[Linganth] Patricia Spyer's book, Orphaned Landscapes

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Karen Strassler asks Patricia Spyer questions about her book, Orphaned
Landscapes.

You can find the interview here:

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana



Press blurb: Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998,
huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on
walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where
conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the
extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to
seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by
Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the
aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and
recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European
Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the
country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate
relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the
Christian god.

Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion,
masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad
ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video
CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation
drawings. *Orphaned Landscapes* theorizes the production of monumental
street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in
which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic
forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers
a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the
work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical
change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art
or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an
attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying
effects in the world.
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