Area of Interest:

religion, intellectual and cultural property law, arts, politics of scale, language, minorities, media, conflict and displacement; Southeast Asia, Indonesia.

Education:

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. 1992 Anthropology

University of Pennsylvania, M.A. Anneberg School of Communications

Research & Activities:

Research Experience

Field research in Central Sulawesi and other areas of Indonesia 1979, 1984, 1986-1989, 1993, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

Comparative research in India, 1979; Singapore, 1979, 1986-1989, 2004; Hong Kong, 1979, 1986-1989; 1999; Thailand 1986-1989; Japan 1979, 1984; Philippines 2003; Malaysia 2004.

Archival research in The Netherlands concerning Indonesia (former Dutch East Indies) 1986, 1987, 1989, 2004.

Comparative research in Mexico (Yucatan) 1991 and highland Bolivia 1995, 2006.

Oral history research on the pre-military occupation of Fort Bragg lands in North Carolina, 1998-1999.

Past and Present Research Projects:

In my research, I have sought to connect the cognitive and experiential aspects of religion, art, and communication with broader political economy constraints and state doctrines. My doctoral fieldwork in Central Sulawesi focused on the history of Protestant missions and state projects that planned to “civilize” and modernize highland ethnic minorities that had not converted to Islam before the Dutch colonial period. I examined how religious and political economy aims became mixed on the part of the rulers and the ruled, with consequent negotiations and compromises in cosmology and practices.

Additionally, I researched Indonesian village arts and their attempted regulation by the Dutch colonial and Indonesian states. Upon returning from Indonesia in 1989, I co-curated “Beyond the Java Sea,” a traveling exhibit on Indonesian arts for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Following the fall of President Suharto’s regime in 1998, the province of Central Sulawesi became the site of Christian-Muslim violence. Poso District’s communal conflict, paralleling several others in Indonesia, escalated in 2000. Periodic revenge attacks and entanglements with immigrant fighters continued for several years. My 1999-2007 investigation of the Poso conflict includes initial documentation and holistic analyses of historic inequities, resource competition, mass media framings, shifting group alliances and rationales, displacement experiences, and reconciliation efforts by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Beginning in 2005, I returned to the topic of arts, joining a multinational, multi-disciplinary research team investigating the possible effects of new intellectual and cultural property law initiatives on Indonesian regional arts, artists, and audiences. 

Our team conversed with artists in communities from ten ethnic regions in eight provinces. It was that effort to consider how new intellectual property laws might affect the social relations of artists and their audiences that spurred my interest in the broader theoretical questions that transcend the seemingly straightforward legal policy issues of intellectual property law. I observed that Indonesian artists in many idioms from music to textiles create neither individually nor “communally,” but rather locate their discipline, personal innovative contributions, and inspiration to achieve within larger social knowledge traditions that exist beyond any living custodian of their heritage.

My current writing project aims to extend anthropology of law, indigenous knowledge, and art scholarship by exploring how the assignment of exclusive legal property ownership, individual or communal, to works of locally shared cultural idioms introduces parochialism to our understanding of human creative processes and exchanges. The research highlights how ritual process values and rhetoric, overseen by local norms of access and distributed authority, are recast by international guidelines and new laws as material property and ownership values assigned to individuals or corporate groups.

Teaching

I have taught courses in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography, Four-field General Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology of Art, Literature and Society in Southeast Asia, and Global Connections in Southeast Asia. Currently I am teaching Directions in Anthropology, the capstone course for Anthropology majors.

I also have taught area courses on Peoples of East and Southeast Asia, as well as undergraduate and graduate seminars for Religious Studies and International Studies Programs.

Selected Publications:

Books and Edited Volumes

2000, Lorraine V. Aragon, Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 384 pages. 

1999, Lorraine V. Aragon and Susan D. Russell, ed. Structuralism's Transformations: Order and Revision in Indonesian and Malaysian Societies. Tempe: Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph Series Press, 464 pages. 

1991, Paul M. Taylor and Lorraine V. Aragon, Beyond the Java Sea: Art of Indonesia's Outer Islands. Wash, D.C. and N.Y.: National Museum of Natural History and Abrams Press, 319 pages.

Refereed Journal Articles

Forthcoming, Lorraine V. Aragon and James Leach, “Arts and Owners: Intellectual Property Law and the Politics of Scale in Indonesian Arts,” American Ethnologist, accepted 2008. 

2005, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Mass Media Fragmentation and Narratives of Violent Action in Sulawesi’s Poso Conflict," Indonesia 79 (April 2005): 1-55. 

2003, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Missions and Omissions of the Supernatural: Indigenous Cosmologies and the Legitimisation of ‘Religion’ in Indonesia,” Anthropological Forum 13(2): 131-140.

2001, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi: Where People Eat Fish and Fish Eat People." Indonesia 72 (October 2001): 45-79.

1999, Lorraine V. Aragon, "The Currency of Indonesian Regional Textiles: Aesthetic Politics in Local, Transnational, and International Emblems." Ethnos 64(2): 151-169.

1996, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Twisting the Gift: Translating Precolonial into Colonial Exchanges in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia." American Ethnologist 23(1): 43-60.

1996, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Suppressed and Revised Performances: Raego' Songs of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia." Ethnomusicology 40(3): 413-439.

1996, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Reorganizing the Cosmology: The Reinterpretation of Deities and Religious Practice by Protestants in Central Sulawesi." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27(2): 350-373.

1996, Lorraine V. Aragon, "`Japanese Time' and the Mica Mine: Experiences of  Occupation in the Western Central Sulawesi Highlands." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27(1): 49-63.

1992, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Revised Rituals in Central Sulawesi: The Maintenance of Traditional Cosmological Concepts in the Face of Allegiance to World Religions." Anthropological Forum 6(3): 271-84.

Book Chapters

Forthcoming, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Distant Processes II: The Global Economy, Deforestation, and Violence in Outer Island Indonesia,” In Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the Start of the Millennium, Barbara Rose Johnston, ed. Revised 2^nd Edition. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Forthcoming, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Central Sulawesi’s Protestants, Their Muslim Rivals, and the Labile State,” in Christianity in the Malay World, Susanne Schröter, ed.

Forthcoming, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Spirit Owners’ Challenges to Art, Intellectual Property, and Governance in Indonesia,” in The Social Lives of Spirits, Tracy Luedke and John Cinnamon, ed.

2008, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Reconsidering Displacement and Internally Displaced Persons from Poso,” in Conflict, Violence, and Displacement in Indonesia: Dynamics, Patterns, and Experiences, Eva-Lotta Hedman, ed., pp.173-205. Ithaca: Cornell University SEAP Publications.

2007, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Elite Competition in Central Sulawesi,” in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Soeharto Indonesia, Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry Van Klinken, ed. Pp.39-66. Leiden: KITLV.

2006, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Bird Omens and Metaphors in Central Sulawesi Ritual Songs,” in Les Messagers Divins: Aspects Esthétiques et Symboliques des Oiseaux en Asie du Sud-Est / Divine Messengers: Bird Symbolism and Aesthetics in Southeast Asia, Pierre LeRoux and Bernard Sellato, ed. Pp. 613-635. Paris and Marseilles: Connaissances et Savoirs / SevenOrients / IRASEC.

2003, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Expanding Spiritual Territories: Owners of the Land, Missionization, and Migration in Central Sulawesi" in Founder's Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, Identity, Nicola Tannenbaum and C.A. Kammerer, ed., pp.113-133. New Haven:Yale SEAP Monograph Series.

2002, Lorraine V. Aragon, “Migrasi, Komoditi Expor, dan Sejarah Perubahan Hak Pemakaian Tanah di Sulawesi Tengah” (Migration, Cash Crops, and Historical Changes in Land Ownership Rights in Central Sulawesi)” in Berebut Tanah: Beberapa Kajian Berspektif Kampus dan Kampung (Land Struggles: Academic and Village Perspectives), Anu Lounela and R. Yando Zakaria, ed., pp.271-282. Yogyakarta: InsistPress.

2002, Lorraine V. Aragon, "In Pursuit of Mica: The Japanese and Highland Minorities in Sulawesi." in Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire, Paul H. Kratoska, ed., pp.81-96. London: RoutledgeCurzon.

2002, Dale L. Hutchinson and Lorraine V. Aragon,  "Collective Burials and Community Memories: Interpreting the Placement of the Dead in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern United States with Reference to Ethnographic Cases from Indonesia," in The Space and Place of Death, Helaine Silverman and David Small, ed., pp.26-54. Arlington, VA: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association No.11.

1997, Lorraine V. Aragon, "Distant Processes: The Global Economy and Outer Island Development in Indonesia," in Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millennium, Barbara R. Johnston, ed., pp.26-42. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. [Cover photograph by Lorraine V. Aragon.]