Mr. Joshua Samuel Gedacht, MA.429 Tempat dan tgl. lahir
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Sekretariat Perizinan Penelitian Asing Kementerian Riset Dan Teknologi
DIREKTORI PENELITIAN ASING DI INDONESIA
2010
ethnicity based on a homogeneous, regionally specific sense of community, where every member was equally “Moro”, “Bugis”, or “Minangkabau”, jostled with reformist visions of
Islam that stressed the universality of Muslim belief across land or territory. These two overlapping, often conflicting bonds of identity played a key role in reconstituting the
communities of the pre-colonial world into nations recognizable today.
Thus, over the course of a seventy year period stretching from 1870 to 1941, my research will examine how the tension between ethnic particularity and religious
universality contributed to a sense of national belonging in regions usually understood as distant from the center of anti-colonial nationalism: the so-called “Outer Islands” of
the Dutch East Indies, including Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Borneo; and Mindanao in the Philippines. Specifically, my project will demonstrate that this productive tension played
a key role in tying regional identities into larger nationalist projects. On the one hand, colonial efforts to divide-and-rule their territories into localized adapt communities in the
East Indies and “Moro” groups in the Southern Philippines, succeeded in making ethnicity a locus of identity-formation in the aftermath of colonial conquest. On the other hand, a
revitalized sense of Islamic belief helped to bring these parochial identities into a larger community of orang jawa, and eventually, would make nascent concepts like “Indonesia”
or “Philippines” intelligible not only to secular elites, but also to average Muslims. Moreover, I will argue this was the case, paradoxically, even when the larger national project in
question, like the Philippines, was dominated by non-Muslims. In sum, my research will explore how colonial policies of oppression helped bring region into the nation across
island Southern Asia.