Trajectories ─ Excursions With the Anthropology of E. Douglas Lewis

This volume engages with the work of E. Douglas Lewis, who has made major contributions to the understanding of Eastern Indonesia, ethnography, culture, and religion, as well as a neurobiologically informed anthropology. Lewis’ work on the Ata Tana ‘Ai (People of the Forest) of Flores has long been regarded as a seminal work on culture and society in Eastern Indonesia. His ‘precedence theory’ became highly influential among anthropologists in their interpretations of other social groups in the region. In this volume, however, a group of scholars influenced by his work undertake diverse and thought-provoking excursions from Lewis’ work, shedding light on his insights on subjects ranging from Eastern Indonesian ethnography, to theorizing culture change, to development, and to the nascent field of ‘neuroanthropology’. Of particular note, this book also features an extended contribution by Lewis that is, as Professor James J. Fox notes in this book’s foreword, ‘the kind of serious contemplation of an intellectual trajectory that every senior anthropologist should be urged to write’.

Julian C. H. Lee is Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at RMIT University and an Executive member of The Centre for Global Research. He is the author of Second Thoughts: On Malaysia, Globalisation, Society and Self (2015) and Policing Sexuality: Sex, Society, and the State (2011) and editor of Narratives of Globalization: Reflections on the Global Human Condition (2016).

John M. Prior is Senior Lecturer in the post-graduate programme at St. Paul’s Institute of Philosophy (STFK), Ledalero where he is also editor of the Institute’s journal. He has written over 200 articles and book chapters and authored and co-edited some 40 books, including Menjebol Jeruji Prasangka: Membaca Alkitab dengan Jiwa [Breaking Through Barriers of Prejudice: Reading the Bible with Soul] (2010) and Church and Marriage in an Indonesian Village (1988).

Thomas A. Reuter is Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council, located at the Asia Institute of The University of Melbourne. He was President of the Australian Anthropological Association (2002–2005) and served as Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is the Senior Vice-President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and on the advisory board of Future Earth (Asia). He is the author and editor of numerous books including Averting a Global Environmental Collapse: The Role of Anthropology and Local Knowledge (2015), Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land: Land and Territory in the Austronesian World (2006), and The House of Our Ancestors: Precedence and Dualism in Highland Balinese Society (2002).