Jan Pouwer

Jan Pouwer (21 September 1924, Dordrecht – 21 April 2010, Zwolle) was a Dutch anthropologist with a thorough grounding in his profession in terms of fieldwork and theory.

Pouwer studied Indology and Ethnology at Leiden University (first degree July 1, 1947; second degree November 14, 1950), a study leading to an academic degree for the Netherlands Indies Public Administration that included: Malayan and Javanese languages, Comparative Ethnology of the Netherlands Indies, Islamic Institutions, Overseas History, Constitutional and Customary Law, Western and Non-Western Economics, Cultural Anthropology.

He studied Indology and Ethnology at Leiden University (MA 1950, PhD 1955) under the renowned Jan Petrus Benjamin de Josselin de Jong.

He worked as a ‘government anthropologist’ and conducted extensive fieldwork in Netherlands New Guinea (now Papua region in Indonesia), 1951–62.

He worked briefly as a lecturer at Utrecht University (1951), then took off on a career as a ‘government anthropologist’ in Netherlands New Guinea, 1951–62.

He was a research officer (gouvernmentsethnoloog) at the Bureau for Native Affairs (Kantoor voor Bevolkingszaken) in Hollandia (now Jayapura), Netherlands New Guinea, 1951–60; served as Acting Advisor for Native Affairs in 1960–1961, as Advisor for Native Affairs in 1962.

He conducted fieldwork among the Kamoro people in the coastal Mimika-area (South-West New Guinea), 1951–54; undertook a two-months’ survey on social structure, land-tenure, prestige economy and some moot problems of acculturation in the areas surrounding the Ajamaru lakes, Central Bird's Head, West New Guinea, 1956; six months of research into the effects of commercial films on the ideas, values and behavior of urban Papuans, 1956; four months of fieldwork in the rugged highlands of the Northwestern Bird's Head (Anggi lakes and surroundings), mainly among two highly dispersed tribes, 1957; eight months of fieldwork as a member of the Dutch scientific expedition to the Star Mountains (Sterrengebergte) near the border between West New Guinea and Papua, 1959; the Iwur region, south of the Star Mountains; the urban community of Tugunese people (1961), a mixture of Indonesian, Portuguese, Dutch, German and Papuan origin, who left their village near Jakarta in 1950 to settle in Hollandia (now Jayapura) and who were expected to migrate to the Netherlands in 1962.

Over the course of his career, Pouwer published two books (one his 1955 PhD thesis) and a wide range of articles.

He obtained his PhD on anthropological fieldwork among the Mimika in the Netherlands New Guinea at Leiden in 1955.

His 1955 PhD thesis at Leiden, Enkele aspecten van de Mimika-cultuur, Nederlands Zuidwest Nieuw Guinea (Some aspects of Mimika Culture, Netherlands South-West New Guinea), was based on twenty-five months of fieldwork among the Mimika (Kamoro) people.

Pouwer makes frequent reference to it in many of his published papers.

Teaching experience: as part of his official duties Pouwer taught general anthropology and ethnography of New Guinea at the School of Public Administration (Bestuursschool) in Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea, 1955–58.

Other themes range from a review of Dutch New Guinea as an Ethnological Field of Study (1961) to a 'travel guide' to the myths of Kamoro and Asmat peoples (2002).

He subsequently served as Professor of Anthropology at Amsterdam, Wellington (N.Z./Aotearoa) and Nijmegen Universities, 1962–87.

Many of his concerns and much of his work can be viewed as a 'text' framed within the 'context' of Leiden Structuralism, itself part of the larger field of modern anthropology.

He enriched this field with insights in configurational comparison and the dialectical character of social structure, mythology, gender and ritual.

A dedicated teacher, Pouwer's ideas are not to be found in a single volume.

They exist, like some forms of mythology, in several outlines and sketches.

He was Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1962–66; Foundation Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Maori Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 1966–76; and Senior Lecturer, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Catholic University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1976–87.

(Pouwer 1967:92) He added that, without taking "...the horizontal arrangement into explicit consideration ... the structure of New Guinea systems will not be intelligible to us."(ibid)

Pouwer's work also demonstrates a consistent attempt to capture, within a strict discipline, something of life's movement.

This tension in his work may have resulted from his immersion in New Guinea lived realities and the lack of fit between those realities and Western understanding.

Possibly for this reason Pouwer did not embrace a purely structuralist position à la Lévi-Strauss.

Pouwer was a foremost advocate of a configurational approach for cross-cultural comparison with an emphasis on the importance of 'relative position' of elements within an arrangement rather than on elements themselves.

Pouwer's configurational approach has a synchronic aspect (comparison between cultures) and a diachronic aspect which (following Lévi-Strauss) he called 'structural history'.

The configurational approach to cross-cultural comparison may also be viewed against other attempts such as those of structural functionalism, which dealt with institutions and functions.

Some of the other themes which ran through his teaching (during his years in Wellington, New Zealand-Aotearoa) do not appear strongly in his published work.

These include an emphasis on complementary opposition and a both-and approach (in comparison to an either/or logic).

He was a visiting professor at Monash University (Australia) in 1971 and at the Universities of Toronto (Canada), Leiden and Utrecht (the Netherlands) in 1972.

One theme which runs through Pouwer's work, both published and unpublished, is the need for new approaches to understanding the social formations of other peoples.

In his work he was always aware of a dialectical relationship, in terms of systems of significations, between the anthropologist as an observer and the lived realities of other peoples.

There was never any easy resting place for dogma in Pouwer's teaching.

He not only embraced paradox and contradiction as necessary features of knowledge, he also emphasized the ongoing dialectical movement from doubt to certainty to doubt ...

His New Guinea experiences lead him to seriously question the use of descent-based anthropological models developed in Africa.

Characterising descent as a vertical form of arrangement, Pouwer noted that "... the structural importance of the horizontal arrangement of kin has been neglected."

In this work Pouwer makes use of a distinction between the symbolic and existential dimensions of social action as refined by Bruce Knauft (1993) while, at the same time and contra Knauft, using a configurational approach to demonstrate the difference between the neighbouring Kamoro and Asmat peoples.

His last book, Gender, Ritual and Social Formation in West Papua: A Configurational Analysis Comparing Kamoro and Asmat, was published at Leiden in 2010.

It can be downloaded from OAPEN for no cost.

In the Prologue to his 2010 book, he notes (2010:3) that a request to have the thesis translated into English was unsuccessful and that this reduced access for those with a limited reading knowledge of Dutch.

Shortly before his death, Pouwer concluded a synthetic monograph comparing Kamoro and Asmat culture, based on his own fieldwork, missionary and administrative reports, and anthropological studies (Gender, Ritual and Social Formation in West Papua. Leiden, 2010).