Our Fellow
Atmaezer H. Simanjuntak, PhD
IFAR Fellow
Atmaezer H. Simanjuntak (Ara) is a financial and environmental anthropologist whose work examines financialisation, debt, and agrarian change in Southeast Asia, with particular attention to Indonesia’s oil palm plantation economy. He integrates long-term ethnographic fieldwork, comparative-historical analysis, and quantitative methods to generate insights relevant to scholars, policymakers, and public audiences. With more than a decade of research experience, his work explores how financial structures of credit, debt, and value-making shape the conditions under which people organize their lives—and how everyday practices, in turn, influence financial systems. Using the plantation system as an analytical vantage point, he traces how debt and value circulate across smallholder households, corporations, financial institutions, and state agencies, situating these dynamics within broader global agendas of development, sustainability, and climate transition. He is also developing a media and research platform, Sunyata Lab. More of his work can be found at www.hariara.com .