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- Wellfelt, Emilie
(författare)
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Historyscapes in Alor : Approaching indigenous history in Eastern Indonesia
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with history and history-making practices in Alor, a small island in southeastern Indonesia. As in all of Indonesia, the people of Alor have experienced European colonialism, and after independence, a period of centralised, authoritarian rule under the New Order (1965-1998). This regime focussed heavily on Indonesia as a united entity, and history was an instrument used in building the nation.Democratisation and decentralisation reforms after 1998 saw interest in formulating the history of the region, village or group rather than the nation blossom. My research took place in the history boom of the 2000s when recording history was a task of urgency for many in Alor. A theoretical and methodological challenge rose from the observation of two different approaches to history, each with separate understandings of what ‘history’ is and what its sources are: ‘academic history’ and ‘indigenous history’. Academic history is concerned with time and dates; indigenous history emphasises spatiality and place. Academic history tends to rely on archival sources and is concerned with establishing chronologies of events. By contrast, indigenous history in Alor is based on oral sources, objects preserved locally, and stories rooted in the landscape. Indigenous histories may include non-human actors like dragons or sea-people living in underwater villages. In academic history, such accounts are discarded as legends or myths of no relevance to history. In this thesis, the ontological gap between these two modes of history is central. I argue that indigenous stories reveal much about historical experiences. The realism claimed by academic history is just another human construct of the past.In the thesis, I develop the idea of a ‘historyscape’ as a methodological tool for handling indigenous histories displaying a wealth of narrators, stories and themes relating to the past. ‘Historyscapes’ is a term which unites conceptual and geographical understandings of an area or realm. A historyscape is shaped and marked off from other areas by stories and perceptions about, as well as experiences from, a shared past. Applied to Alor, the historyscape methodology reveals geographies based on the manner groups and areas connect to each other through key stories. For Alor, I establish four historyscapes. In each, an initial place-oriented reading of indigenous sources is followed by a chronological reading, in which the sources of academic history are included. The juxtaposition with academic history mainly shows the manner in which the colonial powers (Dutch and Portuguese) related to different parts of Alor at different times. From these sources periods of friction between colonial and indigenous are highlighted. The four historyscapes in Alor show variations in historical experiences within short distances, but also commonalities found across a new story-geography.
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- Wellfelt, Emilie, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Islam in Aru, Indonesia : Oral traditions and Islamisation processes from the early modern period to the present
- 2019
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Ingår i: Indonesia and the Malay World. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1363-9811 .- 1469-8382. ; 47:138, s. 160-183
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The coming of Islam in eastern Indonesia is generally assigned to the activities of Muslim traders from the late 15th century onwards. This assumption is an over-simplification, especially in areas outside the main trade centres. In the Aru islands, Islam was introduced by the mid 17th century. We argue that Islamisation in Aru was initially a matter of internal considerations, rather than trade. We present oral traditions about the expansion of Islam as seen from two locations: Ujir, the historical Muslim centre in Aru on the west coast, and Benjuring, a former stronghold of local ancestral beliefs in the east. The oral sources are juxtaposed with European accounts of the 17th century when Muslim and Protestant centres first developed in Aru. The coming of Islam forced people to either convert or leave for non-Muslim areas. By late colonial times (early 20th century), both Islam and the Protestant church had reached remote villages. The most recent wave of conversions in Aru to state-approved world religions took place in the 1970s. In the last 30 years, the population in Aru has grown, especially in the regency capital Dobo. While Muslims used to be a small minority in Aru with their main centre on Ujir island, the point of gravity has shifted to Dobo, a fast-growing town with a large influx of mostly Muslims from other parts of Indonesia. Islamisation is still ongoing in Aru and the character of Islam is changing.
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- Hägerdal, Hans, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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Tamalola : Transregional connectivities, Islam, and anti-colonialism on an Indonesian island
- 2019
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Ingår i: Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia. - : Wacana Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia. - 1411-2272 .- 2407-6899. ; 20:3, s. 430-456
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study focuses on a set of events in the Aru Islands, Maluku, in the late eighteenth century which are documented in some detail by Dutch records. A violent rebellion with Muslim and anti-European overtones baffled the Dutch colonialists (VOC) and led to a series of humiliations for the Company on Aru, before eventually being subdued. As one of the main catalysts of the conflict stands the chief Tamalola from the Muslim island Ujir. Interestingly, this persons also a central figure in local traditions from Ujir. Moreover, his story connects with wider cultural and economic networks in eastern Indonesia. Thus the article asks how the imprints of the Tamalola figure in textual and non-textual sources can add to our knowledge of how communities of Eastern Indonesia ordered their lives outside colonial control.
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| 7. |
- Schapper, Antoinette, et al.
(författare)
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Reconstructing contact between Alor and Timor : Evidence from language and beyond
- 2018
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Ingår i: NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia. - 0126-2874 .- 2187-7297. ; 64, s. 95-112
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite being separated by a short sea-crossing, the neighbouring islands of Alor and Timor in south-eastern Wallacea have to date been treated as separate units of linguistic analysis and possible linguistic influence between them is yet to be investigated. Historical sources and oral traditions bear witness to the fact that the communities from both islands have been engaged with one another for a long time. This paper brings together evidence of various types including song, place names and lexemes to present the first account of the interactions between Timor and Alor. We show that the groups of southern and eastern Alor have had long-standing connections with those of north-central Timor, whose importance has generally been overlooked by historical and linguistic studies.
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