W Keeler
Biographic Data
| ID | 40658 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Keeler |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Keeler |
| SIGNATURE | KEELER W |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1214-8435 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Kathryn Emerson. Innovation, Style and Spectacle in Wayang: Purbo Asmoro and the Evolution of an Indonesian Performing Art
Comparative Queer Southeast Asian Studies
Outsiders have long remarked on a relative tolerance of nonnormative gender and sexuality in lowland Southeast Asian societies. Appreciating the way hierarchical assumptions inflect all social relations in the region helps make sense both of Southeast Asia’s long-standing gender binarism and of the ability of people of nonnormative gender and sexuality to find, at least at times, specialized roles for themselves. Those roles are based on enjoying…
Attaching shame to hierarchy and hierarchy to some versions of attachment
Attachment theory sees individual autonomy as childrearing practices' appropriate goal. But many people in the world do not share attachments theorists' validation of autonomy. They instead believe that they should train their children into behavior appropriate to hierarchical relationships, ones predicated on differences in obligations and privileges. Their childrearing techniques therefore include teaching children to experience shame should th…
Dó ăyèi! Dó ăyèi! Reclaiming political agency in Burma’s democracy era
People marching in the streets in Burma in 1988, infuriated by twenty-six years of military dictatorship, demanded the return of democracy. What they meant by the term reflected a hierarchical understanding of politics: elections would enable them to replace a hated and rapacious superordinate, General Ne Win, with a morally admirable one, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Rather than envision the messy business of conflict and compromise pursued in the name…
The hierarchical right
On Wayang and Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet, Theatre, Television and the Internet by Jan Mrázek
Hierarchy in America
Religious commitment, support for the military and free-market capitalism, and aversion to the welfare system, homosexuality and 'big government' are all attitudes widely shared among conservative Americans. Apparently unrelated, these views reflect an unrecognized but real ideological embrace of hierarchical understandings: to wit, power comes from above, exchange relations with powerful entities are the means for bettering one's circumstances a…
The Incitement to Fieldwork
Fieldwork necessarily causes some degree of psychological stress for an ethnographer, although the nature and consequences of such stress vary individually. Rather than lament or conceal that fact, I suggest that an ethnographer’s idiosyncratic responses can provide particular insights. To illustrate the point, I consider what might have induced me, and perhaps others, to take on the necessarily disorienting role of an ethnographer. I then contra…
Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali
Book Review| April 01 2018 Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali. By Jennifer Goodlander. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 199, 21 black-and-white photographs, notes, glossary, references, index.). Ward Keeler Ward Keeler University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Ame…
The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma
Until its recent political thaw, Burma was closed to most foreign researchers, and fieldwork-based research was rare. In The Traffic in Hierarchy, one of the few such works to appear in recent years, author Ward Keeler combines close ethnographic attention to life in a Buddhist monastery with a broad analysis of Burman gender ideology. The result is a thought-provoking analysis of Burmese social relations both within and beyond a monastery’s wall…
Chapter One. Everyday Forms of Hierarchical Observance
Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves
As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of the Javanese shadow play nor its musical complexity detracts from its wide popularity. By a context-sensitive analysis of shadow-play performances, Ward Keeler shows that they fascinate so many people in Java because they dramatize consistent Javanese concerns about potency, status, and speech.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print…
Shifting Transversals: Trans Women's Move from Spirit Mediumship to Beauty Work in Mandalay
Long active as spirit mediums, trans women have become increasingly important players in the beauty business in Mandalay, Burma, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. I ask what affinities we might discern in these two roles of spirit medium and beautician such that trans women should be thought especially suited to take them on. The boundary-crossing implicit in both turns on self-fashioning, a process which connects humans to spirits and/or ordinary …
The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma
Javanese Grammar for Students: A Graded Introduction
The most striking fact about this book is the astonishing amount of information that is contained within its slim 104 pages. Not only does it include all the important points about Javanese grammar
Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java by Konstantinos Retsikas (review)
Reviewed by: Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java by Konstantinos Retsikas Ward Keeler (bio) Konstantinos Retsikas . Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java. London and New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2012. 192 pp. How readers respond to this book will depend on the preferences they bring to their reading: how they feel about the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and what they…
Écrire Bangkok: La ville dans la nouvelle contemporaine en Thaïlande, Louise Pichard-Bertaux
In Verdi’s mid-19th century opera, “La Traviata,” Violetta refers to “questo popoloso deserto che appellano Parigi.” The 20th century caused fiction writers throughout Southeast Asia to echo her sentiments, as government and commerce, or just bright lights and brighter dreams, drew huge numbers of people to such rapidly growing cities as Jakarta, Rangoon, and Bangkok. Louise Pichard-Bertaux has decided to address two immense and somewhat intracta…
A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta Through the Memories of its Intellectuals (review)
Reviewed by: A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta Through the Memories of its Intellectuals Ward Keeler A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta Through the Memories of its Intellectuals By Rudolph Mrazek . Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. The book's title is clearly intended to resonate in two ways: to refer to the age of Mrazek's interlocutors, people in their later years living in Jakarta in the 1990s, when Mrazek interviewed them in their homes; and to…
What's Burmese about Burmese rap? Why some expressive forms go global
Although older Burmese associate contemporary Burmese rap with an indigenous call-and-response genre, younger Burmese rap fans link it only to international models. The content of Burmese raps strikes an outsider as tame, but rap in Burma resembles foreign prototypes closely in its preoccupation with youthful masculine power. In Burma and elsewhere, rap's lyrical contents reflect a libertarian ideology in keeping with its emphasis on the autonomy…
Friends in High Places: Friends in High Places: the Art of Survival in Modern Day Burma. A film by Lindsey Merrison. DVD, 88 min. 2001. Distributor: Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse St., W…
Friends in High Places: the Art of Survival in Modern Day Burma contains any number of unforgettable characters. There are the two wonderful old “aunties,” one of them Anglo–Burman and ready to tra
Refugee Experiences in the US
Teaching Southeast Asia through fiction and memoirs
Since few undergraduates intend to major in anthropology, let alone go on to professional careers as anthropologists, I ask students to read materials that I think will most compellingly address the curiosity they have about Southeast Asians' lives. This means drawing on the increasingly rich store of Southeast Asian fiction and memoirs available in English. These materials can be used to illuminate important topics in the study of Southeast Asia…
Indonesia: Theater
Myanmar
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Custaaf Houtman. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999. iii. 392 pp., tables, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography
Shame and Stage Fright in Java
What's Burmese about Burmese rap? Why some expressive forms go global
Although older Burmese associate contemporary Burmese rap with an indigenous call-and-response genre, younger Burmese rap fans link it only to international models. The content of Burmese raps strikes an outsider as tame, but rap in Burma resembles foreign prototypes closely in its preoccupation with youthful masculine power. In Burma and elsewhere, rap's lyrical contents reflect a libertarian ideology in keeping with its emphasis on the autonomy…
Shifting Transversals: Trans Women's Move from Spirit Mediumship to Beauty Work in Mandalay
Long active as spirit mediums, trans women have become increasingly important players in the beauty business in Mandalay, Burma, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. I ask what affinities we might discern in these two roles of spirit medium and beautician such that trans women should be thought especially suited to take them on. The boundary-crossing implicit in both turns on self-fashioning, a process which connects humans to spirits and/or ordinary …
Villagers and the Exemplary Center in Java
The vocabulary of Javanese kingship is nothing if not grand: the great princes of Central Java enjoy such titles as "Nail of the World" and "Keeper of the World," making it clear that they represent the center about whom the world revolves.This image of the powerful center seems pervasive in Southeast Asia.On it is predicated the concentration of political, religious, and cosmo logical responsibilities with which many Southeast Asians endow their…
Musical Encounter in Java and Bali
speaks, in the "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked> of music as uthe supreme mystery of the science of man,"* 1 he refers to a language that can be communicated beyond the boundaries of, yet still within, culture.Inscribing a very small arc within that universal circle, I would like to consider two musical ensembles, Java nese and Balinese gamelan, whose cultural contexts as well as musics have marked sympathies.In each case, the line of my argu…
Sharp Rays: Javanese Responses to a Solar Eclipse
When a total solar eclipse occurred over Central Java late in the morning of June 11, 1983, the air became very still and Java's lush vegetation glowed in the eerie light characteristic of sunset in the tropics. As at sunset, too, the horizon turned red, but it did so not only in the west but in all directions, and in the half-light distant volcanoes usually obscured by the glare of the sun became visible. For the four minutes of total eclipse, t…
Attaching shame to hierarchy and hierarchy to some versions of attachment
Attachment theory sees individual autonomy as childrearing practices' appropriate goal. But many people in the world do not share attachments theorists' validation of autonomy. They instead believe that they should train their children into behavior appropriate to hierarchical relationships, ones predicated on differences in obligations and privileges. Their childrearing techniques therefore include teaching children to experience shame should th…
Hierarchy in America
Religious commitment, support for the military and free-market capitalism, and aversion to the welfare system, homosexuality and 'big government' are all attitudes widely shared among conservative Americans. Apparently unrelated, these views reflect an unrecognized but real ideological embrace of hierarchical understandings: to wit, power comes from above, exchange relations with powerful entities are the means for bettering one's circumstances a…
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Custaaf Houtman. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999. iii. 392 pp., tables, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography
Release from Kala's Grip: Ritual Uses of Shadow Plays in Java and Bali
Ward KeelerComparative work in anthropology sometimes appears to be as perilous as it is unfash ionable.That it is unfashionable is evident in the relative dearth of explicitly comparative studies published in anthropology over the past forty or so years.A few exceptions aside, the closest one usually comes is an edited volume in which each essay deals with a single society but an introductory essay by the editors hazards some broader comparative…
Style and Authority in Javanese Muslim Sermons
A preacher claims to address others from a position of implicitly superior insight. To support this claim, he plays upon the style and content of his performance to justify the role he takes. We can therefore ask how people evaluate particular preachers' performances, and what sorts of criteria can be seen to inform those comments. In particular, we can see how such evaluations speak for the interests and concerns of the people who make them. In …
Musical Encounter in Java and Bali
speaks, in the "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked> of music as uthe supreme mystery of the science of man,"* 1 he refers to a language that can be communicated beyond the boundaries of, yet still within, culture.Inscribing a very small arc within that universal circle, I would like to consider two musical ensembles, Java nese and Balinese gamelan, whose cultural contexts as well as musics have marked sympathies.In each case, the line of my argu…
Shame and Stage Fright in Java
Villagers and the Exemplary Center in Java
The vocabulary of Javanese kingship is nothing if not grand: the great princes of Central Java enjoy such titles as "Nail of the World" and "Keeper of the World," making it clear that they represent the center about whom the world revolves.This image of the powerful center seems pervasive in Southeast Asia.On it is predicated the concentration of political, religious, and cosmo logical responsibilities with which many Southeast Asians endow their…
Contexts and Levels: Anthropological Essays on Hierarchy . R. H. Barnes, Daniel DE Coppet, and R. J. Parkin
Sharp Rays: Javanese Responses to a Solar Eclipse
When a total solar eclipse occurred over Central Java late in the morning of June 11, 1983, the air became very still and Java's lush vegetation glowed in the eerie light characteristic of sunset in the tropics. As at sunset, too, the horizon turned red, but it did so not only in the west but in all directions, and in the half-light distant volcanoes usually obscured by the glare of the sun became visible. For the four minutes of total eclipse, t…
Linguistic Anthropology: The Language of Balinese Shadow Theater. Mary Sabina Zurbuchen
Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves
Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves
Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves
The Dalang behind the Wayang: The Role of the Surakarta and the Yogyakarta Dalang in Indonesian-Javanese Society
Where Are You, Spirits: Style and Theme in Berawan Prayer. Peter Metcalf
Wayang Puppets: Carving, Colouring, Symbolism
In response to Paul Stange's “deconstruction as disempowerment: New orientalisms of Java”
The gist of Stange's argument is that Javanists, including myself, have done a disservice to both scholarship and our Javanese informants by failing to pay as much attention as we should to the mystical stream in Javanese culture. Stange criticizes us for reading into statements about mysticism such issues as language ideology, status, and power, rather than taking those statements at their face value. According to Stange, it is not necessary to …
Release from Kala's Grip: Ritual Uses of Shadow Plays in Java and Bali
Ward KeelerComparative work in anthropology sometimes appears to be as perilous as it is unfash ionable.That it is unfashionable is evident in the relative dearth of explicitly comparative studies published in anthropology over the past forty or so years.A few exceptions aside, the closest one usually comes is an edited volume in which each essay deals with a single society but an introductory essay by the editors hazards some broader comparative…
Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions . Arjun Appadurai, FRANK J. Korom, and Margaret A. MILLS
Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen . Karl G. Heider
Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Unni Wikan
Javanese Shadow Puppets
Javanese Gamelan: Traditional Orchestra of Indonesia
Beyond Translation: Essays towards a Modern Philology. A. L. Becker
Style and Authority in Javanese Muslim Sermons
A preacher claims to address others from a position of implicitly superior insight. To support this claim, he plays upon the style and content of his performance to justify the role he takes. We can therefore ask how people evaluate particular preachers' performances, and what sorts of criteria can be seen to inform those comments. In particular, we can see how such evaluations speak for the interests and concerns of the people who make them. In …
Burmese Puppets
Style and Authority in Javanese Muslim Sermons
A preacher claims to address others from a position of implicitly superior insight. To support this claim, he plays upon the style and content of his performance to justify the role he takes. We can therefore ask how people evaluate particular preachers' performances, and what sorts of criteria can be seen to inform those comments. In particular, we can see how such evaluations speak for the interests and concerns of the people who make them. In …
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Custaaf Houtman. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999. iii. 392 pp., tables, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography
Indonesia: Theater
Sociology (29 works) · Art (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Asian Studies and History (18 works) · History (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works)