Jan Pouwer

Who is Jan Pouwer?

Jan Pouwer 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 under the renowned Jan Petrus Benjamin de Josselin de Jong. He worked as a ‘government anthropologist’ and conducted extensive fieldwork in Netherlands New Guinea, 1951-62. He subsequently served as Professor of Anthropology at Amsterdam, Wellington 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 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.