INTERVIEW

James Siegel
Interviewed byJohan Lindquist

Johan Lindquist (JL): Throughout your career, which

began in the early 1960s, you have remained focused on the study of Indone-
sia. You are also arguably the anthropologist who has been most committed to
developing a Derridean deconstructive approach. Before we return to these broad
themes, could you say something about your background and how you became
interested in anthropology and Indonesia?

James Siegel (JS): I was born in Superior, Wisconsin, on the edge of the lake,
in the north. Superior is a small town, about twenty-five thousand inhabitants
when I was born, but founded by speculators to be a rival of Chicago. Sixty-some
years later, when I was born, it had the world's largest sewage system, the high
stone arches extending far beyond the inhabited areas of the town, the town never
attracting many settlers. It was a ghost town before it was born, but it never felt
uncanny, probably because nothing ever happened there to repeat itself. But per-
haps what repeats there is something not occurring.
I was a student in one or maybe two classes of Clifford Geertz in the late 1950s
as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he had just received his PhD. That I don't
remember how many classes I took with him shows the nature of his effect on me.
Geertz lectured with an intensity I had never before seen. He rolled up his tie (it
was the late fifties, all men and even undergraduates [all were male] wore ties), put
it in his mouth, dropped it to scratch the side of his head, moved his hand down (I

This interview is a result of an extended written and spoken conversation between October 2011
and March 2012. Lindquist began by sending a series of questions to Siegel, who responded in writ-
ing. The text was then sent back and forth as Lindquist added questions and asked for further clari-
fication. In January 2012 Lindquist conducted a two-hour interview with Siegel in Paris and then
integrated parts of the transcription into the written document. The text was then again sent back
and forth before being finalized in March 2012. For another recent interview with Siegel, see Barker
and Rafael 2012.

Public Culture 2S:'} DOI 10.1215/08992363-2144652

Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press 559
Public Culture remember it as his left hand) to scratch his behind, moved his hands to the front,
and with both hands rolled up his tie again and repeated this gesture from the
beginning to the end of the lecture. I don't remember what he said. In any case, he
spoke so rapidly no one person could get it down. Students worked in teams to get
what they could into their notes.
Geertz was not precisely an intellectual influence—I can't remember what he
said in the classes I took with him, only the topic, "Indonesia." Not only because
it was over fifty years ago, but also because I was incapable—and still am—of
learning from teachers. I can't even read the instructions that come with appli-
ances. Geertz was not a model—a model is someone one consciously tries to be
like. One can decide to have a model. I cannot decide much of anything, but 1
am easily moved by what I come across. Geertz was an important person to have
come across. He was electricity generating words that issued in formulations
often mixed with irony and humor. One didn't know if the latter was a product of
his nervousness or his ability to stand aside from what he said. In any case, like
everything he uttered, his humor passed quickly. Geertz to me was not a person
but an image of the flow of words through a human body. It seems to me now
that I felt blocked. Words were there, but nothing came out. As a result I was a
mediocre student, always disappointing my teachers, who thought I should do
better. I had no method and did not know there was such a thing. Geertz, more
than anyone else I met as a student, showed me that words need not stay inside
the head even if one has no method. All you had to do was connect the parts of
your body with them. But you could not do that to yourself; it had to happen.
Watching Geertz, it seemed this happened in Indonesia. I still think so, and I still
go there.

JL: Was there anything beyond Geertz that drew you to anthropology?

JS: The humanities and history were less analytical than they are now, a matter of
culture as the proper, it seemed to me then. The social sciences in contrast were
characterized by a vitalizing optimism, particularly in relation to decolonializa-
tion and modernization. Anthropology even appeared to offer an alternative, in
the sense that it could replace religion and politics. This would be impossible
today.

JL: Could you say something about your graduate studies?

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JS: I went to Berkeley to do my graduate work. I read Christaan Snouck Hurgronje Interview:
on Aceh.' I was upset because he seemed able to know, and say everything about James Siegel
Aceh and still be a colonialist—that is, on the wrong side. This was the period of
decolonization. Those who understood were against colonialism. I did not under-
stand the difference between a moral sentiment and understanding. I wanted to
show that Snouck was wrong on both counts. If Geertz was important at all in that
regard, it was because he was brilliant and he was anticolonialist. The opposite
of Snouck in an important way. Once I sank into Aceh and began my fieldwork,
Geertz did not have much to say. But he was kind and helpful to me. He was
not on my thesis committee because he left Berkeley before I was ready for my
exams. He invited me to Chicago, where I spent a year on the Committee for New
Nations mainly trying to avoid abstractions about development and democracy
(due more to Edward Shils than to Geertz) that came with thinking about "mod-
• ernization" but seemed to me to be obstacles to engagement with place.

JL: The year 1965 was a transformative moment in Indonesia with the fall of
Sukarno and the rise of the dictator Suharto, as perhaps one million people were
massacred, most notably those accused of belonging to the Communist Party.
Suharto would rule Indonesia until 1998, when the effects of the Asian economic
crisis and demands for political reform forced him to resign. You conducted your
fieldwork just a few years before the killings, which no one had been able to pre-
dict. How did this affect you?

JS: I shared the optimism of the early 1960s by identification with Indonesians
engaged in doing what they did at that time. But I did not understand them, and
I did not know I did not understand them. I only knew I was for them. It was not
the ideas of the time as taught at the Committee for New Nations that was the
real obstacle for me. It was the exclusiveness of my identification. Had I myself
not confused the moral and the intellectual I would have advanced, but I did not
unravel the difference until I was forced to. That came in 1965 with the massacres
of those accused of communism and with the allegiance of my Acehnese friends
with the butchers. It seems simple now in retrospect, an innocent characteristic

1. Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) was an influential Dutch scholar most famous for his studies
of Aceh and Mecca. Because of his knowledge of Acehnese society and history, he became a key
advisor to the colonial regime of the Netherlands East Indies, helping crush resistance and impose
Dutch rule in Aceh in the early twentieth century.

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Public Culture of the young. But it was not simple, because without such identification with the
Acehnese I would have gotten nowhere at all, and it was not innocent, because
I had avoided thinking about murderous violence, plentiful enough in Acehnese
history up till the present. After that, I needed more than moral shock. I needed
another form of understanding to permit me to engage intellectually and to latch
on to people while showing me their necessarily uncertain status. The Vietnam
War duplicated the shock, as generations in the United States struggled against
each either in support or in opposition to the war. Most profoundly, it became
clear to me that if you follow the path of those you admire, it appears that it is as
likely as not that you will follow the path of murderers. For me there was no way
to conceptualize this.

JL: This was obviously a critical time. In analytical terms, it highlights your need
to break from an earlier form of anthropological engagement and hermeneutics.

JS: When I began reading about deconstruction in the late 1960s, it fused with
my experience and gave me a way to begin thinking. I had been hired as an
anthropologist at Cornell, which quite by chance became a center for the study
of Southeast Asia and deconstruction in literature. It helped immensely that I
learned about deconstruction not in the first place by reading Jacques Derrida but
by listening to friends at Cornell—Neil Hertz, Richard Klein, Piero Pucci—talk
about it between themselves. I had never heard such talk. I learned French over
again to read what they had read. Reading Derrida was so absorbing that it altered
my personal relations. It strengthened my friendships, but in some important
cases it led to conflict. It was the opposite trajectory of the one I describe above.
Teaching with these friends in departments such as classics also helped me learn
and develop a new way of thinking. But beyond that, those interested in Southeast
Asia and deconstruction had nothing to do with each other.

JL: We'll return to the question of deconstruction later. Before we go on, could
you please speak about Victor Turner, who was an earlier influence on your work?

JS: Victor Turner was my colleague the year I began teaching in 1965. Of course,
I read the famous essays on rites de passage (see, e.g.. Turner 1967), and like
everyone, I am sure, I was strongly impressed. The essays alone would have
done that, but it was also the times. Vic gave courses and seminars on the topic
that were attended by faculty from the literature departments and the universi-
ty's leading hippies. Talking about the Ndembu, it seemed as though he spoke

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about us. I think he felt that himself, though not for the same reason. He found in Interview:
liminality—the middle section of rites of passage where the initiand is stripped of James Siegel
social identity—a world of absolute autbority with meanings inverted. It seemed
fundamental, as though one could find moments when the social as constituted
had no prise, and at the same time the nature of the symbolic was revealed and
the social refounded. This wasn't archetypical, à la Carl Jung for instance. It was
rather that a moment of nondefinition was buih into social transition in tribal soci-
eties. At that instant, instead of alienation, instead of putting the social in ques-
tion, the social reasserted itself, but one bad to know how to understand it. Turner
was able to do so, because in his studies of micropolitics he of course became
familiar with the terms in which this politics was set.
The political and cultural disruption that came with the Vietnam War, the
awful break between cbildren and parents, took on tbe beginning of sense seen
tbrougb the Ndembu. Vic showed us ourselves in them. I thought this was just
what anthropology was meant to do. Vic was a wonderful person, full of words,
removed from involvement in the local politics of the university, his mind on other
things, and still au courant of it all. He was warmhearted, sensual, and impres-
sively intelligent. All the more impressive at that moment because he was not an
intellectual, not someone who thought that ideas ruled. It was impossible, in the
face of all that, to avoid his thinking.
The difficulty for me was that I had already done my fieldwork and made my
analysis and found nothing of the sort he spoke about. At tbe same time, I tbought
that not finding anything much like liminality and its phenomena was itself inter-
esting. When I reread Turner today I find it equally impressive but local. Tbe
life of tbe Ndembu now seems mostly of African importance. But I think Vic's
account of them should be studied carefully again, not because "we" are "them" in
the way that they were taken at the time, but because they still have the power to
raise the comparison. It is still necessary to resist them. Therefore, they still have
something to say. The problem would be not to find the cultural phenomenon of
their liminality in our "marginality" or pilgrimage, as Vic went on to do, but to
find the openings in culture where a crisis of culture occurs.
Vic's way of working—proceeding from close observation, the sort that comes
best with immersion, moving to strange sorts of connections in thinking and
culture—is what anthropology does best. I think that does not happen unless,
from the beginning, one takes tbe other seriously as having something one lacks.
The mistake at the time, it seems in retrospect, was to take the Ndembu capacity
for social regeneration as a universal. But if one took their seriousness as they
faced the dissolution of the social built into their society, one might well benefit.

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Public Culture There is no model for this in anthropology, but literature, of course, does this all
the time. It is encouraging to read, something I would not think of saying, it being
so obvious, if literature were not so easily put aside now.
Vic's way of proceeding was also that of Geertz. Geertz wrote The Religion of
Java (1960) to show what the generalizations about religion were based on. Like
Turner, he was sure that the statements of the people he spoke with added up. It is
not the case in my work, but it was initially. Assuming consistency and congru-
ence severely warped my first book. The Rope of God (Siegel 2000 [1969]), and
was one reason I overlooked the causes of the massacre that occurred a year after
I returned from Sumatra. On the other hand, I have retained Geertz's insistence
on the importance of words. He relied on paraphrase, however, and I like to have
the precise words in the original language. Geertz might have done the same had
handheld recorders been available in his epoch.

JL: But at the same time, discontinuity was already there in The Rope of God. The
book describes how people who think they understand each other actually do not,
yet still manage to live together. Rosalind Morris notes that even this book offered
a "radical alternative to hermeneutic models" (2007: 378).

JS: Roz is a brilliant thinker and an excellent reader of texts. I myself had not
formulated the contrast with hermeneutic models; I simply held on to what I had
seen and heard. I wish I had known Roz earlier.

JL: Could you say more about how you attempted to move beyond Geertz and
Turner?

JS: You cannot do what Turner and Geertz did unless you identify with the other,
unless you are interested in understanding the other and believe that what they
say is the truth. To do that kind of anthropology you need to be divided in two,
but that leaves you God knows where. If you choose their side, you end up where
they are; if you choose the other side, you break your connection with the source
of your understanding. This problem was what had led to my initial crisis.

JL: What was your choice?

JS: If you have a way to think not only who the other is but how otherness is
formed, how the fact of that identification is built into the very possibility of
speaking with them or speaking at all, then you have some way of thinking

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through it again. There is no solution or resolution, but it opens up new kinds of Interview:
questions. This was one step further for me. James Siegel

JL: You developed this perspective—an engagement with how otherness is formed,
rather than with meaning per se—as you followed Derrida's seminars in Paris for
fifteen years. This concern with and investment in deconstruction led you away
from anthropology toward critical theory and literature. For instance, you have
published only one article in an anthropology journal during your entire career.
Could you say something about how you understand the relationship between
anthropology and literature?

JS: Literature makes its own laws, and within those laws it shows us a world. In
my mind this is what we study. You have the right to make laws, and they hold
until you stop writing. When I go to Indonesia I sometimes feel like I am going
mad. They are normal; I, who might share their normality, am not. By definition,
normality integrates, whereas madness isolates. You learn from literature how to
deal with that. It is the possibility of putting yourself in the position of the reader
of fiction. But that comes about through a gradual habituation, not through formu-
lation. I am not by nature patient, but in Indonesia I nonetheless am.
The debates going on in literature today is what anthropology once was about.
A few years ago Samuel Weber asked me if, as an anthropologist, I could tell him
if it was necessary to separate the dead from the living. Is it necessary to bury
the dead? This is a question that anthropologists haven't asked since 1860. What
anthropology does now is sophisticated and local but does not speak beyond that
because it doesn't ask the questions that allow it do so. I think it is important to
work locally, but the questions that are critical, life and death first of all, are often
neglected. As I point out in my work on witchcraft (Siegel 2006), the focus on
structure is actually a way of avoiding these issues.

JL: Please say something about this in relation to your ongoing work in Aceh.

JS: I had begun a study of experiences of the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, but I had
not gone so far as to think that perhaps the effort that was put into putting the
dead into mass graves as soon as possible was anything but common sense. In
the tropics, decay and then disease come quickly. Of course they had to bury the
dead. Then, when I went back to the recordings I made of people who had gone
through the tsunami, I realized that, in fact, if one listened carefully, people were
speaking to the dead and were hearing them speak. Sometimes by mistake, at a

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Public Culture time when it was not evident (and it still isn't) who was alive and who was dead.
But sometimes not by mistake at all but by accepting the conditions of what they
thought to be total destruction. Religious conviction told them it was the end of
the world. But they avoided thinking about divine judgment and thought instead
about dealing with the world after the end. This allowed them to accept the dead
as part of their (non)existence. This is a very complicated subject, and I have
grossly simplified it.
I don't know where Sam Weber got his question from. But, of course, he is a fore-
most interpreter of Derrida, and that from a long time ago. In his mind it must have
challenged the necessity for logocentrism and its continuation—phallogocentrism.
Life is associated with voice. One breathes, one speaks, one extrudes something
from deep inside. The breathless cannot speak and might be dead. If one com-
municates with the dead—as often people do in trance in Indonesia via spirits—
it takes a substitute voice, one that comes through someone alive, but not speak-
ing in her everyday voice. If there were everyday communication with the dead,
as happened during and after the tsunami, the everyday voice would be avoided.
This happened without previously formed conventions or rituals. It will take me
some time to make these provisional conclusions convincing.

JL: Could you say something about this in relation to Derrida and deconstruction,
more generally.

JS: The first book of Derrida's I read. Of Grammatology (1976), shows speech is
thought to be an emanation of life. Therefore, it would be impossible for the dead
to speak or at least to speak in the manner of the living. But making this "impossi-
ble," Derrida showed, was a construction that ties language to structure. In a time
when dead and living are confused, in Aceh at least, people speak to the dead,
thinking they are speaking normally. To call it simply a "mistake" is a refusal to
admit the possibility of speech being separated from life. In Aceh, people were
imagining a world of the dead, thinking they themselves were dead, and in a cer-
tain way even saying "I am dead." I give you this necessarily compressed account
as an example of how, at a certain point, starting from simple observation, I have
been led to Derrida.
I say "starting from observation" all the while being well aware that there is
nothing simple in that beginning. I first realized its complexities when I read Sam
Weber's The Legend of Freud (1982). I knew that one could not recognize some-
thing one did not have the means to recognize, but I did not know the complica-
tions Sam outlines. To talk about matters such as death, one quickly comes to a

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point where observations are not replicable by others. I thought that anthropology Interview:
was then severely limited. I realized that I should simply do what I do—look James Siegel
carefully, then say carefully what I see (and especially hear), accepting that it is
necessarily provisional, that I too am part of history. Anthropology, to be what it
can be, can do this (and not only this). In that way we can raise again the questions
that began our discipline, such as the one Sam posed. It makes anthropology like
those other disciplines that rely on continual revision to be what they are. What's
left to us is to stimulate such revision in the first place by putting "the other" for-
ward, even if this other is itself a necessarily complicated idea.

JL: What does it mean to "put the other forward"?

JS: To put the other forward in ethnography means to think how the other is con-
structed in the places we study. One has to know the sociological distinctions that
compose a society. That goes without saying. But it is something else to see how
this other takes shape. It's at the boundaries that this question comes most clearly
into view. With the "mad"—the way that the mad come to be called that, the pos-
sibilities of communication with them, their usefulness—one asks, "Why are there
mad persons?" As Michel Foucault pointed out, at a certain moment the mad were
integrated into society, then they were separated. He showed how this was done
historically. It remains to ask the purpose that is served by having a class of people
with whom one is said to be unable to communicate and who are put aside. What
does it mean, in other words, to preserve a moment where one asserts that com-
munication is not possible and at the same time thinks the opposite?

JL: Is a deconstructive anthropology possible, in more general terms, considering

that anthropology can hardly exist without the human?

JS: There can't be anything by the name of "deconstructive anthropology" in

the way there might be, say, "psychoanalytic anthropology" The latter requires
a set of assumptions and even a method, the conclusions necessarily being set
in a particular vocabulary. Deconstruction is not a method and has presented no
ideas that one necessarily has to use. But it has a guiding question about origins—
their necessity and the impossibility of their firm establishment. Of course, one
does not have to speak about voice to engage in deconstruction. One can't say
what might appear in something that later might be called a "deconstructive
ethnography."

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Public Culture JL; In some quarters there is still a sense that deconstruction is apolitical or neo-
conservative, as for instance Jürgen Habermas once identified Derrida and Fou-
cault. How do you view the question of the political in relation to deconstruction?

JS: There are many ways to answer your question. Derrida did not aim at a par-
ticular political program. Rather, he opened the way for change in the broadest
sense. With deconstruction, nothing is left in place. Deconstruction gives us a
way to see political movements or moves that are not expressed in conventional
terms of a consistent political subject. Again, take for instance the reactions to the
tsunami in the midst of a rebellion against tbe Indonesian government. Some of
tbose struck thought they were dead; they tried to communicate with the corpses
in their midst and tried to join the dead once they were faced with Indonesian
soldiers. They did so out of the possibility of identifying witb tbe complete other
of their selves. (I use the pronoun they, but I do not want to imply tbat tbere was
a communality of reactions. There could not be when the conditions of social
life were practically all wiped out and people had to invent new forms.) At that
moment, they were able to evoke an identity that would have been tbought deliri-
ous in any other condition than the seemingly total devastation they found them-
selves in. They not only were in a lifeless landscape; they belonged there. In this
place, life and death were not mutually exclusive. I doubt tbat before Derrida we
could see such a reaction as anything else but the formation of "myth." But these
people put Derrida's succinct formulation "Tout autre est tout autre"—"All oth-
ers are other and all others are completely other"—to work. Later, with "recon-
struction," the government and the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] tried
to formulate the event quite differently. They depended on an idea of suffering
that demanded to be consolidated within ethnic and national terms, insisting on
identity as unified and exclusive, incorporating them in the old political order.
Yet the experience of the tsunami led in another direction. Something might still
come of it. Deconstruction lets us think tbrough such experiences without impos-
ing ideas similar to those of the government. Its value is to show us the political
where we would overlook it and to show what it depends on in places where we
are familiar with it. And when I say that "something might still come of it," I
want to stress that the condition at which it might come is that we don't know
what that "something" might be. Through relentless (or restless) questioning and
displacement, deconstruction destabilizes, shakes and is shaken, and in that sense
also it has a political force. But it is a force at odds with any idea of program and
programming, at odds with conventional politics in this sense. For Derrida, it is
precisely what escapes any form of teleological thinking (the kind of thinking

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that informs conventional political programs and calculations) that opens up the Interview:
future. The future in this sense, including the future of society and culture, can James Siegel
never be entirely foreseen or foregrounded, no more than the effects of a tsunami".

JL: The question of the political is of great importance in relation to perhaps your
key interlocutor throughout your career, Benedict Anderson, a fellow scholar of
Indonesia whom you worked with at Cornell. From what I understand, your book
Fetish, Recognition, Revolution is largely a response to his Imagined Communi-
ties (Siegel 1997; Anderson 1983), one of the most influential books in the social
sciences since its publication. Could you comment on this?

JS: I met Ben a few days after I arrived for the first time in Jakarta, in 1962. From
the first I knew he was someone whom I could not describe by using the word
talent. That word applies to those who have an aptitude for what they do, as if
they were suited to their work. Ben seems to me to understand so many things
in such different registers, the gap between himself and his objects of study (and
his talk, for that matter, always so agreeable and so penetrating), that one never
knows where his understanding comes from. It is not an "aptitude," a "talent," but
a surpassing of the person. He draws on a range of things that have nothing to do
with Indonesia at all, for instance, but that show us things we never had known
before about it. He has his way with languages—a genuine polyglot. Unlike other
polyglots I have known, he does not stop with mastery of a language. He learned
Javanese, Indonesian, a little Balinese, and I don't know what else, not because he
found similarities in these languages but because the differences between them
seemed to lead him on. He knew from the beginning in an untheoretical way that
understanding passes through language. How he came to know this, I don't know.
But it seems to me that he must have learned what is essential to him (and it is
an enormous amount) the way one learns from him—through apprenticeship,
by watching him do what he does, rather than by having him tell you how to go
about learning. This leaves the boundary of knowledge wide open. By contrast,
for me to reach that point takes skepticism about those who claim they know. (My
favorite word is but when it is not no, no doubt something I learned living here in
France.) Ben can be an excellent polemicist, but that is not how he goes about his
work. I, by contrast, am still angry with Snouck. Not Ben. He moves on.
At Cornell, we taught seminars together on Pramoedya Ananta Toer.^ His abil-

2. Toer (1925-2005), Indonesia's most celebrated writer and a leading social critic, was impris-
oned by the Dutch during the Sukarno era and for fourteen years during the Suharto era, during
which time his writings were banned.

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Public Culture ity to question a single word often was critical in understanding the stories. He
always picked out the telling passages and made me realize I had skipped some-
thing. I envy him his classical education and his ability to use it in ways that close
it off from view. I would have been jealous of him—we are the same age, and I
am ferocious as a brother—had I not benefited so much from him
As for Imagined Communities, I had not conceived Fetish, Recognition, Revo-
lution as an answer to him or even imagined it had a connection with his book.
His thesis, published as Java in a Time of Revolution (Anderson 1972), seemed to
me then and still now to have an importance that has been neglected. Ben showed,
in the face of George Kahin, his teacher and thesis director, that revolution had
to be considered by itself, apart from nationalism, as George had presented it in a
book that remains important (Kahin 1952). Ben carried this further in Imagined
Communities. Whereas in European history it is a truism that revolution led to
nationalism, revolution is put aside on the first page of Imagined Communities. In
contrast to the debates that preceded it, we can understand the rise of nationalism
without recourse to revolution. But there was revolutionary violence in Indone-
sia, a revolution that from a traditional point of view would have been said to be
uncompleted. I think this violence has its own roots outside nationalism—and Ben
in his introduction to Java in a Time of Revolution suggested as much. I think Ben
was right to do as he did, and I hope he still will do more on the subject.
My own book was not meant as an answer to Ben's. I had not formulated the
problem for myself when I wrote it. Rather, it came from looking at a relation of
literature to revolution in a place where literature had uncertain boundaries and
uncertain forms. It was popular literature, the work of amateurs, kitsch really.
Close to life, naive but accurate in describing its fears in the way of melodrama.
No heroes, but rather various bad guys. This is literature not set apart as such and
probably taken by its readers as a reflection of the world. In the case of Toer, [it is]
that literature that needed education to write. Not the well-known Buru Quartet
but the early stories written during or just after the revolution attracted me.3 Here
it is not revolutionary fighters or politicians that matter. Nor is it the culture of
Java. It is rather the pictures of remnants of the colonial world. These people, often
servants, are not heroes, but they are important, not for the fears they embody but
because they are not admirable; they show no resistance. They lead lives, for the

3. The Buru Quartet consists of the novels Child of All Nations, Footsteps, This Earth of Man-
kind, and House of Glass (Toer 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1997). Set during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the books describe the tensions and emergent nationalism of the late colonial
period. For an example of the early writings on the revolutionary period, see Toer 1978.

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most part, outside the dictates of nationalism or politics of any kind. But life wears Interview:
on them in ways that they do not always notice. The roots of revolution are shown James Siegel
not in conflict but in something previous to it that makes the clash that ensued
not more understandable but less so. Opposition is formulated in ideology, and
the formation of opposed identities does not take account of this. It has its effects
in the strange attempts at memorialization of that time. Today the celebration of
the revolution shows brave Indonesians but rarely the Dutch they are supposedly
confronting. A mystery, but solvable.

JL: This series of interviews is largely about scholarship as a process and a craft.
Could you consider your own work more explicitly in these terms?

JS: I start with looking and hearing. I take notes; I make comments; now I record
what I hear others say. The result does not add up. But the connections between
the fragments seem to me important. The words of those I meet convey more than
intentions. Out of that I try to make something. I do not present this as a model
for anyone. It depends where you go, for one thing. I spent a year in Jakarta in the
1980s futilely, because I could not find such connections. It was the result of life
in the capital under the rule of dictator and murderer (Suharto, of course). Life
there was dominated by denial and evasion practiced unselfconsciously. It was
important to me to see this even if I could not formulate it out of ethnographic
observation. Were I to have written an ethnography ofthat moment, it would con-
sist of my consistent failure to find out anything of importance. I should have done
that. I might have had something to say about how such blockage occurs. But I did
not have the heart. Instead, I wrote a book about the fear of revolution, based on
newspaper reports of criminals, for the most part (Siegel 1998). The lack of overt
resistance to Suharto until the end of his decades of rule meant that he simply fell
for causes to be found in the economy and in the limited politics of the army. I
could find no way to get under the deceptions embedded in daily life. But simply
to have seen them was important to me because it goes some way to explain how
a man responsible for the murder of, at the least, hundreds of thousands of his
co-citizens was never brought to trial for it and lived his life undisturbed till his
natural death. Of course, Indonesians were angry with him at the end, but it was
more for having stolen billions than for his lethal acts. I take it as an offense that
Suharto was let off and a warning not to let myself think I have a way to avoid the
omissions that mark my first work.
"Craft" implies a method that can be passed down. I can now, after a long
(but not long enough) time at work, find only a pattern. What I learn is stimu-

571
Public Culture lated by knowing persons. My transferential or identificatory relation to them has
been modified since 1965 by intellectual interests. When I begin anew, the series
repeats itself—thus a "process." But how does one start over? I feel, rather than
know, that I have made errors or important omissions. I want to make up for this,
not directly by revision, though that happens, particularly recently, but by feeling
pulled again to the same place—"Indonesia," where I can do better next time.
"Indonesia" by this time has become for me not only a political and geographical
location but any place where electricity surges through the body and words come
out. The less I interfere with the process, the more I can momentarily put aside
whatever frames a place in advance, the luckier I feel. But after that, the more
likely it is that I feel I misunderstood. Thanks to your question, I ask myself who
it is that tells me I have made a mistake. Perhaps it has to do with growing up in
a place where nothing ever happened, where authority therefore was not clearly
delineated as it needs to be when one deals with events. My father told me when I
was quite young that because of the Depression they had waited four years to have
a child. No doubt the person who writes is the one born in 1933 and the person
who regrets the one born four years later.
Insofar as I can now imagine, I see what made me do what I have done so far;
it all started with friends: Ben Anderson, Tim Bahti, Anne Berger, Claude Guil-
lot, Richard Klein, Phil Lewis, Neil Hertz, Michael Meeker, Roz Morris, Rudolf
Mrázek, Piero Pucci, Sandra Siegel, Sam Weber. And others as well. To say how
would fill the entire journal. I have not seen enough of these people.

JL: This is a good place to end. We should end here.

References

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Barker, Joshua, and Vicente Rafael. 2012. "The Event of Otherness: An Interview
with James T. Siegel." Indonesia no. 93: 33-52.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published
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Geertz, Clifford. 1960. The Religion of Java. New York: Free Press.

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Kahin, George. 1952. Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cor- Interview:
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