Elizabeth Fuller Collins, Ohio University, author of Indonesia Betrayed: How Development Fails:
In Violence and Vengeance, Christopher R. Duncan adds a new dimension to the analysis of communal conflict in Indonesia and beyond, showing how the way in which participants come to understand a violent conflict, given biases and limited information, is likely to reflect long-standing tensions or divisions in a society. However, Duncan does not reduce the conflict in North Maluku to a primordial religious antagonism. Instead, he shows under what conditions this conflict came to be seen as religious despite its origins as a conflict between indigenous people and migrants over the way in which redistricting affected their claims to power. He shows how the religious understanding of the conflict blossomed and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is a must-read for scholars interested in ethnic and religious conflict and NGO activists who work in the field of conflict resolution.
In this marvelous ethnography about religion and communal violence in eastern Indonesia, Duncan provides an important corrective to... assumptions about violence and religion.... Christopher Duncan’s Violence and Vengeance thus provides an invaluable contribution to understanding how people in eastern Indonesia turned to religion and religious difference as they imagined, perpetrated, suffered, survived, and memorialized communal violence.
[T]his marvelous ethnography about religion and communal violence in eastern Indonesia.... offer[s] a compelling corrective to those anthropologists, historians, and political scientists who have fetishized political economy at the cost of understanding religion only in instrumental terms. Christopher Duncan’s Violence and Vengeance thus provides an invaluable contribution to understanding how people in eastern Indonesia turned to religion and religious difference as they imagined, perpetrated, suffered, survived, and memorialized communal violence.
The depth of knowledge and understanding of local dynamics displayed here, both pre- and post-conflict, sets this book aside from other works addressing the communal violence that ensued from the fall of the Suharto regime....Violence and Vengeance should become core reading material for anyone concerned with religiously informed violence (in Indonesia, Asia or elsewhere) as much as for scholars and students interested in methodological issues, whether as historians, political scientists or anthropologists.
Duncan... has extensive experience in this understudied part of Indonesia, including local language ability, and so is able to penetrate down to a very fundamental level in telling the story of what happened and what it means. Unlike many analysts, he is most interested in the specifically religious cast of the confrontation as voiced by local people.
By focusing on narratives and perspectives of 'those who did the killing or witnessed the dying', and not the ‘objective academic analysis based on media reports and interviews with regional and national elites’ (8), Duncan makes a compelling argument of how religion influences people’s violent actions in the North Maluku conflict...the book is no doubt a welcome edition for the studies of religious conflict and conciliation, not only in North Maluku or Indonesia but also in other parts of the world that are plagued by interreligious tensions.
Violence and Vengeanceis the best description we have of the post-New Order communal wars from the viewpoint of the participants... In aiming thus to go beyond causation (p.7), Chris Duncan has done the field a service.
...Violence and Vengeance makes an immense contribution to our understands of the ways in which religion shapes local understandings of violence...Violence and Vengeance succeeds brilliantly in accomplishing this important task.
