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Travel, Editorial and Pop Anthropology Writings
Mecca, Saudi Arabia
Mecca in the fasting month of Ramadan is like no other place on earth. The city swarms with hundreds of thousands of visitors from every corner of the world, filling the hotels and spilling out onto the sidewalks, setting up camp under flyover bridges and occupying every available inch of public space. As I join the stream of pilgrims making their way to the Mosque, I see pale-skinned, blond, blue-eyed Chechens, tall, proud-looking Nigerians, stern Bedouins, Algerian Tauregs with tattooed faces and veiled Albanians mingling together in the street, together with people from hundreds of other cities and nations I have never visited and whose citizens I only vaguely recognize.
The Baduy: Guardians of the Sacred Forest
Banten, West Java
The Baduy are a deeply religious community who live sequestered in the forests where they maintain their ancient way of life.
For tourists, journalists, and anthropologists alike, the very idea of a people who live deep in the forest, excluding all outsiders, has a powerful fascination. A ‘Keep Out’ sign exerts an allure as powerful as the locked cupboard at the end of Bluebeard’s corridor, and for no better reason than that outsiders are not welcome. In our hearts, perhaps, each of us secretly believes we are special, and will be welcome at spectacles and events closed to ordinary mortals. It was this fantasy that had led me, clambering up and down steep, slippery footpaths, past dry rice fields and through light secondary forest and bamboo glades, to a rickety looking bamboo bridge that creaked and swayed gently in the breeze. I sat, scowling and biting my nails, and wiping the sweat from my face with a hand filthy with mud.
Lord Murugan’s Birthday: Joy and Self-Flagellation on the Streets of Singapore
Singapore
You don’t expect to see acts of self-flagellation and ecstatic dancing in Singapore at six o’clock in the morning in the main thoroughfares of the city. Yet for a whole day following the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai, thousands of Hindus engage in precisely such acts when they take to the streets to celebrate the birth of Lord Murugan, the youngest son of Shiva and Parvati, in Thaipusam, a festival both joyous and gruesome.
Jogja, Indonesia
To the Javanese, the scattered remains of the stone temples that lie on the rugged volcanic landscapes of Java are tangible proof of the stories of the wayang. The puppet master tells stories of powerful, wealthy kingdoms reigned over by just, divine rulers, served by gods and clowns; kingdoms that held sway over vast swathes of land and commanded the loyalty of hundreds upon thousands of subjects; kingdoms that attracted priests and traders from around the world. There is the proof, just out there, in the middle of the rice-fields.
The Debus: The Warlocks of Old Banten
Banten, Indonesia
Of all the cultural traditions of Banten, the one that outsiders find most fascinating and frightening is the Debus performance, in which the practitioners engage in such gruesome feats of self-immolation as skewering themselves with metal spikes, walking on coals, and allowing themselves to be beaten with a sledge hammer while lying on a bed of nails, all without appearing to suffer bodily damage.
The Orangutan: The Red Wizards of the Treetops
Kalimantan, Indonesia
Alfred Wallace described the dramatic decline and eventual death of his beloved pet baby orangutan with obvious sorrow. In an earlier passage of his famous ‘The Malay Archipelago,’ he explained how he acquired his ‘little pet.’ In his fascination with the habits and behavior of the great red apes of Kalimantan, he shot and killed no less than seventeen specimens in order to examine the animal more closely. After shooting one mother, he managed to rescue its baby from where it had fallen face down in a bog to take it back to his camp. Separated prematurely from its parent, the baby struggled to survive on the clearly inappropriate diet of coconut milk and sugar. The animal languished and eventually died.
Sitor Situmorang: An Island on an Island
Profile of an Indonesian Poet
Sitor Situmorang is many different things to many different people. He is one of Indonesia’s foremost poets, a world traveller, a sometime journalist, a writer of short stories, an activist, an intellectual and a prominent literary figure. He inhabits many seemingly disparate worlds: He is a tribal Batak, fiercely proud of the village in which he was born, its people, their robust and vigorous history. He is an Indonesian, a towering figure in national literary circles, with more than half a century of involvement in the intellectual life of the nation. He is a citizen of the world, widely travelled, at home with the jargon and argot of anthropology, literary criticism, and social theory in half a dozen languages, and often cited as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. He is also an irascible old man.
Kalideres Immigration Detention Center: A Waste of Lives
Jakarta, Indonesia
From the outside, the Kalideres immigration detention center does not look particularly grim. Granted, it is grubby and run down, but no more so than many of Indonesia’s poorly maintained public buildings. There is a guard post at the front gate, but that is also true even of many of the country’s hospitals and schools, to which this building bears a striking resemblance. Buried in an unobtrusive location in the satellite city of Tangerang, it is only the rusty barbed wire curled over the top of the boundary fence and the bars over the covered windows that hint at its special nature.
East Kalimantan, Indonesia
Borneo is a vast ecosystem of mountains, rainforest and rivers. The thick, impenetrable forest that covers the world’s third largest island acts as an enormous sponge, soaking up the rain, releasing a little at a time to provide a constant supply of clean water that runs into the streams and rivers that flow continuously from the mountains and highlands at its centre, through the coastal plains and into the sea.
Of the myriad rivers that run across the island, the greatest of them all is the Mahakam. The source of this massive waterway is the Muller Range, a body of mountains that lies in the heart of Borneo. The tributaries of this river cascade down from around 2000 m above sea level to 150 m above sea level, in a series of impassable rapids that stretch for more than 100 km. The Mahakam then snakes and loops through the lowlands, widening as it goes. By the time the river flows past the cities of Tenggarong and Samarinda into the sea, it is monumental.
Reog: The Peacock and The Tiger Dance in Ponorogo
East Java, Indonesia
The land around Ponorogo is harsh and fierce. Dry, rocky land stretches from Mount Wilis in the west of the province of East Java, down to the wild coastlines of the south. Scratching a living from the soil here has always been a desperate business, and the people of the area have a reputation for being tough, both physically and mentally. The myths and stories of Java describe them as fierce fighters and skilled practitioners of magic, to be feared and respected. While most inhabitants of this arid land profess faith in Islam, echoes of much older beliefs still ring throughout the region.