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ItemIs ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableGods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableNature and the Self: Liberal Individualism Is the Problem, Not the Solution(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016)
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ItemTrajectories: Excursions with the Anthropology of E Douglas Lewis(Peter Lang Publishing, 2016)
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ItemThe Once and Future King: Utopianism as Political Practice in Indonesia(UNIV COOPERATIVE COLOMBIA, 2016)
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ItemPolitical Parties and the Power of Money in Indonesia and Beyond(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2015-07)Abstract Political parties in Indonesia and in other parts of Southeast Asia have become vitally dependent on the financial support of individuals or conglomerates with large private fortunes. A remarkable new development is that some of the billionaires who have long sponsored political parties have decided to out themselves as political leaders, and thus to adopt the style of oligarchs. I define an oligarchy as a society featuring systematic conflation of political and economic power within the same individuals or within small, elite groups of such individuals in a manner that is visible, tolerated and hence legitimated. The gradual shift from clandestine money politics to open oligarchy is a significant challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conflicts of interest between the demands of public office and their private interests would seem difficult to avoid for politicians who also run large business empires and own great estates. On the other hand, for billionaire sponsors of political parties to come forward and stand for public office personally also means that their hitherto clandestine influence is becoming more transparent, and their conduct and decisions more subject to public scrutiny and accountability. This article describes how both direct and indirect ways of conducting money politics operate and coexist within different types of political parties in Indonesia today, what the significance of these differences is and what is changing; with special reference to the 2014 parliamentary elections in Indonesia.