Joshua Barker's "State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City"

 

In State of Fear: Policing A Postcolonial City, Joshua Barker reckons with how fear and violence are produced and reproduced through everyday practices of rule and control. Examining the ethnographic and historical genealogies of Indonesian policing, Barker focuses on the city of Bandung, which is permeated by anxieties about security, in spite of the fact that it’s a relatively safe city according to the data. Drawing from his fieldwork there during the latter years of the authoritarian New Order regime, Barker traces the complex relationship between the state and vigilante groups like neighborhood watch patrols and street gangs. Through interviews with police officers, vigilantes, and street-level toughs, he uncovers a struggle between two visions of social control that continues to animate policing in Indonesia: the modern, bureaucratic approach favored by the state, and a territorial approach that divides the city into fiefdoms overseen by charismatic individuals of authority. Synthesizing insights from in-depth ethnographic, historical, and theoretical work, Barker reveals how authoritarianism can take root not just from the top down but also from the bottom up.

 

 

Joshua Barker is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Vice-Provost of Graduate Research & Education, University of Toronto, and Affiliate of the Asian Institute, and coeditor of Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity and State of Authority: State in Society in Indonesia. He has taught and conducted research at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia and has been a post doctoral fellow at Twente University, the Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and the Department of Anthropology at Stockholm University (with support from the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies). His research focuses on Indonesia, where he has examined various themes relating to his three main topics of interest: urban studies, crime and security, and new technologies. Barker is currently conducting a multi-year research project funded by SSHRC and the Connaught Foundation. The project is entitled “Engineers and Political Dreams: Indonesia’s Internet in Cultural Perspective.”

 

 

Danilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Previously, she was associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and, more recently, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners and Laughing at Leviathan.

 

Abidin Kusno is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and the former Director of York's Centre of Asian Research (YCAR). Before his arrival at York, he was the Canada Research Chair in Asian Urbanism and Culture at the Institute for Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include global cities, urban/suburbanism, politics and culture, history and theory of architecture, urban design and planning, nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, and Asian studies. His research focuses on Indonesia in particular and he is a speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and Hokkien.

 

Emily Hertzman (Event Chair) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on mobilities, identities, religious practices, and politics. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2017, after completing both her B.A. (2001) and M.A. (2006) at the University of British Columbia. Her work examines how concepts of home and belonging are reshaped by broader societal changes including mobility, democratization, transnationalism, economic restructuring, liberalization, religious encounters, and personal identity construction. She conducts research primarily with Chinese Indonesian communities in Singkawang, West Kalimantan, as well as in Jakarta, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. While a graduate student in the anthropology department, she was one of the founding members of the Ethnography Lab (2014), a faculty and student collaboration and resource center that promotes ethnographic research methods and practice inside and outside the university.