ABSTRACT
Judging from newspaper reports, robbery is an extremely risky undertaking in Java, at least those infringements that are directed at local neighbourhoods. Few situations seem more likely to result in anger, murder and mutilation than the capture of a thief red-handed, or even of one merely suspected of theft. The only people ever likely to be as unfortunate, it seems, are the agents of traffic accidents, again especially when the accidents take place in or close to neighbourhoods. Newspaper reports and widely circulated oral narratives tell of perpetrators, typically discovered by perceptive neighbours, being run down by a handful of resolute chasers, and then killed and mutilated by a concerted neighbourhood mob. The ways in which the violence is carried out vary, but the destruction of the body appears to be an especially prominent feature of such narratives. The reading of signs of violence on the body is, as James Siegel has emphasised (1986, 1998), a major fascination in people's experience of crime. It is not so much the sociology of violence that is of concern, he argues, i.e. the identities of perpetrators and victims or the causes of action, as the very effects of violence, how violence marks the dead body.
