Peer-Reviewed Articles by Jesse Hession Grayman
In 2007, the Indonesian government introduced Generasi, a community-driven development program to... more In 2007, the Indonesian government introduced Generasi, a community-driven development program to address village priorities such as reducing poverty, maternal mortality, and child mortality. When describing Generasi's biggest challenges, program facilitators on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores used a geographic vocabulary of fields (medan, lapangan) and topography (topografi) that evokes the demands of supervising Generasi's implementation across dozens of mountain villages with poor infrastructure. But their geographic language also extends metaphorically to the enduring problems of scale and governance. I analyze these discourses of topography and field in relation to the changing therapeutic landscape of maternal and child health services in the Manggarai highlands of western Flores, then follow Generasi's scalar scaffolding from the meetings and clinics in villages, to the technocratic policy work in Jakarta, and to the academic spaces of Auckland and Cambridge.
Anthropological analyses of post conflict narratives reveal how strategic interests mobilize to r... more Anthropological analyses of post conflict narratives reveal how strategic interests mobilize to resolve or perpetuate conflict. Three years after the 2005 Helsinki peace agreement between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that ended GAM’s thirty-year separatist rebellion, the author led a post conflict programming evaluation. Drawing upon qualitative interviews of rural informants for this study and using an anthropological approach to narrative analysis, this article argues that recovery narratives can be understood in terms of official and counter-official discourses, each utilizing strategic resources to amplify their interpretation of an unfolding peace process. Subaltern narratives heard most clearly are empowered because they adhere to narrative conventions proscribed by the peace agreement and other powerful discourses such as GAM’s separatist ideology. Other unrecognized voices are left out; their stories of recovery resist easy interpretation and sidestep clichéd narratives of peace.
KEYWORDS: Aceh, Indonesia, narrative, post conflict, recovery, separatism,
Few primary sources other than Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje tell us about the traveling bard Abdul... more Few primary sources other than Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje tell us about the traveling bard Abdul Karim, popularly known as Dôkarim, who composed the Hikayat Prang Gômpeuni (Song of the Dutch War). Composed orally in Acehnese verse, the Hikayat borrows generously from the themes and narratives of the famous epic poems that preceded it while also recounting specific details of warrior bravery, political negotiations, and community devastation brought by the war. The Hikayat Prang Gômpeuni was not only a work in progress with Dôkarim adding new verses as the war unfolded, it was also a performance piece tailored to meet the expectations of every patron that commissioned Dôkarim’s recitals. Among Dôkarim’s patrons were Snouck Hurgronje himself, who commissioned the only complete transcription of the Hikayat and the Acehnese war hero Teuku Umar, who later went on to execute Dôkarim before the war's end for his supposed defection to the Dutch. This article shows how the ambiguous figure of Dôkarim in Aceh's 19th century serves as a productive metaphor and cautionary tale for Aceh's culture producers and civil society in the 21st. The Tikar Pandan Community in particular has leveraged the figure of Dôkarim and elevated his partial legacy to the status of a myth, assuming his poetic license to claim a space for building new tales that espouse a critical wariness toward all figures of authority. Key Words: Aceh; Indonesia; civil society; hikayat; humanitarianism; NGOs; post-conflict; tsunami
After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indone... more After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh’s coastal communities. This article presents a medical hu-manitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while working for a large aid agency in post-conflict Aceh from 2005 to 2007. In December 2005, the agency faced the first test of its medical and negotiation capacities to provide psychiatric care to a recently amnestied political prisoner whose erratic behavior upon returning home led to his re-arrest and detention at a district police station. I juxtapose two methodological approachesdan ethnographic content analysis of the agency’s email archive and field-based participant-observationdto recount contrasting narrative versions of the event. I use this contrast to illustrate and critique the immediacy of the humanitarian imperative that characterizes the industry. Immediacy is explored as both an urgent moral impulse to assist in a crisis and a form of mediation that seemingly projects neutral and transparent transmission of content. I argue that the sense of immediacy afforded by email enacts and amplifies the humanitarian imperative at the cost of abstracting elite humanitarian actors out of local and moral context. As a result, the management and mediation of this psychiatric case by email produced a bureaucratic model of care that failed to account for complex conditions of chronic political and medical instability on the ground.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2009
In both the Acehnese and Indonesian languages, there is no single lexical term for “nightmare.” A... more In both the Acehnese and Indonesian languages, there is no single lexical term for “nightmare.” And yet findings from a large field research project in Aceh that examined post traumatic experience during Aceh’s nearly 30-year rebellion against the Indonesian state and current mental distress revealed a rich variety of dream narratives that connect directly and indirectly to respondents’ past traumatic experiences. The results reported below suggest that even in a society that has a very different cultural ideology about dreams, where “nightmares” as such are not considered dreams but rather the work of mischievous spirits called jin, they are still a significant part of the trauma process. We argue that it is productive to distinguish between terrifying and repetitive dreams that recreate the traumatic moment and the more ordinary varieties of dreams that Acehnese reported to their interviewers. Nightmares that refer back to conflict events do not appear as an elaborated feature of trauma as the condition is understood by people in Aceh, but when asked further about their dreams, respondents who reported symptoms suggestive of PTSD were more likely to report PTSD-like dreams, memory intrusions that repeat the political violence of the past.
Book Chapters by Jesse Hession Grayman
The Tourism–Disaster–Conflict Nexus, 2018
Studies of disaster and conflict often mention the Indonesian case of Aceh province because of it... more Studies of disaster and conflict often mention the Indonesian case of Aceh province because of its twin histories of separatist conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, each with massive losses of life and infrastructural damages. This chapter addresses the tourism angle in Aceh’s tourism–disaster–conflict nexus with a review and analysis of the efforts to memorialise these events through the establishment of museums in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. Museums that preserve dark aspects of the past, such as violent wars, dis- asters and mass death must navigate the tension between providing a record of what has occurred and engaging with collective memory while not deny- ing the individual experience of the event. The tsunami has been formally commemorated with a monumental, centrally located museum. Meanwhile, a few local non-governmental organisations with a small grant from an inter- national donor struggled to establish a Peace and Human Rights Museum to commemorate the violence and human rights violations of the war in Aceh. Memories of Aceh’s conflict remain largely in the informal sphere. These divergent memorialisations of Aceh’s disasters and conflicts serve as a point of entry for examining how museums and their benefactors engage in con- tested memory politics.
The Tourism–Disaster–Conflict Nexus, 2018
This chapter introduces the tourism–disaster–conflict nexus through a comprehensive review of the... more This chapter introduces the tourism–disaster–conflict nexus through a comprehensive review of the contemporary social science literature. After reviewing conceptual definitions of tourism, disaster and conflict, the chap- ter explores various axes that link through this nexus. The linkages between tourism and disaster include tourism as a trigger or amplifier of disasters, the impacts of disasters on the tourism industry, tourism as a driver of dis- aster recovery and disaster risk reduction strategies in the tourism sector. Linkages between tourism and conflict include the idea that tourism can be a force for peace and stability, the niche status of danger zone or dark her- itage tourism, the concept of phoenix tourism in post-conflict destination rebranding, tourism and cultural conflicts, and tourism’s conflicts over land and resources. Linkages between disaster and conflict include disasters as triggers or intensifiers of civil conflict, disaster diplomacy and conflict reso- lution, disaster capitalism, and gender-based violence and intra-household conflict in the wake of disasters. These are some of the conversations that organise this volume, and this introductory chapter ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.
Medical Humanitarianism Ethnographies of Practice, 2015
After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indone... more After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh's coastal communities. This paper presents a case study of post-conflict electoral campaign messages that circulated by text message (SMS) around Aceh in advance of the April 2009 legislative elections. The elections were widely seen as an important benchmark of success for the peace agreement, in which former members of the Free Aceh Movement were given the right to form local, Aceh-based, political parties—the first of its kind in Indonesia—in exchange for relinquishing their demands for independence. SMS technology is a cheap and efficient medium for spreading campaign messages. The ability for SMS messages to spread virally, ephemerally, and anonymously also enabled the rapid dissemination of threats and rumors designed to intimidate voters and rival candidates. Intimidations by SMS generally had their intended effect as they circulated in a setting of pre-election violence including arson, bombs, and targeted murders. This case study relies upon data that the author collected while working in Aceh as a registered international election observer during the campaign season in advance of the elections.
Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, Jan 2013
Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, 2010
Reports by Jesse Hession Grayman
In 2007, the government of Indonesia (GoI) introduced PNPM Generasi (National Community Empowerme... more In 2007, the government of Indonesia (GoI) introduced PNPM Generasi (National Community Empowerment Program—Healthy and Smart Generation, Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat—Generasi Sehat dan Cerdas) to address key policy priorities and the Millennium Development Goals—reducing poverty, maternal mortality, and child mortality, as well as ensuring universal coverage of basic education. Generasi provides over 5,400 villages with an annual block grant, which each village can allocate to any activity that supports one of 12 indicators of health and education service delivery. Each village’s success in meeting these 12 targets helps determine the size of the next year’s grant. Trained facilitators recruited from within the communities help implement the program. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation of the program, GoI (working with the World Bank and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) randomly assigned Generasi locations for the pilot phase (2007–09). A randomized evaluation of two different versions of the program (with and without performance bonuses) was conducted in three rounds (Wave I at baseline, Wave II 18 months after implementation, and Wave III 30 months after implementation). In 2016/17, the impact evaluation (IE) team fielded a follow-up survey in the same subdistricts as the first three waves. A separate report analyzes the quantitative findings of this final survey. During the final survey round, the IE team also collected qualitative data in geographically distinct treatment and control communities to explore two questions. First, are Generasi’s three components—facilitation, community participation, and the target and performance bonus system—functioning as intended? Second, what is the program’s long-term impact on village governance and service delivery, and how can it influence Village Law implementation?
Opportunities and Approaches for Better Nutrition Outcomes through PNPM Generasi: A Qualitative Study Conducted in Sukabumi (West Java), Manggarai Timur (Flores, East Nusa Tenggara), and Pamekasan (Madura, East Java), 2014
Good Practices Documentation of the UNFPA Humanitarian Programme in Indonesia from 2005-2012, Apr 19, 2013
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Jesse Hession Grayman
KEYWORDS: Aceh, Indonesia, narrative, post conflict, recovery, separatism,
Book Chapters by Jesse Hession Grayman
Reports by Jesse Hession Grayman
KEYWORDS: Aceh, Indonesia, narrative, post conflict, recovery, separatism,