Readers familiar with Danilyn Rutherford's previous work likely have a sense of her methodological orientation: like Clifford Geertz, she seeks to assess small facts as they articulate with larger issues. In Laughing at Leviathan, she attends to a wide range of topics—from controversial flag raisings, to language ideologies in the mission encounter, to pronominal usage in YouTube videos. Her enduring concern is how Papuans have experienced the risks and pleasures of inhabiting multiple stances toward a plurality of audiences in their ongoing struggle for a sovereignty that has yet to arrive. Rutherford's focus on questions of audience recalls themes from her previous book, Raiding the Land of the Foreigners (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), which centered on linkages between radical alterity, power, prestige, and foreign worlds. By linking ethnographic and historical particulars, she illuminates unstable interdependencies between audience and sovereignty, offering a sustained critique of long-standing theories of sovereignty in the process.
This collection of essays, or palimpsests as Rutherford calls them, traces historical events in West Papua that reverberate in contemporary West Papuans’ cries for sovereignty and recognition. They appear in a more or less chronological order under two thematics: “Geographies of Sovereignty” and “Signs of Sovereignty in Motion.” Part 1 sketches how Papua's marginality has been constructed through its engagement with multiple would-be leviathans: agents of the Tidoran sultanate, so-called “Indo Settlers,” Netherlanders, Indies Netherlanders, and people who today call themselves Indonesians. Chapters 1 and 2 extend the idea of laughter, broached in introductory remarks on Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant,” to the practice and experience of colonial rule. Drawing from J. S. Furnivall's humorous critique of Hobbes's Leviathan in the context of British-ruled Burma, Rutherford locates the ridiculous as a social fact situated at the generative intersection of a vertical plane of colonial anxieties and a horizontal plane in which natives exploit those anxieties. Chapter 3 questions the Netherlands’ seemingly fetishistic desire to rule Western New Guinea after World War II and Indonesia's independence. Rutherford describes West Papua as a remediation of loss that she diagnoses in Dutch rhetorics of purity, exclusion, and sexual difference that took the region as their referential object. Chapter 4 concludes part 1 by discussing 1998 anti-Indonesia protests in West Papua and their links to Koreri millennialism and Papuans’ long-standing encounters with radical alterity.
Part2, “Signs of Sovereignty in Motion,” draws more liberally from linguistic anthropological paradigms informed by Peircean semiotics. Chapter 5 evaluates Dutch missionaries’ attempts at conversion, work that reflected and was shaped by ideologies of linguistic purity and difference. Chapter 6 centers on related questions of the unintended effects of Christian doxa, as Papuan redeployments of the transcendental authority of Christian rituals and texts for nationalist purposes concomitantly ratified the institutional authority of the church.
Chapters 7 and 8 increase in analytical granularity, as Rutherford investigates the multiple roles and meanings of pronominal usage and gesture in videos created by contemporary Papuan nationalists. First, she focuses on Why Papua Wants Freedom, a film emblematic of Papuans’ tendency to speak of their nation in the third person as opposed to the first-person plural “we” that recurrringly features in nationalist rhetoric elsewhere. Invoking J. L. Austin, Rutherford contends that the third person can reveal, rather than create, an already-existing West Papua nation when it is addressed to extranational audiences. In Chapter 8, she evaluates the pleasures Papuans take in interactional scale-jumping by focusing on the potency of so-called “slippery pronouns.” She does so by analyzing a video of a West Papuan nationalist's speech following a controversial 2004 flag raising, focusing on his use of gesture, reported speech, and the Papuan variety of Malay to “conjure” multiple audiences to the here-and-now of his oratory. Rutherford then addresses the “Obama Song for West Papua,” a YouTube video in which images of Papuan victims of Indonesian state violence are overlaid with will.I.am's “Yes We Can,” a song with lyrics consisting entirely of quotations from President Barack Obama's speeches. Rutherford's point is simple yet profound—this version of “We” instantiates a Papuan subject and brings to mind the “legitimating constituencies that Papuan nationalism will need to succeed” (p. 209). In this regard, and notwithstanding a brief note in the preceding chapter about the arguably wider circulation of videos over other texts, it is surprising that Rutherford does not directly discuss ideologies of media structure and use that informed the decision to upload the “Obama Song for West Papua” to YouTube, which, at the time of her writing, had a relatively low view count of 2,630. Exploring the situated and interested character of the producers’ conceptions of YouTube's dynamics of circulation would have brought her analysis into closer conversation with a burgeoning literature on media ideologies in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology.
This quibble aside, Rutherford's lucid, accessible, yet enjoyably challenging book is truly superb. Laughing at Leviathan’s central argument about the contrapuntality between audience and sovereignty is of great comparative importance not only for students of West Papua, Indonesia, or Southeast Asia, but also for scholars working within anthropology and its cognate disciplines.
