Research Background: I take an ethnographic approach to apparently abstract concepts such as “power,” “knowledge,” “magic,” and “religion” as they develop and are lived in everyday experience or in discourse. Conflicts in points of view across cultural/political divides particularly engage my attention. My research often includes analyses of colonial situations: of interactions between peoples in the evolving relations of power that marked European expansion and of the problems of translation—whether in the literal sense, or in a more extended sense of practices of mediation across differences—that ensued. But I am less interested in the past per se than in the making of the present. I see my work as contributing to the development of postcolonial theory: to efforts to rethink the world by examining critically the frameworks, languages, and conditions created in the colonial era. At the same time, I am interested in the on-going formation and transformation of local identities in relation to more extended networks of power. The ethnographic and historical focus of my research is Indonesia. My first book looked at accounts of relations between Klungkung, Bali’s paramount kingdom, and the Dutch colonial state, from the mid-19th century. Moving between memories in Klungkung in the 19th century and reports by colonial officers made it clear that distinct (and changing) understandings of power informed the course of events. I’ve written on relations of power and knowledge in Dutch colonialism; cultural politics in Bali, particularly the effects of state discourses about religion, modernity and history; and the production of knowledge, including anthropological knowledge. Present Research:I am currently working on a book about images of magic and the formation of modern European subjectivities, focused in part on the Dutch East Indies. My goal is to rethink the way the category “magic” is used to translate practices and rhetoric in other cultures, and the theoretical problems in which such translations end up enmeshing anthropologists. To this end, I am involved in a study of popular and expert European discourses about magic as they developed in the era of high imperialism (1870s-1930s). I aim to recuperate some of the multiple debates and images surrounding “magic” at the time of anthropology’s birth as a discipline and examine to what extent what emerged from this period continues to inform anthropological accounts of non-European cultures. A second project, still in the planning phase, concerns the way Balinese came to think of themselves “Hindu” through interactions with outsiders in the context of colonialism and the formation of the Indonesian state. Selected Recent Publications: 2003 "Hidden Forces: Colonialism and the Politics of Magic in the
Netherlands East Indies." in B. Meyer and P. Pels (eds.) Magic
and Modernity:Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, Stanford University
Press 1999 Making Local History in New Order Bali: Public Culture and the Politics of the Past, pp.51-89 in R. Rubinstein and L. Connor (eds.) Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century, University of Hawaii Press. 1995 Doors of Perception: Power and Representation in Bali. Cultural Anthropology 10(4):472-508 1995 Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1994 Object Lessons: Dutch Colonialism and the Looting of Bali. History and Anthropology 6(4):347-370 Classes Taught |
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