ABSTRACT
Victor T. King used the term ‘jobbing’ for the first time in 1994 to talk about his approach to researching the state of Sarawak since the early 1970s. King, as a white, male, former colonial power’s citizen researching former colonies in Southeast Asia, must have faced criticism regarding the hegemonic overrepresentation of English native research throughout his career. Rational critical thinking and communicative abilities have been therefore the defining features of liberal arts education through the ages, and especially in the United States, where the majority of liberal arts colleges are a development that stemmed from a late-nineteenth-century sense of public service and responsibility “to create a better America”. King’s admonition may sound straightforward to anthropologists and other scholars dealing with ‘culture’ in their work, but the author's personal experience from having now worked eight years in Japanese higher education has been that this understanding of culture is almost never shared.
