James Boon
Professor
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1973
interests
hierarchy and heterodoxy, history of anthropological ideas, language and culture, ritual and literature, comparative discourse
short bio
James Boon has done fieldwork in Java and Bali and library research on the history of Indonesian studies and anthropological representations. His work bridges comparative studies of societies and institutions; colonialist ethnology; literary analysis; approaches to kinship, ritual, myth, and media; and the history of ideas. His books are From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition; The Anthropological Romance of Bali: 1597-1972: Dynamic Perspectives in Marriage, Caste, Politics, and Religion; Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts; Affinities and Extremes: Crisscrossing the Bittersweet Ethnology of East Indies History, Hindu-Balinese Culture, and Indo-European Allure; and Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts... Showbiz. Professor Boon teaches courses on cultural practice and critical theory; the art of reading hybrid texts in ethnology; language and culture in endless translation; and dramatically cross-cultural studies.
Abbreviated CV
Education:
B.A. Princeton University, 1968
(French Language and Literature and Cultural Anthropology)
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1973
(Social Anthropology).
Foreign Research
1971, Indonesia; fieldwork in Java and Bali
1972, 1981, 1992, Indonesia; fieldwork in Bali
1972, 1985, 1990, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland; archival and museum work on colonial-era collections
1987, Australia; library and museum work on history of Indonesian ethnology
1992, Bali and Singapore; field study and museum research;
1999 Greece, Museum research on history of anthropology
2000 Hong Kong and Macau, Research on museums, cities, and critical theory
2002 Austria, Switzerland, France, museum research
2005 France, research on social theory and music
[First-language English. Language training: French (reading and speaking), Indonesian (reading and speaking), German (reading), Dutch (reading) Balinese (some speaking)
Received B.A. in French Literature and Anthropology from Princeton in 1968, and doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1973. After teaching at Duke, moved to Cornell where he became Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies; also served on the Comparative Literature Department faculty and the executive committees of the Southeast Asia Program and the Western Societies Program. Acting Director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities in 1984; chaired Cornell’s Department of Anthropology, 1985-88.
In 1989, became Professor of Anthropology at Princeton where he remains; chaired Princeton’s Department of Anthropology in 1998-99 and 2002-2007.Has also served on Princeton’s Program in European Cultural Studies and Program in Media and Modernity.
An interdisciplinary scholar bridging the humanities and social sciences and a specialist in Indonesia and Balinese culture, Jim engages diverse histories of comparative discourse. He emphasizes distinctive schools of interpretive ethnography, politics and poetics of representation, and critical theory both old and new. In his field researches and library-work alike, he cultivates key relations between everyday practices, panoramic spectacles, and philosophies of interrelated arts (verbal, musical, visual). His books, assertively polyvalent, are:
1972 From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition, Blackwell and Harper and Row.
(Spanish translation, El Ateneo, 1977)
1977 The Anthropological Romance of Bali, 1597-1972: Dynamic Perspectives in Marriage and Caste, Politics and Religion, Cambridge University Press.
1982 Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions and Texts, Cambridge University Press.
(Spanish translation, Fondo de Cultura Economica,199l).
1990 Affinities and Extremes: Crisscrossing the Bittersweet Ethnology of East Indies History, Hindu-Balinese Culture, and Indo-European Allure, University of Chicago Press.
1999 Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts . . . Showbiz, Princeton University Press.
Further books underway include (titles tentative):
Cultural Comparison, Encore! Novel Returns to Geertz, Weber, Boasians, Frazer, Critical Theory, and Commercial Desire.
Levi-Strauss, a Longtemps Later
Jim Boon’s recent research reconsiders intricate life-works of scholars called to compare -- stressing significantly odd detours in professional trajectories and strange aftermaths rather than routine “methodologies.” The different studies convey “mingled senses” in anthropology and aesthetics; they craft ways to cross-read myth, music, movies, and magic(s) as ritual modes of experience-unforgotten. (Also remembered is kinship – both actual and figurative). One essay in progress, “Magic the Music of Matter, Myth the Music of Mind,” rekindles affinities between Marcel Mauss and Lévi-Strauss once ascertained by Merleau-Ponty. Jim’s writings factor in hybrid commercial arts as well (Tin Pan Alley; the corpus of Hitchcock and its copious cross-cultural receptions; etc.).
Aside from his published books, his pieces on cultural theory, hybrid arts, and multi-sensory experience include:
1989. “Levi-Strauss, Wagner, Romanticism: A Reading-back.” In George Stocking, ed. Romantic Motives (History of Anthropology, Vol. 6). University of Wisconsin.
1994. “Extravagant Art and Balinese Ritual.” In D. Gerstle and A. Milner, ed. Recovering the Orient: Artists, Scholars, Appropriations. Harwood.
1995 "Panofsky and Lévi-Strauss (and Iconographers and Mythologiques) Re-regarded." In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. I. Lavin, ed. Princeton University Press.
1998 “Accenting Hybridity: Postcolonial Cultural Theory, A Boasian Anthropologist, and I." In Culture and the Problem of the Disciplines. John Rowe, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
1998 "The Cross-cultural Kiss: Edwardian and Earlier, Postmodern and Beyond." David Skomp Distinguished Lectures in Anthropology. Indiana University.
2000 “Showbiz as a Cross-Cultural System: Circus and Song, Garland and Geertz, Rushdie, Mordden ... and More." Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 424-56
2001 “Kenneth Burke's 'True Irony': One Model for Ethnography, Still." In Irony in Action. J. Fernandez and M. Huber, eds. University of Chicago Press.
2002 “Subtly Showy Lowie, or Anthropology’s Ancestors may be Trickier than We Think (even Frazer).” Franz Boas Lecture Series. Columbia University. Department of Anthropology.
2002 “Inter-sensory Travel-Writing as Scientific Dandyism: Select Episodes.” Paper for Conference, “The Science (and Art) of Travel Writing, 1750-1850.” Internationales Forschungscentrum Kulturwissenschaften. University of Vienna.
2004 “Claude Lévi-Strauss.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Second Edition. M. Groden and M. Kreiswirth, eds. Johns Hopkins Press.
2004 “Anthropology, Ethnology, and Religion.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition. Macmillan Press.
2005 “Geertz’s Style: A Moral Matter.” In Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues. R. Shweder and B. Good, eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
2005 “Its All Fijian to Me” (Review Essay of Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa). Anthropology and Humanism, Fall.
2005 “Can Music Compare (et traduire)?: Weberian Affinities (and Hunches).” Paper for Colloquium on Weber et La Musique, IRCAM, Paris.
2007 “Also 100 Years Since Weber Flirted with Ethnography.” In Max Weber’s “Objectivity” Reconsidered. Laurence Mcfalls, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2007 “The Birth of Anthropology out of a Pause on Pausanias: Frazer’s Travel-Translations Re-interrupted and Resumed.” In Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology. G. Marcus and N. Panourgia, eds. Fordham University Press (in press).
RELISHED RESPONSES
Among many welcome comments (including ironic retorts, often the most helpful kind) kindling on-going efforts are these:
1. From Didier Eribon, De Près et de loin (1988; translated as Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991):
D.Eribon. You often say that you are a man of the nineteenth century. What does that mean?
C. Lévi-Strauss. Its not only my own idea. A few years ago, a young American colleague wrote a book [J. Boon, 1972] in which he placed me in the tradition of the symbolists and other writers of the period. I have the feeling that if someone waved a magic wand and I were transported to that time without losing my twentieth-century consciousness, I would not feel too far from home . . . .
2. Cliff Geertz, winking that Jim is “perhaps the most distinctive stylist in Anthropology,” added:
The heart of Boon’s message, here as just about everywhere else, is that solemnity and seriousness are not the same thing, and that those of us – he and I are alike in this, as in so much else . . . unable to keep a wholly straight face when confronting the really important things of life have something of a problem when it comes to anthropological prose making. Comic gravity, a careless air in the face of hard reality is a difficult thing to bring off” (C. Geertz in Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues, R. Shweder and B.Good, eds. 2005, p. 112)
3. Literary theorist-historian John Carlos Rowe characterized Jim’s approach in “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines:
Stressing the performative aspects of teaching that derive directly from the everyday use of language, Boon playfully and thus seriously returns liberal education to the ordinary complexities of real life. Education, the teacher, and the student are always already “hybridized” by the disciplinary networks in which they are constructed. Contemporary as such an approach may be, Boon warns us against historical egotism by pointing out equivalent hybridities in such a venerable figure as Edward Sapir, whose seminal book Language (1920) helped effect the paradigm shift from a cognitive to a language-based model for knowledge.
Boon wants us to respect those precursors who helped frame the intellectual projects of critical theory and cultural studies. He also wants us to understand how intellectuals continue to shape dominant ideas of culture, even if they do so by transgressing the boundaries of such popular conventions. Pointing out how Sapir’s understanding of language’s fundamental hybridity led Sapir also to reject all nationalisms as contrived fictions, Boon stresses the continuing importance of the language model for anthropology and the other disciplines basic to cultural studies. . . . Learning how to “listen” to the sounds we ourselves produce as we interpret other cultures is one of the difficult lessons Boon teaches in this essay . . . Boon achieves this teaching by way of a rhetorical performance that is self-consciously marked in the published version of the lecture he delivered at Irvine, but we can hardly capture the vitality of that lecture, as it involved Boon’s readings in different languages, dialects, and accents in live voice and from audio recordings. (Columbia U. Press, 1998, pp. 10-11).
Longtime Acknowledgments
Fellowships:
Danforth Graduate Fellowship (1968-72); Ford Foundation Grant for work in Indonesia (1971). NIMH Fieldwork Grant (1971-73. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, post-doc (1973-74); Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Visiting Member (1974-75); American Philosophical Society Summer (1981); Cornell Society for Humanities Faculty Fellow (1978-79); Cornell Southeast Asia Program Summer Fellowships (1978 through 1988); Australian National University Humanities Research Center Fellow (1987); Fulbright Scholar, Australia (1987); Salzburg Seminar Faculty (1988); Seeger Fellowship (Princeton) for work in Greece (1999); Miller Endowment Fellow, Center for Advanced Study (Illinois, 2000); Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures Fellow (U. of Hong Kong, 2000).
Awards/Lectures:
Summa Cum Laude (Princeton); Phi Beta Kappa; Woodrow Wilson Fellow; Danforth Fellow; Roy D. Alpert Prize (Chicago); Inaugural Lecture for NEH Themes, Cornell Society for Humanities (1980); Awarded pilot program, N.E.H. series (“A Question of Place”) on National Public Radio (1980); Invitational Six-Lecture Series, State University of New York (1983); Keynote Lecture, KITV, Leiden (1986); Fulbright Lectures in Canberra, Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, and Perth Australia (1987). Keynote Address, Society of English Literature and Language Scholars in Switzerland (1991); Plenary address, New Chaucer Society(1992).Plenary Address, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (1993); Skomps Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology, Indiana University (1996); Miller Endowment Lecture, Center for Advanced Study (University of Illinois, 2000).
