Veronika Kusumaryati_“Wander Like Animals in the Forest”: Papuans and Indonesian Racialist Thinking in the 20th century

This paper traces the racial construction of Papuan-ness in the modern Indonesian political thought. It begins from Boven Digul in West Papua, where the Dutch colonial state exiled many Indonesian nationalists in the early twentieth century and encountered the Papuans for the first time. By examining these nationalists’ first encounters with Papuans and West Papua in Digul, the paper explores how existing racialized narratives about Papuans were reproduced, revised, and incorporated into Indonesian nationalist imaginaries. Boven Digul occupies an important place in Indonesia’s national imagining After the failed 1926 rebellion, Dutch colonial authorities sent members of communist, Islamic, and secular nationalist movements to Digul, one of the world’s early concentration camps. The “Digulists”—those exiled there—produced a wide range of texts describing both their experiences of exile and their views of Papuans. Through close readings of writings by left-wing Digulist authors compiled by Pramoedya Ananta Toer; memoirs and political texts by secular nationalists such as Sjahrir and Mohammad Hatta; texts by Islamist authors, such as Hasjmy, who claimed the Digul legacy; and writings by nationalists who were not themselves exiled in Digul, the presentation traces how racialist ideas shaped Indonesian political attitudes toward the Papuans from the early twentieth century to the present. It also argues that Indonesian racism toward the Papuans drew on local epistemologies and Euro-American colonial and imperial racial thought, and that Indonesian communists, Islamic groups, and secular nationalists, despite their ideological differences, shared this ideology of Papuan inferiority. Finally, the presentation highlights Mohammad Hatta’s emancipatory vision of racial equality and shows how it was marginalized in the service of state building and occupation.

Veronika KUSUMARYATI is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to the easternmost and marginal area of Indonesia.  Her scholarship analyzes the idea of race and indigeneity, and how they have shaped Euro-American and post-colonial ideologies of racial hierarchy. Specifically, she studies the lives, thoughts, and politics of the Indigenous Papuans in Indonesia as they intersect with colonialism, racism, and the expansion of capitalism to the indigenous frontiers. She holds a doctoral degree from the department of anthropology at Harvard with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She’s currently an assistant professor in anthropology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.