Negro influences on Indonesia

The Rev. A. M. Jones in a recent article* on the relationship between Indonesian and African music has called attention to a very interesting cultural feature, but his deductions that Negro African music is indebted to Indonesia is open to grave doubt. The similarities in music between Indonesia and Africa are due to the impress that African Negroes, imported into Melanesia by the Arab slave trade, exerted on the culture traits of Indonesia

Review article on the book: AFRICA AND INDONESIA: THE EVIDENCE OF THE XYLOPHONE AND OTHER MUSICAL AND CULTURAL FACTORS by A. M. JONES (pp. I-VIII, 1-233. Illus. Tables. Index. Pub. E. J. Brill. Leiden, 1964. Price: 36 Guilders).

This book falls into two studies, the one is on the similarities between the music, the tuning and the scales of the xylophones used in Africa and those used in Indonesia; the other is devoted to expounding a solution to explain these similarities

Gendered endings: Narratives of male and female suicides in the South African Lowveld

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9258-y. Copyright @ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.Durkheim’s classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘masculine domination’ provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs