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PROLEGOMENON
Subjects as motion
[T]he best images and parables should speak of time and becoming:
they should be a eulogy and a justification of all transitoriness.
(Nietzsche 1969, 111)
It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and pull in both
directions at once. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a
determinable sense of direction; but paradox is the affirmation of both
senses or directions at the same time.
(Deleuze 2001, 3)
Guntur was a 25-year-old single man I befriended in the late 1990s in the
town of Probolinggo, a beautiful and serene coastal small town in the province
of East Java. As was the case with most town residents, Guntur was a fl uent
speaker of both the Javanese and Madurese languages. He had acquired these
languages from his father, a retired civil servant who had come to Probolinggo
from Surakarta in Central Java some thirty years before to take up a post in
the local branch of the Department of Agriculture, and from his mother, a
Madurese vegetable seller originally from the market town of Pamekasan in
the adjacent island of Madura.
Guntur’s parents’ life stories are typical of many of the town’s inhabitants.
Their biographies as well those of many others are marked by migration, the
movement away from their places of origin, commonly located in other parts
of Java and in Madura, and centre on a conjunction, a coming together that
is best conveyed in the emphasis people place on fi nding a job and a spouse,
having children and prospering in the small town of Probolinggo.
At home, Guntur’s Javanese side was actively cultivated by his father, an avid
exegete of Javanese ‘custom’. He schooled all of his four children in Javanese
language, teaching them its low- and middle-level speech levels, and passed
on to them his enthusiasm for puppet-theatre performances (wayang kulit,
Ind.). Despite being unable to follow the high-level speech employed in such
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xiv BECOMING
performances, Guntur, who was a student of economics in the local university,
used to spend his Saturday evenings in the company of university friends
watching televised puppet-theatre performances together and talking about
them with much enthusiasm. I would often join this company and get drawn
into the adventures of the characters discussed, especially those of Arjuna that
held so much fascination for my interlocutors. The friends’ approach to puppet
theatre, its characters, and performances is indicative of wider engagements
with the art form carried out by locals and anthropologists of Java alike.
According to such engagements, wayang kulit exemplifi es all that the category
of ‘Java’ is about. This ‘Java’ Guntur and his friends would often describe
as being bound with the quality of halus (Ind.), a dispositional and affective
capacity for acting with eloquence, refi nement, humility and circumspection
towards others with which the Javanese are held to be endowed.
At the same time, Guntur had a discernible Madurese side to him which
his relationship with his mother supported and sustained. Despite speaking
Javanese to his father at home, he, his mother and siblings would converse
in Madurese, deploying the lower speech level deemed appropriate for such
intimate relations, it being only one they commanded. In addition, Guntur
would often use low Madurese with some of his neighbours – while engaging
with others in Javanese – as well as with the traders, both male and female,
in Probolinggo’s central market where his mother was making a living as a
vegetable seller and where he acted as her trusted assistant. The employment
of low Madurese in the market context as the instantiation of Guntur’s
Madurese side was accompanied by his movement and speech acquiring a
certain assertiveness, forcefulness and even combativeness that turned his
dealings with the other traders into an event with visible losers and winners.
Bargaining hard over prices, a common practice in which Guntur excelled, was
accompanied by humour and joking, often crass, obtuse and fi lled with sexual
innuendo, which traders enjoyed participating in often at the expense of one
another. Gundur’s habitual style in the market involved the deployment of a
series of distinct dispositions and affects which are locally qualifi ed as kasar
(Ind.); that is, coarse, unrefi ned, boastful and fi erce. Such affects and manners
of orientation are closely associated across Java with the category of ‘Madura’
and with the people that inhabit this arid island located just off the eastern
coast of Java and across a narrow strait.
Condensed in these recollections of Guntur as an actor embedded in
relationships and moving transversally across varied contexts and situations
is the key theme this book addresses: namely what are we as anthropologists,
social scientists or humanities scholars to make of people like Guntur who,
rather than being endowed with a given, singular identity, are differentially
actualized and constituted as a result of the relationships in which they
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xv
participate? Somewhat differently put, the central question this book raises
and seeks to answer is how are we to conceive of individuals such as Guntur
who, despite their obvious givenness due to being veritably produced out of
specifi c relationships such as those of fi liation, friendship and trading, move
(and are moved) in opposite directions, avoiding mere repetition and affi rming
difference?
Guntur’s capacity for actualizing both the categories of ‘Java’ and ‘Madura’
in the modes of his behaviour and with regards to specifi c relations pose
considerable challenges to our thinking of the person as an individual endowed
with an identity. The becoming-Javanese and becoming-Madurese that
Guntur participates in are marked by an indifference towards the assertion and
achievement of ‘identity’ and instead foreground personhood as entangled in a
process of endless transformation. The subject these becomings enunciate is thus
transitive and more akin to a verb rather than a noun, closer to the unfolding of
a process than to the manifestation of an essence. This is so for Guntur’s person
is motivated neither by choice nor by interest. Both choice and interest involve
the positing of the subject as determined in advance and with a priori knowledge
of who he/she is. For such a subject, social relations are assumed to be exterior
and of secondary importance as it is taken to correspond, fi rst and foremost, to
pure, disembodied consciousness. In contrast, Guntur is a self-differing person
in the sense that the process he is involves movement in opposite directions
with his becoming-refi ned implicating his becoming-coarse. Such a person
I call diaphoron, for it is constituted on the grounds of an irreducible difference
that animates and motivates it. The diaphoron person is devoid of unity either
dialectically or transcendentally achieved for it is always in motion and already
a becoming. As becoming it differs constantly from itself.
Guntur is halus now, kasar before; Javanese tomorrow; Madurese yesterday.
To the extent that we differ constantly from ourselves, difference assumes a
positive form of relationality that cannot be negatively defi ned as the lack of
self-similarity without letting difference’s ontological and sociological potential
slip like water through our hands. This potential is more productively taken
hold of and realized when we take difference as guiding the relationship
articulated between becomings. For Guntur, the becoming-refi ned and
becoming-coarse can indeed be grasped as exclusive alternatives – Guntur is
either Javanese or Madurese, this person is either man or a woman, this woman
is either a wife or a sister. However, this is a conceptualization imposed on us
by thinking in terms of individuals as singular and of identities as given. The
end result is for identity to be seen as original and difference as derivative; for
relationships to become exterior and secondary, while self-identical individuals
are taken as primary. But if we are to do justice to ethnographic encounters
and the surprises they entail, which constantly throw us off balance in the
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xvi BECOMING
fi eld, if we are to situate ourselves in precisely those moments of surprise and
wonder and seek to recover and seize on feeling off-balance for the purpose
of anthropological analysis, then ethnographic descriptions can be neither
straightforward nor retain an aura of persuasiveness rooted in the evocation
of the familiar and the common.
What this book aims to achieve is to do justice to my ethnographic
encounters with Guntur and the people of Probolinggo that unfolded during
18 months of fi eldwork from October 1998 to March 2000, as well as during
subsequent visits to the area, the more recent in the summer of 2010. Such an
endeavour demands that Western metaphysics are bracketed and the positing
of the individual as an autonomous, self-identical, indivisible and naturally
given entity is interrogated as a fi gure that has been produced (and is still
being produced) by at least two centuries of religious disenchantment, labour
alienation, democratic representation, and biomedical organicism. There is no
reason, however, to repeat here the uncomfortable and counterintuitive lessons
Nietzsche’s (1967, 1969) and Foucault’s (1973, 1979) genealogical readings of
Western science, philosophy, and morality have taught us.1 There is equally
no reason for going over the signifi cant contributions of Mauss (1985) and
Dumont (1986), which have shown us from a different perspective and with
unparalleled insight the culturally peculiar and historically contingent status of
the self-identical and self-interested individual in the record of human diversity.
The Industrial Revolution, the capitalist defi nition of goods as commodities
and of markets as a separate domain of social action, taken together with
the ideals of the European Enlightenment have had a profound infl uence on
the way we understand the person. Conceived as an individual, this way of
understanding the person corresponds to a key presupposition that critical
1 In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche laments the fateful accidents that grammar
introduces to thought: ‘only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental
errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as
conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject”, can it appear otherwise’
(1967, 45). The overcoming of language necessitates for Nietzsche a strategy that is best
exemplified in his concept of eternal recurrence. If the putative givenness of the subject
is rooted in the misrecognition of an effect of forces as the ultimate cause, then, he
asserts, the willing affirmation and enthusiastic embracing of the subject as an effect
opens up and activates a new figure. This new figure that Nietzsche calls the over-man
is not so much a negation of the human as we know it but a reconceptualization of it as
a becoming, an effected ‘entity’ that is capable of acting only on condition of this very
affirmation. Both Foucault’s conception of the subject as discursively produced and to
anticipate what follows, Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming form further elaborations of
Nietzsche’s critical insights. For a short summary of the convergences and divergences of
the work of these philosophers, see Colebrook (1999).
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xvii
scholarship has elicited as foundational to Western metaphysics. This and
other unnatural givens, such as the culture–nature, subject–object, modern–
traditional, individual–society distinctions, require no further explication as
to their pervasiveness in the West (Latour 1993; M. Strathern 1988; Viveiros
de Castro 1998). What requires rehearsing, however, is ‘becoming’ and its
own modality of producing the given. Lest I am accused of drawing too
rigid a distinction between the West and Java, let me try to loosen it with an
amusing example that will throw further light into the relation that becoming
privileges.
Lewis Carroll’s (2006) heroine, Alice, follows a white rabbit down a rabbit
hole and fi nds herself in Wonderland, a place in which nothing is as it seems.
Here not only are animals capable of language and suckling babies turn out
to be pigs – these ideas are, after all, well known to anthropologists working in
Southeast Asia as well as beyond – but the magic contained in cakes, potions
and mushrooms allows Alice for the fi rst time to experience and undergo
profound transformations with her size shooting up and down ‘like a telescope’,
shrinking to ten inches short and growing into the dimensions of a full-blown
house, and vice versa.
Alice is Gilles Deleuze’s favourite heroine, too. In The Logic of Sense (2001),
Deleuze uses Carroll’s books as an opening to his exploration of the makings
and un-makings of sense and non-sense. What Alice’s adventures amount to,
according to the French philosopher, is the foregrounding of becoming as an
unlimited, infi nite process that the virtual place called Wonderland privileges,
calling for the liberation of difference from its subordination to identity as
prior and given. This is how Deleuze ‘reads’ Alice:
All these reversals as they appear in infi nite identity have one consequence: the
contesting of Alice’s personal identity and the loss of her proper name. The
loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout Alice
adventures. For the proper or singular name is guaranteed by the permanence
of savoir. The latter is embodied in general names designating pauses and rests,
in substantives and adjectives, … But when substantives and adjectives begin to
dissolve, when names … are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and
slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world,
and God. (2001, 5; italics in the original)
In Wonderland, Alice’s identity/size is subject to fl uctuation and reversal; she
is becoming smaller than she is now and is bound to become larger later. She is
certainly not larger and smaller at the same time; her becoming is a differential
relation that unfolds through her moving and pulling in two directions at
once with her size eluding both stability and the present. Alice is precisely a
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xviii BECOMING
diaphoron person, a self-differing person as she does not grow without shrinking
and does not shrink without growing. Her size in any given moment does not
correspond to a prior or original identity, rather is only a pause and a rest;
such pauses and rests are derivative of the transitive process that her unending
becoming amounts to.
What Carroll and Deleuze invite us to ponder is Alice-as-becoming. Such
becoming is the person, a person that constantly differs from itself. At the same
time, they insist on seeing Alice’s proper name, i.e. her identity, as a secondary
principle produced by the unfolding of difference. In this regard, Alice’s
becoming is best conceived as a relation between reciprocally presupposed differentials.
Let me explain: in this scheme, ‘small’ is not the opposite of ‘large’ and ‘large’
does not amount to the negation of ‘small’; difference is not conceived as a
relation between two terms each of which is endowed with a prior identity.
Rather, difference is the ontological ground of unlimited becoming and the
means by which the empirical diversity of sizes, forms and identities is given.2
The inversion of the order of priority of difference and identity effected
in this way is complemented by Deleuze’s reworking of what appear to be
oppositional terms and contradictory phenomena into immanent dimensions
of becoming; that is, equally necessary and mutually implicated aspects of a
single process with one term ‘always concealed by the other, yet continuously
coming to the aid of, or subsisting under, the other’ (2001, 4). Alice’s operation
‘like a telescope’ offers no better image of the dynamic co-implication of small
and large as her larger size subsists under and inheres in her smaller frame,
and vice versa.
As the unfolding of a process, becoming is, for Deleuze, synonymous with
two operations: as well as constantly working towards the disaggregation,
or deterritorialization if you prefer, of any given form Alice takes, causing
2 Becoming is a difference-driven process ‘by which the given is given’ (Deleuze 1994,
222). The given, Deleuze tells us in Difference and Repetition (1994) must be understood
as a secondary operation under which difference is pressed into temporary forms and
multiplicity is translated into singularity. His philosophy thus rests on a consideration
of the morphogenetic processes that create individuated forms out of differential
multiplicities. These processes, which are both unstable and reversible, are discussed on
the basis of a tripartite ontological scheme that posits three closely interrelated planes:
the virtual, the intensive, and the extensive. By means of the mediation of the intensive,
the multiplicities that organize the virtual become actualized in the extensive as the
distinctive and singular forms we take for granted. At the same time, however, a reverse
process is always in operation which acts to disaggregate and detotalize what is already
given before a new cycle of formation/production takes hold. The political implications
of these notions are worked out in the two volumes of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia
project, Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (2004), that Gilles Deleuze co-wrote
with Félix Guattari.
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xix
her to be swept and carried away, reeling her into different shapes, it also
passes through all of these shapes while connecting them disjunctively, i.e.
through affi rming their difference. Becoming is therefore nothing more, and
nothing less, than a specifi c kind of relation, a particular mode of relating
differentials; it is, in other words, ‘a positive principle of relationality, meaning
both disjunction and connection … rather than a merely negative want of
similarity’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009, 245.) Small and large are thus not only
reciprocally presupposed as immanent dimensions of a process but are also
intrinsically connected to each other through their processual unfolding. The
relation becoming privileges therefore amounts to a disjunctive synthesis or a
pairing of two terms with each term providing the context and the ground of
the other. As such, becoming is not to be confl ated with the Hegelian dialectic
that operates by synthesizing two opposing terms into a higher or superior
unity, itself accomplished by the positing of a third term which manages to
contain and thus overcome the earlier opposition. Indeed, Deleuze (1994)
explicitly denounces the dialectic as subordinating difference to identity,
process to stasis, and becoming to being. Alice by contrast forces us to take her
self-differing seriously and without recourse to a superior unity invites us to see
difference at the very heart of being as infi nite becoming.
In a way, all that the current book is about is already here: the becoming-
Javanese and becoming-Madurese of Guntur are running in parallel with the
becoming-smaller and the becoming-larger of Alice. In both cases, the person
is a becoming and thus differentially actualized in accordance to the contexts
and relationships in which it is embedded. Immanent in these actualizations
are two sides, each of which subsists under and inheres in the other even as
one side is concealed and hidden from view in favour of the other which in
the course of events comes to be revealed and made known. The categories
‘Javanese’ and ‘Madurese’, ‘small’ and ‘large’, thus do not amount to exclusive
alternatives but to mutually implicated lines of movement, the trajectories
traced by the person as it unfolds and is unfolded. This person I refer to as the
diaphoron person.
The diaphoron person is elusive due to the multiplicity of the shapes it assumes,
yet its presence is both defi nite and distinctive. Its transitive temperament,
due mainly to the never-ending processes of transformation it participates
in as an effect is coupled with it being veritably agentive. Both this and that,
the diaphoron person resists the assignation of cross-contextual and atemporal
identity, for it is an assemblage made of differentiated parts. Such parts are
often coded in Java as differential dispositions, affects and capacities. Made
up of and moving towards both Java and Madura, the past and the future,
the feminine and the masculine, the higher and the lower, the human and the
non-human, alternately and successively, the person I wish to designate as such
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xx BECOMING
is conditioned by a fundamental, irreducible difference – i.e. made up by an
internal alterity – which, as we shall see shortly, furnishes the very grounds of
its sociality.
In this book, the diaphoron person is a fi gure of thought through which I am
attempting to explore the uncommon conditions of possibility of the person.
In this thought experiment, the fi gure of the diaphoron person is emergent,
evolving out of my involvement in long-term fi eldwork in the East Javanese
town of Probolinggo and of my wonder and constant baffl ement regarding
the events, relationships, and activities I saw people there engaged in. The
diaphoron person also bears the implications of my own participation in such
events, relationships and activities as a relatively young and unmarried male
researcher, who conducted the majority of his research while residing in a small
Islamic boarding school in the town’s periphery. The concept of becoming
that I explore here is hence intrinsically related to my own experiences during
fi eldwork. These I have narrated elsewhere (Retsikas 2008) as involving a
process of becoming a moral Muslim subject despite having not converted to
Islam. In a sense then, my own trajectory is echoed here in the very descriptions
and concepts I am advancing and employing to render my interlocutors’
personhood communicable to an audience unfamiliar with Java. At the same
time, the fi gure of the diaphoron person is also embedded within a set of views
provided by the library, having grown out of subsequent engagement with
anthropological and non-anthropological literatures. As such, the diaphoron
person is also a product of scholarly imagination, the parameters and overall
problems of which are not to be confl ated with those of my informants.
Within my shifting back and forth between personal experiences, scholarly
commitments, and what properly belongs to my fi eldwork friends, neighbours
and acquaintances is the very necessary and inescapable analytical movement
of any ethnographic monograph as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements.
This book is therefore not only about the diaphoron person but is diaphoron
itself.
Becoming
It is perhaps impossible to write about Java, or Indonesia for that matter, without
having to come to terms with Geertz’s monumental work on the subject. This
is due to Geertz’s unparalleled infl uence on the ethnography of the area but
also because it is often the case that people in Java seem only too ready to
explicate themselves to foreign tourists and anthropologists alike through the
very same categories and conceptual connections that Geertz established as
paradigmatic. While his tripartite division of the Javanese religious landscape is
well known and widely accepted by many educated Javanese, every student of
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxi
anthropology at one point or another has had to cut his/her teeth by engaging
with Geertz’s classic essay ‘From the Native’s Point View’ (1993). While the
text is often taught as a critical response to the Malinowskian privileging of
empathy as the very basis of anthropological knowledge, it is more directly
concerned with elucidating alternative conceptions of the person to the
Western one.
In his unique writing style and highly relativistic manner, Geertz’s starting
point is:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less
integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness,
emotion, judgment, and action organised into a distinctive whole and set
contrastively both against other such wholes and against the social and natural
background, is, however, incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea
within the context of the world’s cultures. (1993, 59)
To this odd conception that foregrounds uniqueness in an era of mass
production Geertz counter-opposes a triadic set consisting of Javanese,
Balinese and Moroccan conceptions of the person that differ markedly and
dramatically both from one another and from the Western one. While the
Moroccan way of conceiving persons grounds them in relational contexts
and proceeds by way of arranging them in a series of nested categories, one
more inclusive than the other, and the Balinese seem to view the person as
an de-individuated performer in a theatre of status distinctions in which very
exact positions are statically fi lled by subsequent generations, the Javanese view
of the person revolves around two sets of contrasts that fi nding no resolution
or integration into a higher order result in ‘a bifurcate conception of the self ’
(1993, 61).
While Moroccans and Balinese in their different ways go about insisting
that the person is social in the sense of being always already enmeshed in
social relations, Geertz suggests the Javanese divide the person up by means
of a two-fold partition. No longer an undifferentiated whole, the person is
conceived as split in four. These partitions Geertz relates interpretatively both
to the conceptual division between the ‘inside’ (batin, Ind.) and the ‘outside’
(lahir, Ind.), the emotional life of the human person versus his/her outward
behaviour, and to the distinction between the ‘refi ned’ (halus) and ‘vulgar’
(kasar). The relationships between the two divisions are quite complex and
can be summarized as follows. Batin and lahir correspond not only to highly
autonomous, separate and independent realms of the person but are also
thought of as in need ‘to be put in proper order independently’ (1993, 61). In this
connection, the second pair comes into play with the goal being to avoid acting
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xxii BECOMING
with vulgarity and coarseness, striving instead towards achieving refi nement,
subtlety and smoothness both inwardly and outwardly. The primary means
for accomplishing this coveted goal involve fi rstly, the undertaking of religious
regimes of asceticism that smooth one’s batin and secondly, the regularization
of lahir through conforming to social rules of etiquette. However effective
the ordering of batin and lahir is, the person remains nevertheless the locus
of dissonance as the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can be neither
surmounted nor displaced. Thus Geertz concludes that for the Javanese
An inner world of stilled emotion and an outer world of shaped behaviour confront
one another as sharply distinguished realms unto themselves, any particular
person being but the momentary locus, so to speak, of that confrontation, a
passing expression of their permanent existence, their permanent separation,
and their permanent need to be kept in their own order. (Geertz 1993, 61)
Geertz’s analysis of Javanese ontology – this is the term he himself uses – as
premised on split subjects and foundational divisions is carried forwards in
this book by the concept of the diaphoron person. The diaphoron person, I have
already argued, is to be understood not as the site and source of a pre-given
identity but as an unstable and shifting subject permeated by and constituted
by means of difference, a self-differing person that assumes a multiplicity of
forms which correspond to the pauses and rests of unlimited becoming. If this
carrying forward exercise is to take effect, however, both Geertz’s interpretative
style of analysis that coheres around the cross-cultural translation of concepts as
the differential representations of an objectively given and shared world and his
emphasis on anchoring such representations to a sole theme – theatre in Bali,
nisba in Morocco, dissonance in Java – need to be approached with caution. For
what we are dealing with here is certainly not representations or worldviews but
presuppositions and assumptions that belong to worlds that are differentially
constituted and lived.3 In order for us to better grasp these disparate worlds, it
is not enough to simply emphasize different concepts. We have to rethink and
reconceptualize difference itself, inclusive of culture difference. To this end, it is
also necessary to avoid reducing the complexities of what we encounter in the
fi eld to a few principles, themes or foundations that act as metonyms for what
is veritably a much more open and undetermined fi eld.
3 As Viveiros de Castro puts it, ‘the problem is not that Amazonians and Euro-Americans
give different names to (or have different representations of) the same things; the problem
is that we and they are not talking about the same things’ (2009, 241). On the limits of
cross-cultural translation, see also Retsikas (2010a).
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxiii
While the present book makes no claims regarding the fi rst task, i.e. the
reconceptualization of culture difference, it nevertheless aims to show that
the diaphoron person is not simply the result of the operation of two sets of
‘contrasts’ but a fi gure one runs into in a manifold of social plateaus. As such,
it is neither simply anchored in nor merely reducible to a determinable and
knowable set of factors, themes, or causes. Instead the diaphoron person will be
shown in this book to proliferate acentrically in all kinds of directions and to
thrive in a plurality of local ideas and practices that in turn have to do with
what we conventionally call ethnicity, kinship, religion, sorcery and place. In
addition to having two sides, one of which is eclipsed and the other revealed
as a result of particular encounters and relations, the diaphoron person is also
a multiplicity, containing within itself an assorted set of differences, with its
form changing every time it crosses over and moves from one plateau into
another.
In the plateau of ethnicity, the diaphoron person of East Java is stabilized as
an assemblage of Madurese and Javanese parts. These parts are themselves
related to the halus–kasar hierarchical distinction Geertz mentions above. The
distribution of such parts among the current inhabitants of Probolinggo is
intrinsically related to the demographic history of this part of Java – discussed
in Chapter 1 – that during the nineteenth century saw large numbers of
Javanese and Madurese migrating into, taking up residence in and making
a living out of its resources that related principally to land and its products.
Subsequent intensive processes of inter-ethnic marriage and of spatial
intermingling in ethnically mixed neighbourhoods along with extensive and
widespread patterns of exchange of food, prayers, and ancestors among the
migrants and their descendants have contributed towards the self-identifi cation
of today’s inhabitants as ‘mixed people’ (orang campuran, Ind.), i.e. as a people
who are disjunctively connected both to ‘Java’ and to ‘Madura’. Among the key
contentions of this book, set out in Chapter 2, is the argument that this mixing
has neither cancelled out nor displaced the distinction between Javanese and
Madurese but has worked so as to foreground difference as constitutive of
the experience of locals’ sense of self. To be mixed, in other words, does not
amount to the superseding of the hierarchy that marks the relation between
the categories of ‘Java’ and ‘Madura’ and the people these categories are
associated with. Quite the contrary is true. As I have shown before (2007b) and
argue again here, ethnic difference is re-inscribed from a new and innovative
point of view, that of mixed people that strive to portray themselves as the
occupants of the apex of hierarchical pyramid in their capacity to act both in
Madurese and Javanese ways and manners.
In the plateau of sorcery, the elements that make up the diaphoron person
change and involve the unstable assembly of masculine and feminine capacities
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xxiv BECOMING
and affects therein. As every ethnographer of Java knows only too well, sorcery
is a pervasive and constant concern among the peoples of this most densely
populated island. In general, sorcery is intrinsically connected with acute
anxieties and fears regarding the true intentions and feelings of signifi cant
others and intimates that includes ones’ kin, neighbours, friends and work
colleagues. The book’s excursion into sorcery ideas and practices undertaken
in Chapter 6 is carried out with the explicit aim of showing that the person
is locally understood as an internally differentiated being also with respect
to gender. In all respects and purposes, it is conceived as an androgynous
entity that becomes singularly male or female in view of the specifi c relations
it enters, voluntarily or not. In the case of sorcery, as in the case of ethnicity –
remember the example of Guntur – what we often take to be formally
opposed characteristics (male and female) are locally conceived as reciprocally
implicated and presupposed terms, with masculinity held to subsist under and
inhere in femininity. The internal gender difference that makes up the person
along with its transformability from male to female, and vice versa, is the very
ground on which sorcerers conduct their business. Their techniques are thus
uniquely designed to use both such gendered difference and such becoming
for their own and their client’s advantage through the delivery of misfortune,
pain and death to their intended victim whose gender, in the course of sorcery
rites, is made to change from male to female; that is, from relatively closed and
invulnerable to relatively open, porous, and susceptible to attack.
Quite paradoxically, sorcery’s effi cacy, I argue, stems partly from the
evocation of weddings and marriage transactions as the fee the sorcerer’s
client submits to the sorcerer is construed as mahar (Ind.; mahr in Arabic; also
referred to as mas kawin), an essential part of the validity of any marriage
contract according to Islam that both Madurese and Javanese profess in their
vast majority. The practice of mahar corresponds to the zone of indiscernibility
as far as the differences that organize the plateaus of sorcery and kinship are
concerned. Mahar is the threshold, the door that leads from sorcery to kinship
and back; it is their intersection, the borderline on which the differences that
make them up meet, communicate and cross over; it is the thread that ties such
differences and plateaus together.
In distinct Southeast Asian fashion, persons in Probolinggo are conceived
in sibling terms. Indeed, one of the three most important questions any
newcomer in the area is asked to provide information about is how many
siblings one has – the other two being where does one come from and whether
he/she is married. The right way to answer this question is to include oneself
in the counting, that is to render oneself as part of a set (of two, three, four, etc.)
siblings and often to designate one’s precise position in the set in terms of birth
order, i.e. fi rst, second, third, etc. The conception of person as part of a set,
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxv
I argue in Chapter 3, presents a number of interesting features. Firstly, the
emphasis placed on the set is strongly associated with the identitarian union
of siblings who are thought of as being and acting as one, in accord with
reference to similarly constituted sets. Sibling unity is best exemplifi ed and
actively cultivated by the siblings’ sharing a common set of progenitors, a
common dwelling and a hearth, having access to a commonly held property
that is yet to be allocated, etc. (see Carsten 1997; Errington 1987; Freeman
1970). Indeed, locals of Probolinggo place great emphasis on both the values
of solidarity and co-operation that are said to permeate sibling relations and
on the feelings of love and care that animate and motivate such values. At the
same time, however, such a set is unequivocally conceptualized as dividable,
with the operation of the incest taboo ensuring the parting of the members
of the set. This divisibility, which is fully actualized with marriage and the
distribution of the parents’ property between the parties involved according a
variety of rules and preferences, corresponds to a latent presence that always
and already ‘haunts’ the unity of the set. Indeed, in Probolinggo as well as in
numerous other societies in the Indonesian archipelago birth order more than
gender arranges the set of siblings according to precise relations permeated
by hierarchy, and thus, by difference. The singularity that sibling sets form,
in other words, is both contingent and unstable for it is subject to processes
of dissolution and separation the fi rst effected by marriage and the second
by means of the internal relations of hierarchical difference that regulate
behaviours between birth order juniors and seniors. It goes without saying that
such behaviours are equally elaborated in Java as involving the demonstration
of respect and deference younger siblings owe older ones, and the duty of care
and personal sacrifi ce even that elder siblings owe their younger brothers and
sisters.
In Chapters 3 and 4, I refl ect on the very important literature on kinship
in island Southeast Asia. Taking inspiration from Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the
House (1988), I argue that sibling sets instantiate the diaphoron person in the
plateau of kinship. The person the set so designates is pure becoming for two
reasons. The fi rst relates to what has been said above, i.e. the entanglement
of the processes of singularity formation and hierarchical separation and
dissolution that constantly evoke each other forth, corresponding to two sides
of the same phenomenon. Such processes are never ending as each particular
sibling set is but a momentary pause and rest of all those sets preceding it and
fl owing from it, a point that Errington eloquently conveys in observing that
‘relationship terminology [in Southeast Asian islands] arranges people into
[past, present, and future] layers of siblings’ (1987, 409).
The second reason for siblingship realizing the diaphoron person is that it
amounts to a very particular, very special topos as it connects affi nity with
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xxvi BECOMING
descent, and vice versa. The way this is achieved involves both mythology and
ritual praxis. In common with several other Southeast Asian island societies,
Javanese mythological accounts of the world’s founding tell of the story of
the very strong attraction between a heavenly pair of brother and sister, of
their forced separation, and of the gift of rice agriculture that the sister made
to humanity. The myth, I argue, forms the background for the conduct of
wedding rituals which are dedicated to fashioning the bride and the groom
into younger sister and elder brother respectively, something that is both
refl ected and enforced by the deployment of the relevant kinship terminology
that remains in place at least until the fi rst offspring arrives. Condensed in
the relationship of siblingship, therefore, is an alternative conceptualization
of the social that previous anthropologists working in the region have done
well to emphasize though not fully explore. This alternative conceptualization
my argument is gives primacy neither to the doctrine of descent as vertical
encompassment nor to the principle of alliance as reciprocal recognition.
What the conceptualization of the social in terms of siblingship does is to
highlight the links that connect descent to affi nity and the processes of their
mutual convertibility. More than anything else, siblingship brings attention
to the becomings which persons must undergo as a precondition for the
achievement of reproduction, fertility, abundance, profusion, excess and life
itself. To the extent that siblingship is synonymous with the attainment of
abundance, abundance is contingent on the person being seen from the outset
and forever as a member of a divisible set and/or part of a dissoluble pair. The
referential capacity of this pair is not limited to relations pertaining among the
offspring of a couple but in a distinct fashion encompasses the relations that
organize and make up the couple itself.
The becomings that the incest taboo and siblingship set in motion do not
exhaust local conceptualizations of the person however ‘constraining’ and
specifi c they might be for every anthropologist working on island Southeast
Asia. The unstable assemblages of discrete and hierarchical parts that sibling
pairs form are supplemented – in the double sense of the term as addition
and displacement (see Strathern 1999, 238) – by other, equally contingent
assemblages one readily encounters in the plateau of religious devotion. Much
has been written about the place and relevance of asceticism in Java. The
works of Anderson (1990) and Keeler (1987) have done much to illuminate
both the links that the Javanese establish between religious asceticism and
power, on the one hand, and between abstinence and selfhood, on the other.
In particular, Keeler’s argument about the Javanese ideal of selfhood is
highly pertinent for my purposes. Keeler shows how the Javanese sense of
self revolves around the vagaries, risks and dangers everyday encounters
entail, on the one hand, and, on the other, the promises of unsurpassable
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxvii
self-assuredness, safety and ascendancy that asceticism is credited with
bringing about. Asceticism, he writes, ‘is a kind of reaction to the vulnerability
people sense in encounter’ (1987, 49, n.10) with the decision to disengage
from the world being the result of an attempt to temporarily escape the
incessant negotiation of status distinctions affected by, and manifested in,
among other things, speech level use. Stepping out of the uncertainties of
everyday encounters and getting engaged in silent meditation, Javanese men
as well as some women willingly undergo ascetic practices inclusive of fasting
and abstaining from sex, with the explicit aim that the more one suppresses
one’s desires and the more one is without selfi sh interest, the more one will
be capable of defi ning, or imposing upon, other people one’s own speech,
wishes and claims.
Perhaps Keeler has overstated the extent to which ‘encounter and
asceticism [are] two opposite and complementary modes of action’ (1987,
49). As I endeavour to show in Chapters 5 and 6, ascetic regimes do involve
encounters with non-human beings that can be equally risky and dangerous
as well as very promising in terms of accruing benefi cial outcomes. Chapter 6
ventures into a consideration of the hazardous nature of social relationships
established with non-human beings while Chapter 5 takes a close look into
narratives associated with the acquisition of the capacity to heal by people
who subscribe to traditionalist, Sufi -inspired modes of Islamic piety. East
Java, within which Probolinggo is situated, is widely and validly considered
as one of key strongholds of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim
organization that is centred upon the fi gure of Islamic scholars (kyai) and
networks of Islamic boarding schools (pondok pesantren, Ind.) similar to the one I
found myself living in for more than a year. My close acquaintance with such
fi gures and such traditions is conveyed in the narratives of two people who are
locally renowned for their abilities in dealing successfully with the troubles and
misfortunes that affl ict humans. Such healers are endowed with what I argue
can productively be thought of as heterogeneous assemblages of human and
non-human parts and elements that are intensively connected through circuits
of relations that ascetic regimes of religious devotion foster and maintain. The
difference, on the basis of which such persons are constituted, is traceable to
processes of becoming-sacred. Such processes are transformational as they
involve the voluntary and temporary annihilation of the human and are
accompanied by gifts of divine grace as semi-permanent attachments and
additions to the make-up of the healers’ bodies. Such non-human attachments
are furthermore subject to detachment and circulation that proceed by means
of both commodity logic and exchange relations in terms of their transmission
to other human recipients who then become able to perform healing with a
variety of degrees of effi cacy.
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xxviii BECOMING
The themes that the current book deals with are offered as an incitement
for us to refl ect on the implications this multiplicity of differences has for
the diaphoron person as it, and the accompanying ethnography, crosses over
from one plateau to the other. In a way, the current book is an old-fashioned
sort of ethnographic monograph. I make no apologies for evoking here a
certain ideal, that of a total ethnography which guided many anthropologists
working during the discipline’s classical era. Evans-Prichard’s The Nuer (1969)
and Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1970) provide perhaps the
most iconic examples of such a programme of study, containing descriptions
and analyses of a bewildering variety of materials that encompass almost
everything from ecological conditions and modes of livelihood to material
culture, kinship and political systems, religious practices and ethnic relations.
Beyond the crude and unrefl exive functionalist ‘cutting’ of the social into
distinct institutions and the simplistic task of organically relating back what
had previously been rendered separate, beyond even a certain encyclopaedic
ambition to match the ambitions of colonial governments, there was, it has to
be fi nally admitted, among anthropologists of that generation an admirable
lack of certainty about what was important to the people one studied with,
and a marvellous dearth of a priori convictions about what constituted politics,
or kinship, or economy in such faraway places. This was a moment of aporia
that I want to recapture and redeploy.
During my fi eldwork I had the privilege of fi nding myself with plenty of
time to spare and this plenitude was matched with the generosity of the people
I worked with who were more than willing to put up and assist with my rather
awkward queries. For this I will be eternally indebted. Due to circumstance
and good intentions then I was able to follow diverse lines of inquiry and
diverge into all sorts of concerns, most of which have found their way in this
book. However, the total ethnography I advocate here for is quite different
from totalizing ethnography. Whereas the former is an exploration that
moves laterally and stays on a level, fl at surface, comparing and contrasting
phenomena so as to evince their characteristic ways of diverging, the latter
moves vertically and seeks to reach deep into unfathomable depths so as to
unearth and extract the factor(s) that make things the way they are. In other
words, whereas total ethnography is concerned with mapping the movements
and the transformations incurred on such fl at plane of a ‘thing’ that differs
constantly from itself, totalizing ethnography is characterized by its recourse
to an extrinsic element or a supplementary dimension that gives the observed
phenomena their organic unity and organizational coherence (see Viveiros de
Castro 2010). The systems the two approaches are therefore designed to set up
are largely incompatible and irreconcilable. Total ethnography’s complexity
is related to describing both the processes of assembly and disassembly that
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxix
permeate the empirical phenomena under consideration as encountered in each
specifi c plateau, and the trajectory their crossings over various plateaus trace.
In contrast, totalizing ethnography’s complexity is connected to determining
the system’s transcendent unifi cation by the operation of a limited number of
principles. While the former conserves our aporia and leads to an opening that
is directly associated with difference’s acentric proliferation which is going all
the way down, so to speak, the latter ends up projecting closure and certitude
through the identifi cation of the found and its naming. For all their brilliance
therefore Evans-Prichard’s ‘discovery’ of a Nuer politics conducted by means
of lineage corporate groupings, and Leach’s alternative of Kachin affairs
organized around the oscillation of hierarchy and equality as the horizon and
end point of anthropological inquiry simply won’t do us any more.
For beginning from and staying with aporia, starting from and conserving
wonder it is necessary to tear the person up and to keep it open. The fi rst move
involves paying attention to its becomings; such becomings are associated
with the two reciprocally presupposed sides that the person consists of and
their alternate manifestation in the process of forming relations with other
persons in the space defi ned by particular plateaus. As an assemblage of
heterogeneous elements, the becomings which diaphoron persons undergo
therein are related to the person shooting up and down ‘like a telescope’,
revealing this side and eclipsing the other, becoming male now and female
later, Madurese yesterday and Javanese tomorrow, acting externally in
sibling unison or in accordance to internal hierarchical distinctions. The
relation between reciprocally presupposed differentials that the concept of
becoming encodes is, however, only half of the story. In order to keep the
diaphoron person open, and our curiosity amplifi ed rather than satisfi ed, a
second move is equally required. As Deleuze and Guattari have put it in the
fabulous Chapter 10 of their A Thousand Plateaus (2004), it is also necessary
to focus on the transversal relations pertaining among plateaus, the diagonal
connections among the different sets of heterogeneities that make the
diaphoron person up. This analytical move amounts to a further instance
of foregrounding becoming, a becoming articulated in the intersections
of assemblages, the zones of indiscernibility the meeting of two or more
multiplicities sets up.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there is very little difference between the concepts
of becoming and multiplicity. Indeed, they write that
becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defi ned not by its
elements, nor by a centre of unifi cation or comprehension. It is defi ned by the
number of dimensions it has; … it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing
its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
xxx BECOMING
same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis,
and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities,
according to its thresholds and doors. (2004, 275; italics in the original)
Becoming therefore summons the relations between the immanent
assemblages as the latter continually transform themselves into each other,
cross over into each other. The assemblages in question correspond to the
various dimensions of the diaphoron person explored in this book in relation to
specifi c themes organized in terms of separate chapters. Becoming, however,
exceeds and surpasses such separations and purifi cations by means of the
curve a discontinuous, broken line draws. This excess, which Deleuze and
Guattari (2004) variously name as ‘line of fl ight’, ‘the Body without Organs’
and ‘rhizome’, has certain unmistakable effects; it both sets out to destabilize
and deterritorialize the temporary and concrete forms the diaphoron person
assumes in each specifi c plateau and to push or carry its becomings forwards
and onwards onto new plateaus where fresh processes of form giving or
territorialization are bound to begin their work. This second instance of
becoming bound as it is with crossings-over is all about unhinged growth,
immense proliferation, and lateral profusion. They argue that the rhizome
‘assumes diverse forms, branches in all directions, and forms bulbs and tubers.
[It] is multiple, giving rise to its own structure but also breaking that structure
according to the “line of fl ight” it contains’ (quoted in M. Strathern 1995, 21).
It is in this sense that becoming achieves to generate and permeate everything
there is and to present the best image of being we can hope for getting at.
Becoming as ‘line of fl ight’ not only keeps difference intact but its registered
transversal movements have the capacity to increase difference exponentially.
Becoming does not correspond to a singular entity nor does it present a type.
It is neither an indivisible unity nor a static aggregate of assemblages but
always an evolving difference-in-itself. As its trajectories push the assemblages
it consists of towards change and transformation, so too the connections and
relations becoming creates among them make it to differ constantly from itself.
The more crossing over takes place the more passages through assemblages are
accomplished; the more connections are generated the more differences are
produced. The unlimited character of becoming brings about the unbounding
and multiplication of difference as an internal and immanent dimension of
the diaphoron person, and opens the door to aporia and astonishment once
more as this profusion’s adjunct, this acceleration’s accompaniment.
In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari are as precise and succinct as
possible.
A line of becoming is not defi ned by points that it connects, or by points that
compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
PROLEGOMENON xxxi
middle. … A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither
beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the
absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad play
of words. A line of becoming has only a middle … it is the absolute speed of
movement … the in-between, the border. (2004, 323; italics in the original)
In the face of this aporia of origins and destinations, the task the radical
philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari sets out is at once much simpler and
more challenging. The task consists of constructing a plane of immanence
(sometimes also called a plane of consistency) that gathers all the dimensions,
all the assemblages on a smooth, unstratifi ed, deterritorialized, fl at surface in
such a way that all the becomings involved, all the crossovers and intersections,
all the differences assembled are given due prominence and free rein to
announce themselves, unencumbered as they are from unduly deterministic
and reductionist temperaments. ‘Can a given multiplicity fl atten and conserve
all its dimensions in this way, like a pressed fl ower that remains just as
alive dry?’ they ask (2004, 277). For ethnographers that strive to keep their
experiences alive when transporting them to the dry page, this is the most
apposite challenge and the task which I now turn to.
This chapter has been published in the volume ‘Becoming – An Anthropological
Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’, by Konstantinos Retsikas.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285294
