Janet Hoskins

Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion in USC Dornsife, is the 2022–23 Dornsife-EHESS professeure invitée at the EHESS. Hoskins’s research interests are defined around several overlapping themes, each of which draws on a separate set of interdisciplinary connections: (1) indigenous representations of the past and of time, (2) the relation between gender, exchange and narrative, (3) colonial and postcolonial theory, with specific reference to Caodaism, a new universal religion born in French Indochina in 1926, and (4) migration and religious experience in Transpacific diasporic communities.

Her first book, The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (winner of the 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies) was both an ethnographic study of the politics of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Kodi people of Sumba, it examined indigenous calendars, historical narratives and new symbols of nationalist unity to show how a complex ancestral heritage has been changed in the contemporary context. Her second book, Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), continued this interest in history and anthropology by examining the reasons why headhunting rituals are still performed in the postcolonial era, several generations after pacification. These new instances suggest that headhunting is a powerful symbolic trope that resonates throughout the region, pitting a heritage of violent raids against new anxieties about domination by external political forces. Her third book, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998) explores the relationship between persons and their possessions, and in particular the ways in which both men and women may choose to tell their own life histories by using a domestic object as a pivot for narrative articulation. It draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, literary analysis and exchange theory, and opposes forms of biographic identification to the different forms of materialism in Western consumerism. Her fourth book, The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism, looks at the changing historical contexts of a new millenarian religion that articulated an Asian synthesis of world religions in the context of anti-colonial resistance, the American war in Vietnam, and the post 1975 diaspora. She has also edited, with Viet Thanh Nguyen, the 2014 book Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, and has edited, with Thien-Huong Ninh, a special issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies on Globalizing Vietnamese Religion in 2017. Her most recent research, conducted with Vietnamese anthropologist Nguyen Thi Hien, is about “Little Hanois and Little Saigons: Overseas Vietnamese Communities and Cold War Polarities”, and has included field studies of communities in Paris, Berlin, Prague and Moscow.

She is the co-founder (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) of the Center for Transpacific Studies, and was elected President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (a section of the American Anthropological Association) from 2011-2013. She has been a scholar in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford, the Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Getty Research Institute, the National University of Singapore and the University of Oslo, Norway.

Header image: “Le Plus Grand Reseau du Monde,” Lucien Boucher,
Air France, 1964, David Rumsey Map Center