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- Wellfelt, Emilie
(författare)
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The anthropologist as heroine : contemporary interpretations of memory and heritage in an Indonesian valley
- 2013. - 1
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Ingår i: Oral history in Southeast Asia. - New York : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9781137311665 ; , s. 139-158
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- IntroductionIn 1937 the Swiss American anthropologist Cora Du Bois (1903–91) traveled by sea from New York, via the Netherlands, to the Dutch East Indies. She was a self-conscious social scientist, or as she writes in a letter: a “lady-explorer” on her way to an isolated part of the Indonesian archipelago. Du Bois was intentionally looking for a remote place, as her research within the fashionable culture and personality school required investigations into a society little affected by Western influences. Du Bois set out on a pioneering mission; she was the first to try out methods from psychoanalysis in a non-Western setting and had been advised to choose the island of Alor for the study.Cora Du Bois’ book, The People of Alor, published in 1944, is an important work within the field of psychological anthropology. The author would later become the first woman to teach anthropology at Harvard University. What is less well known is that Du Bois is a celebrity outside the academic world. She has become a heroine in the Abui community she studied, and is quite famous across the whole of Alor. Since Du Bois left the island in 1939, never to return, she has lived on in collective memory as a vivid figure to which hopes for the future are attached. Following her departure, a cult emerged around the anthropologist, and it is still evolving. Du Bois was incorporated into existing beliefs in benevolent magical beings.The main question here is, how and why an American woman, who appeared—and disappeared—in the late 1930s, has reached cult status in Alor.
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- Wellfelt, Emilie, 1965-
(författare)
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Haptic History in Southeast Asia : Archiving the Past in Bodies and Landscapes
- 2022
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Ingår i: The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History. - Abingdon & New York : Routledge. - 9781138743106 - 9781032077406 - 9781315181929 ; , s. 669-689
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Michel de Certeau (1988) argued that history as an academic practice is entangled with colonialism: western powers write their own history while un-writing embodied traditions of indigenous people they want to control. This contribution to indigenous global history and uses of history is an exploration of embodied history, drawing on lessons taught by indigenous experts in the Indonesian island Alor, a place where history is very present but not as written text. It draws also on observations from academic fields ranging from architecture to neuroscience. I suggest the concept ‘haptic history’ as a way to understand how history can be both internalised and externalised when contained in body and landscape. In this context ‘haptic’ refers to the tactile senses that are active as we move through the physical environment. It is a way of orienting oneself in which touch overrides visual impressions. Haptic history is an experiential totality that comes with living in landscapes impregnated with stories from the past. We share this history-space with our predecessors, the ancestors who in the case of Alor are active agents in the present. Such ancestral presences contribute to a perception of time that in certain instances is collapsed into an ‘everywhen’, found also in Australian aboriginal thought in Dreaming. Organising history into place rather than chronological time makes it possible to accommodate many versions of the past without experiencing a conflict. Each story has its place, and belongs to people who are legitimate keepers of certain pasts. This multi-vocal history defies the limitations of two-dimensional written text. Haptic history needs living bodies to stay alive.
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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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- 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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