Social control from below

Locally planned and popular violence

Herriman argues that village-level state officials are not only representatives of the Indonesian state but are also residents of their respective villages and are therefore deeply embedded within the social networks and norms of the community. As a result, these village officials are often sympathetic themselves to retributive actions against alleged sorcerers or subject to substantial communal pressure to allow such violence to occur. In attempting to navigate these village demands against the state imperative to maintain order, Herriman finds that local officials usually deploy one of three options: ignore the problem of sorcery altogether; seek to balance community demands with protection of the accused through re-location or protective custody; or openly side with perpetrators of retributive violence. In a majority of the cases he studied, Herriman notes that local officials “cave in to pressure from below” and therefore, to varying degrees, compromise the state’s absolute control over violence (99). For Herriman, this phenomenon of “social control from below” exemplifies the entangled nature of the state. In Herriman’s words, “such entanglement produces a hybrid society in which local residents seek the state, rather than avoid it, adopting it into their lives on their own terms. In other words, the state is appropriated to local needs” (2). Therefore, the state is not separate and opposed to civil society; rather, the two are mutually constitutive with overlapping interests and claims to power.       

Although Herriman grounds his analysis in the specific case of East Javanese sorcery killings, his concept of the ‘entangled state’ has broad implications for how to understand governance in modern Indonesian history. In this sense, the book serves as a welcome challenge to dominant academic accounts of the New Order as a violent, authoritarian state capable of terror and control at nearly every level of Indonesian life. Herriman criticizes such depictions of the New Order for being largely unsubstantiated and overly simplistic. Instead, he underscores the persistence of local participation and even initiative in Reformasi-era violence (from the East Javanese sorcery killings anti-sorcery to riots in Jakarta) as well as in the 1965-66 anti-communist massacres. While not denying oppressive behaviors on the part of the Indonesian state in either period, Herriman exposes locally planned and popular violence, thereby breaking down the false dichotomy between the immoral, authoritarian state and innocent, passive Indonesians. He therefore rejects the “overly sentimental” moral outrage which many academics have directed against the Indonesian state in exchange for a democratization of violence. On the sorcery killings in particular, Herriman writes: “my research indicates that local residents were not passive and peaceful Indonesians provoked into violence. They were not ‘faced’ with horror or ‘living’ with ‘large armed groups dragging their neighbors away’ or ‘gripped by fear’ at the ‘bizarre and menacing’ murders. Rather, they were actively involved in and leading these groups and were relieved to finally be rid of the ‘accursed sorcerer’ when they had finally killed them” (145). In this more democratic landscape of violence, ordinary Indonesians possess the agency to commit their own acts of terror. They are thus entangled in both collective violence and in the Indonesian state.

Discretion of the state

For the most part, The Entangled State is a convincing and much needed correction to prevailing depictions of the Indonesian state and of the New Order in particular. Nonetheless, there were moments when Herriman’s argument would have benefited from a more extended discussion of the legal role of the state in cases of sorcerer killings. Specifically, in which contexts were the killers of alleged sorcerers arrested and brought to trial? Who within the Indonesian state initiated these proceedings, and to what extent were representatives of the state divided over the legality and ethics of such cases? Moreover, the purported arbitrariness by which Indonesian state officials sought to prevent or, after the fact, to adjudicate the killings of alleged sorcerers perhaps points to an unexamined source of state power: discretion. Did the specter of potential prosecution for retributive violence against sorcerers exact any control over villagers? Over village officials? In order to make his argument about ‘the entangled state’ more persuasive, the book calls for a more detailed exploration of the mechanisms by which state power did exert itself, especially in the legal realm, in relationship to sorcery.

In his engaging examination of ‘the entangled state’, Herriman concludes that “local communities thus exert control over local state representatives, resulting in a breakdown of state control at the local level” (147). However, what exactly constitutes the local for Herriman? The book’s fifth chapter provides a brief sketch of local village officials who reside in their constituencies versus ‘supralocal’ career bureaucrats who reside in towns; but, beyond the implication that villages are synonymous with the local, Herriman does not explicate the wider meaning of the term. Indeed, Herriman treats the local as a self-evident category – a problematic move given the significance of a ‘local’ perspective on the Indonesian state for the book’s overall argument. At the core of this argument is Herriman’s contention that local state officials are inextricably part of their local communities and therefore suffer from a dual loyalty to local concerns and state logics. Yet, are these aspects of ‘local state representatives’ confined only to villages? If so, then are mayors of small towns, provincial-level bureaucrats, or even ministry officials who work in Jakarta therefore not embedded in their own communities? Are they not subject to the demands of kin and neighbors? By extension, are the town, city, province, and nation then still governed by a self-contained and authoritarian state? By taking the category of the local as self-evident, Herriman continues to attribute state control to some undefined ‘center’ (for example, pg. 99), without taking the next logical step and questioning the autonomy of higher levels of state bureaucracy as well. In other words, how high up the ladder of state authority does the entangled-ness of the state go? Without a more critical discussion of the local as a category, Herriman allows the question to linger.

Despite the abovementioned critique, Nicholas Herriman’s ethnographic study of sorcery in East Java provides both a nuanced glimpse into a fascinating moment in recent Indonesian history and contributes an important voice to the on-going scholarly discussion over state power in Indonesia. Filled with intriguing details of village politics, it thereby enriches our understanding of contemporary East Java, of sorcery, and of the relationship between violence and the Indonesian state.

Currently a doctoral candidate in History at Princeton University, Megan Brankley Abbas specializes in the study of Islam in South and Southeast Asia (brankley@princeton.edu)