One of the hard things about studying ethnicity is that socially-embedded meanings and ideas about ethnic identity are hard to uncover. Qualitative and contextual research is essential, but this stands in the way of other important goals such as generalization and inter-group comparison. Political scientists who study ethnicity in the comparative context have struggled to […]
Category: Indonesia
Indonesia is Neither an Islamic nor a Secular State
I recently came across a discussion of alcohol regulations in Indonesia, housed on a site that apparently caters to Indonesia’s expat community. (Westerners have something of an infatuation with restrictions on alcohol as a measure of how religiously tolerant Muslim societies are. This is true even though it is still far easier to purchase beer […]
