Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In this ethnography of contemporary Java, James Siegel analyzes how language operates to organize and to order an Indonesian people. Despite the imposition of Suharto's New Order, the inhabitants of the city of Solo continue to adhere to their own complex ideas of deference and hierarchy through translation between high and low Javanese speech styles. Siegel uncovers moments when translation fails and compulsive mimicry ensues. His examination of communication and its failures also exposes the ways a culture reconstitutes itself.

Reviews

"Few ethnographies can match Solo in the New Order, inspired as it is by Siegel's crafted obsession with the limits of categories of thoughtboth Western and Javanese. His eye for incongruent particularities and odd juxtapositions allows him to engage critically the relationship between the "uncanny' and attempts to domesticate its manifestationsthrough translation practices, historical revisionism, vernacular concepts of the senses, discourses on death and gambling, among othersand makes his work valuable to anyone interested not only in theorizing cultural studies but in carrying out its practical implications and radical possibilities as well."Vincente Rafael, University of California, San Diego
"Few books succeed as well as this one in addressing the most urgent of Western intellectual concerns while remaining entirely within the purview of a non-Western social and cultural field."Sam Weber, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Bio

James T. Siegel is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of The Rope of God (California) and Shadow and Sound: The Historical Thought of a Sumatran Kingdom (Chicago).