This study examines the religious life of reformist Muslims in a Yogyakarta village. The foci of this discussion are on Muslim villagers’ construction, with the help of the reformist paradigm, of the image of the ‘good Muslim’ and ‘Muslim-ness’, on their efforts to incorporate an (reformist) Islamic framework to question taken-for-granted practices and ideas, on the position of tradit…
This collection deals with an ancient institution in Eastern Polynesia called the rahui, a form of restricting access to resources and/or territories. While tapu had been extensively discussed in the scientific literature on Oceanian anthropology, the rahui is quite absent from secondary modern literature. This situation is all the more problematic because individual actors, societies, and stat…
Following the historic 1999 popular referendum, East Timor emerged as the first independent sovereign nation of the 21st Century. The years since these momentous events have seen an efflorescence of social research across the country drawn by shared interests in the aftermath of the resistance struggle, the processes of social recovery and the historic opportunity to pursue field-based ethnogra…
This study presents the contemporary Islamic resurgence movement among young people in Bandung Indonesia, focusing on its emergence, development and routinisation. It traces various factors and conditions that contributed to the emergence of the movement. It also tries to explain how and why young people (students in particular) turn to Islam, and how the movement is organised and developed amo…
For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country’s political leaders, revenue from the country’s oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulat…
This is an unchanged republication of the first historical account of the social work profession in Australia. It traces the development of social work education and professional social work in the larger, more industrialised societies overseas before the same developments began in Australia in the late 1920s, and it notes the part played by overseas influence in the subsequent 30-odd years. Th…
Since its publication in 1985, Peter Bellwood’s Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago has been hailed as the sole authoritative work on the subject by the leading expert in the field. Now that work has been fully revised and includes a complete up-to-date summary of the archaeology of the region (and relevant neighboring areas of China and Oceania), as well as a comprehensive discussio…
This collection of papers is the sixth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers that comprise this volume examine the concept of precedence as a form of local discourse and as a mechanism for ordering status, at different levels, within specific Austronesian-speaking societies. This is the first volume of its kind to focus entirely on precedence and to provide an explication of…
The chapters in this volume canvass political change and development across the Pacific Islands from a variety of perspectives, each contributing to the analysis of a region growing in complexity and in confidence. They fall neatly into three sections: Oceania and its Inheritance; Oceania – Current Needs and Challenges; and Oceania and its Wider Setting. The new states of the Pacific have dem…
This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about le…