University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of Anthropology / Staff / Academic Staff

Professor Linda Connor

Chair of Department
Room 235
RC Mills building A26

+61 2 9351 6678

Linda Connor was born in Sydney and completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Sydney, graduating in 1974. She went on to complete a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1982, undertaking fieldwork in Indonesia, on Balinese healing traditions and the nationally organised biomedical health system.

A year as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco in 1982 was followed by three years at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, where she worked on various projects including a curriculum development project to incorporate health social sciences into tertiary medical education in Indonesia. During the years 1979-1991 she undertook further field research in Bali and worked intensively with ethnographic filmmakers Timothy and Patsy Asch at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California to produce a number of ethnographic films on healing and cremation in Bali, as well as an ethnographic film monograph, first published in 1986 (Jero Tapakan: Balinese Healer. An Ethnographic Film Monograph. L. Connor, P. Asch and T. Asch, Cambridge University Press), and revised in a second edition in 1996. In 1985 she took up an academic position at the University of Newcastle, where she contributed extensively to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, new degree programs and curriculum development, and research student supervision. She was part of the CAPSTRANS team that developed the joint Newcastle-Wollongong Masters Degree in Social Change and Development Studies and also participated in the development of the Bachelor of Development Studies at the University of Newcastle. From 1998 to 2008 Professor Connor was a research associate of the ARC Key Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS) a research centre based jointly at the University of Wollongong and the University of Newcastle. She was Director of the University of Newcastle node of CAPSTRANS from 2005 – 2008, and President of the Academic Senate at the University of Newcastle from 2002 – 2008 .Professor Connor served a three-year term as a member of the Australian Research Council Panel of Experts, and was Chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts panel in 2005-6. She is a member of the editorial committee of the journals Oceania and Medical Anthropology, and was a co-editor of the Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs from 1996-2003.

Research

Professor Connor has continued to develop theory and methodology for understanding large-scale changes in relation to local processes of engagement (with "local" variously defined). In Indonesia, she has researched and published on the transformations wrought by nationally promoted tourist development in Bali, and more recently on notions of citizenship, decentralisation and local communities in the post-Suharto era. In North India in the mid-1990s, she was part of an Australian Research Council-funded team that investigated questions of displacement, identity, and the global context of cultural innovation, through a study of healing in diasporic Tibetan communities. Seven of her completed PhD students have also taken up related questions in various Southeast and South Asian fieldwork contexts, and current students are carrying out research that extends these questions in various ways, in Australia and Indonesia.

Through her own research and supervision of PhD students, Professor Connor has fostered a strong ethnographic approach to issues of sociocultural change in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia. This work provides an invaluable comparative perspective for studies of development and change in the Hunter Valley of NSW, and she is currently an investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on Climate Change, Place and Community: A Regional Ethnography of the Hunter Valley.

Major publications that are an outcome of these research interests are Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century (edited with Raechelle Rubinstein, University of Hawaii Press 1999) and Healing Powers and Modernity: Shamanism, Science and Traditional Medicine in Asian Societies (edited with Geoffrey Samuel, Bergin and Garvey 2001). Professor Connor is also an active researcher in the application of ethnographic and qualitative approaches to the study of health and healing in Australia. The book [[i||Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and Complexity Perspective (Oxford U.P. 2001), co-authored with Nick Higginbotham and Glenn Albrecht, outlines the transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to teaching and research that she has developed in recent years.

Research Interests

  • Anthropology theory and method, especially ethnography
  • The contribution of anthropology to interdisciplinary research in social science, humanities, creative arts, health and environmental sciences.
  • Anthropological study of environmental change
  • Approaches to ethnography in urban and rural Australia
  • Medical anthropology
  • Anthropological research on contemporary society in Bali, Indonesia and Southeast Asia
  • The application of ethnographic approaches to the study of health and healing in Australia
  • Visual anthropology and ethnographic film
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