In this lively book, Benedict R. OG. Anderson explores the cultural and
political contradictions that have arisen from two critical facts in Indonesian
history: that while the Indonesian nation is young, the Indonesian nation
is ancient originating in the early seventeenth-century Dutch conquests;
and that contemporary politics are conducted in a new language. Bahasa
Indonesia, by peoples (especially the Javanese) whose cultures are rooted in
medieval times. Analyzing a spectrum of examples from classical poetry to
public monuments and cartoons, Anderson deepens our understanding of...

In these studies, scholars from the United States and Indonesia identify some of the cultural roots of Indonesian political behavior. The authors, representing the fields of anthropology, history, and political science, explore the ways in which traditional institutions, beliefs, values, and ethnic origins affect notions of power and rebellion, influence political party affiliations, and create new modes of cultural expression.

Using two different but contemporary approaches, the authors show what can be learned about Indonesia through use of the Western concepts of "culture" and "politics."...

These essays investigate institutionalized violence in New Order Indonesia and the ongoing legacy Suharto's dictatorship has conferred on the nation. The collection includes papers on East Timor, Aceh, Biak, the police, and the Indonesian military...

All of those who are interested in contemporary Indonesian society, its organization and social and political articulation, sooner or later come to realize that in order to achieve any real depth of understanding for these phenomena it is first necessary to appreciate the enduring and frequently manifest residuum of traditional, pre-Western culture in Indonesia. Certainly this is true with respect to Java, whose culture has of course had an impact far beyond the shores of that island. In many cases these legacies of traditional culture help to explain current phenomena; in addition they make...

The Indonesian revolution, its origins, the course of its development, and its relation to current conditions in Indonesian society has always been a subject of major concern to the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. Among the principal gaps in the coverage of its history (where both Indonesian and other Asian and Western scholars have given relatively little attention) are the background provided by the final year of Japanese occupation and an account of the first few months of independence, a critical time in which the revolutionary forces acquired their first institutional form.

It is a...

Over the past two decades there has been a continuing debate among Western scholars concerning the nature of Indonesian politics and the best approaches for understanding them. Several of the most important contributions to this debate were never published and others have gone out of print. Thus, it has been difficult for a new generation of students of Indonesia to be aware of the range of opinions and discussion in Western academic circles concerning the character of postrevolutionary Indonesian politics. For this reason, it appeared to us useful to bring together a series of articles that...

A representative sampling of the short fiction produced by a single generation of Thai writers during the "American Era" in Thailand, the two decades from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, when US involvement in politics and the economy ignited rapid...