Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Fadjal Thufail

Fadjar I. Thufail is Research Fellow and member of the Cultural Property research group at Gottingen University. His project deals with the cultural politics of noblemen, examining how sultans and kings draw on the discourse of indigeneity and tradition to strengthen their political relationship with the state and forge alliance with and at the same time differentiate themselves from other indigenous groups.
Fadjar I. Thufail received a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His dissertation, titled “Figures in the May 1998 Riots: Imagining the State in Post-New Order Indonesia”, discusses the narratives of the May 1998 riot in Indonesia. Since 1992, he has been working as a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and currently he is the Head of Asia Pacific Division of the Research Center for Regional Resources of the LIPI. From 2007 to 2010 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Salle, where he carried out research on the social life of reconciliation and its legal implication. Fadjar I. Thufail’s research interests include cultural politics, legal anthropology and cultural property, violence and riot, history of science, and visual anthropology. He has conducted research in North Sulawesi, West Sumatra, Southeastern Sulawesi, the Moluccas, Java, and Japan. He received fellowships from Fulbright, MacArthur, Wenner-Gren, University of Wisconsin, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundation. Besides conducting anthropological research, he also makes photographs. His photographic website is http://www.coretan-lensa.com.