A remarkable feature of much of Rama Mangun’s fiction, including the most famous of his novels, the Rara Mendut trilogy, is that the major characters are women. Their characterization invites the question of what kind of a feminist this unlikely Roman Catholic priest from a village in Central Java was. 

That question opens on to the larger question of what his consistent and admirable championing of the socially marginalized implied about his “surpassing” his Indonesian identity in favor of a more cosmopolitan one. The title of his last collection of essays, which he himself edited, is Pasca Indonesia, Pasca Einstein, and I will share thoughts about what he meant when he wrote of “surpassing” Indonesia in his attitudes toward gender, justice, and politics.

Speaker

Ward Keeler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia (Java and Bali), and in Burma (Myanmar) since the 1970s. His work has focused on performance, gender, language, religion, and hierarchy in all three societies. His publications include monographs on Javanese shadow plays and on Burmese Buddhism and gender, textbooks for the Javanese and Burmese languages, the annotated translation of an Indonesian novel, and CDs of classical Burmese music. A collection of essays on the fate of the performing arts in Indonesia and Burma over the last fifty years, The Aesthetic of Restraint in Tumultuous Times, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2027. His current research focuses on 1) the late priest-cum-activist Rama Mangunwijaya, and 2) the contemporary backlash against queer people in Indonesia.

Discussant

Adrian Perkasa is a postdoctoral researcher at KITLV. His research is about Pranata Mångsa, a Javanese agricultural calendar, cultural heritage and the politics of knowledge (re)production. Furthermore, his project involves inventorying and researching the histories, practices, and uses of Pranata Mångsa and other grass-roots knowledge about agricultural calendars and seasons in Java.

Moderators

Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge and art/heritage practices across the nature/culture divide, and the role of violence therein, in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, and in local, inter-Asian and global dimensions. 

Verena Meyer  is an Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. 

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is an onsite event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden on Wednesday 18 November from 16.30-18.00 PM (CET).