Danilyn Rutherford

Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, studies the historical dynamics of cultural contact in colonial and postcolonial settings. She first approached this problem in Biak, an island group in Indonesia’s easternmost province (formerly Irian Jaya, now known as Papua), by way of research on kinship, exchange, translation, music and dance, narratives and sung texts, millenarianism, modernity, Christian conversion, and the politics of culture and ethnicity.  Her book, Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier, offers a critique of dominant theories of nationalism by showing how Biak practices that valorized the foreign undermined the islanders' integration into the Indonesian nation-state.  She is now completing a project on West Papuan nationalism, globalization and the politics of post-authoritarian regimes.  Her next project will focus on technology, governance, and the idea of the “Stone Age” in colonial New Guinea .
email: drutherf@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Publications:

(forthcoming) "Why Papua Wants Freedom": The Third Person in Contemporary Nationalism. Public Culture.

2006 The Bible Meets the Idol: Writing and Conversion in Biak. In F. Cannell, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham: Duke University Press.

2005 Nationalism and Millenarianism in West Papua: Institutional Power, Interpretive Practice, and the Pursuit of Christian Truth. In J. Nash, ed., Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. London: Blackwell, 146-168.

2005 Frontiers of the Lingua Franca: Malay, Mefoorsch, and the Papuan Soul. Ethnos. 70(3):387-412.

2003 Laughing at Leviathan: John Furnivall, Dutch New Guinea, and the Ridiculousness of Colonial Rule. In J.T. Siegel & A. Kahin, eds., Southeast Asia Across Three Generations. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, pp, 27-46

2003 Ethnography without Culture? Modernity and Marginality in the Anthropology of Indonesia. Reviews in Anthropology. 32(1): 91-108.

2002 After Syncretism: The Anthropology of Islam and Christianity in Southeast Asia. Comparative Studies in Sociology and History. 44(1): 196-205.

2002 Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. Princeton University Press.

2001 Intimacy and Alienation: Money and the Foreign in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Public Culture. 13(2): 299-324.

2001  Waiting for the End in Biak : Violence, Order and a Flag Raising.  In B. Anderson, ed., Violence and the State in Indonesia . Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 189-212.

2000 The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. American Ethnologist. 27(2): 312-339.

1998 Love, Violence, and Foreign Wealth: Kinship and History in Biak , Irian Jaya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4(2): 257-81.

1998 Trekking to New Guinea: Dutch Colonial Fantasies of a Virgin Land 1900-1940. In F. Gouda & J. Clancy-Smith, eds. Domesticating the Empire: Languages of Gender, Race, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press. 255-271.

1996 Of Birds and Gifts: Reviving Tradition on an Indonesian Frontier. Cultural Anthropology 11(4):577-616.