CLARK CUNNINGHAM
Professor Emeritus

My first experiences in Asia were in 1955-56 as an undergraduate assistant in Indonesia to the late Karl Pelzer, a Yale geographer. I wrote a senior thesis based on field material from that year, "The Postwar Migration of the Toba Batak to East Sumatra".

After graduation I interpreted for a delegation from Indonesia's first elected parliament visiting the U.S. My interest was established in Southeast Asia and anthropology which I then studied at Oxford University under Rodney Needham's excellent guidance, doing doctoral dissertation fieldwork in west Timor. Later I did research in Thailand and also taught at Chiang Mai University, 1968-70, as part of an Illinois-Chiang Mai joint project.

I came to the Urbana-Champaign campus in 1970 but made many trips back to Indonesia for research, teaching, and consultations. In 1980, with Indonesian colleagues at the University of Indonesia, I helped plan their graduate program in social sciences, which continues to grow. At the University of Illinois I served twice as Head of the Department of Anthropology and as Director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies.

After my retirement in 1994, two colleagues and I curated the Asia Gallery of the new Spurlock Museum which opened in September 2002. I am doing research on Indonesian migrants to southern California and I continue writing up past research on Southeast Asia. I was deeply moved when, in 1999, 18 former students and colleagues published a book in my honor (Aragon and Russell, eds., cited below). It was much appreciated!!

Research Interests:

social structure and culture change, medical anthropology and health care, kinship and marriage, symbolic systems, religion, ethnicity, migration, impact of development projects. Indonesia, Thailand, and the U.S.

EDUCATION:

B.A. (summa cum laude), Yale University, 1957

D.Phil Oxford University, 1963

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

1999

Aragon, Lorraine V. and Susan D. Russell, eds. Structuralism's Transformations: Order and Revision in Indonesian and Malaysian Societies: Essays in Honor of Clark E. Cunningham. Tempe: Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series Press.

1989	(co-editor with Susan D. Russell) Changing Lives, Changing Rites: Ritual and Social Change in Indonesian and Philippine Uplands. University of Michigan.

1970

(Co-editor with Theodore C. Doege and Hatcha Na Bangxang) Studies of Health Problems and Health Behavior in Saraphi District, North Thailand. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Faculty of Medicine and the University of Illinois Chiang Mai Project, Chiang Mai University.

Essays & Articles:

2001	"Indonesia." In Countries and Their Cultures. Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember (eds.) New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1034-1056.
1997	"Indonesians." In American Immigrant Cultures: Builders of a Nation, Vol.1. David Levinson and Melvin Ember (eds.). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 433-438.
1989	"Celebrating a Toba Batak National Hero: An Indonesian Rite of Identity." In Changing Lives, Changing Rites: Ritual and Social Change in Indonesian and Philippine Uplands. Susan D. Russell and Clark E. Cunningham (eds). University of Michigan, Studies of South and Southeast Asia 1, 167-200.
1970	"Thai 'Injection Doctors': Antibiotic Mediators." Social Science and Medicine 4:1-24.
1965	"Order and Change in an Atoni Diarchy." Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:359-382.
1964	"Order in the Atoni House." Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 120:34-68. Reprinted in R. Needham. (ed.) Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.
1958	"The Postwar Migration of the Toba-Bataks to East Sumatra [Indonesia]." Yale Cultural Report Series No. 5. Southeast Asia Studies Program, Yale University.