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    Language shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia
    Shin, S-C ; Jung, SJ (International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
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    The political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia
    Rosser, A ; Fahmi, M (Elsevier, 2018-07-01)
    Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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    Regular sound change: the evidence of a single example
    Adelaar, A (Faculty of Humanities. University of Indonesi, 2018-01-01)
    The Neogrammarians of the Leipzig School introduced the principle that sound changes are regular and that this regularity is without exceptions. At least as a working hypothesis, this principle has remained the basis of the comparative method up to this day. In the first part of this paper, I give a short account of how historical linguists have defended this principle and have dealt with apparent counter evidence. In the second part, I explore if a sound change can be regular if it is attested in one instance only. I conclude that it is, provided that the concomitant phonetic (and phonotactic) evidence supporting it is also based on regularity. If the single instance of a sound change is the result of developments which are all regular in themselves, it is still in line with the regularity principle.
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    The Lisbon book of pantuns
    Castro, I ; Cardoso, HC ; Koster, G ; Adelaar, A ; Baxter, A ; Castro, I (Imprensa Nacional, 2019)
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    [Review of the Book Histoire et voyages des plantes cultivées à Madagascar, by Philippe Beaujard]
    Adelaar, S (University of Hawaii Press, 2019-06-01)
    This book is written by one of the most prolific and versatile scholars of Malagasy culture and language of our era. Its French title translates as “the history and travels of the cultivated plants in Madagascar”, which is an understatement of the wealth of information it provides.
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    Dual *Kita in the history of east Barito languages
    Adelaar, A (Project MUSE, 2019-12-01)
    In many Philippine, northern Sulawesi, and northern Bornean languages, Proto Austronesian *kita ‘first-person inclusive plural’ became a first-person inclusive dual pronoun. Robert Blust and Hsiu-chuan Liao attribute this semantic change to drift (a change happening in various related languages independently). However, Lawrence Reid contends that it had already happened in Proto Malayo-Polynesian, and that the ensuing gap in the pronominal system of this ancestral language had been filled by the formation of a new first-person inclusive plural pronoun, which was based on *kita combined with a pronominal clitic (or “extender”) *=mu. The latter was a second-person plural pronoun in Proto Austronesian, but after it had lost its plural meaning in Proto Malayo-Polynesian, it was often combined with or replaced by other pronominal extenders. In this squib I show that in East Barito languages (including Malagasy) the first-person inclusive plural pronoun also derives from a dual *kita with a second-person plural extender. Taken in conjunction with the fact that reflexes of *kita also have a dual meaning in various languages in northern Borneo, this suggests that *kita already had a dual meaning in the early history of the West Indonesian subgroup.
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    Is ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias
    Reuter, T (University of Indonesia, Faculty of Humanities, 2014-01-01)
    Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among Austronesian religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of “traditional knowledge” seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the “incremental dualism” of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the “transcendental dualism” of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a deeper appreciation of Ancestor Religion as the oldest and most pervasive of all world religions.
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    Gods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis
    Reuter, TA (INCAA, 2013)
    Questions concerning the relative importance to Indian civilisation of the Brahmana-dominated model of religious status hierarchy and the royal model of divine kingship and associated hierarchies of state power have been referred to as ‘the central conundrum of Indian social ideology’. These two models of hierarchy nonetheless derive from a broader Indian worldview and both shape, and are shaped by, the existential realities of Indian social life and of life in general. They represent an attempt to respond to a ‘central conundrum’ of human sociality – how to differentiate between the members of a society in terms of status – and a central dilemma of human existence – how to be at once engaged with the world and elevated beyond the ordinary conditions of embodied existence. This paper endeavours to achieve a more unified perspective on Indian kingship and Brahmanism by exploring their relation to the world of social action, and action more generally. Indian civilisation has struggled for millennia with the fundamental existential conflicts of ‘being in the world.’ Hence what is to be gained from unravelling the products of this struggle is not only a better understanding of Indian culture alone but of human experience in general.
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    Regaining Lost Ground: A Social Movement for Sustainable Food Systems in Java, Indonesia
    Reuter, T ; MacRae, G (OpenEdition, 2019)
    Since the 1960s, Indonesia has industrialised agriculture, following the model promoted by the global bio-tech research complex and development agencies. Alternative approaches favoured by local grassroots organisations and NGOs include solutions grounded in moral economic systems of communal solidarity, small-scale production, local knowledge and the localisation of distribution and consumption networks. To illustrate the viability of such alternatives, we explore new Indonesian farmers’ movements that seek to produce high-yield, high-quality low-cost food using ecologically responsible food production methods and ‘symbiotic cooperation’ strategies founded upon a moral economy ethos. Our case studies contribute to a model for a worldwide transition to socially and ecologically sustainable regional food systems.
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