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Panggah Ardiyansyah

Talking Indonesia

Panggah Ardiyansyah: 'Kramat' and the Politics of Indonesian History

Published
April 10, 2026
Duration
42:16
Summary source
description
Last updated
Sep 2, 2026

Discusses If you studied Indonesian history in school in the 1990s, you learned to divide the archipelago's pa…

Summary

If you studied Indonesian history in school in the 1990s, you learned to divide the archipelago's past into neat chapters: Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, then Islamic sultanates, with a brief “transitional period” somewhere in between. Colonial archaeologists created these categories in the nineteenth century, and they've structured Indonesian historiography ev…

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Show notes

If you studied Indonesian history in school in the 1990s, you learned to divide the archipelago's past into neat chapters: Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, then Islamic sultanates, with a brief “transitional period” somewhere in between. Colonial archaeologists created these categories in the nineteenth century, and they've structured Indonesian historiography ever since — shaping not just how we study ancient sites, but what counts as history in the first place and what we archive and remember for the