Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke, 2000). She has also edited and co-edited a number of books, including Images That Move (SAR Press, 2013), Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2006, pbk 2013), and Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998).
...the audience for this accessible work will include those who are not Indonesia specialists and those interested in intersections between street art, religion, and conflict.-- Choice Reviews A work of great subtlety and insight, Orphaned Landscapes charts the desperate operations of the image to hold together a world spiraling toward chaos and religious violence. As Ambon's longstanding religious and political order disintegrated following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, the visual became intensely charged with political and epistemic demands, giving rise both to an explosion of religious imagery across public spaces and to new practices of perception by which Christian and Muslim communities sought to navigate a precarious and threatening political terrain. Spyer's superb analysis of the conditions of blindness and visibility that produce and accompany the fog of war is an immense intellectual accomplishment.---Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley, In this profound book, Patricia Spyer brings us into the streets and homes of a city emerging from a civil war that severed bonds of community, destabilized the very ground of living, and rendered familiar social terrain uncertain and obscure. With uncommon ethnographic sensitivity, Spyer attends to the figural impulse that motivated people to make and display images as moorings to orient a newly disfigured world. Illuminating the work of and on appearances, Orphaned Landscapes will be richly rewarding for anyone interested in the aftermaths of violence and the potency of images.---Karen Strassler, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY,