I hold Master degrees in Cultural Anthropology (cum laude, 1988) and history (1988) from Leiden University and obtained my PhD in Social Sciences from the same university in 1994. My research interests cover urban anthropology, environmental sustainability, violence, and, to a lesser degree, decolonization, social inequality, environmental history, and football. I seek to frame my research theoretically in terms of mobility, and the tension between security and freedom. I value comparative and interdisciplinary research and I am inclined to add a historical perspective to my analyses. Most of my fieldwork has been carried out in Indonesia, but I can also point at fieldwork-based publications about Brazil, the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore.
My current main research sets out from the paradox why people, knowing what is necessary for a sustainable lifestyle, persist in non-eco-friendly behaviour; in point of fact I am studying waste-pickers in Indonesian cities, urban communities that jointly clean their neighbourhood, and middle-class urbanites that navigate between the contradictory, global forces of a green discourse and a consumerist lifestyle. For my current research I have annual stints of fieldwork in the Indonesian cities of Surabaya and Semarang. A long-term project, both in scope and in time I have been working on it, is an environmental history of Central Sumatra, Indonesia, from 1600 to 1870. I have also done research recently on the quality of life of kidney dialysis patients in the Netherlands.
Apart from winning awards and nominations for teaching awards, both at Leiden University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I was granted the Professor Teeuw Award for promoting Indonesian-Dutch cooperation in the field of arts and science in 2007. I am happy I can also call myself “Runner-up, Best Supervisor of PhD students”, Faculty of Social Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit in 2011 (the only year this conquest was organized by PhD students).
