Shadow Play: Information Politics in Urban Indonesia

"Shadow Play is a rich guide to comprehending the multiple and layered meanings of street politics in the city of Yogyakarta. Sheri Gibbings captures the complexities of what used to be a relatively simple task: relocating street vendors to a marketplace. She shows with critical verve how and why such a task has become so much more difficult today, and so much more invested with political and cultural meaning. Underlying her intriguing analysis is a theoretically consequential reflection on the cultural politics of information in Indonesia."

Abidin Kusno, Professor of Environmental and Urban Change and Director of York Centre for Asian Research, York University

"Sheri Gibbings’s account of secrecy in state-society relationships reveals how the long history of secrecy in Indonesian politics is still playing out in the post-authoritarian era. More importantly perhaps, her work provides a rich account of how the state is the most secretive institution of all. There is powerful anthropological literature on this increasingly relevant topic, but none is as well-grounded as Shadow Play. There’s no other book like it."

Robbie Peters, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sydney

"Through compelling ethnographic vignettes and incisive analysis, Shadow Play offers a distinctive and fresh perspective on the complexity of information politics surrounding an infrastructure project. Sheri Gibbings’s impressive narratives of the experiences of the actors involved in the relocation project provide not only a rich and more complete picture of urban politics in a post-authoritarian city but also in-depth insights into the intersection between information practices and state-society relationships."

Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University