Danilyn Rutherford
| Title | Professor and Chair |
| Division | Social Sciences Division |
| Department | Anthropology Department |
| Affiliations | Environmental Studies Department |
| Phone | 831-459-1757, 831-334-4156 |
| , | |
| FAX | 831-459-5900 |
| Office | Social Science 1, 311 |
| Office Hours | M 1-3pm |
| Campus Mail Stop | Social Sciences 1 Faculty Services |
| 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA |
Research Interests
My work has touched on a far flung set of topics. My first book focuses on the value of foreignness among the people of Biak, an island group in West Papua, the Indonesian territory that covers the western half of New Guinea. I used my fieldwork on Biak to reveal the limits of contemporary accounts of national belonging. My second book focuses on the relationship between sovereignty and audience in West Papua during the Dutch colonial and contemporary periods. My topics in this book range from pacification campaigns to mission language ideology to documentaries and YouTube videos produced by West Papuan activists. I am now finishing a book on affect, technology, and colonial state-building in the highlands of Dutch New Guinea and beginning a project on secular belief that will involve fieldwork in the United States on speech therapy and disability. I have published articles on kinship, music, dance, money, violence, writing, literature, and the ethics and epistemology of anthropology.Biography, Education and Training
1997 Cornell University. Doctorate in Anthropology. Minor in Southeast Asian Studies.1991 Cornell University. Master of Arts in Anthropology. Minor in Southeast Asian Studies.
1991 New York University. Visiting student in Anthropology and Performance Studies.
1983 Stanford University. Bachelor of Arts and Science in History and Biology.
Honors, Awards and Grants
National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty FellowshipMacArthur Foundation Writing Fellowship in Global Security and Sustainability
Principal Investigator, West Papua Study Group for the Dynamics of Internal Conflicts in Asia, East-West Center Washington
Member, Institution for Advanced Study
President, Society for Cultural Anthropology
Selected Publications
Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.An Absence of Belief? Posting on Christian Moderns in The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere. Blog sponsored by the SSRC. December 1, 2009
Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire. Cultural Anthropology 24,1 (2009): 1-32.
Why Papua Wants Freedom: The Third Person in Contemporary Nationalism. Public Culture 20, 2 (2008): 361-89.
The Enchantments of Secular Belief. Featured essay in the Religion and Culture Web Forum. Moderated by the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion. With responses by Malika Zeghal, W. Clark Gilpin, and Charles Hirschkind. October 2008.
Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Intimacy and Alienation: Money and the Foreign in Biak. Public Culture 13, 2 (2001) 299-324
Love, Violence, and Foreign Wealth: Kinship and History in Biak, Irian Jaya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, 2 (1998): 257-81.
Of Birds and Gifts: Reviving Tradition on an Indonesian Frontier. Cultural Anthropology 11, 4 (1996):577-616.
Selected Recordings
Music of Biak, Irian Jaya: Wor, Church Songs, Yospan. Notes for vol. 10 of Music of Indonesia, ed. Philip Yampolsky. Washington: Smithsonian Institute/Folkways Records, 1996 compact disc.Teaching Interests
Kinship, belief, technology, materiality, semiotics, social theory, sovereignty, nationalism, colonialism, performance, methods and ethics in anthropology, disability, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, United States.Courses Taught
ANTH 200A: Graduate Core CourseANTH 163/263: Kinship
ANTH 225: Anthropology of Things
ANTH 150: Communicating Anthropology