Page 167 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

number of dead or wounded resulting, and the destruction of property. Left out
are the grievances, historical relations, as well as ascribed/assumed identities of
those persons and groups directly involved in a con®ict—their ethnicity, reli-
gion, race, and class or the kind of potentially politicized difference gathered by
7
the Suharto regime under the acronym SARA —as well as the triggers, causes,
background, and unfolding of a given violent happening. The latter, it is impor-
tant to note, is the kind of information that might help one to ¤ll out the pic-
ture, identify the stakes in the con®ict and the range of issues that have brought
the parties involved into con®ict, or, more complexly, begin to understand what
makes people re-cognize their identities in moments of crisis in terms of reli-
gion, ethnicity, or other collective subjectivities, along with the forms and man-
ners in which they do so (Spyer n.d.). In short, the kind of speci¤city and un-
folding dynamics that necessarily form the starting point of any attempt to
come to grips with the complex ways in which otherwise ordinary people per-
petuate the most extraordinary atrocities on one another is erased. Lest I be
misunderstood, I do not mean in the ¤rst instance the “context” or “history”
that all too often is unproblematically marshaled as the explanatory backdrop
to the outbreak and chronic perpetuation of violence but rather the very form
8
that violence assumes in speci¤c situations. What is called for and ¤gures cen-
trally in the larger project of which this paper is a small part is a radical rethink-
ing of the very notion of context—here, speci¤cally, with respect to how a range
of mainstream mass as well as smaller, more tactical media, together with other
factors, intervene, jolt, reshuf®e, and co-produce the volatile runaway topogra-
phies in which violence erratically unfolds. 9
Regarding the two men from the Manado Pos, my point is not to criticize
their journalistic practice. Admirably they were highly concerned and engaged
with the ongoing crisis in Maluku and in their country more generally. Both
were trying to ¤nd a way to translate their concerns into a proactive form of
journalism. And both were right on target in foregrounding the role of the me-
dia in the production of current events and in their acute awareness of how the
news, say, that a mosque or church had been burned down (whether true or
false), could easily set off another spiral of violence. Indeed, in Maluku, rumors
that something has happened have frequently preceded, made possible, and thus
prophesized particular violent happenings (Spyer 2002).
Signi¤cantly, however, while the journalists emphasized the possible damage
or danger to others that a more “transparent” reporting might precipitate, they
were silent when it came to the risks that they themselves potentially ran in as-
signing to particular actors the responsibility for violent occurrences, that is, in
naming their source. Beyond the elusive categories of provokator, pihak tertentu
(certain parties), and elit politik populating the pages of Radar Kieraha as those
of other Indonesian newspapers and media sources, any identi¤cation of those
persons or groups who would either be invested in the sheer fact of violence
and political chaos or in ensuring particular outcomes is by and large also oblit-
10
erated. I do not believe that the elision of this dimension in their conversation
with me or, more generally, in their journalistic practice was either explicit or

156 Patricia Spyer