Constellation Similarity Assertions

Mervyn Aubrey Jaspan was born in Johannesburg in 1926 and graduated with a degree in sociology and anthropology from Natal in 1948. Fieldwork undertaken in the following year on a Zulu-speaking tribe of South-Western Natal became his BSc thesis at Oxford in 1951. After a temporary post at Manchester and a research fellowship at Exeter he was appointed in 1955 to the chair of sociology at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His papers in the Brynmor Jones Library date from this time.

In 1961 he was appointed research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra after which he spent three years working on the Rejang of southern Sumatra based at Tapus in the highlands and Padang Bendar in the lowlands of Bengkulu. His thesis, `From patriliny to matriliny: structural change among the Redjang of Southwest Sumatra' was presented in 1964. In the same year he published four Rejang texts as Folk literature of South Sumatra: Redjang Ka-Ga-Nga texts and was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He became first director of the Centre for Asian Studies there. In 1966 he made a trip to Cambodia to study the Cham people of the middle Mekong and from 1967 began to collaborate with Dr Petrus Voorhoeve on the collection, transcription and translation of South Malay texts, especially those in rencong script.

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