Publication of Research Results “Local Society in Modern Indonesia: A Micrology Approach,” edited by SUGISHIMA Keiji and NAKAMURA Kiyoshi, August 2006, NTT Publishing Co., Ltd. →to details page at NTT Publishing Co., Ltd.

Objectives

FY2002
After the collapse of the centralized Suharto regime (“New Order”), we witnessed the stark emergence of a tug-of-war between the gravitational attraction of regions or ethnic groups and state integration. This research committee will, based on specific materials concerning regional societies, discuss how contiguous with the progress in national consolidation we have had the formation of ethnic and regional identities. Concerning the dynamics between the nation state and ethnic cultures, we aim to make theoretical contributions from an anthropological standpoint. We hope our search for the conditions that have developed in local society amidst the major policy shift from centralized direction to regional devolvement will yield new knowledge concerning the problem of the creation of culture as a national process, which has come to be recognized by anthropology in recent years. We can now see widespread examples of ethnic/religious confrontation, splittist independence movements and other instances in which there are standoffs between the framework of the nation state and regional societies or ethnic groups. We believe that the discussions of our research group will lay the foundation for more general research, for example, for comparative research on the various nations of Oceania.