Area of Interest:
religion, intellectual property law, art and artisan practices, global connections, minorities and states, language and media, migration and conflict, subsistence; Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia
Education:
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Illinois, 1992
Research & Activities:
Caught by an accident of birth between different ancestries, religions, and social classes, I have always been interested in people caught between disjunctive cultural milieus and social expectations. Much of my research pivots around issues of classification, categories and their reformulation. My international research has included fieldwork among people who experienced colonial-era religious conversions, mixed marriages, and culturally distinct visions of aesthetic expressions, property law, and authority over production practices. I have worked in museums and with non-profit NGOs, as well as for various university disciplines and departments, including Anthropology, Asian Studies, Religious Studies, International Studies, and Education.
A youthful trip around the world led me to visit South, Southeast, and East Asia. The puzzles I encountered during a month spent in Indonesia led me to graduate studies in Anthropology. I specialize in Southeast Asia, primarily Indonesia, although I have done comparative research in the Southeast Asian nations of the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Singapore. I also have visited the East Asian nations of Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Macau (both now part of the People’s Republic of China).
My dissertation concerned Christian ethnic minorities living on an outer island in the most populous Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia. With 245 million citizens and a complex maritime trade history, Indonesia defies many common assumptions about the geographic and demographic center of Islam. The dilemmas of rural highland groups on the island of Sulawesi, too pagan and obdurate for their European missionary saviors, but too Christian and colonial for their majority Muslim national leaders, are the subject of my early academic articles and first ethnographic book. I also investigated the Southeast-East Asian relationship during World War II, which disrupted earlier patterns of European colonialism and hurried Indonesia on the path towards independence. This transnational Asian relationship was built upon radically different uses for the mineral mica.
When the Indonesian province where I studied for three years of fieldwork became caught in post-Suharto violence between Muslim and Christian factions starting in late 1998, I had a direct personal concern for groups who had been peaceful, inter-married, and kin long before, and after, their ancestors had become Muslim or Christian. This warranted a story of postcolonial state policies, uneven national development, new forms of cash cropping, and militarized trans-national networks, not the chestnut of inevitable religious incompatibility or civilization clashes.
A classificatory problem I have studied throughout my anthropological career includes the overlapping categories of art, aesthetic expression, ritual practice, cosmology, and ethnographic artifact. In the late 1980s, I conducted Museum collections research and curatorial activities at the Anthropology Department of National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and at the University Museum, Philadelphia.
Although the field of anthropology has an enduring concern with material culture, my interest is piqued by the corresponding intangibles: unwritten songs, tunes, dramatic stories, dances, and designs that move across tangible idioms such as textiles, carving, and paintings.
Between 2005 and 2007, I was fortunate to join an international multidisciplinary team of legal scholars, performance artists, ethnomusicologists, journalists, and NGO community activists, which was charged to investigate the possible impacts of new intellectual and cultural property law initiatives on Indonesian regional arts, artists, and audiences.
The ethnographic survey and conversations we held with Indonesian artists, audiences, and leaders from roughly a dozen ethnic regions in eight Indonesian provinces spurred my interest in broader theoretical questions about creativity, imitation, and regimes of authority and cultural claims of ownership that transcend the seemingly straightforward legal policy issues of globally expanding intellectual property law. I observed that Indonesian artists in many idioms from music to textiles create neither individualistically nor communally, but rather locate their collaborative discipline, personal innovative contributions, and inspiration to achieve within a social knowledge trajectory that exists beyond any living custodian of their heritage.
A 2010-2011 Writing Fellowship at the National Humanities Center supported my work on a book manuscript about how new intellectual and cultural property solutions for indigenous and Global South nations ask us to re-imagine the task of protecting all cultural identity practices in proprietary ways. I argue that conventional legal models often bypass important questions about varying concepts of ethical production, creativity, imitation, personhood, and the local stewardship of cultural expressions in an increasingly transnational business environment.
My North American research endeavors and interests have included the study of Scottish, African, and indigenous settlers in the Fort Bragg area of North Carolina; also, geographically varied working conditions for migrants, household partners, and long-term temporary laborers, an oxymoron of increasing ubiquity. Like many cultural anthropologists, I am intrigued by what others unconsciously take for granted, or studiously ignore. One of my recently published essays concerns a cross-cultural analysis of those familiar words, “please” and “thanks.”
Selected Publications:
2011 “Masalah Kepemilikan Budaya: Hak Kekayaan Intelektual Global dan Kesenian Masyarakat Adat di Indonesia” (Problems of Cultural Ownership: Global Intellectual Property Law and Traditional Community Arts in Indonesia). In Kegalauan Identitas: Agama, Etnisitas, dan Kewarganegaraan pada Masa Pasca-Order Baru, (Contested Identities: Religion, Politics of Rights, and Citizenship in Post-New Order Indonesia), Fadjar Thufail and Martin Ramstedt, ed., Pp.195-217. Jakarta, Indonesia: Grasindo.
2010 “O commons local como o meio-termo ausente nos debates sobre conhecimentos nativos e leis de propriedade intellectual” (The Local Commons as a Missing Middle in Debates over Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property Law,)” in Do Regime de Propriede Intelectual: Estudos Antropológicos (Anthropological Studies of Intellectual Property Regimes), Ondina Fachel Leal and Rebeca Hennemann Vergara de Souza, ed. Pp. 243-261. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Tomo Editorial (ISBN 978-85-86225-65-9).
2008 “Reconsidering Displacement and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) 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 “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 “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.
2005 "Mass Media Fragmentation and Narratives of Violent Action in Sulawesi’s Poso Conflict," Indonesia 79 (April 2005): 1-55.
2003 “Missions and Omissions of the Supernatural: Indigenous Cosmologies and the Legitimisation of ‘Religion’ in Indonesia,” Anthropological Forum 13(2): 131-140.
2003 "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 "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.
2001 "Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi: Where People Eat Fish and Fish Eat People." Indonesia 72 (October 2001): 45-79.
1999 "The Currency of Indonesian Regional Textiles: Aesthetic Politics in Local, Transnational, and International Emblems." Ethnos 64(2): 151-169.
1996 "Suppressed and Revised Performances: Raego' Songs of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia." Ethnomusicology 40(3): 413-439.
1996 "Twisting the Gift: Translating Precolonial into Colonial Exchanges in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia." American Ethnologist 23(1): 43-60.
1996 "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 "`Japanese Time' and the Mica Mine: Experiences of the Occupation in the Western Central Sulawesi Highlands." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27(1): 49-63.
Courses I have planned and taught include:
"Literature and Society in Southeast Asia” (ASIA/CMPL 151)
“Directions in Anthropology” (ANTH 297)
“Ethnography and Life Stories” (ANTH 285)
“Anthropology through Expressive Cultures” (ANTH 120)
“Global Connections in Southeast Asia” (ANTH 199, sec. 71)
“Anthropology and Religion” (ANTH 142/REL 142/FOLK 142)
“Religious Movements across Cultures and States” (RELI 5000/ANTH 5202) East Carolina U
“Communication across Cultures” (INTL 6005/ANTH 5202) ECU
“Language and Culture” (ANTH 4000/ANTH 5202) ECU
“Cultures of East and Southeast Asia” (ANTH 3005) ECU
“Honors Introduction to Anthropology” (ANTH 1000, sec. 299) ECU
“Introduction to Anthropology” (ANTH 1000; Four-field approach) ECU
“Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” (ANTH 100) University of Illinois
“Peoples of the World: Introduction to Ethnography” (ANTH 200) University of Illinois
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