Research

II am a PhD candidate in social and cultural anthropology and the title of my research is: “Strong women, soft power. Glocal ascriptions of womanhood and self-crafting practices among young Balinese women.”

Based on 20 months of fieldwork among Hindu young women, my research explores how their everyday hopes, fears, and long-term stakes are echoing several emotional regimes impinged upon them. For contextualization, I map and analyze the institutional factors (Indonesian identity politics, Balinese traditional norms, and wider global subject-formation ideologies) that influence the young women’s emotions and their definitions of a person. I conceptualize these factors both as social institutions in a  Weberian sense, and as various pedagogies of self which travel not only through globalized spaces, but also through different historical and political times, while reinforcing, recreating, or strongly opposing “celebrated” models of womanhood. I claim that these pedagogies are entangled across various moral, religious, economic, and/or political expectations of how a “good Balinese woman” should be like, and thus defy strict distinctions such as local, national, or global self.

At the core of my research lie diverse performed subjectivities, life histories, and the different degrees of power and independence that my research participants manage to secure in the context of patriarchal structures that celebrate (if not impose) non-confrontive (public) emotional attitudes. Many of these women turn the attitudes that are socially and culturally expected of them, into strategies to assert different levels of power within their families and communities. Nevertheless, acquiring this power comes with costly emotional consequences: internalizing and embodying wider structural frictions and tensions of patriarchal norms and neo-liberal ideas of self. These frictions pervade the knowledge production process and my writing process. My project aims at providing ethnographic narratives beyond the victim-rebel binary and other colonial tropes associated with the women from the Global South.

Before my PhD project, I have conducted fieldwork among young women in 2 high-schools in Romania and Germany, on the topics of self-making practices; future-making and success models; articulating, managing, and negotiating emotions and ways of being-in-the-world.

Research Focus

• Anthropology and sociology of emotions

• Psychological anthropology

• Ethnographic, collaborative, and decolonizing methodologies

• Anthropology of self

• Feminist and gender studies

Research Area

• Will follow soon

Teaching Approach

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