About
I am an author and Professor of Anthropology who has published eight books and a book translation from Portuguese. All are anthropological works and with the exception of a reader in religion and a co-authored introductory textbook in cultural anthropology most are based upon ethnographic research I have carried out in the eastern region of Timor, an island sitting just off the north coast of Australia. When my wife, Maxine, and I first visited the region to carry out ethnographic fieldwork in 1966 it was a Portuguese colony called "Portuguese Timor." Today the former colony has become the independent nation-state of Timor-Leste (it's also known as "East Timor"). Since that long-ago time Maxine and I have traveled back and forth on many occasions between Timor-Leste and Stony Brook University, New York State, where I am Professor of Anthropology. Besides Timor-Leste my authorial interests are witchcraft, religion, and global health.
Featured Work
Most recent book: "Rhetoric and the Decolonization and Recolonization of East Timor." Routledge, Tylor & Francis Group: London and New York. Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series. ISBN:978-1-138-02107-5 (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-315-77806-8 (ebk). 236 pp. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138021075
The years 1974 and 1975 witnessed momentous events in the lives of the indigenous people of a European colony where time had seemed to stand still for 350 years. The Timorese people, the vast majority illiterate and unaware of the world outside their local communities, found themselves abandoned by Portugal and unable to prevent the armed forces of their giant neighbor, the Republic of Indonesia, from invading their land in December 1975. "Rhetoric and the Decolonization and Recolonization of East Timor" describes the tragedy that occurred when the Timorese people, after enduring a chaotic transition to independence, were again colonized, this time by an Asiatic power, their neighbor, the Republic of Indonesia.
