Anthropology of Indonesia in Australia: the politics of knowledge

In its early development, the focus of Australian anthropology reflected the nation's colonial interests - Indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) - but today there is a strong body of anthropologists of Indonesia in Australia and many of the new generation of Indonesian anthropologists are being trained here. Why did it take Australian anthropology so long to discover the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago as suitable 'objects of enquiry'? An important event was the establishment of Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) at The Australian National University (ANU), with a charter to provide research support for Australia's management of regional relationships after World War II. The inclusion of anthropology as a critical founding discipline in RSPacS challenged the presumptions of 'pure science' that had underpinned the establishment of Australia's oldest anthropology department at the University of Sydney. From the 1960s, the RSPacS department actively sought to establish links with Indonesian anthropology. The expansion of universities in Australia in the 1960s saw a rapid increase in the number of university anthropology departments, and a diversification in the scope of the discipline. While the politics of Australia's regional relations post-World War II are significant in the slow embrace of the peoples of Indonesia as research subjects, of equal importance were the shifts in the paradigms of the discipline. While the roots of Australian anthropology were in British social anthropology (characterised by structural-functionalist explanations of society), new paradigms emerging form American anthropology, especially the acknowledgement of 'peasant societies' as suitable objects of study, brought the peoples of Indonesia into anthropological focus. The Cold War emphasis on area studies was also significant in this shift. This paper follows the development of the anthropology of Indonesia in Australia until it became firmly established by the early 1980s, and with brief reference to its current (2009) state.