SOPHIE CHAO University of Sydney We are (not) monkeys: Contested cosmopolitical symbols in West Papua ABSTRACT In 2019 anti-racism protests erupted across the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua. Organized largely by Papuan students, the protests expressed Papuans’ frustration with their oppression at the hands of the Indonesian state. During the protests, Papuan demonstrators repurposed the racialized figure of the monkey—a species routinely deployed in Indonesian discourse to deprecate Papuans as primitive and backward. In doing so, they harnessed the monkey’s animality to support their demands for emancipation from Indonesian rule and to redeem nonhuman beings as consequential and meaningful entities in their own right. In this context, the monkey as political symbol undermined, legitimized, and enabled processes of collective identification among Indigenous activists. The animal’s symbolic mobilization in turn foregrounded the more-than-human dimensions of Papuans’ struggle for sovereignty—one in which humans and nonhumans sit in alternately indexical or antithetical relation to each other as contested cosmopolitical actors and world makers. [racism, political symbols, monkeys, cosmopolitics, sovereignty, West Papua, Indonesia] I n the summer of 2019, an unprecedented spate of protests unfolded across towns and cities in the Indonesian- controlled region of West Papua. These protests, along with smaller rallies in other parts of Indonesia, were triggered by footage of a crowd verbally abusing Papuan college stu- dents in their dormitory. The attack took place in the Javanese city of Surabaya after the students burned the Indonesian flag as a protest against the Indonesian state’s occupation of West Papua and against Papuans’ ongoing oppression. According to official accounts, the at- tack on the students was instigated by civil militias from the Islamic Defenders Front and the nationalist Pancasila Youth organization. They yelled racial slurs at the students, calling them monkeys, dogs, and pigs, and told them to go back to West Papua. When the police arrived, they threw tear gas into the dormitory, arrested the students, and allegedly tortured them. The demonstrations of August and September 2019 were at- tended by thousands of Papuan and non-Papuan participants, attracting widespread attention from national and international media. 1 Riots burst out in several locations. Several government buildings were destroyed, many people were injured, and over 50 people died, most of whom were West Papuans (Blades 2020). Over 6,000 extra policemen and soldiers were flown in to control the uprisings (Reuters 2019). The Internet was temporarily shut down, and foreigners were banned from entering Indonesia (Firdaus 2019). Dozens of protesters were arrested and beaten with rods or burned with cigarettes while in custody (Arndt 2019). At the time of writing, many were awaiting trial on charges of treason for participating in what the Indonesian government calls an act of pro-separatist intent (Papuans behind Bars, n.d.). The protests were, for the most part, organized by Papuan stu- dents frustrated with the pervasive oppression of their people by the Indonesian security forces since the region’s de facto occupation in 1961. More broadly, these protests sat within a trend of intensify- ing nationalism across Indonesia, exacerbated by the historically en- trenched role of militias and provocateurs (Aspinall 2016). At a global scale, they found allyship with the Black Lives Matter movement in AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 274–287, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13023