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This chapter examines the West Papuan independence movement. It describes long-term research with West Papuan refugees living in Papua New Guinea and exiled political leaders. It discusses a shift in the late 1990s from paramilitary opposition to Indonesian violence to human rights activism. It also describes how negative representations of West Papuans, including claims about lost tribes, undermine their pursuit of sovereignty. The author discusses his participation in various forms of solidarity politics.

This chapter charts an ideology of linguistic difference, shaping how Korowai of West Papua have evaluated Indonesian over the first quarter-century of their contact with it. Their naming of this intrusive lingua franca as “demon language” (where “demon” contrasts paradigmatically with “human”) is one of many practices by which Korowai emphasize that the new language is simultaneously strange and parallel to their own language. After describing the social history of Indonesian, in Papua and locally, the chapter examines speech practices in which Korowai associate Indonesian with a perspective on the world that is alien to their own geographic and cultural position, but that is a deformed counterpart to their position. The chapter discusses how bilingual Korowai increasingly use Indonesian in conversation with each other, drawing on the language's artful potential for indexing strangeness and parallelism at the same time.

This chapter argues that language ideologies and practices mediate consequences of cultural contact over time. Focusing on the Pacific, from Rapa Nui to West Papua, it highlights complex histories and variation of cultural encounters, crossings and re-crossings; cultural and political conditions of linguistic research across different colonial and postcolonial phases; the linguistic diversity of Pacific Island societies, and the social centrality of talk and other verbal practices such as literacy, in them. The chapter emphasizes variation in linguistic and cultural change, debates about modernization, missionization, and language endangerment and revitalization, and suggests strategies for understanding the dynamics of such changes by identifying key agents, institutional sites, and linguistic forms, within a wider historical and global conjuncture.

The introduction lays out the problematic explored in the book. It takes as its starting point a 1961 quote from Robert F. Kennedy, the US Secretary of State: in the midst of a dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia on West Papua’s future, Kennedy observed that the Papuans were “still, as it were, living in the Stone Age,” and thus had no ability to decide their own fate. The chapter examines the contemporary problems caused by this assumption, and then offers a brief history of the idea of the Stone Age. Then it introduces the book’s argument on how a particular experience of colonial state building fed the notion that western New Guinea was a Stone Age land. It goes on to provide an overview of the colonial conditions that gave rise to the mission of establishing a Dutch presence in the highlands, before introducing the various chapters and the characters featured in them. The introduction ends with a reflection on the importance of the history described in the book in shaping the fortunes of West Papuans today.

This book explores the ways in which Korowai people of West Papua, Indonesia make qualities of otherness the central focus of their social relations. Otherness is a main category by which Korowai themselves talk about social relations. It argues that Korowai define their social engagements around ways in which they are strange to each other. The main finding developed is that a social bond conjoins qualities of otherness and involvement in Korowai people's reflexive sensibilities about social relations. Korowai places and social relations are not even isomorphic with themselves and this nonisomorphism is of foundational importance to the shape of Korowai social experience. The vision of Orientalism consensus offers only occasional insights for the Korowai cultural practices. Furthermore, it emphasizes how patterns of the temporality of social relations are a major concern. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given.