Elizabeth Pisani

December 31, 2013

Welcome to IndonesiaEtc.com, continuing the Portrait Indonesia journey

Welcome to Indonesia etc, the new face of Portrait Indonesia. It’s over two years since Portrait Indonesia went on the road. Portrait went quiet for several months as I hunched down over a computer, trying to pin Indonesia’s riotous diversity to the page. The book that will emerge in June 2014 will be called Indonesia Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation. It will be published in the UK by Granta, in the US by WW Norton and in Indonesia by Godown,…

June 19, 2012

Indonesia: a miracle despite itself

I’m nearing the end of the first (nine-month long) leg of my Indonesian Odyssey and I don’t feel much closer to understanding the heart of this torturously complicated but endlessly fascinating nation. I’ve done my best to try and sum up some of my thoughts in the June issue of Prospect, one of UK’s more intelligent monthly magazines. For what they are worth, you can now read my reflections on culture, corruption and corpses on Prospect online. And no, Oliver,…

April 5, 2012

The drill in Aceh: whipping up support

I happen to be in Aceh for the local elections. These are interesting times, with rivalries between former comrades in the para-political movement formerly known as GAM hotting up. It’s a sensitive topic in a still-fragile part of this increasingly centrifugal nation; I’d say a lot more, but I have promised the Indonesian intelligence services that I won’t report on the ins and outs of local politics. True to my word, I’m going to write instead about Aceh’s creativity with…

October 24, 2011

Hair today, gone tomorrow

There’s only so much of one’s time one can spend thinking about other people’s sex lives. I feel as though I’ve been doing it for a very long time — there’s more than you want to know about it over at The Wisdom. Now for something completely different. For the next year or so, I’ll be rediscovering an old passion: Indonesia. I brushed against it 30 years ago, and fell properly in love in the late 1980s, when I worked…