Alumni & Voices

Suzanne E. Siskel

Dr. Siskel is Assistant Representative of the Ford Foundation in Indonesia.

I came to Indonesia in 1982 on a Fulbright grant to research family life patterns in Madura. Although it wasn’t part of my original plan, I ended up living for more than a year with a family that runs a small Muslim boarding school on the outskirts of Sumenep. They were well connected with the network of religious leaders throughout Madura and they allowed me to use their home as a base while conducted my study.

I traced out the relationships that the school had with other schools and tried to understand the relationship among students who came to this particular school. As a consequence I spent a lot of time visiting the villages from which these students had come. Often I was invited for ritual events. I took down oral histories from a number of people as well. As an anthropologist I was using a technique they call ‘participant observation’. In other words, you become a part the community for a time but also remain an impartial and uninvolved observer.

One thing led to another. My husband, also an anthropologist, took a job in western Timor and I was subsequently hired to do some studies related to an ongoing AID irrigation project. Now I’m based here in Jakarta with the Ford Foundation, where I work on water management and irrigation projects throughout the country.

Since my own Fulbright study I’ve had the opportunity to sit on several AMINEF review panels, interviewing Indonesian candidates for Fulbright grants. Naturally I’d like to see more funds allocated to the Fulbright program. And I think I’d like to see more attention paid to recruiting qualified candidates from regions outside of Java. Overall, I believe this kind of investment in high-quality education is most worthwhile. Overseas study is proving to be extremely valuable in long run.

This article appears from the book of U.S Indonesian Fulbright Program – Forty Years of Scholarships and Mutual Understanding 1952 – 1992 (pages 36 – 42 ) published in 1992.

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