As a professional anthropologist, I'm working my dream job. Even if I inherited a fortune from my great aunt, I'd still be back at work on Monday morning. Why? Because I'm fascinated by what makes us tick as humans. With my focus on socio-cultural anthropology, I concentrate on cultural and social aspects of human life. So I'm not like Indiana Jones; I don't study old bones and stones. Instead, I use a kind of fieldwork known as participant-observation (or ‘ethnography’). For me, this meant months living in Java in the 2000s. I spent my time learning the language, participating in everyday life, trying to put myself in the shoes of people who live different lives. A highlight of my research has been providing the only thorough and scholarly account of the killings of about 100 alleged sorcerers in 1998 Java. It's a book called Witch-hunt and Conspiracy. So I've decided to call myself a 'world leader in the anthropology of witch-hunts'. I only know of a few other living anthropologists who have studied witch-hunts, so who's going to disagree with me? Additionally, I used the experience of doing participant-observation as a means to understand how we as humans interact with the state (that is, the government, bureaucracy, official organisations, etc. The specific issue I considered was that, during the witch-hunt, government officials often sided with those who killed sorcerers. I tried to explain why in a book called The Entangled State.

I continued that research interest, in the 'state', doing partipant-observation on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the 2010s., I studied how people try to bring the state into their lives, but on their own terms. I wrote that up in an article called "Seeking the State". I've published several other pieces about the Cocos Malays, but I'm proudest of my book The Cocos Malays: Perspectives from Anthropology and History. For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book called Weaving Leaves, which also based my fieldwork experiences of living on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Currently I'm researching the lives and experiences of Australians who, like me, have taught English in Japan. I've been interviewing some fascinating people who have been kind enough to share their experience of being teachers on the Japan Exchange & Teaching program. So watch this space. 

The way I see it, I've been blessed to do what I love. So I try to share what I've been fortunate enough to learn. My job lecturing and supervising lets me do this. I also try to spread the knowledge through Blogging and Vlogging on anthropology and related topics.