Rifle Reports - by Mary Margaret Steedly (Paperback)

About the Book

"Indonesians declared national independence in 1945, just days after the Japanese surrender that ended the World War II. Over the next five years the population would find itself engaged in a struggle for independence against the Dutch colonialists who sought to retake their former colony. This was a time of military mobilization, diplomatic negotiation, low intensity guerrilla warfare, as well as social turbulence, collective aspiration, and internecine violence. By 1950 the Dutch had been defeated, and the Republic of Indonesia was born, constituting the first successful war of anticolonial liberation in post-World War II Asia. Rifle Reports is a historical ethnography of everyday life during this extraordinary time, recalled in stories of the people who lived it. It is an anthropological study of gender during wartime; it is also an inquiry into storytelling both as memory practice and as ethnographic genre: how stories are told and received, how past events are recalled, how the art of narration constitutes its subject--in short, how stories inhabit social space. Matters of form and style, poetics and politics, genre and storytelling are just as critical to the author's analysis as matters of historical accuracy and authentication"--

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"Fascinating ... Mary Steedly moves away from the conventional narrative histories of the period, which have generally reflected the perspective of male revolutionaries and leaders, to a more deeply textured portrayal of the experiences of ordinary people during the independence struggle."--Audrey Kahin "Indonesia" (6/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

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.