Indonesian Islam in a New Era: How Women Negotiate their Muslim Identities

Abstract

to obsessively ‘prove’ his counter-history. As this short review of Refracted Visions indicates, this highly readable and carefully produced volume, which received the 2011 Gregory Bateson book prize of the AAA’s Society for Cultural Anthropology, will arouse the interest of Indonesianists of various disciplinary backgrounds, as well as anthropologists working in Southeast Asia (and beyond) and the broader readership concerned with visual cultures. As Strassler briefly alludes to in the epilogue, in the meantime, photography in Indonesia, as almost everywhere else on the planet, has become digital and has gone online. Today’s Indonesia, boasting the world’s third largest Facebook community, thus witnesses the production and circulation of images on an unprecedented scale. As such, whereas Refracted Visions is appreciated in its own right for the topics and time periods it covers, readers are invited to find additional inspiration by consulting the book as a ‘pre-history’ of the current digital/online photography boom that is rapidly transforming Indonesia’s visual cultures.