Daniel Fisher - Becoming Like the State

8/11/2019 Daniel Fisher - Becoming Like the State

1/6

Preface: Becoming Like the State

Daniel Fisher

University of California, Berkeley

Jaap Timmer

Macquarie University

INTRODUCTION

What happens when those most frequently considered marginal, unassimilable, or peripheral

to the state seek to become like the state? The six papers in this special issue describe and

analyze a widespread, but diverse phenomenon of groups endeavoring to embody, capture, orotherwise gain access to state power through forms of mimetic or bureaucratic magic. The

papers present materials from the remarkably diverse region of Oceania (with case studies

from Papua, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, and Aboriginal Australia), yet they cohere both

in their analytical questions and in their concern with a region marked by Australian power,

histories of political intervention, and ongoing cultural influence. They also draw attention to

a phenomenon that remains under-explored both in the post-colonial Pacific and elsewhere.

Over the past two decades a broad range of work has endeavoured to illuminate the

workings of state power, to deconstruct and articulate its particular characteristics and to

make the meaning of the state a focus of ethnographic investigation. Such research builds

on a long and varied history of political anthropology one that has approached its objectthrough forms of ritual performance and spectacle (Leach 1954; see also Geertz 1980;

Gluckman 1958) and through efforts to historicize the formation (and failures) of postco-

lonial states (see Coronil 1997; Ferguson 1994; Scott 1998, 2009) and in earlier works to

undermine the telos underwriting some descriptions of modern states (as in Clastres 1977).

These works inform a related concern with sovereignty and efforts to understand sovereign

power less in ontologically absolute terms and more through contingent relations and prac-

tices that may be dispersed and partible rather than isomorphic with any singular state

(Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Kapferer and Taylor 2012; cf. Mitchell 1988). In the context

of these conversations a number of scholars have suggested a dispersal of the state and a

focus on its margins, on the performances and appropriations of stateness that can be seenboth in efforts to secure new urban settlement as well as to underwrite the authority of the

police (Das and Poole 2005; Holston 2008; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). This perspective

suggests a radical de-essentialisation of state power, and often figures the states magic as

a phantasmic effect of its historically specific technologies, practices, and institutions

(Coronil 1997; Taussig 1998; see also Fisher 2012; Timmer 2010).

This collection pursues this critical conversation further by focusing on the ways in

which people use the performances, rituals, or the normative frameworks of the state not to

create alternatives to the state, but rather in an effort to become like the state itself. The

different avenues of investigation include appropriations of the state for the legitimation

and/or exercise of Indigenous law and sovereignty, local assertions that suggest that the state

itself relies on native magic and stories, and unorthodox interpretations of the state based on

its resemblance to religious institutions, performances, and rituals.

The volume coheres around three major themes. First, all articles focus their analyses on

processes of becoming and suggest the ways in which stateness is itself a performative

accomplishment, even for those states whose sovereignty and power seem self-evident, under-

written by their taken-for-granted character. Secondly, contributors re-examine anthropologi-

bs_bs_banner

Oceania, Vol. 83, Issue 3 (2013): 153157

DOI:10.1002/ocea.5017


2/6

cal reckonings with sovereignty by questioning analyses that privilege a monopoly on

violence as the principal analytic at the expense of broad issues of recognition and relationship

that themselves lend sovereignty (see Cobb 2005; Young 2001). Thirdly, the papers cohere in

their attention to the role of the Australian state in its imperial or (neo-colonial?) periphery asinterlocutor and model sovereign for these diverse regional endeavors to become like, or at

least be seen as, a state (Fisher 2012; Scott 2009; Timmer 2010).

In the first instance, these papers re-examine the question of magic in the ways that states

secure and instantiate their power. Each contributor explores a particular instance in which

people seek to become like the state by emulating that states magic, and the collections

focus on becoming draws attention to performative and experiential facets of state-making.

By focusing on specific instances of becoming like a state, all the articles seize the possibility

this opens up for understanding the attractiveness of the state, and yet the ethnographic

approaches retain a critical stance as they suggest some novel ways people living in the

margins of the state criticize the official state. That is, the acts of becoming like the statestudied in this volume also include models that account for individual, communal, regional

and national destiny in terms of justice and expose the failing of the official state in just these

terms. Yet studies of the state as seen by citizens at its the margins (Hansen and Stepputat

2001; Das and Poole 2004) or in terms of informal sovereignties (Hansen and Stepputat 2005;

Hansen and Stepputat 2006) frequently focus on how the state is critiqued or opposed by

marginal actors. In contrast, the studies in this issue ethnographically describe the empower-

ment that comes from discovering the magic that is hidden in the state. They investigate the

ways in which people use the performances, rituals, and the normative frameworks of the state

to create alternative forms of state power.

Secondly, the collection engages with an exciting new focus on questions of sovereignty.In part this focus has emerged from work that foregrounds cracks in states monopoly on

violence, drawing on studies of vigilante justice and of non-state actors whose practices

implicitly challenge this monopoly. This work has allowed ethnographers to see the severe

limits that states encounter at their margins and to figure state sovereignty as an accomplish-

ment, as always incomplete and dependent on particular forms or threats of violence. This

sense of stateness as an accomplishment also can be drawn from work on Indigenous sover-

eignty. Indigenous and other marginal actors have made strides in questioning the sovereignty

of the state by achieving recognition and concessions for their own claims to sovereign

belonging. Land claims and native title adjudications, as much as longer-standing reservations

and Indigenous sovereign space in North America, have suggested the ways that indigenous

claims have limited in practical terms the sovereign power of settler-colonial nation-states.

Scholars have continued to use these historical and ethnographic materials to challenge

western historical conceptions of sovereignty that imagine autonomy rather than relationship

(Cattelino 2008; Young 2001).

Thirdly, the collections focus on becoming also provides new insight into what the

editors figure as Australias neo-colonial frontier. A focus on becoming like the state in a

region so marked by Australian security concerns and forms of cultural influence allows

insight into a range of contests at the margins of the Australian state as well as a range of

post-colonial state projects in its sphere of interest. This casts new, ethnographic light on the

ongoing phenomenon of Australian neo-colonial interest and investment in this region. For

instance, Australia has famously intervened to address the supposed failure of the self-

determination policy in Indigenous Northern Australia. Yet it has also intervened in Solomon

Islands and Bougainville to shore up so-called failed states and to police internecine warfare.

The collection will bring together analyses of stateness in both Australias internal and

external margins, staging a comparative discussion on the structuring effect of these profound

interventions that are rarely considered side by side. A focus on how people seek to emulate

154 Preface: Becoming Like the State


3/6

and engage with the state in the Pacific region allows us to see anew the ongoing, growing role

of Australian institutions in the Pacific region.

THE PAPERS

Jaap Timmer investigates an alternative constitution for the State of Papua (Indonesia), called

Basic Guidelines. Don Flassy, a prominent activist and bureaucrat in the Provincial Govern-

ment of Papua, edited the document. Timmer uses this investigation to explore how a com-

bination of Christianity and local customs, and mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation

building and symbols of the Indonesian nation-state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian

nation-building agendas. The constitution shows that the state has journeyed down to Papua

and forged faith in the law and Timmer emphasises that it is essential to see how evolving

legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems inparticular Christianity and custom (adat) and practices and how they mutually allow for and

invite strategies. Timmer shows that the process of constitution production opens up a pow-

erful window on the experience of becoming like the state as cosmopolitan, eclectic, and

multi-centric.

The papers by Anna-Karina Hermkens and John Cox both discuss the conflict and

post-conflict situation on the restless island of Bougainville, now a province of Papua New

Guinea enjoying special autonomy. Since 1989, Bougainville Island has sought to secede from

Papua New Guinea and form a separate sovereign state. The vicious struggle between the

Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and the Papua New Guinea Defence Forces

(PNGDF) that followed lasted a decade and destroyed nearly all infrastructure, socio-economic services, and the functions of the state. As Hermkens discusses in her contribution,

the crisis also brought about the establishment of new local governments, such as The

Bougainville Interim Government, as well as a new Nation: the Independent Republic, and

later, Kingdom of Meekamui, ruled by BRA leader Francis Ona. Hermkens focuses on the

beliefs, performances and rituals that reveal the interplay between nation building and religion

in the creation of the Kingdom of Meekamui. She illuminates the ways people think about

and relate to the Papua New Guinea state and its Australian allies, and their own independent

Holy Nation of Bougainville.

John Coxs article discussesU-Vistract, a Ponzi scam (or fast money scheme, to use the

Papua New Guinean term). Cox shows how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have

grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver development.

These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, alternative but imitative of the

main narratives of the Papua New Guinea state, which bases itself on the moral reform of

Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver

development. Where the state-centred narrative of development was losing its discursive

power, U-Vistract reinvigorated these hopes with a new narrative of access to a fulfilled

modernity, centred on the promise of access to money, characterised by widespread prosperity

and delivered by its investors as new patrons of development. U-Vistract sought to be seen to

be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating

in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New

Guinean state. Legitimacy, that is, came tied to a form of power overtly conceptualized in the

framework of state authority.

In East Timor becoming like the state by groups marginal to the state also follows an

armed struggle for sovereignty. Since gaining independence in 2002, the new Timor-Leste

state has been repeatedly challenged by disaffected groups of Timorese including gangs,

martial arts groups, ritual arts groups, and veterans organisations. Henri Myrtinnen points out

Oceania 155


4/6

that Portuguese colonialism, Indonesian occupation, and the long independence struggle

shape the relationship between the state and these groups. While not necessarily challenging

the idea of an independent East Timorese state, these various groups see themselves as

marginalised in the post-independence era and demand a (sometimes radical) reconfigurationof the State. Myrtinnens article looks at the ways in which these groups shape their attempts

at becoming like the state.

Tim Pilbrow looks at the way in which Australian Aboriginal communities engage in the

magic of narrative in the emplotment of state-subject relations. He asks the challenging

question of who is telling whose story in the native title process in Australia. Since 1992

Australian Aboriginal communities have been engaged in a complex and fraught legal process

for the recognition of their traditional rights to country (native title), through which identities

are objectified by means of various kinds of narrative. This paper examines the cross-cutting

narratives of key players in this process (Indigenous communities and their representatives,

government bodies, the judiciary). The paper advances our theoretical understanding of hownarrative emplotment works to structure the subjective experience of the state. It will also

contribute a grounded critique of the discourse and practice of native title determination in

Australia.

Daniel Fishers article focuses on intra-Indigenous relationships in Darwin, capital of

Australias Northern Territory. The Larrakia, Darwins traditional owners, have been involved

in a decades-long effort to gain recognition of their rights as such through Land Rights and

Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitle-

ment and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes in-so-far as recognition

through jural means has been partial at best (Povinelli 2002; Scambary 2007). However, over

the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Devel-opment Corporation (LDC) have emerged as important and successful corporate representa-

tives of Larrakia interests in the economic and social life of Darwin. Through suburban

development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through

forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia have emerged in the eyes of

many other Aboriginal people as ade facto Aboriginal state in the Darwin region. The article

analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of state within a state,

responsible for world-shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health out-

reach, vocational training and education, and even policing.

Joshua Barker concludes the issue with an Epilogue in which he brings out two important

themes. First he distinguishes the notion of becoming like the state from that of informal

sovereignties leading Barker to posit that becoming like the state focuses attention on the act

of becoming. The articles in this special issue all draw attention to the performative side of

state-making drawing people into a theatre that is compelling. And, as Barker says, in being

drawn in, at some level one is oneself being drawn into the state-making process itself. And

this leads to his second point, which is that a focus on becoming like a state adds an

attentiveness to the experience of state-making. All the articles in this special issue that

research on the process and experience of becoming like the state bring understandings of the

experience of the gravitational force of claims to statehood.

REFERENCES

CATTELINO, J. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press.

CLASTRES, P. 1977. Society Against the State. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley in collaboration withAbe Stein. Oxford: Blackwell.

COBB, A. 2005. Understanding Tribal Sovereignty: Definitions, Conceptualizations, and Interpretations. AmericanStudies 46(34): 115132.

CORONIL, FERNANDO. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela . Berkeley: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.

156 Preface: Becoming Like the State


5/6

DAS, V., and D. POOLE. 2004. State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. In: V. Das, and D. Poole (eds)Anthropology in the Margins of the State, pp. 333. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

(eds). 2005. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.FERGUSON, J. 1994. The Anti-politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in

Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.FISHER, D. 2012. Running Amok or Just Sleeping Rough? Long-grass camping and the politics of care in northern

Australia.American Ethnologist39(1): 171186.GEERTZ, C. 1980.Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.GLUCKMAN, M. 1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Manchester: Manchester University

Press.HANSEN, T.B., and F. STEPPUTAT. 2001. Introduction: States of Imagination. In: T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat

(eds) States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State . Pp. 138. Durham:Duke University Press.

(eds). 2005. Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

2006. Sovereignty Revisited. Annual Review of Anthropology35: 295316.HOLSTON, J. 2008.Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

KAPFERER, B. and C. TAYLOR. 2012. Forces in the Production of the State. In A. Hobart and B. Kapferer (eds),Contesting the State: The Dynamics of Resistance and Control, pp. 119. Wantage: Sean KingstonPublishing.

LEACH, E. 1954. Political Systems of highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

MITCHELL, T. 1988. Society, Economy, and the State Effect. In: G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State Formationafter the Cultural Turn, pp. 7697. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

POVINELLI, E. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multicul-turalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

SCAMBARY, B. 2007. No Vacancies at the Starlight Motel: Larrakia Identity and the Native Title Claims Process.In: B. Smith, and F. Morphy (eds), In The Social Effects of Native Title: Recognition, Translation,Coexistence, pp. 151165. Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU.

SCOTT, J. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. NewHaven and London: Yale University Press.

2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

TAUSSIG, M. 1998. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge.TIMMER, J. 2010. Being Seen Like the State: Emulations of Legal Culture in Customary Labor and Tenure

Arrangements in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. American Ethnologist37(4): 703712.YOUNG, I.M. 2001. Two Concepts of Self-Determination. In: A. Sarat, and T. Kearns (eds), Human Rights:

Concepts, Contexts, Contingencies, pp. 2544. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Oceania 157


6/6

C o p y r i g h t o f O c e a n i a i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f W i l e y - B l a c k w e l l a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d o r

e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s w r i t t e n

p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

Documents

Daniel Fisher - Becoming Like the State