Emotive Banners and Billboards - Worlding Covid-19 and Orders of Feeling in Kupang, Indonesia - Brill
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
European Journal
European Journal of of
East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28 East Asian Studies
brill.com/ejea
Emotive Banners and Billboards
Worlding Covid-19 and Orders of Feeling in Kupang, Indonesia
Thomas Stodulka | orcid: 0000-0002-9142-0814
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Thomas.stodulka@fu-berlin.de
Abstract
This paper analyses the affective ramifications at the onset of the emerging Corona
pandemic in Kupang, Indonesia. Steering towards now established social and political
orders of public conduct outside one’s home and neighbourhood, public billboards and
warning signs became early visible manifestations of worlding Covid-19 into the city’s
infrastructure. Rapidly emerging governmental and entrepreneurial banners commu-
nicated new orders of personal and communal hygiene practices. They created mes-
sages of Covid-19 infectiology based on globalised public health rhetoric calling famil-
iar socialities and ordinary feelings into question. This paper scrutinises the pandemic
worlding of spaces and socialities and reflects on the relationship between newspa-
per reports, billboards and the feelings they evoked. The article proposes the concept
of ‘orders of feelings’ as a valuable complement of ‘worlding’ theories via the analy-
sis of banners, signs and newspaper articles as ‘emotives’. Ultimately, it contemplates
anthropological knowledge production in a pandemic context that obstructed tradi-
tional ethnographic engagement.
Keywords
worlding – pandemic – emotive – orders of feeling – Kupang, Indonesia
What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of rela-
tionships. Never a ‘thing’.
bateson 1972: 249
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/15700615-20220121
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
2 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
My family and I arrived in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, on 13
March 2020. We landed at El-Tari airport when the neighbouring nation of
Timor-Leste closed its borders due to the uncertainties related to the Covid-
19 pandemic. We found out through online conversations that colleagues and
expatriates were making their way out via the capital Dili before airports, har-
bours and border posts were about to close down. Across the border, in Kupang,
the pandemic conundrums were about to unfold. We spent our first days with
our host family, whom we knew from fieldwork the year before. No one wore
masks yet in the public spaces and the crowded areas of the city, and there
were no confirmed cases of Covid-19 infections yet. While Kupang restaurants,
markets and hotels were operating, some areas in our country of residence, Ger-
many, went into lockdown. Federal governments shut down public institutions,
schools, shops and offices, limited public transport and ordered citizens to stay
home. With this news from home and Covid-19 related media reports from the
capital, Jakarta, starting to rise in Indonesia’s newspapers and national tv sta-
tions, we decided to move into a hotel room on 16 March. We did not want to
expose ourselves and others to unnecessary risks and kept social contacts to a
minimum. Since the intended fieldwork on environmental education in West
Timor and Timor-Leste could not take place under such insecure and pandemic
circumstances, we followed the foreign office’s request to return to Germany as
soon as possible. And yet the situation was too intriguing (and confusing at the
same time) not to attend to and document it.
In a social and mass media-saturated atmosphere that disseminated reports
and images of a korona wave looming to ‘roll into’ Indonesia and the island
of Timor from Europe via Jakarta and Bali, I decided to systematically docu-
ment the daily reports of Kupang’s three leading newspapers, Timor Express,
Pos Kupang and Victory News, between our arrival on 13 March and our depar-
ture back to Germany on 24 March. In addition, I went on daily walks to
gauge the atmosphere in public and commercial spaces and document them
via photographs and field diary jottings. Taking the unpredictability of the
health consequences of moving and engaging across the city into account, I
decided to keep physical distance and not tag along with other persons, famil-
iar interlocutors from previous fieldwork, or inquire into their experiences
through conversations or interviews during sensory and other walkalongs. I
asked myself: how does an anthropologist track the local repercussions of a
globally circulating virus that are not always detectable to the ethnographer at
the onset of a newly worlding pandemic infrastructure? How does an anthro-
pologist who usually relies on repeated and open-ended encounters, conver-
sations and sharing everyday lives with interlocutors over long periods con-
duct fieldwork in times of physical distancing without exclusively resorting
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
emotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 3
to digital ethnography? In a climate of collective—even global—puzzlement,
and with little time to reflect on other methodological options, I decided
to document the prominently emerging Covid-19 related public banners and
signs, alongside which I focused on situations where emotions were running
high.
To theorize how media discourses started creating an emotional atmosphere
where banners and signs could develop significant emotive potentialities to
reorder inner-city mobilities and socialities, I will introduce ‘orders of feel-
ings’ as analytic concept. I focus on the interplay between media narratives and
emotive public signs as infrastructures of worlding spaces and socialities affec-
tively. After reflecting on methodological constraints and potentials of studying
orders of feeling ethnographically in times of an unfolding pandemic where
mobilities and the possibilities for familiar social encounters were impossible,
the article introduces Kupang’s demography and history and explores disrup-
tive outcries, anxieties and irritations in the vicinities of emerging Covid-19
billboards and signs. Employing close-reading and discursive analyses of pub-
lic billboards and media reports during the emergence of new korona orders
in the Timorese city between 13 March and 23 March 2020, I theorise whether
these hinted at the emergence of new orders of feeling and conduct that later
translated as the ‘new normal’ (Sparrow et al. 2020). Finally, this article dis-
cusses whether the short time window of eleven days could in hindsight be
recollected as an affective tipping point when a looming and abstract pandemic
started transforming into significantly felt irritation and disruption of famil-
iar everyday routines. By probing the concept of ‘worlding’ (Ong 2011) from an
affect and emotion theory perspective (Slaby and von Scheve 2019), I hypothe-
sise that emotional outbursts can indicate disruptions of everyday familiarities
and hint at newly emerging orders of feeling and conduct. This theoretical tin-
kering relates to the limited temporality and fieldwork immersion due to Covid-
19 disruption. It uses the speculative character of ‘worlding’ to its advantage.
Since worlding, as one anonymous reviewer pointed out convincingly, involves
uncertainty, ongoing changes, shifts, possibilities and speculation, it forms a
theoretical hook to connect the uncertainties of pandemic fieldwork and sub-
sequent anthropological analysis. Flâneur-type fieldwork (see below), then,
becomes a similarly ambiguous probing. Its results, in turn, do not have the
usual ethnographic gravitas, but they figure into the emergence of future affec-
tive potentialities and governmentalities. Similar to the Covid-19 pandemic
itself, which reshuffled familiar socialities, this contribution cannot claim to be
a traditional article in which ethnographic data supports the faît accompli of
an already established new order of feelings or a ‘new normal’. Instead, this arti-
cle draws on the observations, banners, signs and newspaper articles as sugges-
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
4 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
tions, speculations or signposts of where we might find the ‘new normal’ or
what new orders of feeling might look like.
1 Worlding Infrastructures and Orders of Feeling through Emotives
As a conceptual framework, ‘orders of feeling’ focus on the relationship
between discursive and infrastructural arrangements of emotives and their
affective repercussions of feeling and conducting oneself appropriately (Sto-
dulka 2019). It brings into focus the emergence of new or the collapse of for-
merly established feeling rules (Hochschild 1979) and asks how persons’ feel-
ings change vis-à-vis new orders, laws or discursive infrastructures. Alongside
the worlding concept, which focuses on the emergence, adaption and contes-
tation of infrastructures and travelling concepts of socialities and imagined
futures, orders of feeling relate the infrastructural, social and imaginary to the
personal and emotional. A combined approach opens up theoretical pathways
to track the emergence of continuously worlding political and legal imperatives
of authorities that affect the emotional dimensions of experiencing human
life and sociality in particular times and places. This article engages the two
concepts to study emergent discourses (Covid-19 related media reports) and
objects (signposts and banners) as emotive worlding of Covid-19 infrastruc-
tures. It carefully asks whether and how they emote city dwellers and shape
local orders of feeling and behaving appropriately in public.
The focus on feeling orders highlights persons’ bodies and their affective
experience in the worlding and emplacement of global public health infras-
tructures. By bringing the actors’ bodies and feelings explicitly into focus, I
build on Aihwa Ong (2011), who relates worlding to unique and diverse local
assemblages of globally circulating standards, measurements and visions.
Accordingly, the worlds of people dwelling in cities are neither stable nor struc-
tured but processual and emergent. Relating to Martin Heidegger (1962 [1927]),
who defined ‘worlding’ as multiple assemblages of being in, with and attending
to the world, attending to orders of feeling as research focus underlines that
worlding relates to dynamic arrangements of ever-renewing infrastructures,
emerging sensations, perceptions and feelings through which humans must
constantly work their way. To extend Donna Haraway’s multispecies perspec-
tive, in which ‘companion species’ engage in relentless processes of ‘becoming
with’ a world in which ‘natures, cultures, subjects and objects do not pre-exist
their intertwined worldings’ (2016: 13), the novel coronavirus seems particularly
effective regarding its potentialities of worlding local infrastructures, socialities
and feelings. Referring to Helen Palmer and Victoria Hunter (2018), worlding
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
emotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 5
is informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or
encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context
in which events and interactions occur. It is above all an embodied and
enacted process—a way of being in the world—consisting of an individ-
ual’s whole-person act of attending to the world.
Ethnographically studying orders of feeling as an affective gauge of emerging
worlding infrastructures opens up a variety of research foci on different spa-
tial, social and political scales. In the case at hand, it might help capture the
rather abrupt shift from pre-pandemic to pandemic orders of appropriately
acting and feeling in public spaces by zeroing in on emerging Covid-19 media
discourse and the spatial arrangement and emotive potential of oversized ban-
ners. Such an affective perspective on placemaking takes the friction, embod-
iment and experience of normative orders seriously. It attends to the affective
dimensions of governmentality and media narratives. Newspaper headlines
and billboards (see images in sections below) such as ‘be careful not to …’, ‘stay
away from …’, ‘avoid engaging with …’ or ‘take care of/not to …’ intend to address
persons’ public conduct and affect their feelings, so my reasoning goes.
Identifying emotives (Reddy 1997) in mass media texts and public banners
can convey explicit authoritative commands of governing, disciplining and
worlding the city’s public and commercial spaces. In the literal sense of the
New Oxford American Dictionary, emotives are defined as
arousing or able to arouse intense feeling … The words emotive and emo-
tional share similarities but are not interchangeable. Emotive is used to
mean ‘arousing intense feeling’, while emotional tends to mean ‘charac-
terized by intense feeling’. Thus an emotive issue is one likely to arouse
people, while an emotional response is one that is itself full of arousal.
William Reddy considers emotives as predominantly performative utterances,
which refer to a person’s inner feelings and ‘actually do things to the world’
(1997: 331) in terms of social parole. In an extension to the author, I will illus-
trate that emotives are not exclusively related to utterers’ feelings. Emotives
can be arranged spatially and discursively to provoke affective arousal and
response in others not only by human beings but also through media and
objects: rhetoric, mediatised and materialised emotives impact affective expe-
rience. They can shape how persons perceive emerging governmentalities, how
they feel and act upon them. They impinge on persons’ bodies and sociali-
ties. In the context of the emerging Covid-19 pandemic, humans across the
globe witnessed how (social) media discourses and public signposts and ban-
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
6 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
ners affected them directly. Signposts admonished that persons, collectives and
whole societies adhered to the newly established global orders of physical dis-
tancing, alerted hygiene, wearing masks and staying at home. An analysis to
what extent, whether or why people adhered to, resisted, tweaked or ignored
those emerging and emoting infrastructures is not within the scope of this
article. It focuses on the first weeks of pandemic worlding and the emotive
and affective dimensions of emergent governmentalities. It discusses how new
orders of feeling and conduct, later dubbed the ‘new normal’, could manifest in
East Nusa Tenggara’s capital Kupang.
2 Out of Options? Or: The Covid-19 Fieldwork Flâneur
In addition to the growing anxiety and confusion over how to behave appropri-
ately and avoid possibly infectious environments, the pandemic situation was
methodologically challenging. Ethnographers had to find new ways to continue
research beyond exclusively drawing on online surveys, online interviewing
and the analysis of virtual media and online spaces. Thus, this article is also an
attempt to carve out practices of knowledge construction in pandemic times
and with regard to limited time, constrained in-situ mobility and haphazard
sociality. It suggests possibilities of being present in the field without actually
being there. Instead of shifting my focus on to social media and other online
communication, I decided to observe disruptive situations: that is, emotional
outbursts around emerging Covid-19 signposts on multiple routes through the
city between 13 and 23 March 2020. I will contextualise these through quanti-
tative content analysis and a close reading of collected hardcopy newspapers
published during these days.
While I was in Kupang, I was striving for a methodological figure that would
fit my otherwise limited scope for familiar ethnographic engagement. I remem-
bered Peter Nas’ (2012) text on the symbolic pattern of Indonesian cities, in
which he framed the urban anthropologist as flâneur. In twenty years of field-
work in Yogyakarta and recently in Kupang, I never considered myself an urban
symbolist, even less a flâneur. Yet the early phase of the pandemic forced
anthropologists to probe ethical and responsible ways to navigate the chal-
lenges related to social and physical distancing, impossible neighbourhood
visits and wearing masks during social encounters in hot and humid environ-
ments. With few other options left, I asked myself how to become a flâneur
in pandemic times, ‘an active and intellectual observer driven by curiosity
and (who) combines the casual eye of the stroller with the purposeful stare
of the detective’ (Nas 2012: 432). When in-depth and repetitive conversations,
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
emotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 7
extended case study observation, sensory walkalongs (Low 2015) or systematic
mind-mapping or photo stories (Varvantakis et al. 2019) were obstructed by an
atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion, and by pandemic rules that restricted
movement in and towards crowded places, micro-focusing on newly emerging
public signs and emotionally charged situations around them seemed like a
viable option. Aside from this, I could combine the daily walk to the newspaper
stand inside a mall with observant and documented flâneries across Kupang’s
public and commercial spaces. Instead of drawing on the flâneur’s bygone
connotations as elite and masculine (Wolff 1985), I call on the methodologi-
cal figure’s critical and sensuous engagement with places and urban spaces.
Jamie Coates describes the flâneur as ‘an icon of movement in the city and a
methodology for understanding themes of embodiment and the urban’ (2017:
31), without focusing too much on the anthropologist him or herself.
3 Worlding New Orders of Feeling: Emotive Signposts
The provincial capital of Eastern Nusa Tenggara (ntt) is a rapidly growing
middle-sized Indonesian port city on Timor island. Despite its population num-
ber rising to 434,972 in 2019 (bps Kupang 2020), it ranks only as number 35 of
Indonesian cities, similar in size to Ambon in the Moluccas, Manado in North
Sulawesi, or Mataram in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. It is the provincial capi-
tal of the islands grouped around Flores, Sumba and Timor, and also the biggest
city in the area. In addition to the impressive new and old colonial-style admin-
istration buildings, Silvia Tidey (2012) writes that the infrastructure of visible
governmentality makes it difficult not to notice state orders and images.
Since 2012, the national governmental plan for the development of Indone-
sia’s eastern provinces, also known as ‘The Timor-Leste–Indonesia–Australia
Growth Triangle’ (tia-gt), was initiated by former president Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, and then, spearheaded on the Indonesian side by the current
president Jokowi, resulted in a significant expansion of administrative, trans-
portation and economic infrastructures. With its recently built new upmarket
hotels, restaurants and malls, the city caters to a new cosmopolitan class in
addition to labour and kinship migrants that have transformed Kupang into a
multi-ethnic and pluri-religious hub over the centuries (Van Klinken 2014). The
city of Kupang is home to a majority of Protestant Christians with a growing
Muslim community that conflates with a historically grown Buginese pres-
ence along the coast, whereas the majority of the ntt province is Catholic.
Since 2002, Timor island has been home to two nation-states, Indonesia in the
west and Timor-Leste in the east. In response to the island’s long history of
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
8 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
colonial, interethnic, interreligious or state- and military-sponsored violence,
the provincial government has erected gigantic sculptures of multi-ethnic har-
mony and peace. De Giosa (2011) has illustrated that East Nusa Tenggara’s
provincial capital is structured along an ‘axis of harmony’—a city boulevard
that runs through the city from the west to the east where monuments of
multi-ethnic and multi-religious symbolism tower over traffic roundabouts.
Aside from concrete-structured painted monuments promoting harmony and
statues of heroes reminding the younger generations of the struggle for inde-
pendence against the Dutch colonisers in the 1940s, Kupang’s governmentality
symbolism also comprises gigantic banners (spanduk) and billboards (papan).
Compared to many Javanese cities, where religious, neighbourhood and civil
society movements orchestrated the banners (see Duile and Tamma 2021; Sto-
dulka 2017), Kupang’s public symbolism was under the stewardship of the
municipal and provincial governments. To substantiate these claims with an
example from my flâneries, the banner below (Figure 1) reflects the mayor’s
initiative not so much to counter deficient waste management and sewage sys-
tems, but to address the (moral) behaviour of its residents. The banner shows
the mayor and his deputy in uniform with a thumbs up to encourage the pub-
lic to ‘become aware’ (sadar) that one ‘can change’ (berubah) and ‘be clean’
(bersih).
In addition to banners related to waste management and environmental pol-
lution, signposts that explicate dengue fever (demam berdarah) precautions
are another prominently visible feature in ntt’s cities, towns and villages. In
2020, on 17 March, the provincial government set up dengue fever reminders
that were different from the years before. Figure 2 illustrates the mixed mes-
sage between the national government’s newly implemented 3M orders (Har-
madi 2020) that translated the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 direc-
tives of wearing masks, washing hands and physical distancing into Indonesian
(Memakai masker, Menjaga jarak dan menghindari kerumunan, Mencuci tan-
gan pakai sabun), ‘plus’ preventing dengue (plus mencegah demam berdarah).
The following sections theorise on this shift of discursive attention. They reflect
on both the print media’s significant shift from dengue fever to almost exclusive
Covid-19 reporting despite the evidence. The flâneur’s witnessing of increas-
ing public Covid-19 notifications and related emotional outbursts in their close
vicinities carefully suggests the emergence of new orders of feeling and con-
duct in public spaces.
Four days later, on 21 March, the Province’s Public Health Services (Dinas
Kesehatan Provinsi ntt) erected Kupang’s first Covid-19 signpost that offered
new orders of containing and preventing infection (Figure 3). The governor
and his deputy advised the public to ‘keep oneself and one’s family safe
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access
emotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 9
figure 1 Banner at the newly constructed urban park Tugu Ina Bo’i (Monument of the
Beloved Mother): ‘Let’s change—it is possible to be clean if we become aware’
© author
from the Coronavirus with germas’, the latter being an acronym of Gerakan
Masyarakat Sehat, the national government’s health community movement
that targets lifestyle changes for illness prevention (Karso and Wibawa 2017).
The six recommendations merged the germas movement with the World
Health Organisation’s pandemic recommendations as follows:
1. Wash hands with soap under running water/use antiseptic liquids.
2. Take care of personal and environmental cleanliness.
3. Boost your body stamina by consuming nutritious food.
4. Minimise physical contact and proximity with others.
5. Sports and enough rest.
6. Use mask in case of cough or protect the mouth with your inner upper
arm.
From an affective perspective on placemaking that focuses on billboards as a
materialised discourse of emerging pandemic infrastructures, I consider the
conveyed messages as significant emotives that address the city population in
affective ways. Billboards and signs aimed at establishing new orders of feeling
and conduct thriving on the global who directives, the national government’s
policies to implement these, and the local press coverage.
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access10 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
figure 2 Novelty: Dengue and Covid-19 prevention billboard
© author
figure 3 First Covid-19 billboard in Kupang
© palce amalo, media indonesia
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 11
4 Worlding New Orders of Feeling: Emotive Media
Vidi Sukmayadi (2019) writes that Indonesia comprises the highest number of
mass media in the world. She reminds us, however, that all of them are con-
trolled by only twelve major media groups. Over half of these twelve media
tycoons are members of national political parties, some of them even their
chairpersons. Media consolidation in Indonesia is ‘a mechanism by which busi-
nesspeople and the politicians convey their interests and at the same time, take
profits from their media empire’ (Sukmayadi 2019: 61). Without oversimplifying
the interlinkage with political parties and business empires, it is important to
remember that billboards, banners, signposts and media narratives are more
often than not originating from very similar, if not the same, sources.
The quantitative analysis and close reading of nineteen editions of Kupang’s
three newspapers, Timor Express, Pos Kupang and Victory News, between 13 and
23 March reveal how the otherwise prominent topics of seasonal dengue fever
(November to April), the provincial government’s commitment to counter
stunting and reduce poverty, and waste management were pushed back almost
into oblivion by an initially speculative Covid-19 journalism. Table 1 singles
out the comparison between newspaper articles and images (photographs and
illustrations) related to Covid-19 and those related to dengue fever to exemplify
this discursive shift. While reports on dengue prevention measurements and
infection rates were still on balance with Covid-19 news reports until 14 March,
the wabah korona (corona plague) dominated after this.
Covid-19 related reports (224) and images (135) between 13 and 23 March
amounted to 359, whereas dengue reporting was comparably low with 53
reports and images altogether. From a strictly evidence-based perspective,
this imbalance is surprising. While the number of detected dengue infec-
tions reached a nationwide record high in ntt during the rainy season of
2019/2020, the first Covid-19 infection was only confirmed on 10 April, with
the first Covid-19 related death in the entire city of Kupang and ntt on 11 May.
Up to 1 December, the number of Covid-19 infections reached 1,355 cases, and
hospitals registered 25 deaths throughout the ntt province. By contrast, the
number of persons infected with dengue fever between January and June 2020
alone amounted to 5,482 persons, and 55 persons died. When accounting for
the infection rates of both illnesses and comparing them to the number of
media reports, the numbers indicate a clear shift of attention from dengue
to Covid-19. Reports on the governor’s promised initiatives to counter stunt-
ing, poverty and littering almost disappeared from media focus and coverage.
When juxtaposing Covid-19 related journalism with the emergence of Covid-
19 related banners and signposts (see the section below), these eleven days
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access12 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
table 1 Shifting media discourse: worlding korona
Date Corona Corona Dengue Dengue Newspaper
articles images articles images
23.03.20 25 17 1 1 Timor Express
23.03.20 24 11 1 0 Pos Kupang
22.03.20 22 12 0 0 Victory News
21.03.20 16 9 1 0 Pos Kupang
20.03.20 17 8 0 0 Pos Kupang
19.03.20 10 7 2 2 Pos Kupang
19.03.20 15 10 0 0 Victory News
18.03.20 10 3 1 1 Pos Kupang
18.03.20 9 5 2 1 Timor Express
18.03.20 13 9 1 0 Victory News
17.03.20 9 6 2 0 Pos Kupang
17.03.20 15 10 1 1 Victory News
16.03.20 13 5 3 1 Pos Kupang
15.03.20 5 3 4 2 Pos Kupang
14.03.20 10 9 2 2 Pos Kupang
14.03.20 2 3 2 2 Timor Express
14.03.20 4 5 4 4 Victory News
13.03.20 3 2 3 1 Pos Kupang
13.03.20 2 1 3 2 Victory News
Total 224 135 33 20
might be considered a transitional phase from known and familiar orders of
feeling and conduct to new ones that later resulted in national governmen-
tal rhetoric of the ‘new normal’, a term that was later substituted through the
slogan of ‘adapting to new habits’ (adaptasi kebiasaan baru) in the national
government’s rhetoric.
New orders of feeling in public spaces and new ways of behaving within
them were rapidly promoted by the media, following the measures recom-
mended by the globalised health regime of the who. These measures were later
also proclaimed in markets and malls through banners and signposts. While on
14 March Victory News printed the national health minister’s advice to residents
and health workers to ‘overcome dengue first, and then focus on korona’ (Atasi
dulu dbd baru Fokus ke Korona) on its front page, with Pos Kupang encouraging
travellers to ‘not be afraid to stay in hotels’ ( jangan takut ke hotel), and Timor
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 13
Express reporting that Kupang was ‘Covid-19 free’ (Kupang bebas pemantauan
Covid-19), the tone of reporting changed significantly only one day later.
On 15 March, Pos Kupang reported that the ‘who urges [us] to declare a
national emergency’ (who desak umumkan darurat nasional) only to be fol-
lowed by the headline that the national ‘House of Representatives Proposes a
Lockdown’ (dpr usul Lockdown, Pos Kupang, 16 March 2020), with five articles
and three images on Covid-19 infectiology on the front cover, and a story on
the death of a Covid-19 infected patient in Cianjur, West Java (which is almost
3,000 kilometres away), on page 2. The front cover of the same newspaper’s
edition of 17 March reads, ‘ntt Refuses European Tourists’ (ntt Tolak Turis
Eropa), ‘Forbidden to Kiss/Rub the Nose’ (Larang Cium Hidung), and shows a
picture of the province’s governor on his way to the office where his temper-
ature is measured by a thermal screener (caption: ‘Preventing Corona’, Cegah
Corona). Taking into account the many Covid-19 related articles which directly
address readers on how to behave reasonably vis-à-vis the pandemic in terms
of diet, sports, medicalisation and staying at home, the sudden emergence of
new discursive orders was impressive regarding their rigidity and force. Reports
on ‘Mayor Disperses Crowd—Minimal Awareness’ (Wali Kota Bubarkan Keru-
munan Massa—Kesadaran Minim, Pos Kupang, 23 March) at Kupang’s nightly
hangout place at the Tirosa (acronym for the three islands Timor, Rote and
Sabu) roundabout, or the warnings to close local marketplaces (Pos Kupang,
23 March) in case of continued ‘inappropriate’ behaviour regarding the new
corona orders of physical distancing and abstaining from familiar greeting cus-
toms such as nose-kissing, intended to emote readers to care, social respon-
sibility and compliance. These emotives connected to the rationale of global
public health recommendations, but they failed to resonate locally. Initially,
they infused disordered feelings of anxiety, fear, suspicion and confusion. In
particular, global orders of physical distancing in public ran contrary to local
concepts of space where private and public dimensions of conduct and feel-
ing are entangled. The streets, the beach or roundabouts can become extended
homes and settings of intimate encounters, where kinning and socialising take
place. Similar to other towns and cities across East Nusa Tenggara and the
Indonesian archipelago, fellow-feeling, compassion, care (peduli), social and
kinship ties are often communicated less through talk than through embodied
presence and positioning in space. Embodied get-togethers are inevitable prac-
tices of cultural sociality, even more so in marginalised areas where telecom-
munication infrastructures are either non-existent or left to residents’ financial
responsibilities, such as buying phone credit (pulsa) to connect to the internet
and its promoted virtual platforms.
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access14 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
5 Worlding New Orders of Feeling: Disruptive Situations and
Emotional Outbursts
The proclaimed urgency displayed in banners and media narratives fuelled
their emotive potential of addressing citizens affectively, as commands that tar-
geted the restructuring of feelings: who was expected to ‘adapt to (which) new
habits’ (adaptasi kebiasaan baru; Harmadi 2020)? And which feelings were pro-
hibited and prescribed towards—or not towards—whom?
In focusing on emotives’ disruptive affective repercussions, I draw on Bir-
gitt Röttger-Rössler, who writes that emotional phenomena resonate in almost
every social encounter, yet they become particularly salient in situations of
adversity, irritation and conflict (2004: 196). I illustrate such disruptive situa-
tions as they unfolded at the onset of the pandemic worlding. I relate to Jarrett
Zigon, who writes that, as a concept, ‘the situation allows us to understand how
persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and culturally
distributed get caught up in the shared conditions that emerge from the sit-
uation’ (2015: 501; emphasis in original). Hence, I understand ‘disruptive situa-
tions’ as tenacious predicaments between the familiar and the novel that affect
persons in emotionally significant ways. The first example relates to the affec-
tive ramifications of mediatised ‘corona news’ in the public space of a seashore
promenade, whereas the second illustration focuses on emotional outbreaks
in response to banners, signs, thermo-screens, gloves or hygiene masks at the
entrance gates of a mall, a private hospital and a newspaper agency building.
5.1 ‘Go Home, Bule!’
Studying orders of feeling calls on researchers to put their own emotions
and affects into perspective and juxtapose them with the analysis of media
reports, billboards and observation of others. As socially and affectively posi-
tioned subjects within the orders they study, neglecting the researcher’s own
affective experiences in emerging pandemic worldings equals scientific distor-
tion (Davies and Stodulka 2019). How else, one might ask provocatively, could
ethnographers possibly research and write about the dynamic entanglements
of orders and their affective dimensions in emerging infrastructures?
This section draws on field notes, which I made to understand what was at
stake at the disorienting onset of the pandemic. The field notes comprise three
different documentation formats: methodological reflections, ethnographic
descriptions and documented emotions.
On 21 March, when the newspapers had started publishing Covid-19 stories
excessively, embassies and foreign offices started ordering foreigners to return
home. Yet affordable flight tickets were difficult to obtain. After five days of
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 15
living in a small hotel room together as a family of three, I jotted the terms
‘fatigued’, ‘intimidated’ and ‘anxious’ in my log’s emotion section. The emotion
terms were related to the following incidents that I had witnessed during the
day.
The hotel staff asked for our passports and took pictures of all the visas
and stamps reaching back as far as 2014. On our further inquiry, the hotel’s
managing director monosyllabically commented that the police had ‘recently’
(barusan) issued a new order that entitled governmental and police authorities
to track all visitors’ transnational movements. On our way from the reception
desk back to our room on the second floor, I ran into a middle-aged man with
prayer marks on his forehead, wearing a Javanese batik koko shirt. We greeted
each other with a smile and polite Javanese language (I had lived in Java for
almost five years) before he took my hand and instructed me, ‘It seems that the
burka now seems not such a bad idea all along’, pointing to the mask on my
face. He continued in an authoritative voice, ‘The al-Quran teaches not to be
close with the bodies of the other gender. That comes in handy now.’ Although
he was not wearing a mask, I could not tell whether he was joking. A few hours
later, on our sunset walk at the very short seashore esplanade (a wall with a nar-
row road facing the sunset) near our hotel, we realised it was hardly possible
to keep physical distance from other strolling couples or groups of friends and
family. It was impossible to adhere to the mediatised recommendations once
we were outside our one-bed hotel room, especially since our hotel restaurant
and the lobby hosted large wedding receptions of sometimes more than a hun-
dred persons on an almost daily basis. I jotted in the field diary, ‘How does all
this fit with checking our passports because of “police orders”?’
Feelings of insecurity and anxiety peaked on 22 March. One day after the
unexplained and intimidating document check inside our hotel, I described in
my field notes that
today I got insulted for the first time by a gang of five youngsters that were
hanging out at the promenade near the hotel. Every time I passed them
on my sunrise laps, they shouted at me in a coarsely loud and derogatory
tone, ‘Where are you from? Corona! Corona! Corona! Go home, whitey!’
(Dari mana? Belum pulang? Korona! Korona! Korona! Pulang saja, bule!)
In the evening and during the following two days until our departure, the same
group of young men shouted, ‘Whitey, corona, corona!’ (Bule, korona, korona!)
in my direction whenever they spotted me in the hotel grounds from the out-
side promenade. No one interfered. Everyone averted their gaze. My jottings
further read, ‘What does this mean for citizenship, residency and mobility
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access16 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
issues? What backlashes in terms of social cohesion, stigmatisation, racism,
and xenophobia are to be expected?’
This incident resonates with the online circulation a few days earlier of a
citizen’s open letter to the regent of Central Manggarai, on the neighbouring
island of Flores, which is also part of the East Nusa Tenggara province. In the
letter, which shared, on social media on 17 March, the location and travel route
of a group of ten bule students intending to learn about local cosmologies in
Flores, readers were urged to stop the buses along a particular route, report the
students and their instructors to the police and deport them from the coun-
try. In twenty years of fieldwork in the archipelago, I have never encountered
such forcefully and publicly voiced xenophobia towards ‘White Westerners’. I
am far from carelessly diagnosing parochial tendencies in an otherwise highly
diverse society. I understand that such emotional outbursts might be contex-
tualised as an affective response to newly emerging orders of how to feel and
act in a climate of insecurity and anxiety vis-à-vis foreign bodies, non-familiar
viruses and the new societal orders the latter carried with them. After our
return to Germany on 24 March, I kept track, filed and read daily online news
reports in the three local newspapers until the end of May 2020. Reports on
the closed borders with Timor-Leste and the shutdown of the fifteen other air-
ports in East Nusa Tenggara province to avoid exposure to foreign bodies and
viruses became routine narratives. Yet one controversial debate surrounding
the docking of the national passenger ferry km Lambelu at a harbour in Flo-
res stood out. After ten days of intensive media coverage from 10 to 20 April
(Bana 2020; cnn Indonesia 2020) and political debate between the provin-
cial governments of East Nusa Tenggara (destination port of Maumere, Flores)
and South Sulawesi (departure port of Makassar), the crew and passengers
were not allowed to leave their quarantine zones at Maumere harbour. Even
when rapid Covid-19 tests proved negative, passengers ‘primordially’ foreign
to the island of Flores were sent back to their point of departure in Makas-
sar, Sulawesi, to self-quarantine there. What seemed unthinkable before the
new coronavirus started worlding mobility infrastructures through lockdown
and shutdown policies has become global hegemonic practice since. Instead
of creating infrastructures that promote solidarities, mobilities and coopera-
tion, anachronistic ‘blood and soil’ policies singling out citizenship, residency,
locality and nationality have regained discursive power as legitimate govern-
mentalities and worlding ethos.
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 17
figure 4 Closed mall side gate with provisional notice
© author
5.2 ‘There Is No Corona in Kupang!!!’
A few days earlier, on 18 March, when careful flâneries through the city still
felt appropriate despite globally circulating news and reports of rising infection
rates in Europe, I went on a four-hour walk from the shoreside esplanade to one
of Kupang’s two malls. I stopped by at the city’s new private hospital and the
office and printing workshop of a local newspaper, and traversed public parks
and residential areas. To avoid potential sunset crowds, I decided to walk in the
early afternoon heat. I chose the route because I wanted to continue exploring
whether the emerging Covid-19 media narratives and an increasing number of
billboards conveyed affective traces in otherwise mundane and familiar flows
of conduct and speech in commercial, public, health care and residential areas.
5.2.1 Disruptive Situation: The Gates of the Mall
The mall opened in 2015 as the sixtieth retail and entertainment centre of
Indonesia’s largest property developer. The property group also owns the neigh-
bouring private hospital, inaugurated only a few months earlier. I reached the
mall at its northern entrance, where I encountered a printed note glued to its
locked doors (Figure 4): ‘Announcement. In connection with the increasing
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access18 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
figure 5 Main gate to the mall with a crowd and security officer with a thermo-screen
© author
spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19), as of 15 March 2020, visitors are asked to
enter the mall through the Main Gate (Ground Floor) for sterilisation. Thank
you. Building Management.’
I headed onwards to the main gate, located some 200 metres away. There
was an unusual crowd gathering around a guarding security officer. Uniformed
(mostly) male security officers are a familiar sight at the entries to any offi-
cial building all over Indonesia, but the pointing of a gun-like thermo-screen at
every forehead that wanted to access the airconditioned mall was a new sight
(Figure 5). Most of the persons were denied entrance without the officer even
checking the new gatekeeping gadget. Soon, it became a familiar gatekeeping
object and regulated access to the city’s commercial, office and governmental
spaces.
The main gate also exhibited a newly pinned-up poster that requested flâ-
neurs and consumers (once admitted) to adhere to four instructions of conduct
inside the mall: ‘use hand sanitiser once per hour / use cashless payment / a
maximum of six persons per elevator / keep 1-metre distance if you are queue-
ing or in the elevator’ (Figure 6). These orders of appropriate conduct to pre-
vent Covid-19 infection were new not only to Kupang residents. While wearing
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 19
figure 6 Instructions at the main gate
© author
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access20 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
figure 7 Closed main entrance at the hospital
© author
masks can be a common sight in motorbike-riders due to pollution and exhaust
in Indonesian cities, being rejected at the entrance gate was a novelty. There
was commotion and disbelief, and nobody seemed to move away, enduring the
confusion despite the heat.
All of a sudden, a woman in her early thirties shouted with a loud and shaky
voice: ‘But there is no corona in Kupang!!! There is no corona in ntt!!’ (Tapi
disini tidak ada korona di Kupang!!! Di ntt itu tidak ada korona!!) Her loud and
angry voice cut through the silence. Exhausted, she had to be supported by four
companions, who carried their friend alongside the mall’s wall and fanned her
with their handbags.
5.2.2 Disruptive Situation: The Gates of the Hospital
I left the scene timorously and headed to the private hospital, located only a
few hundred metres away. When I reached the main entrance and registration
area, I encountered locked doors and an array of banners outlining the new
procedures of registration and administration (Figure 7).
To get admission to the hospital, patients and their accompanying aide (now
only one person, which is very unusual in Kupang, where otherwise whole fam-
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 21
figure 8 New bureaucratic procedures of hospital admittance
© author
ilies care for ill family or friends) had to go through a new screening process in
a tent in front of the hospital’s side entrance. Figure 8 shows the new bureau-
cratic and hygiene procedures of admittance effective of 16 March: ‘For the sake
of mutual safety, we carry out screening with the following stages: (1) Complete
the health declaration form, (2) Temperature recording, (3) Form checked by
staff, (4) Clean hands’. The only clientele gathering in front of the banners was
a team of five male nurses. They wore latex gloves and medical masks, but no
one else was around. Our conversation was limited to the following few lines:
‘Excuse me, can I take a picture of the banner?’
‘What for?’
‘Documentation.’
‘Okay, but do not write badly about us! Do not blame us for being incom-
petent! We are doing the best we can!’ the doctor shouted at me.
Compared to my mundane visits to the hospital one year before during previ-
ous fieldwork, the situation felt unfamiliar, uneasy and emotionally tense.
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access22 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
5.2.3 Disruptive Situation: The Gates of the Newspaper Agency
The route back to the hotel led me past the printing agency of one of Kupang’s
three newspapers. There were no Covid-19 related signs there, but I encoun-
tered a printing apprentice instead. He spotted me from afar and asked me
why I had made this long walk in the afternoon heat. We sat down opposite
each other at the appropriate distance on two parked motorbikes.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Germany.’
‘Are you not going back to your country?’
‘I would rather stay here, but this whole corona situation is too unpre-
dictable, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t get me started on corona. All we print now is corona, corona,
corona! Do not accuse us and say we are not doing enough against corona!’
he insisted firmly.
(See also Djalante et al. 2020 on media practices in Indonesia between
January and March 2020.)
On the downhill walk back to the hotel, I wandered through residential neigh-
bourhoods. There were no thermo-guns, no banners, signposts or locked doors,
and no outcries of despair or anxiety. The doors of the houses were open, and
children played on the streets. One boy rubbed his snotty nose on another boy’s
shirt. A young woman gave a man a haircut on the side of the road, and another
middle-aged woman gave a man a neck and shoulder massage. Under a tree on
an empty lot, there was a group of six teenagers hanging out on their scoot-
ers. They smoked, watched videos on their smartphones and giggled. Walking
past three more dengue and Covid-19 billboards along the main road, I finally
reached the hotel. When I entered the elevator, I discovered a new bilingual sign
in both English and Indonesian (Figure 9): ‘Social distancing in lift. For social
distancing, given the current covid-19 situation. Please follow this structure
when using in groups or sharing with other building occupants.’ The clashing of
contrastive socialities could not have been more disparate between the public
and commercialised spaces of the governed city adhering to globalised pan-
demic worlding and the neighbourhood realities of residents’ everyday lives.
The emotional outbursts and the disruption of otherwise mundane flows of
everyday sociality in regulated and ordered public and privatised spaces, and
the appearing continuity of neighbourhood life, resonates with Ong and others’
analysis that worlding never manifests as linear or schematic processes of gov-
ernmental or neoliberal orchestration. A further in-depth ethnography might
reveal the shifts and continuities of everyday sociality and feeling ‘at home’ and
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 23
figure 9 ‘Social distancing’ in a hotel elevator
© author
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free access24 10.1163/15700615-20220121 | stodulka
‘in public’, and illustrate ‘that worlding refers not to a single unified political
process, but to diverse spatializing practices that mix and match different com-
ponents that go into building an emergent system’ (Ong 2011: 12).
6 Conclusion
Brian Larkin writes that ethnographies of infrastructure are ‘a categorical act’
because infrastructures are not just ‘out there’ (2013: 230). This article has cat-
egorised billboards, banners, posters and mass media narratives as emerging
pandemic infrastructure that shaped persons’ feelings and behaviour in public
spaces.
The worlding of Covid-19 through public signposting, the sudden appear-
ance of ‘temperature guns’, installed hand sanitisers and face masks, or distance
markers glued to floors or chairs to proscribe appropriate body movement,
could develop new and initially significantly disruptive orders of feeling and
conduct. In the early phase of the pandemic, a fearmongering media discourse
and omnipresent emotives, such as ‘be careful not to …’, ‘stay away from …’,
‘avoid engaging with …’ or ‘take care of/not to …’, could contribute to disordered
feelings and disruptive situations of unfolding xenophobia, panic, anxiety and
frustration. The translation of global health recommendations to public sign-
posts and related restrictions of access and mobility created social and emo-
tional crises vis-à-vis the unfamiliar, the looming and the unknown. Almost
two years later, at the time of this article’s publication, it has become clear that
Covid-19 has created havoc in multiple ways: economically, socially, politically,
emotionally, for many existentially. And yet, many researchers have witnessed
another form of crisis, particularly at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic: a
predicament that relates to collectively experienced ‘breakdown of commu-
nication when elites become disconnected from the masses that they govern.
When the ruling system no longer reflects the realities of those governed’ (Noor
2020). The configuration of pandemic orders of feeling and conduct in the city
of Kupang reflects such temporary disruption between the implementation of
globally circulating public health orders and their application to divergent local
realities. In Kupang, the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic and its orders of
feeling and adhering felt like a crisis of sociality and fellow-feeling that could
result in xenophobia or misanthrope outbursts.
This article has reflected on pandemic worlding through newspapers, gov-
ernmental billboards, temperature guns, signposts, warning signs, closed gates
and barrier tapes. It has theorised that these discourses and objects contributed
to reimagined orders of feeling appropriately towards persons and across
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessemotive banners and billboards | 10.1163/15700615-20220121 25
spaces. It suggests that emotional outbursts in otherwise mundane situations
might indicate new worldings through shifted orders of feeling and conduct.
With regard to local mobility and the manoeuvring of public and commer-
cial spaces, the emerging pandemic infrastructure reshuffled social and cul-
tural practices in a local context where the street, the roundabout, the market
or the mall was not only considered as traffic corridor or consumption hub but
always also regarded as extended spaces of ‘home’ where kinning and social-
ising were paramount. In local worlds where fellow-feeling, compassion and
care (peduli) are communicated not only through talk but embodied presence
without words, get-togethers are inevitable practices of essential sociality and
solidarity. Moreover, in areas outside the commercial zones of malls and other
connectivity hotspots like cafes or public parks, where flat-rate and online
communication infrastructures are less accessible, staying at home and self-
isolating was not a socially, culturally or personally appropriate crisis aversion.
The infrastructural marginalisation of city areas, which lack regular access to
running water and sewage plants, represented fundamental obstacles in adher-
ence and falling in line with new orders of conducting and feeling. If govern-
ments expected residents to adopt new habits then residents might, in return,
ask their governments to implement public infrastructures that also enable
them to engage in sustainable and responsible illness prevention and care.
This article has emplaced the methodological figure of the ‘Covid-19 field-
work flâneur’ affected by media narratives and emoted by disruptive situations
around billboards and signposts as a pandemic adaptation of anthropologi-
cal knowledge construction. Yet, to fully grasp shifting orders of feeling and
conduct, engaging in in-depth and long-term conversations is paramount to
ethnography, which aspires to understand, reflect and discuss actual emotions
as they emerge in social life. Billboards and media reports can be consid-
ered valuable signifiers of potentially worlding infrastructures, but ultimately
anthropology and worlding are not about ‘things’. They are about (talking
about) relationships and people.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the guest editors of this special issue and two anonymous
reviewers for their excellent guidance and substantial support throughout the
process of writing this article.
European Journal of East Asian Studies (2022) 1–28
Downloaded from Brill.com07/05/2022 09:01:59PM
via free accessYou can also read
