UNC Research Collaborator Affiliate
Email: aragon2(@)email.unc.edu
Phone: 919-962-1243
Area of Interest:
Anthropology of religion, intellectual property law, and arts production; (post)colonialism, ethnic minorities and state relations; global connections and heritage nationalism; migration and conflict; language and media; subsistence and exchange; ecology and relationality; health; gendered experiences; Southeast Asia, Indonesia.
Education:
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Illinois, 1992
M.A. Communications, University of Pennsylvania
Professional Background:
I am a sociocultural anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Illinois; M.A., Communications, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania) with broad interests in human worldviews and values as they are classified and communicated through the institutions of religion, customary practices, law, and arts. My research focuses on Indonesia’s (post)colonial development, ethnoreligious pluralism, and material culture. I have received awards from US-Fulbright, National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, American Council of Learned Societies, and Carolina Asia Center.
My 2022 article “Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Arts and Religious Freedom Debates” is published in Anthropological Forum 32(1): 20-40. I wrote an essay on historical highland Sulawesi textiles for the illustrated volume, Textiles of Indonesia: The Thomas Murray Collection (Prestel Verlag, 2022). I have published over sixty essays in academic journals and edited volumes, and been author on three books and many public articles. My current book manuscript is Balance and Betterment: Diversity in Indonesian Regional Arts and Intellectual Property Law.
My early book Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia (2000, Hawai’i) focused on Central Sulawesi and pioneered the anthropology of Christianity. I also co-curated and co-authored Beyond the Java Sea: Art of Indonesia’s Outer Islands (with Paul M. Taylor; 1991, Abrams) for the National Museum of National History, Smithsonian Institution.
For the University of North Carolina, I taught Anthropology and Asian Studies courses on anthropological theory, ethnographic methods, artisanship, popular culture, human habitats, and more.
Research & Activities:
My primary geographic region of specialization is Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. My research is organized around questions about changing processes and practices of cultural expression, especially how local norms are transformed or sustained in response to the extension of categories and political institutions from power centers to the periphery.
I began fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia, researching the consequences of Protestant missionization and conversion of upland swidden rice farmers whose descendants live in what is currently the world’s most populous Muslim nation. These highlanders taught me how land and local knowledge was not owned outright by individual humans. Rather, they were subject to distributed authority, differential patterns of use, and ritual relations with non-humans. Beginning in1998, I investigated and analyzed Indonesia’s regional tensions and religious conflicts, which are based in long-standing inequities as well as more recent economic and political policies.
I am currently working on articles and a book drawing on Indonesian fieldwork that I began between 2005 and 2007 with an international team of legal scholars, performance artists, ethnomusicologists, and NGO community activists. The research team was tasked to investigate the possible impact of intellectual and cultural property law initiatives on Indonesian regional arts, artists, and community audiences.
This multi-sited and multi-disciplinary research advances an anthropological perspective on intellectual and cultural property models as they become adopted and unexpectedly melded outside of their Euro-American origins. New legal doctrines tacitly divide “traditional” from “modern” citizens according to the types of arts they produce and the claims they are willing to make about individual authorship.
In Indonesia, as in much of the world, collaborative creativity in the service of folkloric or “traditional” cultural expressions has, until now, been practiced in what can be called intellectual property’s negative space. My work seeks to reexamine local logics and evaluations of creativity along with the new socioeconomic processes that surround the production of tangible and intangible cultural expressions. I argue that creative expressions such as myths, dances, songs, graphic designs, and textiles are becoming subject to revised nationalist purposes and proprietary legal regimes that stand in unsettling opposition to anthropology’s contemporary efforts to define historically intertwined cultures and their bearers as relational, situated, fluid, and transformative.
Selected Publications:
2022, “Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Art, and Religious Freedom Debates” Anthropological Forum 32(1):20-40. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/C7QRAKBAVVYS8RZD5FQQ/full?target=10.1080/00664677.2022.2042793
2021, “Regulating Religion and Recognizing ‘Animist Beliefs’ in Indonesian Law and Life.” In Religious Pluralism in Indonesia: Threats and Opportunities for Democracy, Chiara Formichi, ed., Pp. 135-162. Ithaca, NY: SEAP, Cornell University Press.
2021, “Sulawesi,” In Textiles of Indonesia: The Thomas Murray Collection, pp. 256-269; 280-313; 322-347. Munich and London: Prestel Verlag.
2021 [1996], “Masa Jepang dan Tambang Mika: Pengalaman-pengalaman Pendudukan di Dataran Tinggi Sulawesi Tengah” Arianto Sangadji, trans. LOBO 1(3): 99-115. https://lobo.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/issue/view/7.
2021 Lorraine V. Aragon and Susan Long, “Clark E. Cunningham’s Cutting-Edge Contributions to Research on Biomedical Appropriation in Southeast Asia” Moussons 38: 193-202, Special Issue on: The Appropriation of Biomedicine in Southeast Asia, Meriem M’Zoughi, ed.
2018, “Who Owns the World? Recognizing the Repressed Small Gods of Southeast Asia.” In Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, Michael Ostling, ed., Pp. 277-299. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
2014, “Uncovering the Trauma of Indonesia’s Cold War Killing Fields,” Film review of 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy directed by Robert Lemelson. Current Anthropology 55(4): 493-494.
2013, “Development Strategies, Religious Relations, and Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi: A Cautionary Tale,” In Development Strategies, Identities, and Conflict in Asia, William Ascher and Natalia Mirovitskaya, ed., Pp. 153-182. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2011 Essays on Sulawesi artifacts, in Paths of Origins: The Austronesian Heritage in the Collections of the National Museum of the Philippines, The Museum Nasional Indonesia, and The Netherlands Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Purissima Benitez-Johannot, ed. Pp. 226-235. Singapore: ArtPostAsia.
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). InKegalauan 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 “Expanding Spiritual Territories: Owners of the Land, Missionization, and Migration in Central Sulawesi.” InFounder’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:
“Artisans and Global Culture” (HNRS/ANTH 356)
“Anthropological Perspectives on Society and Culture” (ANTH 294)
“Directions in Anthropology” (ANTH 297)
“Literature and Society in Southeast Asia” (ASIA/CMPL 151)
“Popular Culture in Modern Southeast Asia (ASIA 252)
“Culture and Power in Southeast Asia” (ANTH/ASIA/FOLK 429)
“Habitat and Humanity” (ANTH 123)
“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