Bandit Saints of Java
Bandit Saints of Java

Author: George Quinn

Publisher: Monsoon Books

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1912049457

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Java’s pilgrimage culture is a dense, batik-like pattern of contradictions: seriousness collides with laughter; curiosity with bewilderment; piety with scepticism; intense spirituality with, in some places, the joy of shopping. The pilgrimage culture on the island of Java in Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim country – is a rebuke to the conservative orthodoxy that has been gaining ground in Indonesia’s religious landscape since the 1980s. In the rhetoric of this orthodoxy the “real” Islam is pure and exclusive. Piety comes from obedience to religious authority and its rules. Local pilgrimage is anything but pure and exclusive or rigidly authoritarian. It is powerfully Islamic but it fuses Islam with local history, the ancient power of place and a pastiche of devotional practices with roots deep in the pre-Islamic past. Quietly but tenaciously – just outside the great echo chamber of public space – it is growing as fast as the higher profile neo-orthodoxy. Bandit Saints of Java delves deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities and stories in the weird world of local pilgrimage, where Middle Eastern Islam wrestles with the ancient power of Javanese civilisation. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practised today – largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists – by many of Java’s 130 million people.

Extremist Islam
Extremist Islam

Author: Kumar Ramakrishna

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 019761096X

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"On 17 April 2020, eleven soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) were killed during a battle with 40 fighters of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in Patikul town, in the Sulu region of Mindanao, southern Philippines. The ASG had apparently ambushed the troops during the latter's operations aimed at tracking down two senior ASG figures, Radullan Sahiron and Hatib Sawadjaan-the leader of the Philippine branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) global terror network. The firefight between the pro-ISIS ASG and the AFP forces was apparently the bloodiest in months. This encounter occurred in the midst of the worldwide novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak that had not spared the southern Philippines as well. A government spokesperson acknowledged the strain on the armed forces, who were on "the forefront as the government's arm to prevent the spread of the dreaded disease on the one hand", while simultaneously engaged in "battling this terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group""--

Philosophy on Fieldwork
Philosophy on Fieldwork

Author: Nils Bubandt

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-29

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 1000182487

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How do we teach analysis in anthropology and other field-based sciences? How can we engage analytically and interrogatively with philosophical ideas and concepts in our fieldwork? And how can students learn to engage critical ideas from philosophy to better understand the worlds they study? Philosophy on Fieldwork provides "show-don’t-tell" answers to these questions. In twenty-six "master class" chapters, philosophy meets anthropological critique as leading anthropologists introduce the thinking of one foundational philosopher – from a variety of Western traditions and beyond – and apply this critically to an ethnographic case. Nils Bubandt, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and the contributors to this volume reveal how the encounter between philosophy and fieldwork is fertile ground for analytical insight to emerge. Equally, the philosophical concepts employed are critically explored for their potential to be thought "otherwise" through their frictional encounter with the worlds in the field, allowing non-Western and non-elite life experience and ontologies to "speak back" to both anthropology and philosophy. This is a unique and concrete guidebook to social analysis. It answers the critical need for a "how-to" textbook in fieldwork-based analysis as each chapter demonstrates how the ideas of a specific philosopher can be interrogatively applied to a concrete analytical case study. The straightforward pedagogy of Philosophy on Fieldwork makes this an accessible volume and a must-read for both students and seasoned fieldworkers interested in exploring the contentious middle ground between philosophy and anthropology.

The In-Between in Javanese Performing Arts
The In-Between in Javanese Performing Arts

Author: Sumarsam

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2024-10-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0819501271

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This book is the first comprehensive overview of Javanese performing arts from their origins to their dynamic present. Renowned scholar and musician Sumarsam draws from a lifetime of immersion in both wayang and gamelan to guide readers through the concept of the "in-between," revealing how the interplay of dualisms—myth and history, sacred and secular, personal and cultural—forms the bedrock of Javanese performance. Rigorously researched historical case studies reveal the intricate relationship between histories and mythologies in Java. Wayang, accompanied by gamelan, is a multimedia performance imbued with rich historical, aesthetic, religious, and emotional associations. Sumarsam delves into this intricate, profound, and ever-evolving art form, exploring its diverse manifestations and venues, from courtly village entertainment-cum-ritual to palace-based aesthetic expressions of cultural proficiency; from coastal mercantile entrepots to the verdant wet rice terraces of Java; from colonial plantation and textile factory cultures to communities centered around contemporary industrial estates and creative economy initiatives. An essential resource for scholars, musicians, and enthusiasts of wayang and gamelan, The In-Between in Javanese Performing Arts offers an unparalleled immersion into the heart of traditional Javanese performing arts, revealing their profound impact on Javanese culture, identity, and artistic expression.

What Is Religious Authority?
What Is Religious Authority?

Author: Ismail Fajrie Alatas

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0691204292

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An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of Java This compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, Alatas traces the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia and looks at how they traversed complex cultural settings while opening new channels for the transmission of Islamic teachings. He describes the rise to prominence of Indonesia's leading Sufi master, Habib Luthfi, and his rivalries with competing religious leaders, revealing why some Muslim voices become authoritative while others don't. Alatas examines how Habib Luthfi has used the infrastructures of the Sufi order and the Indonesian state to build a durable religious community, while deploying genealogy and hagiography to present himself as a successor of the Prophet Muḥammad. Challenging prevailing conceptions of what it means to be Muslim, What Is Religious Authority? demonstrates how the concrete and sustained labors of translation, mobilization, collaboration, and competition are the very dynamics that give Islam its power and diversity.

Buddhism in Indonesia
Buddhism in Indonesia

Author: Roberto Rizzo

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1040019153

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Based on extensive original research, this book explores the history and current revival of Buddhism on the Indonesian island of Java. Beginning by tracing how Buddhism came to Java from India via southeast Asia, it considers how Buddhism has survived and adapted as Islam and Christianity became dominant. It goes on to report on detailed anthropological research both in a remote highland community, Temanggung, and in Java’s main cities including Jakarta, showing how youth activism and close community cohesion have brought about revival. It includes an examination of the production of Buddhist wayside shrines. Throughout it shows how Buddhism in Java has fused with local traditional practices, local circumstances and trans-national processes to form a unique Javanese Buddhism.

Storied Island
Storied Island

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9004678891

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Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

Living Art
Living Art

Author: Elly Kent

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2022-11-08

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1760464937

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Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History is inspired by the conviction of so many of Indonesia’s Independence-era artists that there is continuing interaction between art and everyday life. In the 1970s, Sanento Yuliman, Indonesia’s foremost art historian of the late twentieth century, further developed that concept, stating: ‘New Indonesian Art cannot wholly be understood without locating it in the context of the larger framework of Indonesian society and culture’ and the ‘whole force of history’. The essays in this book accept Yuliman’s challenge to analyse the intellectual, sociopolitical and historical landscape that Indonesia’s artists inhabited from the 1930s into the first decades of the new millennium, including their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The inclusion of one of Yuliman’s most influential essays, translated into English for the first time, offers those outside Indonesia an insight into a formative period in the generation of new art knowledge in Indonesia. The volume also features essays by T. K. Sabapathy, Jim Supangkat, Alia Swastika, Wulan Dirgantoro and FX Harsono, as well as the three editors (Elly Kent, Virginia Hooker and Caroline Turner). The book’s contributors present recent research on issues rarely addressed in English-language texts on Indonesian art, including the inspirations and achievements of women artists despite social and political barriers; Islam- inspired art; artistic ideologies; the intergenerational effects of trauma; and the impacts of geopolitical change and global art worlds that emerged in the 1990s. The Epilogue introduces speculations from contemporary practitioners on what the future might hold for artists in Indonesia. Extensively illustrated, Living Art contributes to the acknowledgement and analysis of the diversity of Indonesia’s contemporary art and offers new insights into Indonesian art history, as well as the contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia and Asia more generally.

Young Soeharto
Young Soeharto

Author: David Jenkins

Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

Published: 2021-05-06

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 9814881015

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When a reluctant President Sukarno gave Lt Gen Soeharto full executive authority in March 1966, Indonesia was a deeply divided nation, fractured along ideological, class, religious and ethnic lines. Soeharto took a country in chaos, the largest in Southeast Asia, and transformed it into one of the “Asian miracle” economies—only to leave it back on the brink of ruin when he was forced from office thirty-two years later. Drawing on his astonishing range of interviews with leading Indonesian generals, former Imperial Japanese Army officers and men who served in the Dutch colonial army, as well as years of patient research in Dutch, Japanese, British, Indonesian and US archives, David Jenkins brings vividly to life the story of how a socially reticent but exceptionally determined young man from rural Java began his rise to power—an ascent which would be capped by thirty years (1968–98) as President of Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth. Soeharto was one of Asia’s most brutal, most durable, most avaricious and most successful dictators. In the course of examining those aspects of his character, this book provides an accessible, highly readable introduction to the complex, but dramatic and utterly absorbing, social, political, religious, economic and military factors that have shaped, and which continue to shape, Indonesia.