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Muslims and Matriarchs is a history of an unusual, probably heretical, and ultimately resilient cultural system. The Minangkabau culture of West Sumatra, Indonesia, is well known as the world's largest matrilineal culture; Minangkabau people are also Muslim and famous for their piety. In this book, Jeffrey Hadler examines the changing ideas of home and family in Minangkabau from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. Minangkabau has experienced a sustained and sometimes violent debate between Muslim reformists and preservers of indigenous culture. During a protracted and bloody civil war of the early nineteenth century, neo-Wahhabi reformists sought to replace the matriarchate with a soci...
"During much of Soeharto's thirty-two years of reign as president (1967-1998) Indonesia was seen as a successful test-case in third-world development, a wayward pariah turned into a shining example of modern economic planning and democracy. His New Order government won awards from the United Nations for the country's advances in family planning. The nation's massive development plans won the applause of the World Bank and international financiers. In fact, behind the New Order's benign facade was an intricate web of nepotism, corruption and a persistent and wide-ranging repression of civil liberties, the full scope of which is now just beginning to become apparent." "Indonesia in the Soehart...
Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabau--one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia--label their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women. Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate. Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.
Contemporary concerns with the way the movement of Islamist ideas has radicalized Southeast Asia are put in a necessary deep historical context by this timely book. The fourteen authors represent the best of the new trilingual scholarship doing justice to both Arabic and Indonesian sources. They reach back to the seventh century to explain how trade brought the two crossroads of Eurasia together, and Islam provided the passion and the idiom for their subsequent complex interactions. There are no centers and peripheries in this sophisticated interpretation of how waves of reform have affected both homelands. Such relationships contribute to regional and global events in many crucial ways, and this volume is important for anyone interested in the future of Asia and the Middle East.
Ratline is the documented history about the mechanisms by which thousands of other Nazi war criminals fled to the remotest parts of the globe—including quite possibly Adolf Hitler. It is a story involving Soviet spies, Nazi priests, and a network of Catholic monasteries and safe houses known as the ratline. The name of one priest in particular, Monsignor Draganovic, was discovered by the author in a diary found in Indonesia. Why would this name turn up in a document written in a spidery German hand in a remote island in Indonesia? As famed author Peter Levenda began his research, more information came to light: In December of 2009, it was revealed that the skull the Russians claimed was Hi...
No detailed description available for "More Than Words".
"This monograph explores the relationship between Islam and Marxism in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and Indonesia from the publication of the first Communist periodical in 1915 to the beginning of the anti-communist massacres of 1965-66. It explores various permutations of how Muslim identity and Marxist analytical frameworks coexisted in the minds of Indonesian nationalists, as well as how individuals' Islamic faith and ethics shaped their willingness to employ Marxist ideas. Such confluences have long been obscured by state-driven narratives which demonize Marxism and posit the mutual exclusivity of Islam and Marxism. By examining Indonesian-language print culture, including newspaper...
How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa an...
After the 2004 Asian Tsunami wiped out whole communities on the Indian Ocean, Indonesia’s West Sumatra province learnt a startling reality—they were next. A loosely allied bunch of scientists, students and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of this suddenly precarious location, centering on the area capital of Padang and hurrying together a plan to save it before it’s too late. But the limits of their grassroots activism in a crowded, striving, ill-planned city has critical implications for some of Asia’s other cities facing their own geological and climate time bombs. Smaller, more nimble places may be able to thrive in the coming century of environmental reckoning.
Examines the role of black American music abroad in the post-WWII era through the lens of one of the period's most prolific and influential blues scholars, Paul Oliver