This book discusses the causes, the character and the outcomes of land conflicts between palm oil companies and rural Indonesians. On the basis of the first-ever large-scale documentation of 150 such conflicts, the authors examine how communities protest against palm oil companies, why they do so, and to what extent they succeed in finding a solution for their grievances.

This project is a sociolinguistic history of vernacular Malay, the language of and for society in pre-independence Indonesia. This non-standardized form of Malay was used by the ethnically diverse, rudimentary educated urban lower middle-class - a large demographic niche that occupied the forefront of modernity. A substantial body of literature is available on this vibrant world, yet the linguistic character of these sources is not well-known. A study on the history of this language is crucial to understand how its speakers experimented with new concepts, ideas and knowledge, and how this affected Indonesias sociocultural history. What were the characteristics of vernacular Malay? Who were involved in shaping the mixed language and culture of Indonesias colonial cities? What desires and anxieties emerged in this society and how were they expressed in the vernacular Malay literature? The central objective of this research is to analyse a voluminous collection of digitized Malay books and newspapers (1870s-1930s). These writings offer vivid depictions of the language and society of Indonesias oft-neglected urban populations in late-colonial times. This project will produce a monograph-length sociolinguistic analysis and an online, publicly available database of this body of literature. Digital access to these primary sources facilitates quantitative cross-validation of qualitative research. Consequently, I will be able to generate a robust evidential base and reveal patterns previously opaque. Based on the sociolinguistic expertise of the researcher, this project aims to gain insight into the history of everyday life in an ethnically diverse society at the crossroads. The characteristics of a non-standardized language, the origins of its vocabulary, and its role in the designation of new ideas and concepts will provide a multifaceted picture of a nations colonial roots and its legacies for the present, in which the non-elite and the culturally hybrid can finally assume their rightful place.

Female Islamic leaders are gaining in prominence. This project will explain this remarkable phenomenon by looking at the ways in which women with religious authority engage in visual rhetoric: the use of visual images to communicate with an audience. The literature on female Islamic leadership privileges the interpretation of legal and theological texts and their implication for women. This is too limited. Visual images are less hermetic and more open to ambiguity than most written texts. My point of departure is that visual rhetoric, expressed through dress, bodily comportment, or the use of physical environment, constitutes an important alternative to texts for constructing, performing or contesting religious norms. My hypothesis is that women, more than men, combine textual skills and practices with the vast, non-theological realm of visual communication, thus subtly subverting the gendered hierarchies of the Islamic scriptural tradition. To investigate this hypothesis I analyse the lives, careers and strategies of a number of female Islamic leaders in Malaysia and Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority countries in Southeast Asia. Apart from housing a significant part of the worlds Muslim population, Southeast Asia is known for the strong position of women in the public sphere. This project combines historical, anthropological and visual research methods. Ethnographic research will examine individual religious leaders and their place in local communities, (trans)national politics and media-scapes. Historical research will contextualise these cases in long-term, contingent and shifting repertoires of gendered imagery. In addition to using visual images as sources, this project will actively create images (though photography and filming) for scholarly publications and dissemination of research results among a broader (professional and non-professional) audience. In addition, this project will inform policy makers, activists, journalists, and the general public about the roles, achievements, and challenges of female Islamic leaders, in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Expensive elections campaigns are a threat to democracies around the world, because they generate corruption and political inequality. Yet, due to methodological obstacles and a western bias in the current literature, we do not really know what makes election campaigns expensive. Employing a new methodology, this project studies the campaign expenditures of a thousand politicians from across India and Indonesia to explain why campaign expenditures vary. In doing so, this project aims to help reduce the role of money in elections to healthier levels.

What concepts are encoded as words across languages? Are there semantic distinctions made in words that are universally found in human language? How do we explain variation in the patterns of lexicalization observed in the worlds languages? What factors (environment? culture?) governs the lexical variation that exists in languages? How does such variation come into being and are there universals in the metaphorical and metonymical shifts observed in changes to lexical semantics? Answering such questions about the lexicon will provide insights into the very fundaments of human cognition, since words represent concepts and are thus closely tied to cognitive representations. Yet, hitherto typological research into lexicon has yielded only very modest results because of the limited empirical basis of existing studies; questions of the universality versus specificity of linguistic phenomena demand consideration of a broad range of the world?s languages and not simply a few large, national languages. This project seeks to expand cross-linguistic perspectives in lexical typology by carrying out a detailed comparative investigation of the lexicon in the Papuan languages of the little-known Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family. The project will examine the diverse evolutionary histories of the lexicon within this family. Changes in the lexicon will be tracked throughout the family in terms of both the forms of lexemes and their meanings. This will create a detailed picture of the dynamics of lexico-semantic change and throw light on the cognitive structures underpinning patterns of lexicalization. This project will be set on a solid empirical foundation by combining in-depth fieldwork-based study with cross-linguistic comparison using extant materials. The project will result in primary lexical documentation in the form of dictionaries of two TAP language-culture systems, as well as specific studies of lexico-semantic evolution in TAP languages. Together, these will contribute to improving our understanding of worldwide diversity in lexical semantics.