br />
Killings in West Papua have lately become more frequent, mysterious, and arbitrary. In a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/did-timor-teach-us-nothing-20120623-20uvi.html" target="_hplink">string of shootings</a>
that has seemed to baffle regional government officials and
investigators, at least 19 people have been killed in recent weeks.
[Read accounts from the <i>Jakarta Post</i> on <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/07/02/another-civilian-killed-armed-group-papua.html" target="_hplink">7/2/12</a>, <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/07/03/media-warned-papua-death-toll-increases.html" target="_hplink">7/3/12</a> and <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/07/05/one-dead-another-wounded-papua.html" target="_hplink">7/5/12</a>.] Many more, including a <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/05/30/teacher-dead-german-tourist-hurt-papua-shootings.html" target="_hplink">German tourist</a>,
have sustained bullet wounds. One Papuan leader, Mako Tabuni, held a
press conference on June 13th where he publicly asked the police to get
to the bottom of the shootings. "Only one local media outlet,
papuapos.com, dared to report on this press conference," according to a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/octovianus.mote" target="_hplink">Facebook update</a>
by Octovianus Mote, a Senior Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School who
hails from West Papua's highlands. "Probably Mako didn't get a chance
to read <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/06/2012614152842866855.html" target="_hplink">the news story</a>,"
the Facebook post continues, "because it was published the same morning
that uniformed police officers came to his house and killed him." <br />
<center>
<img alt="2012-07-05-makotabuniBinpa.jpg" height="217" src="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-07-05-makotabuniBinpa.jpg" width="300" /></center>
<center>
Mako Tabuni (Photograph: <a href="http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/c81.0.403.403/p403x403/205359_10151026284951754_272269924_n.jpg" target="_hplink">Facebook</a>) </center>
<br />
"The killing of Mr. Tabuni is a clear violation of international human
rights law principles," wrote Franciscans International in a formal
allegation to the United Nations last month. "This is a clear example
of a targeted killing." As international organizations call attention
to ongoing abuses, access to the region has become even more difficult.
The Indonesian government recently requested that Scot Marciel, the
Ambassador of the United States, reschedule a planned trip to West
Papua. In response to my query about this aborted trip a U.S. State
Department Spokesperson said:<br />
<blockquote>
Ambassador Marciel was not able to immediately reschedule
his visit... [and] is committed to rescheduling his travel to Papua as
soon as feasible. Limitations on access to Papua by foreign government
officials, NGO personnel and journalists feed suspicions in the
international community about government actions in those areas. We
encourage the Indonesian government to take this into consideration when
reviewing travel requests. The U.S. government condemns the recent
violence in Papua and urges the Indonesian government to conduct full
and transparent investigations into the incidents and allegations of
excessive force on the part of the security forces.</blockquote>
Spectacular violence by Indonesia's security forces has long been
hidden in West Papua. But, the old tactics of terror are no longer
working. Smartphones and social media are allowing savvy indigenous
leaders to reach out to allies abroad and to spread audacious hopes
amongst their countrymen at home. <br />
While travel guides intent on piquing the imagination of explorers
are still painting pictures of Papuans with an exotic brush, indigenous
activists are quietly formulating their own imaginative dreams. Papuans
are picturing sweeping changes on future horizons. They are imagining
an end to the current military occupation, a new era of justice and
freedom. Watching recent developments from afar, I have started to
expect the unexpected. Intrepid travelers who are willing to put up
with months of bureaucratic tedium, or who dare to defy unjust visa
policies, certainly stand a chance of learning about surprising
indigenous visions.<br />
<div>
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</div>
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</div>
Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-27621914717731959772012-04-18T06:12:00.003-07:002012-04-18T06:12:59.688-07:00Book Review: Pigeon Trouble and Wild Dog Dreaming<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidE_g-yCMxI6AEdFKpun5BwVuj6VOpG0Mlo92lGazK-UX5uHx1RDxDpS0-AI_L3iD1wzjc0obLANGLqUVvSYBZQJaT7HDfjw9uK7lIZ0ReS0aEz3oLkkVZUgRn-BXE8XR2T8Z2iu0xOUuh/s1600/pigeon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidE_g-yCMxI6AEdFKpun5BwVuj6VOpG0Mlo92lGazK-UX5uHx1RDxDpS0-AI_L3iD1wzjc0obLANGLqUVvSYBZQJaT7HDfjw9uK7lIZ0ReS0aEz3oLkkVZUgRn-BXE8XR2T8Z2iu0xOUuh/s320/pigeon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
[First published in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01138.x/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+3+Mar+from+10-13+GMT+for+monthly+maintenance" target="_blank"><i>Cultural Anthropology</i></a>]</div>
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Holding together a pair of texts by a dog lover, and a
self-confessed bird phobe, I found entangled themes and threads of
argumentation:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>about being with others
in a world of intersubjectivity, a world in which sentient subjects face each
other, where scenes of deadly commotion might suddenly erupt with cycles of
terror spinning out of control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hoon
Song uses his own “opaque madness”, a fear of the cold flinty beaks and
sewed-in button eyes of pigeons, as a route to circumspectly approach the
delicate theme of whiteness in rural America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Intimate knowledge of the irrationality of the former, Song suggests,
might illuminate the same in the latter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Deborah Bird Rose reckons with madness of white settler colonialism in
Aboriginal Australia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Campaigns by
ranchers to poison dingoes have generated what Rose calls “double death”, a
process that uncouples life and death, diminishing life’s capacity to offer
intergenerational gifts, and diminishing death’s capacity to turn the dying
back toward the living.</div>
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The mass death of birds in the rural Pennsylvania community
of Hegins, the site of Hoon Song’s <i>Pigeon Trouble</i>, was once bound to an
ethos of charity and communal solidarity amongst humans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the early 20<sup>th</sup> century the
residents of Hegins began staging Labor Day Pigeon Shoots—big communal fests
where well-to-do citizens killed birds and donated them as food for the poorest
farmers in town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Song describes how the
gaze of Others—animal rights activists, journalists, and academics like himself—began
to prevent the pigeon shooters from being totally themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As legions of activists came to protest and
document the Labor Day Pigeon Shoot, the event became an annual frenzy of
killing by hooligans, a celebratory theatrics of flamboyant lynching. </div>
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Mutually invoked misunderstandings threatened to spiral out
of control as Song (who hails from Korea) went about conducting fieldwork in
this rural white milieu haunted by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meeting the gaze of racists, and enduring
occasional death threats, Song found himself thrust violently into a terrifying
vortex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“My fear...took the form of a
precipitous anticipation of what scene of commotion might transpire in our
encounter; it was not only fear <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of </i>[the
racist] but, shall we say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fear for both
of us</i>” (p. 14).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Song’s
“ornithophobia” is much like his intersubjective experience of racist
xenophobia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Legions of birds perched on
electric wires, reflect and multiply his fears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“It is as if my fear of them is never in the present tense...What is so
dreadful is the imminent prospect of...uncontrollably spiraling into a mutually
invoked eruption of convulsive panic” (p. 9).</div>
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Song sees “a certain cruel beauty” in the relationship
between birds and their executioners, where “helpless victims find comfort in
the sure grip of confident and thick-skinned handlers” (p. 25).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the “apprehensive and timid” hands of
animal rights activists, each clad in a pair of rubber gloves, wounded pigeons
put up all kinds of struggle, according to Song, on their way to a Wounded Bird
First Aid Station set up outside of the Labor Day Shoot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What kind of prudent ‘love’ is this?” he
asks, “Love that fears, and fears for both the subject and object?” (p. 39).</div>
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Deborah Bird Rose argues for an ethics of love and care that
does not exclude death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“An ethical
response to the call of others does not hinge on killing or not killing,” she
argues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas Song navigates a liminal
space betwixt and between social worlds, refusing an easy alliance with
activists who are uncomfortable touching animals or with hooligan executioners,
Rose clearly casts her lot with Aboriginal Australian ways of being in the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dwelling with people who inhabit
the realm of Dreaming, who live within multispecies kin groups traceable back
to creation, Rose found that dingo people and dingo dogs take care of each
other—watching out for each other’s interests, defending against
outsiders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She also carefully documents
tactics used by outsiders, her own white countrymen, to disrupt indigenous
lifeways and ecologies.</div>
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Dingo extermination campaigns by white Australians have, at
times, involved grotesque spectacles of violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rose describes trees strung up with the
“strange fruit” of dead dingoes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quoting
cattle-ranchers, she recalls the massive police actions, uncontrollable scenes
of panic, in Aboriginal villages during the 1940s: “As the bullets flew past
them the women screamed in fright, dragging their animals ever faster behind
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pandemonium broke loose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A dog yelped suddenly, leapt into the air,
and rolled kicking in the dust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another
followed, and another...At last [the Mounted Constable] put down his rifle and
looked around him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No dogs in the camp
now, only a bunch o’ niggers scared half out o’ their wits.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking into an emptiness that used to be
dogs, Rose sees not departures that could be twisted back into life, but
one-way trips into nowhere (p. 23-4).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
coming decades, wild dingo poison-baiting programs instigated broader waves of
death in the lands of Australian dreaming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Poisoned dingoes became agents of double death in the afterlife—living
things who came for sustenance, who ate the dead as food, were harmed or killed
by the poison as well.</div>
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Song describes a parallel trajectory in the United States:
the advent of pest poisoning campaigns in urban areas and the use of lead
shotgun shells in rural areas began to transform how people were thinking about
pigeons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If pigeons were once a
wholesome food, emergent killing technologies made them into pests and
outcasts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the Labor Day Shoot
initially turned dying back toward generous forms of productive life, as the
birds became inedible the event became an instantiation of double death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bird corpses began piling up in the land of
the living (cf. Rose, p. 92).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Animal
rights activists also inadvertently played a role in helping turn pigeons into
vermin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spreading fears about
interspecies contact and contagion, the campaigners who tried to stop the Labor
Day Pigeon Shoot mobilized biomedical experts, who testified about the
epidemiological dangers of handling birds.</div>
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At gun clubs in hidden backwoods
hollows, Song discovered people who were intimately handling pigeons despite
the alleged epidemiological risks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
“barn birds” used in the Labor Day shoot were regarded as vermin, and confined
the realm of killable “bare life” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">zoe</i>),
the daily training of pigeons, or “brushing”, brought them into the realm of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bios</i>, with legible biographical lives
(cf. Agamben 1998:2).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fed with a special
diet, and treated with the utmost care, brushed birds were enlisted in an existential
dance with humans and phantom hawks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Brushing involves tying a auditory simulacrum of a hawk—a whistle,
bottle cap, or bell—to the tails of prized pigeons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Daily training with these “hawks” makes these
pigeons evasive fliers, better able to outmaneuver shotgun blasts during
private head-to-head shooting matches among competing gun clubs.</div>
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Writing about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">avian
existentialism</i>, Song suggests that brushing also makes pigeons think that
“the hawk’s look is always ‘on’. “<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Building on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze, he suggests “the hawk’s
look can function as a condition of possibility for the pigeon’s look only
insofar as the former does not appear in the latter’s purview as another look
but only as something whose presence is suspected” (p. 189).</div>
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Hoon Song’s own fears and anxieties proliferate, at several
points in the book, when he becomes trapped in a gaze of mutual-recognition
with pigeons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The creatures regard me
in sidelong glances of apprehensive familiarity,” he writes, “there is a sense
of my being primordially given to their recognition—the recognition of none
other than a birdphobe in me” (p. 9).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps Song <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">becomes animal </i>himself
during his first contacts with pigeons—his terror of the birds generates
frenzies of creaturely violence (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987:265; Haraway
2008:28).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reckoning with his fears by
becoming the apprentice of a respected bird brusher, Song eventually becomes a
careful student of bird behavior with an ethologist’s eye for detail. </div>
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The source of the pigeons used in the Labor Day Shoot was a
closely held secret amongst his interlocutors who feared persecution by
Outsiders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following the animals, and
adopting clever methods for divining their origin, Song noted birds that were
unfamiliar with the territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
contrast to the fast flying and flock-forming “brushed birds”, which were
grounded in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">topos </i>of territory
(cf. Derrida 1994: 82; Kirksey 2012), he spotted small groups of birds flying
slowly around the Hegins Valley area in the weeks after the shoot. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Song scattered a bagful of peas—feral
pigeons’ favorite diet—he found “no apparent pecking dominance, no sign of
heavier-looking birds occupying the central position of the feed spread.” (p.
106).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deducing an unstable and
improvised social formation from these pecking behaviors, Song concludes that
they were clearly displaced birds, likely carted in from cities for the Labor
Day Shoot.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
In <i>Wild Dog Dreaming </i>Rose also explores the
fragmented social formations amongst dingoes who survive massive extermination
campaigns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She describes interspecies
relations of love, where “people were burying their kin, and as they did so
they looked into a death space in which not only their loved ones, but the
future generations of their loved ones, had been exterminated” (p. 25).</div>
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<a href="http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/images10/DINGOLindyontheprowl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/images10/DINGOLindyontheprowl.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Departing from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who pulled
ethics away from abstractions and located ethical call-and-response within the
living reality of the material world, Rose accounts for interspecies
responsibilities that are up-close, face-to-face, in both life and death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Levinas ultimately rejected obligations to
animals, creatures he regarded as lacking a “face”, Rose develops her idea of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ecological existentialism</i> to think about
how responsibility and accountably works across the species interface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Ecological existentialism pulls together two
major shifts in worldview: the end of certainty and the end of atomism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From certainty the shift is to uncertainty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From atomism the shift is to connectivity”
(p. 2-3).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas the uncertainty of
intersubjective connections generate fear and anxiety for Song, these same
dynamics prompt Rose to assert the need for life-affirming awareness.</div>
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Offering a rare and intimate account of anxieties that can
proliferate in encounters with animal Others, <i>Pigeon Trouble <u></u></i>will
certainly become a canonical text in the emergent interdisciplinary tradition
of multispecies ethnography (for a review of other foundational texts, see:
Kirksey and Helmreich 2010).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Song
betrays an existentialist loneliness, a sense of cosmic isolation, against
which Rose offers an antidote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Ecological existentialism,” in her own words, “proposes a kinship of
becoming: no telos, no deus ex machina to rescue us, no clockwork to keep us
ticking along” (p. 44).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Situating
ourselves in this rich plentitude, with all its joys and hazards, offers a
route to biocultural hope.</div>
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Hoon Song. <i>Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a
Deindustrialized America</i>. 2010. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 262 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4242-3</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Deborah Bird Rose. <i>Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction</i>.2011.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>169 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8139-3091-6</div>
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<b>References</b></div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Agamben, Giorgio</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>1998<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Homo Sacer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>1987<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Derrida, Jacques</div>
<div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
1994<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. New York: Routledge.</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Haraway, Donna</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>2008<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When Species Meet. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Kirksey, S. Eben</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>2012<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Freedom in Entangled Worlds. Durham: Duke
University Press.</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmereich</div>
<div class="NoSpacing">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>2010<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Emergence of Multispecies
Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-687.</div>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-23210234320133422242012-04-01T19:21:00.000-07:002014-04-18T18:29:18.509-07:00Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Global Architecture of PowerREVIEWS<br />
<br />
“Here at last is the account I can
unreservedly recommend to anyone interested in the courageous people and
fragile geography of West Papua. Eben Kirksey makes accessible the
unique imagery of West Papuans long subject to racism, corporate
exploitation, and a brutal military. Marshaling impeccable scholarship,
he transcends conventional political ideology to define a form of
conflict resolution relevant to many ‘entangled worlds.’ Bravo!”<br />
-Max White, Amnesty International USA<br />
<br />
"In
this remarkable book, Eben Kirksey attends to West Papuan indigenous
thinkers and activists as they craft practical, surprising, and
generative freedom projects in the fissures of power exercised by
Indonesian occupiers, global financial interests, and foreign
governments. Freedom in Entangled Worlds is shaped by explorations of
complex messianisms, attention to the pragmatics of unexpected
collaborations, and Kirksey's own unassuming and sustained commitment to
the worlds and dreams of his West Papuan teachers."<br />
-Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz<br />
<br />
“[A]n
extraordinary and also risk laden piece of fieldwork. . . ." Deleuze
and Guattari's figure of the rhizome is pushed into arboreal realms.
Kirksey's "banyan is both domination and subversion, growing down toward
the dirty but nourishing soil of history and up toward the light of
future possibilities,”<br />
- Celia Lowe, <i><a href="http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/Issue_99-100/10-PoachingMultispecies.pdf" target="_blank">Kroeber Anthropological Society Journal</a> </i><br />
<br />
“With its highly creative, mid-range theoretical innovations<i> Freedom in Entangled Worlds</i>
will be of special interest to theoretical anthropologists studying
social movements. Its brevity and adventurous tone will make the book an
excellent fit in a theory class for talented undergraduates or junior
grad students. Although I enjoy dabbling in French post-structural
literary theory and psychoanalysis it has never been clear to me until
now just how we are to connect that to the ethnographic. I felt that I
came away from this book with a clearer understanding of some difficult
primary authors and an appreciation for how anthropology can be relevant
on a global stage.”<br />
- Matt Thompson, <a href="http://savageminds.org/2012/06/11/book-review-freedom-in-entangled-worlds-by-eben-kirksey/" target="_blank">Savage Minds--a collective anthropology blog</a> <br />
<br />
"<i>Freedom in Entangled Worlds</i> is not a dry academic book. Kirksey
writes with verve. His analysis is sharp, his writing engaging. Kirksey
draws the reader in. Not content to seduce the reader with tales of
suffering – although he does that without recourse to sentimentality –
Kirksey inspires solidarity."<br />
<i>- </i>Jason MacLeod, <a href="http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/review-west-papua-s-freedom-struggle-in-its-global-context" target="_blank"><i>Inside Indonesia</i></a><br />
<br />
“Readers
cannot help ask themselves at what point does the consumer of these
resources also take responsibility for their first world lifestyle? Eben
Kirksey answers that questioning by finishing the book with a call for
an ethical and political transformation through the imaging of
open-ended possibilities, a powerful lesson he learnt from imbuing the
spirit of the merdeka and so the spirit of the land of West Papua.”<br />
- C. F. Black, <i><a href="http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/aug2012/black-kirksey.php" target="_blank">Leonardo Reviews</a> </i><br />
<br />
"In
a page-turning blend of cultural analysis, human rights reportage, and
ethnography, Eben Kirksey documents the West Papuan freedom struggle. In
the process, he provides keen insight into the movement's dynamics and
the desires that have led West Papuans to rise up against seemingly
insurmountable odds. Kirksey clarifies the possibilities and
predicaments they face, and he makes sense of the multiple times,
mundane and messianic, in which many West Papuans seem to live."<br />
—Danilyn Rutherford, author of <i>Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuXdbzHIG8GB3P-I0FsCNMFaM4T3o_t8cBLmZCHjAYLuS7Ri7B57zFQMV3QTCe3O4QDsJtXFIhM8JrDdWe35mon4czMzBpBsP9tThsvM9BX7S7ThJfBkM4k3ewiXe9g2lZie73UJmsXEp7/s1600/Book-Cover_small.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuXdbzHIG8GB3P-I0FsCNMFaM4T3o_t8cBLmZCHjAYLuS7Ri7B57zFQMV3QTCe3O4QDsJtXFIhM8JrDdWe35mon4czMzBpBsP9tThsvM9BX7S7ThJfBkM4k3ewiXe9g2lZie73UJmsXEp7/s200/Book-Cover_small.jpg" height="200" width="135" /></a></div>
<br />
I first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. My later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as I discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement.<br />
<br />
Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, I witnessed the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. I discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions.
<br />
<br />
This book is about West Papua's movement for freedom when a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and narratives of my own experiences, the book argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies.<br />
<br />
<br />
PREVIEW<br />
<br />
Google Books offers a searchable <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6DjD1lo-wFUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=freedom+in+entangled+worlds&source=bl&ots=UGfMgBVuLr&sig=uvCXhgNWOiJFFkLJLuy-lRVDbDg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8iB6UPzzHbGaiAeP1YGoDg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">on-line preview</a> of the book. Scribd lets users download a free copy of the <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/81492965/Freedom-in-Entangled-Worlds-by-Eben-Kirksey" target="_blank">Introduction</a>.<br />
<br />
BUY A COPY<br />
<br />
The paperback edition is available in West Papua from <a href="http://www.elshampapua.org/" target="_blank">Elsham Papua</a> and in the United States from <a href="http://www.etan.org/resource/books.htm#B98%20Kirksey" target="_blank">ETAN</a> (for $25.00) Proceeds from these sales will support human rights work in West Papua.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Entangled-Worlds-Architecture-Global/dp/082235134X" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a> is also selling paperbacks, hardbacks, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Entangled-Worlds-Architecture-ebook/dp/B007CGXV1U/ref=tmm_kin_title_0" target="_blank">Kindle editions</a>.<br />
<br />
In Australia, affordable copies are avaiable via the on-line search tool <a href="http://booko.com.au/9780822351344/Freedom-in-Entangled-Worlds" target="_blank">Booko.com.au</a>.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-64549621382070772882012-03-15T22:29:00.000-07:002012-04-18T06:18:54.894-07:00Obama: Do the right thing for West Papua<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Republished in <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eben-kirksey/obama-new-guinea_b_1357196.html" target="_blank">The Huffington Post</a> and <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/16/the-crisis-in-west-papua/" target="_blank">CounterPunch</a> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGPe_m6Z-j8fr4g-mAb7pK6RQRrHGZeZrs1d75qiMK2iI5yjonKRUQvrZJ2LgoE8-XjUYoHGE5PcTCbQzStBRssih_RzW0II5Nq8HtVYOsc-qShyphenhyphenYGZNEY_pmsP6UsNg5SJo3L24VJekS/s1600/Obama-Yudhoyono_Alt-B.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGPe_m6Z-j8fr4g-mAb7pK6RQRrHGZeZrs1d75qiMK2iI5yjonKRUQvrZJ2LgoE8-XjUYoHGE5PcTCbQzStBRssih_RzW0II5Nq8HtVYOsc-qShyphenhyphenYGZNEY_pmsP6UsNg5SJo3L24VJekS/s400/Obama-Yudhoyono_Alt-B.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
Barack Obama meeting with President Yudhoyono of Indonesia.</td></tr>
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Today five indigenous leaders in West Papua, the half
of New Guinea
under Indonesian rule, were charged with “treason.” Hours ago they were each sentenced to three
years in prison for peacefully protesting the government. Barack Obama raised the issue of human rights
in West Papua last November when he met with President Yudhoyono of Indonesia. It is time for the President to once again
raise his voice to support human rights in this seemingly remote territory. </div>
</div>
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Obama’s interest West Papua stems, in part, from
personal experiences growing up in Indonesia with his mother, Ann
Dunham Soetoro, a cultural anthropologist.
In his autobiography, <i>Dreams from My Father</i>, he recalls a
conversation with his step-father, Lolo Soetoro, who had just returned home
after a tour of duty with the Indonesian military in West
Papua. Obama asked his
step-father: “Have you ever seen a man killed?” Lolo responded affirmatively,
recounting the bloody death of “weak” men.
West Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the “weak” men
killed by Lolo Soetoro, have read Obama’s autobiography with keen
interest. Even as many Americans have
lost hope in their President, many West Papuans
still embrace the message from the 2008 campaign, “Yes We Can.” </div>
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Taking inspiration from the people of Tunisia who
rose up to depose President Ben Ali last year, and the populist spirit that
spread out from Tunisia with the Arab Spring, West Papuans are harboring
seemingly impossible dreams. After 50
years of living under a brutal Indonesian military occupation, West Papuans are hoping to reach a peaceful political solution
to this conflict. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://imo.thejakartapost.com/turiuswenda/files/2012/02/321548_293539843999282_100000298069048_1165346_2141826623_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://imo.thejakartapost.com/turiuswenda/files/2012/02/321548_293539843999282_100000298069048_1165346_2141826623_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Forkorus Yaboisembut moments before he was arrested.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> One West Papuan leader, Forkorus Yaboisembut, remains
hopeful against all odds. He was
detained last October, moments after being elected President during the Papuan
People’s Congress, and is among the men who were convicted today for “treason.” </span>Thousands rallied behind him, demanding
independence from Indonesia,
at this event that was peaceful by all accounts. As the Congress was
concluding, the delegates were surrounded by some 500 Indonesian police and
military personnel with a cordon of armored cars. Scores of my friends, people who I know from
working as a cultural anthropologist in West Papua,
were in the crowd. I had a sleepless
night as I monitored Facebook and text messages from the other side of the
world, following the developments in real time. Markus Haluk, the leader
of a Papuan youth group, sent a text message saying “in these next few moments
we might see a massacre and a bloodbath.”</div>
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Videos circulating on YouTube show Indonesian troops
firing assault rifles into a crowd from armored personnel carriers, while
others pistol whip and kick delegates.
Unarmed civilians desperately tried to clamber into their cars while
uniformed police officers and plain clothes thugs beat them. In 1998 I witnessed a massacre in West Papua that killed upwards of 150 civilians, so I
feared the worst. </div>
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When the dead were counted from
the violent crackdown at the Papuan People’s Congress, I was relieved to learn
that the carnage was minor by local standards.
Human Rights Watch concluded that three civilians were shot dead by
Indonesian police on October 19<sup>th</sup>, 2011. Over 300 delegates to the Papuan People’s
Congress were initially detained by Indonesian security forces. On the heels of these arbitrary detentions,
US Secretary of State Hillary <span class="il">Clinton</span> voiced alarm. She said that the United
States has “very directly raised our concerns about the
violence and the abuse of human rights” in West Papua. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Most of the delegates to the Papuan
People’s Congress were quickly released, except for five leaders who were
charged with inciting rebellion. Forkorus
Yaboisembut is among these five, along with Edison Waromi, the newly elected Prime
Minister. Today they joined upwards of
90 West Papuans in Indonesian jails who have
been identified by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Indonesia is the fourth largest
country in the world. The United States regards Indonesia as a “Strategic Partner”
and has considerable influence in the country’s political, economic, and
strategic affairs. Clearly tales of Indonesia’s ongoing war in West
Papua troubled Barack Obama as a young man. Now, as an adult, he is in a position to
support the “weak” power of non-violent resistance with a few carefully chosen
words. President Obama should join
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in calling for the unconditional
release of West Papuan political prisoners.</div>
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<br /></div>
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* * *</div>
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<br />
Eben Kirksey earned his Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz and
is currently a Mellon Fellow at the CUNY
Graduate Center
in New York City.
His first book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Entangled-Worlds-Architecture-Global/dp/082235134X" target="_blank">Freedom in EntangledWorlds: West Papua and the Architecture ofGlobal Power</a>”, will be published by Duke University Press on March 30th, 2012.</div>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-49772616123798350352011-11-08T08:01:00.000-08:002012-03-07T15:20:58.361-08:00Cosmos/Bios/Polis Panel at the AAA meetingsCosmos/Bios/Polis<br />
Thursday, November 17, 2011: 10Panel at the American Anthropological Association<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">This panel explored the challenges of building common worlds—with former enemies who might become allies, with technological networks, with other species—while remaining open to surprises from the unknown. If the promise of a perpetual peace from Kantian citizens of the cosmos no longer rings true, then what are the prospects of Isabelle Stengers' cosmopolitical proposal? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Cosmopolitics presences “the question of possible nonhierarchical modes of coexistence among the ensemble of inventions of non-equivalence, among the diverging values and obligations through which the entangled existences that compose it are affirmed.” Giving resonance to the unknown cosmos beyond our fragile constructions, this panel will reckon with how common cosmopolitical worlds are created when many players work together, tooth and nail. Thinking within the constraints imposed by the unknown, we will bring cosmos together with bios, the biographical life that concerns the polis. Appreciating the foolishness of human exceptionalism, this panel will follow Donna Haraway to explore contact zones where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake. Working to get past the thanatological drift in contemporary biopolitical thought, speakers will probe the attractions and limitations of the search for an affirmative biopolitics. Being polite, or political in common worlds, where multiple species meet, may require discomforting intra-actions with newly recognized subaltern subjects. </span>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-50970025355061111132011-10-28T08:08:00.000-07:002011-10-28T08:36:09.369-07:00Indonesian President Open to Dialog with Amnesty InternationalLast week Amnesty International issued this statement: "Amnesty International calls for the immediate and unconditional release of at least fourteen people who are currently being detained and interrogated by the police in Papua."<br /><br />Several thousand people representing various tribes from all over Papua attended the Third Papuan People’s congress from 17- 19 October 2011. Organisers had informed the Jayapura police of the gathering as required by law. At the peaceful gathering, participants reportedly raised the prohibited Morning Star flag, a symbol of Papuan independence, and made declarations of independence. During the period of the congress there was a build up of an estimated 500 military and police personnel surrounding the venue.<br /><br />On the afternoon of 19 October 2011, the final day of the congress, military and police units approached the venue and started firing shots into the air to break up the peaceful gathering. This caused widespread panic among the participants who began to flee. As they fled, police units from the Jayapura City police station and the regional police headquarters fired tear gas and then arbitrarily arrested an estimated 300 hundred participants.<br /><br />Police and military officers allegedly beat participants with their pistols, rattan canes and batons during the arrest. The bodies of two participants, Melkias Kadepa, a student, and Yakobus Samonsabra, were found near the area of the congress with bullet wounds."<br /><br />In response to this statement by Amnesty (read the full statement <a href="http://www.amnesty.org.au/news/comments/27058/">here</a>) the President of Indonesia told the press that he was open to dialog with human rights NGOs:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://image.tempointeraktif.com/?id=94208&width=490"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 490px; height: 280px;" src="http://image.tempointeraktif.com/?id=94208&width=490" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta - President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono asked the Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Djoko Suyanto to explain the position of the government of Indonesia to the Amnesty International-regarding problems in Papua. The president made this response to allegations by Amnesty about human rights violations and demands political prisoners be released.<br /><br />"I hope that Minister Suyanto will act as a coordinator with the relevant officials to engage in dialogue with Amnesty International. Explain the basic position and policy of our approach. Thus, there will be no misunderstanding, misconception, or other matters that are not necessary the case," the president said when opening the meeting plenary cabinet at the State Secretariat Jakarta, Thursday, October 27, 2011.<br /><br />The president said Indonesia is an open and democratic country with a policy that could be accounted for. If there is an error on the part of the military and police officers, the law will be enforced. Similarly, if an error or a violation was made by others.<br /><br />"For the sake of justice must also be enforced, and (given) the same legal sanction. The law must also be enforced, security must also be kept. It's very clear and in a variety of occasions when I met with many world leaders, I explained all this," he said.<br /><br />Matter of government policy, the president compared Indonesia's actions with the hundreds of people in New York who were detained by local authorities for shutting down streets with demonstrations, and riots that also occurred in England some time ago. Detention of people because they act against the law, is happening around the world.<br /><br />Because Indonesia is also a state governed by law, the President requested this position be explained to non-governmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations. "I hope what I have to say, is that this could be communicated to Amnesty International and other NGOs. Dialog with us, Indonesia is very open to discussing these allegations," he said.<br /><br />This is a quick translation I did of this article. The original, in Indonesian, is <a href="http://www.tempointeraktif.com/hg/politik/2011/10/27/brk,20111027-363605,id.html">here</a>.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-745508969016450822011-07-07T17:43:00.000-07:002011-07-23T18:00:40.173-07:00Presenting the John Rumbiak Human Rights Defender AwardOn July 7th, 2011, Eben presented the John Rumbiak Human Rights Defender award to Congressman Eni Faleomavaega on behalf of the West Papua Advocacy Team.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/26182541?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" frameborder="0" height="225"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/26182541">Congressman Eni Faleomavaega</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user4543529">Eben Kirksey</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</p>“I am humbled by this award,” Faleomavaega said. “I do not feel worthy of it, and this is why I have donated the prize money to the Papuan Customary Council (Dewan Adat Papua) in honor of the men, women and children of West Papua who are the true heroes.”<br /><br />John Rumbiak is a renowned champion of human rights who suffered a debilitating stroke in 2005.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-67996954933233779952011-05-23T17:50:00.000-07:002011-07-23T17:59:45.192-07:00Poaching Paige West's "Conservation is Our Government Now"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9ovSQlZfVVNtz5oTL6lRU6iQyZCl7p2jcJMUtyCo41pELEEgN"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 225px;" src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9ovSQlZfVVNtz5oTL6lRU6iQyZCl7p2jcJMUtyCo41pELEEgN" alt="" border="0" /></a>A multispecies zeitgeist is sweeping anthropology. A central reference point for this lively conversation is a question that was first posed by Donna Haraway: “what counts as nature, for whom, and at what cost?” Paige West speaks to this question – exploring how the idea of nature was torqued during encounters among New Guinea highlanders, biologists, and other foreign ecophiles.<br /><br />West illustrates how a hybrid environmental ethics was forged among competing political, economic, and symbolic systems. She offers us intimate portraits of long-distance, interspecies love. Describing photographer David Gillison’s affair with the Bird of Paradise, she unravels a fetish logic that separates particular species from ecosystems and explores how commodification extracts nature from social relations. Chronicling ambivalent emotions – desire, mourning, and anxiety – she opens a window into the affective dimensions of trans-cultural and multispecies contact zones.<br /><br />Set in the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, a place that was formed amidst countervailing institutional agendas and jockeying by diverse agents, this ethnography attends to how conservation was enacted amidst material and social inequalities. Some residents of Maimafu, a village in the Management Area where West conducted her fieldwork, engaged with environmentalists in hopes of chasing after the elusive idea of development. Even as some men from Maimafu reaped modest benefits from these social relations with foreigners, as they gained access to symbolic capital and modest sums of money, this conservation project initially did not directly benefit many women. It reinforced local regimes of patriarchy.<br />At a pivotal moment in the book, West describes a Papuan woman named Nanasuanna – one of her trusted interlocutors – who confronted the conservationists. She stood up at a yearly meeting with visiting foreign and Papuan NGO workers, waiting for the assembled men to recognize her turn to speak. After the director of the conservation organization group asked “Wife of Nelson, do you have something to say?”, Nanasuanna began an impassioned speech: “We women are the backbone of the community. We are the backbone of life. You men tell us that we do not know things. You tell us that we know nothing. But we do. We know. We know gardens. We know houses. We know children. We know how to work. We know how to make a net bag… These are the things that make life possible.” This speech marked a watershed event in Maimafu village. Following this encounter, women were given the opportunity to have a formal role in the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area. Nanasuanna was thus able to partially articulate her visions of life and livelihood to an institution of environmental governmentality, using outsiders to gain traction within local regimes of social inequality.<br /><br />The moment of political electricity during Nanasuanna’s speech-in-action at the conservation meeting generated emergent collaborations and novel articulations. Poaching this text – transforming its meaning, turning it to my own ends (Certeau 1998, Matsutake Worlds 2010) – I found Nanasuanna speaking to freedom dreams on the other half of the island of New Guinea, across the border in West Papua. Following an invasion by the Indonesian military in December 1961, indigenous West Papuans have been told that they do not know things – that only outsiders have authoritative knowledge of development, religion, and modernity; that they do not know how to govern themselves. In the face of this symbolic violence, and ongoing state violence, West Papuans are struggling to actualize hybrid ideals about freedom – visions of national independence and dreams of post-national economic justice (Kirksey 2012).<br /><br />At certain historical junctures, West Papua’s political struggle became an arboreal rhizome of sorts, like the banyan tree – the symbol of a dominant Indonesian political party (Lowe 2011). This movement for justice and rights climbed up and around the architecture of domination – encircling Indonesian institutions, multinational corporations, as well as transnational organizations bent on governmentality and control.<br /><br />Women form the backbone of human life in New Guinea – both in the independent country of Papua New Guinea and the emerging nation of West Papua. As the nationalist movement in West Papua approached a climax in the early 21st century, as this figural banyan seemed ready to choke off the host tree of Indonesian domination, the women of New Guinea were still maneuvering within pervasive male-dominated institutions, making rhizomorphic articulations.<br /><br />The emergent connections enabled by Nanasuanna’s speech at the meeting of conservationists, certainly mirror strategies of political engagement used by indigenous West Papuans. Her words also recall Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about the “war of position,” the open-ended struggle that is ever-present in situations of hegemony. Gramsci writes of “molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.”<br /><br />West’s writing about the microprocesses of conservation practice in Maimafu village, in concert with her insights about ecofetishism and the commodification of nature, offers a framework for thinking about human agents who enlist particular species in regimes of biopolitical control. This book places conservation squarely within a matrix of ecological forces and social relations. Rather than point toward a utopic future, an imagined moment of naturalcultural harmony, West gives us thick description of molecular changes in the historical present. Perhaps schemes to protect nature in the global south will always be implicated in post-colonial, and neo-imperial, power dynamics. Perhaps ecosystems will always contain unloved others, creatures that escape regimes of cultivation and care (Rose and van Dooren 2011). Nonetheless, West offers visions of modest biocultural hope – la lucha continua with a multifaceted war of position to make conservation projects more just and equitable. Her work has prompted me to rearticulate the question from Donna Haraway that opened this short essay: Which species are protected, for whom, and at what cost?<br /><br />(Originally published as <a href="http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/10-PoachingMultispecies.pdf">Kirksey et al, "Poaching at the Multispecies Salon", Kroeber Anthropological Society. 100(1): 129-153.</a>)Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-46166201881806884222011-02-25T16:59:00.000-08:002011-02-25T17:02:03.013-08:00Comprehending West PapuaThis is a remote video presentation about Eben's forthcoming book, "Freedom in Entangled Worlds", that he presented at the conference on West Papua organized by the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in February 2011. <br /><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/20225464?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=fbca54" width="580" height="326" frameborder="0"></iframe>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-8547212076756459392010-10-19T10:33:00.000-07:002014-06-26T03:25:02.008-07:00CFP: Call for Poachers<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghx3HSglrXLXblJqd7Dx1TKqcMs4J1YqAx1sUVUApzqp6z9Wz6Qd640JQwhpL6DhIhPtr2KD4JKN9aYLKNrj7uOP8fpds2VmpJNrpmKXcUMkO8ozbSHhnOoR6GAfNuUstnV22WCTQ1GM_B/s1600/poacher-people-weapon-guns-lifestyles-poverty-wildlife-men-rural_12962.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghx3HSglrXLXblJqd7Dx1TKqcMs4J1YqAx1sUVUApzqp6z9Wz6Qd640JQwhpL6DhIhPtr2KD4JKN9aYLKNrj7uOP8fpds2VmpJNrpmKXcUMkO8ozbSHhnOoR6GAfNuUstnV22WCTQ1GM_B/s400/poacher-people-weapon-guns-lifestyles-poverty-wildlife-men-rural_12962.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529812493990531874" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 258px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>CFP: CALL FOR POACHERS<br />
<a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/">The Multispecies Salon</a> <br />
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Michel de Certeau speaks of “reading as poaching” in The Practice of Everyday Life. This assertion is part of de Certeau’s larger argumentthat consumption is not a passive act, determined by systems of production. He suggests that reading is a foundational mode of modern consumption, and therefore, of everyday life. In contrast to the “private hunting reserves” cultivated by elite literati, who alone claim rights to inscribe meanings to texts or landscapes, reading as poaching allows one to “convert the text through reading and to ‘run it’ the way one runs traffic lights” (1984: 171-176).<br />
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“What does it mean to poach another person’s paper, especially an unpublished one?” ask members of the <a href="http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/364">Matsutake Worlds Research Group</a>. The English word “poach” is related to the French word pocher, to push or poke with a finger or pointed instrument, to pierce. “Poaching is a way of pushing or poking pieces of ones research towards that of another,” suggests the Group, “something of an offering; not an encroachment but a gift.”<br />
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We hereby announce an open CFP (Call for Poachers) in association with the Multispecies Salon panel at the upcoming American Anthropological Association meetings (Saturday, November 20th, 1:45 p.m.-5:30 p.m., New Orleans Sheraton, Grand Ballroom A, 5th Floor). Seventeen papers are available for poaching—all orbiting around the emergence of multispecies ethnography, a novel interdisciplinary mode of inquiry.<br />
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“Multispecies ethnography asks cultural anthropologists to reengage with biological anthropology,” write event organizers Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich. The papers under discussion explore human entanglements with animals, plants, fungi, and microbes.<br />
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Rather than passively listen to conventionally scripted conference presentations, we invite audience members to push or poke the papers on the table, to run them, like traffic lights. We invite the audience to offer up examples from their own research, to “poach” papers like pears, using red wine and honey to intensify and transform the flavor of the fruit.<br />
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Become a poacher at <a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/">The Multispecies Salon</a>.<br />
<a href="http://www.wix.com/multispecies/multispecies" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-34384482112958470342010-08-28T11:46:00.000-07:002014-06-26T03:26:17.985-07:00Multispecies Salon 3: Call for Wild Artists<a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/">The Multispecies Salon</a> used art to explore human relationships with nature.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR0NonSOR4LKwjAyGgvi9KQfrr13tNBNJhHOk4pKlKHzt6xQbyKj0lgqsMH_eBriis4AsDuNf38mUlInx_dzhCkgwBekSPTvhrXK-0BaH6yfrX36oA9yW1RuLOnsnFigNFHJXDxLxN70qy/s1600/paranoia-banner.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR0NonSOR4LKwjAyGgvi9KQfrr13tNBNJhHOk4pKlKHzt6xQbyKj0lgqsMH_eBriis4AsDuNf38mUlInx_dzhCkgwBekSPTvhrXK-0BaH6yfrX36oA9yW1RuLOnsnFigNFHJXDxLxN70qy/s400/paranoia-banner.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5510535910299849186" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 113px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>A curatorial collective is reaching out to renowned bioartists, ecoartists, and kinetic artists in New Orleans, across the United States, and around the world. With this call we are also soliciting artifacts and organisms from wild artists: school children, environmental advocates, community organizers, and scholars who do not all have recognizable art credentials. Pushing Joseph Beuys' famous decree--"You are all artists"--beyond human realms we will also frame microbes, insects, and plants as creative agents.<br />
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The Multispecies Salon originated in the San Francisco Bay Area where artists have been collaborating with anthropologists to explore human relations with other species. The Salon has orbited around the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in San Francisco (in 2008) and San Jose (in 2006). The coming of the AAA to New Orleans, from 17-21 November, prompted us to organize Multispecies Salon 3. Our art exhibit accompanies the emergence of multispecies ethnography, a new mode of anthropological research and writing about how human lives are entangled with animals, plants, fungi, and microbes.<br />
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To submit an artifact or artwork to the Multispecies Salon e-mail us an image or a brief description of your piece (200 words or less): Multispecies.Salon@gmail.com. All submissions should fit within one of the three themes described on this website: 1) Life in the Age of Biotechnology, 2) Edible Companions, and 3) Hope in Blasted Landscapes. If you would like to submit a bioart piece, using living matter as your medium, please include an additional statement addressing how the piece should be cared for in the gallery and any public health concerns. Submissions are due on September 1st and participants will be notified by September 15th if their piece is accepted. Opening night will be November 13th, 2010.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-23843408631041308562010-06-28T08:34:00.000-07:002010-06-28T08:35:13.152-07:00President Obama, What Would Your Mother Say?<span class="style29">P</span>resident Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently — canceling his visit there for the second time this year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she were still alive, she might well be disappointed in her son. <p class="style23">As President Obama turns his attention to the oil spill in the Gulf, the U.S. Congress is reminding him of other important issues in a seemingly remote corner of Indonesia. A resolution introduced by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (H.Res. 1355) calls attention to the human rights problems in West Papua, the half of New Guinea that was invaded by Indonesia in 1962.</p> <p class="style23">In the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he recalls a conversation with Lolo Soetoro, his step-father who had just returned home after a tour of duty with the Indonesian military in West Papua. Obama asked his step-father: “Have you ever seen a man killed?” Lolo responded affirmatively, recounting the bloody death of “weak” men.</p> <p class="style23">Ann Soetoro never spoke out publicly about Indonesian atrocities in West Papua, but she divorced her husband shortly after he came back from the frontlines of this war.</p> <p class="style23">Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the “weak” men killed by Lolo Soetoro, have read Obama’s autobiography with keen interest. They still embrace the message of hope from the Presidential campaign and the slogan, “Yes We Can.”</p> <p class="style23">At a moment when many Americans are questioning whether Obama will be able to fulfill his campaign promises, when everyone is wondering if he can reign in the hubris of the corporate executives who produced the disaster in the Gulf, it is worth considering these enduring hopes in West Papua. </p> <p class="style23">Perhaps it is time for those of us who were drawn in by the slogan “Yes We Can” to remind the President that grassroots political movements still have power.</p> <p class="style23">Many people, including some anthropologists, do not know the difference between West Papua* and Papua New Guinea. The subject of several classic anthropology books — from Margaret Mead’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0688178111/counterpunchmaga">Growing Up in New Guinea</a> to Marilyn Strathern’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520072022/counterpunchmaga">Gender of the Gif</a>t — the independent nation of Papua New Guinea is familiar to almost anyone who has taken an introductory anthropology class. Indonesia is also well known among academics who study culture or politics. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us tales of Balinese cockfights and Javanese religious systems, and political scientist Benedict Anderson famously wrote about imagined communities and power in Indonesia.</p> <p class="style23">At the edge of national and scholarly boundaries, West Papua, in contrast, falls through the cracks.</p> <p class="style23">Anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines should join human rights advocates and others in noticing West Papua. Amnesty International is currently working with Representative Kennedy’s office to pass his Resolution which calls attention to many pressing problems:</p> <blockquote> <p class="style23">“Whereas Amnesty International has identified numerous prisoners of conscience in Indonesian prisons, among them Papuans such as Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage, imprisoned for peaceful political protests including the display of the ‘‘morning star’’ flag which has historic, cultural, and political meaning for Papuans…</p> <p class="style23">“Whereas a Human Rights Watch report on June 5, 2009, noted ‘‘torture and abuse of prisoners in jails in Papua is rampant’’;</p> <p class="style23">“and Whereas prominent Indonesian leaders have called for a national dialogue and Papuan leaders have called for an internationally-mediated dialogue to address long-standing grievances in Papua and West Papua.”</p> </blockquote> <p class="style23">If passed, this Resolution would give President Obama some issues of substance to talk about with Indonesian leaders once he does make a return trip to Southeast Asia. Resolutions are non-binding acts that convey the sentiments of Congress.</p> <p class="style23">Amnesty International, and the other human rights groups advocating for this resolution, are up against powerful forces. Transnational companies have been lobbying for stronger military ties with Indonesia. The same company that brought us the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP, has a huge natural gas field in West Papua called Tangguh. </p> <p class="style23">Starting this year, BP is scheduled to start shipping super-cooled gas from this site (liquid natural gas or LNG) to North America where it will be piped into the homes of millions in California, Oregon and other westerns states.</p> <p class="style23">BP has been a major donor to the U.S.-Indonesia Society, an organization committed to educating congressional staff and administration officials about the “importance of the United States-Indonesia relationship.” The U.S.-Indonesia Society is also supported by Freeport McMoRan, a company that operates one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines in West Papua.</p> <p class="style23">The American public is starting to reign in the irresponsible behavior of companies like BP that have created domestic disasters. American must also reckon with the foreign entanglements of the companies supplying the U.S. natural resources and should question the politicians who have led the United States into a series of environmental catastrophes and debacles on foreign soil.</p> <p class="style23">Who the official cosponsors of Kennedy’s Resolution on West Papua are is public knowledge.</p> <p class="style23">If your representative hasn’t yet signed on, call the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Ask to speak with your representative’s office. Once you get through to the office of your congressman or congresswoman, identify yourself as a “constituent” and ask to speak with the staff person responsible for international affairs or human rights. Once you have that person on the phone (or, more likely, are transferred to their voice mail), identify yourself by name, where you live or the place you work, and say “Please support H.Res. 1355 from Patrick Kennedy’s office about political prisoners in West Papua.” Sometimes the person you end up talking to will want to chat, but often they will be brief.</p> <p class="style23">Or, you can click through to this Amnesty International action center.</p> <p class="style23">The responses that human rights advocates are calling for today is pathetically small compared to the scale of the problem. Making your voice heard is one step toward addressing U.S. entanglements and misadventures in a seemingly remote corner of the world.</p> <p class="style23"><strong>S. Eben Kirksey</strong> is a cultural anthropologist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. <em>Freedom in Entangled Worlds,</em> his forthcoming book, published by Duke University Press, explores the social and political dynamics of West Papua’s independence movement from 1998 till 2008.</p> <p class="style23">*In 1961 a council of indigenous New Guinea intellectuals declared that their land, then known as Netherlands New Guinea, would henceforth be known as West Papua. Indonesia. Weeks after this declaration, Indonesia invaded and named their newly acquired territory Irian Jaya. Now this place is officially known as the Indonesian Provinces of West Papua and Papua—though many indigenous people? continue to use the name West Papua to refer to the entire territory.</p> <p class="style33">Suggested readings.</p> <p class="style23">Butt, L. 2005. ‘”Lipstick Girls”‘ and ‘”Fallen Women”‘: AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in West Papua, Indonesia’. Cultural Anthropology 20(3):412-442.</p> <p class="style23">Farhadian, Charles E. 2005 Christianity, Islam, and Nationalism in Indonesia. New York: Routledge.</p> <p class="style23">Glazebrook, Diana 2008. Permissive Residents: West Papuan Refugees Living in Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Australian National University.</p> <p class="style23">Golden, Brigham 2003 “<a href="http://www.asiasource.org/asip/papua_golden.cfm">Political Millenarianism and the Economy of Conflict: Reflections on Papua by an Activist Anthropologist</a>” Asia Source, 23 June, </p> <p class="style23">Kirksey, S. Eben 2009 “Don’t Use Your Data as a Pillow,” in Alisse Waterston and Maria D. Vesperi (eds.) Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, pp. 146-159, Wiley-Blackwell.</p> <p class="style23">Kirsch, Stuart 2010 “Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua” Critique of Anthropology 30(1):3–22.</p> <p class="style23">Rutherford, Danilyn 2005. ‘Nationalism and Millenarianism in West Papua: Institutional Power, Interpretive Practice, and the Pursuit of Christian Truth’, in June Nash (ed.) Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, pp. 146–67. London: Blackwell.</p> <p class="style23">Stasch, Rupert 2001 “Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)” Oceania 72:33-52.</p> <p class="style34">This article originally appeared on the excellent website <a href="http://anthropologyworks.com/">AnthropologyWorks</a>.</p>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-36558729920963887932010-01-08T13:31:00.000-08:002014-06-26T03:36:03.455-07:00The Multispecies MealThe Multispecies Meal<br />
@ the Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings in Santa Fe<br />
May 7-8, 2010<br />
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Artists, anthropologists, and significant others came together to break bread at The Multispecies Salon, a special off-site event at the 2008 meetings of AAA in San Francisco. We shared food in an exercise of being and becoming with Donna Haraway’s companion species. A bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, come together in companion species. “Companion comes from the Latin cum panis, ‘with bread,’” she writes. During our meal we ate sourdough bread while Jake Metcalf told us about a microbial culture that crossed the Oregon Trail and then propagated itself on the internet. Acorn mush was prepared by Linda Noel, a Native American poet who told us that she always left some acorns behind “for the deer.” <br />
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Artisanal cheeses from nearby Cowgirl Creamery featuring organic milk and ambient as well as freeze-dried microbes from earth, air, and lab, were provided by Heather Paxson. She told us about what she calls “microbiopolitics”, the ways that human systems of ethics and governance bear on the doings of microorganisms. <br />
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Other items on our table involved small-scale relationships of mutual care as well as mutual violence. Geographer Jake Kosek had just collected fresh honey from his own beehive and was sporting a swollen hand from a fresh sting. While we sipped dandelion root tea, performance artist Caitlin Berrigan asked that we give blood to a dandelion plant, providing much needed nutrients. The violence was asymmetrical to be sure—bee stings and finger pricks are not equivalent to the large-scale robbery of a hive’s resources, or the uprooting of a plant. Still, this minor violence to human bodies was a reminder that the entangled relations among companion species are often fraught.<br />
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Eating a meal in an art gallery turned mundane routine into an opportunity for rumination and reflection. In trying to swallow the products of multispecies labor relations and nested ecological becomings, more than one gallery goer experienced indigestion. The fermented smell of sourdough yeast lingered on the palate, mixing with the bitter taste of dandelion tea and acorn mush.<br />
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We will host another multispecies meal at the 2010 meetings of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in Santa Fe. This will be a poster session, of sorts, where people can informally talk about their work and break bread together. People who are already participating in formal paper presentations are welcome to submit their edible organisms for consideration. Entrants should be prepared to bring enough food to share with audience members.<br />
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To be included in the session proposal, entrants should simply submit a title for their project by Monday, January 11th, 2010 at noon EST. Address all entries and queries to S. Eben Kirksey (skirksey@pitt.edu). Late entrants will be considered up until the SCA meetings in May.<br />
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More information about the Multispecies Salon: <a href="http://www.multispecies-salon.org/">www.multispecies-salon.org/</a>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-42655831528751705262009-11-09T10:51:00.000-08:002009-11-09T11:11:12.237-08:00Dialog in West Papua<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.house.gov/faleomavaega/images/banner-portrait.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 175px; height: 150px;" src="http://www.house.gov/faleomavaega/images/banner-portrait.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Today Rep. Eni Faleomavaega and Rep. Donald Payne joined Papuan leaders and Indonesian intellectuals in calling for dialog in West Papua. In a letter to the President of Indonesia, they wrote: “A national dialogue would present an opportunity to resolve important issues in West Papua long viewed with concern by Members of Congress and the international community. These include human rights abuses, demographic shifts leaving many Papuans as minorities in their own land, limits on freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, restrictions on the free movement of Papuans within Indonesia, and constraints on international journalists, researchers, and those in nongovernmental organizations seeking to visit or work in West Papua.”<br /><br />“It is our sincere hope that you will establish an internationally-mediated commission to initiate a dialogue bringing together nationally-respected leaders of your government and of West Papua. We believe this is the moment to begin such a process. A serious national dialogue will enhance the welfare of the people of West Papua, demonstrate Indonesia’s commitment to democracy and justice for all its citizens, and enhance your country’s growing stature on the global stage,” the letter concludes.<br /><br />Faleomavaega and Payne both are members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives. Faleomavaega is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment, and Payne is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-83137246373782022272009-07-15T00:19:00.000-07:002009-07-15T01:06:03.257-07:00Indonesia's Military Investigates Itself--AgainToday George Aditjondro, an Indonesian sociologist and public intellectual, suggested that the Indonesian military staged a series of ambush murders last weekend at the Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mine. Aditjondro told the Associated Press: "Whenever they (security forces) feel they do not receive enough 'protection fee' then they orchestrate an attack to show Freeport how vulnerable they are and increase protection fees."<br /><br />Indonesian officials today announced that the Indonesian military would join the police in investigating the killings of last weekend.<br /><br />If recent history can serve as any guide, the Indonesian military will not be able to pull off a credible investigation. In December 2002, when the police fingered military shooters in a similar attack, General Endriartono Sutarto, then the head of Indonesia's Armed Forces, dispatched a fact finding team to the crime scene. This team, led by Brigadier General Hendarji, conducted what they called a "reconstruction."<br /><br />The purported aim of this reconstruction was to assess the accuracy of eyewitnesses testimony placing Indonesian soldiers with the Kopassus Special Forces at the crime scene. In short, the reconstruction conducted on 28 December, 2002, in Timika was a sham. Crime scene eye witnesses and human rights observers reported that they were intimidated during the exercise. The military publicly exonerated themselves after this reconstruction, saying that the eyewitnesses had "lied."<br /><br />If Indonesian military personnel are among the likely suspects in the latest round of murders, then they should not participate in the investigation.<br /><br />To read the interview with George Aditjondro see: <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hWyGJPDTk951pr0Y5J5hLInkwZtAD99EMKH80">Anthony Deutch, "Security Suspected in Indonesia Gold Mine Killings," <span style="font-style: italic;">The Associated Press</span>, 15 July 2009.</a><br /><br />To learn more about the December 2002 "reconstruction" by the Indonesian military see pages 188-189 of: <a href="http://skyhighway.com/%7Eebenkirksey/writing/Kirksey-Harsono_Timika.pdf">KIRKSEY, S. E. & A. HARSONO. 2008. "Criminal Collaborations: Antonius Wamang and the Indonesian Military in Timika", South East Asia Research, 16 (2): 165-197. </a>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-76162475147031031432009-07-13T23:51:00.000-07:002009-07-15T13:10:11.110-07:00Indonesia's Police and Military at Open War<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAeDtd-FtAQT3ol4RdXyXXtAed28gKhJFf7XCTcUVL8YMFi7GpUVzkf-1RSPfumw2U2TloqYubynl7Qcb1mKt3nu2d1VSJu9D1pxvQgNhZB-coCjmBa3WJ2nBZxwM-t6Xn2IhV24L4TPQQ/s1600-h/Drewcar385_588491a.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 154px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAeDtd-FtAQT3ol4RdXyXXtAed28gKhJFf7XCTcUVL8YMFi7GpUVzkf-1RSPfumw2U2TloqYubynl7Qcb1mKt3nu2d1VSJu9D1pxvQgNhZB-coCjmBa3WJ2nBZxwM-t6Xn2IhV24L4TPQQ/s320/Drewcar385_588491a.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358207001465278210" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Timika, a city in West Papua, has become a site where an open war over money, involving the Indonesian military (TNI) and the police (POLRI), is taking place. In 2008 the U.S. mining giant Freeport McMoRan paid $8 million in support costs to security forces, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Last year $1.6 million of this money went to "allowances" for TNI and POLRI officers despite a 2007 Ministerial decree handing over all security for "vital national projects" (provit) to POLRI.<br /><br />TNI had financial incentive to stage the attack last weekend that left Drew Grant, an Australian national, dead. A disturbance would show that POLRI was doing a poor job at providing security for this national project. At the same time POLRI is now in a situation, much like they were with the 2002 attacks that killed three teachers in Timika, where it is in their best interest to pursue evidence of TNI involvement in the ambush. The battle between TNI and POLRI in Timika is a microcosm for a war between these two institutions on a national level. Very lucrative security contracts at other vital national projects, like BP's Tangguh project in Bintuni Bay, are at stake.<br /><br />The jury is still out about who conducted the attacks over the weekend. Allegations and denials are flying from all possible corners. If investigators identify marksmen, my first questions will be: Where did they get their guns? and Who trained them?<br /><br />For more details of the $1.8 million "monthly allowance" see: <a href="http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/23032009/323/mining-giant-paying-indonesia-military.html">Aubrey Belford (2009) "US Mining Giant Still Paying Indonesian Military", AFP, 23 March.</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">For details on Freeport's $8 million in broader "support costs" for some 1,850 Indonesian police and soldiers see:<a href="http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2234808/"> </a></span><a href="http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2234808/"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span>"DJ US Giant Freeport McMoran Still Paying Indonesia Military", </span></span>Dow Jones Commodities News select via Comtex, 22 March 2009.</a>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-55411475525774631122009-07-12T20:55:00.000-07:002009-07-12T21:35:35.395-07:00Déjà vu in Timikapreliminary thoughts about a new ambush murder<br /><br /><br />When Papuans are murdered by Indonesia’s security forces, which has been happening with a predictable regularity ever since I began paying serious attention in 1998, the international community rarely takes notice. When whites are killed, the world starts to care.<br /><br />Two days ago Drew Grant, a 29-year-old Australian national, was shot five times with what police investigators are calling “military-style weapons” along the heavily guarded road leading to Freeport McMoRan’s gold mine in West Papua. Yesterday an Indonesian security officer was also shot. A 2002 attack on the same road left one Indonesian and two U.S. schoolteachers dead. Ballistics evidence and eye-witness testimony point to an Indonesian military role in the ambush murder from seven years ago. Reading media reports published in the last few days, and talking to a couple of friends who are tracking the case on the ground, I have experienced an uncanny feeling of déjà vu.<br /><br />Over the weekend there were also two Indonesian civilians murdered in the highland town of Wamena: a Javanese and a Papuan. A separate shooting, also on Saturday, took place on Yapen Island, off West Papua's north coast. Last week four Papuans were killed in the remote Mamberamo region by Indonesia’s Densus 88 unit, crack troops that recieve training from the U.S. government. Of all this recent violence, only the death of the Australian has captured the attention of major media outlets.<br /><br />A “sniper” carried out the attack that killed the Australian mining employee this weekend, in the words of Indonesian national police inspector-general Nanan Sukarna. A similarly skilled marksman was at work in 2002. The first four shots that killed the two U.S. teachers, were distinct, methodical, and fatal. A group of Papuans were jailed for the 2002 attack. But, prosecutors did not muster evidence that any of the men had the technical skills to precisely target passengers in a moving vehicle.<br /><br />Indonesian investigators have been quick to admit that the weapons used by the sniper the Australian man this weekend were standard issue for security forces. “It’s clear they (the attackers) were using weapons belonging to the police or the military,” said Major General Ekodanto, the Provincial Chief of Police. But others have been quick to add that these guns may have been stolen.<br /><br />Papuan guerilla fighters, known by the acronym TPN, have long had access to a handful of “military-style” weapons—namely M16 and SS1 assault rifles. But a long hard look at many of these “freedom fighters” reveals that many are not really TPN, but affiliates of the TNI, the acronym for the Indonesian military. Antonius Wamang, who is currently serving a life sentence for the 2002 attack, was one such figure who mingled with government security forces in Timika’s shadow lands and even traveled with them to Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta. If you like murder mysteries, and feelings of déjà vu, click here:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.blogger.com/skyhighway.com/%7Eebenkirksey/writing/Kirksey-Harsono_Timika.pdf">KIRKSEY, S. E. & A. HARSONO. 2008. "Criminal Collaborations: Antonius Wamang and the Indonesian Military in Timika", South East Asia Research, 16 (2): 165-197. </a>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-47132003546951186802009-07-07T10:21:00.000-07:002009-07-07T10:26:26.046-07:00Op-ed in the Saint Petersburg Times<a href="http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1016205.ece" target="_blank">http://www.tampabay.com/news/<wbr>article1016205.ece</a><br /><br />St Petersburg Times<br /><br />Indonesia's bleak record on rights<br />By Eben Kirksey, Special to the Times<br /><br />Tuesday, July 7, 2009<br /><br />Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said improving relations with Indonesia will be a priority of the Obama administration. As Indonesians go to the polls Wednesday to choose a president, this is an excellent time for the United States to press for a fuller investigation of an incident that has been a stumbling block for the two countries: the 2002 ambush that killed two U.S. schoolteachers in Indonesia's remote territory of West Papua.<br /><br />New documents add a surprising twist to public accounts of the killings. Ballistics reports and eyewitness testimony point to an Indonesian military role in the attack. But declassified State<br />Department documents reveal that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the current president of Indonesia who is up for re-election Wednesday, coordinated a coverup. Before Indonesians head to the polls, our elected officials have the opportunity to tell Yudhoyono that the United States is disappointed with his record on transparency and human rights.<br /><br />The teachers were ambushed about 300 yards from an Indonesian military checkpoint and pinned in their cars during 45 minutes of sporadic gunfire. Two Americans and one Indonesian were murdered and eight other Americans were wounded. The teachers were driving home from a picnic near the gold and copper mine operated by Freeport McMoRan, a U.S. company that employed them to teach at an international school. Police investigators singled out officers in Kopassus, Indonesia's notorious special forces, as the culprits. The motive of these soldiers may well have been a bid for more money. In 2002 Freeport paid the Indonesian military $5.6 million for protection, including $46,000 to a Kopassus soldier placed at the crime scene by witnesses.<br /><br />After reports of military shooters emerged, Yudhoyono, then political and security minister, took over the inquiry. Initially Yudhoyono blocked an FBI investigation, according to previously secret State Department cables obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents were released online last week. While Yudhoyono stalled, Indonesian military agents intimidated key witnesses and tampered with material evidence.<br /><br />Despite initial CIA reports linking military shooters to this murder, the Bush administration pushed to renew financing for Indonesia's armed forces. With a population of 240 million, Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic country, was seen as a key ally in the global war on<br />terror. With vast mineral resources, natural gas reserves and timber, Indonesia was also regarded as an important U.S. trading partner. Nevertheless, a Republican-controlled Congress stonewalled Bush administration attempts to fund training for Indonesian soldiers until they cooperated with the FBI. Justice in this murder case became the most important issue in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Indonesia.<br /><br />The trail was cold by the time the FBI was allowed in the country. Yudhoyono began to micromanage the investigation, meeting repeatedly with the low-ranking FBI field agents in charge of the case, according to the declassified State Department documents. Initially the FBI investigators were only allowed to interview witnesses in the presence of Indonesian military agents and were given limited access to material evidence.<br /><br />The scope of the FBI investigation was also limited by Bush's goals in the war on terror. The special agents found a fall guy but tiptoed around evidence connecting him to the Indonesian military. Antonius Wamang, an ethnic Papuan, was eventually indicted by a U.S. grand jury for his role in the attack. He was apprehended in 2006 by the FBI and sentenced to life in Indonesian prison. But Wamang had extensive ties to the Indonesian military, and these ties were not explored in the Indonesian court system.<br /><br />The impunity in this case speaks to a broader pattern of abuse by the Indonesian military directed at their own people, especially ethnic minorities. Since Yudhoyono began his first term as president in 2004, scores of indigenous Papuans have been killed by government soldiers.<br />Last month a 13-year-old boy was shot dead. Since April seven young Papuan women have been kidnapped and raped, others killed, and civilian homes burned during a series of police sweeps in West Papua's highlands.<br /><br />This week Yudhoyono is running in a hotly contested presidential race against other former generals with similarly dismal human rights records. Gen. Wiranto, vice president on the Golkar ticket, has been indicted by the United Nations for crimes against humanity in East Timor. The Democratic Party of Struggle's vice presidential candidate, Gen. Prabowo Subianto, commanded the Kopassus special forces when his subordinates kidnapped and disappeared student activists.<br /><br />Indonesian voters have bleak options at the ballot box this week. No matter who is elected, the Obama administration should ensure that the masterminds of the 2002 ambush are brought to justice. The FBI investigation into this case is still officially open and Eric Holder's Justice Department should move forward to bring it to a conclusion. Prosecuting the people who were truly responsible for this attack will help protect U.S. and Indonesian citizens alike from further human rights abuses.Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4516673077983612494.post-35121238740425513792009-06-30T18:06:00.000-07:002009-07-07T12:42:51.858-07:00Indonesian President Covered Up Ambush Murder of U.S. CitizensPreviously secret <a href="http://etan.org/news/2009/06Timika.htm">U.S. State Department documents</a> implicate the President of Indonesia in a probable cover-up of an ambush in West Papua. The documents show Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is running for reelection on July 8, maneuvering behind the scenes to manage the investigation into the August 2002 murder of three teachers—one Indonesian and two U.S. citizens.<br /><br />The documents released today add a new twist to a hotly contested Presidential race.<br /><p>Selections from these documents are published here in seven distinct sections: </p> <p>1) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/1_State-Department_FBI_Response.pdf">Response by the State Department and the FBI to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request</a> </p> <p>2) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/2_Initial-Reports_SBY-Orders-Response.pdf">Initial Reports About Attackers; Yudhoyono Orders a Quick Response </a> </p> <p> <a href="http://www.etan.org/news/graphics/indonesia_mine.jpg"> </a>The first State Department reports about the 2002 attack seriously entertained two theories: that the perpetrators were Papuan independence fighters (OPM guerillas) or rogue elements of the Indonesian military. The documents note that the assault took place on a foggy mountain road near a military checkpoint and an Army Strategic Reserve Forces post. Upon learning of the attack, Yudhoyono ordered a quick response to restore security and to investigate the attack. </p> <p>The U.S. Embassy noted in a cable to Washington: ”Many Papuan groups are calling for an independent investigation led by the U.S. Calls for an independent probe are unrealistic, but we believe that Papua's Police Chief, who enjoys a good reputation with Papuan activists (and U.S.), can conduct a fair investigation.” The Police Chief’s investigation later indicated that the Indonesian military was involved. The FBI subsequently launched a separate probe. </p> <p>3) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/3_Victims-Treated-In-Secrecy.pdf">Attack Victims Treated in Secrecy at Australian Hospital</a> </p> <p>The survivors of the assault were airlifted out of Indonesia to a hospital in Townsend, Australia. Here U.S. diplomats, the FBI, Queensland Police, and the Australian Defense Force kept a tight lid on the situation—preventing the victims from speaking with the press and even from contacting family members for the first two days. See: Tom Hyland, “<a target="_blank" href="http://www.theage.com.au/world/lost-in-the-fog-20080927-4pb8.html?page=-1">Lost in the Fog</a>," The Age, September 28, 2008.<span lang="en-us"> </span> </p> <p>4) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/4_SBY-Assumes-Control.pdf">Yudhoyono Assumes Coordinating Role in Investigation</a> </p> <p>Following police reports of Indonesian military involvement, these documents reveal that Yudhoyono began to play a more active role in managing and influencing the direction of the investigation. Yudhoyono met repeatedly with the FBI field investigators, as well as high-level U.S. diplomats, blocking their initial attempts to gain unmediated access to witnesses and material evidence. This file includes a letter from Yudhoyono to the Charge D'Affaires of the U.S. Embassy where he outlines a strategy for managing the broader political and security aspects of the incident. </p> <p align="center"> <img src="http://www.etan.org/news/2009/4_SBY-Assumes-Contro%20to%20excerpt-1.jpg" border="0" height="265" width="497" /></p> <p>5) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/5_Commander-In-Chief-Concerned.pdf">Commander-In-Chief Concerned About Washington Post Interview </a> </p> <p>The Washington Post reported in 2002 that senior Indonesian military officers, including armed forces commander General Endriartono Sutarto, had discussed an unspecified operation against Freeport McMoRan before the ambush in Timika. General Sutarto vehemently denied that he or any other top military officers had discussed any operation targeting Freeport. He sued The Washington Post for US$1 billion and demanded an apology from the paper. Several months after this lawsuit was settled out of court, The Washington Post asked to interview Sutarto. This document contains notes from a meeting between the U.S. Ambassador and Commander-in-Chief Sutarto where this interview request was discussed: “Clearly concerned, General Sutarto asked why the Washington Post wanted to interview him, as well as TNI’s Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS) and the State Intelligence Agency (BIN) Chiefs regarding the Timika case.” See: Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress “<a href="http://etan.org/et2002c/november/01-09/03mine.htm">Indonesia Military Allegedly Talked of Targeting Mine</a>," The Washington Post, November 3, 2002. </p> <p>6) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/6_Most-Important-Issue.pdf">Most Important Issue in U.S.-Indonesia Bilateral Relationship</a> </p> <p>The U.S. Ambassador stressed in a June 2003 meeting with Yudhoyono that justice in the Timika killings was “the most important issue in the bilateral relationship.” During this period, FBI agents were given intermittent access to evidence. Yudhoyono continued to play an active role in coordinating the political aspects of the investigation. Taking an unusual personal interest for someone with a Ministerial level position, Yudhoyono repeatedly met with the FBI case agents — the low-ranking U.S. investigators who were deployed to Timika for field investigations. </p> <p>7) <a href="http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2009/7_Ashcroft-Suppressed-Evidence.pdf">Attorney General Ashcroft Suppressed Evidence</a> </p> <p>On June 24, 2005, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that Antonius Wamang, an ethnic Papuan, was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for the Timika murders. The indictment alleged that Wamang was a “terrorist” who sought independence from Indonesia. Following this announcement, three respected human rights groups and indigenous organizations charged that the U.S. Government suppressed evidence linking Wamang to the Indonesian military. A peer-reviewed article, titled “Criminal Collaborations: Antonius Wamang and the Indonesian Military in Timika," details the nature of these links. The group called for Wamang to be given a fair trial in the U.S., rather than in notoriously corrupt Indonesian courts. See: Eben Kirksey and Andreas Harsono, “<a target="_blank" href="http://skyhighway.com/%7Eebenkirksey/writing/Kirksey-Harsono_Timika.pdf">Criminal Collaborations,</a>" South East Asia Research, vol 16, no 2. </p>Eben Kirkseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13721496415022101800noreply@blogger.com