Word: indonesia
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...house called Hysteric Glamour, baggy pants, a chain of oversize dice hanging from his waist and silver rings on his fingers. Being a deejay would be kind of cool, he says, but he likes graphic design too. And then he met this salesman who tried to import beetles from Indonesia, and that sounded promising?except all the beetles died while waiting to clear customs. "Maybe I could do that," he says...
Last week, the American media filled in the gaps with stories about Chechen separatists hijacking a passenger airplane, militants carrying on a guerrilla war in Indonesia's Molucca islands, and the Taleban destroying ancient Buddhist statues--all in the name of Islam...
...century was a fundamentally conservative place, albeit with variations. In the largely Roman Catholic Philippines, men frequently had more than one wife. Few places were as straight-laced as Singapore, but its drag queens thrived. You could be gay in Java - if you liked isolation. "Homosexuality is tolerated in Indonesia," says Dede Oetomo, an anthropologist at Surabaya's Airlangga University, "as long as it's not in one's family." Well, that ruled out everyone but gay test tube babies...
...This promises real representation and much more. Under nagari, disputes over land, water, theft, inheritance and livestock will be dealt with swiftly by a local council, unlike the thousands of cases that each year sink in the quagmire of Indonesia's Western-style legal system. "Of the dozens of cases I've handled recently, only three will have to go to court," says Evianto Datumbi, head of a local customary legal committee. "With nagari, you have to settle or else the two parties can never bring up another case...
...smile, says he's now free to sell whatever he harvests, and he's earning 10 times more than before. "Going back to nagari means going back to our roots and putting everything back in its rightful place." If autonomy brings a fraction of the justice Masrun has received, Indonesia may just yet hold together as a nation...