Christianity Colonization And Gender Relations In North Sumatra

This book describes changes in the patrilineal society of the Toba Batak (Sumatra, Indonesia) due to Christianity and Dutch colonial rule (1861-1942) with a focus on customary law and gender relations.

Dorothy Fujita-Rony’s The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History, examines the importance of women's memorykeeping, for two Toba Batak women whose twentieth-century histories span Indonesia and the United States, H.L.Tobing and Minar T. Rony.

This book focuses on a Pentecostal-Evangelical Kenyah community in central Borneo, a region that crosses the border between Malaysia and Indonesia. The book argues that the Pentecostal-Evangelical (P/e) mode of religious authority and organization has the capacity to adapt to both the pre-existing hierarchical traditional institution such as Adat and modern egalitarian social forms. It has been necessary within the context of Kenyah’s experience of religious change as it enabled many actors from various social classes to obtain and perceive religious authority in a specific local and regional political-religious situation while promoting their identity as egalitarian and autonomous modern subjects. In contrast with other studies on the P/e church that emphasize its egalitarian spirit as a factor that supports its impressive growth, the book contends that its adaptive structural characteristics have enabled the development of this specific Christian denomination to expand rapidly and play a dominant position in contemporary social life in various parts of the world. The book thus provides novel findings in the study of religious change in Southeast Asia by enriching the discussion of historical transformation in the region, and analyzing the articulation of global and regional Christian movements, with the socio-political characteristics of Bornean society.

Indonesia is the home of the largest single Muslim community of the world. Its Christian community, about 10% of the population, has until now received no overall description in English. Through cooperation of 26 Indonesian and European scholars, Protestants and Catholics, a broad and balanced picture is given of its 24 million Christians. This book sketches the growth of Christianity during the Portuguese period (1511-1605), it presents a fair account of developments under the Dutch colonial administration (1605-1942) and is more elaborate for the period of the Indonesian Republic (since 1945). It emphasizes the regional differences in this huge country, because most Christians live outside the main island of Java. Muslim-Christian relations, as well as the tensions between foreign missionaries and local theology, receive special attention.

Weaving Women's Spheres in Vietnam examines the changing status of womanhood in 'traditional', transitional and contemporary Vietnam from anthropological, historical, and sociological perspectives, focusing particularly on women's active agency in negotiating their own roles in family, religion and community.

Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.

Essential reading for scholars of gender and sexuality and anyone interested in Asia.

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.