RESEARCH

Below is a list of some of the work I have done as an always-almost historian. If you would like an electronic copy of anything I have published or presented, send me an email (mkm275@cornell.edu).

dissertation/book project #1

Modifying Men: Religion and Masculinity in Eastern Indonesia, 1870-1942

From 1870-1942, Christian men from what is today Eastern Indonesia migrated across the Netherlands East Indies as soldiers in the Dutch colonial army. They were recruited by the Dutch colonial state to help conquer other indigenous groups in Aceh, Java, Bali, and elsewhere, and they later policed annexed areas of the Dutch East Indies empire. My dissertation, “Modifying Men: Religion and Masculinity in Eastern Indonesia, 1870-1942,” traces this history of migration by interrogating the lives of these colonial soldiers as they constructed and performed normative masculinities while crossing new geographies, religions, ethnicities, and the Dutch colonial state. In their efforts to fill their colonial army with more “loyal subjects,” Dutch colonial officials inscribed a new brand of masculinity, one of trustworthy, martial colonial soldiers, upon two indigenous groups far from the colonial centers of power, the Ambonese and the Minahasa. My project addresses Dutch attempts to conjoin Christianity with loyalty to the Dutch empire to reify a particular brand of masculinity for these men from the eastern regencies. I utilize archival research undertaken in the Netherlands and Indonesia to follow conjoined colonial ideologies of masculinity and anticolonial ideologies of masculinity across the archipelago and ask how Ambonese and Minahasa soldiers understood their place within the colonial hierarchy, and how other future Indonesians they crossed paths with, many of whom were Muslim, understood them. In the years following World War II, former colonial soldiers from Eastern Indonesia chose a variety of new ways to define themselves: Dutch, Indonesian, Separatists, Christians. By analyzing variegated constructions of indigenous hegemonic masculinities, I pursue new understandings of the histories of gender, religion, colonialism, and nationalism in colonial Southeast Asia. My project shows how colonial discourses of power, inscribed upon preexisting forms of indigenous masculinity, were not seamlessly adopted by their intended audience, and instead mutated as men from Eastern Indonesia crossed new geographies and peoples.

publications

I’m working on it.

podcasts

Indonesia in 10 Films

In 2023 I began to develop a podcast for the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, Indonesia in 10 Films. In each episode of this podcast, I interview a film critic or scholar about one Indonesian film. Some episodes include a bonus Bahasa Indonesia version of the show. The podcast will appear intermittently on the Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast’s feed. The podcast is currently in production in the fall of 2025, but you can listen to our first pilot episode on the film Lewat Djam Malam here: https://gattyrewind.libsyn.com/episode-1-after-the-curfew-lewat-djam-malam-with-adrian-jonathan-pasaribu. The Bahasa Indonesia version of this episode can be found here: https://gattyrewind.libsyn.com/versi-bahasa-indonesia-lewat-djam-malam-after-the-curfew-dengan-adrian-jonathan-pasaribu.

And here is a link to the show’s homepage: https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/southeast-asia-program/about-us/podcasts/indonesia-10-films.

The Gatty Lecture Rewind

In 2018, with support from the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, I created “The Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast.” This podcast interviews scholars who work in, on, or around Southeast Asia. From 2018-2022, I recorded, edited, and published over 70 interviews as a part of this project. In 2022 I handed over the podcast to the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, where they have continued to record and publish episodes. The podcast (as of June 2024) has reached over 15,000 downloads.

future work

Book Project #2: Megafauna and Empire in the Pacific

My first book project, Megafauna and Empire in the Pacific, is a comparative history of megafauna in small islands and littoral zones across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Specifically, my project analyzes the consequences of animal capitalism on environmental degradation within islands where horses and cattle became essential to indigenous life underneath empire. I am especially concerned with how European veterinarians and animal breeders created animal capital and remade island environments. The locales under my purview include Sumbawa and Sumba in Indonesia, the Marquesas Islands and Tonga in Polynesia, Darwin in Australia, and Okinawa in Japan. This project is a transnational history of multiple environments where animal husbandry still features as an essential part of postcolonial life. I argue that livestock are not simply a force of environmental degradation, but also coconspirators in decolonial futures.

Article Length Project #1: Violence and Veterinary Medicine at the Edge of Empire: Sumbawa, 1913

This research article takes a small historical moment from my second book project to ask larger questions about medicine, race, and pathologies in 20th century Dutch East Indies. In 1913, on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, three Samawa men, Manusung, Batang, and Pojo, stabbed and killed the Dutch appointed government veterinarian and his wife, Bernard and Maria Eysenburger. Upon their arrest, the three men claimed their attack was revenge for Bernard mistakenly ordering thirty of their horses to be culled. Bernard believed the animals to be infected with glanders, a contagious and deadly disease. In the ensuring months and years, countless newspaper columns in the Netherlands discussed the death of Bernard and Maria as a failure of all involved, at every level of colonial society. The aftershock of Bernard, Maria, Manusung, Batang, and Pojo’s encounter in the Dutch popular press elucidated certain anxieties inherent to the Dutch colonial state’s growing encroachment into the lives of indigenous peoples in the East Indies. By examining contemporary newspaper reports, Dutch veterinary medical journals, and indigenous histories of horse breeding in Sumbawa, I discuss the clashing ideologies of animal medicine, care, and commodification between veterinarians in the Dutch metropole, the Dutch colonial state, the horse breeders of Sumbawa, and the foreign horse traders moving the animals across the archipelago. As the colonial state attempted to commodify Sumbawa ponies for sale across the globe, Dutch imaginations, in Holland and in Batavia, of the fringes of their empire were informed by racialized pathologies of human-animal care and animal science, including burdened categorizations of Indonesians as the antithesis to Dutch veterinary science.

 

Article Length Project #2: Football and Masculinity in the Dutch East Indies

This research project is a tangent from my dissertation project on masculinity in the Dutch East Indies. I attempt to unravel the discourse of martialness placed upon indigenous Ambonese soldiers by the Dutch Colonial State and understand how this discourse of masculinity was experienced by the Ambonese outside of their home island in the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of Dutch-language sporting magazines and the Malay-language popular press in cities with a major colonial army presence, I argue that Ambonese loyalty, and indeed Ambonese “martialness” was never fully accepted by Ambonese soldiers, and instead was contingent on the Dutch colonial state’s continued, significant political and economic support of the soldiers and their families. While Dutch reporters constantly praised the fitness, athleticism, and fierceness of Ambonese football teams in Dutch-language magazines, Ambonese men in Malay-language newspapers complained about their station within the Dutch army, keeping one foot tied to the anti-Dutch revolutionary movements of the time. Further, stadium-wide brawls between Ambonese teams and European teams in colonial Batavia undergirded the anxiety the Dutch felt towards these soldiers deciding to become revolutionaries fighting against, not with, the colonial state. Indeed, as one Dutch sporting magazine aptly put it, the Ambonese footballers needed to be “under constant and good leadership” from a European coach. Finally, I also consider what other non-Ambonese future Indonesians wrote about their experiences living alongside Ambonese barracks on the islands of Java and Sumatra and what they thought of Ambonese footballers and Ambonese football teams. The discourse of the manly, martial, Ambonese footballer was a critical site of debate about empire and revolution in colonial Indonesia. Indeed, this racialized discourse of the Ambonese as more fit and athletic than other Indonesian ethnic groups continues in Indonesia today.

Article Length Project #3: Dutch Literature and Advertisements for Colonial “Fusion” Foods in the Dutch East Indies

This research project analyzes colonial literature and colonial advertisements in the Dutch East Indies for one specific food: the spekkoek. Food in the Dutch East Indies was a site of constant production and upkeep of empire: what Dutch colonials ate and how they ate it defined their status in their East Indies colony. Indeed, scholars of colonial intimacies have previously analyzed the ways in which food helps uncover the tension between state propaganda and colonial realities of “civilizing” the colonial “Other,” both in colonial and postcolonial societies. This project, however, tries to understand one food’s inability to fit within constantly redefined colonial categories – the spekkoek. The spekkoek (and foods like it) blended ingredients from the Indonesian archipelago with traditional Dutch recipes, creating an uncanny representation of Dutch identity abroad. The spekkoek was a dessert that could not completely be indoctrinated into European pallets or cuisine nor was it completely the food of the Dutch colonial, nor the colonized subject. Furthermore, who could cook the spekkoek, a difficult dish to conceive, was fraught with contradictory colonial discourses of racial hierarchies. In Dutch colonial literature, the spekkoek was a strange representation of Holland, a cake with eerie connections to the metropole. This project analyzes Dutch colonial literature alongside Dutch recipe books and colonial advertisements for spekkoek sales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to uncover how Dutch discussions around the spekkoek were fraught with colonial misrepresentation. Through an analysis of colonial “fusion” foods, we can better understand how Dutch colonists struggled to reify all aspects of colonial society into methods of adaptive colonial power.