Religion under the Sign of Crisis

Abstract

At the height of Ambon’s war, a small stone surrendered by a Muslim to a Christian on an urban battlefield circulated with stunning effect in a Christian prayer group. Within no time, it infected this core scene of Christian worship and community, triggering illness and possession, turning the group’s prayers into a Qur’anic reading session, and inserting the spectral presence of a North Malukan sultan’s daughter into its midst. This scene of haunting and radical displacement sums up so much of Ambon’s traditional Protestant community’s dilemma. At the same time, it gestures, if obliquely, toward the possibility of generosity as opposed to hatred toward one’s others, of moving beyond the friendenemy dyad to include a third term, that of the neighbor. Apart from what Ambon’s possession reveals about religiously defined subjects during the conflict, it also attests to the erosion of the carefully policed difference between magic and religion by church and state. In this chapter, I pay special attention to the sites where the defensively upheld distinction between Muslim and Christian broke down and to the capacious waywardness of things as symptoms of a world in the grips of dramatic change. In doing so, I rely on a symptomatology of crisis to track the shapeshifting movements of subjects and objects and the ways in which religion in the city became dramatically refigured. Following the previous chapter, Ambon’s scene of possession may come as a surprise. It may require a leap of imagination to recall that, besides Christians, and in particular Protestants, others also exist in the city. The painted landscapes—the Christian enclave folded in upon itself, the Pancasila Jesus stretching diversity under the sign of the Christian universal, or the masculine street culture congregated around its newfound Jesus icon—equally banish whole parts of urban sociality to the pictures’ invisible, if energizing, backdrop. With 4