This lar­ge rese­arch pro­ject – fun­ded by the Swiss Natio­nal Sci­ence Foun­da­ti­on – sup­port­ed five Ph.D. stu­dents. Under the gui­dance of Prof. Wolf­gang Mar­schall, the group car­ri­ed out joint rese­arch into the mar­ket system of a high­land regi­on in Suma­tra, fol­lo­wed by indi­vi­du­al rese­arch on spe­ci­fic aspects of eco­no­mic deve­lo­p­ment and poli­ti­cal inte­gra­ti­on in that area. The results were published in a series of five mono­graphs.

My rese­arch focu­sed on the trans­for­ma­ti­on of rice agri­cul­tu­re through inten­si­fi­ca­ti­on pro­grams in the 1970s and 1980s, and its impact on the far­ming system and far­ming hou­se­holds (Ph.D. the­sis, published in 1995, “From Upland to Irri­ga­ted Rice”, Rei­mer, Ber­lin).

As a group and indi­vi­du­al­ly, we came out of this mul­ti-year rese­arch effort much enri­ched, pro­fes­sio­nal­ly and per­so­nal­ly. As the say­ing goes: “anthro­po­lo­gists are made during their fieldwork”.