UCSF

This dissertation draws on approximately 18-months of fieldwork (2015-2017) based in Timika, West Papua, the politically contested easternmost region of Indonesia. I take the Indonesian state’s radical denial of violations of human rights in the region – the public declaration at the United Nations that such allegations are a “hoax” – as an opportunity to consider alternative evidentiary modes and epistemic frames through which to narrate what can be said to be happening in West Papua. If epistemic uncertainty is a daily reality for most Papuans, I explore how a kind of motivated uncertainty or ambiguity allows for the possibility of other ways of knowing and remembering that produce living (poetic) archives disruptive of the state’s desire to produce “truth beyond dispute” (Mbembe 2001). I argue for a poetic epistemology that is both a methodological intervention – an ethnographic mode of both knowing and writing – as well as an ethnographic observation of a kind of knowing that emerges through these daily conditions of uncertainty.