Solo in the New Order

James T. Siegel is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of The Rope of God (California) and Shadow and Sound: The Historical Thought of a Sumatran Kingdom (Chicago).

"Few ethnographies can match Solo in the New Order, inspired as it is by Siegel's crafted obsession with the limits of categories of thought—both Western and Javanese. His eye for incongruent particularities and odd juxtapositions allows him to engage critically the relationship between the "uncanny' and attempts to domesticate its manifestations—through translation practices, historical revisionism, vernacular concepts of the senses, discourses on death and gambling, among others—and makes his work valuable to anyone interested not only in theorizing cultural studies but in carrying out its practical implications and radical possibilities as well."—Vincente Rafael, University of California, San Diego