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Elizabeth Pisani, fluent in multiple languages including Indonesian and French, holds degrees in classical Chinese, medical demography, and infectious disease epidemiology. She served as a correspondent for Reuters and The Economist in Indonesia from 1988 to 1991, worked with the Indonesian Ministry of Health as an epidemiologist from 2001 to 2005, and traveled through the Indonesian archipelago from 2011 to 2012. She also authored The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS.
Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago, consisting of 13,500 islands, home to 360 ethnic groups speaking 719 languages. It possesses abundant natural resources and unparalleled cultural diversity and heterogeneity. Having long suffered from colonial exploitation and conflict, with a complex colonial history and arduous modernization process, combined with its geographical characteristics resulting in multi-ethnicity, multilingualism, and multi-religiousness, understanding it is particularly difficult. Elizabeth Pisani traveled throughout the Indonesian islands as a foreign correspondent and AIDS epidemiologist, deeply observing and comprehending this mysterious and changing country at the wondrous intersection of modernity and tradition. She delves into Indonesia's modern history, political system, ethnic and religious identities, rigid bureaucracy, and traditional "viscous" culture, piecing together fragments of her travels into a complete portrait of Indonesia.