Dr Lee Wilson

lw243@cam.ac.uk 

Research Summary 

The different strands of my research are underpinned by my interest in the social aspects of human intersubjectivity.  In Indonesia I have carried out fieldwork in West Sumatra,  West Java, Jakarta and Bali on the martial art of Pencak Silat, and I  continue to train in the art in Cambridge with the members of the CU  Indonesian Martial Arts Society. The first of two books currently in preparation is a monograph entitled 'Unity or Diversity: the Constitution of a National Martial Art in Indonesia'.  The book offers an account of Indonesian nationalism as refracted through the contested practice of Pencak Silat.  It traces the transformation of Pencak Silat under the patronage of President Soeharto’s New Order regime from a system of self defence and spiritual development closely associated with person, place and ethnicity, to its constitution as an international competitive sport and object of national culture.  Through a focus on Pencak Silat as a system of body cultivation the book makes a unique contribution to the ethnography of the Indonesian state and the New Order administration.  Its theoretical value lies in its examination of the limitations in Foucault’s thinking on political anatomy as a particular modality of power defining the modern state through an exploration of the body and power in Indonesia. It reasserts the importance of the study of bodily practice to the field of political anthropology and sheds new light on the intricacies of forms of power and sovereign practices in Indonesia. The book thus makes a significant contribution to the anthropology of Indonesia and the study of Indonesian politics and, more broadly, offers new insights and methodologies to the study of nationalism and the state elsewhere in the world. 

A research project currently being developed with Laurens Bakker and Frans Husken is a comparative examination of civil militia groups in Indonesia. These groups have far-reaching control over their domains. They maintain significant political influence and are entwined with local networks of criminality as well as with elements of the police and military. Significantly, their authority rests on the potential for violence, not just its enactment.  Taking a hitherto overlooked approach to the study of collective violence in Indonesia, the point of departure and initial hypothesis for this research is that communal identities in Indonesia are relational attributes often mediated through the threat and execution of violence.  Through multi-sited fieldwork and comparative methodology the research will provide an account of the dynamics and conditions of local level conflict in a number of different locations in Indonesia, tracing its trajectories and the ways in which conflict does, and does not, lead to violent escalation in these sites.  The roles played by local actors in mediating conflict and the connections these figures maintain with the political and military elite will be investigated.  The broader relevance of this research will be explored with respect to unrest elsewhere in Indonesia, and comparatively in other post-authoritarian contexts. 

The second book on which I am working, Subversion, Conversion, Development: Public Interests in Information Communication Technology (ICT) is a volume of papers from a symposium convened at CRASSH in 2008 along with Robin Boast and James Leach.  The book brings together for the first time leading anthropologists working in the fields of design and development to reflect on knowledge practices and their effects in the digital economy in a range of cultural contexts. The central question that the volume addresses in relation to ICT is that of diversity: diversity of use, of purpose, and of value(s).  Does diversity matter, and if so, why? 

The book is part of an agenda to achieve the following aims: 

•    To promote the development of ICT media that ensures diverse and local public constituencies and interests.
•    To encourage an approach to ICT development - in education and civic society that will adopt and enable diversity of use, local modification and creativity.
•    To encourage cultural and educational institutions to disseminate their vast bodies of information for the use of diverse communities, with diverse interests and knowledges, in a way that will enable and empower reuse, modification and local significance.

I am the lead social scientist and co-investigator of a NESTA funded research project, Interdisciplinary Innovation: strategic creation or self organising success? A cross-sector experience, with Alan Blackwell at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory.  The aim of the research is to generate new insights about the principles and practices that inform successful collaborations in different parts of the economy and society. The findings and insights from this work will be published in a major report later this year. 


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