 Chairman, ladies, gentlemen, and colleagues, we honor today the intellectual achievement of a remarkable anthropologist. He introduced anthropological labor studies to Asia. In the course of more than half a century, he has produced a large corpus of work and provided great new insight into the nature of the dominance and exploitation of the powerless, especially in India and Indonesia. He is internationally recognized for defining a whole new field of study and for providing emblematic examples of how to undertake research within these fields, combining a meticulous attention to detail with firm overall empirical historical contextualization. Jan Bremen was born in 1936 in Amsterdam. He studied at the University of Amsterdam. In 1962, he joined the faculty of what is now the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He was professor dean at the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam and simultaneously extraordinary professor of sociology at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He is now emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow of the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden. He grew up in a poor working-class home. This invited him with a determination to confront social injustice and entrenched poverty. Scholarly, he steeped himself in the anthropological fieldwork tradition, but he simultaneously engaged with important debates throughout the disciplines of development studies and colonial history. In India, he turned anthropological village studies into the study of the extreme conditions and powerlessness of low-caste, bonded agricultural labors and of the socioeconomic and political relations through which such conditions were imposed. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, he developed these themes through an unrivaled series of field-based studies on rural labor. His 1974 book, Patronut and Exploitation, provided a seminal treatment of the transformations of the common relations of clientelism, dominance, and exploitation. His 1984-85 book of peasants, migrants, and popes, rural labor, circulation, and capitalist production in West India traced the use of new types of migrant agricultural labor and was a pioneering work on rural-rural circular migration. In the 1990s, he turned to non-agricultural, informalized labor and provided in the book, Footloose Labor, Working in India's Informal Economy, the first comprehensive insights into labor and work outside of agriculture, among the most down-strung in India. In books such as his 2004, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class, sliding down the labor hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India, he studied the impact that informalization of urban industries had on labor. During the last decade, he has continued his fieldwork on wage hunters and gatherers in rural India, while also pursuing in-depth historical perspectives of workers and regimes of labor control. This has been published in several noted books, including The Reasoned at Work in the Informal Economy of India, A Perspective from the Bottom-Up from 2013. He's also reflected on the political historical origins of European social security systems in the context of debates about social security in India. In 2007, Oxford University Press turned his work into an omnibus, an honor in development studies, otherwise only given to the Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen. Bremen also works on Indonesian, agrarian and labor relations. His 1989 book Taming the Cooley Beast on the Pentation System in Dutch Indonesia caused a stir in the Netherlands and was followed by a volume on Indonesian labor after the crisis in the late 1990s. His book from 2010 in Dutch, The Colonial Profit from Unfree Labor in Dutch Indonesia, did not go unnoticed either. He has extended his comparative reach to other Asian countries, as in the 2010 book, Outcast Labor in Asia, Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy. His work has been published in English and Dutch and translated to German and French and to several Indian languages, perhaps Indonesia and Chinese. Bremen has been a member of several Dutch-European and American Scholarly Associations and Research Councils. He has received academic and government prizes and honors in India, Indonesia, the Netherlands and the UK. He's a fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Academia Europea. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals including Development and Change, the Indian Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Agrarian Change. Bremen's investigations into how the colonial and the modern economy changed labor relations and reworked power relations, not necessarily to the better, have become pragmatic. They set the standard within rule and informal labor studies in India. He was the first to analyze and conceptualize the transition from pre-capitalist labor bondage to modern neo bondage. His study of the move of informalized labor out of agriculture into informal, non-agricultural footloose labor continues to be a central point of reference in the field of informal labor studies. He's a scholar of extraordinary standing and international influence within his fields. Bremen's relationship with SOAS goes back to 1991 to 92 when he took a crash course in Gujarati here. It is time to formalize this long-standing relationship. It is my privilege now, Chairman, to present to you Jan Bremen for the award of the degree of Doctor of Social Science and I invite him to address this assembly. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and friends. Accounts of local level research are based on various methods of data collection. Surveys are based on questionnaires, which list that what the researcher wants to know, but the usual practice is for field investigators to go around and collect the data in short encounters with respondents. Interviews are more time consuming and they're not standardized in a fixed schedule, allow for more latitude in lengths and depth of information sought. Distinctive for anthropological field work is that the researcher arranges to stay put at the site of investigation and once embedded engages in what is sometimes rather misleadingly referred to as participant observation. In short, to remain on the spot, interact with persons belonging to the field, not once, but whenever the occasion arises, that is as much and as often as possible and as long as possible and register from close by what is going on. In such close encounters, it's not only the anthropologist who is asking queries. The other side may also want to know why the interlocutor is there, what he or she is after as well as up to. The dialogue that ensues between informants and researchers can lead to a free and frank give and take, but on both sides, zones are demarcated as off-limit and transgression of this code is met with non-response. Just offering your credentials of true intentions and promise of discretion is not good enough. To create a sphere of empathy on both sides and to build up rapport, let alone trust, takes time. As the observer goes around the field observing, he or she is observed in turn. What drives him or her coming to the locality for reasons that are difficult to fathom? Such puzzlement is easy to understand, but the strategy of research becomes more complicated when the site investigated is contested terrain with the inhabitants split up and confronting each other as stakeholders in a variety of conflicts. In a setting of acute polarization, as I found in South Skujarat in India, it becomes very difficult to abide by the dictum of fieldwork that is to remain a neutral outsider who looks on from a distance and tries to maneuver around in pretended impartiality. Of course, I'm not arguing in favor of direct entanglement in brawls going on and to keep lines of communication open to all casts and classes makes good sense. Taking sight does not stop in the field. Having said that, it is also clear that the gist of observation is filtered through the lens of participation. I have from the very beginning of my fieldwork half a century ago consistently located my investigations in the lower echelons of the village economy or in urban slums. Does that approach evince a bias that is bound to end in flawed or even distorted findings? I don't think so. Taking sights as a matter of fact precedes going to the field and is expressed in the problematic taken up for research and the way it gets all rationalized in making prior choices on the course of investigation. Not taking on board deep seated inequalities and not pondering in advance on how to address and how to address them result in misplaced posture of neutrality that actually gravitate into staying close to the vested interests and towing the lines of all those who count. And of course, the implicit or explicit party pre of the fieldworker is all the more reason for avoiding subjectivity, both in the collection of data as well as in their post-facto analysis. At the same time, the need for counter failing information impels the fieldworker not only to seek the company of the underclasses but to move out and to move up. In such partial fieldwork, is such partial fieldwork prone to end in findings that reflect the preconceived ideas of the researcher more than those of the researched? Here I would like to refer to what I've earlier written on the empowerment of investigations at close quarters. An even greater danger to scholarly objectivity and how I quote, then the researchers partiality can be the denial that such a bias in fact exists. I was keenly aware of my own partiality while engaged in research, but it was precisely this consciousness that induced me to pay attention to the other side of the coin, to be open to contradiction and counter-proof, to take note of undesirable facts and opinions that is those which did not fit with my representation of views which followed from my own choice and logic. This involved an obligation to change the metal of my work for instance by introducing nuances when this was necessary and by taking account of the processes of differentiation within the lower classes that had eluded me earlier. The few from below to which I persistently adhered did not mean finally that I lost sight of the gap separating me from those working and living at the bottom of the rural or urban order. Driven by spasmodic displays of solidarity, the researcher who believes in the emancipation of the oppressed would like to bring the time for refusal of social relations closer, but where the wish for action is transformed into a distortion of reality, the only result is bad research which serves no purpose of any kind. My findings are meant to highlight the dismal combination of a culture of ingrained inequality with an economic regime structured by market fundamentalism. In the setting of longitudinal studies in South Skudjurat, I have endeavored to raise the visibility of the lower classes in the countryside as well as in urban locations. I try to speak up on behalf of people whose voices have remained muted. You've learned a lot during your stay in Solace. I advise you in your life to take sides. Thank you very much.