The End of ‘Medieval Indonesia’

You may have noticed that I’ve uploaded a couple of dozen articles on this blog this month. They were all Patreon exclusive pieces — things I wrote for paying patrons on my Patreon account back in 2022, when I thought I’d have enough time and energy to write regularly for money. I had to give that up after only a few months as work became busier and new projects came along. I thought I’d go back to the Patreon at some point, but as that hasn’t happened I decided to post the old articles on here instead of letting them languish behind a paywall. They were all written fairly quickly, and they could all do with (or have done with) some more editing, but there ought to be some interesting things in them if you’re into this sort of thing. Most of them are about topics I haven’t thought about in a long time. Some I’d even forgotten that I’d written (like the one on zeroes in Southeast Asian inscriptions).

A photo I took at Prambanan the last time I was in Indonesia — about five-and-a-half years ago now.

These will be the very last posts on this blog. I haven’t worked on any Indonesia-related material in about a year now, and have transitioned to studying some indigenous South American languages with which I have become fascinated. That sort of subject matter is obviously not appropriate for a blog entitled ‘Medieval Indonesia’. I left academia proper two years ago, back in January 2022. I was never really part of it anyway. I didn’t receive the support I needed to turn my hobby (that’s really what it was) into a career, and in any case visa and immigration difficulties made it impractical or impossible for me to follow the usual post-doc route. I don’t have an academic job and doubt I’ll ever apply for one; if I do, I doubt it’ll be in Southeast Asian studies. It’s probably best to close this chapter of my life and leave this blog where it is.

If my book on Bujangga Manik is ever published, I will write a brief note on here letting you know. I don’t know when that will happen and don’t have much invested in it.

I’ll continue to check the email address associated with this blog (siwaratrikalpa@gmail.com), so feel free to message me there if you need me for some reason.

Alex West