Summerall Guards Drill Team performs at the Citadel commencement parade, May 2001
Karo spirit medium performs the dance of the "magic staff"
William James Hall 440
(617) 495-3730
M.A. Folklore, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1979, Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1989.
Narrative and history, culture theory, the politics of religion, comparative colonial studies, Christian missions, citizenship and subjectivity, nationalism, gender studies, violence, military culture, Indonesia, southern U.S.
Mary Margaret Steedly, Professor has focused on the Karo Bataks, a kinship-based society of the North Sumatran uplands deeply implicated in colonial and postcolonial projects of modernity, development and nation-building. Her first book, Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland (Princeton University Press, 1993) received the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 1994. Based on three years' ethnographic research with Karo spirit mediums and extensive study of colonial sources, this work approaches Karo historical experience through stories of encounters with spirits.
She is now completing a second book, Rifle Reports: Gender, Nationalism and Peasant Resistance in the Karo Area, 1945-1950, which explores the Indonesian war of independence of Karo participants. Like her earlier work, this book is concerned with the mutually constituting relations of narrative and experience, but it moves beyond the personal realm of belief to consider questions of subjectivity and state formation in the political domain of agency, citizenship and social violence. Supported by a grant from the John C. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program on Security and Sustainability, her next project will turn to contemporary American culture, and to the paradoxical centrality of undemocratic institutions in a democratic society. During the calendar year 2000 she will be conducting ethnographic fieldwork at The Citadel Military College of South Carolina, focusing on the construction and inculcation of a particular "military culture" of soldier-citizens.
Her recent publications include "The importance of proper names: Language and 'national' identity in colonial East Sumatra," American Ethnologist (1996); "What is culture: Does it matter?" in M. Garber, P. Franklin and R. Walkowitz (eds.), Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1996); "Surrogates, slips and incidental encounters: The tale of Raja Bakaléwat," Anthropology and Humanism (2000), and "The state of culture theory in the anthropology of Southeast Asia," Annual Review of Anthropology (2000)
SIGNS OF CRISIS: Media and Politics in Southern Asia