Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon's Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination

The topic I explore here is especially elusive and tangential. It concerns the role of the anticipated, the barely sensed, the possible, and the conditional in the structuring of ordinary peoples' perceptions and actions in extraordinary times of acute duress, crisis, and chronic violence.1 I aim to trace in the workings of the conflict in Ambon, with occasional forays into neighboring Moluccan Islands, the influence and effects of what is most often glossed by terms denoting a certain presence but bereft of any real precision such as "climate," "ambiance," "atmospherics," and "milieu." Elusive as this may sound, I hope to show that what I pursue here is not only crucial to making sense of Ambon and the war's unfolding over the past few years, but that it also