life in Indonesia, resulting in new organizational forms and ways of per- ceiving self and society. ... Having appropriated the magic of the state, the Dharma.
DHARMA POWER Searching for Security in Post–New Order Indonesia Kari Telle
Abstract: Security concerns are creeping into new aspects of everyday life in Indonesia, resulting in new organizational forms and ways of perceiving self and society. Stressing the cultural shaping of all security discourses, this article examines how members of the Balinese minority on the island Lombok have formed a Hindu-inspired civilian security force known as Dharma Wisesa. I argue that the appeal of this movement is located in its attempts to fuse domains of power that the modern state has prised apart. Having appropriated the magic of the state, the Dharma Wisesa movement also maintains relations with a ‘spirit army’ that provides supernatural support. Such practices draw into question the notion of secular modernity and suggest that authority is constituted by allying oneself with different forms of power, both visible and invisible. Keywords: Dharma Wisesa, Indonesia, Lombok, ontological uncertainty, power, security, spirit army
“In both its realist and humanist guises, security takes the form and promise of a metaphysical discourse: an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees existence itself that makes the possibility of the world possible” (Burke 2002: 3). Enormously seductive, the metaphysical discourse of security is inherently paradoxical. Anthony Burke argues in “Aporias of Security” (2002: 20) that the “promise” of security “breaks down when we consider that, because ‘security’ is bound into a dependent relation with ‘insecurity’, it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images of ‘insecurity’ in order to retain its meaning.” From this perspective, it is analytically futile to attempt to stabilize security’s ontology.1 Instead, Burke identifies “an urgent need to interrogate the images of self and other that animate (in)secure identities, and to expose the violence and suppression that is so often relied on to police them” (ibid.: 7). In this spirit, this article examines how security concerns are infiltrating new aspects of daily life in Indonesia, giving rise to new organizational Social Analysis, Volume 53, Issue 1, Spring 2009, 141–156 © Berghahn Journals doi:10.3167/sa.2009.530109
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forms and ways of imagining self and society. As I will show, religious ideas and practices inform the discourse on and provision of security, which has slipped beyond the discursive and practical control of the state. My interest in the nexus of religion and security was triggered during my return to the island of Lombok in 2001.2 I was struck by the range of civilian patrol and security groups that had sprung up since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966–1998), as Indonesia embarked on a rocky process of democratization and decentralization. Even a passing acquaintance with these sprawling, often violent formations suggests that their members are busy inventing and experimenting with new logics or grammars of security. While these grammars may borrow from the statist idea of ‘security’ that was a key tenet of New Order rule or may draw on the global discourse of ‘human security’, they cannot be reduced to either. These grammars are, to put it simply, animated by particular ontological and religiously inflected notions of power and safety, danger and uncertainty. Emphasizing spiritual training and the harnessing of technologies of invulnerability, these grammars hold out the promise of spiritually sanctioned forms of security, and thus speak to a quest for enhanced agency in the contemporary world. As these observations make clear, security is not an unproblematic universal concept. Rather, my premise is that all notions and practices of security are socially situated and discursively defined products embedded in cherished and often unquestioned value systems.3 While it is important to insist on the cultural shaping of all security discourses (Kent 2006), it is equally important to trace how different security discourses inform and feed off each other. For critical security scholars, “securitization” (Wæver 1995) is a speech act that takes politics beyond established (democratic) rules by framing an issue within a ‘special’ kind of politics. Extending this approach, Bubandt (2005) points out that securitization is a discursive device for community building on various scales. What merits attention are the “complex processes of accommodation, rejection and reformulation [that] take place in the interstices between global, national and local representations of the problem of security” (Bubandt 2005: 276). This article explores how members of the Balinese minority on Lombok have responded to a sense of ‘ontological uncertainty’ by forming their own security force.4 Specifically, I will take a look at Dharma Wisesa, a Hindu-oriented quasi-corporate security group, based in Cakranegara, the island’s commercial center. Formed just before the turn of the new millennium—a time of upheaval when apocalyptic expectations were rampant in many parts of Indonesia—its founders envisioned the movement as a vehicle for providing political and cosmological stability by unifying the Lombok Balinese community. While some of these lofty hopes have been dashed, Dharma Wisesa and similar movements are proposing alternative ways of safeguarding self and society than those promoted by state agents and by the proponents of so-called global security (Duffield 2001) governance. Besides having appropriated the magic of the state, Dharma Wisesa has become embedded in a spiritual economy and maintains relations with a ‘spirit army’ that confers supernatural ‘backing’. Fusing different registers of power and authority, Dharma Wisesa attempts to bring
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together domains that the modern state has pulled apart. It is in this totalizing impulse of bridging and fusing spheres that we may locate the current appeal of Dharma Wisesa and similar formations. In creating their own vernacular forms of security, they are remaking the social and religious terrain.
The Politics of (In)Security In their introduction to Spirited Politics, Kenneth George and Andrew Willford (2005: 9) state that religion is “an enduring and increasingly significant precinct of Southeast Asian politics and public life.” Their observation certainly applies to Indonesia, where religious ideas and idioms have returned with a vengeance in public life and politics in the post–New Order period. On Lombok, the return of the religious in public affairs is perhaps most apparent in the rise of faithbased security groups that are dedicated to fighting crime, enforcing justice, and offering ‘protection’. Here, revitalized religions and their symbolic forms assume increasingly violent imaginings. Located just east of Bali, Lombok has an ethnically and religiously diverse population of some 2.5 million people. The Sasak, most of whom are Muslims, compose about 92 percent of the population, with Chinese, Arabs, Javanese, Buginese, and Balinese making up the remainder. The Balinese, numbering approximately 120,000, form the largest ethnic and religious minority. When the idea of establishing a Hindu-oriented security force came up in 1999, the initiative received enthusiastic support from most quarters of the Lombok Balinese community. Prominent members of the provincial chapter of Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), the highest national body of Hindu affairs responsible for articulating a new religious orthodoxy, also welcomed the establishment of such a force. Yet why are the Balinese creating new grammars of security? And why is this mobilization couched in religious terms? The answers to these questions are to be found in the new political landscape that emerged as Indonesians began “identifying with freedom” (Day 2007). After 32 years of authoritarian, centralist rule came to an end in 1998, the country entered a hopeful era termed Reformasi. Two interrelated developments are especially relevant: the retraditionalization of Indonesian politics and the reinvention of security. As the Asian monetary crisis deepened in 1997, demands for political reforms grew from resentment against the highly centralist and corrupt regime. For their part, international organizations that were heavily involved in the restructuring of the country, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, subscribed to the neo-liberal doctrine that decentralization would both benefit the economy and foster democracy (Hadiz and Robison 2003). The discourse promoted by such organizations, with ‘participation’ and ‘local ownership’ being key tropes, was embraced by many actors, including those who claimed that local traditions embodied these principles (Avonius 2004; Davidson and Henley 2007; Telle 2009b).5 If, under the New Order, local traditions of governance had been emasculated and stigmatized as obstacles to development and progress, now ‘local wisdom’ (kearifan lokal) emerged as a key resource for remaking the social order. This
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period, in which identities and institutions were destabilized, was exceptional and exhilarating. Once again it was possible to imagine a different future, which brings me to the reinvention of security. Long before the role of security became all-encompassing in the post-9/11 world, the New Order regime was a “state of fear” (Barker 1998). Security had become a fundamental societal discourse under the Suharto regime, which accommodated the colonial concept of security inherited from the Dutch and “made ‘safety and order’ (keamanan dan ketertiban) the basis of its high-modernist, neo-patrimonial rule” (Bubandt 2005: 281). As in other military regimes, the armed forces had a dual function: to defend against foreign enemies and to maintain regime stability by guiding the development of society. This implied a focus on surveillance and the routine evocation of threats posed by internal enemies, be they political or criminal (Anderson 2001; Dwyer and Santikarma 2007; Siegel 1998). At the same time, the regime used civilian proxies and gangs to conduct some of its dirty business. Some argue that the state operated in ways analogous to a criminal gang, normalizing violence and extortion as state practice (Lindsey 2001; Schulte Nordholt 2002). With the transition to Reformasi, the police achieved more autonomy, while the military lost its former near-monopoly on the securitization of society. With the shift from state-secured development to liberal democracy, the meaning and organization of security was up for grabs. Lombok is one of many places in Indonesia where the retraditionalization of politics, combined with militant religious politics, has translated into a preoccupation with security. Embodying the participatory spirit of Reformasi, popular initiatives to combat crime and lawlessness were welcomed as “a new form of people’s power” (MacDougall 2007: 287). Most groups began as localized neighborhood watches, but some in central and east Lombok rapidly evolved into supra-local crime-fighting militias (pamswakarsa). Controlled by Islamic leaders and enjoying ties to high-level politicians, these groups soon acquired a reputation for brutal measures in their efforts to ‘clean out’ crime and criminals.6 In the face of the growing influence of Islamic militias and more assertive claims of Sasak ‘majoritarianism’, along with discourses stressing the Sasak’s status as the island’s ‘original’ inhabitants, religious and ethnic minorities have become concerned about their own status as minorities. Within minority circles, a growing sense of disillusionment with the state’s interest and ability to guarantee physical safety and legal rights took hold once it became apparent that the police and the judiciary failed to guarantee the rights of the victims of lethal vigilante actions. Although most Balinese feared and despised the faithbased patrol and crime-fighting groups cropping up around them, in 1999 the ‘obvious’ solution to overcoming their anguished sense of uncertainty was to establish their own Hindu-inspired security force. In doing so, the Balinese took advantage of the new political climate that made it possible to mobilize along ethnic and religious lines. By adopting this solution and embracing the seductive yet utopian promise of modern logics of security, which thrive on fear and violent exclusions (Burke 2002; Der Derian 1995), they may also have fed the increasing spiral of insecurity.
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Dharma Wisesa and Spirit Warriors The most tangible outcome of this mobilization is an organization called Dharma Wisesa, or Dharma Power, whose formation illustrates how socially produced anxieties and a quest for security can serve as a powerful basis for reimagining community and reconfiguring religion. As I will show, Dharma Wisesa draws upon local traditions of engaging supernatural forces in order to confront and negotiate change and uncertainty. This interest in sustaining relations with occult forces is not simply a reinvented traditionalism. Rather, I see it as an expression of a Balinese “alternative modernity” (Taylor 1999) that remains enchanted and for which the ability to transact with spiritual forces is vitally important. Dharma Wisesa’s headquarters is strategically located across from the entrance to Pura Meru, a large and important temple in Cakranegara, the island’s bustling commercial center. For the Lombok Balinese, this city, with its large temples, pleasure garden, and former royal palace (puri), is closely associated with the time of Balinese rule on Lombok. Nowhere else in modern Indonesian history was there a comparable setting in which Muslim subjects were ruled by Hindus (Hägerdal 2001). Between 1740 and 1894, a branch of the Karangasem dynasty originating in East Bali controlled most of the island. Much effort was put into constructing temples and irrigation works, and the king held key roles in state rituals promoting human and agricultural fertility (Gerdin 1982; Harnish 2006). Balinese rule came to a dramatic end in 1894 when rebellious aristocrats from east Lombok joined forces with the Dutch colonial army to defeat the Balinese troops and their Sasak allies. Refusing to accept the humiliation of defeat, some members of the court perished in a ritualized puputan (fight to the end). Wary of the continued influence of the king, the Dutch exiled Anak Agung Ngurah Karangasem and some of his followers to the island of Java. After the defeat, most Balinese remained on Lombok, although this meant being reduced to the status of a minority with little political influence. This history of marginalization helps to explain why the legendary conquest of the island and stories of the heroic fight to the end figure so centrally in the Balinese self-conception, along with a tendency to glorify the time when their forebears held power over Lombok. During the transition to Reformasi, narratives celebrating the time of Balinese rule gained new salience and became wedded to a militant defense of Hindu Balinese culture. Since 2000, the Dharma Wisesa headquarters has been staffed, day and night, by rotating teams of uniformed guards. Seated behind a large desk and calling up fellow pecalang guards using police radio, the guards, in their all-black uniforms, give a striking appearance. Although many cultivate a tough image, sporting sunglasses and large tattoos, most of them were quite approachable, and I soon found myself hanging around the office, which is furnished with bamboo furniture, a color television set, a whiteboard, and a number of prominently displayed spears. From these meetings, I learned that many guards feel themselves to be backed by occult forces described as a ‘spirit battalion’. Collectively known as bale samar, these forces are understood to
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engage in a form of spiritual warfare whenever the collective well-being of the Lombok Balinese community is threatened. Like other spiritual beings, the spirit army ordinarily remains hidden from view, manifesting itself in times of crisis. Even then, these forces are glimpsed only momentarily and only by some; hence, people are left to wonder whether or not these warriors are real. I do not pretend to comprehend fully the nature of this invisible spirit army. Neither do most Balinese. Like me, they learn from hearsay that the spirit battalion has been spotted in action. Lately, such sightings have become more frequent. While this suggests that Lombok Balinese interests are under threat, such sightings are viewed as reassuring signs that supernatural protection is close by. In January 2000, when Lombok became the site of a week-long riot targeting the island’s Christian minority, members of the spirit army were spotted in action. The riot began immediately after an Islamic rally (tabliq akbar) held in Mataram in support of the Muslim victims of the violent conflict raging in the Moluccan Islands in eastern Indonesia. Churches, shops, and houses belonging to Christians—often but not exclusively of Chinese descent—were burned and looted, and thousands of people hastily left the island.7 Although the Balinese Hindus were not directly attacked, they were deeply traumatized by the violence. Most neighborhoods in Cakranegara and Mataram are religiously and ethnically mixed. During the riot, Balinese men guarded the entrances to their neighborhoods and tried to prevent the mobs from setting buildings on fire. Months after the situation had calmed down, rumors to the effect that Islamic vigilante groups were about to take revenge because the Balinese had protected their Christian neighbors during the January riot caused near panic within Balinese circles. Reflecting on the riot, my Balinese acquaintances, both within and outside the ranks of Dharma Wisesa, would often remark on the puzzling incidents that occurred during this frightful time. For instance, they noted that men who were slightly taller than ordinary men had been spotted next to temples (pura). Seconds later, they had vanished without a trace. Another narrative recounted how a group of Sasak Muslims who were about to torch a church in a mixed neighborhood in Cakranegara suddenly turned and, for no apparent reason, fled in panic. Why? Because the spirit army, assuming a wild and ferocious demeanor, had driven them back, thwarting their intentions. During an interview in 2006, Dharma Wisesa’s commander-in-chief, Anak Agung Made Djelantik, lowered his voice and said: “Just imagine if the bale samar had not intervened during those days. I am quite confident that the city of Cakranegara would have been utterly destroyed (hancur total).” He added that the headquarters where our conversation took place now serves as the earthly ‘base’ (pusat) for these troops. The stories celebrating this spirit army reach back to the very origin of Balinese rule on Lombok. According to local oral traditions, these spirits aided the prince from Puri Kelodan in Karangasem in his endeavor to found a dynasty on Lombok.8 The ability to command these potent forces was a gift bestowed by the powerful deity of Mount Agung in East Bali. Sometime earlier, the sister of the prince had borne a child who had been fathered by this deity. When the child, Batara Alit Sakti, was about six months old, he asked his family to carry him toward the
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mountain where he vanished (moksha) and crossed into the ‘invisible realm’. The family built a temple, named Pura Bukit, in his honor. Before leaving for Lombok, the prince visited this temple and asked Batara Alit Sakti for blessings. As the boats left the shores of Bali, they were accompanied by leaves from the kepel trees near Pura Bukit, which later turned into yellow butterflies. Having safely guided the boats to the shore, the butterflies assumed the shape of warriors. With the aid of their remarkable strength and fighting prowess, the prince established his court and extended Karangasem’s domain to the island of Lombok. The stories about these spirits are elements in a cosmology of divine kingship that serves to legitimize the founding of a new political order. But to concentrate solely on how they legitimize political authority would be to miss a key feature of such spiritual beings, that is, their ambiguous and unbounded qualities. Stories about these forces emphasize their capacity to change shape and to transform themselves from one state of being to another. In fact, these spirit forces take form in reaction to the situation and problematics that they address. Describing sorcery practices in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer (2003: 105) has argued that “sorcery has the capacity always to be reinvented as something new.” Similarly, these products of the Balinese religious imagination lend themselves to being deployed in novel circumstances, and popular spirit beliefs and practices have a remarkably creative potential and ability to hybridize. Attuned to contemporary circumstances, members of the spirit battalion may appear as ordinary men, but they are frequently dressed in the white-and-black poleng cloth, which is imbued with protective powers and is used regularly on ceremonial occasions. Today, these forces are propelled into action and infuse the quotidian practice of security with supernatural force.
Dharma Wisesa and the Provision of Security We have seen that Dharma Wisesa is embedded in a spiritual economy and maintains relations with a spirit army that confers protection. In what follows I will elaborate on Dharma Wisesa’s grammar of security, an eclectic fusion of different registers of power and knowledge. Drawing on cosmological forms of knowledge associated with pre-colonial Hindu kingdoms and the authority of the modern state, Dharma Wisesa articulates a notion of security in which ideas of collective safety mingle with more individualistic concerns to acquire invulnerability. A vitally important element in this security grammar is the knowledge of invulnerability, which is perhaps better understood as a technology of power for defensive or offensive purposes (see Wilson forthcoming). Such talismanic knowledge of invulnerability “acts as a source of both cosmic dominance and daily survival, a key to a kind of ‘freedom’ that still makes sense in modern Southeast Asia today” (Day 2002: 165). The vision that inspired the formation of Dharma Wisesa was a bold one: to unify the Balinese by forming an organization with branches in Balinese settlements across Lombok. Just as this goal was nurtured by fear, it was only by communicating this sense of fear to those still ignorant of being in danger that
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the vision could successfully be realized. The handful of men in Cakranegara who took the initiative to bring the Balinese into the protective fold of a revitalized Hindu movement agreed that the best strategy was to contact the heads of neighborhood associations (banjar) that coordinate life-cycle rituals and temple festivals. I am not suggesting that these men were opportunistically exploiting a sense of fear. If anything, they were as equally in the grip of “political paranoia” (Bubandt 2008) as anyone else. But they did have the resources and rhetorical ability to communicate (about) fear in writing. The response to their outreach campaign, which dispatched hundreds of letters using couriers, was overwhelming. In the great assembly (Mahasabha) held in May 2000 to discuss the situation and how to develop the organization further, approximately 350 delegates from different corners of the island took part and drew up a program. Seeking a leader with broad and unifying appeal, the assembly appointed Anak Agung Gedé Biarsah, the grandson of the last Balinese king on Lombok, to head the organization. Part of the rationale for this choice is the assumption that members of the royal family have privileged access to spiritual forces and to potent objects associated with the former kingdom. When I interviewed Agung Biarsah in 2007, he was adamant that monarchy “is a far more peaceful and stable form of government, certainly when compared to the democratic system that we have now. We already have our tradition (adat). So why do we need democracy? That means tradition is being sidelined.” While his political views are controversial, Agung Biarsah has consolidated his family’s role within the organization by appointing his eldest son as the commander-inchief, a task he combines with being a civil servant. This response to overcoming ontological uncertainty bears the distinct imprint of New Order military culture. The headquarters is conceived as the command center (pos komando pusat) that is to coordinate the commanders (komandan), the regiments (regu), and the elite corps (pecalang inti), which some guards compare to Kopassus (Komando Pasukan Khusus), the Army Special Force Command. Despite its admiration for the state’s military might and its military apparatus, Dharma Wisesa is asserting a Hindu Balinese moral superiority in its practice and discourse. This is evident in the efforts to imbue the movement with historical depth through a process of “remythologization” (Kapferer 1997) whereby myths and legends of the past are reinvented as an ideology of coherence to suit the political and economic circumstances of the present. Making their residence, Puri Pamotan, the locus of many Dharma Wisesa activities, the leaders appear to engage in a form of ‘deep play’ whose logic goes back to pre-colonial times, when the king’s ability to mobilize manpower for rituals and war testified to his strength and was taken to reflect a divine mandate to rule (C. Geertz 1989; Wiener 1995).9 Born in a turbulent period, Dharma Wisesa represents a recuperation of tradition in the sense of a recently reimagined and highly militarized tradition. Key here is the deliberate rejection of the conventional, if problematic, distinction between sacred and secular domains. The guards, ranging from their early twenties to their mid-sixties, refer to themselves by the term pecalang. I learned that this is the term for ‘traditional Balinese police’ or ‘palace guards’,
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designations that imbue this new occupation with the authority of tradition (Santikarma 2003). Their main tasks include acting as bodyguards and directing traffic in connection with life-cycle rituals, parades, and the temple festivals that are major social and religious occasions. They also patrol streets and neighborhoods, protecting private and commercial property. A substantial part of Dharma Wisesa’s income derives from money, collected once a month, from Balinese- and Chinese-owned businesses in Cakranegara. In the course of carrying out these tasks, the guards sometimes run into troublemakers and alleged criminals, whom they question, discipline, or pass over to the police. The leaders, accompanied by an entourage of guards, also mediate in conflicts, including those arising in connection with inter-religious marriage. Whatever the task, it is categorized as virtuous religious work (meyadnya) carried out without self-interest to further dharma. In short, Dharma Wisesa claims to provide spiritually sanctioned security as an alternative to the inferior protection offered by the state and commercial security firms. This claim is, I will argue, grounded in ontological assumptions about power and in the belief that Dharma Wisesa mediates relations, not just between people, but also between people and the invisible realm.
The Play of Power The name chosen for this organization tasked with enhancing security conveys a preoccupation with power—a complex abstraction anywhere and certainly in a Balinese context. The notion of dharma, which may be glossed as ‘truth’ or ‘balanced cosmic order’, is a key concept in Hindu Balinese thought. As such, it is the antithesis of adharma, or ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’. In everyday parlance, dharma implies a sense of virtue and the duty to behave according to religious and social codes. The Balinese term wisesa connotes power or force. I Ketut Namia, a retired teacher who has served on the group’s advisory board, explained the concept as follows: “God, the creator, is all powerful. When human beings possess some of this power (wisesa), this is evidence that they are close to God.” This explanation indicates an affinity with the key concept of sakti, which is usually translated as ‘magical or spiritual power’. It also articulates what most Balinese take for granted: that power results from the generation and maintenance of connections between a person and the invisible world, especially, but not exclusively, the gods. Although only the realm of the visible world (sekala) of social relations can be seen with the naked eye, it is widely assumed that what happens in people’s lives is to a large extent influenced by what takes place in the invisible world (niskala) of spiritual relations. To quote Margaret Wiener (1995: 10): “It is in fact the latter that makes the authority of a person in [the visible world] possible at all.” To this we must add that Balinese talk about power (sakti) tends to be “pervaded with a rhetoric of battle” (H. Geertz 1994: 85), which reflects a conception of the world “as one of a multitude of beings, human and non-human, in competition for control over one another” (ibid.). In such a
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world, much emphasis is placed on cultivating ties to figures who can mediate between the invisible and visible worlds. In times of crisis, there is heightened demand for insight into the ordinarily hidden workings of power. These ontological assumptions informed the founding of Dharma Wisesa, which was designed as a vehicle that would bring the visible and invisible realms closer together and thus invest the practice of security with supernatural force. Like all Dharma Wisesa artifacts, the headquarters is steeped in religious imagery and projects images of power. The converted storefront is embellished with engraved golden plaques, banners, and a flag. Ceremonial parasols flank the entrance to the headquarters, which stands out from the rather drab urban landscape with its brightly painted façade, decorated with red, black, and white stripes. These colors are associated with the gods making up the Hindu trinity: red is the color of Brahma, the creator; black is associated with Visnu, the preserver; and white is the color of Iswara, the god whose weapon is a thunderbolt and who is also known in another manifestation as Siwa, the main deity of the Hindu Balinese pantheon. While usually described as ‘the destroyer’, Siwa is the divinity from whom everything emanates and who contains the qualities of all the other gods.10 This deity, which epitomizes the symbolic ambiguities of Hinduism, was chosen as Dharma Wisesa’s chief guardian. The group’s logo depicts Lord Siwa meditating on a lotus throne inside a ring of fire that is surrounded by the eternally spinning chakra weapons. Facing north, south, east, and west, these weapons intercept and ward off dangers from all directions. This image, which is reproduced on all Dharma Wisesa attributes, evokes Siwa’s awesome power, which is simultaneously protective and destructive. Given the importance attached to the development of a portfolio of material emblems, some comments about how these images are conceived are in order. The Dharma Wisesa logo was designed by Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga, a military retiree who was among the group of men who took the initiative to form a pan-Balinese security force. He admits that his career in the military police has been of great value in developing Dharma Wisesa. Between 2000 and 2004, he headed the ‘repressive section’ (seksi represif) and coordinated the elite corps. A man of many talents, Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga has lately devoted himself to healing and the study of religious texts, fitting occupations for those of Brahmana status. Among his most important assets as a healer is a collection of magical drawings. “Magical drawings,” Angela Hobart (2003: 72) points out, “form an iconographic system of representation,” expressing core assumptions about the universe and its elements. Often referred to as tools or weapons (sikepan), these drawings depicting gods, demons, and a host of other powerful beings may be adapted and transferred to other mediums, including paper, cloth, metal, or bodies. What became the Dharma Wisesa logo was adapted from these jealously guarded drawings. The fact that these drawings are characterized as weapons or tools indicates that their usage is directed toward pragmatic ends; they are elements in an enchanted technology. Conceived as nodes that mediate between the visible and invisible worlds, such drawings are handled with care, since disrespectful treatment is likely to harm the offender. The efficacy of the images depends
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in part on the potency of their creators. Hence, before modifying the drawings, Ida Bagus Ketut Yoga prepares himself through prayer and meditation. Throughout the process of making an image, offerings and incense are kept by his side. When the drawing has been physically completed, the image is purified of negative influences before being made ‘alive’ (urip) through a process of reciting mantras and prayers. Bringing an image or an object to life entails “inviting invisible forces to ‘sit’ in it and make it useful (maguna)” (Wiener 1995: 55–56). This focus on making images come alive underscores how they are effectively conceived as social agents (Gell 1998). Such images are not so much repositories of power as they are intersections in expansive spatio-temporal fields comprising humans and non-human entities. Combining the ritual technology of rendering images alive with the mechanical power of reproduction, Dharma Wisesa images are made to act as talismans of invulnerability. Most guards will also carry their own personal talismans of invulnerability (bebadong), often in the form of miniature weapons.11 By constituting itself through an assortment of ritually forged yet massproduced identity tokens, Dharma Wisesa appears to have adopted the commercial logic of branding, which is intended to gain recognition and inspire confidence or ‘faith’ in a particular product. From the start, much attention was paid to developing a collection of Dharma Wisesa emblems, including stickers, banners, flags, T-shirts, and different sets of uniforms. These items are known by the Indonesian term atribut. Even the motorcycles purchased to facilitate patrols have been modified to be recognized easily as Dharma Wisesa assets. Apart from stickers, the saddle is covered in the checked white-and-black cloth (kain poleng) that has become something of a trademark among pecalang guards on both Lombok and Bali. This emphasis on projecting visually distinct tokens of Hindu Balinese religious imagery into the public realm and the tendency of Dharma Wisesa to treat these images as its own exclusive property testify to the central role of trademarks in Indonesia. The fact that trademarks have currency, both as culture and as private property, creates “generative conditions for struggles over significance; they are simultaneously shared in a commons of signification and jealously guarded in exclusive estates” (Coombe 1996: 202). Seeking to establish itself as the supreme provider of security for the Lombok Balinese, Dharma Wisesa claimed aspects of Hindu Balinese aesthetic heritage as its own, a process that seems inclusive but which also has inspired defensive measures to guard its exclusive rights to these images. Although they could not ensure legal protection of its logo and other images, the Dharma Wisesa leadership soon grew concerned that other Balinese might copy or steal its signature attributes. To enhance the group’s visibility and credibility, and possibly to guard against infringement, the Dharma Wisesa leadership decided to issue personalized membership cards. Except for the surfeit of Hindu imagery, the laminated card is almost identical to the state-issued identity cards that Indonesian citizens are obliged to carry. By expanding its portfolio of identity tokens to include membership cards, Dharma Wisesa appropriated the “logic and languages of stateness” (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). The move to issue identity cards should not
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be taken to imply a rejection of the state’s authority. Rather, it is more about “creating a sort of authority for oneself” (Siegel 1998: 14). The authority of the Indonesian state is partly defined through its ability to issue official papers and rests on an extensive set of bureaucratic artifacts, such as seals, stamps, and signatures. Possessing the right documents is of utmost importance, as they facilitate movement within the country. Returning from a trip to Bali in 2006, one of my companions noted that his Dharma Wisesa membership card had been “far more useful” than the state-issued identity card. The Dharma Wisesa card, Made Pasek Gel Gel explained, had facilitated his smooth entry to Bali and ensured respectful treatment from the immigration authorities, the police, and ordinary Balinese. That the Dharma Wisesa card was felt to command respect even among agents of the state is illustrative of the importance of the insignia of authority in Indonesia, where the blurred boundary between the official and the counterfeit has given rise to the neologism aspal (asli tapi palsu), meaning ‘original but false’. By creating its own official documents, Dharma Wisesa made itself ‘legible’ to the state. According to James Scott (1998: 101), “legibility is a condition for manipulation,” as it is only through the invention of units that are visible that states can effectively intervene in society. For Dharma Wisesa, legibility is a strategy for accessing and obtaining state recognition. Only by becoming state-like can a group like Dharma Wisesa gain governmental recognition as an ‘official’ security group. Minimally, the process involves paying a lawyer to approve the group’s program and its ethical code of conduct, but it may also involve lobbying. Despite the care that goes into producing neatly printed documents, nobody assumes that they accurately reflect the realities of such groups. Nonetheless, the ability to convey a façade of respectability through a command of the bureaucratic jargon is required. Having secured official recognition, an organization is in a position to solicit funds from officials in municipal, district, or regional government, who, over the past decade, have been quite eager to support civilian enterprises carried out in the name of enhancing security, especially when such initiatives are taken by so-called traditional or religious leaders (Telle 2009a, 2009b).
Conclusion I have emphasized how Dharma Wisesa constituted itself by drawing on various registers of authority, including state, commercial, and religious forms. Fusing different types of power, Dharma Wisesa established itself as a sovereign body with the bold aim to bring the entire Lombok Balinese community under its sphere of protection. Formations of this sort, be they civilian security groups, vigilante groups, gangs, or protection rackets, have been described as “shadow states” (Reno 2000) and “twilight institutions” (Lund 2001), terms that convey the double sense that they operate in the blurred zone between state and society and that they thrive on and exploit the unclear boundary between the licit and the illicit. Many observers are concerned that the state, under current
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neo-liberal conditions, is being hollowed out through outsourcing or is being appropriated by a range of sovereigns beyond the state. However, in the context of Indonesia, it should be remembered that the state never had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (Anderson 2001; Siegel 1998), much less controlled valued forms of knowledge, such as the knowledge of invulnerability, which is highly prized across much of Southeast Asia. In his important study of state formation in Southeast Asia, Tony Day (2002) makes the case that violence and aesthetics ought to be studied together, and gives many examples of how “violence is both the source and guarantor of the state’s magical ‘beauty’” (ibid.: 292). Highlighting the dynamic transformation between the violent and benevolent faces of Southeast Asian states, Day observes that states in the region, however dominant or coercive, have never been able fully to control local knowledge, especially that of invulnerability. Notwithstanding the secrecy that often governs access to such knowledge, the knowledge of invulnerability is not exclusive property to a certain class but rather is potentially available to anyone. “Such powerful knowledge,” Day (ibid.: 160) points out, “also attracts adherents who form communities of the ‘protected’. It is a state-forming kind of knowledge.” Far from being obsolete, invulnerability practices are increasingly prominent throughout Indonesia (Wilson forthcoming). In my view, Dharma Wisesa is a modern-day avatar of what Day (2002) calls a “culture of security” centered around invulnerability practices that serve to bring the bearer and those who seek the same form of knowledge into a protected ‘state’ of well-being. While this is associated with being impervious to outside influence, I have stressed how Dharma Wisesa has sought to align itself with and draw upon diverse forms of authority. This suggests that it is only by aligning oneself with higher forms of authority that this state of well-being—epitomized in the celebrated and seemingly impenetrable (kebal) body—may temporarily be achieved.
Acknowledgments This work has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Chr. Michelsen Institute.
Kari Telle is a social anthropologist who works as a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway, where she also coordinates the “Politics of Faith” research program. She is presently engaged in a three-year research project that explores the intersection between religious mobilization, security politics, and decentralization in Indonesia. Her recent publications include “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post–New Order Lombok” (2009), “Entangled Biographies: Rebuilding a Sasak House” (2007), “Nurturance and the Spectre of Neglect: Sasak Ways of Dealing with the Dead” (2007), and “The Smell of Death: Theft, Disgust and Ritual Practice in Central Lombok, Indonesia” (2003).
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Notes 1. While security has emerged as a key trope in the post-9/11 world, the fertility of the concept lies in its definitional vagueness and polyvalence. As Burke (2002: 7) puts it: “Security’s power lies in the very slipperiness of its signification.” 2. This article is based on 7 months of fieldwork carried out between 2001 and 2008. I have previously conducted 13 months of fieldwork in Sasak villages in Jonggat, Central Lombok. 3. Der Derian (1995: 25) argues that “within the [Western] concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics.” 4. I follow Bubandt’s (2005: 277) definition of ontological uncertainty as the “socially constructed anxiety that shapes pertinent kinds of danger, fears and concerns for a particular community at a particular time.” 5. For a good account of cultural and religious policies since Indonesia’s independence, see Ramstedt (2004). 6. The organization linked to most violent incidents is Amphibi, a vigilante-style crimefighting group. In 1999, just four months after its formation, it boasted of having more than 200,000 paying members (MacDougall 2007; Telle 2009a). 7. Official records report that 7 people died and 54 were severely injured. For insightful accounts of the riot and its aftermath, see Avonius (2004) and Sidel (2006). 8. For different and more elaborate versions of this myth, see Harnish (2006). 9. In 2004, several members who had played key roles in developing Dharma Wisesa withdrew from the organization over disagreements related to issues of leadership. They claimed that they wanted the movement to be more “democratic” and “transparent” and objected to what they describe as a “feudal” consolidation of power. These men, along with their followers, quickly established competing security groups, notably Bayu Mandala and Sikep Cakra Yudha. Consequently, Dharma Wisesa can no longer claim to represent the entire Lombok Balinese community. 10. This understanding is expressed in texts describing the nine-fold division of the cosmos (nawa sanga) in which Siwa is placed in the center. According to this cosmic map, each deity is associated with a particular direction, weapon, color, syllable, and bodily organ (see Hobart 2003). 11. These ritually forged talismans are intended to make the body impenetrable (kebal) to weapons and bullets. Other talismans protect the body’s integrity by aborting the enemy’s desire to attack.
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