Trajectories

This volume engages with the work of E. Douglas Lewis, who has made major contributions to the understanding of Eastern Indonesia, ethnography, culture, and religion, as well as a neurobiologically informed anthropology. Lewis work on the Ata Tana Ai (People of the Forest) of Flores has long been regarded as a seminal work on culture and society in Eastern Indonesia. His precedence theory became highly influential among anthropologists in their interpretations of other social groups in the region. In this volume, however, a group of scholars influenced by his work undertake diverse and thought-provoking excursions from Lewis work, shedding light on his insights on subjects ranging from Eastern Indonesian ethnography, to theorizing culture change, to development, and to the nascent field of neuroanthropology. Of particular note, this book also features an extended contribution by Lewis that is, as Professor James J. Fox notes in this books foreword, the kind of serious contemplation of an intellectual trajectory that every senior anthropologist should be urged to write.