Andrew Beatty

Andrew Beatty is senior lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University. He is currently writing THE SPRING IN THE CAVE: A JOURNEY INTO THE MUSLIM HEART OF JAVA for Faber & Faber. This is an eyewitness account of the speedy fracturing of a harmonious multi-religious society, in this case following the island’s infiltration by radical Islamists. It will follow on from his academic study, Varieties of Javanese Religion: an anthropological account, published by Cambridge University Press in 1999.

Beatty writes with a rare subtlety in his evocation of the complexity of the societies he writes about. He has also completed AFTER THE ANCESTORS, an astonishing account of daily village life in the tropical cloud forest of Nias, an island in the Indonesian archipelago. There is nothing quiet about the lives of these isolated, impoverished village farmers: their dramas have the all the intensity of a Shakespearean tragedy. The devastating loss of their traditional beliefs is unpicked with a lyrical sadness. The villagers’ forced accommodation to an unwelcome and alien modernity leaves them sapped of dignity and energy. While the villagers’ past has been rapidly destroyed and devalued, the present seems flat, featureless and unsatisfying. A powerful indictment of globalisation and a passionate rebuttal of the notion that there is such a thing as a primitive society.

Varieties of Javanese Religion

Paperback: 292 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (8 April 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521624738
ISBN-13: 978-0521624732

Cambridge University Press, 1999.