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Maluku experienced one of Indonesia's most serious conflicts following the fall of Suharto in 1998. The peaceful reconciliation that eventually occurred is reported to be mainly based on tradition (adat) to rebuild bridges between the religious communities. However, emphasis on processes of peacebuilding through inter religious dialogue and lack of support for interethnic or intergenerational dialogue have enhanced forms of social inequality. This article engages with selected village communities in Ambon and West Seram, where, assisted by a few local representatives, I identified three potential fields for creative peacebuilding that also aim to address emerging inequalities: identity building based on local traditions, protection of the environment and interethnic dialogue. Examples of locally rooted measures with potential for sustained peacebuilding include the Pukul Sapu ceremony in Morela (Ambon), the sasi ritual in Niwelehu (Seram) and building relations between diverse ethnic groups based on religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What caused the surprising electoral success of an Islamist party in one of Indonesia's most Catholic regions, and why was this success short-lived? This article argues that in Ngada district on Flores Island in 2014 the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) deftly mobilised local voters not because of its own organisational and programmatic discipline but because of its "project of commonness", or adaptation to prevailing local patterns of personalistic local electoral competition. The party's growing popularity in Ngada, however, paradoxically fell after it sought to build solid and coherent relations with the electorate in preparation for the subsequent election. The case of the PKS in Flores thus suggests that under certain conditions, in which voter–party linkages are highly fragmented and cleavage-based politics remain undeveloped, party institutionalisation can harm electoral performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many of their Austronesian neighbours, the Meto people of Timor-Leste’s Oecussi enclave have a history of accommodating foreign ideas and technologies without compromising their distinctive, socio-political identity. Now living on the site of Timor’s first special autonomous zone and exposed to an unprecedented program of megaproject construction, the task of better understanding this remarkable adaptability has taken on a new importance. In this article, through the detailed exegesis of ritual speech (uab natoni) used in one of its highland villages to render the concept of school based education comprehensible to ancestral spirits, I seek to highlight the inherent flexibility of Meto customary thought and belief in a time of profound and ongoing social and economic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the eastern tip of Flores Island (Indonesia), there is a people whose members sing in special places, both inhabited and uninhabited, and at special times. Approximately four times a year, songs and dances are performed around a group of stones, in the dancing place. Singers move around these stones all night until dawn. They also sing in front of special trees when going out to their fields, or standing in circles around posts, stones or altars set up on the cultivated land. All these locations are named ‘dangerous places’. They are as far flung as seashores and forests. What relationships with these places do humans enter into? What kind of history and stories do these places mark? What potency do they bear? This paper shows that singing brings people into relationships with various categories of beings at certain places in every ceremonial domain of this peninsula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resolving contestations over resource management rights around coastal villages remains a focal challenge for co-management initiatives in remote coastal zones. Contemporary socio-political settings increasingly see local people having to negotiate between local long-standing (horizontal) relationships and new emerging (vertical) relationships which involve collaborations with outside actors who try to assume neutral mediating positions. Using two conflicts, this article examines the rise and fall of a participatory coastal resource management program in eastern Indonesia involving a fishing community engaged in a co-management arrangement with a conservation non-government organisation (NGO). An actor-oriented approach is applied to analyse how these conflicts shape, drive and direct collaborations across the community–NGO interface. We discuss how these impact the implementation of the conservation ethics and sustainable natural resource management practices, and show how particular mediating capacities of an NGO may overcome, and even build forth on, conflict in some contexts but fall short in others. We argue that local resource user groups and conservation teams operate according to strong local relationships that are entrenched in cultural–historical hierarchies of power. We moreover note that these local relationships significantly influence the extent of neutrality of external groups in their mediating, coordinating and technical advisory roles. The effectiveness of co-management partnerships hinges on the ability to balance actors’ mediating capacity with their local dependence for operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay ofViolence and Vengeanceengages with Duncan's view that religious distinctions on their own are rarely the cause of violence, although they may subsequently form its raison d'etre. The review examines how religion assumes a very public space in various Indonesian societies but how the public profession of distinctive religious positions need not stir hostility. However, recent assertions of religious purity and correctness are putting new pressures on community relations, and can be seen as contributing to the severe expressions of violence in North Maluku studied by Duncan. The review questions his call for a truth commission as a necessary precursor to reconciliation, suggesting it may disrupt the strong progress already made towards peace. Instead, it calls for a closer analysis of elite and state roles in provoking or countenancing communal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does fiscal decentralization empower sub-national governments to raise sufficient revenue from local sources thereby reducing their dependence on the national government? This paper addresses this question by focusing on Indonesia's most recent decentralization policy and assessing and analysing the role of local governments in this regard. Based on data collected from two different locations in Eastern Indonesia the paper shows that the dependency of local authorities on central government is excessive and that the share of local revenue in regional budget has remained rather small. It also shows that while the fiscal power granted to local governments is limited, a combination of politico-economic and contextual factors has further undermined the prospect of revenue mobilisation at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a diachronic perspective on the exchange of cloths (kain timur) and the transformations in their importance over time with social and political changes in the Bird's Head region of the province of West Papua. Providing insight into the transformations in kain timur exchange sheds light on the history of the region, long characterised by influences from other islands in Eastern Indonesia while simultaneously displaying distinctly Papuan cultural and linguistic features. The exchange of kain timur has evolved amid colonial and post-colonial influences such as missionisation, government administration, education, migration, and the exploitation of resources. The most prominent current meaning of the exchange of kain timur is the safeguarding of the moral community in regard to marriage practices and married life. As material objects kain timur are considered authentic cultural products that mark local identity. In contrast to other Melanesian art forms kain timur has to date attracted little attention from art collectors, anthropologists, and tourists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of calls for anthropology to devote more attention to non‐visual modes of perception. Frequently, the implicit suggestion of these calls has been that the acknowledgement of different ways of organising the senses could help us escape the supposed malaise of modern ‘ocular‐centrism ‘. This paper explores the sense and symbolism of smell in Buli, a village in eastern Indonesia, to argue that smell is part of an ontology that catches Buli people in a malaise of their own. ‘Bad’ smell attests to an ambiguous moral order that can be traced across myth, ritual and everyday life. Ambiguity is ever‐present because ‘bad’ or disgusting smells destabilise the very conceptual order they also help support. The analysis of smells as they relate to local notions of disgust is therefore suggested as an alternative way to conceptualise the contradictory nature of power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]