This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde 172 (2016) 310-342 bki brill.com/bki Abstract Death represents sovereignty and through it people negotiate their existence, concludes Claudio Lomnitz (2008:496) in his history of Mexican death. This conclusion holds true for the politics of death in the city of Surabaya, Indonesia, but only if death is

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... tood in topographic and genealogical terms; or, in other words, in terms of land and one's ancestral/genealogical connection to it. Through a discussion of the politics of land occupation and of the production, commemoration, and denial of death in post-colonial Surabaya, I present a 'topogenic' history of death as an instructive way of understanding state-society relations in that city. Throughout the article, I ground that history in the kampong's social institutions of the communal meal and prayer (slametan) and the guard (gardu) as vehicles for the expression of an inviolable topogenic sovereignty.