A Man of Indonesian Letters


Book Description

This collective volume contains articles in honour of Professor A. Teeuw.




Ancient Indonesian Bronzes


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Gender, State and Social Power in Contemporary Indonesia


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This book examines gender, state and social power in Indonesia, focusing in particular on state regulation of divorce from 1965 to 2005 and its impact on women. Indonesia experienced high divorce rates in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a remarkable decline. Already falling divorce rates were reinforced by the 1974 Marriage Law, which for the first time regulated marriage for both Muslim and non-Muslim Indonesians and restricted access to divorce. This law defined the roles of men and women in Indonesian society, vesting household leadership with husbands and the management of the household with wives. Drawing on a wide selection of primary sources, including court records, legal codes, newspaper reports, fiction, interviews and case studies, this book provides a detailed historical account of this period of important social change, exploring fully the impact and operation of state regulation of divorce, including the New Order government’s aims in enacting this legal framework, its effects in practice and how it was utilised by citizens (both men and women) to advance their own agendas. It argues that the Marriage Law was a tool of social control enacted by the New Order government in response to the social upheaval and protests experienced in the mid 1970s. However, it also shows that state power was not hegemonic: it was both contested and co-opted by citizens, with men and women enjoying different degrees of autonomy from the state. This book explores all of these issues, providing important insights on the nature of the New Order regime, social power and gender relations, both during the years of its rule and since its collapse.




Journalism and Politics in Indonesia


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This book weaves a history of the Indonesian press, and of Indonesia’s post-independence history, through the life story of Mochtar Lubis: one of Indonesia’s best-known newspaper editors, authors and cultural figures with a national, regional and international prominence he retained from the early 1950s until his death in 2004.




Ritual, State and History in South Asia


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The contributions in this Festschrift extend over the whole range of Indian civilization: in the first part the earlier stages of Indian history spanning the period from the Indus civilization up to medieval times, and in the second part the more recent history of South Asia.




A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement


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Here, the history of the Indonesian LBT movement is charted, from invisibility, to visibility and now as it moves again into hiding. In the early 1980s, during the oppressive military dictatorship called the New Order in Indonesia, the first organizations of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans persons were established. They were short-lived, but prepared the ground for a more comprehensive LBT rights movement after the democratic opening of society in 1998. From 2000 to 2015 the visibility of the movement grew, until a vicious state-sponsored backlash set in, driven by majoritarian, fundamentalist Islamist groups. Saskia Wieringa tracks the movement's progress and explores the persistence of the butch/femme model of relationships; the proliferations of identities; family violence and conversion therapy; religion; and the anti-LGBT campaign. In its insistence on the local dynamics of this movement, the book aims to debunk the idea that homosexuality is a Western import. Chapters deal with the many religious and secular phenomena that are linked with gender diversity and same-sex relations traditionally, and the erasure of many of these traditions is explained using the concept of postcolonial amnesia. A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement is also a contribution to the growing literature on decolonization studies, pointing out that its dynamics, its historical course and its present condition, different as they are from the dominant Western view on a global LGBT movement, needs to be considered as valuable as accounts of Western LGBT histories are.




The Passage of Literature


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Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship. This study nimbly traces a trio of distinct yet interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy is productively paired with the hallmark work of Indonesian modernism, Pramoedya's Buru quartet. The two novel sequences, penned years apart, narrate overlapping histories of imperialism in the Dutch East Indies, and both make opera central for understanding the cultural dynamic of colonial power. Creole modernism--defined not only by the linguistic diversity of the Caribbean but also by an alternative vision of literary history--provides a transnational context for reading Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea, each novel mapped in relation to the colonial English and postcolonial Indonesian coordinates of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and Pramoedya's This Earth of Mankind. All three modernisms-English, Creole, and Indonesian-converge in a discussion of the Indonesian figure of the nyai, a concubine or house servant, who represents the traumatic core of transnational modernism. Throughout the study, Pramoedya's extraordinary effort to reconstruct the lost record of Indonesia's emergence as a nation provides a model for reading each fragmentary passage of literature as part of an ongoing process of decolonizing tradition. Drawing on translated and un-translated works of fiction and nonfiction, GoGwilt effectively reexamines the roots of Anglophone modernist studies, thereby laying out the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology even as he resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.




The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature


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Traditional literature, or 'the deed of the reed pen' as it was called by its creators, is not only the most valuable part of the cultural heritage of the Malay people, but also a shared legacy of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei. Malay culture during its heyday saw the entire Universe as a piece of literature written by the Creator with the Sublime Pen on the Guarded Tablet. Literature was not just the creation of a scribe, but a scribe himself, imprinting words on the 'sheet of memory' and thus shaping human personality. This book, the first comprehensive survey of traditional Malay literature in English since 1939, embraces more than a millennium of Malay letters from the vague data of the seventh century up to the early beginnings of the modern literatures in the late nineteenth century. The long path trodden by traditional Malay literature is viewed in historical and theoretical perspectives as a development of integral system, caused by cultural and religious changes, primarily by gradual Islamization. This changing system considered in the entirety of its genres and works, is seen both externally and internally: from the point of view of modern scholarship and through the examination of indigenous concepts of literary creativity, poetics and aesthetics. The book not only repesents an original study based on a specific historico-theoretical approach, but it is also a complete reference-work and an indispensable manual for students.




Amir Sjarifoeddin


Book Description

Amir Sjarifoeddin explores the experiences of a central figure in the Indonesian revolution, whose life mirrored the idealism and contradictions of the anti-colonial and post-war world of twentieth century Indonesia. Amir was born at the edge of an empire in a time of change. Imprisoned by the Dutch for anti-colonialism, he was sentenced to death by the Japanese for anti-fascism. He survived to become the prime minister of the new Indonesian republic. Disappointed by the direction the Indonesian elites were taking, Amir turned increasingly to the left. In 1948 he joined the armed uprising against both the Indonesian government and the corruption of the national revolution, and was captured and executed as a traitor. In Amir Sjarifoeddin, Rudolf Mrázek unveils the human dimensions of a figure who is widely mythologized but often poorly understood. Through Sjarifoeddin's life, it is possible to study the moral ambiguity and complexities of the political revolutions of the twentieth century.




Paths and Rivers


Book Description

Fieldwork extending over a thirty-year period provided materials for this book. Paths and Rivers offers an unusually deep and broad picture of the Sa’dan Toraja as a society in dynamic transition over the course of the past century. The Toraja inhabit the mountainous highlands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and are well known for their dramatic architecture, their unusual cliff burials, and their flamboyant ceremonial life, which places extraordinary economic demands on individuals and families. The analysis is informed, firstly, by a comparative perspective which sets Toraja social structure in the context of the Austronesian world. Secondly, the author delves deeply into Toraja social memory to show how people think about the past. She examines the usefulness of history and myth in the present as a source of identity, a template for action, or a resource by means of which to claim precedence. The book gives a clear picture of the structure and ethos of the indigenous Toraja religion, the Aluk To Dolo or "Way of the Ancestors", with its complex cycle of rituals. The book concludes with an analysis of the ceremonial economy, which draws upon both domestic subsistence production and the global market economy. Paths and Rivers draws together a fascinating picture of one society’s journey into modernity.