For decades, scholars of Indonesia have rejected the religious claims of the Darul Islam movement, interpreting the antagonism between the Islamic state and Soekarno’s republic as a fight for power, self-assertion, or land rights. Recently Kartosuwiryo and the Darul Islam have become heroic symbols of the local Islamist struggle, offering an alternative vision of this politician. The author l…
In this study of the Dutch East India Company the author uses the Company’s seventeenth century diplomatic interaction with the trading Sultanate of Macassar, on the southwestern tip of present day Sulawesi, as a case in cross cultural diplomacy. The author argues that the outlook of the Company’s agents both home and overseas was pragmatic, as was the nature of the solutions to the problem…
Recent years have shown an increase in interest in the study of cleanliness from a historical and sociological perspective. Many of such studies on bathing and washing, on keeping the body and the streets clean, and on filth and the combat of dirt, focus on Europe. In Cleanliness and culture attention shifts to the tropics, to Indonesia, in colonial times as well as in the present. Subjects ran…