Projects per year
Abstract
In the last few years, occult head-hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head-hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head-hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more-than-representational’ approach to the organ-stealing head-hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co-producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | Oceania |
Volume | 87 |
Issue | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 38-57 |
Number of pages | 20 |
ISSN | 0029-8077 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'From Head-hunter to Organ-thief: Verisimilitude, Doubt and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
-
AURA: AURA - Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene
Tsing, A. (Project manager), Bubandt, N. O. (Project manager), Forssman, N. (Participant), Funch, P. (Participant), Svenning, J.-C. (Participant), Wentzer, T. S. (Participant), du Plessis, P. (Participant), Gan, E. (Participant), Korsbæk, M. (Project coordinator), Brichet, N. S. (Participant), Overstreet, K. (Participant), Bertoni, F. (Participant), Hoag, C. B. (Participant), Swanson, H. A. (Participant), Vestbo, S. (Participant) & Thorsen, L. M. (Participant)
01/09/2013 → 31/08/2018
Project: Research