John Kleinen

John Kleinen studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated with honors. He also obtained his Ph.D. degree from this university (1988). His dissertation, mainly based on archival materials in France and in Vietnam, focused upon peasant and elite's resistance between 1880 and 1940 against French colonialism in the central region of Vietnam.

Kleinen is a staff member at the Sociology and Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam. During 1989-1991 he served as a research co-coordinator at the University of the Philippines (Manila), assisting Filipino researchers in a project on land reform policies and coping mechanisms of victims struck by man-made and nature-made disasters. Between 1995 and 1999 he was a visiting professor at the Public Administration and Management Department of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium. In 2000- 2001, he acted as the director of the branch office of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Amsterdam. Between 2002 and 2004, Kleinen was a visiting Social Sciences Research Councilprofessor at the National Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (NCSSH) in Hanoi. In 2004, he served as a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Wassenaar.

Kleinen conducted anthropological fieldwork in Vietnam (Ha Tay province). This field research has focused on the revival of religious practices. A monograph based on this research is published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore under the title Facing the Future Reviving the Past. A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnamese Village (1999).  Between 1999 and 2002 he conducted fieldwork in coastal Nam Dinh among fishery communities. A book publication is in preparation. Some other publications are country-studies of Cambodia (1989), Vietnam (1993), and articles about colonial ethnography, religious practice, visual anthropology. fiction and cinema of the Vietnam War and maritime piracy in Southeast Asia. In 2001 Kleinen edited Vietnamese Society in Transition, a collection of papers of the 3rd Euroviet conference.

His present research interests are the meaning of civil society for a transitional society like Vietnam and the environmental effects of global and regional changes in climate, water levels and the use of land and natural resources. This research is part of a larger WOTRO research project. Kleinen is a member of the Maritime Anthropology Research Group MARE. For the next few years he is involved in a major research project on development issues, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Website:  http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.g.g.m.kleinen/