Jill Forshee

Background

Jill Forshee was born in 1956 in Canada. She is the daughter of Harold and Erma (McMurter) Forshee.

Education

After graduation from Amherst Central High School, Jill Forshee went to Sonoma State University and received there a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987. Then she attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she obtained a Master of Arts degree in anthropology in 1990 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in anthropology in 1996.

Career

Jill Forshee is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Indonesia and East Timor. She was fascinated with the Indonesian people and culture ever since she visited that region as a tourist in 1981. Forshee was intrigued by Indonesian artistry and local people's ability to see the vast potential in an international market for their arts. Inspired by that initial trip Forshee pursued her curiosity which has resulted in the books Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels from Sumba and the co-edited Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia. In Between the Folds, an examination of Sumbanese textile production, Forshee delightfully brings together the lives of weavers, designers, and cloth traders. Using stories of individual artisans to augment her ethnographic analysis, Forshee depicts how the southeast Asian island's traditional craft and culture were influenced by the modernizing aspects of expanded, global trade.

Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia, which Forshee coedited with Christina Fink and Sandra Cate, focuses on the interaction between tourists and local villagers throughout southeast Asia. The book is geared toward an academic audience and includes many case studies from sample regions, giving the editor's work a wide and credible perspective.

Forshee also contributed to books, including Sumha: Decorative Arts and Social Life, Altered States: Material Culture and Shifting Contexts in the Arafura Region, Gender/Tourism/Fun?, and A State of Emergency: Violence, Society and the State in Eastern Indonesia, and to periodicals, including Indonesia and the Malay World, Museum News, Indonesia (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program), American Ethnologist, and Asian Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Besides her researching and writing, Forshee was engaged in teaching from 1996, the year when she lectured anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The next year she worked as a curator at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. In 1997 she began her career as a research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley but in 1998 became a guest co-curator at the National Museum of Ethnology in the Netherlands and a research fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asia Studies at Charles Darwin University in Australia. She left her position in the Netherlands in 1999 and in Australia in 2001.

In 2002 she continued her work as a research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Since 2006 she has taught cultural anthropology at Columbia College Chicago. She also worked as a research anthropologist and consultant at The Fowler Museum in 2008 - 2014.

Achievements

• Jill Forshee is a known and recognized cultural anthropologist with more than twenty years of experience in researching and writing about cultures of Indonesia and East Timor. For the success in her research, she was honored and was a Wenner-Gren fellow, Fulbright scholar, and Australian Research Council fellow. The books she wrote or edited also received wide acclaim. For her book, Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels, Forshee was nominated for the 2002 Harry J. Benda Prize from the University of Hawaii Press.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Culture and Customs of Indonesia

    (Indonesia comprises more than 17,000 islands stretching o...)

    2006
  • Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels from Sumba

    (Textiles have long been integral to the social life and c...)

    2000
  • Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia 1999

Views

Many cultural anthropologists - especially those working in Indonesia, such as Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, Edward Bruner, Janet Hoskins, Marie Jeanne Adams, and others - influenced Forshee's writing. But she also loves literature of all sorts, and writers from George Orwell to Annie Proulx inspired her.

Quotations: "I think that it is crucial to do justice to the people you write about as an anthropologist, especially since ethnography is so much a matter of translation and interpretation. By this, I mean that something of the actual words and lives of people under study should emerge for the reader, apart from the anthropologist's concern for placing them under a theoretical rubric."

"Places in Indonesia and East Timor have a way of taking you in for life. This is what continues to inspire me. I feel compelled to return to the people and places I've written about - to experience what's new in their ongoing stories and just to visit friends again."

Membership

Jill Forshee is a member of the American Ethnological Society, Society for Visual Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, Association for Asian Studies, Textile Society of America, American Council for South Asian Art, and Council for Museum Anthropology.

Interests

• cooking, gardening, traveling, art

Connections

Jill Forshee married Pierre Horn on April 7, 1998.

Father:

Harold Forshee

Mother:

Erma (McMurter) Forshee

husband:

Pierre Horn