Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Post-Conflict Ambon (Indonesia)
Patricia Spyer, Leiden University/Center for Religion & Media-NYU

During the war in Ambon and since, popular Christian painters have been plastering the city's main thoroughfares and Christian neighborhood gateways with billboard portraits of Jesus and Christian murals. These artifacts perform in several capacities: as visual emblems of Christian territory, as an urban counterpublic to the political and televisual prominence of Muslims nation-wide, as monumental Citizen IDs modeled upon yet divergent from those issued by the Indonesian state, as a way of presencing and therein a being-seen-by God, and as a mode of intervention in everyday Christian behavior. The paintings' migration from church interiors to urban public space and their non-institutional base raises questions concerning the transformations post-war of religious sensibility, senses of belonging, and the specific role of both mass and alternative media therein. During and following the war, different dimensions of the visual have been both explicitly and implicitly thematized in a variety of ways-first, in the sense among ordinary Ambonese of not being able to trust appearances, of not seeing or foreseeing what might come, of a radical refiguration of not only subjectivity but, more precisely, sensory subjectivity during the war. Second, the pervasive sense that they themselves were unseen, that their suffering went unnoticed by the Indonesian government, their fellow countrymen, the larger world. Among minority Christians who in the late Suharto period saw their prior privileged social, political, and economic position diminished, the sense of being unseen and orphaned by the state is even stronger. Implicit in some practices-albeit a theological impossibility-is the perception among Ambonese Christians that their own desperate plight may have even been invisible to God himself, whose "eye" itself refracts a host of different forces, from the Indonesian state to the United Nations. The gigantic Christian portraits and murals rising on the ruins of war across Ambon bear witness and give material form to Christian anxieties about invisibility while also aiming to alleviate the very condition of being unseen. Homing in on blindness as much as varied refractions of the visual, the paper also expands our understanding of what the visual might be.

Patricia Spyer obtained her BA in History and Anthropology at Tufts University, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Thereafter she was a Harper Fellow in the College of the University of Chicago, a Lecturer at the Research Centre of Religion & Society at the University of Amsterdam and, since 2001, holds the Chair of the Anthropology of Indonesia at Leiden University. During 2006-7 she is the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University where she is working on a book provisionally titled Orphaned Landscapes.

She carried out two years of fieldwork in the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia and archival research in the Netherlands which form the basis of her book The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke 2000). Her current ethnographic project focuses on the role of mass and small, alternative media in the conflict and postconflict situation in Ambon, Indonesia. She also co-directs, with Mary Steedly of Harvard University, a collaborative research project Signs of Crisis: Alternative media and the making of political identities in Southern Asia.

She has published, among other topics, on violence, historical consciousness, the media and photography, materiality and religion. Besides her ethnography on Aru, her books include the edited Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge 1998), and the co-edited Handbook of Material Culture (Sage 2006).

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