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. * 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. 1 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. * 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 2 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. * 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 3 and 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.