Elizabeth Coville
Introduction • Research Interests • Teaching
• Writing • Recommendations
Introduction
I have been interested in cultural anthropology since taking
classes called Jewish and Negro Literature and Asian History during high school in the mid 1960s. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, I found myself at one of the main centers for the study of Southeast Asia in this country and developed an interest in the peoples and cultures of Indonesia. I never could decide whether to major in literature, linguistics, or anthropology, so I made up my own major which combined parts of the three. I attended graduate school at the University of Chicago where I was lucky enough to discover the intellectual excitement of symbolic and linguistic anthropology. Over the last thirty odd years, my fascination with language has led to topics ranging from Philippine riddles, Malay fishing magic, Toraja ritual speech, historical fiction written in Indonesian and set in the Dutch East Indies, and communication via the Internet.
Research Interests
My first real (participant observation) fieldwork was in small
village in the largely-Christian, Toraja highlands of Sulawesi (Celebes), one of Indonesia's outer islands. There, building on my interest in the power of ritual communication, I studied the traditional ritual cycle surrounding wet rice cultivation and the promotion of collective health and well-being. This research revealed the subtle ways in which the performance of language is steeped in the social context—and in the changing social context of a village encountering modernity. This fieldwork, along with three subsequent follow-up visits, has also given me an appreciation of the inescapable reality of the world beyond the village—the source of goods, ideas, and images, and the place to which so many young people venture and from which so many return home. My current goal is to complete an ethnography of communication based on this research, entitled Vital Words at Worldly Risk.
Writing
These are pdf files of three published articles that grew out of my Toraja fieldwork:
"'Mothers of the land': vitality and order in the Toraja highlands" (2003)
"Remembering our dead: the care of the ancestors in Tana Toraja" (2002)
"Centripetal ritual in a decentered world: changing maro performances in Tana Toraja" (1989)
In fall 2008 my commentary on the political language of Barack Obama was published in Anthropology Bews, the newsletter of the American Anthropology Association.
"Our Union Grows Stronger: The poetic persuasion of Barack Obama" (2008)
During the academic year 2006-7, I wrote a column called "What's Up on the Web" posted on the Resources for Researchers page of Antara Kita, the online journal of the Indonesia and East Timor Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies. And while living in northern India for academic year 2005-06 when Van had a Fulbright, we kept a blog, New Delhi Notes. One of these days, I'm going to separate out my "Language Lessons I - VII" and give them their own online home, but for the time being they are archived here.
Teaching
I participate in the gateway course for majors: Anthropology 300 Issues in Anthropology
In addition, I teach annually:
Anthropology 3490 Language and Culture
Anthropology 1410 Indonesian Music and Cultures
The classes I currently teach as well as those I have taught
elsewhere and in the past—Medical Anthropology, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, a seminar on Clifford Geertz—all reflect my interest in symbols, meaning, and society. Having lived most of the last twenty-three years in Minnesota, I have expanded my regional focus beyond just Indonesia to include other areas of Southeast Asia and have grown especially interested in one of the many new immigrant populations in the Twin Cities—Hmong refugees from Laos. When the opportunity came to team up with an Indonesian musician and dancer, we developed a course that introduces Indonesia to students through the arts. The performative force of language; contrasting ideologies of language; translation and metalanguage; the impact of literacy and print media on social relations; and the importance of presupposed knowledge and prior text (see work by A.L. Becker, such as his book Beyond Translation) are all issues that have always been fascinating. In teaching, I try to pass on to students a sense of wonder about such apparently self-evident language phenomena as terms of address and small talk. For me, anthropology begins with a curiosity about how people interpret reality. What sense do people make of events, objects, phenomena? How do they (and we) interact with new circumstances and new ideas (past/present, inside/outside, local/global)?
Recommendations
I recommend the experience of studying a foreign language,
preferably a non-European one, and preferably intensively, both inside and outside the classroom. In the Twin Cities, I recommend exploring the immigrant neighborhoods in and around Frogtown. I recommend traveling solo in unfamiliar surroundings, talking with people, and writing about what they (and you) do and say. On Indonesia, I recommend reading, in translation, the historical fiction of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the work on the idea of the nation and nationalism by Benedict Anderson (such as his well known book Imagined Communities), and the thick description of Clifford Geertz (in Interpretation of Cultures), followed by the work of his students and critics. For a more contemporary and even broader perspective on Indonesia and the world, I recommend exploring the Research Site on Indonesia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic World and American Society. Or go to the blog, Simplicity.
