Arts Faculty News

Professor Margaret Kartomi, from the School of Music – Conservatorium, has been awarded an Australia Research Council grant for a 3-year project entitled ‘Female body percussion music as a contribution to cultural identity in western Aceh before and after the conflict and tsunami’.

Project Description

This is the pioneering project on an unstudied but widely practised mode of music and dance in the world: female body percussion. The fieldwork locale is western Aceh, which recently experienced prolonged war and the tragic tsunami. The project aims to analyse the techniques and social functions of the body percussion genres, examine change caused by the conflict and tsunami, and develop the first theory of the functions of female body percussion. Research outcomes include archival deposits of audio-visual recordings, three refereed articles, an edited book on cross-cultural comparative body percussion, two book chapters, and a PhD thesis.

View Monash Magazine article ‘Taking Notes‘ for further information on Professor Kartomi’s research.

View Professor Kartomi’s profile.

Cover of Splashed by the saint

Abdul Qadir al-Jaelani (d. 1166) is a truly global saint. Born just south of the Caspian Sea in Iran, his tomb is now a prominent place of pilgrimage in Baghdad. He is the subject of intercessionary practices performed by Muslims the world over.

Dr Julian Millie (PSI) spent more than a year (2002-2003) attending intercessionary rituals amongst Muslims of Bandung, West Java. His book on the subject, ‘Splashed by the Saint: Ritual reading and Islamic sanctity in West Java’ has just been published by the Royal Anthropological Society of the Netherlands.

In West Java, the intercessionary ritual takes the form of reading or singing the tales of Abdul Qadir’s saintliness in a ritual setting. The practice is of long standing in West Java, and has left a large legacy of literary translation (from Arabic and Javanese) in the holdings of Sundanese manuscripts. But the ritual reading tradition has received stimulus from the recent regeneration of the sufi order known as the Tarekat Qadiriyyah wa Naqsyabandiyyah, the most popular sufi order in Java.

The book, heavily reliant on Millie’s fieldwork and his skills in Sundanese and Arabic, explores the meanings the ritual has for Sundanese Muslims of the past and of contemporary Bandung. It explores how the contemporary resurgence of the sufi order brings a supralocal nuance to an event which has traditionally displayed string signs of local tradition, and discusses the multiple and contested meanings of sanctity in Islamic society.

View a sample chapter

Indonesia at the Margins

Between Three Worlds Asian films and videos is proud to announce the release of a new DVD, Indonesia at the margins: political documentaries and essay films.

The executive producer of this DVD is David Hanan of Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, who re-subtitled the documentaries, designed and authored the DVD and wrote a essay on the films, which is included in the DVD as a pdf file.

The four films on this DVD are the most important early documentary and essay films by Indonesia’s leading director of features, Garin Nugroho. The subjects examined in this collection include environmental issues in Jakarta, the plight of young street kids in Yogyakarta, the past and future of  West Papua, and Nugroho’s relationship to his own films. The first two films are pioneering works in the development of critical and investigative documentary in Indonesia, made in the Suharto era, at a time of considerable political repression. The two later films are innovative documentary-essay films, made by Nugroho with the resources of his SET Workshop.

View ‘Indonesia at the margins: Political documentaries and essay films‘ on the MAI site for further information.

Herb Feith

The third annual Herb Feith Lecture will explore the difficulties faced by Indonesia in 2005 in maintaining national unity while striving to recognise diversity among its many islands.

1. More Info.