Guo-Quan Seng. Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia

divergences: Emerson can spot any variant or innovation and reflect on their implications with complete assurance.Purbo Asmoro is extremely lucky to have found in Emerson such an able and discerning intermediary between him and an English-speaking world.Emerson's attention to detail as a researcher is nothing short of jaw-dropping.To take one particularly striking, but hardly exceptional, example: late in the book she provides graphs analyzing the timing of different elements of performances by ten different contemporary puppeteershow much time was taken up for narrative or "interpretive" sections, for comic interludes, for battle scenes, etc.We're talking seconds here, not just minutes.Working up these graphs has to have taken extraordinary amounts of very patient work, but the results are indeed enlightening, providing an easily legible comparison of performance practices among the most famous puppeteers of the day.Emerson appears also to have taken careful notes on every performance she has attended (over 1,500 of Purbo Asmoro's alone) and all the many interviews she has had with performers and commentators.The contrast between this meticulously researched, highly informative, and lucidly written contribution to the field of wayang studies, on the one hand, and a great deal of what gets published in performance studies today-poorly edited, poorly copyedited, and providing only clichd analyses-on the other, is striking.