Profiles
Current Profile: Larry Chavis, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler Business School
It was 1997 and the Asian financial crisis was cresting. Larry Chavis’s extended family on his wife’s side was visiting from Indonesia, where they had lived for decades. Violence was exploding on the streets of Jakarta, as the country’s political and economic forces collided.
“We’d come home from sightseeing with my in-laws to messages on the answering machine from family saying, ‘don’t worry we’ll be ok, we’re keeping our heads low, staying indoors.’ It was just so hard seeing a place you know falling apart.”
Chavis knew Indonesia well, having focused his doctoral work in anthropology on ethnicity and class in that country. He’d spent significant time studying the language, and he had devoted two years to “really being about Indonesia all the time.”
What he couldn’t understand at the time, however, was what he was reading in the papers. “I felt, wow, I don’t even have the skills to read the news to understand what exactly happened. What are these macroeconomic terms I’m reading? What are the forces that are driving this crisis?”