Nicholas Herriman

Bio: Nicholas Herriman is an academic researcher from La Trobe University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Extended family & Confession. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 22 publications receiving 258 citations. Previous affiliations of Nicholas Herriman include University of Western Australia.

Thailand's political peasants: Power in the modern rural economy, by Andrew Walker

Abstract: Thailand’s political peasants: Power in the modern rural economy, by Andrew Walker. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 2012, xiii + 276pp., endnotes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-...

The Great Rumor Mill: Gossip, Mass Media, and the Ninja Fear

Abstract: Different methods of communication imply different social and political relations. Generally, mass media are distributed through centralized broadcast stations or presses and controlled by the elite. Face-to-face communications, which circulate through physically close contact between people, have more subversive potential. The author analyzes rumors spread in the press and by word of mouth during October and November 1998 in East Java, Indonesia. Conspirators and ninjas were suspected of killing many alleged sorcerers and persecuting the traditionalist Muslim majority. In response, local residents established guards against, attacked, and even killed suspected ninjas. Suspicion also was directed against the government, elites, and the armed forces. This subversive content is attributed to the interaction of two forms of communication: oral rumors became written rumors, and vice versa.

Presumptions of promiscuity: reflections on being a widow or divorcee from three Indonesian communities

Abstract: This article is concerned with a pervasive gender stereotype within Indonesian society, that of janda, meaning both widows and divorcees. The term janda is no neutral signifier of marital status, but rather carries a bundle of pejorative meanings concerned with status and presumed sexual availability to men. It is bound up within assumptions about the normality of heterosexual marriage in Indonesia, and in many ways janda is the antithesis of the ideal of ibu, meaning a virtuous wife and mother. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by each of the three authors, the article examines the reproduction and effects of this stereotype in three Indonesian communities; a village in East Java, a mining town in East Kalimantan and among Indonesian expatriates in Perth, Australia. Using this multi-sited and multi-positioned material we reflect on the everyday lived experience of being a janda, in particular how the stereotype affects social status, livelihood opportunities and modes of representing ones...