James Siegel Interviewed by Johan Lindquist

Abstract: This interview is a result of an extended written and spoken conversation between October 2011 and March 2012. It deals with Siegel's career as an anthropologist and scholar of Indonesia. The interview focuses on his intellectual development, from his time as a graduate student advised by Clifford Geertz, to the influence of colleagues such as Victor Turner and Benedict Anderson at Cornell where he spent his professional career. Cornell was significantly a major center not only for Southeast Asian studies, but also for emerging scholarship on the form of deconstruction represented by Jacques Derrida. Building on this trajectory, the interview discusses in particular Siegel's experience of ethnographic work in Indonesia while engaging with a deconstructive approach.