Laughing at Leviathan
Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua
University of Chicago Press, 2012
For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia.
In Laughing at Leviathan, Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself—how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked players: those that make up an audience.
Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state.
Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power.
Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.
Praise
At the core of Laughing at Leviathan is a heart-wrenching story: a subtle tracing of the historical disjunctions and disseminations of empire and nationalism that have not led to a new nation in Melanesia. It is a kind of prehistory to a sovereignty that never comes. In writing the prehistory of a form of sovereignty that has neither failed nor succeeded, Danilyn Rutherford also provides a searing metacommentary on sovereignty itself.
Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University
It is rare to find a book that blends insights from linguistic anthropology and anthropology of religion and politics so effortlessly and elegantly in exciting and jargon free prose. Rutherford does not try to flaunt her mastery of this impressive material. She really wants to tell us this riveting story and along the way she changes the reader’s perspective. This is anthropology at its very best.
Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University
Thanks to Rutherford’s trademark combination of theoretical sophistication, eagle-eyed ethnographic insight, and irrepressibly zany humor, Laughing at Leviathan offers an eminently worthy companion volume to John Furnivall and Ben Anderson’s classic studies. This book will interest, inform, and inspire scholars working across Southeast Asia and far beyond for many years to come.
John T. Sidel, London School of Economics and Political Science
This is scholarship of the highest order.
Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University