Judith Bovensiepen is the Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and honorary professor at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Before taking on this position, she worked as a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (2010-2011).
Bovensiepen’s current research focuses on human-environment relations, natural resource extraction, and the transformation of animist orientations through interactions with changing political, economic and religious regimes. This is part of a broader interest in how we can draw on anthropological approaches to knowledge and ignorance in order to study the relations between energy and society. Most of Bovensiepen’s research focusses on Southeast Asia, specifically Timor-Leste, where she has been carrying out ethnographic research since 2005. Her previous work focussed on analysing the dynamics of post-conflict recovery, examining how people’s relations with the environment are transformed by violence and forced displacement. For her research achievements, Bovensiepen won the Nadel Essay Prize in 2014 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020.
Judith Bovensiepen is the author of the monograph The Land of Gold: Post-conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in independent Timor-Leste (2015, Cornell University Press), the editor of The Promise of Prosperity (2018, ANU Press) and the author of numerous book chapters and articles, published in journals such as American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Ethnos, Oceania and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She co-edited two special issues, one on ‘Megaprojects and National Development Models in Timor-Leste’ (TAPJA) and one on Wilful Blindness in Critique of Anthropology. She is currently working on a monograph with the provisional title: Oil Fever: Animism and Extractivism in Post-Revolutionary Timor-Leste.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2024) Fiat speech, fiat infrastructure: Anticipation as transformative action in the emerging oil economy of Timor-Leste. American Ethnologist51 (2): 258–269.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2023) Governing through opacity: customary authority, hidden intentions and oil infrastructure development in Suai, Timor-Leste. Special Issue on Mind/State Legibility, edited by Natalia Buitron and Hans Steinmüller. Ethnos 88 (4): 797–818.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2021) Can oil speak? Difference and ambivalence in Timor-Leste’s oil infrastructure development. Anthropological Quarterly94 (1): 625–651.
Bovensiepen, Judith and Mathijs Pelkmans (2020) Wilful Blindness. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 40(4).
Bovensiepen, Judith (2018) ed. The Promise of Prosperity: Visions of the Future in Timor-Leste. Canberra: ANU Press. Link.
Bovensiepen, Judith and Laura Meitzner Yoder (2018) Megaprojects and National Development Models in Timor-Leste. Special Issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology19 (5).
Bovensiepen, Judith (2015) The Land of Gold: Post-Conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in Independent Timor-Leste. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Link.
Bovensiepen, Judith and Federico Delgado Rosa (2016) Transformations of the Sacred in East Timor. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (3): 1–30.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2016) Visions of Prosperity and Conspiracy in Timor-Leste. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 75: 75–88.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2014) Lulik:Taboo, Animism or Transgressive Sacred? An Exploration of Identity, Morality and Power in Timor-Leste. Oceania 84 (2): 121–137.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2014) Installing the Insider “Outside”: House–Reconstruction and the Transformation of Binary Ideologies in Independent Timor–Leste. American Ethnologist 41(2): 290–304.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2014) Words of the Ancestors: Disembodied Knowledge and Secrecy in East Timor. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 20(1): 56–73.
