Description

This talk will explore a relocation of 800 pedagang kaki lima (street vendors) in Yogyakarta where both the government and street vendors evoke the possibility of violence a few months before a government planned relocation to a marketplace. I argue that this apprehensive moment, assumes a similar structure and feeling evoked in moments such as elections, and as what has been described as a saat in Bahasa Indonesia. I describe how this saat, a possible moment of violence, has its own structure and vocabulary and occupies a space between “actual” and “possible” violence, and how this space generates unique and very powerful structures of feeling, narratives and talk around violence.

The narratives associated with this saat are powerful because they are imagined in relation to other incidents of violence in the past and present. In this way, I argue that the talk of violence had a pervasive and persuasive hold over those involved in the relocation because it drew on other abnormal moments from the past, which placed this moment also outside the “normal” and the everyday and to surpass the exigencies of the local and the present.