Tracing Genealogies

12 Pages·2003·0.04 MB·English

Keynote Address
Tracing Genealogies:
Toward an International Multicultural Anthropology1
James J. Fox
(The Australian National University)
Introduction
Tracing intellectual genealogies should be of particular interest to anthropologists. Gene-
alogies are recognized as a significant way to link generations, to recognize predecessors and to
trace origins. They are thus a primary basis for acknowledging participation in a tradition. The
Islam tradition of learning, for example, though its use of isnad gives central importance to
genealogy in affirming critical intellectual succession. And certainly in the much briefer tradition
of anthropology, which only began to take shape in the early twentieth century, anthropologists
were taught to make use of the ‘Genealogical Method’ as a means of research as well as a means
of understanding.
In tracing predecessors in the anthropological tradition, I would allude to a seminal figure—
indeed a founding figure—in the study of genealogy and its importance in determining social
continuity across generations. This founding figure in the anthropological tradition is the great
English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, who in 1750 wrote an ‘Essay on Collateral Consanguinity:
Its Limits, Extent and Duration’ to establish an understanding of the possibilities of defining
collateral kinship. His purpose in this essay was to demonstrate that over time the possibilities
of defining relations by consanguinity are infinite and could be considered not as a means of
definite exclusion but rather as a means of comprehensive inclusion.
It is not my intention, however, in this paper to propose so all-embracing a use of genealogy.
Instead I want to undertake a more modest use of genealogy to link my generation in the
anthropological tradition with proceeding generations. On various occasions, when I have been
called upon to give introductory lectures on the history of anthropology, I have generally
begun, in a similar fashion, by tracing various intellectual genealogies. Intellectual genealogies
acknowledge the transmission of ideas and can be as potentially far-reaching as genealogies
based on ever-widening consanguinity.
In my case, I would look to my first teachers at Harvard. When I first arrived at Harvard, I had
never heard of anthropology and was first introduced to the subject by Clyde Kluckholm who
offered a general education course comparing ancient Greece with pre-modern Japan and by
William Howell, who as physical anthropologist taught a general introduction to the field in the
1 This paper is based on the keynote address presented in the 1st Plenary Session of the 3rd International
Symposium of Journal ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA ‘Rebuilding Indonesia, a Nation of “Unity in Diversity”:
Toward a Multicultural Society’, Udayana University, Denpasar, Bali, July 16–19, 2002.
106 ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002
broadest terms comprising biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology. I
later studied under Douglas Oliver, Evon Vogt, Dorothy Lee and Benjamin Colby.
Still later as an undergraduate, I was introduced to British social anthropology by David
Maybury-Lewis and was allowed to take a yearlong graduate course in social anthropology with
Douglas Oliver. I did a summer’s fieldwork in a village called Huaylas in the mountains of Peru
and wrote my Honour’s thesis on Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. The thesis was an attempt
to reanalyze Franz Boas’s data on the Kwakiutl in order to describe the social organization and
ceremonial structures of these extraordinary people. As such, the thesis was a piece of intellec-
tual puzzle solving in the form of social archaeology.
In terms of intellectual genealogies, Kluckholm looked to Kroeber, though his background
was quite eclectic; Dorothy Lee looked to Whorf, Sapir and an entire tradition of American
linguistic anthropology; while Douglas Oliver who had studied in Vienna traced a portion of his
intellectual genealogy to the continental tradition of field anthropology. Evon Vogt and Ben-
jamin Colby came out of a tradition at Harvard with fieldwork interests that had begun in the
Southwest of the United States and had transferred to Mexico.
David Maybury-Lewis at Harvard was instrumental in directing me to his teacher at Oxford,
Rodney Needham with whom I studied for the Diploma, BLitt. and DPhil. It was Needham who
first interested me in the anthropology of Indonesia and then decided for me that I would do
fieldwork on Rote. Because of his interest in ‘prescriptive’ marriage systems, deriving from Van
Wouden on the one hand and Lévi-Strauss on the other, Needham was, at the time, directing
students to eastern Indonesia where such marriage systems were supposed to be found. When
I arrived in Oxford in 1962, Clark Cunningham was finishing his doctoral thesis on the Atoni Pah
Meto of West Timor. I was the next in line and Rote was as yet a relatively unknown island in
eastern Indonesia.2
In my first year in Oxford, as soon as Michaelmas term was over, I went to Paris in time to
attend the public lectures of Lévi-Strauss, Dumezil and Beneveniste given at the College de
France. At the time, Oxford anthropology was closely aligned with developments in French
anthropology. Whereas Needham’s BLitt supervisor had been Radcliffe-Brown, his DPhil super-
visor was Louis Dumont who taught at Oxford before taking up his position in Paris. Evans-
Pritchard who as the Professor was the dominant figure in the Institute of Social Anthropology
fostered the idea that much of the ‘intellectual capital’ for social anthropology was drawn from
the work of the Anneé Sociologique produced by Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, Hertz and others.
After completing the Diploma in Social Anthropology, I wrote a BLitt thesis on Rote and
Savu based on published materials as well as all archival materials that I could gather on these
two islands. In my search for this material I had to spend time in the Netherlands and as a
consequence, much of my second year at Oxford was spent living in Leiden where I was given an
introduction to the Leiden tradition of anthropology. During my first year at Oxford, Needham
had introduced me to Patrick de Josselin de Jong who had come to Oxford for a brief visit. Just as
Needham was my intellectual mentor in Oxford, de Josselin de Jong became my intellectual
mentor in Leiden.
2 A few years after me, Robert Barnes was sent to Lembata where he studied the Kedang and a few years after
him, Gregory Forth went to Sumba to study in Rindi. Cunningham, Barnes and Forth all found forms of
‘prescriptive alliance’ whereas no such systems were to be found on Rote or on Savu.
ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002 107
Were one to draw intellectual genealogies between Oxford, Paris and Leiden, these genealo-
gies would interlink. Needham’s intellectual genealogy (at the time that I was studying with him)
was oriented to Dumont, Lévi-Strauss and Leach; de Josselin de Jong’s to the Leiden tradition
that included his uncle, J.P.B.de Josselin de Jong but also Rassers and from these founding
figures to the French tradition as well to the American tradition of linguistic anthropology. G. W.
Locher was part to this group: he did fieldwork in Timor, though his fieldnotes were lost during
the war. His thesis at Leiden was on the Kwakiutl. Although I did not understand it at the time,
I did, in fact, make use of Locher’s Leiden thesis in writing my undergraduate thesis at Harvard.
Without fully realizing it, my discovery of Locher while I was an undergraduate at Harvard was
my first encounter with the Leiden tradition.
At Leiden, I attended some classes in Professor Teeuw’s introductory course in Indonesian.
The instructor in that class was Ismael Hussein who went on to become a distinguished Profes-
sor of literature in Malaysia. Unfortunately, I had very little time to study Indonesian in Leiden,
especially since I was concentrating on learning to read Dutch. So before finishing and submit-
ting my BLitt degree, I went to Cornell to do an intensive course in Indonesian supervised by
John Wolf. In drawing up a full genealogy, I would need to include these three linguists with
whom I continued contacts through much of my career. After Cornell, I returned to Oxford to
finish and submit my BLitt thesis before going to the field.
On my way to the field, I met another of the figures who became an intellectual mentor to me
for more than three decades of my research in Indonesia. This was R.M. Koentjaraningrat who
began in 1965 by assisting me with the most basic advice on how to write a proposal to do
research in Indonesia. His advice was both practical and sensible—and ultimately useful in
obtaining permission at a time when few foreigners were doing research of any kind in Indonesia.
For more than three decades from the time of my first visit to his house at the UI campus, I would
continue to visit him for advice and assistance. He had a genius for offering insights in an
understated manner. Although by training his genealogy drew from the American tradition of
anthropology, he was concerned to be comprehensive in what he took to be the anthropological
tradition. In this, he was endeavouring to lay the broadest possible foundations for anthropol-
ogy in Indonesia.
During my fieldwork, I gained another intellectual mentor. After having arrived on Rote, I
was taken by the camat of Rote Tengah, Ernst Amalo, who was also still considered the Manek
(or Raja) of Termanu, to meet the traditional leaders of the domain. As camat, he told me that he
had no idea what anthropologists do, but as the traditional ruler of Termanu, he wanted me to
write a ‘history’ of his domain. To do this, he therefore introduced me to a balding, slightly built
old man who held the position of Lord of the Earth (Dae Langak) in Termanu. He was known
simply by the name of his clan, Meno and invariably referred to as ‘Old Meno’ (Meno Tua).
Meno—as he told me sometime later—was both uncertain and suspicious of what it was
that I wanted to do. Neither he nor I knew what a ‘history’ of Termanu might be since the
narratives of the domain belonged to different clans and not to the ruler nor to the royal clan. It
was only after the birth of his grandson—his only grandson—that he decided to assist me
because he saw that the tape-recorder that I had brought with me, which was referred to as a
penangkap suara, would be able to transmit his ‘voice’ and others’ to future generations.
108 ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002
From then on he became for me my most profound mentor. He had a way of teaching which
I found at first frustrating but I soon came to realize that it was—and is—the most essential way
to teach. Meno would ‘guide’ me to an understanding but never make explicit what he was
guiding me toward. Thus it was always up to me to make connections and come to my own
understanding. Much of our time together involved circling an understanding and only when he
felt that I had achieved some degree of comprehension could we move on further.
Meno’s genealogy goes back to a mysterious past—to a figure known as Pada Lalais, the
origin point of social reckoning on the island of Rote. From a different perspective, Meno formed
part of a tradition of learning that was once widespread and is still recognizable: one based on an
apprenticeship in implicit cultural learning for which there exist no formal timelines, course
credits, or degrees. Learning from Meno was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I
had hoped on my second fieldwork to be able to continue my learning but unfortunately Meno
had died before I returned to Rote in 1973.
At that time, I had been teaching at Harvard and had gained yet another extraordinary
mentor: Roman Jacobson. Roman Jakobson was then a Professor at both Harvard and MIT. His
career had taken him from pre-revolutionary Russia to the United States. He had participated in
all of the most important developments in linguistics in the 20th century from the Russian Formal-
ists to the Prague Circle and then to the Copenhagen Schools of linguistics. During the Second
World War, he had held a position at the New School of Research in New York where he had a
decisive influence on the development of Lévi-Strauss’s analytic approach in anthropology and
he had found his way to MIT about the time that Chomsky was developing his generative
syntactic analysis of language.
I originally went to see Jakobson with questions about Rotenese ritual language and in
particular about a long ‘specimen’ text that I was working on as a first publication for the
Bijdragen (see Fox 1971). As I soon came to learn, the ‘canonical parallelism’ embodied in
Rotenese ritual language was one of his life—long intellectual interests. As I later discovered,
one of the first article he wrote was focused on the linguistic significance of parallelism. He even
went so far as to describe parallelism ‘as the double door to anthropology and linguistics’.
By this, he saw that the interests of both linguistic and anthropological analysis were
complementary in the semantic analysis of the ‘paradigmatic’—or, as he phrased it in his later
publications, the ‘metaphoric’ dimension of language. Unlike my informal learning sessions with
Meno, preparing to meet with Jakobson required an effort. Jakobson had developed an ap-
proach to linguistics in the course of a lifetime. His writings were extensive; they were coherent;
and they continued to develop. To make use of the opportunity of a discussion with him
required an understanding of what he had written and after a discussion with him a need to
search out and read all of the references he had referred to in the discussion. A number of us—
junior faculty and students—formed our own Jakobson discussion group to read and discuss
his work among ourselves. A great honour for me was being asked to contribute a paper on
‘Semantic Parallelism’ for a Festschrift for Jakobson on his 80th birthday (Fox 1977a). Jakobson
was someone who was truly intellectually peripatetic: his career was one of movement, so when
I told him that I had decided not to stay at Harvard but was going to the ANU, he was immedi-
ately understanding and supportive.
ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002 109
Australia provided me with one another powerful mentor: Derek Freeman. Derek Freeman
was, in many ways, a challenge to much that I had been taught and valued in anthropology. His
immediate intellectual genealogy was linked to figures in British social anthropology with whom
I had little connection, such as Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes. From the time I first read his
remarkable Report on the Iban, I had regarded Derek Freeman as an extraordinarily gifted eth-
nographer but by the time I arrived in Canberra, he had given up on ethnography and was more
concerned with what ethology could contribute to anthropology. Although he had a masterful
command of the languages of the peoples he studied, he was not interested in linguistic analysis
as such, nor could he see much value in comparative analysis based on a linguistic framework.
His concerns were with deeper biologically based social action. One thing we shared was a
suspicion of Boasian cultural analysis.
The challenge that Freeman posed—for me, at least—was one of reconciling his ideas with
what I had learned. Even coming to grips with his arguments was difficult. For one thing, Free-
man would insist that ‘anthropology is the study of error’ and that anthropologists spend too
much of their time glorifying such error. By this, he meant that not all cultural ideas can possibly
be correct and therefore humans by participation in different cultures, have a multiplicity of false
ideas about the nature of the world and their place in it. The Aztecs with their passion for human
sacrifice intended to ‘regenerate’ the world were a prime example, for him, of a society that had
grossly incorrect ideas about the nature of the world. For Freeman, the role of anthropologists
was not just to describe but also to evaluate what they encountered among the cultures of the
world. His insistence on Popperian ideas of science was fundamental to his position.
Yet despite the fact that we were often at opposite ends of a spectrum on many intellectual
issues but we never once—in my recollection—ever quarreled over these issues. I insisted to
him that as an ethnographer he had an obligation to continue to write about the Iban, whether or
not he regarded their ideas as correct. I maintained that his Iban ethnography, especially since it
related to a period in the 1950s before Iban society began to change dramatically, was one of his
most important contributions to knowledge. In the end, he bequeathed to me all of his notes on
the longest chant he recorded among the Iban, leaving me to find someone with the competence
to link the sequences in this chant to the accompanying ‘talking board’ that the chanter had
used in reciting it. He, too, would tacitly agree that ethnography, in its fullest form, was
anthropology’s critical contribution to its intellectual endeavour.
Ethnography in anthropology
At the time that I began my doctoral research, it was still possible to discern various tradi-
tions within the field. British social anthropology could still be distinguished to some degree
from American cultural anthropology. Within Britain, there were different stands of social an-
thropology: Oxford differed from Manchester and as indeed it differed from London. Similarly in
the Netherlands, Leiden endeavoured to distinguish itself from Amsterdam. In France, although
there were distinct individual approaches, Paris was focused on Lévi-Strauss. The research
groups that later formed around Dumont and Condominas had not yet emerged.
Koentjaraningrat was only beginning to set the foundations for anthropology in Indonesia:
he had a vision for anthropology that was broad and encompassing and he tried to point his
110 ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002
students in various directions for their doctorates so that each would return to Indonesia with a
different approach and perspective.
The United States continued to generate new intellectual fashions. When I began my study
of anthropology, ethnoscience was the ‘new ethnography’. By the time I returned to teach at
Harvard, fashions had shifted from structural anthropology to symbolic anthropology. Ecologi-
cal anthropology was distinctive; both ‘economic’ and ‘political’ anthropology were engaged in
their own internal debates. A commitment to some particular specialisation within anthropology
had become a critical mark of individual identification and a necessary label for research.
Since then shifting patterns of research have set so many new directions for anthropological
research that it is now difficult (and would perhaps be foolhardy) to distinguish distinctive
national traditions within the discipline. In this sense, anthropology has become both interna-
tional and specialized. As a result, many anthropologists tend to identify themselves according
to their subfield of interest—medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, political anthropo-
logy and so forth. This is the identification for which they were recruited to a university or
research institution and in which they generally do their primary research or offer their primary
teaching. It has indeed become impossible to comprehend the whole of the discipline.
Despite this specialization, I would argue that insistence on ethnography has remained as
critical feature of the discipline. Although the nature of ‘ethnography’ has changed dramati-
cally—no longer the holistic studies of communities like those of Tikopia or of the Nuer—and
will continue to change, the study of some ‘social formation’ through close participant involve-
ment has continued as part of the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists tend to identify
themselves by their fieldwork because such fieldwork generally sets the direction for their future
research.
When I was setting out to do my fieldwork, there was a tacit assumption that producing an
ethnography was the first step—one’s initial contribution—in the pursuit of more general an-
thropological research. If each ethnography was a building block in the larger edifice of anthro-
pological understanding, such building blocks were ultimately intended for the purpose of
comparison. Although each ethnography was interpretable in its own terms, it was supposed to
be read in relation to previous ethnographies and could best appreciated in relation to a corpus
of relevant works.
Evans-Pritchard would use the metaphor of the ‘grain of the wood’ to characterize an eth-
nography. On the analogy that each tree species is identifiable by the patterning of its wood—
a plank of mahogany can be distinguished from that of oak or cedar—so too an ethnography of
a particularly community or society was supposed to present the distinct configuration in the
social and cultural life of a particular community and thus convey what, by its very distinctive-
ness, was most interesting about that community. To be able to do this was the mark of a ‘good
ethnography’.
At the same time, Evans-Pritchard maintained that an ethnography ought also to provide as
much information about its subject as was possible to enable a reader to make a judgement on
the presentation or argument of the ethnography and thus to be able to draw other interpreta-
tions from it. As such, a requirement of a good ethnography was that it allows for multiple
readings—in spite of the persuasive craft of the ethnographer in presenting his or her percep-
ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002 111
tion of the ‘grain of the wood.’
In this sense, every ethnography is itself a comparative statement created in relation to
previous ethnographies and shaped to be read in relation to future ethnographies. It stems from
a comparative impetus and is part of a comparative tradition. It is for this reason I have urged
students to immerse themselves in the reading of ethnography, not simply for the pleasure of
reading about the distinct and remarkable communities of humankind, but to enhance one’s
understanding of the richness of the ethnographic tradition. The more one reads, the more one
can appreciate, from a comparative perspective, the next ethnography one reads.
With the comparative ethnographic tradition—what some would refer to as the tradition of
ethnology—there are innumerable distinct genre, sub-traditions, and strands of comparative
inquiry. Many of these traditions are based on a ‘style’ of ethnographic inquiry and on the
particular conceptual concerns of those regions in which the inquiry occurs.
The comparative ethnographic tradition at the Australian National University
In my case, as a graduate student, I was sent to the field to write an Oxford style ethnogra-
phy but the comparative concerns of this ethnography were those indicated by previous Leiden
anthropologists in their study of Indonesia. In translating F.A.E. Van Wouden’s Types of Social
Structure in Eastern Indonesia (1968), Rodney Needham clearly announced Oxford’s participa-
tion in the Leiden comparative endeavour.
In turn, when I took up my position at the Australian National University, I endeavoured to
carry forward this comparative enterprise by directing graduate students to the study of eastern
Indonesia. This has resulted in at least a dozen ethnographies of societies on Flores, Timor and
Maluku, each of which has added appreciably to our comparative understanding of the region
but also has contributed to a substantially more nuanced understanding of the nature of these
societies. Each of these theses, I would argue, can be read in relation to each other and as such
they have contributed to a rethinking of the ideas that originally prompted this comparative
project.
Given the increasing understanding of the societies of eastern Indonesia it became difficult
to accord them a privileged position in relation to other societies in Indonesia. It was the belief
of an earlier generation in Leiden that the conceptual and organizational structures of the soci-
eties of eastern Indonesia offered unique insights into earlier forms of social organization. Al-
though they indeed have the potential to offer such insights, they are by no means unique in this
possibility. Thus a comparative framework had inevitably to be expanded to embrace a wider
ambit. Stimulated by a large interdisciplinary project—The Comparative Austronesian Project—
that was convened at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the late 1980s, the
framework of comparison was expanded to the whole of the Austronesian-speaking world.
From the 1990s, Austronesian comparisons had begun to set the research agenda and it
became eminently possible to bring to bear insights from the ethnographies of the whole of
Indonesia and beyond. This resulted in a series of new publications: Inside Austronesian Houses:
Perspectives on Domestic Designs for Living (1993a), The Austronesians: Historical and Com-
parative Perspectives (1995), Origin, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian
Ethnography (1996), The Poetic Power of Place: Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian
112 ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002
Ideas of Locality (1997). Concepts based on the exploration of ideas of origin, ancestry, prece-
dence, and topogeny, originally developed in relation to the societies of eastern Indonesia, were
found to be of relevance in the analysis of other societies of the Austronesian-speaking world.
It also became pertinent to define the features of eastern Indonesian societies—or even
more specifically, the societies of Flores, Sumba, Timor and Maluku—that distinguished them
from other parts of the Austronesian-speaking world. With the contributions of both archaeolo-
gists and comparative linguists, it is becoming possible to formulate such inquiries within a
broad time framework.
In looking back at the theses—PhDs and MAs—that I have supervised at the ANU, how-
ever, I see that I have supervised far more theses on Java and Bali than I have on eastern
Indonesia. By rough count, I have supervised some 10 PhD theses on Java and 6 PhDs on Bali,3
plus another 12 MA theses on Java. These theses cover a great range of topics from the study
of the environment and resource management to the study of Islam in different social contexts.
I was fortunate on coming to the ANU in having a number of students whose interests were
focused on East Java—Raharjo Suwandi, Yulfita and Zamakhsyari Dhofier. Together and in very
different ways, these three students directed my interests to research in East Java and in the
early 1980s, by good fortunate, I was given the opportunity to do fieldwork in Jombang (see Fox
1989, 1991). This, in turn, added a new dimension to my research on Indonesia.
It is important to emphasize that the kind of comparative framework based on a linguistic
model that I have described for the Comparative Austronesian Project is only one among many
possible frameworks in which to undertake comparative anthropological inquiry. For some, a
comparative Austronesian framework poses questions of fundamental importance; but equally
so, it excludes other questions of pressing importance. The historical value of anthropology has
been its development of multiple comparative frameworks.
Pak Koen was the official sponsor of my first fieldwork on the island of Rote. When I went
to see him at his home in January 1965, I showed him my Oxford proposal for research. He quite
properly assured me that he had no objections to this kind of research, but he wanted me to
prepare another proposal that would focus at least partially on issues of local development. With
this admonition in mind, I made my way to Rote and was fortunate to find there a remarkable
system of resource management around which the whole of social life revolved. In many ways,
this proved to be ‘the grain of the wood’.
It is useful to recall that Evans-Pritchard’s classic study, The Nuer, is a study of what E–P
referred to as ‘modes of livelihood’. It was therefore not inappropriate to present, in a somewhat
similar fashion, the modes of livelihood of the Rotenese: their dependence on the lontar palm and
their cultural elaboration of ideas about the palm. This became the Harvest of the Palm: Ecologi-
cal Change in Eastern Indonesia (1977)/Panen Lontar: Perubahan Ekologi dalam Kehidupan
Masyarakat Pulau Rote dan Sawu (1996).
In retrospect, I see Harvest of the Palm both as study of resource management and as a
3 There is a certain irony in having supervised so many theses on Bali despite the fact that I myself have never
done fieldwork on island. What I know of Bali has come from the work of a succession of exceptionally able
students. I was fortunate in being able to work closely with Professor Antony Forge, who had done fieldwork on
Bali and was Head of Anthropology in the Faculties at the ANU when I arrived in Canberra. His death left a
ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002 113
study of local environmental history. By means of the use of Dutch East India Company ar-
chives, I was able to examine change in the Timor area over a period of some three hundred year.
Similarly when I had the opportunity to do research in East Java, the principal focus of my
research was on the management of rice production. Here, too, I could follow the course of the
Green Revolution at the village level but also draw upon Dutch colonial documentation that
traced the transformation of the Brantas through the nineteenth century (see Fox 1993b).
The study of ‘modes of livelihood’ either as resource management or a range of other topics
relating communities to their use of the environment is a well-established tradition. By my
translation of Mauss and Beuchat’s Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo (1979), I have tried to
indicate centrality of this concern not just within the British tradition but also within the Anneé
Sociologique tradition. Within Indonesia, the anthropological study of resource management
and the environment is of the greatest importance because it is of immediate relevance to the
nation. In many, if not most cases, it constitutes more than a simple academic endeavour: it
involves a commitment to and an engagement in a struggle for the future welfare and prosperity
of the nation.
Whether this research involves the study of integrated pest management, the impact of the
Green Revolution or the effect of logging on local communities, the policy consequences of
plantations and timber estates, conflicts over marine resources, the adaptation of transmigrants
to new environmental situations, the intra—and inter-island movement of peoples—all such
theses of the kind I have supervised at the ANU—are at the heart of the anthropological tradi-
tion. They are at once critical, comparative and engaged. In many cases, it is the anthropologist
who is most informed about the local consequences of national policies and can therefore give
‘voice’ to what is occurring. The comparative dimension is no less important. All such research
must be viewed not simply as a study of the ‘local’ but within a regional, national and global
perspective.
Yet another direction of personal research, prompted by fieldwork in East Java in the 1980s,
became the comparative study of Islam. The village in which I was studying rice production was
only a few kilometres from the sugar factory of Cukir and the Pesantren Tebuireng. At the time,
the ANU had begun to enroll a number of Indonesian students sponsored by AusAID coming
not from the university system, but from IAIN system. As part of an anthropological training
program, I began offering a reading course on the anthropology of Islam, beginning with another
classic text by Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. The purpose of the course was to read
a variety of ethnographies written with a focus on Islamic communities in different parts of the
world. Thus the emphasis was both ethnographic and comparative. Students later wrote their
theses as particular ethnographies, resulting in over a dozen studies at the MA and PhD level.
These theses demonstrate the great potential in Indonesia for the comparative study of Islam.
Directions for the future
In every generation of anthropology, the next generation defines and reformulates its re-
search directions. This task is a continuous one. Looking to the future, I would say that every
study of the ‘local’ which is the special concern of the anthropologist now requires a ‘global’
dimension. This is particularly true of the study of the environment and of any study of the way
114 ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA 69, 2002
in which local communities strive to manage their resources. New national regulations on au-
tonomy are of the utmost relevance to the way such communities are now attempting to develop.
Equally, however, the pressures of globalization and market demands for natural resources must
be taken into account. Similarly with the comparative study of Islam communities throughout
Indonesia, global influence and pressures from outside these communities are of great signifi-
cance and must be fully appreciated.
The world is undergoing an enormous transformation. One consequence of this transforma-
tion is a vast movement of peoples bringing with them their social traditions and encountering
new (and often alien) traditions in their place of settlement. No study would seem more important
to anthropology than the study of these migrations but nothing is more challenging to the
traditional methodologies of the anthropologist that have concentrated on the intimate acquain-
tance with communities in particular localities. What was previous ‘local’ is now dispersed, if not
‘dislocated’ and all the more difficult to access.
The work of the anthropologist can no longer be comfortably confined to a single location.
Strategies for research need to be formulated in a networked fashion. Even where communities
are localized, it is often the social connections between these communities that is significant to
their identity. If I may give an example of strategically focused research based on many sites, I
would point to the thesis by I Gde Pitana, In Search of Difference: Origin Groups, Status and
Identity in Contemporary Bali, which is a study of a variety of warga and their temple interrela-
tions throughout the whole of Bali.
In a recent paper entitled, ‘Asal Dari Mana’ in a volume, entitled Departures: How Societies
Distribute their People, I have drawn on the work of various demographers to sketch the
historical dispersal of once clearly defined ‘ethnic groups’ throughout the archipelago. In the
paper, I argue that in terms of historical migration, the single most remarkable site in Indonesia is
Jakarta itself. Jakarta has grown from a town with a population of a half million in the 1930s to a
conurbation of 12 million people at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Every so-called
ethnic group in Indonesia can be found in Jakarta, often linked with particular occupations—
Madurese saté sellers, Tegal warung owners, taxi-drivers and construction workers, but also
Sikanese wrecker operators. Jakarta could be regarded as an anthropologist’s paradise, a micro-
cosm of the nation. Whatever community one has studied in whatever region, one can usually
connect to members of that community in Jakarta and recognize the way in which they are
adapting to changing national conditions.
In the face of all of the pressures for critically relevant research, I would also put in a plea for
continuing research on ‘local knowledge’ including the recording of myths, oral history and
traditional poetry. Anthropologists have regularly recorded this local knowledge and made
considerable efforts to see that it is preserved for posterity. My own first fieldwork began at the
time when the tape recorder was becoming a tool for anthropological research. I still remember
that Old Meno’s main concern that that his traditional knowledge be preserved and transmitted
to subsequent generations. Such traditional knowledge represents a vast intellectual treasury,
which should be valued and maintained in a rapidly changing world.
I would end by noting that to a large extent, the video-recorder has now replaced the tape-
record as one of the principal instruments of anthropological research. When I went with Tim
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