The Stranger-Kings of Sikka

The Stranger-Kings of Sikka
Author: E. Douglas Lewis
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004253777

The Stranger-Kings of Sikka is the first monographic study of an origin myth and history of an indigenous eastern Indonesian state and the first contemporary ethnography of the Ata Sikka of Flores. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, ethnologists of Austronesia, historians and political scientists whose interests include Southeast Asia. During the 1920s, in the regency of Sikka on the island of Flores, D.D. Pareira Kondi and A. Boer Pareira, two notable men among the first literate Sikkanese, began writing about the history and culture of their people. Among their many surviving manuscripts are two long works on the origin of the rajas who ruled Sikka until the end of the rajadom in the 1950s. The author of this book uncovered the manuscripts in 1994 and found among them versions of the myth of origin of the Sikkanese rajas, an epic tale of immigrant-kings that was lost to living memory and as oral tradition by the 1970s. Drawing on Boer’s and Kondi's texts and his own field research in the regency of Sikka, Lewis presents an abridged English translation of the origin myth and constructs a history of the Sikkanese rajas and the organization of the society they ruled.

Astonishment and Evocation

Astonishment and Evocation
Author: Ivo Strecker
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857459368

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

Integrating Strangers in Society

Integrating Strangers in Society
Author: Jos D. M. Platenkamp
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030167038

This book provides a uniquely positioned contribution to the current debates on the integration of immigrants in Europe. Twelve social anthropologists—“strangers by vocation”—reflect upon how they were taken in by those they studied over the course of their long-term fieldwork. The societies concerned are Sinti (northern Italy), Inuit (Canadian Arctic), Kanak (New Caledonia), Māori (New Zealand), Lanten (Laos), Tobelo and Tanebar-Evav (Indonesia), Banyoro (Uganda), Gawigl and Siassi (Papua New Guinea) and a township in Odisha (India). A comparative analysis of these reflexive, ethnographic accounts reveals as yet underrepresented, non-European perspectives on the issue of integrating strangers, enabling the reader to identify and reflect upon the uniquely Western ideals and values that currently dominate such discourse.

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies
Author: Ricardo Roque
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2019-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789202728

The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

Precedence

Precedence
Author: Michael P. Vischer
Publisher: ANU E Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2009-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1921536470

This collection of papers is the sixth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers that comprise this volume examine the concept of precedence as a form of local discourse and as a mechanism for ordering status, at different levels, within specific Austronesian-speaking societies. This is the first volume of its kind to focus entirely on precedence and to provide an explication of its social uses and the way in which it is contested. Each paper is ethnographically-focused and offers its own distinctive approach to the examination of precedence. The papers, however, relate closely to one another and are thus able to proffer a variety of comparative reflections.

Chiasmus and Culture

Chiasmus and Culture
Author: Boris Wiseman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0857459619

Anyone who has heard of chiasmus is likely to think of it as no more than a piece of rhetorical playfulness, at times challenging, though useful for supplying a memorable sententious note or for performing a pirouette of syntax and thought. Going beyond traditional rhetoric, this volume is concerned with the possibility of using the figure of chiasmus to model a broad array of phenomena, from human relations to artistic creation. In the process, it provides the first book-length study not of chiasmus, the rhetorical figure, but of chiastic thought. The contributors are concerned with chiastic inversion and its place in social interactions, cultural creation, and more generally human thought and experience.They explore from a variety of angles what the unsettling logic of chiasmus (from the Greek meaning “cross-wise”), has to tell us about the world, human relations, cultural patterns, psychology, and artistic and poetic creation.

Austronesian Undressed

Austronesian Undressed
Author: David Gil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027260532

Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

A History of Christianity in Indonesia

A History of Christianity in Indonesia
Author: Jan Sihar Aritonang
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1021
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 900417026X

Indonesia is the home of the largest single Muslim community of the world. Its Christian community, about 10% of the population, has until now received no overall description in English. Through cooperation of 26 Indonesian and European scholars, Protestants and Catholics, a broad and balanced picture is given of its 24 million Christians. This book sketches the growth of Christianity during the Portuguese period (1511-1605), it presents a fair account of developments under the Dutch colonial administration (1605-1942) and is more elaborate for the period of the Indonesian Republic (since 1945). It emphasizes the regional differences in this huge country, because most Christians live outside the main island of Java. Muslim-Christian relations, as well as the tensions between foreign missionaries and local theology, receive special attention.

Punks, Monks and Politics

Punks, Monks and Politics
Author: Julian C H Lee
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786600226

Explores the notion of authenticity in three Southeast Asian countries with a high degree of cross-border mobility where the boundaries between the local and international are blurred