images of violence and piety in aceh 291
geography (suitable terrain for clandestine operations) seems to have
been a more important factor in their choice of location. At the same time,
people in Aceh generally seemed to regard their presence as an outright
threat to a hard-won peace. That said, this strange and unexpected
episode in my fieldwork also revealed a lot about the ways in which
‘Aceh’ has been constructed, both inside and outside the province, as
a meaningful entity. Like all geographic denominations, ‘Aceh’ means
more than a physical space defined by borders. It exists in the minds of
people as a set of particular features and images, connected to the shared
and contested memories of the past and views of, and aspirations for, the
future. My research in Aceh, which deals, among other topics, with the
religious practices and experiences of ordinary Acehnese, has involved
a careful deconstruction of the detrimental stereotypes dominating
many (scholarly as well as non-scholarly) views of Acehnese history and
society. The problem remains, however, that images of violence and piety
carry meaning for the people I write about. The stereotype of Acehnese
fanaticism is a distortion, but it is also, to some extent at least, quite
tangible and ‘real’.
This situation, obviously, produces particular challenges for a re-
searcher. On the one hand, these concern the complex ways in which
stereotypes created outside Aceh travel ‘back’, so to speak, from the
transnational spaces in which they are produced into the lives of ordinary
Acehnese. On the other hand, the discussion above shows that images
of violence and piety have been produced continuously within Aceh,
by different groups and individuals, and under differing circumstances.
One thing I have tried to make clear, then, is the usefulness of combining
historical research with the practice of doing fieldwork, approaching this
as a truly dialectical enterprise. Fieldwork as a method is indispensible for
questioning the images constructed in archives, libraries and collective
memory, while archival and library research helps us to understand the
discourses and social practices we encounter in the field. By going back
and forth, we may appreciate the force of (stereotypical) images, as well
as the limits to their effects.
Another, more specific argument concerns the ways in which the
images of violence and piety – that is, the various expressions of ‘holy
struggle’ delineated above – are ‘used’, and how this is commonly
interpreted. By now it has become commonplace to frame the history
of Aceh in terms of an ongoing struggle against ‘outside’ forces, be
this Dutch colonialism, the Indonesian central state or the fears of
‘Westernisation’ or ‘Christianisation’ emerging in the slipstream of
post-tsunami reconstruction and post-2005 peace building processes.
This has led, to some extent, to misrecognition of the function of local