ABSTRACT
More than 40 years ago, the Indonesian anthropologist Koentjaraningrat remarked that one of the laudable results of the development of post-colonial anthropology is the “increasing number of non-European anthropologists” who will probably soon “dominate the anthropological activity” in their own countries (1964: 295). Koentjaraningrat’s self-conscious assessment that most of the previously colonized countries “now have their have own national anthropologists” (ibid.) was influenced, of course, by the memories of the academic developments in his own country, where an anthropology of Indonesia dominated by Indonesian scientists only became possible after the Dutch scholars had been forced to leave the country in the late 1950s. During these years, for the first time after independence, the opportunity had developed to appoint Indonesian scholars to the vacant university positions, and thereby to make an attempt to decolonize and Indonesianize the Dutch scientific heritage.
