Phillip Winn, Dip Teach (QUT), BA Hons (UQ), PhD (ANU)
Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology

Email: phillip.winn@anu.edu.au

Biographical Statement

I am currently Senior Research Associate in connection with the ARC Discovery Project: 'Being Muslim in eastern Indonesia: practice, politics and cultural diversity', 2009-2011 (in collaboration with Prof. Kathy Robinson, Dr Andrew McWilliam [ANU] and Prof Nurul Ilmi Idrus [Universitas Hasanuddin]). This project aims to investigate Muslim beliefs and practices through ethnographic research across a range of communities in relatively understudied locales, and promises to substantially enlarge existing understandings of religious, cultural and political expressions of Islam in Indonesia. My main field-based research to date has been in the Maluku region of eastern Indonesia. I have held several teaching and/or research positions in academia, government and with non-government organizations, and published articles in edited volumes and scholarly journals in addition to newspapers and magazines. /p>

Research Interests

Political anthropology, especially sovereignty, governmentality and political culture; anthropological approaches to understanding Muslim diversity; moral and ethical ideas in the constitution of subjectivity; socio-cultural analysis of violence; theorizing religion in relation to conditions of (post)modernity and (post)secularism; the significance of place and emplacement versus mobility and displacement; theorizing community and identity; practices of cultural tourism and its effects; Maluku & eastern Indonesia; approaches to the holistic study of small island contexts.

Key Publications

• 2008 'The Butonese of Banda: departure, mobility and identification', in Horizons of home: nation, gender and migrancy in island Southeast Asia (Annual Indonesia Lecture Series, no. 25), pp. 85-100. Penelope Graham ed. Melbourne: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash Asia Institute (an imprint of Monash University Press).
• 2007 'The Southeast Asian exception and "unforeseen results": unfree labour in the Banda Islands', in Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives, pp. 76-107. M. Fernandes-Dias ed. London: Cambridge Scholars.
• 2006 'Tanah berkat (blessed land) and the source of the local in the Banda Islands, central Maluku', in Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land. Land and territory in the Austronesian world Comparative Austronesia Series, pp. 61-81. T. Reuter ed. Canberra: ANU E Press [http://epress.anu.edu.au/austronesians/sharing/pdf/ch05.pdf].
• 2003 'Sovereign violence, moral authority and the Maluku cakalele', in A State of Emergency: Violence, Society and the State in Indonesia, pp. 49-76. S. Pannell ed. Darwin: Northern Territory University Press.
• 2002 ' "Everyone Searches, Everyone Finds": moral discourse and resource in use in an Indonesian Muslim community'. Oceania 72 (4): 275-293.
• 2001 'Graves, groves and gardens: place and identity – Central Maluku, Indonesia.' The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 2 (1): 24-44.

Career Highlights

Lecturer and convener of postgraduate coursework programs in anthropology at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Social Sciences, the Australian National University (2005-8); consultant anthropologist with North Queensland Land Council in 2005 (authoring a 206 page research report entitled: ‘Kunjen people and the Red River-inland Staaten River Region of SW Cape York, Queensland’ with Dr J. Lahn); team member of the Australian Parliamentary Election Observer mission at the Indonesian Parliamentary Elections of 2004; Indonesia and East Timor analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australian Government (2002-4); public lecture in the Annual Indonesia Lecture Series, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University (2002). Reviews Editor at The Australian Journal of Anthropology since 2005.