Thesiss

This dissertation explores how “modern” obstetrical principles are combined with traditional midwifery practices, producing hybrid forms of women's reproductive health care in rural Java. The Indonesian government promotes the adoption of Western biomedical approaches to deliver…

The title for this paper comes from a series of bumper stickers produced by Ponorogo residents to advertise and make claim to the reyog performance. As implied, reyog, for the Ponorogoans at least is more than art. Reyog for the Ponorogoans is about life, about religion, politic…

Rasa, in a Javanese musical context, has many meanings that range from "affect," "feeling," and "inner meaning" to "perception," "understanding," and "intuition." Musicians use the word and its synonyms ubiquitously in evaluating music, and in describing what good performers and…

The sculptural reliefs depicting the Rāmāyana at the ninth-century Hindu temple complex of Loro Jonggrang in Central Java represent the most extensive telling of the epic in stone. For over a century the identification of many of their episodic themes and the influences leading …

What is behind the spread and popularity of gamelan performance outside Indonesia? This dissertation attempts to answer this question through considering the development of one type of gamelan, Central Javanese, in one region (Britain). The answer involves locating gamelan perfo…

This dissertation provides a description and analysis of salient aspects of the grammar of Tengger Javanese. The data collected for and described in this work is the result of the author's year and half long fieldwork in the volcanic highlands of the Tengger Massif in East Java,…

This dissertation is a theoretical investigation of the thesis of Minimalist Interfaces, namely, that syntax-external linguistic interfaces that interact with the core syntactic computation and language-independent sound and concept systems play a more critical role in manipulat…

Gamelan performances are means of communication with which musicians evoke and stimulate thoughts of audiences. In villages, gamelan performances provide meanings in wider contexts not only among hosts but also among audiences, patrons, and the community at large. The meanings o…

This dissertation examines the spread of Islam into South and Southeast Asia through the lens of translation processes, linguistic change and literary transmission. The textual materials analyzed are those produced by Muslim communities in three of the regions' major languages--…

In a postcolonial context, such as Indonesia, a church inherited Christianity that had been formed by layers of intercultural dynamics. Not only did the postcolonial church receive Christianity as a product of assimilations of biblical cultures and the western cultures, the chur…

This dissertation is a study of how ideas and theoretical views about "the family" developed under the shadow of colonialism, nationalism, and state development on the island of Java between 1900 and 1945. These years spanned two colonial regimes, that of the Dutch (1900-1942) a…

This dissertation provides a specific linguistic, cognitive, and cultural theoretical framework for analyzing emotions in general and SHAME in particular in English, Arabic, and Javanese. It argues for a universal, language- and culture-free SHAME-defining formula that is based …

This Thesis deals with the cultural encounter between Islam and Javanese culture as represented by the slametan ritual. The major purposes of this thesis are threefold; (1) to give a brief account of the historical backdrop of the encounter between Islam and the Javanese traditi…