Zane Goebel

Zane is a linguistic anthropologist with a long-term interest in Indonesia. Linguistic anthropology is a multidicsiplinary endevour spanning semiotics, social theory, ethnography, ethnomethodology, politics, history, and media studies. “Ethnomethodology” may be the least familiar, but in a nutshell much work in this area takes a close look at the way people talk and use language in everyday conversations. Ethnography helps to understand the relationships between the people talking (e.g. why are they talking, what brought them together, their history).

During my doctoral studies I used this mix of approaches to understand how Indonesians of different ethnic backgrounds use different languages (mainly Javanese and Indonesian) to build and maintain social relations in an urban Indonesian neighbourhood. I’ve published a specialist book on this with Cambridge University Press (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/sociolinguistics/language-migration-and-identity-neighborhood-talk-indonesia).

More recently, I have applied this approach along with a dash of political economy as a way of understanding why ethnicity is such an enduring category in Indonesia, how this relates to language, and what a decade of political and fiscal decentralization have done to existing language hierarchies. This work which was supported by a grant from the the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science is to be published in May 2015 in, what I hope, is a user friendly book with Oxford University Press (http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199795420.do).

At present I am working on how everyday talk and the movement between a number of languages (Javanese and Indonesian) in this talk assists in managing and leading a group of Indonesian civil servants. I have published a number of academic articles on this project which is funded by an Australian Research Council grant. You can look at pre-print copies of my work at: http://latrobe.academia.edu/ZaneGoebel