Dr. Dieter Bartels

Dieter Bartels is a Professor of Anthropology at Yavapai College, located on the extreme edges of civilization in the American Wild West. His hometown is Clarkdale in Central Arizona — an old company town built for workers of a nearby copper mine. The houses are built out of solid brick, a construction form rarely found in the desert of the American Southwest. It gives him a sense of permanence and a link to Europe in this very transient land.

Born in Munich, Germany, he received his doctorate from Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). He still has fond memories of this hallowed Ivy League institution where he was a member of the world-renowned Southeast Asia Department, allowing him to receive a truly interdisciplinary training rather than being confined to the boundaries of one particular academic field.

Since 1974, he has done extensive research among Ambonese Moslems and Christians in the Central Moluccas, as well as in the Ambonese-Moluccan exile community in the Netherlands, resulting in several books and numerous articles covering such topics as pela alliances, Moslem-Christian relationships, terrorism, ethnicity, minority emancipation, Dutch-Moluccan interrelations, bicultural education, ethnohistory, identity formation, miscegenation, and socialization.

In the summer of 2000, during one of the worst outbreaks of Christian-Moslem violence, he was conducting research and filming in Ambon and Saparua, frequently under hostile fire. He witnessed the attack by radical fundamentalist Moslem fighters (Laskar Jihad) on the Christian University (UKIM) in Ambon City from within the burning buildings of its campus. It was then that he coined the term “Action Anthropology” – a subfield he does not recommend as a specialization with great future potential for those loving to live.

Currently, he is working on a radical revision of his dissertation on pela alliances and Christian-Moslem relationships, necessitated by the recent, dramatic developments in the Spice Islands. He also has been shifting his focus to Visual Anthropology and is busy with the editing of an ethnographic documentary film about the future of Moluccan children in The Netherlands shot in 2003.