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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller, "Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago" (U California Press, 2025)
Description: Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago (U California Press, 2025) represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were co...