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In an intriguing footnote to her 1984 article “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Sherry Ortner remarked that “[i]f culture itself has been an elusive phenomenon, one may say that [Clifford] Geertz has pursued the most elusive part of it, the ethos. . . . Perhaps the majority of students who go into anthropology . . . are drawn to it because they have been struck at some point in their experience by the ‘otherness’ of another culture, which we would call its ethos. Geertz’s work provides one of the very few handles for grasping that otherness.” His pioneering work in Java and Bali contributed to the popularity of Indonesia as a research site, and led it to be identified with his particular style of research, which examined culture as embodied in public symbols expressing shared social values, core meanings and common orientations. In the 1980s and thereafter, this approach was critiqued for presenting “other” cultures as bounded, unified, ahistorical forms. Rather than continue this fairly obvious line of critique, this paper recognizes another set of influential figures in Indonesian cultural studies of the period – James Peacock and Hildred Geertz in urban Java; and, in Sumatra, Edward Bruner, Clark Cunningham, Karl Heider, James Siegel and Susan Rodgers, among others. Mostly set in multi-ethnic urban environments, their work zeroes in on what is mostly missing from the Geertzian model: cultural hybridity, social mobility, historical transformation, internal conflict, and mass media.