Reviewed by: The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia by Rachmi Diyah Larasati Toni Shapiro-Phim (bio) Rachmi Diyah Larasati . The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press , 2013 . 196 pp. Anthropologist and scholar of Southeast Asia Sally Ann Ness has written about returning “bodily experience as a form of consciousness and understanding to a central place within” Western academic inquiry. Not to do so, especially in a case in which such embodied knowledge and practice “may be as central to the human experience of another culture as it is marginal to that of mainstream US society,” would, she argues, “deny the interpretive potential” of dance and other choreographic phenomena.1 In The Dance That Makes You Vanish, Rachmi Diyah Larasati heeds Ness’s call, making visible the potency of Indonesian dance (mainly of court traditions), and the lives of its performers. Chronicling—and countering—erasure of the dance’s practitioners, she also illuminates possibilities in terms of mobility and identity negotiation that dancing for the state can offer female artists. Larasati’s focus is the horrific violence of 1965–66 and its aftermath. She explicates—from both an academic and a personal perspective—the multifaceted relationship between female dancers and the Indonesian state as Suharto took control of the country and then ruled for another three decades. In addition to being a professor of dance, Larasati is a classical dancer, one who performed as a member of the Indonesian Cultural Mission, a state-sanctioned dance troupe. Weaving memoir, history, and theory into a poignant narrative, she paints a compelling picture of the complex interplay between performance and the politics of memory, making the case that “the reconstruction of [national history and memory] serves to erase the extreme violence and chaos on which Suharto’s New Order state itself was founded” (p. xxi). State officials accomplished this, in part, by, first, recognizing that aesthetic practices are efficacious means of both communicating and influencing identity, embodied experience, and memory; and, second, by manipulating those practices to their own ends. Larasati delves into the New Order’s “massive societal re-categorization” (p. 5) that was coeval with the unchecked killings and arrests that followed the 1965 purported attempted coup d’état. She chronicles the impact on artists, in particular female artists, many of whom had been associated with organizations (e.g., Lekra [Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, Institute of People’s Culture], an artists’ guild; and Gerwani [Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement], what Larasati calls a “protofeminist” women’s group) that were all-of-a-sudden labeled under Suharto as “communist” and, therefore, evil. Forbidden to perform and assaulted, arrested, shunned by authorities and neighbors, and murdered or disappeared, these women’s traumatic displacement from the lives they had known was compounded by their ultimate replacement (hence, erasure) by state-sanctioned facsimiles. With the female [End Page 163] dancing body at the center of much of the public construction—both domestic and international—of what was to constitute Indonesian national culture, it was imperative to formulate, indeed, to create, a polished, idealized version of that body. And while Javanese court aesthetics were privileged by the government, “hold[ing] sway over the nation’s diverse groups through hegemonic over-representation,” (p. 93) Larasati adds that minority practices had been appropriated as well. “[T]o erase, exclude, or eliminate the historical bodies who once performed certain cultural practices—rhetorically positioning them as originals to be replaced by eternalist state cultural discourse and its dancing replicas—is at the minimum a serious abuse of human rights. At worst, such actions constitute politicized mass murder, or genocide” (p. 101). In a book of chilling revelations and haunting analysis, stories of the practice of wajib lapor (“duty to report”), the New Order’s instrument for political rehabilitation of those deemed in need of such, are particularly arresting. Reporting weekly to local village or army officers, as required, some widows, or wives of men who had disappeared, were repeatedly raped. They had no recourse. In Bali, it was sometimes the same men who violated those “reporting” who also ritually processed offerings made by...
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Sep 1, 2019
Daniel Arbino 
Open Access