Politics and Power in baliem Valey

Politics and Power

Poof these relations on the life of the very young.
The Chapterslitics and Power
Political worlds are not solely those of the state and of institutions but are also of the everyday transaction, the family and the home. Politics–the stability, conformity, opposition, strength and fragility of the dominant social order and value system that characterizes it–pervades the everyday (Dirks et al. 1994:4; Bourdieu 1977). Following the key insights of Foucault and feminist scholars, theorists have recognized that “all the relations of everyday life bear a certain stamp of power” (Dirks et al. 1994:4). Being a parent, child, woman, or man involves negotiating questions of “power, authority, and the control of the definitions of reality” (ibid: 4). This day-to-day struggle pervades the life of the young. Cross-culturally, in a seemingly universal fashion, infants are “brought up” by other persons in a social world within which they learn to operate (LeVine et al. 1994; Whiting and Edwards 1988). Thus, infants and adults equally live in political worlds, and thus politics are manifest in every step of the process of conceiving, birthing, and raising a child.
When a woman tucks her child away in a netbag and covers her up with a set of a dozen bags to block out light and noise, how do these seemingly apolitical events shed light on political system? Child care, at first glance, appears to fall outside the realm of politics. Bourdieu partially dissolves this distinction by charting the process by which disjunctures and inequalities in the social order are made natural, where coercion is unseen, and seemingly unnecessary in the taken-for-granted traditions employed to raise a child. Bourdieu terms this process habitus: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1990:53). These acquired dispositions are learned, transmitted, and reinforced through childrearing, education, and other forms of practice that operate at a level of apparent naturalness. For example, it is an unquestioned custom for Dani women to stay in the hut where the infant was born for the first week or so after birth. One root of that custom lies in fears that post-partum vaginal bleeding will pollute pathways and gardens. Another is the chance that ancestor spirits or malevolent wood spirits will attack and enter the body of the baby. Thus the mother loads down her head with a dozen bags, saying this is to “keep out the sun,” and she hides her child from light to keep out the spirits also. These values are not neutral. On the contrary, they are embodiments of gender relations and political hierarchies between humans and ancestors among others and are transmitted to succeeding generations in a myriad of ways.
Bourdieu tags embodiment as key to how acquired dispositions of inequality are transmitted to the younger generation:
Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking …Treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic form, the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. (Bourdieu 1977:93-94)
Bourdieu pinpoints formal and informal education and the acquisition of work and language skills to children from the age of five on as key moments in cultural learning. While data from the Baliem valley support the broad outlines of Bourdieu’s argument, I dispute two points: first, that the rote, durable techniques of learning become important only after the approximate age of five (Bourdieu 1977). On the contrary, I show that children under the age of two in the Baliem valley can distinguish between people on the basis of gender, and can address them using gendered speech, lauk to salute women and nayak for men10. A verbal 18-month old baby knows well the bodily adornment, physical bearing, verbal manners, and objects that distinguish men from women, and he reacts to them accordingly in both physical actions and verbal communication. Thus, the types of
10Dani men, in particular, were insistent that my child Malcolm be able to use the right word when addressing a man or a woman. Malcolm was able to say a much-modified “Lauk,” and he used it to greet every indigenous person we met from the age of 14 months onwards. Men often grew agitated and pointed to their chests and said “Nayak” every time Malcolm got it wrong.
dominance written into body language have found their way into infant interaction; Bourdieu may have limited his analysis by considering relations of dominance as relevant only when the child attains some linguistic mastery.
The second concern with Bourdieu’s formulation lies in the notion that infancy is not of theoretical interest because it is merely a site wherein habitus is reproduced unproblematically. While this might be the case in some cultural settings, women in the Baliem valley, who average only 1.5 live children per woman and who traditionally wait up to six years between births, experience birth and the early life of their child as a crucial time of concern for the outcome of childbirth. Thus childrearing may be mundane, routine, and taken-for-granted, but it is also acutely scrutinized and analyzed because the outcome will have a profound impact on social relations. In other words, infants are sites of prolonged and powerful political struggles, couched in the quiet, patterned nurturing that babies demand.
The issue becomes not whether or not relations of power are part of childrearing but to what extent, if at all, power is separable from the social space of childrearing. Foucault employed the term power to mean a “relation of force” that reproduces itself through seemingly seamless control. Exploring the breadth of power was a key part of Foucault’s explorations of how subjects are constituted. Power is not a thing, an abstract mallet that pounds people into shape; on the contrary, it is everywhere, “not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault 1978:93).
A number of historians and philosophers have used Foucault’s definition of power to explain how institutions are made up of and reinforced through the use of power as a coercive tool or a “strategic relation” with which to constrain and control people, notably through control of their bodies (Feldman 1991; Stoler 1995; Armstrong 1983). Foucault and followers show how discourses, seemingly natural or normal, hold structures of thought and practice (epistemes) over seemingly free and autonomous individuals. Foucault breaks with analysts who vest power only in the hands of the state and argues
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instead for starting analysis with the infinitesimal mechanisms of power so as to see how these powers have been “invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc. by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination” (Foucault 1980:99).
In a challenging application of Foucault’s ideas to New Guinea pre-contact societies, Knauft (1996, 1994) shows that indeed “status divisions could be totalizing, dominating and internalized down to the deepest core, and they could be inscribed in bodies in a profound and sometimes pernicious way” (Knauft 1996:159). Knauft (1994) and Keesing (1982) both show that power and surveillance often operate through the privileged knowledge of senior men. What is most intriguing about these particular claims to the importance of elders and ancestors, however, is that in highland Melanesia the status of these men and their links to ghosts depend in part on their ability to control the outcome of reproduction. Among the classless Etoro for example, Kelly (1993) argues that reproduction is the focus of male political leaders and the cosmologies containing moral evaluations that are produced and maintained by them11. These cosmologies have local merit only inasmuch as they claim to sustain life: “the means and relations of the production and allocation of prestige and moral superiority are…linked to the perpetuation of life across generations” (Kelly 1993:11).
Those with power in highland Melanesia look to infants to validate their claims. They do so, I argue, at least in part because local patterns of morbidity and mortality allow an enormous degree of political power to anyone who claims to control reproduction outcomes. Thus in this dissertation I argue that power is appropriated mostly by men and feeds on the vitally important cycle of human reproduction:
The Etoro cosmological system that comprehends reproduction, the spiritual constitution of persons, and life-cycle transformations, is the central locus for the
11In contrast, class-based societies appear to require a more multi-stranded analysis. See Rousseau (1991) for analysis of residence patterns, relations of production, sexual differentiation and political status among stratified communities in Central Borneo (see also Peletz 1995 for summary).

production of inequality because it constitutes the source of morally evaluated social differentiation. (Kelly 1993:511-512)
Drawing from Kelly, I argue that infants among the Dani play a key role in constructing and validating inequalities because infants are the outcome of reproduction; they are a space where personhood is constituted; and they are a key moment in life cycle transformations. Men and women position themselves differently with regard to infants, however, and a central theme of this dissertation is gender inequality and its intersection between the infant body, cultural constructions of gender, and relations of power. I thus address issues of marriage relations, relations of production, and patterns of gender inequality as complements to the discussion of cosmologies.
In the Baliem valley, the local world of face-to-face interaction changes every day and increasingly reflects the symbols and ideologies of the Indonesian nation-state.12 I thus complement the study of the microcontexts of everyday relations with a scrutiny of prominent attempts by the nation-state to intervene in family organization, to alter infant health outcomes, and to improve infant “quality” (Government of Indonesia 1992). It is becoming a truism to acknowledge that states intervene in reproduction (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Stephens 1995), but the impact of efforts to manipulate indigenous families and their reproductive outcomes has not been well-documented in Indonesia. This dissertation explores the stark contrasts between national images of a plump, prospering “normal” infant as the eager recipient of pembangunan or government sanctioned economic development and indigenous representations and imaginings of the child. Used in media to promote family planning and the two-child family, the infant as youngest member of the family connotes an innocence and a pliability that the nation-state manipulates to maximize control over the quality of the next generation: “the regulation
12I use the term nation-state rather than state because of the close association in Indonesia between state operations and boundaries of the nation; political society is too often indistinguishable from civil society and coercive relations pervade both realms (Van Langenberg 1991). Hegemonic relations, values, and practices are protected by an armour of coercion that spans the length of the country and is inseparable from the constitution and maintenance of the nation.

of procreation through state activity asserts control over not only the definition of social being, but also the physical preconditions of social being” (Foster cited in Stephens 1995:29). By denying the political status of the infant and by enhancing the child’s physiological passivity and dependence, the Indonesian nation-state asserts a right to determine under what conditions a child can be born.
Health care policies and practice can be instrumental in efforts to create situations of conformity. One strategy employed in Indonesia is the use of what I term the “normal” infant in health models, a Euroamerican construct with roots in colonial practice and biomedical knowledge that legitimate interventions to improve infant health in order to bring them up to so-called normal standards. Another strategy is the manipulation of statistics to demonstrate that indigenous people are in greater need of intervention. Another is to target family participation in health care through services aimed at infants. I explore the outcomes of these fabrications about the infant and her family, and suggest links between health care and state strategies to bring indigenous people into the realm of the national culture of the country.
The Dani live on the margins of the Indonesian nation-state; they are designated suku terasing, or most isolated tribal peoples. The Dani neither receive the full force of nation-state attempts to constitute citizens out of tribal peoples nor fall out of the realm of intervention altogether. Perhaps because of Dani reticence to participate in the nation-state and perhaps because of the nation-state’s reticence to invest in the Dani, relations between the state and the Dani exist at a stage where distinctions are not seamless and where Dani elders and Dani youth can articulate their history in terms of impacts and can assess when and in what ways they see changes altering their lives. As Knauft argues, these forms of change “have been as cultural and epistemic as they have been political and economic” (Knauft 1996:160), and he proposes it is time to analyze how intrusions from the outside are “actively engaged by indigenous powers that have their own internal legacies of bodily and institutional inscription” within (Knauft 1996: 163; see also Dirks

et al. 1994). This dissertation has the goal to explore the impact of these relations on the life of the very young.