Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Review of Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia: The Ideology of the Family StateWinters, Jeffrey A. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Review of Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial IndonesiaVan der Meer, Arnout (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Review of Indonesian LawKingsley, Jeremy J. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Review of Wayang & Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the InternetVarela, Miguel Escobar (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Mary Margaret Steedly: Selected PublicationsThe Editors (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Review of Indonesia: State & Society in TransitionHefner, Robert W. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item Review of Censorship in Colonial Indonesia, 1901–1942Ingleson, John (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Item MemoryStrassler, 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.Item After AllGeorge, 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.Item HauntingGood, 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.Item SpiritsBuyandelger, Manduhai (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 “spirits,” and reflects on how Steedly wove stories of encounters with spirits and mediums into an intricate matrix, thus revealing a space of a particular narrative experience. Each encounter pushes someone out of a comfort zone, thereby destabilizing a recognized identity, revealing the fragility of a boundary (“border between two worlds”), or undermining confidence in one’s understanding of something. While Steedly’s projects on spirit mediums and Indonesian supernaturalism are different and separated by twenty years, they complement each other. Attention to the supernatural offered her an unusual lens on the twists and turns of Indonesia’s historical transformation from a modernizing postcolonial nation to the mass-media-saturated, post-New Order era.Item SpecificityParreñas, Juno Salazar (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, “specificity,” expounds on advice that Steedly gave to the author during her doctoral defense. Steedly offered that “there’s a very nice balance between the primatological issues that you are dealing with and the distinctive personalities of orangutans. You also do that with your human subjects … you were able to address them as people with specific issues and concerns and lifestyles … but it does seem that [in your thesis] the larger structures in which these social relations are embedded tend to either dissolve or blur into generic categories of capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, without as much specificity … [It would be helpful to] engage more with the social context in which those interactions took place, in a very specific way: not just colonialism, but British colonialism in Sarawak … Not just indigenous peoples, but Ibans specifically … thicken up the context in which these were going on … it could possibly enrich what you are doing.”Item NationalismKusumaryati, Veronika (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 “nationalism.” Steedly’s ethnography based on her fieldwork experience in the 1980s reveals Indonesians’ quiet forms of resistance and uncertainty in ways that resonate with the author’s own family’s relationship to the state. An atmosphere of coercion, violence, and abuse of power is palpably felt in Steedly’s work. The Karo Batak she wrote about did not so much openly resist as live at an oblique angle to the authoritarian regime. In the larger scheme of “typical” Indonesian studies, Steedly’s interest in North Sumatra was unique. Her work there complicated the predominant idea of Indonesian nationalism and its Java-centric orientation in three key ways. First, by how the Karo understood Indonesia and nationalism differently from the elite, male, Javanese nationalists who came to define Indonesian nationalism. Second, by how she treated the Karo themselves as an epistemic community, as historical actors who articulated what it means to be part of a supralocal entity called Indonesia. And third, by her complicated conceptualization of postcoloniality as an ongoing force. Following Steedly’s lead, Indonesia still offers the possibility to rethink nationalism, colonialism, and postcolonialism in new ways.Item OutskirtsGrayman, Jesse Hession (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 “outskirts”—areas that are not just geographically distant from a metropolitan center, but also fraught with an ambivalent national identity and people’s ambiguous sense of belonging. The author relied on Steedly’s example and personal direction to fairly handle, interpret, and analyze ethnographic data and recordings that he himself had not collected. He introduces people who are representative of those unrecognized, ambivalent figures who populate the outskirts of Aceh’s post-conflict landscape as a way to challenge and interrupt what might otherwise have been overly neat and coherent narratives of Aceh’s recovery from tsunami and war. This is an explicit nod to Steedly’s influence: when one pays attention to the layered moments of the interview, the moment of transcription and translation, and the moment of interpreting texts, whole new modes of analysis and insight open up.Item AudienceLeshkowich, Ann Marie (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 “audience” and considers Steedly’s two-part charge of “how to audience.” First, look for stories that do not follow the script, ones that exist beyond the mainstream. Such stories are not neat and do not offer consistency and closure. They do not deliver a lesson or moral, but their very messiness, their uncorralled excess, carries potent possibilities. Steedly’s second charge is to attend to the interactive sociality of narration by assuming the roles of both speaker and listener: ”… how do we convince our audiences that our stories are compelling?” All of us are not just tellers of stories, our own and those of others. We are the hearers of those stories, and it is in our listening that the worldmaking potential of stories can flourish.Item GenderJones, Carla (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 “gender.” Even when gender was not at the center of Steedly’s analytical frame, it was. Steedly saw a world of intersecting lives, forces, and things. Hers was a world of relationships, and Steedly’s analyses often included gender even when her informants did not consider that to be at the core of their own stories. With Steedly, gender was always a point of view. This is most evident in her concept of “the social production of ephemerality,” in which the feminine was consistently, but not inevitably, pushed to the edges of respected life. This ephemerality was marginalizing, devaluing, and in some respects impossible to escape. Yet Steedly never stopped there. She gave us the joy, pride, and accomplishment her subjects also experienced, by way of theorizing experience itself. By studying the edges of life, the excess that social disorder produced, she argued that we could more clearly see the partiality that undergirds the illusion of order emanating from stories told by those at the center of the action. By visiting a world where subjects were perpetually at risk of exceeding boundaries of propriety, where spirits and people merged, where people, things, or animals needed each other, Steedly also captured an important fact: that we are always touching each other, that we are split, relational selves that cannot exist without others. This has been a core concept in feminist theory, yet Steedly found a way to convey that fact through refusing the binary nature often ascribed to gender.Item CultureLahiri, Smita (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 “culture.” Steedly regarded stories as belonging to two distinct but entwined orders of reality: experience and memory. Since primary experience is always at the point of vanishing, it is only and inevitably through personal (and, in different ways, collective) memory that it can become publicly expressed and accessed anew. The two orders of reality coming together in narrative, for the act of recollection before an audience, whether real or fantasized, constitutes its own form of experience. This, in a roundabout way, brought Steedly back to “culture.” Stories became a privileged point of entry into culture as a manifold of potential significations that no individual storyteller ever grasps in its entirety, even though he or she is continuously in the midst of actualizing it. Not surprisingly, then, Steedly’s signature way of writing ethnography (one could say, of writing culture) was to retell someone else’s story for purposes of her own. And while her topics and concerns ranged widely, they inevitably included the textuality of the story itself: how it had been told, what had occasioned its telling, and how it had fared with its audience. Steedly veered subtly off the anthropologist’s traditional path of cultural translation toward what might be more aptly called “cultural transcreation.” Situating each story afresh, putting it in conversation with other sources of information—songs, genealogies, official records, authoritative accounts—she sought to open up an entire horizon of refracted significances before new audiences.Item TelltaleSpyer, Patricia (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 “telltale.” Telltale speaks to the acute attention and thinking that Steedly brought to her work, to the subtlety, nuance, power, and persuasiveness of her writing, and to the way Indonesianists and other scholars may recall and draw on her insights and contributions for years to come. “Telltale” evokes Steedly’s method and the pleasure of surprise and sense of adventure that she found in her fieldwork and ethnography. Steedly had a keen alertness to the telltale in the sense of an outward sign, an indication of something, however slight, that marks a difference, discloses a possibility, intimates a shift in direction. Occasionally, something telltale clamors for attention. More often, it is small, even modest in its singularity, a telling detail that stands out from its surroundings, gives pause, catches the eye, makes one listen more closely or look again. Telltale assumes myriad forms—a word, a gesture, a tone, a silence, a change of posture, something scuttling at the edge of the visual field. Telltale is not just noticeable but suggestive, since it betrays the presence of something else—another way of telling, someone else speaking, or a fugitive site of ephemerality … exactly the sorts of things that characterize Steedly’s writings and ruminations.Item NarrativePeacock, James (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 “narrative.” Throughout all of Steedly’s work one can see her consistent attention to meaning, humanity, and story. This article recalls her master’s thesis, a masterpiece of fieldwork, writing, and compassion that foreshadows the brilliance of her later books on Indonesia. Displaying her skill as an ethnographic writer with a close eye to detail, Steedly allows her subject’s voice to resound in her text as a source of both testimony and commentary. Steedly’s analysis of her subject’s context, content, and structure reflects a distinctive and eclectic approach to theory and ethnography, for example, by drawing on anthropological investigations of symbols and classification systems while avoiding disrespectful studies and predictable comparisons. Her earliest work demonstrated her gift for combining sensitive, detailed description with broader symbolic analysis; and a curiosity for the invisible, an interest in documentation, and a knack for conveying details even when they did not conform to the story. These later came to be among the theoretical hallmarks for which she will be remembered.Item Eating an Elephant: Culinary Nationalism and the Memory of the SensesSteedly, Mary Margaret (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2020-04)Mary Steedly’s “Eating an Elephant” is a previously unpublished paper that Steedly originally delivered as a lecture. This essay offers insight into her ethnographic praxis as an observer, listener, and writer, making it the perfect prelude to the keyword essays in this memorial collection that constitute a multi-voiced appreciation of Steedly by her colleagues and students. “Eating an Elephant” demonstrates Steedly’s extraordinary ability to draw rich insights from apparently insignificant, yet “telltale,” details. The essay showcases Steedly’s skill as a crafter of narratives, both distinctively authored and characteristically replete with other people’s voices. In its reference to Orwell’s autobiographical short story “Shooting an Elephant,” it reflects Steedly’s openness to literature as a source of insight and inspiration. Finally, it displays her sense of humor and her refusal to elevate the story of Indonesia’s independence struggle from its grounding in mud, hunger, death, confusion, and absurdity.