This study explores the relationship between outmigration and gender roles in two villages in North Tapanuli, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. In a symbolic sense, land and women have always represented security to Toba Batak men as they travelled in search of a livelihood. The main purpose of this study is to throw light on the options open to the women staying behind and the adjustments they make, as well as their reasons for making them. The approach followed is an anthropological one. It combines an analysis of actor-oriented perceptions and strategies with an insight into the...

Warfare and wealth were the major means for acquiring status in precolonial Minahasa (North Sulawesi). The author argues that the quest for power and prestige is an ongoing concern among Minahasans. Based on extensive anthropological and historical research, this book focuses on patterns and processes of social mobility. The character of leadership in tribal society, then under the colonial bureaucracy, and later in modern Indonesia are discussed. Besides political changes, changes in economic conditions and in religion have had a considerable influence on mobility. These processes are...

Beneath the Volcano is the first major account of the Nage, who inhabit the central part of Flores in eastern Indonesia. The book focuses on Nage ideas concerning a variety of spiritual beings and how these influence both ritual practices and ideas about human beings. In exploring these subjects, the author sets out to uncover a classification of spirits. While quite different from taxonomies of natural beings, Nage ways of linking named categories of spirits nevertheless reveal a regular conceptual order. In describing this order, use is made of a version of Dumont's notion of...

From the late seventeenth century until the Dutch conquest of the early twentieth Century Bali was ruled by a set of competing kingdoms. This study of the Balinese text Kidung Malat is the first work in Indonesian historical studies to analyse the main ideology of these Balinese kingdoms. It does so by demonstrating how the performance and presentation of the text presented an image of the ideal prince to both rulers and subjects. The Kidung Malat exemplifies courtly ideology through its descriptions of the adventures of kings and princes from the era of the medieval kingdoms of...

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this work explores the historical and cultural dimensions of an indigenous Timorese domain in the southern central highlands of West Timor. Informing the study of Timorese social and cultural practice is an interpretative framework based on the concept of precedence and the rich repertoire of indigenous metaphor and binary categories by which Timorese articulate and classify social relations. Ideas of place and precedence are central to an understanding of local status differences within and between hamlet settlements. They also inform the...

Combining historical geography with historical demography, and conceived as a study in environmental history, this book examines the long-term relationship between population, economy and environment in the northern half of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Using a rich variety of Dutch historical sources, including VOC and missionary archives, it attempts to reconstruct and analyse patterns of demographic, economic and landscape change throughout this large and ecologically diverse region over a period of almost three and a half centuries. Particular attention is given to the articulation...

Historians of Southeast Asia have traditionally preferred to write about politics and culture rather than economics and ecology, and where they have looked at the history of agriculture they have most often concentrated on cash crops like sugar, coffee and rubber which figure prominently in colonial records. Smallholders and stockbreeders, by contrast, provides a rare survey of the history of foodcrop farming, and a unique look at the history of animal husbandry, in the Southeast Asian region. Thirteen contributions by an international selection of expert authors cover topics ranging...

This study presents the text and first English translation of a Sumatran turi-turian or chanted epic called the tale of Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman, the hero's name. This is a famous southern Batak story from the town of Sipirok. The version at issue, in the Angkola Batak language, was published as a folkloric but also rather novelistic printed paperback book for a popular southern Batak audience in 1941, at the end of Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. This sly book version of Datuk Tuongku by the novelist and newspaperman M.J. Soetan Hasoendoetan, gave southern Batak readers...

King of the waters describes how a brilliant Dutch engineer ultimately failed to implement his plans for modern irrigation in Siam. Homan van der Heide's identification with the interests of the rice farmers caused ambivalent reactions from his Siamese environment. Interwoven with the detailed description of the actions of the Dutch engineer, King Chulalongkorn and some of his ministers is the ambiguous performance of the Siamese state towards agriculture in the first decade of the twentieth century. The book shows the weight of many contingencies in state affairs, especially through...