Jeffrey Hadler, an assistant professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies, has received a Townsend Fellowship for Alternative Islams in Southeast Asia: Islamic Matriliny and Ideas of Home, a study of the world’s largest matrilineal Muslim society, the Minangkabau, who live in the highlands of western Sumatra, Indonesia. When completed, Hadler’s book will trace the changing definitions of intimacy, gender, family relationships, and home in a locale that is often seen as the periphery of the Islamic World. It will analyze local interpretations and negotiations of identity and Islam in a society that maintained Sufi and pre-Islamic traditions and allowed women control over the household. At the same time, since the Minangkabau also became a proving ground for broader theories and assumptions, particularly among Marxists and feminists, Hadler’s study demonstrates how the interactions of anthropological theory and anthropological object illuminate the colonial relationship between anthropology and empire, constructions of identity and modernity, and the tensions underlying much of modern postcolonial theory.