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