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Indonesian Night 2024, brought to you by the Indonesian Association at Cornell (IAC), is an annual celebration aimed at showcasing the vibrant cultural heritage of Indonesia to the Cornell community. This event is a unique opportunity to dive into Indonesia's diverse traditions and arts, completely free of charge. Attendees will be treated to an evening filled with performances that highlight traditional Indonesian musical instruments, including a special performance by the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble, dance by our very own student members, cultural exhibits, and a vast selection of Indonesian cuisine including coffee, offering an authentic taste of the country's rich cultural tapestry.

In anticipation of this cultural gala, the Cornell Chimes will enchant the campus with a medley of Indonesian songs on the Friday before the main event.

Are you a first-time attendee of the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting? A PhD student or early career researcher with questions about how AAS works, how to navigate such a large event, and how to build community with people who share your interests?

Join the GETSEA consortium for an informal discussion with Tom Pepinsky (Cornell), Trude Jacobsen Gidaszewski (NIU), and Nida Sanglimsuwan (UCLA) about the ins-and-outs of the AAS for students and scholars of Southeast Asia.

Keynote address of the 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference.

With its recent hit series Cigarette Girl, Netflix is shoring up its market position in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country. Based on a novel by Ratih Kumala, Cigarette Girl weaves a tale of romantic family and business intrigue against a historical backdrop of postcolonial nationalism, political violence, and tobacco industry growth. Examining what Cigarette Girl reveals and conceals about the past, I argue that the series reproduces commodity nationalist aesthetics, fantasies, and ideologies that frame the clove cigarette (kretek) as indigenous cultural heritage. By centering the hand-rolled kretek and Javanese business rivalries, Cigarette Girl obscures how machine-rolled kretek and Chinese Indonesian families actually dominate the market. As the series grapples with other unresolved historical issues, including class and gender inequalities, the 1965/6 massacres, the military occupation of West Papua, and Indonesia’s tobacco-related disease epidemic, it also arrives at politically conservative conclusions.

Marina Welker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is the author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Postauthoritarian Indonesia (University of California Press, 2014) and Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024).

eCornell Keynote

From the river valleys and grasslands of Nepal to the high mountains of Central Asia, from tigers to leopards to vultures to Asiatic wild dogs (or dholes) — and from canine distemper to wildlife poisonings to the infectious diseases impacting wild sheep and goats as well as their domestic cousins — there is no shortage of threats to the health of these magnificent species and ecosystems, with some of these very same threats being of importance to agriculture and public health.

Join us as Dr. Martin Gilbert from the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health and some of its students and team members share their fieldwork experiences and help illustrate how the health of wildlife and our own health and well-being are inextricably linked.

The Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, with programs around the globe, strives to sustain a healthier world by developing and implementing proactive, science-based solutions to challenges at the interface of wildlife health, domestic animal health, human health and livelihoods, and the environment that supports us all. With its focus on Asia, the Cornell Wild Carnivore Health Program promotes the health and long-term sustainability of wildlife populations by advancing scientific tools and sharing knowledge to protect and improve the health of wild carnivores and their prey, all while seeking to mitigate human-wildlife conflict.

Register for the event here.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

How securing the health of our wildlife is key to conservationThe ways in which our health and the health of wildlife are inextricably linkedHow the field of wildlife health often yields surprisesHow wildlife resources are incredibly important to rural livelihoods and national economies