Compromising Power:Development,Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

Abstract

accomplishment of rule owes as much to the understandings and practices worked out in the contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy as it does to the imposition of development schemes and related forms of disciplinary power.3 My study is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of Indonesia's official program for the resettlement of isolated people. Resettlement programs are familiar enough as objects of anthropological study and critique, and there are many important accounts of the damage done to indigenous folk by inept bureaucrats and bullying regimes. My focus is rather different, for I seek less to expose the all-too-predictable havoc wreaked by state power in the periphery than to highlight the significance of that periphery, and the activities that go on there, in the constitution of the self-proclaimed center. Just as others have shown that colonialism was critical to the self-fashioning of the West (Cooper and Stoler 1997), "development" is here explored as a modern state's attempt at self-fashioning and rule, considered always as fragile and contingent accomplishments.4