Twelve years ago, I was in the KITLV special collections room, studying archival materials about the colonial subjugation of Aceh, the region on the northern tip of Sumatra. It took four decades, from the 1870s...
For the longest time, this little girl wanted to be white. She did not like her hair; she did not like her dark eyes; she did not like anything about the way she looked. She had very dry skin, and when she...
It was a sad moment in my academic life. Last week Friday afternoon, after months of intense writing, I had given myself the luxury of reading. I had been rearranging my bookshelves at home with adding ...
The Anthropology weblog 'Standplaats Wereld' published a blogpost by Shannon van Leeuwen, Evelien van Overveld and Fridus Steijlen about Evelien and Shannon's 'Corona home run' from fieldwork...
My search for Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak - about which I wrote in my previous blog - took me to Yogyakarta before visiting Pontianak itself. I was in Yogyakarta to improve my knowledge of the Indonesian language, culture and history. ...
Last November, I visited Pontianak, the capital of the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat. This city is inextricably linked with Max Alkadrie (1913-1978), better known as Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak ...
Small states rarely make world headlines, but dramatic political developments in Malta and Suriname over the past few days promptly catapulted these countries into the international limelight...
In Papoea zijn de afgelopen twee maanden mensen overal de straat op gegaan, de grootste publieke demonstratie van Papoea’s sinds jaren. Tientallen Papoea’s vonden daarbij de dood, honderden werden ...
Indonesia is a vast archipelago of 17,508 islands. With more than 265 million inhabitants, about 57% of whom inhabit the volcanic island of Java, it is also the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country. ...
Area Studies is shooting itself in the foot with its singular focus on dissertations. To be clear: during my PhD trajectory I had two wonderful supervisors, whose kindness, erudition and inquisitiveness were ...