ABSTRACT
Why do I, a German anthropologist working in the Netherlands, want to write about the history, the socio-political context and the perspectives of Indonesian anthropology? Am I just another contributor to ‘hegemonic Northern anthropology’ who is going to silence the voices of ‘Southern’ colleagues by attempting to assess ‘them’ or, even worse, to speak ‘for them’?1 With regard to the critique of Western ‘orientalism’2 and the concurrent deconstruction of Western strategies of ‘othering’,3 my attempt to describe the function of anthropology in modern Indonesia demands a clarification or even justification, since indigenous anthropologists are likely to be much more conversant with the national history of their discipline.
