Allen R. Maxwell papers

Allen Richmond Maxwell, Jr. was born on December 10, 1939 in Hanover, New Hampshire. He attended the University of Michigan, where he received a B.A. degree in anthropology in 1961. The summer after his graduation he accompanied Michigan linguistics professor William J. Gedney, a specialist in Thai languages, to Thailand to serve as an instructor in an intensive Thai language course for Peace Corps volunteers. His experience with Peace Corps Training Program Thailand convinced him to pursue future anthropological fieldwork in Southeast Asia. He remained at the University of Michigan to pursue an M.A. degree in linguistics, which he received in 1962.

The following year, Maxwell applied to Yale University’s M.A. program in Southeast Asian Studies, but was instead accepted by the department of anthropology, where he pursued a doctoral degree under the supervision of Professor Harold C. Conklin. Yale was designated as a center for the National Defense Foreign Language Title VI Indonesian program, and he obtained a fellowship for the study of Indonesian from 1962 through 1966. Initially interested in pursuing ethnographic field work in Indonesian Kalimantan, the country’s volatile political climate in the mid-to-late 1960s led Maxwell to turn to neighboring Brunei. With the aid of a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a National Institutes of Health research grant, he pursued ethnographic and linguistic research focused on Brunei’s Kadayan people from 1968 through 1971, spending most of his time in Kampung Psasaw-Pyasaw in the Labu Valley. Upon his return to Yale, he taught at Southern Connecticut State College, and later became an instructor at Barnard College in New York City in 1972. In 1974, he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama, and remained there throughout his career. In 1980, Maxwell submitted a dissertation entitled "Urang Darat: An Ethnographic Study of the Kadayan of Labu Valley, Brunei," for which he received the Ph.D.

Maxwell’s ethnographic work and writings on Brunei centered on Kadayan kinship, environment, social structure, and ethnohistory. His linguistic writings attended to the Brunei variety of Malay and its Kadayan sub-dialect. Of particular interest was his compilation and analysis of several versions of the Sya'ir Awang Simawn, an epic poem describing the founding of Brunei.

His broader interests in ethnohistory and greater Borneo led Maxwell to conduct nine months of research on oral traditions in Sarawak, a Malaysian state and Brunei’s southern neighbor. This survey work, carried out in the mid-1980s, was supported by the Fulbright Southeast Asia Research Grant Program and analyzed oral traditions among the Malays, Kayans, Kenyahs, and other ethnicities in Sarawak. His collection of the Sarawak Malay text, Cetera Syekh Othman, is particularly noteworthy. Maxwell was interested in the role played by these texts in the intergenerational transmission of sociocultural beliefs and practices.

From 1999 to 2000, Maxwell returned to Brunei as a visiting professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. In 2006 he was a visiting professor at the Institute of the Malay World and Civilization at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and the following year he was a senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. He retired from the University of Alabama in 2010.