Universiti Brunei Darussalam

Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta

Binus University

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Australian National University

University of Melbourne

University of Western Australia

International Monetary Fund

Chr. Michelsen Institute

University of Hamburg

Wageningen University & Research

Leiden University

Utrecht University

Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

SOAS, University of London

University of Connecticut

University of Indonesia

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

University of Southern California

Yale University

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde is focused in particular on the linguistics, anthropology, and history of Southeast Asia, and more specifically of Indonesia. The journal appears in four issues, running a total of roughly 600 pages annually. The large majority of articles, notices, and reviews are published in English. English title: Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Published continuously since 1853. Published continuously since 1853, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde is focused in particular on the linguistics, anthropology, and history of Southeast Asia, and more specifically of Indonesia. It appears in four issues, running a total of roughly 600 pages annually. The large majority of articles, brief notices, and book reviews are published in English.

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania

The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia, by Roy Ellen

Rising Islamic Conservatism in Indonesia Islamic Groups and Identity Politics, by Leonard C. Sebastian, Syafiq Hasyim, Alexander R. Arifianto

This article discusses the ways in which citizens have enhanced agency through informal and polite claims-making. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in West Java, this article argues that citizens tend to pressure the authorities in polite, personal, and highly informal ways to deal with state institutions and gain access to public services. Such forms of informal and polite citizenship signify a reasonably effective communal culture of consensus-formation that defines the predominantly complex character of state institutions in Indonesia. Consequently, citizens have become more capable in claiming their rights and positioning themselves vis-à-vis the authorities. These everyday practices have affected the balance of power between village authorities, informal community leaders, and citizens. By taking examples from rural West Java, this article unveils the everyday informality and the politics of politeness that may also take place in other rural areas of Indonesia and possibly the larger non-Western world.

Polite Citizenship: Everyday Informal Claims-Making in Rural West Java, Indonesia

This article examines the performance of non-heteronormative modes of gender in Malaysia’s longest-running Malay sitcom, Senario. My close textual reading centres on two episodes to identify the show’s linkages with broader Malay socio-cultural attitudes about gender fluidity. Three facets of Senario’s non-heteronormativity are foregrounded: (1) the religio-cultural belief that gender fluidity, sexual deviancy, and non-heteronormative identities are ‘conditions’ that can be ‘corrected’; (2) that this gender ‘correction’ is a recourse that privileges the masculine, and (3) that heteronormative binary roles are sustained even when imagining inversions of gender. By correlating these performances with wider religious and cultural beliefs/practices, and historical developments, it is observed that Senario’s gender performatives were heavily influenced by, and inflected with, real-world biases towards non-heteronormative communities. This work represents a meaningful step towards addressing the present lacuna of critical scholarship on Malay television representations of non-heteronormative gender identities.

Binary Inversions and Gender Fluidity in the Malay Sitcom Senario

A Catholic priest and amateur palaeontologist, Father Theodor Verhoeven (SVD) is best known for his discovery of sites on Flores Island (Indonesia) that yielded fossilized remains of Middle Pleistocene stegodons and lithic materials suggesting early occupation by pre-sapiens hominins. Eventually, these finds influenced investigations that resulted in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in Liang Bua cave. Verhoeven’s earliest fieldwork, however, concerned other Florenese caves, where he found Late Holocene remains of small-bodied Homo sapiens which he identified as ‘negritos’ or ‘proto-negritos.’ In this article, I present new evidence revealing that Verhoeven believed negritos survived on Flores as discrete populations during his own time and, moreover, that one such negrito was a fellow Catholic priest. Though Verhoeven died 13 years before the discovery of floresiensis, his views on both prehistoric and living ‘negritos’ suggest that he would likely—though ultimately incorrectly—have interpreted both as descendants of floresiensis and earlier hominin contemporaries of Middle Pleistocene stegodons. The significance of Verhoeven’s palaeoanthropological and archaeological discoveries for subsequent, professional research illustrates one of the most remarkable collaborations between academics and amateurs in the history of anthropology.

Verhoeven’s Living Negritos and the Story of Zakharias Ze

The article discusses an enigmatic Old Javanese bird named kalaṅkyaṅ. The avian species known by this name is identified as the white-bellied sea eagle, a bird common in the past in the coastal parts of Java. In the second section it is argued that the kalaṅkyaṅ bird is represented in Old Javanese poetry as the mirror image of the Javanese kawi (poet).

The Kalaṅkyaṅ in Old Javanese Literature

Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia, by Chris Chaplin

This article calls for a rethinking of the concept of diasporic return in light of contemporary religious and political developments in Indonesia. It does so by exploring two modalities of diasporic returns, namely, re-embedding and re-encountering, neither of which necessarily involve transnational travel or any notion of an ancestral homeland, but both of which are nevertheless important to the process of diasporization. Based on ethnographic observation among the Ḥaḍramī diaspora in Indonesia, the article follows the biographical becoming of two nationally prominent figures who had been estranged from their diasporic community. The article traces how these two figures have returned, whether inadvertently or by choice, to the Ḥaḍramī diasporic identity and community. The two cases point to the porosity and contingency of diaspora as both a subjective position and a social formation that enables its members to exit and enter in various ways. They also exemplify forms of diasporic return that unfold in and through, but are not reducible to, national politics. Comparing the two cases and tracing their connections reveal the possible entanglements between diasporic and national politics in Indonesia’s religio-political field that have hardly been recognized by observers of Indonesian politics and religion. By developing the notion of diasporic re-embedding and re-encountering to complicate diasporic return, the article unravels the more complex, politically grounded and ambivalent relations that dynamically form and transform an Indian Ocean diaspora and its relationship to the Indonesian nation.

Rethinking Diasporic Returns: Ḥaḍramī Trajectories in Indonesia’s Religio-political Field

Taiwan Maritime Landscapes: From Neolithic to Early Modern Times , by Paola Calanca, Liu Yi-chang and Frank Muyard (eds)

Beyond the Pale: Dutch Extreme Violence in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–1949 , by Gert Oostindie, et al. (eds.)

Human rights abuses and corruption during authoritarian rule are rooted in the arbitrary and coercive use of power. This study examines how two post-authoritarian accountability issues intersected in the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia. In the Philippines and South Korea, human rights abuses and corruption were viewed as overlapping or related legacies of authoritarian rule. The activities to eliminate corruption worked as catalysts for milestones of transitional justice, and violations of socio-economic rights were acknowledged. In Indonesia, by contrast, corruption and human rights abuses were treated as special crimes that occur continually across time. Specialized agencies helped Indonesia deal with human rights abuses and corruption during the authoritarian era. This study shows that anti-corruption activities can work as a catalyst for the progress of transitional justice for human rights abuses. It also highlights that post-authoritarian practices to deal with economic violence existed in Asia before transitional justice took shape as a field.

Human Rights and Corruption in Settling the Accounts of the Past: Transitional Justice Experiences from the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia

Book Reviews Islamism and the Quest for Hegemony in Indonesia, by Luqman Nul Hakim

cc_by publishedVersion Downloaded from Helda, University of Helsinki institutional repository. This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. Please cite the original version.

Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia : From Past to Present Vadillo, Veronica Walker

In memoriam J. van Baal, 25-11-1909 - 9-8-1993

Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri leave Aceh in 1054 A.H.?

Why leave so much unsaid and unargued? (Review of:) A handbook of method in cultural anthropology, edited by Raoul Naroll and Ronald Cohen; Published by the Natural History Press, New York 1970; 1017 pp.

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania

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