My research interests are varied and based on two primary fieldwork experiences. In addition to graduate work, my undergraduate education in human ecology was instrumental in developing an appreciation for applying a range of methods and explanatory models in the effort to understand complex and interconnected social and environmental problems. I continue to develop my appreciation for mixed-method and interdisciplinary approaches. The fieldwork sites I detail here are vastly different. One is located in the United States and considers present-day transnational social and structural transitions through exploring the meaning of relocation in middle-class working families away from metropolitan areas to growing rural communities high in natural amenities. The other site is island Southeast Asia and deals with issues of cultural and identity politics, ethnicity, post-colonial nationalism, and nation building in a multicultural society through study of a government program relocating mostly landless poor from urban to rural areas. Although different, these projects share important traits which express enduring intellectual interests including my desire to conduct community-based research with a focus on issues of migration, community building, personhood and place, narrative constructions and identity, and negotiations between work, family, and self in different social and historical contexts.

My most recent fieldwork was established during two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the rapidly growing lakeside communities of Northwest Lower Michigan. The project explores non-economic, urban to rural migration of middle-class families that has led to the sudden, often unexpected population growth. This relocation is a manner of negotiating building tension between personal experience with material demands in pursuit of a livelihood within the flexible, contingent new economy and cultural conventions for the good family and community life as a basis for defining individual character. My fieldwork considers how accounts of these migrants are part of a larger moral story of what constitutes the good life when basic social categories and cultural meanings are shifting. I argue that this migration is a continuation of long-standing American traditions of starting over rooted in a belief that we can remake ourselves through sheer force of will. At the same time, it is also a uniquely modern expression as people respond to challenges and opportunities of a flexible economy based increasingly on contingent work. Their accounts are narratives of travel and conversion where downshifting and displaced workers pass through a period of liminality in an attempt to redefine themselves through relocation to places believed to provide refuge for the discovery of an inner, authentic self.

Many middle-class families become sophisticated consumers of place where residential choice becomes part of a self-conscious construction of identity through life-style. Pursuing personal images of the good and seeking to find greater balance and integration across domains of work, family and community, migrants attempt to feel greater personal control by relocating away from lives that become incompatible with their sense of a potential self. Many migrants describe feeling like refugees who cannot be at home in a corporate world of work based on ideas of contingency and flexibility. The life-style migrants reveal how social and structural changes present not only challenges but also opportunities for redefining work and family while emphasizing personal fulfillment and well being.

A project began much earlier is sited in Sulawesi, Indonesia. This initial research was conducted in four relocation settlements developed as part of the government’s “transmigration” program which began during the final period of the Dutch colonial presence. In this community-based work, I employed both qualitative and more survey-based approaches. I concentrated my participant-observation, in-depth interviewing, and social-surveys in a single village as a primary fieldsite. In order to assess my early findings through comparison with other cases while considering ethnographically interesting similarities and differences with other locations, I extended data collection into three other nearby settlements. Each of these places possesses a unique set of circumstances for their establishment and continued growth as communities. Every one of thousands of settlements established wholesale from the ground up over the past century represents a unique confluence of people, places, and a wide range of social and structural factors. Each settlement is faced with its own particular challenges and opportunities. At the same time, they also share a certain degree of input by virtue of the fact that they have emerged from the program’s bureaucratic and ideological framework. At the most basic level, the program involves a struggle of power and identity between two quite different intents.

On the one hand there are the deliberate objectives of the State to create and maintain an “imagined community” of unified Indonesians on a national scale through the medium of the program’s design and implementation. On the other hand, there are the more immediate and frequently less coherent aspirations of the settlers themselves as individuals, and to varying degrees as groups, to succeed in establishing socially, economically and ecologically viable communities in a particular time and place. These places exist as contested socially constructed spaces linking the imagined community of Indonesian nationalism, the specific site, and the local social and physical conditions which interpret and shape how an engineered national culture is not simply reproduced but rather may be challenged in different ways within the context of community building.

I value the depth and breadth of my research interests and experience. I continue to work with data from my research in Indonesia as I present to professional societies and publish in this area. At the same time, with presentations and publications I have established a strong presence in the anthropology of work in the United States. This varied experience has given me valuable opportunities. My work with Indonesian transmigrants offers insight into how I might interpret the experiences of relocating professionals in the life-style migration project. Specifically, transmigrants spoke of how they used their relocation to selectively edit out or enhance certain personal characteristics and even distinctive cultural elements that defined their ethnic group. I was able to reveal a similar process of editing among life-style migrants who relocated in order to bring about what they felt was a necessary break from established ritual and routine. They used relocation to redefine priorities and, in many cases, to get in touch with what they describe as a true self. The value of ethnographic research conducted in a variety of social, cultural, and physical contexts is that it encourages me to be open to possibilities and to imagine new ways of thinking. This is another reason why I value the ethnography of everyday life. It is in neglected details of day-to-day life that real insight into the meaning of important social and cultural change is most powerfully and relevantly expressed in lived experience.

Building on this previous experience, a recent project considers forms of ‘New Work,’ alternative arrangements of work and family life, explored by so-called free-agents of the post-industrial economy. This project reveals how some individuals and groups explore a kind of frontier of social and economic arrangements and thus help redefine the meaning, purpose and place of work in personal and community life. In Indonesia, I have maintained contacts in the field and continue to observe the changing landscape of identity politics in the wake of the end of the New Order government and how its end has impacted expressions of ethnicity and community in the transmigration settlements of Northern Sulawesi. I am also developing a project that builds on my longstanding interest in the anthropology of space and place. I connect this interest directly to emerging areas of inquiry in the fields of public health and health geography. This project entails examining how different community design reform movements from the 19th century “moral treatment” approach in asylum care to today’s new urbanism attempt to use the spatial order as foundation for a new moral order. From built form to landscape, I look at the therapeutic use of place not only for planned treatment of individual disease/disorder, as in moral treatment, but also the intent to offer remedies for perceived ills of the collective through alternative spatial and social arrangements within purposive community.


You may also see/download this concise summary of fieldwork experiences, research interests, and future plans as a Statement of Research Interests in PDF Format.
 

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