Personal

Lex Kuiper (1987) graduated cum laude in Medical Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate School of Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam. In this programme he researched conceptions of love and romantic relationships and made clear by looking at 'what people do with love' that emotions should receive greater attention by anthropologists as social phenomena. Lex's research interests include, amongst others: medicalisation and globalisation processes, health and disease, gender, conflict, sexuality, language and music.

He joined the AISSR as a Ph.D. candidate in 2012 where he did research with heroin users that are enrolled in methadone maintenance programmes in West Java, Indonesia. He is interested in how hope and hopelessness arise in lived temporalities shaped by the clinic and the substances used. His dissertation focuses amongst others on how drug addiction is perceived in Indonesia both as a disaster to the Indonesian nation that needs to be eliminated and as a disease that needs to be treated, on the preceived risk of diversion of substances and surveillance measures, and on the notion of addiction as a chronic relapsing disease that has become widely accepted after writings in neuroscience. The key finding concerns how the clinic, addiction discourses, and the substances used shaped a temporal structure of perpetual repetition and boredom. Maintenance entailed a forever-present of healing without hope of a future recovery.

Lex currently coordinates the MA programmes in Anthropology.

Publications

Dissertation

• Stuck: Stability and Repetition in an Indonesian Methadone Programme

Theses

• Love is an activity: love and romantic relationships among young Indonesians. 
  Master thesis, accessible at https://www.mas-alumni.org/portfolio/love-is-an-activity/
• Life in Concert: strategies of survival among street musicians in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. 
  Bachelor thesis, available on request
   

Bookreviews

• Musical worlds in Yogyakarta - Max Richter.
  In Amsterdam Social Science

Conference papers

• The drug user as dangerous patient
  Presented at the 5th annual Southeast Asian Studies Symposium 2016 (Oxford, 14-16 April, 2016)

• Living in the Forever-Present: The Stickiness of Methadone
  Presented at the 114th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (Denver, November 18-22, 2015)

• Methadone and time: on (the absence of) hope in the forever-now
  Presented at the 6th annual Medical Anthropology Young Scholars conference (Amsterdam, June 11-12, 2015)

Conference panels

• Rhythms of recovery: temporalities of becoming otherwise
  114th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (Denver, November 18-22, 2015). Co-organised.