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Publication Number AAT 9910246
Title THE TATTOO AND THE FINGERPRINT: CRIME AND SECURITY IN AN
INDONESIAN CITY
Author BARKER, JOSHUA DAVID
School CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Degree PHD
Date 1999
Adviser SIEGEL, JAMES
Source DAI-A 59/11, p. 4195, May 1999
Pages 355
Subject ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326); HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND
OCEANIA (0332); SOCIOLOGY, CRIMINOLOGY AND PENOLOGY (0627)
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Abstract This dissertation examines the relation between fear and
state power through a study of formal and informal security
institutions in Bandung, West Java. Using a combination of historical
and ethnographic data, it argues that the central problem for the
evolution of the urban security apparatus has been a fundamental gap
between local and state notions of what security is and how fears are
to be defined. State institutions define security as a strict
correspondence between blueprints of order and the arrangement of
things in the world 'out there.' They fear, above all, contagions and
recognition failures (e.g. criminogens, impostors). To ward off these
threats they enforce an order of surveillance using maps, identity
cards, fingerprints, and the law. Local institutions, in contrast,
define security as a problem of social and bodily integrity. They fear
outsiders and alien markings (e.g. strangers, thieves, tattooed
bodies), and mobilize against such threats in a territorial fashion.
The first half of the dissertation highlights the gap between the two
notions of security by exploring the internal dynamics of three
institutions: the ronda (neighborhood watch), the jawara (local tough,
gang leader), and the police. Each of these institutions is analyzed
interpretively with respect to its practices, its organization, its
technologies, its definition of threats, its history, and its forms of
political power. The remainder of the dissertation describes the
consequences of the gap for practices of policing in Suharto's New
Order. Specifically, two cases are analyzed: the daily workings of a
police precinct in which the officers act both as agents of state
surveillance and as protectors of the local sphere against the effects
of the law; and the government's attempts in the 1980s to eradicate
'criminality' and to subordinate security institutions to central
control through PETRUS (paramilitary murder of 'criminals') and
SISKAMLING (Environment Security System). While at the precinct the
police worked to maintain the gap between local and state concerns,
PETRUS and SISKAMLING tried to abolish it, deploying symbolic and
institutional power to identify the state's fears with local fears and
to redefine all security as a problem with a national solution.
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