This study compares Muslim women's views on wearing the veil in a Muslim majority society, Indonesia, with the Muslim minority in India. In-depth interviews reveal significant differences between the two: Majority women talk in terms of convenience, fashion, and modesty with little reference to religion as their reasons for veiling. The responses of Muslim minority women are diverse: their account of veiling stretches from religiously inspired arguments through to reasons of convenience, and to opposition against stereotypes and discrimination. Most minority women see the veil as a way of affirming their cultural identity. We argue that religious minorities are forced into constructing their cultural identity in ways that exaggerate their group belonging and difference from broader society. This may be motivated either by falling back on religious resources or by using ethnic markers to overtly oppose endemic prejudice. No such identity issue exists for the Muslim majority women. This contradicts the dominant view in non-Muslim countries in the West, where the female scarf is primarily considered a symbol of religious fundamentalism and patriarchal oppression.

This article analyses the significance of Jakarta’s night venues, defined in a narrow way (bars, clubs and prostitution complexes). They represent not only forms of modernisation and their acceptance in a city from the developing world, but they show how usual means of controlling the night have different understandings and produce different types of arrangements, regarding where one is located. We show how informal agreements are central to ordering the night and to governance processes, and how they produce different types of territories within an Indonesian context. The first part draws a topography of the night-time economy in Jakarta, showing how the evolution of the venues reflects both the growth of the metropolis and Indonesia’s different political regimes. Then the paper analyses the inner (dis)organisation of the venues and neighbourhoods in which they are concentrated, before assessing the meaning of the policies aimed at creating order in the city at night, showing how appearances of order take precedence over the effective planning of the metropolis.

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Psychospiritual harmony was originally considered a movement in psychotherapy that referred to the nonduality of mind–body as a way to answer the quest for true self. Springing from the need to find psychological foundations outside the boundaries of Western conceptions of a split mind–body and a separated self–society, this movement borrowed from Asian wisdoms and formulated ideas of spirituality and harmony that constituted the base for individual psychological balance and social peace. Ontologically, psychospiritual harmony can be understood as a representation dialectically positioned to Western notions that emphasize the dichotomy between the mind as something absolute in its perfection and the body as something material and even sinful. More than three centuries after Descartes defined Spirit as the root of human progress, a countervailing movement began to promote a nondual humanity, reconciling the mind–body split and individual–social union.

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