Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006: Meaning, method, and Indonesian economic history

Clifford Geertz was best known for his pioneering excursions into symbolic or interpretive anthropology, especially in relation to Indonesia. Less well recognised are his stimulating explorations of the modern economic history of Indonesia. His thinking on the interplay of economics and culture was most fully and vigorously expounded in Agricultural Involution. That book deployed a succinctly packaged past in order to solve a pressing contemporary puzzle, Java's enduring rural poverty and apparent social immobility. Initially greeted with acclaim, later and ironically the book stimulated the deep and multi-layered research that in fact led to the eventual rejection of Geertz's central contentions. But the veracity or otherwise of Geertz's inventive characterisation of Indonesian economic development now seems irrelevant; what is profoundly important is the extraordinary stimulus he gave to a generation of scholars to explore Indonesia's modern economic history with a depth and intensity previously unimaginable

Constructing the nation: Ethnicity, race, modernity and citizenship in early Indonesian thought

This article examines the ways in which some early twentieth-century Indonesian thinkers conceptualised the state they had so recently imagined, and particularly how they attacked the vast problem of accommodating ethnic difference within the framework of that new state. Notwithstanding the highly promising beginnings of Indonesian self-appreciation in the early twentieth century and an extraordinarily successful cooptation and, as necessary, subjugation of local and regional expressions of ethnicity to the notion of a united Indonesia, there developed at the same time the new and strange concept of an 'Indonesian race'. That concept represented a regressive reluctance to dispense completely with pre-modern notions of culture and belonging, and created a damaging feature of the understanding of Indonesian citizenship that endures to this day

Marginality, Morality, and the Nationalist Impulse: Papua, The Netherlands and Indonesia: A Review Article

Review article of P.J. Drooglever, Een daad van vrije keuze: de Papoea's van westelijk Nieuw-Guinea en de grenzen van het zelfsbeschikkingrecht (Amsterdam: Boom, for the Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2005)

A note on the sources for the 1945 constitutional debates in Indonesia

A close examination of the papers held in the archive of Mr A.K. Pringgodigdo in the Nationaal Archief in The Hague indicates that Muhammad Yamin, presumably for the purpose of his own self-aggrandisement, changed important sections of the original text in his 1959-60 edition of the 1945 constitutional debates in Indonesia. Furthermore, the New Order’s efforts to reduce the legacy and legitimacy of Soekarno led Nugroho Notosusanto, in particular, to use Yamin’s work in an effort to diminish Sukarno’s role in the development of the state ideology of Pancasila

The redshift evolution of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation in Simba

The baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR) is an important tool for constraining galaxy evolution models. As 21-cm HI emission studies have been largely restricted to low redshifts, the redshift evolution of the BTFR is yet to be fully studied. The upcoming LADUMA survey (Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array) will address this. As preparation for LADUMA, we use the Simba hydrodynamical galaxy formation simulation from the Simba-hires (25 h$^{-1}$ Mpc)$^{3}$ run to generate rotational velocity measures from galaxy rotation curves ($V_{\rm flat}$) and HI spectral line profile widths ($W50$ and $W20$) at three different redshifts ($z$ = 0, 0.5, and 1). Using these measures, together with the dark matter velocity dispersion, we consider the redshift evolution of the BTFR of Simba galaxies. We find that LADUMA will be successful in detecting redshift evolution of the BTFR, provided that auxiliary data is used to distinguish galaxies with disky morphologies. $W20$ spectral line widths give lower scatter and more pronounced redshift evolution compared to $W50$. We also compare these rotational velocity measures to the dark matter velocity dispersion across redshift and galaxy morphology. We find weak redshift evolution between rotational velocity and the dark matter halo mass, and provide fits for estimating a galaxy's dark matter halo mass from HI spectral line widths. This study with Simba showcases the importance of upcoming, deep SKA pathfinder surveys such as LADUMA, and provides predictions to compare with redshift evolution of the BTFR and galaxy dark matter content from HI rotational velocity measures.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to MNRA