in Kemiren, Banyuwangi, January 1997
(Photo courtesy Marrik Bellen)
Ben Arps is Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University. His greatest intellectual curiosity concerns social and political processes and configurations in which language plays a formative role, or, put differently, the question how language is made to work in the world. In his teaching and research so far he has focused on four fields of this kind: religion, promotion and propaganda, cultural policy, and language itself. Ben Arps derives his theoretical inspiration from linguistic anthropology and devotes special attention to media and performance.
Ben Arps publishes and teaches in these fields, and he directs collaborative teaching and research projects in some of them. He has supervised dissertations at doctoral, Master’s, and Bachelor’s level in Javanese, Sundanese, Betawi, Balinese, Sasak, Indonesian, and Thai studies, covering such fields as sociolinguistics, performance, the music industry, radio, television, film, literature, lexicography, and education. He also edits a number of periodicals and book series, has lectured widely, and has organized (with others) several scholarly meetings.
Since 1979 Ben Arps has conducted a total of four years of fieldwork in Indonesia, principally in Surakarta and Yogyakarta in central Java, Banyuwangi on the eastern tip of the island, and Cilacap on the south coast.
The specific ethnographic projects Ben Arps is currently working on concern the ways performance can get out of hand (including ideas about what constitutes ‘out of hand’), the use of audio media in everyday Indonesian life and especially religion and politics, the impact of media and performance on the forms and functions of language (illustrated by the case of Osing in Banyuwangi), popular music and dance as means of promotion (case study: two genres in Banyuwangi), the realism of shadow puppetry, and the translation, adaptation, and interpretation of narrative across religions (the case study being the story of Dewa Ruci). In the long run each of these projects is to result in a book.
Ben Arps is attached to the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, where he teaches primarily in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Indonesia, a department that he chaired in 1995, 1999/2000, and 2003–2006. Before coming to Leiden in 1993 he lectured in Indonesian and Javanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1988–1993). He was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2001/02, a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Asian Studies and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University during the first half of 2005, and the Netherlands Visiting Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan in 2006/07.
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in Kemiren, Banyuwangi, January 1997 (Photo courtesy Marrik Bellen) |
Last updated: 23 September 2009