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Indonesia, Vol. 109, April 2020

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https://hdl.handle.net/1813/69870

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 24
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    Review of Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia: The Ideology of the Family State
    Winters, Jeffrey A. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Review of Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia
    Van der Meer, Arnout (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Review of Indonesian Law
    Kingsley, Jeremy J. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Review of Wayang & Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet
    Varela, Miguel Escobar (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Mary Margaret Steedly: Selected Publications
    The Editors (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Review of Censorship in Colonial Indonesia, 1901–1942
    Ingleson, John (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Review of Indonesia: State & Society in Transition
    Hefner, Robert W. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
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    Memory
    Strassler, Karen (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
    This essay is one of more than a dozen in this volume to honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly. The paper’s theme is “memory.” Steedly described memories as “densely layered, sometimes conflictual negotiations with the passage of time.” According to her, memories do not serve to complete or set straight a historical record—and in her work she did not try to locate authentic, oppositional voices or to excavate evidence by which to contest official historical accounts. She refused a naïve and instrumentalist approach to memory as a source of subaltern truths to be tapped. Experiences are always already dressed in narratives that anticipate and prefigure them, cast through and against iconic figures and dominant tropes, and reworked in dialogue with other stories and subsequent occurrences. Memories have specific tellers and tellings, but they never belong, finally, to a single speaker or moment. What matters, then, Steedly wrote, is “not what really happened … but rather why [something came] to be recalled and retold in one particular way and not another … and what might be at stake” in that particular time and manner of telling.
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    Haunting
    Good, Byron J.; Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
    This essay is one of more than a dozen in this volume to honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly. The paper’s theme is “haunting.” Steedly’s writings are filled with stories of spirits—in Karoland during the New Order’s core years, as well as in Indonesian horror films in the post-Suharto Reformasi years. There are the keramat of Mount Sibayak and the spirits of the dead. Steedly views spirit figures as part of the everyday world—her interest is not whether they exist, but rather what Indonesians do about them. She takes up analysis in terms of visibility and invisibility, or, more specifically, transparency and apparition. It is in the context of a suppressed national history that the ghosts of the New Order find a presence in popular Indonesian horror films—possibly, an association of revenge with the unexplained and unmourned dead remains present until today in talk about the dangers of revisiting Indonesia’s violent history. It is this association that begins to point back to Steedly’s experiences of ghosts and questions of vengefulness decades earlier in her Karo work. She did not engage theories of haunting explicitly, but her writings suggest important directions for placing her work in conversation with recent writings on hauntology.
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    After All
    George, Kenneth M. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)
    This essay, one of more than a dozen in this volume to honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly, takes the place of an afterword for this memorial collection that constitute a multi-voiced appreciation of Steedly by her colleagues and students. Steedly was always a voracious and discerning reader, and her capacity to read widely and well was behind the artful, writerly style that she cultivated, and that made such an impression on her students, colleagues, and other scholars. Yet especially striking and meaningful were her intense curiosity and nimble intellect, and her ethnographic sensibilities—her capacity to conjure the feel and often contradictory forces animating social life, which were in keeping with her pursuit of historical ethnography. Steedly’s breakout article is a brilliant, piercing analysis of Karo Batak ceremonial curing practices. It showcases her deft handling of discursive fragments and contradictions so as to challenge analytic presumptions about cultural coherence and therapeutic efficacy, while also conveying something of the richness, humor, and open-endedness of curing rites despite ongoing human suffering, broken families, and an inevitable status quo.