Beyond the Horizon: Essays on Myth, History, Travel and Society

Clifford Sather received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1971. His principal publications include The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of Southeastern Sabah (1997, Oxford UP) and Seeds of Play, Words of Power: an ethnographic study of Iban shamanic chants (2001, Tun Jugah Foundation & Borneo Research Council). He also co-edited (with James J. Fox) Origins, Ancestors and Alliance: explorations in Austronesian ethnography (1996, Australian National University). He taught and held research positions in Southeast Asia (Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, and National University of Singapore), Australia (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University), and the United States (Vassar, Reed College, and University of Oregon) and retired in 2005 as Professorial Fellow from the University of Helsinki. He is currently editor of the Borneo Research Bulletin, the annual journal of the Borneo Research Council.

Timo Kaartinen is Lecturer of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki where he began his academic career as Jukka Siikala’s student. His Ph.D. dissertation, accepted at the University of Chicago in 2001, was based on fieldwork in the Indonesian islands of Maluku and focused on different forms of ritual and narrative temporality. He has also published articles about sociolinguistics, state-society relations, nationalism and the theory of ritual, and his recent fieldwork is concerned with linguistic diversity and local responses to political transition in Kalimantan. From 2001 until 2007 he was president of the Finnish Anthropological Society. At present he edits the monograph series Studia Anthropologica Fennica published by the Finnish Literature Society.