Around 1910, the Netherlands Indies established its boundaries as they were to remain until, depending on how one chooses to view the matter, 1942 or 1949. In order to achieve this end, the government adopted an aggressive policy of forcibly subjecting those principalities in the Indies which previously it had indulged with considerable, if inconsistent, neglect.
The authoritarian regime and its leader are gone and the structures that maintained his power are weakened, but in post-New Order Indonesia violent conflict has become more frequent and more varied. It is no longer sufficient to explain the violence in the terms used by the regime and others during its rule.
The term 'British interregnum', in relation to Indonesia, refers to two short periods in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the British took control of most of the Netherlands Indies from the Dutch, only to hand it back a few years later. The British did this as a result of their wars with France. The first occupation occurred in 1795-1797 after a pro-France regime had been…
In 1977 I prepared a paper for the Second International Conference on Austronesian linguistics. It dealt with the possessive category, its general features, its evolution and its use in grammatical structures of Indonesian languages (Alieva, 1978). Among the problems connected with the possessive category, it is essential to discuss the problem of the possessive structure of a sentence over aga…
Focusing on the traditional cosmology of the Sa'dan Toraja of Indonesia, this article aims to contribute to the recent revival of the animism debate within anthropology (Descola 1992, 1996; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Bird- David 1999; Stringer 1999; Pedersen 2001) and to further our understanding of a particular Indonesian cosmos (see also Van der Veen 1965; Nooy-Palm 1979; Bigalke 1…
In his elaborate PhD dissertation, J.O. Sutter (1959:2) defines indonesianisasi as 'a conscious effort to increase the participation and elevate the role of the Indonesian and more particularly, the "indigenous" Indonesian in the more complex sectors of the economy'. In a broader sense, the term stands for the end of Dutch tutelage and subsequent reorientation of the Indonesian economy during t…
One of the assumptions behind the Borneo hypothesis is Sapir's model (1968) claiming that in the quest for a linguistic homeland, the area with the larg est genetic diversity in relation to its size is most likely to be the homeland. This model is useful, all things being equal; but in practice other factors often interfere with it. If one compares Europe to the situation in the Americas, where…