What's the Next Adventure?

Dear friends,

Apologies for the radio silence - I’ve been waist-deep in fieldwork across Aceh, Madura, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya. With 700 living languages and 17,000 islands, no amount of research can capture Indonesia’s diversity, but I was really struck by ongoing cultural contestation.

From Aceh’s hisba (religious police) enforcing weekly prayers and clearing beaches, to Salafis engaging in da’wa missionary activities, to 20% of Indonesian schoolchildren enrolled in madrasas, to TikTok megastars advocating liberal tolerance, to young men and women sharing favorite books late into the night at trendy cafés - Indonesia abounds with cultural clashes. Eager to understand these struggles for state power, prestige, and persuasion, I interviewed over a hundred fishermen, traders, entrepreneurs, university students, police, Salafis, artists, feminist activists, clerics and kyai (religious teachers).

Next up? I’ve just begun a British Academy Fellowship exploring the “Islamic World’s Great Gender Divergence” - why some Muslim societies are more gender equal than others. Simultaneously, I’m embarking on a great expedition to my favourite place: California!

Stanford University has invited me back as a Visiting Associate Professor in Economics! I’m so excited to learn from brilliant minds - like Alessandra Voena, Neale Mahoney, Lukas Althoff, Marcel Fafchamps, Walter Scheidel, Lisa Blaydes, Michele Gelfand, Hesham Sallam, Muriel Niederle, Anna Grzymała-Busse, Hakeem Jefferson, Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Saad Lakhani, and Suhani Jalota. Perhaps you recall our previous podcasts? Rest assured, I’ll be asking for more! I’m also trying to catch-up with Bay Area tech pros - who can advise me in using computer vision to track global cultural variation through a million paintings at the MET.

To comply with my J-1 visa, I must pause this Substack side hustle. So I’ve given paid subscribers a year’s complimentary membership - entirely gratis. Posting may be infrequent, as I really need to finish writing The Great Gender Divergence.

When I started this book project, I was quite frankly terrified. No single person could ever understand, let alone articulate, the causes and consequences of global cultural variation. While Large Language Models excel at summarizing public data, they still struggle with comparative rigor. And if this is the age of Artificial Super Intelligence, I can hardly expect to out-compete!

Fears loom large, and punishment fires not from the barrels of enemy guns, but the world’s multi-platform armies of critics. Trepidation about bullies and attacks might help explain why women have tended to specialise in narrow topics - leaving ‘Big Books’ to (more confident) men.

My secret weapon? You - my wonderfully generous readers - have been phenomenally helpful in sharing papers, facilitating introductions, and always rocking my priors. Wherever I venture in this world, you’ve been in my pocket - spurring me onwards, encouraging this quest. It is most certainly a team effort, racking up enormous debts of gratitude.

Thank you all so much,

Alice

P.s. If you’re near Stanford, do say hello.

Javanese Muslim couple getting their wedding photos. This is a superb example of religious syncretism, incorporating both Javanese traditions (batik, the ‘keris’ sword, her 3 hair prongs) and Hindu-Buddhist guardians. That same day, in central Yogya, the entire street stopped for the national anthem.