I have just learned that Amin Sweeney, the great scholar of Malay literary and oral culture, passed away in Jakarta on 13 November 2010. An obituary was published in a Brunei website (http://brudirect.com/index.php/Columnist-Column/the-detective-of-malay-manuscripts.html) and reprinted in H-Asia.
I first met Amin when I was applying for graduate schools back in 1990 - and remember vividly visiting his office at Berkeley, where he showed me the full set of wayang Siam puppets he kept there and impressed me with the way he combined his scholarship with practice as a tok dalang.
He was an important influence on my work in years thereafter - and while we met in person only a few times, he was a significant interlocutor for me. His passing merits further notice.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment