Book presentation | Alcohol in early Java: Its social and cultural significance | Jiří Jákl

This hybrid event examines the history of alcohol in Java and is organized around the recent publication of Jiří Jákl’s Alcohol in Early Java (2021, Brill). Cecilia Leong-Salobir will discuss the book from the perspective of culinary history and Arlo Griffiths from Javanese philology, after which the floor is open for questions from the live audience as well as Zoom participants.

Abstract

In Alcohol in early Java: Its social and cultural significance, Jiří Jákl offers an account of the production, trade, and consumption of alcohol in Java before 1500 CE, and discusses a whole array of meanings the Javanese have ascribed to its use. Though alcohol is extremely controversial in contemporary Islamic Java, it had multiple, often surprising, uses in the pre-Islamic society.

Author

Jiří Jákl is a researcher at the Heidelberg University, working mainly on the cultural, religious, and social history of pre-Islamic Java and modern Bali. Jiří has studied Old Javanese at the Leiden University, and has obtained his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Queensland,Brisbane, for his work on warfare in pre-modern Southeast Asia. Aside from his monograph on alcohol and its multiple uses in pre-Islamic Java, he has published about Java’s early culinary history, textile trade, and human-animal relations.

Discussants

Cecilia Leong-Salobir, University of Western Australia & University of Wollongong
Arlo Griffiths, École française d’Extrême-Orient

Chair

Tom Hoogervorst, KITLV

Format

Hybrid

Registration

If you want to join the seminar on location, please register via: [email protected]
Seats are limited.

If you wish to join this seminar online, please register via:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqdeGrpzMqGNFiOrbDmjN1_yU7olx7adli

Time

5.30-17.00 pm Leiden.

Live stream on Facebook

This webinar will be streamed on the public KITLV Facebook page.

Image (below): Javanese ambulant vendor of distilled arrack. Around 1870 (p. 352 in Alcohol in early Java)