A Shadow Falls: In the Heart of Java

(Paperback, Main)

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Beatty spent two and a half years in an idyllic-seeming village in Java, the largest island of Indonesia, and was entranced by its strange and sensual way of life. Javan mysticism, Hinduism and Islam coexisted without competing with each other; and the ancient traditions of the shadow and dragon plays, of celebratory feasting, communion with the spirits of the dead and belief in werewolves seemed set to endure as they had always done. Tolerance of transvestism and of short-lived affairs made for a very unpuritanical kind of life.

But the village was shadowed by a dark past, like the rest of Indonesia: in 1965, local people suspected of communism were murdered in huge numbers. And in the present, the chill wind of Islamism was driving apparently young women to take the veil, young men to announce that they would no longer participate in the old rituals. The loudspeakers on the local mosques grew more intrusive and strident, blaring intolerance all hours of the day. Physical violence began to intrude, and a sharpening of boundaries. Beatty and his family began to feel like vulnerable outsiders. And out in the countryside an hysterical fit of killings began, a kind of witch craze.

Author Bio

Andrew Beatty is an internationally-respected anthropologist, who has spent five years in Indonesia. Before he became an anthropologist he spent another three years travelling in Asia. He teaches at Brunel University and lives near Oxford with his wife, who is from Mexico, and their two children.