Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia

Patricia Spyer

Open Access Published by Fordham University Press 2022

Orphaned Landscapes

Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia

Patricia Spyer
Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823298716

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book examines the proliferation of monumental Christian street art in a Muslim/Christian conflict to show how ephemeral phenomena are inherent to sociopolitical change.

A highly compelling account of how novel forms of perception and popular image-making surface and proliferate in a war torn city.

Author / Editor information

Spyer Patricia :

Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000). She has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Images That Move (SAR Press, 2013), Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2006, pbk 2013), and Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998).Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000). She has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Images That Move (SAR Press, 2013), Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2006, pbk 2013), and Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998).

Reviews

...the audience for this accessible work will include those who are not Indonesia specialists and those interested in intersections between street art, religion, and conflict.

Orphaned Landscapes is an important study of the topics of violence, religion, and visual discourse that deserves our attention.

Patricia Spyer’s Orphaned Landscapes is both a revealing meditation on violence and a deep exploration of what she calls “the work of and on appearances”. . . Her writing is richly evocative and densely layered, and the 119 color plates in the book convey both the ubiquity and the arresting power of the images that are its subject. If the effects of images remain elusive and resistant to our clunky social scientific lenses, this immersive, moving book helps us to grasp how profoundly they shape us and our worlds.

A work of great subtlety and insight, Orphaned Landscapes charts the desperate operations of the image to hold together a world spiraling toward chaos and religious violence. As Ambon’s longstanding religious and political order disintegrated following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, the visual became intensely charged with political and epistemic demands, giving rise both to an explosion of religious imagery across public spaces and to new practices of perception by which Christian and Muslim communities sought to navigate a precarious and threatening political terrain. Spyer’s superb analysis of the conditions of blindness and visibility that produce and accompany the fog of war is an immense intellectual accomplishment.---Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley

In this profound book, Patricia Spyer brings us into the streets and homes of a city emerging from a civil war that severed bonds of community, destabilized the very ground of living, and rendered familiar social terrain uncertain and obscure. With uncommon ethnographic sensitivity, Spyer attends to the “figural impulse” that motivated people to make and display images as moorings to orient a newly disfigured world. Illuminating the work of and on appearances, Orphaned Landscapes will be richly rewarding for anyone interested in the aftermaths of violence and the potency of images.---Karen Strassler, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	i
Contents Open Access Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance Open Access Download PDF	1
1 Fire without Smoke Open Access Download PDF	33
2 Christ at Large Open Access Download PDF	67
3 Images without Borders Open Access Download PDF	113
4 Religion under the Sign of Crisis Open Access Download PDF	157
5 Provoking Peace Open Access Download PDF	191
Conclusion: Ephemeral Mediations Open Access Download PDF	229
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	233
Notes Open Access Download PDF	239
Works Cited Open Access Download PDF	281
Index Open Access Download PDF	299

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Illustrations
- Other: 119 color illustrations
Keywords: images; visuality; appearance; ephemera; mediation; materiality; street art; violence; religion; Indonesia

eBook

Published: November 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780823298716