Orphaned Landscapes

"Emerging from a civil war that destabilized the very ground of living and rendered familiar social terrain obscure, people turned to images as moorings and markers to reorient them in a newly disfigured world. Orphaned Landscapes is a profound book that will richly reward anyone interested in the aftermaths of violence and the potency of images."--Karen Strassler, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

"A work of great subtlety and insight, Orphaned Landscapes charts the desperate operations of the image to hold together a world spiraling toward chaos and religious violence. Spyer's superb analysis of the conditions of blindness and visibility that produce and accompany the fog of war is an immense intellectual accomplishment."--Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city amid the country's widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god.

Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children's reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure their urban surroundings. The work on appearance, Spyer shows, is inherent to sociopolitical change, and the book richly demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world.

Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

Patricia Spyer