South East Asia (esp. Indonesia)
The Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University has several experts on Indonesia and South East Asia.
Prof. Patricia Spyer
Patricia Spyer holds the chair of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Contemporary Indonesia at Leiden University and is Global Distinguished Visiting Professor at New York University’s Center for Religion & Media and Department of Anthropology. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke 2000), editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge 1998), and co-editor of the Handbook of Material Culture (Sage 2006).
Patricia Spyer has published, among other topics, on violence, media and photography, historical consciousness, materiality, and religion. Her current book project Orphaned Landscapes focuses on the mediations of violence and postviolence in the recent religiously-inflected conflict in the Moluccas, Indonesia. A co-edited volume Images Without Borders with Mary Steedly of Harvard University is forthcoming with the School of American Research Press.
Keywords: Religion, Media, Visual and Material Culture, Violence, South East Asia (Indonesia).
Dr. Bart Barendregt
Bart Barendregt is currently researching the process of appropriation of mobile phone technology by marginalized groups as part of a larger book project on the “Underbelly of Indonesian IT society”. He is linking this research to the dynamic and growing field of research on ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) based movements, which plays an essential role in determining the relevance of future anthropological research.
Bart Barendregt is also interested in Islamic pop culture, new media and images/imaginations of the future. He is currently working on a book about Nasyid: Islamitic boyband music and the mixing of religion, youth culture and politics that has become so popular among Malaysian and Indonesian students and activists. Bart Barendregt is also involved in a long-term research project on eco-chic and slow living Asian style: a mix of lifestyle politics, wellness and the desire to return to an aristocratic version of ‘traditional culture’, in which newly rich Asians are adopting a cultural version of the politically loaded “Asian Values” debate.
Keywords: South- East Asia, Mobile Technology, ICT 4 Development, Relgion (Pop Islam), Asian Eco-chic.
Dr. Ratna Saptari
Ratna Saptari studied anthropology at the University of Indonesia (MA 1984) and at the University of Amsterdam (PhD 1995). Saptari is coordinator of the IIAS-funded Changing Labour Relations in Asia (CLARA) programme. She organized several panels and conferences in collaboration with research/teaching institutions in Europe and Asia focusing on topics such as labour, migration, domestic service, social movements and histories of subaltern groups.
In addition to several articles and book chapters on these themes, she has also co-edited a number of books: The Household and Beyond: Cultural Notions and Social Practices in the Study of Gender in Indonesia; Labour in Southeast Asia: Local Processes in a Globalized World; and on the politics of history-writing Pemikiran Kembali Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia (Rethinking Indonesian History-Writing). Ratna Saptari is currently writing on and researching ‘The Making and Remaking of the Cigarette Labour Communities in East Java: a comparative study of three cigarette towns, 1913-2003’; ‘Decolonisation and Urban Labour in Indonesia (1920s to 1965): Continuity and Change’and ‘The Cultures of Tobacco in Indonesia and India.’
Keywords: Migration, Social Movements, Labour, Gender, Oral History, South East Asia.