Content area
Full text
The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Tineke Hellwig and Eric Tagliacozzo. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Softcover: 465pp.
The Indonesia Reader offers its audience an overview of the cultural, political and historical transformations which have shaped Indonesia over the last 1,500 years. Unlike conventional academic manuscripts, the volume is a collection of purely primary source documents, namely excerpts from personal documents, government reports, newspaper editorials and the like. As such, the only criterion for judging this book is the dexterity of the authors in selecting and compiling their material. Assessed on this standard, the editors of the Indonesia Reader have created a manuscript which should be of interest to a small audience consisting mainly of historians.
Hellwig and Tagliacozzo have arranged their sources in ten chapters. These chapters broadly follow the chronology of Indonesian history, from the earliest recorded writings on stone inscriptions dating from AD400 to the discourses of contemporary times. Within this chronological framework, the editors offer several thematic chapters which explore especially pertinent historical issues.
Chapter One examines Indonesian history from the first millennia to the end of the medieval period. Given the paucity of written material from this era, the editors have relied largely on secondary source analyses from archaeologists and historians. Chapter Two offers a glimpse of Indonesia in the early modern period,...