Poaching Eben Kirksey
by Celia Lowe, University of Washington
Cite as: Lowe, Celia (2011) Where Banyan Meets Cloud. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 144-145 (Download article PDF)
Having a chance to “poach” Eben Kirksey’s paper, “From Rhizome to Banyan” from his book Freedom in Entangled Worlds (Duke), is a distinct honor. Having thus far read two chapters and an annotated table of contents, I observe that this is an extraordinary and also risk laden piece of fieldwork. In 1950, Yale anthropologist Raymond Kennedy was shot on the road between Bandung and Yogyakarta by five men in military dress. This specter hangs over all of those who have done critical research in Indonesia, but nowhere more so than in Indonesian Papua. Papua is a highly militarized province, far from world media attention, and closely guarded by the Indonesian military defending Indonesian (and American!) state interests in Indonesia’s rich Grasberg gold mine, the richest gold mine in the world. Likewise traveling through the halls of British Petroleum, the US Congress, and the National Security Archives entails its own unique risks, and Kirksey’s is a remarkable set of field site articulations.
What I was curious about in reading Eben’s paper through mine is the process we both engage in, of poaching (in the other sense of illicitly taking) nature for the benefit of culture. Critiquing Deleuze and Guittari’s rhizome, Eben writes of the “banyan,” Sukarno’s symbol for the Golkar party, reworked by Suharto as a symbol of the regime and the developmentalist state, and then understood by the Indonesian people as a site under which nothing can fruitfully grow. Beginning life as a deposit of feces and seeds, the banyan contains both putrification and emergence, and Eben deploys it usefully as a metaphor for the contaminated politics of possibility of Papuan resistance fighter and government collaborator Theys Eluay.
Likewise, I propose the “viral cloud” as a metaphor for the uncertainty of influenza events in the Indonesian H5N1 outbreak (Lowe 2010). Based on the presence of different genomes found in individual influenza viruses, the viral cloud stands in for the “cluster of different biosocialities at play and at work in the H5N1 Influenza epidemic in Indonesia.” The cloud indicates the political fog of viral security where good and evil, possibility and dead end, are opaque.
In raiding nature to make cultural meaning, we are looking to nature for new approaches to political theory, in Eben’s case and mine each seeking spaces of multispecies, natural/cultural hope within always already compromised political spaces and life chances. Contra 1990s raised-fist anthropology or 1970s ecology, we are not seeking a politically utopian biosocial climax community, but rather how to exist within a post-socialist, climate changed, war infested, species reduced, peak oiled, and thoroughly invaded and securitized world, which never-the-less continues to grow and emit possibilities for hopeful natural/cultural configurations.
Eben writes that “the particulars of banyan biology offer a novel perspective on revolutionary political projects – displacing dominant ways of understanding ‘resistance’ with a figure that illustrates principles of collaborative engagement.” But also cloudy uncertainty, since the fig may either strangle or provide sweet fruit.
Following scientists in action, and such, has taught cultural theorists to pay attention to the details of the biological as never before, and allowed us to be more open, like our cousins in biological anthropology, to the obvious biological nature of the human. But is the reverse then true, that nature, in the form of cloud or banyan, is also human? Is this practice of raiding nature for metaphor so easily accomplished because the relationship is more than metaphorical? Could nature also be part human? Not in the sense that nature is given meaning or contested by humans, but in the sense that nature/cultures are once more not divisible when it comes to patterns for contestation, occlusion, or possibility?
Eben’s banyan reminds me of another banyan in the courtyard of the cultural studies program at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta where I have taught for the past two years. This banyan, people told me with pride, was planted by Sukarno. It came to represent, not the strangulation of Suharto’s Golkar party, but the tenacity of Sukarnoist dreams during the Suharto period, and the revival of those freedom dreams after Suharto. This banyan was an umbrella under which, in 2008 and 2009, former accused Communists would read their work, and where critical and politically innovative dramatic performances would take place. It is here where banyan meets cloud, that even the metaphor can be rescripted to produce unexpected meanings.
While Eben’s banyan is both domination and subversion, growing down toward the dirty but nourishing soil of history and up toward the light of future possibilities, the viral cloud suggests that genomic-cum-social pasts and presents are tied to but do not contain the future for either humans, influenza viruses, or metaphors. The banyan and the cloud suggest unexpected connections, identities, and existences; new relations between pessimism and optimism; and finally, a chance to use metaphor and the arts, rather than rational calculation, to prepare for our future.
References
Kirksey, Eben (2010) From Rhizome to Banyan. In Freedom in Entangled Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lowe, Celia (2010) “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4).
Multispecies Website (2011) Multispecies Salon III: Swarm. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/363. Accessed January 18, 2011.
