Since the late 1970s Professor Saskia E. Wieringa has done fieldwork in Indonesia, interrupted by a 13 years' ban. During the New Order period she carried out research on women's labour and women's organisations, both state-directed, independent and underground. After reformasi she focused on sexuality issues, particularly the LGBTI movement and the 1965 genocide. All topics were controversial at the time and the latter two topics still are controversial. She had to resort to various strategies  to get the data she needed and to keep her informants and herself safe. In this lecture, she will outline these strategies, but also raise more ethical concerns. What can the role of a 'militant anthropologist' (Scheper-Hughes) be under these circumstances? She will discuss issues of commitment, obligations, authorship, political work as action research and the pros and contras of the various means of dissemination that she used (academi non fiction,  fiction, media). In particular she will address the question of the ethical motivation of anthropology, using references to Snouck Hurgronje and Wertheim.

Saskia E. Wieringa is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam. She chairs the International People's Tribunal on the 1965 Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia and co-organized the Tribunal on that topic, held in November 2015. She wrote and (co-) edited more than 30 books and over 200 articles. The latest books include: (2012 co-edited with Nursyahbani Katjasungkana) The Future of Asian Feminisms; (2013 co-edited with Horacio Sivori) Sexual Politics in the Global Sout; (2013, co-edited with Maznah Mohamad), Family ambiguity and domestic violence in Asia: concept, law and process (Sussex Academic Publishers) ; Heteronormativity in Asia (2015 Sussex Academic Press). Forthcoming is Imagined evil; Propaganda and the Indonesian genocide (Routledge).

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