The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ wrote L. P. Hartley. Hidden in a park on the outskirts of Arnhem lies such a country, Bronbeek. Being both monument, veterans’ retirement home and ...
Last week more than 500 scholars convened in Vienna for the 8th conference of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously held every three years and from now on biannually,...
A couple of weeks ago, as part of a holiday in the Balkans, my girlfriend and I visited the Dalmatian island of Hvar in the Adriatic Sea. According to our guidebook, Hvar is “a perfect getaway for people who want to enjoy...
President Jokowi is a source of inspiration for future new leaders in the districts of Indonesia. A friend of mine on the island of Sumba in Eastern Indonesia tried to register as an independent candidate for the December ...
To be or not be (called) Dutch: is that the question…? The media can’t have it both ways: we are Dutch, or we are not. It is a fact that in times of failure, the media writes about the ‘Curaçaoan’ that lost,...
‘Oh my land Papua’: Izäak Samuel Kijne, 1899-1970: Missionary teacher in New Guinea. In the autumn of 2013 a Papua fanatic visited the KITLV. The Papua fanatic is an elder Dutch male social anthropologist and ...
You can’t miss the official monuments in Indonesia. They are are everywhere. Statues of Diponegoro or General Sudirman gaze out over busy traffic, which takes little notice of them. The story of national ...
In March I had the privilege to visit one of our PhD students, Prio Sambodho, who is currently doing fieldwork in West Java. Prio’s research is part of a larger project on citizenship in Indonesia and investigates...
Historians such as myself have cause to rejoice, if recent American political rhetoric is anything to go by. History, that heretofore scantily-funded discipline of the humanities known (along with English and ...
As 2014 came to an end, I began a four-week tour of Southeast Asia, taking in Jakarta, Manila, Hanoi and Singapore. Together with young local researchers, I interviewed 21 young people aged 18 to 20 about their lives, hopes and ambitions...