Draft: 21 July 2020
Memories of My Time at the ANU
James J. Fox
When, on a visit to the ANU in 1974, I was offered a Professorial Fellowship in the Research School of Pacific Studies, Professor Anthony Low, who was then the Director of the School, told me that he expected me to create a strong focus on Indonesia in the Department of Anthropology. This is what I set out to do when I arrived to take up my position in October of 1975.
At the time I was unaware that Anthropology’s founding Professor, Siegfried Nadel, had planned to focus a significant portion of the Department’s research on Indonesia and the
Department in an earlier phase had recruited a number of research students to do fieldwork mainly in Sumatra. He also recruited Derek Freeman who had done brilliant ethnographic research among the Iban of Borneo as part of his plans for the Department. But Derek had shifted his interests to Samoa, where he had also done research, and had turned his theoretical interests in other directions.
Derek had played a crucial part in persuading to come to the ANU. I regarded his study, Report on the Iban, as one of the great ethnographic monographs of the 20th century, but in our conversations, he assured me that his interests were no longer in ethnography but in the study of the biological bases of human behaviour. He gave me his full support to develop ethnographic research on Indonesia.
When I arrived in Canberra, Anthony Forge had already taken up the Foundation Professorship in Anthropology in the Faculties. We had met two years before in Bali while he was doing fieldwork there and I was on my way for more fieldwork in eastern Indonesia – on Rote, Savu and Ndao, islands off the western tip of Timor. Antony was also eager to develop more ANU research on Indonesia. So, there could be, and indeed was, close cooperation between the Research School and the Faculties on this effort.
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In discussions that I had had with Clifford Geertz, he referred to eastern Indonesia as an ethnographic “blackhole” and it was this situation that I set out to change when I arrived at the ANU. One of the features of the Research School that most impressed me coming from
Harvard was that all PhD students were designated as ‘Research Scholars’. Their work was an integral component of the Department’s research efforts and they were given the highest
priority, especially in the allocation of Departmental funding for fieldwork. A Research
Scholar’s seminar presentations were critical to the Department’s on-going seminars.
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The first student I was able to recruit to the Department was Douglas Lewis who went off to
Flores and did excellent research on the then unknown population of Tana Ai’ in central east
Flores. He became one of a long line of students of mine to work on Flores. At Harvard, I had previously supervised the research of a student, John Gordon, who worked among the Manggarai of Flores. As it happened, he eventually made his way to teach in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. Over the years at the ANU, I went on to supervise a good number of research scholar who did fieldwork on other little known populations on Flores: Satoshi Nakagawa on Endeh, Eriko Aoki, his wife, on the Wologai of Lio, Penny Graham on the Lewotala in the Lamaholot region of eastern Flores, Michael Vischer on the Koa of Palue, Andrea Molnar on the Hoga Sara of Nggada and Philippus Tule on Keo of central Flores The work of these eight students over the course of my time at the ANU spanned the island from west to east and made it one of the better known islands in eastern Indonesia.
Other research scholars followed with a variety of projects: Patrick Guinness doing research in Yogyakarta and Kathy Robinson researching a population dominated by a massive mining operation in Sulawesi, David Stuart-Fox on Pura Besakih on Bali, Greg Acciaioli on a Bugis community in central Sulawesi and Andrew McWilliam on a community of Atoin Pah Meto of central Timor. Most of these students went on to teach at the ANU or at other Australian universities.
Thanks to Anthony Forge, I was also given the opportunity to supervise three students in the Faculties: Rahajo Suwandi and his wife Yulfita who did their research in Blitar on Java and Zamaksyari Dhofier who did his research on the Pesantren Tebuireng in Jombang on Java. These students had an enormous impact on my career because they introduced me to Java and their influence prompted me to undertake fieldwork on Java as a key area of my research interest.
I was able to visit Raharjo and Yulfita in the field. Raharjo who was doing his research on a
millenarian ‘Ratu Adil’ movement led by a charismatic elder known as Embah Wali, insisted
that I arrive at a specific time in Blitar where he was doing his research. I did as he instructed and arrived to join a huge celebration organized by the group, fulfilling a prophesy about the return of the departed balanda. I was accepted as a member of the group – a genuine ‘grandchild’ of Embah – and on many subsequent visits was always welcomed back.
On that same first visit, after the celebration in Blitar, I joined Raharjo and his brother in visiting the tombs of the Wali Sanga to get a sense of the Java that I had been learning about from Zam Dhofier. We managed on our lelono to visit eight of the nine saints of Java, giving me a personal engagement in the practice of ziarah on Java, which became one of my continuing research interests.
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At Harvard, I had taught an Ethnographic Film course with Tim Asch, a distinguished film maker who had made films around the world. Convinced of the value of this documentation for anthropology, I was able to persuade Derek Freeman and Roger Keesing, who were sharing the Headship of Anthropology, to offer Tim an appointment to establish an
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Ethnographic Film Laboratory within the Department. Tim arrived with his wife Patsy who was also a talented film maker and superlative film editor. Together they established the Laboratory and Tim and I were able to obtain a substantial grant from the US National Science Foundation to do filming in eastern Indonesia.
Despite setbacks to our original plans, Tim, Patsy and I succeeded in making two films on
Rote: The Water of Words and Spear and Sword. Tim and Patsy, working with the
anthropologist, Linda Connor, went on to make four remarkable films on Bali and another film, with Douglas Lewis, on the ceremonies of the Tana Wai Brama in Flores. Later, relying on video rather than film, Raharjo, Patsy Asch and I were able to record the activities of the Embah Wali group in Blitar and produce two films: In the Play of Life and Conversations with Embah Wali. Together this collection of ethnographic films was something of a brief
achievement but as cuts began to be made in the Research School’s budget, Tim’s
appointment was not continued, and he and Patsy moved to UCLA which had a specialized program on filming. The Laboratory continued to limp along with limited resources that allowed partial funding for Gary Kildea whose most notable films were on the Philippines, but eventually it came to an end.
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For an anthropologist, ethnography should not be an end in itself, but a process of investigation that relates to wider comparative issues. Having chosen to do research on a tiny island, Rote, in eastern Indonesia, it has always been incumbent upon me to make clear the significance of what I was documenting in a wider perspective. I tried to do this in the papers that I wrote before coming to the ANU and the publication of my book, Harvest of the Palm (1977) was part of this process and, in my mind, a step toward a more comprehensive ethnography.
To write for Harvest of the Palm a social and environmental history of the islands within which Rote is located required, I trained myself to read the 17th and 18th century Dutch of the Timor Boeken, the voluminous handwritten VOC documentation of its time in the region from the 1650s. Given these interests in history, both indigenous and documentary, I was pleased to be part of the conference that led to the publication of Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (1979). I was also part of the conference that led to the publication of
Southeast Asia in the 9th to the 14th Centuries (1986), by which time much of my research had
begun to focus on Java. However, despite my inclusion in these volumes, I have never considered myself as a Southeast Asian scholar. From my graduate years, I have always considered myself an Indonesian researcher and, as my research expanded, as someone whose research interests were those of a comparative Austronesian scholar. I confess a sadly inadequate knowledge of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. I have, however, relished the expertise of those at the ANU who have a remarkable knowledge of these countries.
For me, the landmark conference at the ANU was the one that led to the publication of Indonesia: Australian Perspectives (1980), which was published as a single volume and as three separate volumes jointly by four editors: Jamie Mackie, Peter McCauley, Ross Garnaut
3and myself. This effort was a declaration on behalf of those of us at the ANU that we had become the paramount research centre on Indonesia in the world and were able to conduct and coordinate this research across a wide spectrum of disciplines.
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The publication of my edited book, The Flow of Life (1980) and my second edited book, To Speak in Pairs (1986) defined two major directions to my comparative research. The Flow of Life was concerned with the structure of the societies of eastern Indonesia and about the basic underlying conceptions of life that informed these structures. My introduction was intended to shift thinking to metaphors of living from formal models of social organization. To Speak in Pairs examined forms of parallelism – the use of dyadic lexical pairs – in the elaborate rituals of eastern Indonesia and my introduction outlined the comparative significance of parallelism in oral traditions. Both arguments were linguistic in orientation and I continued to publish extensively on these topics in my research even into retirement.
My interest in semantic parallelism was sparked by my encounter with the complex forms of Rotenese canonical parallelism. One of my continuing concerns has been to record, translate and comment on these traditions. My comparative interests have extended to the study of the parallelism as a world-wide tradition of oral and I have written on the extent and diversity of this phenomenon. I have tried not just to identify these traditions a mode of composition but to analyse them, more deeply, as an expression of a fundamental proclivity of the human mind.
Similarly, my study of Rotenese society was first extended to the study of similar studies in the region but, as my perspectives expanded, this study has extended to examine the range of possible Austronesian societies, of which Rote is just one example, from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Easter Island.
Even as I continued to publish and to supervise students in Canberra, I spent a lot of time away from Canberra, not just in Indonesia but elsewhere and, thus, earned myself the
nickname, ‘The Qantas Professor of Anthropology’. In 1977-78, I was a Fellow at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, then for roughly six months in 1981, I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and in 1986, for three
months, Directeur d'Études Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in
Paris, followed by two semesters, in 1986-87, as Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and in 1988, Professor of Indonesian Studies at Leiden University.
In 1989, my research took on a new focus with the establishment in the Anthropology Department of the Comparative Austronesian Project. I was given charge of this three-year interdisciplinary project, which involved anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists, and to which the Department committed five of its short-term appointments. During the course of the project, there were over forty visitors who attached themselves for varying periods to take part in its seminars and conferences. The Project resulted in a publications series that continues to this day. This year (2020) the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series is being prepared and will be published by the ANU Press. The Project also resulted in
4numerous ground-breaking publications by the Department of Linguistics and for a while was the dominant focus of that Department.
My involvement in the Project reshaped and redirected my comparative research. Among other things, it prompted me to build a massive data base on Austronesian relationship terminologies which I have mined to develop a comprehensive understanding of Austronesian societies from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Easter Island.
In the 1990s, I was involved in supervising an ever-larger contingent of outstanding students – 21 PhDs plus 11 MAs, many of whom went on to do PhDs – from 1990 to 1999. Almost without exception, these students did their research of topics closely related to my main research interests. This cohort featured theses not just on Flores but on Timor, Maluku and Bali: Tom Therik on Wehali in southcentral Timor, Barbara Grimes on the indigenous population of Buru, Nils Bubandt on the Buli of Halmahera, and Christine Boulan-Smit on the Alune of Seram, Thomas Reuter on highland Bali and I Gde Pitana on the warga of Bali. The cohort also included a string of theses on Islam on Java: A.G. Muhaimin on Cirebon, Hyung-Jun Kim on Reformist Muslims in Yogyakarta and Endang Turmudi on the Kyai of Jombang. It also included Minako Sakai who wrote her thesis on the Gumai of South Sumatra and went on to teach at ADFA. She has been both a collaborator on comparative Austronesian research and a colleague in the study of Islam in Indonesia. Another important member of this group was Yunita Winarto who wrote her thesis on integrated pest management in Indramayu. She became a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indonesia and we have collaborated closely for decades on research on rice production in Java.
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In August 1998, I took over as Director of the Research School. In the preceding year, I had temporarily replaced Merle Ricklefs when he went off on one of his trips. Peter Grimshaw
was scheduled to retire so in Merle’s absence and with Ann Buller’s help, I set up a spreadsheet to transfer all of the information from Peter’s ledgers into a coherent budget for
the School. This was a slow but highly informative process. When Merle suddenly announced that he was leaving the ANU to take a position at the University of Melbourne – something that took us all by surprise – and I was initially appointed as acting Director in his stead, I had no difficulties in understanding the budget. When I was officially appointed as Director, I could concentrate on developing what I had begun. In my first Director’s Report
in the Annual Report for 1998, I made a special point of declaring the School’s commitment
to postgraduate education. The School had a deficit, but my main problem as Director was to try to heal the internal rifts caused by the creation of the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management (APSEM) and eliminate the competition between Divisions (and Departments) over an opaque management plan that allocated positions in staged rotation among units. Once each Division had a fixed base allocation and was allowed to keep both savings and earnings – and raise additional income, the School was able to achieve a surplus and could expand even after the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) was obliged to give up a share of the block grant to be
5able to join the national system. In these efforts, I had the strong collegial support of Darrell Tryon, Warwick McKibbin and Chris Reus-Smit and good management support from first Peggy Daroesman, then Katy Gillette, along with Alick Dodd and Sue Lawrence. By the last year of my Directorship, the School had almost 200 PhD students, almost equally divided between Australian and overseas students, at least 150 MA students and a substantial surplus. Crucial to this was a scholarship fund of over a 1.5 million dollars that allowed the School flexibility in choosing and attracting outstanding advanced degree students.
One of my efforts as Director was to work with the ANU librarian, Colin Steele, to persuade Vice-Chancellor, Ian Chubb, to re-establish the ANU Press as an ePress that would disseminate ANU research to the world. The ANU Press was the first university press to offer its publications free-for-down load (with purchase print-on-demand copies as well) and has gone on to become an international leader in open scholarly access with roughly 3.5 million downloads in 2019 to over 150 countries.
During my time as Director, I continued supervising students – a cohort as capable and as impressive as any previous cohort. This cohort included a couple of Muslim students writing on Islam in Java: Jamhari Makruf on Islam in Klaten and Arif Zamhari on Majlis Dhikir in East Java; five students working on eastern Indonesia: Philippus Tule on the Keo of Flores, Phillip Winn on the island of Banda, Dedi Adhuri on the island of Kei, Gregor Neonbasu on the domain of Biboki in west Timor, and Lintje Pellu on Landu on Rote; and my first student from Timor-Leste, Dionisio Babo Soares who wrote on East Timorese nationalism and later became Foreign Minister for Timor-Leste. I also supervised my first Taiwanese student, Mei Hui-Yu who wrote on Chinese ritual practice. I co-supervised with George Quinn Tommy Christomy who wrote on a sacred ziarah site, Pamijahan in West Java and with Virginia Hooker, two students: Yudi Latif on Muslim intellectuals and Lukman Hakim on ideas of Jihad in the Malay world.
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I stepped down as Director in January 2007 and later that year, my wife and I left for Cambridge where I held the Australian Chair at Harvard. One of my former students, Arthur Kleinman, was Head of the Anthropology Department and I was able to meet many friends and former colleagues, but the year convinced me that I was right to have chosen to come to the ANU in 1975.
I left Harvard in early May to travel to Germany to give the Jensen Memorial Lectures at the University of Frankfurt. When I arrived back in Canberra, research, supervision and consulting resumed as before.
I had been awarded a generous three-year ARC grant to study and compare poetic compositions in parallelism from the chain of dialects across the island of Rote. (Although there is no break in this chain, it consists of what could be considered at least six related languages) This ‘Master Poet Project’ involved bringing oral poets from all dialect areas and from parts of Timor to Bali for a week of intensive recording, which gave me more than enough material to work on for a year. I was able to extend my allocated ARC funding for five years and then find other additional funding to continue. So far, there have been eleven
6successive gatherings both for recording and increasingly to discuss, analyse and interpret material that was already recording. The research proved to be as enjoyable as it was challenging and has, so far, produced two books, Explorations in Semantic Parallelism and
Master Poets, Ritual Masters.
PhD supervision continued in retirement but with more co-supervision, as required by the university. I supervised Steven Sager writing on the Orang Rimba of Jambi with Patrick Guinness, Shu-ling Yeh on the Amis of Taiwan with Mark Mosco, Angie Bexley on East Timorese Youth and Andrey Damaledo on the east Timorese in west Timor, both with Andrew McWilliam, but I also had a few students for whom I was principal supervisor: Lintje Pellu writing on Landu on Rote, Hendra Siry on coastal management in Konawe and Pantajene, and Paulus Liu on the adaptability and social vulnerability of populations in Kupang in West Timor.
Lintje Pellu, Andrey Damaledo and Paulus Liu are Rotenese so with Tom Therik, I have managed to supervise four Rotenese PhDs in my time at the ANU, a small return gift to a population that has been obsessed with education since the early eighteenth century.
In retirement, I continued as Chair of the Supervisory Committee of the ANU Press, was elected Chair of the Emeritus Faculty and was appointed International Secretary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. I was also made an Adjunct Professor in the Anthropology Department of the University of Indonesia where I was both able to lecture and to work with Yunita Winarto and her students in continuing research on Java. Most recently, I have been elected as President of the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC) for a two-year term, beginning in January 2020.
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I never imagined when I came to the ANU that I would become so involved in development work. My initial involvement was thrust upon me without my realizing what I was becoming involved in but, over time, this work became a constant feature of my time at the ANU.
Initially, after the visit of the Governor of Nusa Tenggara Timor, Ben Mboi, to Canberra, I
was ‘drafted’ to join an Australian Aid mission to investigate the possibility of an aid-project for West Timor. At the time, my ‘services’ were offered to the Australian government as part
of ANU’s ongoing commitment to assist the government. The proposal that emerged was to provide small farm-dams in the mountains of Timor for watering livestock in an extensive pasture area in the vicinity of the village of Mio in the southern part of Timor Tengah Selatan.
Having participated in the original mission to define the project, I was recruited to join the implementation team organized by the Consultancy Firm, ACIL, and returned again to Timor to reconnoitre the project area in the midst of a heavy rainy season. Over the next several years, I returned repeatedly to Timor to work on the Project, having encouraged the local Timorese to give a name to the Project area and convinced AMSET to provide funding for the building of a proper Timorese lopo, as a local gathering place, near the team barracks.
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The name given by Timorese was Besi Pae, a fusion of two ancestors’ names, and this has
now found its way onto official maps of west Timor. The building of a network of small dams proved successful because they provided water not
just for cattle but for village drinking water and for women’s gardens that quickly sprang up
around the dams. The Project was judged so successful that President Soeharto came to Timor and praised its achievement. But AusAid managed to restructure the Project from its focus on an expanding network of dams to grandiose one that would construct a single dam per village throughout west Timor. Since a ‘village’ (desa) on Timor generally comprises at least 25 sq. kilometres, this plan was a recipe for a costly failure. I resigned from the Project, claiming the Project would be a social, economic, and environment disaster, which it proved to be. I resolved that I would never allow myself to become involved in this kind of low-level project that could be altered at a whim.
