BAAL, JAN VAN. Jan van Baal (1909–1992), a Dutch anthropologist of religion, studied Indonesian culture, law, and languages at Leiden University and was influenced by J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong's structural ethnology. Van Baal's Ph.D. thesis (1934) about the Marind-anim of New Guinea was based on ethnographic material collected by the Swiss ethnologist Paul Wirtz. Van Baal later became a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies (1934–1949), a prisoner in Japanese concentration camps (1942–1945), an advisor on native affairs to the government of Dutch New Guinea (1946–1953), and the governor of Dutch New Guinea (1953–1958). Van Baal served as professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Utrecht from 1959 to 1973, and he acted until 1969 as director of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. He published Dema, a thousand-page volume on the Marind-anim of New Guinea in 1966, and a number of articles and books, of which Symbols...