From the Bubble to the Hearth: Social Co‐Presence in the Era of COVID‐19 in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

Abstract

For Asmat people in Indonesian Papua—hunter gatherers who live in and around approximately 220 village settlements in the mangrove swamps of Papua's coastal and lowland southwest—the spatio-temporal organization of social co-presence is a key problematic of everyday life. In a social world in which kin groups often disperse themselves across the riverine environment in which they live, and centralized gathering is a socially remarkable exception rather than the norm, the physical act of being together with others is intensely resonant. The COVID-19 pandemic has globalized this concern, as people the world over explicitly work on the arrangement of who is together, where, and when, and rethink the implications of peoples' togetherness in space and time. Far away from Melanesia, in settings such as central London, people whose daily lives once involved being thrown together with others in ways that may not have immediately appeared socially significant—on the street, on public transport, in the supermarket—now find themselves being asked to reconsider how to be together with, or separate from others in light of co-presence's newfound salience and risk. In particular, in ‘Western’ settings, new ideas about ‘social distance’ often cut across existing practices of kin togetherness. As people try to manage new forms of physical separation, being with others against this background engenders a newfound intensity of feeling. At one level, this brief paper, including a selection of photographs taken during my fieldwork between 2016–2018 (Figs. 1-3), provides a concrete description of how Asmat people, and their missionary and state others, are trying to negotiate the risk of coronavirus transmission.1 At another level, this vignette uses the pandemic as a lens to reflect on the spatio-temporal organization of Asmat life, and how it is being warped by its incorporation within broader macro-structural orders during an era of national decentralization. More broadly, however, this discussion of how pandemic risk articulates with Asmat social worlds is animated by a classical anthropological impulse towards cultural critique. In particular, I feel moved to comment on the limitations of the normative social models mobilized in ‘Western’ responses to the pandemic, which appear impoverished when placed into conversation with an analysis of Asmat sociality. Put simply: concepts such as the misnamed ‘social (i.e. physical) distancing’ (cf. Presterudstuen 2020), or social ‘bubbles’ (Long et al. 2020), define sociality simply through its demarcation from that which is outside of it. These images do not, however, re-think the value of social co-presence itself, leaving us in the perverse situation of seeking to reorganize the spatio-temporal arrangement of social life without also reconsidering how to think about the value of being together with nearby others. My comparative impulse is driven, in Roy Wagner's (1986: xii) words, less by a desire to ask ‘How do these [i.e., Asmat] people solve our problems within their means?’, but rather by the hope of discerning ‘How […] they resolve and transform our meanings within their problems?’ Asmat social life is permeated with a tension between two social ideals: autonomy and social coordination. This is materially lived out between two types of settlements. The first are forest camps (isi cem).2 These are, often temporary, sites on riverbanks which operate as bases from which people gather food. They consist of small houses inhabited by kin and affines, who live at close quarters, away from non-kin others. The second are villages (takambi3), which are sites of inter-clan gathering, established as permanent settlements with the advent of colonialism. Asmat people often say about themselves that they ‘cannot be organized' (‘tidak bisa diatur'), and indeed spend much of their time moving in and out of the village in kin groups, often according to their own timelines, without consideration for broader village-scale activities. Against this ground of dispersed movement, periods of gathering and coordination around inter-clan activities are valued and socially remarkable. Gatherings typically occur as part of cycles of ancestral ritual feasts, Catholic feasts for Easter and Christmas, which follow a ritual pattern, and the activities of the state, which today centre around the implementation of devolved national community development grants. Movement between forest camp sites and the village is ‘economic’ as much as ‘social’. In a setting in which food distribution is navigated through ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993), being co-present with others is required in order to elicit a share of what they have (Widlok 2013). Asmat people place intense value on having the same, which makes missing out an intolerable prospect. In order to obtain a part of what others are eating, therefore, one must move to be physically present with them before the items are finished. Movement, then, is often animated by lack, and a desire to obtain relation-affirming consumables. It is no accident, therefore, that Asmat thinking about being together with others is epitomized by the image of a hearth, enclosed within a house, around which people gather. This approach to social co-presence is permeated by the shared act of eating, and an awareness of food division and distribution, which is the archetypal expression of kin relatedness. Ethnographers of the region, such as Rupert Stasch (2009: 54–63), have emphasized that in Papuan social worlds, feelings of strangeness and separation at times permeate being together with others, even within the most intimate house spaces. Furthermore, as elsewhere, Asmat life is shot through with instances of domestic violence and forms of social exclusion, particularly for the elderly. Nonetheless, reflecting on Asmat hearth-focused thinking, in which being together with others is imbued with a sense of remarkableness in the context of quotidian challenges to the successful coordination of social activity, I cannot help but be struck by the gap in ‘Western’ coronavirus response policy, which envisions social formations without also thinking through the qualities that being together might have in said social assemblages. In the Sawa Erma region of Asmat in which I have conducted fieldwork, the local response to the threat of pandemic spread has pivoted around indigenous approaches to the spatio-temporal organization of social co-presence. Although it is unthinkable to isolate people singly, Asmat kinship seems to offer a good base for ‘social distancing' at the level of kin groups, and from the point of view of land ownership and food gathering patterns. The Catholic parish, therefore, asked people to disperse in a coordinated fashion to separate food gathering sites, following an indigenous interactive strategy of fleeing to the forest when seeking refuge. Where the English-language terminology of ‘lockdown' evokes incarceration, from an Asmat point of view, dispersal does not necessarily entail hardship. Indeed, Asmat people feel carefree in forest camps, enjoying being away from the densely settled village site, and closer to food resources. After a false start, in which those leaving Sawa Erma encountered an ancestral spirit in the form of a bird urging them to return—an incident about which, from a distance, I have unfortunately been unable to collect any full account—people dispersed to their various forest sites. According to data collected in late April by the Catholic parish health team, almost half the population of Sawa Erma region's four main settlements (the villages of Sa, Er, Erma and Sona) left to the forest. Across six rivers and their tributaries, villagers settled in 73 separate forest camp sites, containing a total of 331 family units, comprised of 1,422 people. The key challenge, here, was convincing Asmat people to refrain from inter-forest camp visiting, and from returning to the area's district centre, where much yearned-for consumables such as tobacco, sugar and coffee can be bought with money, most often yielded by selling fish to Indonesian settlers. Keeping a distance from the district centre was particularly important. While from the 25th of March, Asmat was closed to flights and ships from beyond the region (notably, the faraway cities of Timika and Merauke), small-scale trading vessels have continued the unregulated transportation of goods through the Sawa Erma river system to the upstream settlement of Momogu, which is being developed as port linkage with the Trans-Papua Highway infrastructure project. In discussions with church staff about how to support Asmat people to maintain their distance from the district centre, one option mooted was the provision of something like a universal basic income scheme, in which consumable goods would be transported to forest camps and given out free of charge to mitigate peoples' desire to travel to the shops. This was not implemented, however, because of the difficulty of squaring the distribution of cigarettes and sugar as a health intervention. It is also the case that far from sating desire, the presence of store-bought comestibles might arguably prompt, rather than curb, demand sharing-focused movement between forest camps. The picture I have presented, of an indigenous people with existing approaches to social relations and being in the environment that will allow them to navigate the pandemic threat, seems idyllic. It is not, unfortunately, that simple. First, as in settings the world over, patterns of kin visitation, a key aspect of relationship management and food distribution, have been difficult to curb. A related, and more consequential factor has been how nationwide coronavirus support measures have interacted with peoples' patterns of gathering and dispersal. The national government distributed assistance in the form of cash payments to eligible households each month between April and June, with half-payments set to continue until September (Bean 2020). In settings in which livelihoods are supported through wage labour, such programmes have supported the constriction of social gathering by ensuring recipients do not need to go to, or go looking for, work in unsafe environments. In Asmat, the situation is reversed. The presence of unevenly apportioned money, distributed at village sites, acts as a magnet, drawing even those who have not received government money directly into centres where a share of goods bought by others at district shops can be elicited by presenting oneself to kin as someone who has nothing. This phenomenon is part of a broader socio-historical picture. In the post-Suharto reformasi era (1998 to present), the division of government grant funding has become central to social gathering in Asmat in ways that reshape the organization of existing foci of collective social action, such as ancestral and Catholic ritual feasting. This blending of state process with indigenous approaches to organizing the time and space of social life was exemplified on August 17th, the anniversary of the proclamation of Indonesian Independence. Asmat people from Sa village, where I conducted fieldwork, timed the inter-clan work of renovating their village feast house so that it coincided with the national holiday. This organizational work was amply rewarded; a visit by officials from Asmat's regency government, invited to witness the feast house's inauguration, yielded villagers a gift of at least 50 million rupiah (approximately $4,725 AUD). This sum of money, enormous in local terms, was spent on highly desirable store-bought comestibles, which in turn provisioned excited and memorable periods of exceptional, village-wide shared smoking, drinking and eating. Cycles of ritual feasting are a characteristic Asmat response to periods of strife (Sowada 1990). Correctly actioned inter-clan cooperation is seen as key to ensuring ancestral favour, and with it, health and communal viability. And indeed, miraculously, COVID-19 appears yet to have swept through Asmat. While I am reluctant to reproduce tropes that stereotype indigenous knowledges by pitting them against ‘Western' biomedical understandings of pandemic risk, I nonetheless cannot shake off the anxiety that large-scale social gathering is a recipe for virus transmission. Would my Asmat interlocutors make a connection between their especially efficacious ritual action and the virus' non-appearance? From a distance, it is hard to say. What I can be sure of, however, is that they would locate the agentive power behind world-shaping events in their own decisive actions, and in those of the spirits of their forebears (cf. Strathern 2013: 164–5). The response to COVID-19 in Asmat therefore seems to present something of a paradox. Asmat peoples' sensitivity to the spatio-temporal organization of social co-presence, and the nimbleness with which they continually attempt to reorder it, seems uniquely suited to ‘social distancing'. At the same time, this very nimbleness is a source of risk, as the exigencies of food distribution, which is rarely entirely equitable, constantly perturbs and reconfigures peoples' gathering across the landscape, leaving them vulnerable to virus spread. This is particularly the case in the current moment, when moves to decentralize governance in Indonesia through devolution, ironically, works as a centralizing force at the village-level, drawing people in from outlying forest areas around the promise of grant distribution. Despite this, I continue to be inspired by the central value Asmat people place on being together, and the extent to which organizing the spatio-temporal contours of co-presence is a central focus of their lives. Anthropological commentators have wisely cautioned against adopting household-based metaphors—such as ‘the hearth’—for conceptualizing being together in an era of ‘social distance’, observing that they may not be fit for purpose in ‘Western’ settings in which ‘networks’ of valued social relations, and residence patterns, may not neatly overlap. Nicholas Long and his colleagues (2020), for example, reviewing the pandemic response in New Zealand, advocate for the concept of social ‘bubbles’, arguing that it offers a transparent language for talking about social containment, which can be used creatively to bound various kinds of social formations according to peoples' differing situations. New models of how to think about bounding in-person interactions, however, are incomplete as theorizations of sociality during the pandemic if they do not also include an analysis of co-presence itself, and how its value and resonance is being reshaped by the strictures of the COVID-19 era. While many are no doubt longing for a post-pandemic horizon, in the immediate future, physical distancing in some form seems here to stay. We find ourselves in a situation, therefore, not unlike my Asmat interlocutors, where the spatio-temporal arrangement of social interaction appears as a central, existential concern, on which we have to labour explicitly. Theorizing the qualities of social co-presence itself, here, will be an important part of rethinking our broader interactive repertoires. The fieldwork that informs this article was cleared by the PhD Committee of the University of Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology. All interlocutors consulted gave informed consent to their participation in the project. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Keenok people of Sawa Erma for welcoming me around their hearths, and Bishop Aloysius Murwito (OFM), the Agats-Asmat Catholic diocese and the Parish of Sawa Erma for all their kindness and hospitality. Thanks also to Fr. Vince Cole (MM), Yeni Kristanti and the Sawa Erma parish health team, Panahan Parapat, and Dr Freya Jephcott for the conversations which informed this piece. Special thanks to Rupert Stasch, to Roy Villevoye, and to Sophie Hopmeier, without whom this work would not be possible. Tom Powell Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Department of Social Anthropology, and founder and convenor of the ‘Risk and Renewal in the Pacific' research network at the university's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. He has conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Asmat, Indonesian Papua, studying the relationship between customary ritual, Catholicism and the state, from the point of view of the categories of time and space. In addition, he has produced research collections for several ethnographic museums in the UK, Netherlands, and Indonesia. Tom is the recipient of the Cambridge Australia Trust's 800th Anniversary scholarship.