Tiny worms causing silent and insidious damage. In 1915 the Rockefeller Foundation brought its campaign to eradicate hookworms to Suriname. Tests found that more than 90 percent of the ...
The Black Lives Matter protest held on 10 June 2020 was originally planned to take place at Anton de Komplein in the Zuidoost district of Amsterdam. But due to the huge numbers expected to attend...
Where is my golden pen? An academic cannot be an anti-racist activist today without a smartphone. I know, I can also join a protest march and carry a placard stating that Black Lives Matter. I can, yes, but then I will...
Twelve years ago, I was in the KITLV special collections room, studying archival materials about the colonial subjugation of Aceh, the region on the northern tip of Sumatra. It took four decades, from the 1870s...
For the longest time, this little girl wanted to be white. She did not like her hair; she did not like her dark eyes; she did not like anything about the way she looked. She had very dry skin, and when she...
It was a sad moment in my academic life. Last week Friday afternoon, after months of intense writing, I had given myself the luxury of reading. I had been rearranging my bookshelves at home with adding ...
The Anthropology weblog 'Standplaats Wereld' published a blogpost by Shannon van Leeuwen, Evelien van Overveld and Fridus Steijlen about Evelien and Shannon's 'Corona home run' from fieldwork...
My search for Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak - about which I wrote in my previous blog - took me to Yogyakarta before visiting Pontianak itself. I was in Yogyakarta to improve my knowledge of the Indonesian language, culture and history. ...
Last November, I visited Pontianak, the capital of the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat. This city is inextricably linked with Max Alkadrie (1913-1978), better known as Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak ...
Small states rarely make world headlines, but dramatic political developments in Malta and Suriname over the past few days promptly catapulted these countries into the international limelight...