James A. Boon

1945-Present

       James A. Boon was born in 1945. He attended Princeton University where he received his B.A. in French Language and Literature and Cultural Anthropology in 1968. Boon then attended the University of Chicago until 1973, when he graduated with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. Between 1971 and 1973, he conducted his graduate research in Bali with his wife and daughter. In 1972, he and his wife contracted a serious tropical disease and Boon was forced to cut his research short. Nonetheless, the research was eventually completed and Boon composed his dissertation.

    After teaching at Duke, he took a position as Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell. Boon served on the executive committees of the Southeast Asia Program, the Western Societies Program and on the Comparative Literature Department faculty. In 1984 he was the Acting Director of Cornell's Society for the Humanities. From 1985-1988 he chaired the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. Boon assumed his present post as Professor of Anthropology at Princeton in 1989. In 1998-1999 and 2002-2007, he chaired the Department of Anthropology at Princeton.

    His specialized fields of study include the history of anthropological ideas, ritual and literature, marriage and hierarchy, language and culture, and comparative discourse. Boon has performed fieldwork in Java and Bali and has done extensive research on the history of Indonesian studies and on anthropological discourse.

       His achievements in literature are many and well acclaimed. The long list includes The Anthropological Romance of Bali: 1597-1972; From Symbolism to Structuralism; The Cross-Cultural Kiss: Edwardian and Earlier, Postmodern and Beyond; Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts … Showbiz; Dynastic Dynamics: Caste and Kinship in Bali Now; Affinities and Extremes: Crisscrossing the Bittersweet Ethnology of East Indies History, Hindu-Balinese Culture, and Indo-European Allure; and Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Tests.

       In his work entitled The Anthropological Romance of Bali 1597-1972, Boon wrote about three main types of marriages in Bali. The first type was marriage by capture, the second type of marriage is between ancestor-groups, and the third type of marriage is intratemple marriage or ancestor-group endogamy.

       Boon’s unorthodox approach to anthropology coupled with his creative and entertaining style of writing has drawn much attention to his books. He writes from a different point of view even in his dissertation. As he puts it in the preface of The Anthropological Romance of Bali, he is “concerned with the ritual of subsistence and politics and the needs of status and belief (pg x of preface).” This is backwards to conventional thinking and is just the sort of thing that makes James Boon an outstanding anthropologist. The logic behind his themes is an attempt to show how separate fields such as ideas and actions interpenetrate. His work as an anthropologist and an author bridges comparative study of societies and institutions approaches to kinship, myth, and ritual, colonists ethnology, literary analysis, and the history of ideas.

       Boon teaches courses at Princeton University in New Jersey. His classes consist of lectures on comparative hierarchies, related topics in language and culture and social theory, the art of reading hybrid texts in ethnology, and European cultural studies. During his career, Boon as received numerous grants, awards and given lectures around the world.

      

Reference

 http://www.princeton.edu/anthropology/faculty/james_boon

The Anthropological Romance of Bali : 1597-1972 (1972)

 

Written By: Eric Hendrickson & Kristina Koga, 2001

Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008