Introduction -- A neighborhood comes of age -- Hierarchy and contradiction: merchants and aristocrats in colonial java -- The specter of past modernities -- Gender and the domestication of desire -- The value of the bequest: spiritual economies and ancestral commodities -- The mask of appearances: disorder in the new order -- Disciplining the dcomestic sphere, developing the modern family
Summary
While doing fieldwork in the modernizing Javanese city of Solo during the late 1980s, Suzanne Brenner came upon a neighborhood that seemed like a museum of a bygone era: Laweyan, a once-thriving production center of batik textiles, had embraced modernity under Dutch colonial rule, only to fend off the modernizing forces of the Indonesian state during the late twentieth century. Focusing on this community, Brenner examines what she calls the making of the "unmodern." Against the social, political, and economic developments of late-colonial and postcolonial Java, Brenner describes how an innovative, commercially successful lifestyle became an anachronism in Indonesian society, thereby challenging the idea that tradition invariably gives way to modernity in an evolutionary progression. Brenner's analysis centers on the importance of gender to processes of social transformation
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-293) and index
