Witch-Hunt and Conspiracy: The "Ninja Case" in East Java.

• Author: Jaffrey, Sana
• Position: Book review

Witch-Hunt and Conspiracy: The "Ninja Case" in East Java. By Nicholas Herriman. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2016. Softcover: 208pp.

Extraordinary violence has often accompanied momentous political change in Indonesia. The democratic transition in 1998 was no exception. Following President Soeharto's resignation in May 1998, racial riots broke out in major urban centres and communal violence paralysed daily life in parts of the country. Within the context of this widespread insecurity, observers also noted an alarming rise in mob attacks across Indonesia. Perhaps due to the salience of political contention at the time, early accounts describe these attacks as the consequence of inter-elite competition produced by rapid institutional reform. In Witch-Hunt and Conspiracy, Nicholas Herriman challenges the primacy of these national-level factors. Based on a painstaking examination of witch-hunts in East Java, Herriman argues that while broader economic and political forces may have created an opportunity for mob attacks, the motivations behind these killings emerged from local belief systems and communities' quotidian interactions with alleged scorers.

The empirical scope of the book centres on the killing of a hundred alleged sorcerers in Banyuwangi district. While such incidents were prevalent even under the New Order, Herriman argues that the events of 1998 were unusual for two reasons. First, they can be described as an "outbreak" due to the high frequency of killings during a relatively short period of time (p. xxi). Second, unlike past attacks on sorcerers that were local affairs, these killings came to be viewed as part of a national conspiracy. Subsequent reprisals against the perpetrators of these witch-hunts, collectively known as the "Ninja" phenomenon, are duly noted in the book but are not its main focus. Instead, the author seeks to explain the motivations behind denunciation of particular sorcerers by their communities and the timing of mob attacks against them (p. xxiv).

Herriman brings to bear an impressive range of qualitative data in order to advance his argument. This includes participant observation and over 150 interviews with the perpetrators, victims' families and local elites. Drawing on these extensive sources, the book presents detailed chronologies of individual incidents along with informants' personal impressions about the practice of magic. While the killings took place under different...