Art as Politics: Re-Crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory)

Art as Politics explores the intersection of art, identity politics, and tourism in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic research from the 1980s to the present, the book offers a nuanced portrayal of the Sa'dan Toraja, a predominantly Christian minority group in the world's most populous Muslim country. Celebrated in anthropological and tourism literatures for their spectacular traditional houses, sculpted effigies of the dead, and pageantry-filled funeral rituals, the Toraja have entered an era of accelerated engagment with the global economy marked by on-going struggles over identity, religion, and social relations.