Dari tahun 1982 hingga 1985,
Prof. Dr. Mary Steedly, guru besar Antropologi di Universitas Harvard (USA),
melakukan penelitian mengenai Karo di Medan, Deliserdang dan Kabupaten Karo
yang kemudian menghasilkan buku berjudul Haging Without A Rope: Narrative
Experience in Colonial and Post Colonial Karoland (1993). Kini, Steedly menerbitan sebuah buku baru berjudul Rifle Reports: A Story of
Indonesian Independence. Buku ini berisikan sejarah etnografis mengenai
perjuangan kemerdekaan RI (1945-50) di Dataran Tinggi Karo.
Laporan Rifle merajut
kenangan pribadi dan keluarga, lagu dan cerita, memoar dan sejarah lokal, foto,
dan monumen, bagaimana perempuan dan laki-laki Karo berkontribusi pada pendirian bangsa
Indonesia. Perjuangan nun jauh dari ibukota negeri ini.
The routes they followed are divergent, difficult, sometimes wavering, and rarely obvious, but they are clearly marked with the signs of gender. This innovative historical study of nationalism and decolonization is an anthropological exploration of the gendering of wartime experience, as well as an inquiry into the work of storytelling as memory practice and ethnographic genre.
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On August 17, 1945, Indonesia
proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule. Five years later, the
Republic of Indonesia was recognized as a unified, sovereign state. The period
in between was a time of aspiration, mobilization, and violence, in which
nationalists fought to expel the Dutch while also trying to come to grips with
the meaning of "independence." Rifle Reports is an ethnographic
history of this extraordinary time as it was experienced on the outskirts of
the nation among Karo Batak villagers in the rural highlands of North Sumatra.
Based on extensive interviews and conversations with Karo veterans, Rifle
Reports interweaves personal and family memories, songs and stories, memoirs
and local histories, photographs and monuments, to trace the variously tangled
and perhaps incompletely understood ways that Karo women and men contributed to
the founding of the Indonesian nation. The routes they followed are divergent,
difficult, sometimes wavering, and rarely obvious, but they are clearly marked
with the signs of gender. This innovative historical study of nationalism and
decolonization is an anthropological exploration of the gendering of wartime
experience, as well as an inquiry into the work of storytelling as memory
practice and ethnographic genre.
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
"Steedly's project is not
just to read history against the grain, but to significantly interrupt the
national history of Indonesia, with fragments of remembered pasts from what she
calls the outskirts of the nation. Her narrative opens to the complexity of the
past and brings us to a place where the granularity of detail is left to
generate multiple puzzlements. Rifle Reports reflects upon material experiences
of the past refracted across remembered stories in a precise and telling manner
that reveals the authorized history of the nation to be just one of those
stories."--Nancy Florida, University of Michigan
About the Author
Mary Steedly is Professor of
Anthropology at Harvard University and the author of Hanging without a Rope:
Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland.
Product Details
Paperback: 414 pages
Publisher: University of
California Press (May 10, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520274873
ISBN-13: 978-0520274877
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1
inches
Source :
Amazon.com
