https://englishkyoto-seas.org/<Book Review>
JPaul S. Manzanilla

Karen Strassler. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and theImage-Event in Indonesia. Durham and London: Duke University Press,2020.
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 388-392.

How to Cite: Manzanilla, JPaul S. Review of Demanding Images: Democracy,Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia by Karen Strassler. Southeast AsianStudies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 388-392. DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.2_388.
Link to this book review:https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-book-reviews-jpaul-s-manzanilla/

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Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

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and how they continue to do so. This overall theme is relevant not only in the history of Buddhism
and medicine but also in the more general questions of relationships between religions andmedicine, questions that have been discussed more at length with regard to other religions—primarily Christianity, but also Islam and to a lesser extent Judaism. In this sense, too, this book
is important as it brings the discussion of Buddhism and medicine within the playing fields ofrelevant mainstream disciplines where Buddhism and medicine are still not sufficiently known,taught, and researched. With this excellent volume at hand, we are in a much better position tohope that Buddhism and medicine will become better known in contexts and disciplines wherethey are not yet well known.
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim
Goldsmiths, University of London; Princeton IAS
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9806-4461
References
Gyatso, Janet. 2017. Review of Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China by C. Pierce Salguero.
History of Religions 57(1): 96–99. https://doi.org/10.1086/692319.
Salguero, C. Pierce, ed. 2020. Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary
Sources. New York: Columbia University Press.
―, ed. 2017. Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. New York: Columbia
University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/salg17994.
Salguero, Pierce. 2022. Blue Beryl. Buzzsprout. https://blueberyl.buzzsprout.com/, accessed November
20, 2023.

Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Eventin Indonesia
Karen Strassler
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.
It took a decade for Karen Strassler to come up with her second and much-awaited book. Indeed,
it could have taken much longer to do the ethnographic fieldwork, converse with a whole gamut ofsources, and finally put together a monograph that sustains her analysis of the productive work ofimages in contemporary Indonesia. Demanding Images is a fascinating study that younger scholars
can only aspire to do. The author introduces the concept of the “image-event” or “a politicalprocess set in motion when a specific image or set of images erupts onto and intervenes in asocial field, becoming a focal point of discursive and affective engagement across diverse publics”(p. 8) to help us analyze Indonesian visual culture in the wake of Suharto’s downfall.

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Benedict Anderson remarked that the mass medium of print enables the creation of the nation
when it conjures communities, when people of the same polity imagine others as fellow subjects
in the nation. Strassler broadens this continuing imagination by exploring images existing in thepublic sphere: photographs, videos, money, street art, graffiti, banners, posters, and digital media.
As both cause and consequence, images are demanded by certain situations as they also demand
the creation of different kinds of order for the people that produce and consume them. In otherwords, images neither simply exist nor are created: they happen and make things happen.
Strassler calls attention to “ludic” images instead of the “evidentiary” mode of documentary
images such as photographs. Ludic images “deploy remediation, repurposing, and reworking to
generate new constellations of truth and modalities of revelation on the surface of the image”(p. 24), which are suggestive of the pleasurable, conservative, redemptive, and revolutionary
functions of images, depending on one’s manner and purpose of using them. Yet there is somethingthat exceeds the intentionality of the image-maker and user. There are possibilities of reversal
and an opening to new ends. After reeling from three decades of authoritarian rule, Indonesia isexperiencing an exponential proliferation of images in its public sphere, at once a testament toinitiatives beyond what was once the center, which is the state, and part of the worldwide technological and artistic innovations in crafting images.
The author begins by discussing the doctoring of the rupiah, the country’s currency, in theaftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 2008 that devastated the economy and led to Suharto’sresignation. Suharto’s images resurfaced as a man hiding in shame, asking the public whethertimes had been better during his three-decade rule. In response, people manipulated Suharto’s
face on printed currency as the image of money became the focal point for criticizing the New
Order regime, which had delivered rapid economic growth but collapsed under the weight offiscal mismanagement and cronyism. Arrested students attended law court hearings using pictures of Suharto’s face as masks, demanding that he appear instead and be accountable. Theabundance of counterfeit money, called aspal (a combination of aslu or “authentic” and palsu or“false”)—issued by the state bank, no less—exposed the corruption that lay at the heart ofIndonesian politics. Counterfeit money also served as a platform for evoking nostalgia for theSukarno era as a counterweight to the Suharto period, when Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno’sdaughter, appeared on fake currency. The politician Megawati also had authoritarian tendenciesof her own, though, and her short-lived presidency failed to deliver on the promises of democracy.
Strassler deepens the anthropological conceptions of the face as a mask, the fetish of money andpower, and examinations of appearances: the malevolent force hiding behind the mask andimages, the Javanese pleasure in appearances, and the prowess (and cowardice) and strongman’srule centrality (and its decentralization and deterritorialization) in the archipelago.
While photography became pivotal as a document for witnessing history during the Reformasi
and as a play in the satirical exposition of corrupt regimes, it became fodder for misogynistic and390

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racist attitudes when its presence and—especially—its absence became a defining ground for
adjudicating the rape cases of ethnic Chinese women in the heady days of Suharto’s ouster. Since
the prosecution of crime relies on proof, for which photography provides the supreme objective
and impartial form, the disinclination on the part of Indonesian Chinese women to present documentation of their sexual abuse highlights the question of the authenticity of both their violationand their status as Indonesians. Here, what Strassler calls “the dream of transparency” (p. 68)
grapples with “forced visibility” (p. 73), and national pride staves off the “international gaze”(p. 79). The possibility of photographic falsification, “conjur[ing] specters of obscurity andmanipulation” (pp. 80–81), not only belies transparency but also discloses the gendered dimensionsof violence in what was supposedly a democratizing society. Indonesian Chinese women arevictimized anew by this obsession with transparency that works against them: Who would want
to be stigmatized and retraumatized by photos of one’s violation? It is telling that the bodily
violations of Indonesian Chinese suggest their persistent marginalization from the Indonesian bodypolitic. The author does not include pictures in this second chapter, so as to avoid replicating theviolence of the visual on silenced subjects.
The third chapter shows leading political figures embroiled in sex scandals that could not bedenied because of the authenticating evidence of videos and photos. At a time when citizens are
finally cherishing the production and circulation of images beyond state control, it is the lurid sidethat (expectedly) animates the public and produces a productive relationship between democracy
and morality. Self-proclaimed telematics expert Roy Suryo’s role is pivotal in unmasking pornography, though his expertise is questioned by hardline Islamic groups that support the politicians.
It is also through publicity that porn stars have tried to make amends or correct public perception
by public displays of piety. The following chapter delves into the controversy generated by thePinkswing Park exhibit showing naked celebrities. Usually, artworks attract a limited audience,
being enclosed in galleries and museums that tend to alienate the populace who must spend timeand money and may not know much about art. Yet this time around, the policing gaze of political
Islam thrust the image into the public sphere and subjected the exhibit to a moral campaign thatradicalized adherents of political Islam. The Indonesian art world and its secular middle-classchampions, in turn (and unfortunately), responded by segregating artistic production from religious
interpretation, saying that the artworks’ value should be appraised by the keen eyes of artists,
critics, and curators.
The last chapter, “Street Signs,” is particularly absorbing as it analyzes the people’s appropriation of public spaces through street art. Dominated by state and private interests simultaneously announcing and advertising their control and soliciting support, urban inscriptions by guerrillastreet artists testify to the reclamation of the commons. However, the same spaces are being
repossessed by government agents who are out to fabricate overwhelming support for extrajudicial
acts of punishing criminals. And here is where the possibility (or threat) of reversal to moreBook Reviews391

authoritarian times portends both residual and emerging repressions and dares artists and citizens
to be bolder in critiquing and wrestling state power. In 2013, street artists called for justice for thehuman rights activist Munir, who had been assassinated in 2004, and yet the same spaces of
mediation are now being reconquered by evil forces most likely guilty of present-day violations.
This is coupled with Yogyakartan natives’ rebuke of “outsiders” who use the city as a canvas forsocial critique, revealing the other kinds of social boundaries regnant in the country. While thebanner-posting operation was surreptitiously carried out by the military immediately after theprison-killing operation, the presence of banners in public places conceals right-wing and counterrevolutionary violence insofar as it proclaims public approval from authors hiding in anonymity.
Banners proclaiming support as if it was coming from the public demonstrate the manipulationof the people and uncover the tendentious character of actually existing democracy. This “as if”
quality is central to images as it unwraps artifice, (un)truth, play, potentiality, and redemption.
Strassler’s conclusion draws our attention to the most explicit demonstration of public visibility of the contemporary moment: the selfie. Belying accusations that backing for the popular
candidate (and by now twice elected and outgoing president) Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was fake orexaggerated, supporters flooded social media with selfies of their attendance at campaign rallies,
even demonstrating the technical details that indexed the mammoth crowd. As a self-madeentrepreneur and political figure with no ties to the New Order regime, Jokowi also embodies the“dream of transparency” in fighting the lies and fakery of his electoral opponent, Prabowo Subianto,
the dictator Suharto’s former son-in-law and himself a military general involved in the murdercase of Reformasi activists. Although selfie-taking demonstrates a very active kind of selfproduced visibility using the benefits of technology, group selfies by middle-class participants atelectoral campaign rallies also show the limits of democracy: this is not substantive democracy—
a democracy of civil freedoms, human rights, and material equality—but electoral (and to someextent) elite (because elitist) democracy, congenial to neoliberal self-fashioning that includes
insofar as it excludes many others. “Neoliberal volunteerism” that calls for a “mental revolution”(pp. 236–237) is far removed from the structural transformation that revolutions desire. Admiringthemselves and relishing the technology through which they produce themselves, the middle
classes and educated people also tend to look down on others and brand them as susceptible to
fake news and disinformation, the unworthy subjects of democracy.
It is expected that the relatively open political climate of the last two and a half decades will
result in the full flowering of image production and contending ideas in the marketplace ofdemocracy. Yet this marketplace is something that is presumed—not a given, and maybe notthe ideal. As more and more people gain the knowledge and creativity to craft images, there is atendency for image creation and reception to be monopolized by “people who know” instead ofbeing fully exercised and enjoyed by the “people from below.” The former aggressively remediate
our understanding of the world, limiting our capacity for changing it. There is the gatekeeping of392Book Reviews

democratization, its subjection to problematically nationalist, elitist, religious, partisan, conservative, and even right-wing and counterrevolutionary pursuits. Who has the right to say anddetermine what democracy is and what determines its course? The authenticity expert? The
religious cleric? Art curators and critics? Government bureaucrats? Old elites seeping into newpolitics, displaying their revanchism in the public sphere? Strassler’s book is a perceptive studyof the visual in a time of neoliberal democracy, and we hold our breath for more of her work.
JPaul S. Manzanilla
The Integrative Center for Humanities Innovation,
Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University

Ramayana Theater in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Madoka Fukuoka, ed.
Singapore: Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2023.
Ramayana Theater in Contemporary Southeast Asia provides an introduction to Ramayana performances across contemporary Southeast Asia, with chapters on Cambodia (Sam-Ang Sam on a rangeof Khmer art forms inspired by the Reamker), Thailand (Hinata Shinsuke on Khon masked danceand Hiramatsu Hideki on Ramayana-inspired films by Chaiyo Studio), Indonesia (Umeda Hideharu
on Wayang puppet theater in Bali and Fukuoka Madoka on Sendratari dance drama in Java), Singapore(Takemura Yoshiaki on dance performance in the Indian diaspora community of Singapore), andJapan (Fukuoka Shota on Ramayana displays at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan).
Each of the contributors has taken care to make their work accessible to non-specialists, so
the book should be of interest not only to Ramayana scholars but also to scholars working inSoutheast Asian media studies more generally. While the title refers to Ramayana “theater,” thechapters actually cover a wide range of performance media including dance, song, film, animation,
comic books—what the editor calls “dramatic art forms”—along with other visual arts as well as
cultural practices such as astrology. For readers unfamiliar with the Indian Ramayana, there is anappendix with a summary of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, which is an important point of reference
for all the performance traditions discussed in the book.
The chapters are written such that they can be read independently. This results in someredundancy, as historical background about the Ramayana is provided repeatedly. However, eachtime the writers present the specific literary and performance history in a way that is most relevantto their own national context, providing a kind of crash course in the many centuries of Ramayana
literature and performances throughout Southeast Asia.
Because the chapters are introductory overviews, they do not engage in detailed critical or