[csaa-forum] Swinburne ISR seminar Fri 19 June 12 noon-1pm: ': Social Anthropology and History: an ethnographic case study from Viqueque, Timor-Leste' - Professor David Hicks, Stony Brook University

[Angela Daly]

 Swinburne Institute for Social Research - Seminar Series



*Presenter: Professor David Hicks, Stony Brook University*

*Title: Social Anthropology and History: an ethnographic case study from
Viqueque, Timor-Leste *

*Date: Friday, 19 June 2015 *

*Time: 12:00-1:00pm *

*Venue: AGSE211*



At a time when the frontiers separating the traditional scientific and
scholarly disciplines are being obliterated the occasion is apt for a
reconsideration of the relationships between social anthropology and its
sister disciplines such as political science, sociology, literary studies,
and the like. In my talk today I discuss the overlap between social
anthropology and history and make the case for revisiting the well-known
contributions to this topic made by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who himself
began his academic career as a historian, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose
advocacy of a structural approach to the human domain might be thought to
imply a anti-historical regard for understanding social institutions. In
demonstrating how diachronic and synchronic perspectives may be combined in
their respective ways in helping to render institutions intelligible this
talk examines some of the lessons learned from several periods of fieldwork
in Timor-Leste beginning in 1966 by examining how archival documents and
published materials may be conjoined with ethnographic research. The talk
firstly describes the background to the first period in the field; then
considers the extent to which archival and secondary sources were used
during that first period of field research; and finally consider how the
use of archival and secondary sources during the later periods of field
research compared with the initial period.

*Professor David Hicks* is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook
University and Life Member of Clare College, University of Cambridge. He
holds Doctor of Philosophy Degrees from the University of Oxford and the
University of London and his scholarly specializations lie in the fields of
politics, oral literature, ritual, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste, in both
countries of which he carried out field research. In East Timor this has
amounted to more than thirty months since 1966. His field research has
resulted in publications that include the books, Tetum Ghosts and Kin
(2004), Structural Analysis in Anthropology (1978), A Maternal Religion
(1984), Kinship and Religion in Eastern Indonesia, Cultural Anthropology
(with Dr. Margaret A. Gwynne), Ritual and Belief: Readings in the
Anthropology of Religion (2010), and Rhetoric and the Decolonization and
Recolonization of East Timor (2015), as well as essays that have appeared
in the American Anthropologist, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Society, the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Oceania,
Anthropos, and Sociologus, in addition to many anthologies. He is the
translator, from the Portuguese, of Peoples of Timor, People of Timor:
Life, Alliance, Death (1993). Professor Hicks has received grants and
fellowships from, among other organizations, the United States Institute of
Peace, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society; has been a
resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Vila Serbeloni in
Bellagio; a Visiting Professor at Clare Hall in the University of
Cambridge; a Visiting Professor at the University of Göteborg; and a
Fulbright Scholar. Email: david.hicks at stonybrook.edu.







- ALL Welcome -







*http://www.sisr.net/ <http://www.sisr.net/> http://www.apo.org.au/
<http://www.apo.org.au/> http://www.creative.org.au/
<http://www.creative.org.au/> http://www.inside.org.au/
<http://www.inside.org.au/>*
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