A01=Mary Margaret Steedly
anthropologists
anthropology
asia scholars
asian studies
Author_Mary Margaret Steedly
Category=JHMC
cultural memory
decolonization
dutch colonialism
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographers
ethnographic history
gender issues
gendered history
historians
independence
indonesia
indonesian independence
karo batak
local histories
men and women
nation formation
nationalism
nonfiction
north sumatra
personal histories
photographs
postcolonialism
postwar era
sovereignty
storytelling
veterans
villagers
wartime experiences
Product details
- ISBN 9780520274877
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 May 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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On August 17, 1945, Indonesia proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule. Five years later, the Republic of Indonesia was recognized as a unified, sovereign state. The period in between was a time of aspiration, mobilization, and violence, in which nationalists fought to expel the Dutch while also trying to come to grips with the meaning of "independence." "Rifle Reports" is an ethnographic history of this extraordinary time as it was experienced on the outskirts of the nation among Karo Batak villagers in the rural highlands of North Sumatra. Based on extensive interviews and conversations with Karo veterans, "Rifle Reports" interweaves personal and family memories, songs and stories, memoirs and local histories, photographs and monuments, to trace the variously tangled and perhaps incompletely understood ways that Karo women and men contributed to the founding of the Indonesian nation. The routes they followed are divergent, difficult, sometimes wavering, and rarely obvious, but they are clearly marked with the signs of gender.
This innovative historical study of nationalism and decolonization is an anthropological exploration of the gendering of wartime experience, as well as an inquiry into the work of storytelling as memory practice and ethnographic genre.
Mary Steedly is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the author of Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland.
