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ItemThe political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia(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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ItemRegular sound change: the evidence of a single example(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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ItemThe Lisbon book of pantuns(Imprensa Nacional, 2019)
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Item[Review of the Book Histoire et voyages des plantes cultivées à Madagascar, by Philippe Beaujard](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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ItemDual *Kita in the history of east Barito languages(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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ItemRegaining Lost Ground: A Social Movement for Sustainable Food Systems in Java, Indonesia(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableChinese Academy of Social Sciences and University of Melbourne Joint Workshop on Language Maintenance: November 25, 2017, Beijing (China)(Chinese University Press, 2019-01-01)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGendering cosmopolitanisms: Hospitality and the asylum seeker Other(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2018-03-01)Debates about cosmopolitanism have pointed both to its exclusionary character as a problematic child of western modernity, analytically and politically dubious, and to the possibilities offered by the new cosmopolitanisms stressing cosmopolitan practice and ethics. This paper suggests that a gendering of such arguments can add important dimensions to these debates. Exploring the gendered character of the hospitality at the heart of cosmopolitanism's founding arguments, the discussion is grounded in an examination of the situated cosmopolitan hospitality offered by several prominent women-centred asylum seeker and refugee support and advocacy groups in Australia. These groups have created significant spaces of hospitality welcoming “Others,” deploying explicitly feminine imaginaries against the counter-cosmopolitanisms of the increasingly securitized and militarized border politics of the Australian state, and xenophobic anti-refugee nationalisms. The situated cosmopolitan hospitality and affective politics of these practices are linked to feminist arguments about political mobilizations of the feminine, especially the maternal, in social movements.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGender and modernity revisited: Dialogues with Joel Kahn(SAGE Publications, 2019-09-01)This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultural forms and pointed to the crucial place of gendered imaginaries within modern social orders, with women being frequently identified and deployed as bearers of nation, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilisation’. Unpacking and challenging the received categories and paradigms – not least ‘woman’ – has proved demanding, however. Problems have been intensified by prevailing Eurocentrisms, and conceptual divisions of the world into essentialised binaries like ‘modern' and ‘traditional', ‘West' and the 'Rest', and latterly Islam and the West. With increased contests around the concept of modernity – feminist and non-feminist – some writers have argued for a pluralisation of modernity, with such concepts as multiple modernities or alternative modernities, or through conceiving of a global modernity. Engaging critically with such ideas, and grounding the discussion in empirical work on Malaysia carried out in dialogue with Joel Kahn, this article looks to possible further developments in framing debates about gender and the modern, exploring the contributions that locally based, anthropological scholarship can make to theorisations of modernity and its relationship(s) with gender.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBook review: Migrant Returns: Manila Development, and Transnational Connectivity(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018-11-01)
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