The pagan. Races of the Malay Peninsula

This paper aims to define and illustrate the ways in which a change in land tenure can impact on housing provision. It looks in particular at rural Scotland. The paper interprets interview data gathered on the isle of Gigha, a small island off the west coast of Scotland in the spring of 2005. Three years earlier, Gigha had been purchased by its residents from a single, private landowner. The paper finds that the process and nature of ownership change have fundamentally reshaped economic, social and political relationships governing housing provision. The paper concludes by reflecting on the significance of the findings.     

The STSI-SOAS Indonesian television project

The Balinese Television Project is a collaborative venture between STSI Denpasar and SOAS, starting in 1990, to record, document, preserve archivally, and transcribe important Balinese cultural television broadcasts for educational and research purposes. The project now has an archive of some 1,500 hours of selected broadcasts, and is supposed to be among the largest archives on non-Western television in the world. Although Indonesia has a very important, active, and rapidly changing television broadcasting network, which is central to its role as a developing Pacific Asian country, the social and cultural implications of television on people's lives have remained largely unstudied. Among the problems is a relative lack of materials and of research on contemporary mass media in Indonesia. Television companies have virtually no archival facilities. So the project began as a pilot scheme in Bali to preserve broadcasts of particular cultural and religious value from destruction, by recording, transcribing, and establishing an archive for the use of both Indonesian and foreign scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The aim was that archive should also form a basis for more extensive research into Indonesian media.     

Islam in and out of politics: The Indonesian case

Accounts of the relationship between Islam and politics in Indonesia often fail to appreciate the contribution that an anthropological perspective can make towards understanding the heterogeneity of Muslim communities in the country. Looking at recent events that have political dimensions in the country, this article shows how paying close attention to the popularity of celebrity preachers can complement a political science approach.