“Don't use your data as a pillow,” a West Papuan human rights activist told Eben Kirksey as he carried out research for Freedom in Entangled Worlds. “[Don't] go to sleep when you go back to America. Don't just use this as a bridge to your own professional opportunities” (127).

These are two seriously entangled books. Rutherford and Kirksey deliver sophisticated scholarship of the sort that one expects from two of the anthropologists most engaged in the study of West Papuan movements for independence from Indonesia. Both authors are well aware of how they themselves are entangled, perhaps unavoidably, in the movements they study. The two books inform each other, circling back to related incidents and building on each other's analysis even while making different theoretical points.

West Papuan independence movements, and the territory in whose name they seek to speak, are complex and confusing to outsiders. West Papua is a many-named place, the names themselves reflecting complexity and disputes over ownership of the land and its people, and the borders of both. Even to name the territory as “West Papua,” as both Kirksey and Rutherford do, is to betray understandable sympathy with the nationalist cause—it is not a name preferred by partisans of Indonesian occupation. As Netherlands New Guinea, the territory was part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), a colony terminating in a sharp line scratched across the middle of the island of New Guinea, with the other half painted in the colonial colors of Germany, Britain, and later Australia. The eastern half is now the independent country of Papua New Guinea.

The borderline through New Guinea center of course expressed colonial imaginations more than actual control. Dutch colonial control arrived relatively late in West Papua. Anthropological missions were “discovering” uncontacted Papuan groups in the interior as late as the 1960s. Dutch colonialism, in other words, reached many Papuans even as that colonial rule was itself drawing to an end. For the 1940s through the 1960s also marked a new contest for control of West Papua and West Papuans. In the histories, this is often glossed as a fight between the Netherlands and Indonesia, the independent state that emerged in the 1940s. A deal recognizing Indonesian independence left the western half of New Guinea retained as a Dutch colony. Indonesian leaders accepted this only as a short-term sacrifice, and pursued their claim through the 1950s and early 1960s. A group from the offshore Papuan island of Biak renamed the mainland Irian, a name suggesting a hot, hazy land rising from the tropical seas. The Indonesian government was soon calling for “the return of West Irian to the fold of the motherland.”

An indigenous independence movement emerged, demanding that their homeland be named West Papua. Their campaign was shattered in 1962 when an American-mediated agreement saw the Netherlands hand the colony to the United Nations, which in turn handed the territory to Indonesia in 1963. The transfer was then formalized by an “act of free choice” held in 1969 by Indonesia and still contested by Papuan independence campaigners. Indonesia officially renamed the territory West Irian in 1963 and then renamed its new province Irian Jaya (Victorious Irian). In a gesture to Papuan desires, the Indonesian president then renamed the province Papua in 2000, though independence-minded activists still insisted on West Papua. In short, West Papuan history is a history of multiple shifting, entangled sovereignties.

Sovereignty is a central concept in Laughing at Leviathan. Even the book's title questions colonial sovereignty's claims to certainty. Rutherford opens with the story of a Dutch battleship wending its way across the world en route to take part in the defense of West Papua from threats of Indonesian attack in 1960. The voyage was at the same time a carefully staged performance to demonstrate for global audiences Dutch sovereignty over West Papua. A sovereign state, in theory, can position its ships wherever it wants on its own territory. “But then there's the getting there, and the impression getting there makes on onlookers, great and small,” Rutherford writes. “This book is the product of my fascination with such moments—moments when sovereignty makes an appearance, and in making an appearance, puts itself at risk” (xi). The ship was met with anti-colonial protests, refusals for permission to dock, and other signs that the audience was not reacting as the Dutch government might have hoped. Sovereignty was being questioned, even on a voyage designed to demonstrate it.

Rutherford wrote and interviewed for Laughing at Leviathan while also working on Papua advocacy projects, for instance an East-West Center Washington project on international conflicts in Asia. She carried out her fieldwork in West Papua primarily in the 1990s, with later visits interspersed with observation from across the Pacific. Laughing at Leviathan consists mostly of previously published articles, with three new chapters alongside six already in print. It is episodic rather than comprehensive, but covers precolonial times to the present. The first half maps geographies of sovereignty with a focus on the colonial period and a 1998 flag-raising episode on Biak, Rutherford's prime field research location. The book's second half discusses signs of sovereignty in motion, expressed in language, religion, and nationalist discourse. The author has added new connecting paragraphs and sentences to sustain an argument and themes through the entire book, which emerges as more integrated rather than a collection of unrelated essays.

Each chapter explores Rutherford's central theme, the relationship between sovereignty and audience. The latter “infects the very concept of sovereignty: audience is sovereignty's basis and its bane” (2). To her, the central paradox of sovereignty is that it relies on international recognition, which in turn compromises sovereignty by creating a dependence on outsiders. West Papuan activists have been all too aware of the paradox. “Outgunned and underfunded, Papuan nationalists are eager to recruit friends in high places who are willing and able to bring their adversaries to heel …. The proliferation of these audiences opens opportunities for new claimants to partake in the dream of sovereignty, but, as we shall see, it also makes it difficult to sustain the illusion of being in charge” (6). Outsiders have played a role in constructing all nationalisms, she argues, and West Papuan nationalism is a prime case. Outsiders have seen “Stone Age” West Papuans as too primitive to have agency, and so nationalists have gone to great lengths to conjure outsiders to back their aspirations. Thus a pro-independence documentary film uses Indonesian “neutral” narration; nationalist political resolutions cite outside documents from UN resolutions to the Indonesian constitution; Papuan activists highlight human rights and seek to have the conflict in their homeland defined as “genocide” in order to gain international support; and so on. “There is no way of knowing if the West Papuan quest for sovereignty will succeed, but it does seem likely that it will continue,” Rutherford concludes (124).

Early chapters begin in the colonial period, painting colonial sovereignty's pretensions as ridiculous. Chapter 1, “Looking Like a Fool,” recalls George Orwell's tale from his days as a British colonial officer in a Burmese village. Faced with a rogue elephant, Orwell decided he had to shoot it to avoid looking foolish, the typical colonizer's fear in the face of the colonized. Dutch claims to sovereignty in West Papua faced the same challenge. Chapter 2 develops this theme. Dutch prestige, it was said, would not permit leaving West Papua in a primitive state. Nor could the territory be left alone: to keep Britain and other potential colonizers out, Dutch power and presence had to be displayed. Thus “colonial expansion turned on the fact that Leviathan just could not take a joke” (49).

West Papua's odd colonial history continues in chapter 3, Rutherford's account of efforts to transform it into a colony of settlement for mixed-race “Indos,” the Indies-born descendants of Dutch and Indonesian parents. Dutch sympathy for South African Boers was displaced onto Indo settlers in West Papua and linked to metropolitan fascist movements. The failed settlement efforts of the interwar years prompted renewed Dutch desires to retain West Papua even as Indonesia was set free. As Rutherford explains, it “was more than simply refuge for loyal colonials; its development was an act of national will. Conveniently, the primitive Papuans seemed to cry out for guidance and protection” (86–87).

The early colonial frame turns in chapter 4 into a close study of one 1998 incident in which a West Papuan civil servant, previously apparently loyal to Indonesian administration, raised the West Papuan independence flag on Biak. “In raising and pledging their allegiance to the flag,” Rutherford writes, “the protesters called into being a nation” (20). They directed this performance of nation at multiple publics: for Indonesian audiences they performed resistance; for overseas audiences they displayed an appeal protection and authorization. “What was at stake in that contested piece of cloth known as the Morning Star flag was Indonesia's sovereignty” (98). Indonesian soldiers understood that when they met the protest with deadly force, killing anywhere from five to a hundred people.

Subsequent chapters are thematic rather than chronological. Chapter 5 asks whether language can be read as a performance of sovereignty. Scholars of nationalism have long assumed the need for a common language. To the extent that West Papua has one, it is the same Malay language that Indonesia calls Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian language). Does this reflect Dutch use of Malay as the administrative language, does it show West Papua as an Indonesian province using the national language like other provinces, or can it be re-imagined as an indigenous “Malay-Papuan” tongue? Linguistic fluidity is illustrated in this chapter by an account of how Dutch missionaries defined and standardized “Noefoorsch” as a new Christianized language of Biak that was considered for a time as a potential lingua franca for all of West Papua, but which instead evolved into “Bahasa Biak.”

In chapter 6, Rutherford asks why Christianity has persisted so strongly in Papuan nationalism. The Biak Koreri belief system saw the land of the foreigners as a source of wealth and mystery, and read the Bible as the secret of the Koreri myth revealed, with Jesus cast as Manarmakeri, a founding Koreri mythical figure. Christian words turned into “booty” in ways that exasperated missionaries. Christian and indigenous beliefs intertwined, and the Protestant and Catholic churches became refuges for indigenous leaders. Churches now legitimize new groups, and prayer abounds at nationalist gatherings. “By turning Christian prayer into a separatist weapon, today's Papuan nationalists have reinforced the churches' authority, even as they have run afoul of the organizations' officially neutral stance,” Rutherford writes. “In the same fashion, Indonesian leaders have created a resource for Papuan nationalists through their own deployment of Christian practices and texts” (174).

In chapter 7, Rutherford asks whether nationalism repeats itself in modes, as Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities. Papuan nationalists slide between pronouns when discussing the nation they are trying to build: “he,” “she,” “they,” rather than “we.” This reflects a search for distanced, “objective” outside approval. “Papuan leaders found it impossible to speak for their ‘nation’ in international settings without others hearing Dutch voices coming from their mouths” (186). Papuan responses have come in two streams: armed struggle by people calling themselves “us,” and elite struggle by leaders who call other Papuans “them.” These latter elites “have found it safer to speak about, rather than for, the territory's population, and they have gained authority by distancing themselves from their supposedly Stone Age kin” (186). This “third-person nationalism has promoted the stereotype of Papuan primitivism, preserved the privileges of the Papuan elite, and provided fodder for an Indonesian multiculturalism that papers over very real conflicts and inequalities that plague this postauthoritarian nation-state” (201).

Rutherford concludes with a new chapter on “The Appeal of Slippery Pronouns.” When the chance for independence seems so slight, she asks, why do Papuans still pursue it? What is so appealing about the representations they make depicting independence hopes? Nationalists gain “pleasurable sense of potency from encounters with the foreign” in Papuan and Biak history, she argues, pointing to pro-independence materials directed at outside audiences such as YouTube videos. This, to Rutherford, is responsible for staying power of West Papuan freedom campaigns.

A good chunk of West Papuan campaign materials is produced not only for outside consumption, but also in collaboration with outside supporters. This point is illustrated well by Eben Kirksey, who writes with admirable honesty about his own entanglement with his research subjects. “West Papuans came to draw me, a young anthropologist, into their collaborative projects,” he writes (6). “Recruited as a believer and a partisan, I became involved in the social movement that I had set out to study as a doctoral student.” As an undergraduate researcher, he saw West Papua as a relatively untapped research field. As an exchange student at Cenderawasih (Bird of Paradise) University, he watched pro-independence protests break out around him in the late 1990s, then “set out to conduct what I then saw as real anthropological research in the hinterlands” (40). En route in Biak, traveling with a Belgian entomologist, he arrived to another protest that had been hoping UN observers would soon arrive. “We were disoriented from our overnight journey and sweaty from the midmorning sun. Everyone quickly surmised that we were not emissaries from the United Nations” (46). Soldiers opened fire soon after: Kirksey had arrived to witness the protests leading up to the Biak massacre, about which Rutherford has written.

Kirksey turned to documenting the Biak killings, then, after a time of writing human rights reports in collaboration with West Papuan activists, set out to meet pro-independence guerrillas. One rights researcher “saw me as a potential ally, but one who needed some serious reschooling” (127). A guerrilla commander “tried to recruit me as a potential collaborator, working to capture my imagination with surprising visions and dreams” (185). Rights activist John Rumbiak “fashion[ed] me into a reliable witness—an expert on Papua who would be prepared to make strong claims to knowledge” (130). In short, Kirksey's work is that of a participant-observer. In an interesting technique, he has used Geertzian-style discursive footnotes and much of the theoretical and elaborative asides thus appear in fascinating footnotes, with the bulk of the text permitted to flow in more readable fashion. The preliminary work and disciplinary conversations are at the end; the text flows freely and speaks for itself.

Kirksey's argument is nevertheless complex, and rotates around the “entangled worlds” of his title. This is no simple story of Indonesian colonialism and West Papuan resistance. Rather, it sees West Papuan nationalism expressed most often in a collaborative mode, with shifting collaborators including at times agents of the Indonesian state. “In short,” he writes, “wedding the strategy of collaboration with an expansive imagination opens up surprising opportunities in the field of historical possibility…. Collaboration, rather than resistance, turned out to be the primary strategy of this political movement. West Papuan revolutionaries demonstrated an uncanny knack for getting inside institutions of power” (xiii, 1). With Anna Tsing, he sees collaboration, as potentially “the hopeful edge of a political project” (6), allowing surprising outbursts of freedom in unexpected places. “Anything can happen at any time when this sort of collective imagination meets up with collaborative action” (32).

Kirksey's tale is of the West Papuan nationalist movement since 1998. He opens with the toppling of General Suharto from Indonesia's presidency. Part 1, “Breakout,” describes the next three years of hope and disappointments. Indonesian democracy activists had sought a common goal of the dictator's removal, and with this common enemy gone their project started to fall apart. The freedom-oriented energy shifted to outlying regions: East Timor (which in 1999 gained a referendum on independence), Aceh (where peace talks ultimately resolved a separatist conflict with a grant of wide-ranging autonomy), and West Papua (which still awaits a resolution). Kirksey likens the growing freedom movement of this period to a rhizome—stems that spread laterally in topsoil and send down roots, used by some theorists as a metaphor for resistance movements, building networks and hard to pin down or destroy since they grow back as they are cut down. The rhizomic independence movement coalesced around the messianic figure of Theys Eluay, who shifted from loyal supporter of Indonesian rule to the leading figure of the pro-independence movement. Yet the Indonesian state struck back. In the Biak massacre, the new, ostensibly democratic government allowed the army to use the “same old tactics of state violence from the Suharto era” (51). Eluay, meanwhile, was murdered by army agents.

The nationalist movement had to reinvent itself, burrowing under state structures to enter power centers stealthily. Kirksey's metaphor shifts from rhizome to banyan, the rainforest creeper tree that forms an interwoven web of interlocking branches and aerial roots, which was also the symbol of Suharto's ruling party, Golkar. From the periphery, West Papuan leaders found possibility within the power structure, and began to climb. The banyan, Kirksey argues, offers “a novel perspective on revolutionary political projects, displacing dominant ways of understanding resistance with a figure that illustrates principles of collaborative engagement” (59–60). But as a strangler fig on host trees, the banyan can also “reproduce regimes of domination even as it harbors the promise of liberation” (61). Eluay again serves as example—his ongoing links to Golkar and other Indonesian power-holders prompted some activists to ask whether he was savoir or potential dictator. With his removal, other potential messiahs came to the fore: grassroots groups, multinationals offering funding, even a sympathetic president of Indonesia. The movement stalled: influential, but unable to make further progress toward independence.

Part 2, “Plateau,” covers the years from 2000 to 2002. It opens with a comparison between Freeport, an American mining multinational that sought to buy out the independence leadership to protect its own large presence if West Papua achieved independence, and a Papuan Mee man's initiative to feed the world through an enterprise he called Freeport Sweet Potato Distribution Inc. Through such strange symbols did the freedom movement project its voice. Guerrilla fighters performed a war dance in front of another Indonesian president, boasting that they had humiliated a member of the Indonesian elite by frightening her into losing control of her bladder. Yet this encounter was staged by the Indonesian army, which had invited guerrillas to Jakarta and helped undermine the previous president's conciliatory line.

With Eluay gone, a polycentric structure grew. Rights activist John Rumbiak opposed the former leadership's desire to work with multinational funders like BP (the former British Petroleum) that sought investment opportunities in the new West Papua. Rumbiak's prominence grew when, as Kirksey describes, three teachers, two American and one Indonesian, were killed near the Freeport copper mine. Eventually the FBI indicted a West Papuan farmer rather than Indonesian soldiers. After Rumbiak suffered a stroke, Kirksey worked hard to document this case and bring it to wider American attention. “Where the FBI saw simplicity—West Papuan terrorists and innocent Americans—I found complexity” (147). The event threatened to derail U.S.-Indonesian military ties that Washington saw as important to a global counter-terror agenda. Rumbiak's group, in accusing the army of complicity in these killings, opened itself to libel suits and, after losing them and seeing foreign donor funding evaporate, collapsed.

Kirksey titles Part 3 “Horizons,” and dates it from 2002 to 2028. He depicts the nationalist leadership as being partly captured by international capital in the form of Freeport and BP—very much the wrong sort of entanglement—yet as also living on in other places. In the twenty-first century's first decade grassroots pro-independence rallies revived. Someone broke open the Freeport slurry pipe, a piece of global capitalist extractive networks, and protests against Freeport also increased. Freedom in Entangled Worlds ends with a suggestion that readers act to disrupt the many tubes, literal and figural, tying together global capitalism.

Kirksey's narrative depicts the West Papuan nationalist quest for supportive audiences about which Rutherford writes. With heavy competition for sympathy from other movements around the world, West Papuans have become adept at capturing the attention of foreigners. A guerrilla commander prays for the UN to open its eyes to suffering in West Papua; a pastor gives Kirksey a bag to deliver to the secretary-general, asking that he put freedom in the bag and then return it to West Papua. These are symbols of a clear understanding of the international diplomatic history that brought West Papuans under Indonesian rule, and of a widespread desire to escape that rule through performing sovereignty claims for outsiders. These are not Stone Age primitives bemoaning their fate to an indifferent world, but sophisticated nationalists operating in their own modes.