conditions in Papua have changed considerably and one might argue that ‘the real world’ as described by van Baal has, at least in some of its aspects,

There are probably no other people on earth to whom the image of the ‘stoneage’ is so persistently attached than the inhabitants of the island of New Guinea, which is divided into independent Papua New Guinea and the western part of the island, known today under the names of Papua and West Papua. This volume focuses on the latter region, which took its own trajectory since the colonial division of the island and especially since its controversial incorporation into the Indonesian nation-state in the 1960s. In Papua, stone-age imagery has motivated missions to ‘pacify’, ‘civilise’, ‘modernise’, ‘Christianise’ and ‘Islamise’ the local population, and mobilised a proliferation of hierarchical relations, locally and regionally.  These projects of frontier transformation became particularly invasive during the authoritarian Suharto regime (1966–98), but are continuing today under different guises. Today, many Papuans are connected in ‘real-time’ through Facebook,  YouTube and other social networking sites and are increasingly mobile within and beyond Indonesia, certainly belying the old images of isolated stone-agers. At the same time, technologies and mobilities offer certain freedoms while constraining others; novel trajectories may meet familiar challenges.  This volume explores the real-time, mobile, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Papua, including historical trajectories that collapse notions of the past with visions of the future. It is concerned with the genealogy of the image of the stone-ager as well as with its current transformations by Papuan, regional and (inter)national agents. In this interconnected age, Papuans may position themselves anew offline and online,  as  they  explore  often  heterodox  religious  and  political  visions,  engage in Christian and Muslim networks, renegotiate intra-Papuan relations as well as their relations with non-Papuans, develop forms of resistance in a highly militarised space, and critically question prejudices directed against them. In short, Papua is being remade. Grappling with today’s globalised modernities, indigenous agents are reworking inherited ideas, institutions and technologies according to their own interests, but also coming up against palpable limits on what can be imagined or achieved, secured or defended.  This volume investigates some of these trajectories of   innovation for the cultural logics and social or political structures that shape them, and  examines in detail ways that Papuan efforts and aspirations may equally go awry. It attends to the circulation of particular images, technologies and ideas  among Papuans and  interrogates what  they mean for emerging and ongoing  inequalities.  The  volume  analyses  the  scope  of  Papuan  actions,  and reactions, that have been generated and curtailed at the intersection of new (trans)national connections and routes of mobility. At the same time, it also illuminates how new mobilities shape power dynamics in situations that are variously intimate, interactive or publicly visible.
 THE PRYER NETWORK FOR FREE WEST PAPUA
Similarly  to the appeal  of the real-time today, in the  Dutch colonial era officials were occupied with what they regarded as ‘real’ or as belonging to ‘the real world’, notions that implied already a sense of coevalness as well as its denial. Most  importantly,  it  was  the  world  of  Papuans  that  was  not  granted  this  status of being ‘real’. Michael Cookson (2008: 389) quotes in his dissertation Jan van Baal, a key figure of the colonial regime, who lamented in the 1950s about the state of education in Papua: Their knowledge of arithmetic may be very unsatisfactory and that of reading and writing only slightly better, but they will all come to understand  that  the  world  of  their  fathers,  that  small  and  mysterious little world, is not the real world after all.  There is only one real world that matters: it is the world of schools, of big ships and planes, of trade and films, of motor-cars, luxury and prosperity.  That real world, however, is not theirs. In the meantime, conditions in Papua have changed considerably and one might argue that ‘the real world’ as described by van Baal has, at least in some of its aspects, become part of Papuan daily life. Moreover, Papuans participate not only in what van Baal characterised as ‘real’ but in realms of the real-time he was not able to imagine in the 1950s. Given this contemporary emphasis on contemporaneity  this volume asks  what consequences,  frictions and anxieties the current moment generates, when the persistency of the stone-age image meets the practices and ideologies of the real-time, and when different conceptions of time collide in ways that potentially endanger IndonesianPapuan hierarchies. A first answer to that question may be that in the age of the real-time, considerably more effort has to be invested in denying Papuans a role in the present, and in relegating them to a past time by identifying them with stone-age images. Again, consider the case of the circulating picture of the Papuan in the bank.  The Javanese businessman’s friend, or whoever has taken the picture, could easily have portrayed Papuans dressed in trousers and not a koteka. In fact, there were probably more trouser-wearing Papuans than  koteka wearing Papuans in the bank.  Yet such a representation would grant Papuans a status of contemporaneity, of being part of Indonesia’s modern economy as bank customers or even businessmen. Instead, this picture from the Papuan frontier, circulating among Javanese businessmen in contact with each other via social media, exhibits the Papuan as a curiosity in the modern space of a bank. It  imputes  the  opportunities  that  Papua  apparently  has  to  offer  to  those  who are  really  part of the real-time, i.e. smartphone-owning Javanese businessmen who feel  themselves  compelled  to document  outsiders-cum-stone-agers who are intruding into the spatio-temporal realm of the contemporary. Digital files sometimes take widely ramified trajectories, and this has also been the case  with the ‘koteka-wearing  Papuan  in a  bank’ picture.