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As a social anthropologist, I have maintained a strong interest in political economy and relationships between human and environment in insular Southeast Asia. I have thus explored social forces shaping the region through the articulation of history and ethnography both from macro and micro perspectives. More specifically, my research focuses on the material bases of socio-cultural configurations in maritime Southeast Asia, analyzing them in both their local and global contexts and looking into their interaction. I have been engaged in interdisciplinary research on the Malay world and on present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, with special attention to the role of cultural interpretations in the reproduction and maintenance of power, identity politics, nation-making, ethnogenesis, socio-cultural dislocation, and the mobilization of social labor.

My current research themes include the transnational process at a state border in western Borneo, the social history of a riverine society in Northern Sarawak, Malaysia, commodity chains connecting Southeast Asia and Japan, and the socio-cultural construction of “nature” in the industrialized environment of Southeast Asia.