“This is a rare case of a scholar taking seriously the Islamic religious sentiments that underlie a local Southeast Asian artistic tradition.””

“The Encoded Cirebon Mask is a deeply informed presentation of a remarkable performance tradition from Java. The rich ethnographic insights, based on years of experience, are enhanced by the author’s thoughtful reflections on Indonesian Sufi connections. This is a valuable contribution that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the culture and spiritual traditions of Southeast Asia, or the intersection of living art and religion.””

“The scholarship [Ross] delves into is formidable..””

“The study of the arts and performance in Java has often tended to portray these aesthetic traditions as legacies of a distant and pre-Islamic culture. In this sumptuously illustrated and beautifully written social history, Laurie Margot Ross explores one of the richest of Java’s performance traditions. She reveals how this deeply gendered dance tradition, in which a woman or man dances with masks that portray male characters, has systematic links to key elements of Islamic mysticism (tasawwuf). As with Islamic traditions in Indonesia as a whole, the masked dance tradition has also been swept up and transformed by changes in Islamic religious authority and practice since the late nineteenth century. The story Ross tells speaks powerfully to central questions in the study of Islam and the arts, and to equally compelling questions of what Islam in Java was and is today becoming. In short, this is one of the finest and most moving works on the Islamic arts in Southeast Asia that I have ever read.””

“Ross has given us a beautifully written and illustrated book, full of new information and profound insights… gleaned from [her] many years of multi-sited, methodologically diverse research. She illuminates her close examination of a variety of artifacts and her intensive participant-observation of topeng training and performances with far-ranging ethnographic and archival research. Ross’s explication of topeng’s embroilments with Indonesian politics and Indonesian discourses of Islam extends well beyond the work of previous researchers, whose focus on mysticism and continuities in topeng performance often obscured the tradition’s remarkable flexibility in the face of calamitous changes.””