You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explores the evolving political culture in Indonesia, by discussing the country's dominant political philosophies, then showing how those philosophies affect the working lives of ordinary Indonesian citizens. It focuses in particular on the working lives of news journalists, a group that occupies a strategic social and political position.
Controversial topic: Indonesia, human rights, Asian values Major contribution to the understanding of the Suharto regime
The turn of the century and the crossroads of reformasi presents a timely juncture for examining Indonesia's political, economic, and social history--both to evaluate current events and to chart the country's future course. Providing an up-to-date overview, this volume explores events, processes, and themes in contemporary Indonesia--including the evolution of political institutions and democracy, economic development and political economy, religious and social movements, political ideology, and the role of the armed forces. By holding a mirror to historical events, the authors add a rich dimension to our understanding of Indonesia and its problems, free from the exigencies of the present and the prejudices of the past.
This book is the first comprehensive study of the practice of kekawin composition in Bali. Based on field research and a diverse range of palm leaf texts, it explores Balinese perceptions of kekawin composition and demonstrates the nexus between religion and the writing of these poems. Like kekawin from ancient Java, Balinese kekawin have been conceived as a mystical means of unification with divinity, as temples of language. In the first part of the book Bali is shown to be a society of religious literacy, and alphabet magic and the religious beliefs that underpin literary activity are examined. The second part explores Balinese conceptions of the practice of kekawin composition as literary yoga. Both the priestly identity of poets and the act of composing as a religious ritual are considered. The final section investigates the craft of composition through texts that concern prosody, poetics and orthography: the Canda, the Bhasaprana and the Swarawyanjana.
Local renderings of the two Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in Malay and Javanese literature have existed since around the ninth and tenth centuries. In the following centuries new versions were created alongside the old ones, and these opened up interesting new directions. They questioned the views of previous versions and laid different accents, in a continuous process of modernization and adaptation, successfully satisfying the curiosity of their audiences for more than a thousand years. Much of this history is still unclear. For a long time, scholarly research made little progress, due to its preoccupation with problems of origin. The present volume, going beyond identifying sources, analyses the socio-literary contexts and ideological foundations of seemingly similar contents and concepts in different periods; it examines the literary functions of borrowing and intertextual referencing, and calls upon the visual arts to illustrate the independent character of the epic tradition in Southeast Asia.
In Alcohol in Early Java: Its Social and Cultural Significance, Jiří Jákl offers an account of the history of alcohol in pre-Islamic Java (9-15th C.E.).