Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (59 page)

Resources and Further Reading

If you would like to see photos and videos of some of the people and events in the book (and some that didn’t make it to the book), please check out the enhanced e-book. You should be able to buy it from the normal on-line retailers, but you can find full details of availability in different territories at http://indonesiaetc.com/ebook. Buying the enhanced e-book is a good way of helping Elizabeth repay the debts incurred during this project. If you don’t have a tablet that can show colour pictures and video, you can see some of the videos and slide shows from the enhanced e-book at http://indonesiaetc.com/extras

References for most of the factual statements in this book can be found at http://indonesiaetc.com/references

What follows is a list of resources and further reading that many Indonesia specialists will find eccentric and all will find incomplete, but that contains some of the material I found most useful. It is arranged thematically. Several of the publications listed here are collections of essays; individual essays and papers are listed at http://indonesiaetc.com/references

If you wish to draw attention to any important resource you feel is neglected, please email [email protected] and we will consider adding it to the online resource pages.

Films

The Act of Killing
(2012), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. An extraordinary documentary showing how Indonesia has (and hasn’t) processed the memory of the slaughter of 1965/66.

The Year of Living Dangerously
(1982), directed by Peter Weir. Based on the novel of the same name; old but still good.

Sang Penari
(‘The Dancer’) (2011), directed by Ifa Isfansyah. Based on Ahmad Tohari’s triolgy of novels published in English under the same name. In Indonesian, with subtitles.

Lewat Djam Malam
(‘After the Curfew’) (1954), directed by Usmar Ismail. Recently remastered, this classic of Indonesian cinema shows the difficulty that some former revolutionaries had in integrating into post-independence Indonesia.

English language news and current affairs

The two major daily newspapers in English are the
Jakarta Post
at http://www.thejakartapost.com/ and the
Jakarta Globe
at http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/. Both can be read free online.

The weekly news magazine
Tempo
publishes an English-language edition at http://magz.tempo.co/. There is also an online portal for the Tempo group’s digital news at http://en.tempo.co

Inside Indonesia
, a thematic quarterly magazine, edited in Australia, is the place to go for thoughtful reporting by people who study Indonesia. It also publishes weekly in-depth articles on current topics at http://www.insideindonesia.org

Literature

The best source of Indonesian literature in translation is the Lontar Foundation: see http://www.lontar.org. They publish books on paper and electronically. They also maintain a digital library with archival material such as videos of interviews with major Indonesian writers. The digital library is available at http://library.lontar.org

Equinox also publishes some Indonesian fiction in translation: See http://equinoxpublishing.com/browse/fiction

There is a remarkable collection of literature related to Malaysia and the archipelago at the Melayu Library: see http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library. The books and documents are mostly out of copyright; they include some classics from the early colonial years. If you use this privately maintained resource, please consider making a donation.

Some Indonesian books I like (in English)

Farid, Lily Yulianti,
Family Room
. Translated by John H. McGlynn. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2010.

Lubis, Mochtar,
Twilight in Djakarta
. Translated by Claire Holt. Singapore; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Mangunwijaya, Y. B.,
Weaverbirds
. Translated by Thomas Hunter. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 1991.

Rusli, M.,
Sitti Nurbaya: A Love Unrealized
. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2009.

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta,
This Earth of Mankind
. Translated by Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1996. This is the first of the books that make up the
Buru Quartet
. I like the next two –
Child of All Nations
and
Footsteps
– as well.

Tohari, Ahmad,
The Dancer: a trilogy of novels
. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2012.

Wijaya, Putu,
Telegram
. Translated by Stephen J. Epstein. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2011.

Novels set in Indonesia

Conrad, Joseph,
Almayer’s Folly
. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895.

Conrad, Joseph,
Victory, An Island Tale
. London: Methuen & Co., 1928.

Koch, C. J.,
The Year of Living Dangerously
. Melbourne: HarperCollins, 1978.

Multatuli.
Max Havelaar, or, The coffee auctions of a Dutch Trading Company.
Translated by Roy Edwards. London; New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

History and nationhood

The Digital Atlas of Indonesian History
(http://www.indonesian history.info) by Robert Cribb is an invaluable source of information on just about everything relating to pre-colonial, colonial and modern Indonesia, including history, geography, ethnicity, religion and other social issues. Thanks to the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, it is now easily available online.

The Melayu Library (http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library) provides a wonderful, freely accessible online library of historical documents relating to what is now Indonesia. This includes many accounts by early travellers, and a great gallery of maps.

General histories

Brown, Colin,
A Short History of Indonesia: The Unlikely Nation?
London: Allen & Unwin, 2003.

Ricklefs, Merle Calvin,
A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200
. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Taylor, Jean Gelman,
Indonesia: Peoples and Histories
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

VOC and Netherlands East Indies

Bown, Stephen R.,
Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600–1900.
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009.

Gaastra, Femme,
The Dutch East India Company
. Leiden: Walburg Pers, 2003.

Milton, Giles,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History
. London: Sceptre, 2000.

Zanden, J. L. V.,
The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Nationalism, 1965, Modern Indonesia

Anderson, Benedict,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
. New York: Verso, 2006.

Cribb, Robert B.,
The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali
. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia 21. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 1990.

Cribb, Robert, ‘How Many Deaths? Problems in the statistics of massacre in Indonesia (1965–1966) and East Timor (1975–1980).’ In: Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhofer (eds.),
Violence in Indonesia
. Hamburg: Abera, 2001, pp. 82–98.

Cribb, Robert B.,
The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880–1942
. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994.

Schulte Nordholt, Henk, ‘Renegotiating Boundaries: Access, agency and identity in post-Soeharto Indonesia’,
Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia
159, no. 4 (2003), 550–89.

Schwarz, Adam,
A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia in the 1990s
. Boulder, Colo; San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994.

Vatikiotis, Michael R. J.,
Indonesian Politics Under Suharto: The Rise and Fall of the New Order
. London: Routledge, 2004.

Geography

Sutherland, H., ‘Geography as Destiny? The role of water in Southeast Asian history.’ In: P. Boomgaard (ed.),
A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories.
Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007.

Tomascik, T., and A. J. Mah,
The Ecology of the Indonesian Seas
. North Clendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 1997.

Wallace, Alfred Russel,
The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature
. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1869.

Politics, the economy and the law

The Indonesian Bureau of Statistics (now rebranding as StatisticsIndonesia) produces data on a number of economic indicators. Narrative reports are sometimes bilingual, and tables almost always are. They have a useful English-language website at http://www.bps.go.id/eng

The World Bank makes data available in easily downloadable formats. It also produces in-depth reports on specific areas of economic and social growth, and – if you are good at reading between the somewhat rosy lines – a useful quarterly report on the Indonesian economy. http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/indonesia

The OECD (of which Indonesia was not, at the time of writing, a member) works with fewer political constraints and produces some excellent analyses of the Indonesian economy, available at: http://www.oecd.org/indonesia

Readings

Asia Foundation,
Local Economic Governance
. Jakarta: Asia Foundation, 2011. asiafoundation.org/publications/pdf/1027

Aspinall, Edward, ‘Democratization and Ethnic Politics in Indonesia: Nine Theses’,
Journal of East Asian Studies
11, no. 2 (1 May 2011), 289–319.

Aspinall, Edward, and Marcus Mietzner,
Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions, and Society
. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010.

Aspinall, Edward, and Gerry van Klinken (eds.),
The State and Illegality in Indonesia
. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011.

Buehler, M., ‘Indonesia’s Law on Public Services: Changing state–society relations or continuing politics as usual?’,
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
47, no. 1 (2011): 65–86.

Burgess, R., M. Hansen, B. A. Olken, P. Potapov, and S. Sieber, ‘The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics’,
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
127, no. 4 (2012), 1707–54.

Davidson, Jamie, and David Henley,
The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism
. Vol. 5. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis, 2007.

Harvard Kennedy School,
From Reformasi to Institutional Transformation: A Strategic Assessment of Indonesia’s Prospects for Growth, Equity and Democratic Governance
. Cambridge, MA: Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, 2011.

Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, et al., ‘In Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies’,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
28, no. 6 (2005): 795–815.

Holt, Claire (ed.),
Culture and Politics in Indonesia
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Lev, Daniel,
Legal Evolution and Political Authority in Indonesia: Selected Essays
. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000.

Van Klinken, Gerry, and Joshua Barker (eds.),
State of Authority: The State in Society in Indonesia
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2009.

Religion

For analytical reports on religious violence or extremism, see the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict at http://www.understandingconflict.org; Human Rights Watch at http://www.hrw.org/reports; and the Setara Institute at http://www.setara-institute.org/en/category/category/reports.

Readings

Beatty, Andrew,
A Shadow Falls: In the Heart of Java
. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Buehler, Michael, ‘Subnational Islamization Through Secular Parties: Comparing Shari’a Politics in Two Indonesian Provinces,’
Comparative Politics
46, no. 1 (2013), 63–82.

Fealy, Greg, and Sally White,
Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia
. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008.

Geertz, Clifford,
The Religion of Java
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Picard, Michel, and Rémy Madinier,
The Politics of Religion in Indonesia: Syncretism, Orthodoxy, and Religious Contention in Java and Bali
. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011.

Wilson, Ian Douglas, ‘“As Long as It’s Halal”: Islamic Preman in Jakarta.’ In: Greg Fealy and Sally White (eds.),
Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia;
[... Papers Presented at the 25th Annual Indonesia Update Conference held at the Australian National University (ANU) on 7–8 September 2007], Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008, pp. 192–210.

Conflict and violence

By far the best source of detailed information on specific conflict areas in Indonesia are the reports of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC): http://www.understandingconflict.org

The International Crisis Group has useful reports archived on its website: http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia.aspx

Human Rights Watch also produces occasional analyses of issues related to rights and conflict: http://www.hrw.org/asia/indonesia

Books and articles on cultural and political violence