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Seeing the Unseen in Indonesia's Public Sphere: Photographic Appearances of a Spirit Queen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2013

Karen Strassler
Karen Strassler*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center
*
kstrassl@umich.edu
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Abstract

Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture. In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 98 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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References

1 Darwyn Tse, “The Golden Era Returns,” at: http://kanjengratukidul.blogspot.com/2010/01/golden-era-returns.html (accessed 23 Aug. 2010). Ratu Kidul is also often pictured with a snake/dragon (naga) or the horses of her invisible army. Sometimes she rides in a chariot, led by her horses through the waves.

2 Hariman, Robert and Lucaites, John Louis, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 1.

4 Ibid., 37.

5 Jain, Kajri, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 18Google Scholar.

6 On “remediation,” see Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar. On “media ideologies,” see Gershon, Ilana, “Media Ideologies: An Introduction,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, 2 (2010): 283–93Google Scholar. Of course, television, film, and the Internet are not purely visual media, and nor are ritual and dance non-visual. What I want to emphasize by describing these media as “image-based” is the centrality to these media of the reproducible and thus transportable image.

7 Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 198Google Scholar.

8 Azoulay, Ariella, The Civil Contract of Photography (London: Zone Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 146.

10 Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography.” Levin, Thomas, trans., Critical Inquiry 19, 3 (Spring 1993): 421–36Google Scholar, here 433.

11 On the coexistence of different visualities within national modernity, see, among others, Strassler, Karen, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Nation and Imagination: The Training of the Eye in Bengali Modernity,” Topoi 18 (1999): 29–47Google Scholar; Harris, C., “The Politics and Personhood of Tibetan Buddhist Icons,” in Thomas, Nicholas and Pinney, Christopher, eds., Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment (London: Berg, 2001), 181–99Google Scholar.

12 A semiotic ideology is “basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world. It determines, for instance, what people will consider the role that intentions play in signification to be, what kinds of possible agents (humans only?Animals? Spirits?) exist to which acts of signification might be imputed, whether signs are arbitrary or necessarily linked to their objects, and so forth.… [Thus,] semiotic ideologies are not just about signs, but about what kinds of agentive subjects and acted-upon objects might be found in the world.” Keane, Webb, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23, 3–4 (2003): 409–25Google Scholar, here 419.

13 See Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? For another key work treating images as social agents, see Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On the agency of photographs see, among others, Halvaksz, Jamon, “The Photographic Assemblage: Duration, History and Photography in Papua New Guinea,” History and Anthropology 21 (2010): 411–29Google Scholar; Smith, Benjamin R., “Images, Selves, and the Visual Record: Photography and Ethnographic Complexity in Central Cape York Peninsula,” Social Analysis 47, 3 (2003): 8–26Google Scholar. Keane's Peircian approach to the materiality of signs, cited above, likewise attempts to address “the historicity and social power of material things” (Keane, “Semiotics,” 411).

14 The event took place on 28–29 June 1999, at Parangkusumo Beach. Gus Dur became Indonesia's fourth president in October.

15 Bruinessen, Martin van, “Back to Situbondo? Nahdlatul Ulama Attitudes towards Abdurrahman Wahid's Presidency and His Fall,” in Nordholt, Henk Schulte and Abdullah, Irwan, eds., Indonesia: In Search of Transition (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2002), 15–46Google Scholar, at: http://www.let.uu.nl/~martin.vanbruinessen/personal/publications/back_to_situbondo.htm (accessed 23 Apr. 2010).

16 Anderson, Benedict, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 29Google Scholar.

17 Writing of Indian nationalism, Chakrabarty describes “the familiar political desire of the modern to align the world with that which was real and rational” (“Nation and Imagination,” 31). Morris, Rosalind notes a comparable Thai “nationalized discourse of modernity whose oppositional terms are those of science versus magic, rationality versus supernatural belief, the visible versus the invisible, and mind versus body”; “Modernity's Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand,” Public Culture 12, 2 (2000): 457–75Google Scholar, here, 470.

18 In opposing “traditional” and “modernist” Islam, I follow the terminology used within Indonesia. Though these are inadequate glosses for the diversity of positions within them, they are useful shorthand terms.

19 See Martin van Bruinessen and Farid Wajidi, “Syu'un Ijtima'iyah and the Kiai Rakyat: Traditionalist Islam, Civil Society and Social Concerns,” in Nordholt, Henk Schulte, ed., Indonesian Transitions (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2006), 205–48Google Scholar, here 213. See also, van Bruinessen, “Back to Situbondo?” on khaul, ritual events held on the death anniversaries of powerful kyai.

20 Strassler, Karen, “Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese-Indonesian Rape Debates in Post-Suharto Indonesia,” Gender and History 16, 4, (2004): 689–725Google Scholar. Nevertheless, the post-Suharto period has seen the florescence of media trafficking in occult phenomena. The quest for transparency in the domain of politics and the fascination with supernatural apparitions in popular media share an “aesthetic of appearance,” based on “anticipation for the moment of (potential) revelation or recognition.” Steedly, Mary Margaret, “Transparency and Apparition: Media Ghosts of Post-New Order Indonesia,” in Spyer, Patricia and Steedly, Mary Margaret, eds., Images that Move (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2013), 257–94Google Scholar, here 261. See also Heeren, Katinka Van, “Return of the Kyai: Representations of Horror, Commerce, and Censorship in Post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2007): 211–26Google Scholar. Jean and John Comaroff argue that to invest in transparency's axiom of “to see is to know” is inevitably to be haunted by that which “hovers on the edge of the visible”; “Transparent Fictions; or, the Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination: An Afterword,” in West, Harry G. and Sanders, Todd, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 286–99Google Scholar, here 288. Such analyses, however, risk reducing belief in the supernatural to a metaphor, a displacement, or a form of mystification. In Indonesia's post-Suharto era, belief in occult forces is not merely an epiphenomenon of transparency or an expression of concerns originating elsewhere, but the mark of a genuinely alternative political ontology.

21 Mazzarella, William, “Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India,” Public Culture 18, 3 (2006): 473–505Google Scholar.

22 Scholars link the legend of the Ratu Kidul to Austronesian fertility myths, mythology involving snakes and rulers in China and mainland Southeast Asia, and Hindu and Buddhist goddesses. See Wessing, Robert, “A Princess from Sunda: Some Aspects of Nyai Roro Kidul,” Asian Folklore Studies 56, 2 (1997): 317–53Google Scholar, here 319–20; Jordaan, Roy E., “Tara and Nyai Lara Kidul: Images of the Divine Feminine in Java,” Asian Folklore Studies 56, 2 (1997): 285–312Google Scholar. Jordaan describes the various names for Ratu Kidul, the most common of which, alongside the simple Ratu Kidul, are Kanjeng Ratu Kidul (Venerable or Her Highness Queen of the South) and Nyai Roro Kidul (Nyai means “old woman”; Roro means “maiden” or “girl”) (pp. 302–3). These different names are generally understood to be different appellations of the same goddess, but sometimes—especially in modern films—they register her fragmentation into several related figures.

23 Wessing, “Princess from Sunda,” 321.

24 For a more extended and eloquent telling of this part of the myth, see Florida, Nancy K., “The Badhaya Katawang: A Translation of the Song of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” Indonesia 53 (Apr. 1992): 21–32Google Scholar.

25 While she is generally seen as pre- or non-Islamic, many accounts emphasize her close ties to Islam (see, for example, Wessing, “Princess from Sunda,” 320).

26 The association between Ratu Kidul and the killings of communists in 1965–1966 and street gang members in the 1980s may derive from common knowledge that bodies were thrown into caves in Gunung Kidul, a region southeast of Yogyakarta, that connect directly to the southern sea. Most of the bodies, which presumably washed out to sea, were never seen again.

27 Ricklefs, M. C., The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726–1749 (Honolulu: Allen & Unwin and University of Hawaii Press, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, 1998), 6–9Google Scholar.

28 Fischer, Joseph, The Folk Art of Java (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 111Google Scholar. Although Ratu Kidul may have been visualized in the late colonial period in response to colonial Javanology, I have not yet located any colonial-era images of her.

29 Tellingly, Fischer found many contemporary images produced by children, who are taught to draw subjects of “cultural tradition,” and by batik artists catering to the tourist market. Ratu Kidul's emergence as a subject of contemporary “folk art” is clearly tied to the promotion of a packaged and commodifiable national folklore.

30 On Dutch colonial visualities taken up by nationalists, see Mrazek, Rudolf, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Anderson, Benedict, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light: Transposition in Early Indonesian Nationalist Thought,” in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 241–70Google Scholar.

31 See, among others, Strassler, Refracted Visions; Pinney, Christopher, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004)Google Scholar; and Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed.

32 Morris, Rosalind C., “Photography and the Power of Images in the History of Power,” in Morris, Rosalind C., ed., Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 121–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 135. “In Siam, the era of photography marks the end of the king's absolute withdrawal from public space and his increasing emergence into the public sphere” (137). Through photographic mediation the king became the object of commoners’ gaze and thereby a figure for identification and a representative of the nation. Morris further argues that photography transformed “the” Siamese king into “a” king on a par with European kings, thus helping to reconstitute the Thai monarchy within the serialized, comparative logic of the national order; see also Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 169Google Scholar.

33 Siegel, James T., Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 85Google Scholar. Cutting the Sultan's images out and framing them, people attempted to rescue the king from this troubling visual democracy.

34 There are actually two palaces in both Solo and Yogyakarta; for simplicity's sake I will focus here on the most important court in each city.

35 Pemberton, John, On the Subject of ‘Java’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 110Google Scholar. On Ratu Kidul's role in signaling the end of Javanese kingly power, see page 123 of Pemberton's book, and also Nancy Florida, “Badhaya Katawang,” 24.

36 Hughes-Freeland, Felicia, “Charisma and Celebrity in Indonesian Politics,” Anthropological Theory 7, 2 (2007): 177–200Google Scholar, here 186.

37 Florida, “Badhaya Katawang,” 24, fn. 16.

38 Resink, G. J., “Kanjeng Ratu Kidul: The Second Divine Spouse of the Sultans of Ngayogyakarta,” Asian Folklore Studies 56, 2 (1997): 313–16Google Scholar, here 313. It is important to note that some practitioners of Javanese spiritualism continue to reject the idea that Ratu Kidul can be made visible through any material medium.

39 Sochaczewski, Paul Spencer. “A True Javanese Fairytale: The Sultan and the Mermaid,” New York Times, 14 June 1994, at: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/14/opinion/14iht-edpaul.html (accessed 19 Aug. 2010).

40 For somewhat different accounts, see Roy James, “A Room for the Javanese Goddess of the South-Sea,” at: http://www.jawakidul.nl/roomg308.htm; Peter Janssen, “Pelabuhanratu (Indonesia)—A Resort with a Ghost,” at: http://www.mikalina.com/Texts/pelabuhanratu_indonesia.htm (both accessed 15 Dec. 2010); and “Samudra Beach: Room No. 308 Still Retains Its Mystery,” at: http://indahnesia.com/indonesia/JABSAU/samudra_beach.php, 2009 (accessed 19 Aug. 2010).

41 Basuki Abdullah is known to have painted six paintings of Ratu Kidul, several of which are widely reproduced; Dermawan, Agus, R. Basoeki Abdullah RA: Duta Seni Lukis Indonesia (Jakarta: PT Gramedia, 1985), 32Google Scholar.

42 Mikke Susanto, personal communication, Yogyakarta, 27 May 2013.

43 Holt, Claire, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 248Google Scholar.

44 As Kajri Jain, reading Michael Warner, argues, “Iconic figures in the mass-cultural public sphere are situated at the intersection between politics and consumerist desire.… Publicness generates a meta-popularity that imbues the iconic image with a kind of surplus value”; Gods in the Bazaar, 292.

45 On this genre, sometimes also called “mystic” (mistik) or “superstition” (klenik) films, see van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai.” On Ratu Kidul films, see Robert Wessing, “‘Dislodged Tales’ Javanese Goddesses and Spirits on the Silver Screen,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 163–64 (2007): 529–55. See also Veronika Kusumaryati, “Return with a Vengeance: The Feminine Grotesque in Indonesian Horror Films,” Primal Scenes (2009), at http://primalscenes.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/return-with-a-vengeance-the-feminine-grotesque-in-indonesian-horror-films/ (accessed 23 July 2013).

46 Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 542.

47 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Arendt, Hannah, ed., Zohn, Harry, trans., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51Google Scholar, here 221.

48 Ibid., 231.

49 Ibid.

50 Hughes-Freeland, “Celebrity and Charisma,” 188.

51 Ibid., 180.

52 See, for example, Perkawinan Nyi Blorong (Sisworo Gautama Putra, 1983)Google Scholar.

53 Ajian Ratu Laut Kidul (Sisworo Gautama Putra, 1991)Google Scholar.

54 Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 535.

55 See, among others, Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Mankekar, Purnima, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nationhood in Post-Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

56 Van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai.” See also Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 540.

57 Van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai,” 212–13.

58 Ibid., 216.

59 Ibid., 217. The quote is from R. Hartono, then Minister of Information.

60 Christopher Pinney has recently drawn attention to Benjamin's insight that photography reveals the difference between magic and science to be a “thoroughly historical variable.” Despite ideological attempts to position photography in alignment with scientific rationalism as opposed to superstition, photography reveals the degree to which science and magic are propelled by the same divinatory impulse. Pinney, C., Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 12Google Scholar; see also Harvey, John, Photography and Spirit (London: Reaktion Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

61 Ardus M. Sawega, “Ratu Kidul di Mata Perupa,” Kompas, 17 May 2010, at: http://oase.kompas.com/read/2010/05/17/09094232/Ratu.Kidul.di.Mata.Perupa-3 (accessed 17 Aug. 2010). The article also refers to painters of Ratu Kidul who died in 1998 and 2001.

62 Royjava, “Schilderijen Basoeki Abdullah,” De Javaanse GODIN DER ZUIDZEE, 8 Nov. 2003, at: http://javagodin.multiply.com/journal/item/342 (accessed 19 Aug. 2010).

63 Dermawan, R. Basoeki Abdullah RA, 32.

64 See Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 536–37.

65 More recently, actress Julia Perez (popularly known as “Jupe”), who was cast to play a Ratu Kidul figure in a film, paid homage to the actress/spirit queen by going to room 308 of the Samudra Beach Hotel to ask for Ratu Kidul's blessing. Willem Jonata, “Jupe Ketakutan Ratu Kidul Berkedip.” Tribun News, 2 Feb. 2012, at: http://www.tribunnews.com/2012/02/02/jupe-ketakutan-ratu-kidul-berkedip (accessed 28 Apr. 2012).

66 Kutukan Nyai Roro Kidul (B. Z. Kadaryono, 1979). See also Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 536.

67 Pembalasan Ratu Laut Selatan (Tjut Djalil, 1988). This scene takes place in a shrine dedicated to Ratu Kidul in a hotel room. Unlike most Ratu Kidul films, this one was released internationally (as Lady Terminator), and features Western actors in key roles. See “Lady Terminator,” Teleport City, 19 Apr. 2010, at: http://teleport-city.com/2010/04/19/lady-terminator/ (accessed 13 June 2013).

68 Wessing, “Dislodged Tales,” 537.

69 On the lens flare as a revelatory sign of the wahyu, or divine light of power, see Strassler, Refracted Visions, 261–62. On effects like blurring and double exposure as signs of spiritual presence, see Wright, Christopher, “‘A Devil's Engine’: Photography and Spirits in the Western Solomon Islands,” Visual Anthropology 21 (2008): 364–80Google Scholar.

70 Vries, Hent de, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Vries, Hent De and Weber, Samuel, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3–42Google Scholar, here 23–24. See also Meyer, Birgit and Moors, Annelies, Religion, Media and the Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Cruz, Deirdre de la, “Coincidence and Consequence: Marianism and the Mass Media in the Global Philippines,” Cultural Anthropology 24, 3 (2009): 455–88Google Scholar.

71 Darwyn Tse, “My Newest Painting of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” 27 May 2008, at: http://kanjengratukidul.blogspot.com/2008/05/my-latest-painting-of-kanjeng-ratu.html (accessed 23 Apr. 2010).

72 Darwyn Tse, “Mystical Picture of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” at: http://kanjengratukidul.blogspot.com/2009/05/mystical-picture-of-kanjeng-ratu-kidul.html (accessed 23 Apr. 2010).

73 Woodward notes that the queen's spirit armies are believed to have supported anti-Dutch struggles during the colonial period and the revolution. Cited in Wessing, “Princess from Sunda,” 339, fn. 14. See also Strassler, Refracted Visions, 283–84.

74 As of 2012, the blog was no longer active. However, its images and texts continue to circulate within other blogs, where they are incorporated without attribution.

75 On the use of English in text messaging as an index of modern cosmopolitanism among Giriama in Kenya, see McIntosh, Janet, “Mobile Phones and Mipoho's Prophecy: The Powers and Dangers of Flying Language,” American Ethnologist 37, 2 (2010): 337–53Google Scholar.

76 Darwyn Tse, “How It all Started,” 27 May 2008, at: http://kanjengratukidul.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-it-all-started.html (accessed 23 Apr. 2010). In his blog he also describes his visit to room 308 and posts snapshots of the room.

77 The quintessential such object is the pusaka, an heirloom imbued with supernatural power that can be transmitted via contact. Florida, Nancy, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), xxGoogle Scholar.

78 In a parallel vein, Keane argues that in practices of “spirit writing,” the material properties of the written sign are manipulated to materialize the immaterial and de-materialize the material. How people draw on the “latent” “affordances” of written signs is determined by their semiotic ideologies. Keane, Webb, “On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013): 1–17Google Scholar, here, 7.

79 Pinney likewise notes the lack of semiotic distinction between photographs and paintings in Indian popular visualities. Pinney, Christopher, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 131Google Scholar.

80 Anwar, Salman Rusydie, Misteri Nyi Roro Kidul dan Laut Selatan (Yogyakarta: Flash Books, 2010), 35Google Scholar. See also Dermawan, R. Basoeki Abdullah RA, 31–32.

81 Similar discourses of photographic mediumship can be found in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American and European spiritualist photography. See Fischer, Andreas, “‘A Photographer of Marvels’: Frederick Hudson and the Beginnings of Spirit Photography in Europe,” in Chéroux, Clément et al. , eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 29–36Google Scholar; Christa Cloutier, “Mumler's Ghosts,” in the same volume, 20–23, here, 21–22; Gunning, Tom, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny,” in Petro, Patric, ed., Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71Google Scholar, here 58; Sconce, Jeffrey, “Mediums and Media” in Sturken, Marita, Thomas, Douglas, and Ball-Rokeach, Sandra J., eds., Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 48–70Google Scholar, here 60–61.

82 Agus Dermawan quotes Basuki Adullah describing his “instructions” or “direction” from Ratu Kidul (“petunjuk dari sana”). Petunjuk literally means an index: a pointing or an indication. “Dari sana,” literally “from there,” in this context implies a communication from the spirit world. Because he could never quite see her face clearly, however, Basuki Abdullah initially relied on models, an act that, as noted above, apparently displeased Ratu Kidul. Recognizing the dangers involved, in later paintings Basuki Abdullah ceased to use models in registering his communications from Ratu Kidul. Dermawan, R. Basoeki Abdullah RA, 32.

83 On the “aesthetics of presence” in Indian icons, see Davis, Richard, Lives of Indian Images, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Kajri Jain's discussion in Gods in the Bazaar, 292–93.

84 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Howard, Richard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)Google Scholar, 87, 82, 88. On tactile seeing and mimetic contact, see Taussig, Michael's reading of Benjamin, in Mimesis and Alterity (New York and London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar.

85 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 83, 80.

86 Ibid., 82.

87 Among numerous examples from the anthropological literature on photographic technologies as means of contact with spirits and the dead, see Wright, “‘A Devil's Engine’”; Smith, “Images, Selves, and the Visual Record”; Deger, Jennifer, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Halvaksz, Jamon, “Photographing Spirits: Biangai Photography, Ancestors, and the Environment in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea,” Visual Anthropology 21 (2008): 310–26Google Scholar. Each of these examples reveals the interplay between photographic technology and culturally specific semiotic ideologies and ontologies. On materiality and the mediation of ontological gaps, see Keane, “On Spirit Writing.”

88 Gunning, Tom, “What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs,” NORDICOM Review 5, 1/2 (2004): 39–49Google Scholar, here 46. Although Gunning opposes phenomenological and semiotic approaches, his own language describing the photograph as a means acknowledges its mediating role and suggests that such a stark opposition is unnecessary if we follow a Peircian (rather than a Saussurean) semiotics. Peirce's triadic model of the sign does not exclude the object to which the sign refers, and acknowledges how both object and material sign motivate and constrain the process of semiosis. So, too, the “interpretant,” in contrast to the Saussurean “signified,” is not the value of the sign within a static system but the effect or actualization of a material sign in a particular instance. Thus sensorial, experiential encounters between people and things, to put it simply, are not excluded from Peircian semiotics.

89 Ibid., 47.

90 We could reframe this in Frazerian terms by arguing that the photograph partakes of both forms of sympathetic magic: similarity (iconicity) and contagion (indexicality). Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: MacMillan, 1923)Google Scholar; see also Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity.

91 While for Peirce the index was a “natural” sign with a causal relation to its object, he also acknowledged that indexes and icons in and of themselves “assert nothing” (cited in Keane, “Semiotics,” 419) and there are no pure icons or indexes. Cultural convention thus shapes not only which signs are recognized as “natural” or “causal,” but also how those signs are believed to function and what effects they are considered to have.

92 Roberts, Allen F. and Roberts, Mary Nooter, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003), 26Google Scholar.

93 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 223.

94 “Misteri Lukisan Nyi Roro Kidul,” at: http://wong168.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/misteri-lukisan-nyi-roro-kidul/ (accessed 30 July 2010). See also Roberts and Roberts, Saint in the City, 27.

95 Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28Google Scholar. See also Belting, Hans, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Jephcott, Edmund, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

96 At: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerrypics/2603144452/in/photostream/ (accessed 11 Apr. 2012). Although the year 2004 is inscribed on the photograph itself, the flickr page states that the photos were taken in 2008. “Kerry” appears, from other images in her photo stream, to be married to a non-Indonesian and to live or have lived in Canada.

97 Ibid.

98 At: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerrypics/2602315363/in/photostream/ (accessed 11 Apr. 2012).

99 Schlehe, Judith, “Anthropology of Religion: Disasters and the Representation of Tradition,” Religion 40 (2010): 112–20Google Scholar. See also, “Selubung Mistis Gempa Yogya (1–4): Gara-Gara Ratu Kidul Murka,” Detik News, 5 June 2006, at: http://us.detiknews.com/read/2006/06/05/090401/609070/159/gara-gara-ratu-kidul-murka (accessed 14 July 2010).

100 Schlehe, “Anthropology of Religion,” 116.

101 “Gus Dur: Ratu Kidul Dipaksa Jilbaban,” Inilah.com, 27 Sept. 2008, at: http://www.inilah.com/news/read/politik/2008/09/27/52049/gus-dur-ratu-kidul-dipaksa-jilbaban/ (accessed 14 July 2010). The FPI is known for its attacks on brothels, bars, human rights organizations, media outlets, and anyone else they claim offends Islamic morality. A well-known paranormal and politician, Permadi, also linked the earthquake to Ratu Kidul's anger about the pornography law. Detik News, “Selubung Mistis Gempa Yogya (4): Sajen Hingga Obo-Obok Omah Ratu,” 5 June 2006, at: http://us.detiknews.com/read/2006/06/05/113320/609222/159/sajen-hingga-obok-obok-omah (accessed 14 July 2010).