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Janet Hoskins, Professor
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Department of Anthropology ResearchJanet's research interests are defined around several overlapping themes, each of which draws on a separate set of interdisciplinary connections : (1) indigenous representations of the past and of time, (2) the relation between gender, exchange and narrative, and (3) colonial and postcolonial theory, with specific reference to Cadoaism, a new universal religion born in French Indochina in 1926. Her first book The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (winner of the 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies) was both an ethnographic study of the politics of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Kodi people of Sumba, it examined indigenous calendars, historical narratives and new symbols of nationalist unity to show how a complex ancestral heritage has been changed in the contemporary context. Her second book, Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), continued this interest in history and anthropology by examining the reasons why headhunting rituals are still performed in the postcolonial era, several generations after pacification. These new instances suggest that headhunting is a powerful symbolic trope that resonates throughout the region, pitting a heritage of violent raids against new anxieties about domination by external political forces. Her third book Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives (1998) explores the relationship between persons and their possessions, and in particular the ways in which both men and women may choose to tell their own life histories by using a domestic object as a pivot for narrative articulation. It draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, literary analysis and exchange theory, and opposes forms of biographic identification to the different forms of materialism in Western consumerism. Her current book project, The Left Eye of God: Caodaism travels from Vietnam to California, looks at the changing historical contexts of a new millenarian religion that articulated an Asian synthesis of world religions in the context of anti-colonial resistance, the American war in Vietnam, and the post 1975 diaspora. ----------------------- BioJanet discovered Anthropology at the age of 18 while studying in Paris, and perhaps as a result French theorists have often loomed as important influences. She was drawn to Indonesia because of the great variety of different cultures, religions and influences in the Malay archipelago, and the remoteness of certain islands. She chose to do her dissertation research on Sumba, the last island in the archipelago to maintain a pagan majority until the 21st century. She has also done research in the Spice Islands of the Moluccas and in Flores, Timor, Bali, Java and Sumatra. Since 2003, her research focus has moved to mainland Southeast Asia, and she has studied French Indochina and the modern nations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as well as overseas Vietnamese religious communities in the United States. She has taught at universities in Australia, Norway, France and The Netherlands on various visiting appointments. ----------------------- EducationJanet completed a BA at Pomona College, Claremont California, and an MA and PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University. She has also done postgraduate research in Lund, Sweden on Nordic Archaeology, and undergraduate coursework in Paris, France in programs in Ethnology and Philosophy-Letters. ----------------------- Recent PublicationsThe Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (winner of the 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies) Berkeley: University of California Press (1993). Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1966) . Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives. New York and London: Routledge (1998) ----------------------- Courses TaughtRace and Sexual Politics in Southeast Asia; The New Vietnam: Arts, Culture, Diaspora; Visualizing Colonialism; Shamans, Spirits and Ancestors: Non-Western Religious Traditions; Regional Ethnology: Problematizing Locality; Magic, Witchcraft and Healing; History and Foundations of Anthropology; Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. ----------------------- Awards and Honors2002-03 Getty Scholar, Getty Research Institute: Biography in different cultural contexts ----------------------- Professional MembershipsMember of the Editorial Board, American Ethnologist ----------------------- |