Different features of work systems in Indonesia and their consequent approaches

Indonesia, with its ultimate development goal of "developing the people and the community as a whole," in fact is facing problems in the execution of this goal. With a population of more than 200 million persons, different in sociocultural background, educational level and environmental conditions, it is understandable that the process and results of technological choices and transfers for various target groups will be different. A wide range of work systems is found, from the simplest man-tool system to the most complex. The conditions are becoming even more complex, a phenomenon especially evident through studies of their sociocultural, psychological, and environmental factors. As a consequence, if success is to be gained in anticipating and understanding the role of Indonesia in the global competition that lies ahead, a very wise approach to the situation by using local values that are often based on traditional habits and customs in a modern context should be carried out. This approach will require an immense amount of time, dedication and effort. Improvement endeavors that have been carried out in different work systems in different types of activities and industries, showed that if the improvement to be sustained, a holistic, systemic, and interdisciplined participatory approach should be taken into consideration where the technical, economical, ergonomic, sociocultural, energy, and environmental factors will play significant roles.     

The flight of the self: Exploring more‐than‐human companionship in rural Pakistan

The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more‐than‐human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals, explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. This paper takes inspiration from Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter, and philosophical thoughts of a 12th‐century Muslim mystic poet, Farid ud‐Din Attar, to examine how becoming‐with pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds, develop entrenched companionship and shape their social choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties.     

Sorcery, corruption, and the dangers of democracy in Indonesia

Magic is the continuation of politics by other means. This, at least, has been the case in North Maluku since the political reshuffle that followed the fall of Suharto and the implementation of decentralization in Indonesia. The strategies pursued by the regional elite to obtain lucrative positions in the new landscape opened up by regional autonomy are thus seen to be thwarted by sorcery from political rivals. Following the life and death of Muhammad, a North Malukan political entrepreneur, I show how sorcery plays an integral part in the new politics of democratization in Indonesia. Political sorcery thrives, I argue, in a complex moral economy that mixes local ideas of sociality, political practices of patrimonialism, and global discourses of democracy. Sorcery and corruption are part of the same political imagination, because both speak ambivalently to the problems of power in times of change. Rather than being anathema to democracy, as the new global discourse on transparency would have it, the occult politics of corruption and sorcery are among the means through which a contested form of democracy is conceptualized and implemented in Indonesia.     

Becoming a Developer: Processes of Personhood in Urban Community-driven Development,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Community-driven development in Indonesia requires the recruitment of volunteers: local residents with the will to develop themselves and others. By revealing the processes of personhood in light of volunteers’ own theories of self, I aim to disrupt simple readings of subjectification in the anthropology of development. Local volunteers understand their recruitment as having the opportunity to occupy a social position that is aligned with their jiwa (nature), and their participation as satisfying their hati (seat of emotion). Rather than assess the success or failure of state actions to regulate or constitute citizens through discursive and affective means, I take seriously this understanding of development as a process of locating and recruiting people predisposed to becoming the subjects of state development. Doing so prompts new lines of enquiry that have been overlooked in understanding processes of subjectification in development: namely the reason why some people are recruited as development subject, while the majority are not.     

Biomass burning, humans and climate change in Southeast Asia

Biomass burning is an integral part of the Earth system, influencing and being influenced by global climate conditions, vegetation cover and human activity. Fire has long been associated with certain vegetation types and land uses in Southeast Asia, but has increasingly affected forests in Indonesia over the last 50 years or so, and peat swamp forests in particular during the last two to three decades. The role of humans, as igniters of fires and as contributors to the conditions that enable fires once ignited to spread widely, is discussed. Other factors, notably the involvement of anomalous climate conditions linked to variability in the Indian and Pacific oceans, are also considered. Global warming and changes in landuse could result in biomass burning becoming more frequent in the future, threatening biodiversity and human health and leading to positive feedbacks with climate change. Deliberate action is required to break a developing disequilibrium within the Earth system: incentives currently being considered under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change aimed at curbing climate change-causing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation could help mitigate biomass burning, while the effective management of biochar, a stable form of carbon produced from the incomplete combustion of organic matter, by farmers in Southeast Asia, and in other regions where biomass burning is common, could help in carbon sequestration. The paper concludes by stressing that in order to be effective any action needs to recognise the full range of environmental and human factors underpinning biomass burning.     

Kesum-body and the places of the gods: the politics of children's masking and second-world realities in OKU (cameroon)

As emerging nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa engender warfare and rapid socio-political change that increasingly affect children, this article examines the ways in which child masking may represent a means for children in Oku, a kingdom in the Cameroon Grassfields, to incorporate references to exogenous forms of modernist violence in their fantasy-play. The means by which children overcome their fear of adult masks and the forest spirits they represent by becoming maskers themselves is first examined. Two new children's masquerades, one representing a white man and the other referring to the SDF opposition political party, then serve as a focus to illustrate how children now extend their use of masking to incorporate the exogenous forces of the state, transforming the fragmentation of social ties and local cosmologies these forces threaten into new trans-local models of social cohesion.     

Psychological autonomy and hierarchical relatedness as organizers of developmental pathways

The definition of self and others can be regarded as embodying the two dimensions of autonomy and relatedness. Autonomy and relatedness are two basic human needs and cultural constructs at the same time. This implies that they may be differently defined yet remain equally important. The respective understanding of autonomy and relatedness is socialized during the everyday experiences of daily life routines from birth on. In this paper, two developmental pathways are portrayed that emphasize different conceptions of autonomy and relatedness that are adaptive in two different environmental contexts with very different affordances and constraints. Western middle-class children are socialized towards psychological autonomy, i.e. the primacy of own intentions, wishes, individual preferences and emotions affording a definition of relatedness as psychological negotiable construct. Non-Western subsistence farmer children are socialized towards hierarchical relatedness, i.e. positioning oneself into the hierarchical structure of a communal system affording a definition of autonomy as action oriented, based on responsibility and obligations. Infancy can be regarded as a cultural lens through which to study the different socialization agendas. Parenting strategies that aim at supporting these different socialization goals in German and Euro-American parents on the one hand and Nso farmers from North Western Cameroon on the other hand are described. It is concluded that different pathways need to be considered in order to understand human psychology from a global perspective.     

Being harmed while doing good: affective injuries in a community development programme,Medan, Indonesia

Complaints, accusations, and failures of gratitude are everyday experiences for volunteers in community‐driven development in Medan, Indonesia. In this article I develop the analytic of ‘affective injury’ to describe the force of such encounters: the sensation of having one's ethical self questioned or put at risk that manifests as an immediate force or lingering hurt. While humanitarian and development workers are all susceptible to affective injuries, I argue that they operate on a different register for developers who belong to, and have an enduring relationship with, the ‘community’. The ways local volunteers respond to, and seek to recover from, affective injuries are distinct from reflective responses to ethical dilemmas. The suppression of, or diversion from, thoughts that could derail self‐understanding is a hindrance to reflexive development practice.     

Masterful words: musicianship and ethics in learning the ney

Unlike in some recent anthropological writings that show the insignificance of verbal or overt instruction in the process of skill acquisition, talk is, in vital ways, constitutive of the practice of ney (reed flute) learning that I discuss here. What is it about masterful speech that makes it such a compelling vehicle for musical education? To address this question, the article presents a number of key processes that sohbet (or conversation) is designed to facilitate in learners: new skills of hearing and musical understanding; extra‐musical sensibilities germane to becoming a skilled ney‐player; and communal affections between those participating in the listening act. It is argued that when all of these combine, certain ethical dispositions are fostered in learners’ moral selves, enabling new ways of relating to others and to the city.     

The dialogical collective: mediumship,pain, and the interactive creation of Ndyuka Maroon subjectivity

This article explores how pain ritually assists in producing Afro‐Surinamese Ndyuka Maroon understandings of subjectivity and the self. Ndyuka discourses conceive persons as composites of multiple human and spirit others. I describe how these discourses emerge dialogically during oracular interactions between possessed mediums and their patients. Beginning as inarticulate sensations, personal pain is ritually transformed into identifiable spirits who expose their hosts as embodiments of past and present social relations. Over the course of oracular interactions, the qualities of physical pain are made to communicate that the pain is both an identity and a vital part of the sufferers’ embodied self. In parallel to this process, spirit mediums perform pain in possession to establish the origins of their authority in relations with spirits. Ritually transforming pain into identities of relation, Ndyuka oracular mediumship persuades patients to re‐evaluate their subjective experiences as innate evidence of Ndyuka social ideology.     

Microbial and viral drug resistance mechanisms

Microorganisms and viruses have developed numerous resistance mechanisms that enable them to evade the effect of antimicrobials and antivirals. As a result, many have become resistant to almost every available means of treatment. This problem, although not new, is becoming increasingly acute and it is now clear that a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that microbes and viruses deploy in the development of resistance is essential if we are to gain new insights into ways to combat this problem.     

Not You: Addiction,Relapse, and Release in Uganda

In recent years, alcohol abuse and dependence have become topics of increasing concern in Uganda, but the chronic relapsing brain disease model of addiction remains only one of many ways of understanding and addressing alcohol-related problems there. For many Ugandan Pentecostals and spirit mediums to be addicted is to be under the control of a being that comes from outside the self. Where these two groups differ, and here they differ strongly, is in regard to the moral valence of these external spirits and what ought to be done about them. This article draws on four years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork to explore the affordances of these ways of viewing and experiencing addiction and recovery for Ugandans attempting to leave alcohol behind. While the idioms of bondage, dedication, and possession are at times severe, this article argues that they contain within them concepts and practices that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and towards the possibility of release.

     

What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience

Both developmental and neurophysiological research suggest a common coding between perceived and generated actions. This shared representational network is innately wired in humans. We review psychological evidence concerning the imitative behaviour of newborn human infants. We suggest that the mechanisms involved in infant imitation provide the foundation for understanding that others are 'like me' and underlie the development of theory of mind and empathy for others. We also analyse functional neuroimaging studies that explore the neurophysiological substrate of imitation in adults. We marshal evidence that imitation recruits not only shared neural representations between the self and the other but also cortical regions in the parietal cortex that are crucial for distinguishing between the perspective of self and other. Imitation is doubly revealing: it is used by infants to learn about adults, and by scientists to understand the organization and functioning of the brain.     

The rise and fall of forensic hypnosis

This paper examines the fortunes of the controversial use of hypnosis to ‘enhance’ autobiographical memories in postwar America. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, hypnosis became increasingly popular as a means to exhume information thought to be buried within the mind. This practice was encouraged by lay understandings of memory drawn from a material culture full of new recording devices (motion pictures, tape and then video recorders); and during the years when the practice was becoming most popular and accepted, academic psychologists developed a contrary, reconstructive, account of memory that was put to use in a series of battles meant to put an end to hypnotic recall. But popular commitment to the idea of permanent memory ‘recordings’ sustained the practice and the assumptions about memory and self that were associated with it, and in the face of a culture of academic psychology fully committed to the idea of ‘reconstructive’, malleable memory, a tidal wave of ‘enhanced’ memories swept America in the late 1980s and 1990s, in the so-called ‘memory wars’. These, in turn, provoked academic psychologists to research the claims and counter claims central to the memory wars. The paper will also make an argument about the importance of lay knowledge in the psychological sciences explored in this paper: that popular psychological beliefs played a significant, even formative role in defining the nature of forensic psychological expertise, and also the framing of elite academic psychological research.     

On our best behavior: optimality models in human behavioral ecology

This paper discusses problems associated with the use of optimality models in human behavioral ecology. Optimality models are used in both human and non-human animal behavioral ecology to test hypotheses about the conditions generating and maintaining behavioral strategies in populations via natural selection. The way optimality models are currently used in behavioral ecology faces significant problems, which are exacerbated by employing the so-called ‘phenotypic gambit’: that is, the bet that the psychological and inheritance mechanisms responsible for behavioral strategies will be straightforward. I argue that each of several different possible ways we might interpret how optimality models are being used for humans face similar and additional problems. I suggest some ways in which human behavioral ecologists might adjust how they employ optimality models; in particular, I urge the abandonment of the phenotypic gambit in the human case.     

The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money

Offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts is an increasingly important part of everyday life in Vietnam. When it concerns the traces of a violent war, this custom is believed to help the spirits of the dead become liberated from their grievous histories. This article discusses the role of money in death commemoration, focusing on how money-offering takes on different meanings between gods and ancestors, on the one hand, and displaced, grievous ghosts, on the other. Based on this discussion, the article will explore the current situation where replica US dollar notes have become a pre-eminent ritual currency in parts of Vietnam and how this situation is related to changing political relations in the imagined world of the dead.     

High-resolution circular dichroism of N-acetyl-L-phenylalaninamide: solvent effects

Biological membranes consist mainly of lipids and proteins. At present, the structure of the lipid phase appears to be established, but hypotheses on the molecular organization of the protein are difficult to support. Thus the deformation behavior of whole human erythrocyte ghosts, ghosts after the selective removal of lipids and ghosts stripped of lipids as well as nonlipid components have been examined in the hope of securing indirect information on the organization of the protein. It has been found that large localized deformations result in partial membrane failure and long uniformly wide fibrils, frequently in excess of 3000 Å, are drawn across the rupture. These data are interpreted in terms of currently favored membrane models and the possibility of a fibrous membrane framework consisting predominantly of protein is reviewed. The behavior of the membrane in its various stages of extraction is compared and contrasted to that of synthetic polymer films of known organization.     

The Development of External Means of Communicative Orientation

That human activity is mediated by signs is one of the key postulates of the cultural-historical theory of the development of the mind. The tools and sign systems mediating activity are becoming increasingly numerous and are in a continuous process of transformation and evolution. Accordingly, ways of transforming mental processes are also evolving. Specialists working in the mainstream of the sociohistorical approach analyze phenomena of "remediation," exploring their practical relevance for psychological diagnoses and correction (Cole, 1989).     

Two new species of the cryptic chrysidid parasitoid subfamily Loboscelidiinae: The second species in Rhadinoscelidia and the first Loboscelidia for the Indonesian fauna

Two new species in the cryptic chrysidid wasp subfamily Loboscelidiinae are described based on males from Gunung Halimun National Park, West Java, Indonesia. One is the second species in Rhadinoscelidia Kimsey, and the other, belonging in Loboscelidia Westwood, is the first species of the genus for the Indonesian fauna.     

Urban Kampongs in Ambon: Whose Domain? Whose Desa?

A devastating fire in a poor quarter of the city of Ambon, Eastern Indonesia, provided the context in which a number of the social, cultural and historical factors shaping the lives of the city's residents came to the fore. The paper argues that to comprehend the experiences of people whose lives were touched by the fire, and to appreciate its significance, the meanings ascribed to the event, it is necessary to comprehend those multiple factors in all their complexity and interpenetration. The paper argues that the symbolic construction of urban space and its constitution as ‘place’ are continuously emergent out of processes which appear in transformational moments, such as this fire. Physical changes to the quarter through time are examined to demonstrate their relevance to understanding the contemporary social processes and their local interpretations. The migratory origins of the people; continuing divisions between Christian and Muslim populations; the ongoing relevance of ancestral spirits and magic; the role of colonial and postcolonial states, and Ambon's strategic position, are all argued to be important to understanding the meaning of the place and the use of space in the city. The implications of the intersection of at least four clusters of ideas about space and place are considered critical to any adequate account of the contemporary lives of Ambonese and to explaining how it comes to be that some residents can become permanently displaced. The argument emphasises the processual nature of the understandings of space in the urban context.