For the past forty years, Niels Murder has been actively engaged with the cultures of Java, Thailand and the Philippines. In 2002, he retired to Mt Banahaw in southern Luzon where he works on his intellectual biography, of the which Doing Java is the second volume. In this book, he retraces how he learned to think about life on Java at the beginning of and in the late 1970 s. In doing so, we also obtain a picture of Yogyakarta and a sketch of the academic climate of those days. Altogether, the book should offer an idea of anthropological research, or at least how the author experienced it.