Biopolitics of Invulnerability

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the course of their nation building, most Southeast Asian countries worked among other things on setting governmental policies on their respective highly developed martial arts practice groups. These groups relate to diverse structures: initiation communities, security agencies, militia organisations. The Southeast Asian governments strove to standardise the martial practice, to ‘sportivise’ them, and to integrate them into the school education curricula. The federations are the subject of massive programmes for physical and ideological formation, designed to incorporate a patriotic political ethos and the interiorisation of nationalist values. However, by fostering the construction of ‘strong bodies’, these state biopolitics also contribute to (re)generating regional groups concurrent to the central power. Through several examples in the Malay world and with a particular focus on Indonesia, this article describes that these groups constitute political networks that are relatively autonomous, and convey alternative models for the expression of the agonistic body.