Richard Fox

Full Name

Richard Fox

Pen Name

Richard Fox

Photograph by

private

Link to Photograph

https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/pacificasia/people/faculty/profile/fox-richard.php

Website for biography

Place

Canada
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Related Music

Related Books

More Than Words - Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali

Related Scholars Articles

Nyen Kal Ngisidang Bangkene? Shifting Relations of Neighborliness and Family in Bali

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Biography

In English

I am an anthropologist by training, though my teaching and research tend to cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries—in pursuit of questions pertaining to the historical and ethnographic study of religion, media and performance in South and Southeast Asia. More specifically, my work has primarily focused on Indonesia and the wider Malay region. I also have a longstanding interest in the philosophy of the human sciences.

Before coming to Victoria, I taught for six years at the Institut für Ethnologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, where I was a member of the collaborative research initiative on Material Text Cultures. There I completed the Habilitation in Anthropology. I have also held research and teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Williams College and Universitas Udayana. As to academic training, I completed the doctorate in both Anthropology and Religious Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (2002). Prior to this I had taken an MA in Oriental and African Religions (SOAS, 1995), with formal examinations in Sanskrit language, Indian philosophy and Buddhist Studies. My BA was in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1994).

Dr. Fox’s full profile is available at: https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/pacificasia/people/faculty/profile/fox-richard.php

In Balinese

In Indonesian

—

https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/pacificasia/people/faculty/profile/fox-richard.php

Examples of work

Book More Than Words - Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali

Scholars Room Nyen Kal Ngisidang Bangkene? Shifting Relations of Neighborliness and Family in Bali

Balinese forms of social organization, collective labor and solidarity are gradually being transformed – and often displaced – by new social institutions and their attendant ideals, desires and pleasures. The rise of the nuclear family, as a new social ideal and institution, is one the more important developments in this connection. This essay examines rival conceptions of the family, and of household economy, that underpinned a debate that took place in a southerly Balinese ward over the provision of neighborly assistance during six-monthly odalan ceremonies. The analysis provides insight into how social and cultural transformation is understood and experienced at the level of day-to-day life.

More Than Words - Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali

Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of "the living letter" may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—linked to academic philology, reform Hinduism, and local politics—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. More than Words shows how Balinese practices of apotropaic writing—on palm-leaves, amulets, and bodies—challenge these notions, and yet coexist alongside them. Reflecting on this coexistence, Fox develops a theoretical approach to writing centered on the premise that such contradictory sensibilities hold wider significance than previously recognized for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140106255130&fa=author&person_id=5894#content