Matthew H. Amster

I am a cultural anthropologist with a main research focus on processes of sociocultural change among indigenous people. My main research projects have been in Borneo where I have worked in both rural and urban settings among the Kelabit people, a small indigenous group from the interior highlands along the Malaysian-Indonesian border of Sarawak, Malaysia. My research explores many facets of the global, regional, and local influences on changing Kelabit life, including work on religious movements, urban ethnicity and political mobilization, social networks, gossip, and media, and the effects of cross-border movement on the Kelabit rural economy. Since coming to Gettysburg, I have also begun to study Civil War reeanactors from an anthropological perspective. Many of my courses (including Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Anthropology of Religion, and Cross Cultural Perspectives on Gender and Sex Roles) explicitly engage with theories of globalization, particularly as it relates to change among indigenous groups around the world. I also teach a course in visual anthropology and digital film production (Ethnographic Film: Theory and Practice), Field Methods in Cultural Anthropology, and the Capstone Experience in Anthropology.