Andrew Beatty

Andrew Beatty is senior lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University.

His latest book is A SHADOW FALLS IN THE HEART OF JAVA, published by Faber & Faber on 2 April 2009. This is an eyewitness account of the speedy fracturing of a harmonious multi-religious society, following the island’s infiltration by radical Islamists. The book follows 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.

His next book is 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. Beatty unpicks the devastating loss of their traditional beliefs 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. Here is a powerful indictment of globalisation and a passionate rebuttal of the notion that there is such a thing as a primitive society.