Organizer and Chair: Kenneth M. George, Harvard University
Discussant: Rita Kipp, Kenyon College
National and transnational forces continue to bring about obvious and significant change in the contemporary sociocultural landscape of Southeast Asia. This panel explores some of the less obvious political dilemmas, complexities, and compromises surrounding interpretive work when matters are anything but settled and viewpoints are kept in constant flux and negotiation. What is at stake as people struggle for control over images, objects, ideas, memories, values, and the means of cultural representation? How do these same cultural forms elude positioned attempts to hold them down? How do people confront or take advantage of the uncertain and the unexpected? And how might ethnographers capture and be captured by the unfolding cultural politics of contemporary Southeast Asia? Panelists will discuss the discourse of virtue in Vietnamese village politics; the life histories of a Toraja family scattered across Indonesia and Europe; reflections on the trauma of places that are no more-Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand; and the biography of an abstract canvas by Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, from the time it was first exhibited in 1968 to its recent appropriation by a critical art history.
Shaun Kingsley Malarney, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies
Similar to the Confucian state that preceded it, the revolutionary socialist state in Viet Nam engaged in a concerted campaign to create and popularize official definitions of ethics and virtue. Immortalized in Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary adage 'Industry, thrift, incorruptability, and righteousness. Public spirit and impartiality,' the socialist state attempted to replace local constructions of ethics and virtue with an official canon that directed people's loyalties toward the state and revolution. The popular acceptance of this canon, however, was problematic as local definitions of virtue and moral responsibility oftentimes remained salient in social practice. Using the example of a commune election in Hanoi province as a case study, this paper will examine the tensions and consequences of the interaction between official definitions of virtue and local systems of value during the cooperative period (1959-1986). Then, focusing on the period since the 1986 introduction of the reform policies in Viet Nam, the paper will further explore the manner in which the turn to 'market socialism,' with its attendant endorsement of individual production and wealth accumulation, is further transforming both official and local notions of what is ethical and what is virtuous. As will be shown throughout, the dynamic and complex discourse on virtue in contemporary northern Viet Nam has been profoundly influenced by the at times complementary, at times contentious, interaction between local values and the agenda of the state.
Lindsay French, East West Center
Cambodians who spent as long as twelve years in camps on the Thai border have watched their "resistance struggle" fade within the larger sweep of events that have come to define contemporary Cambodian history. How have their perspectives on a traumatic period from their past changed with the emergence of a new Cambodian state and a democratically elected government aimed at "national reconciliation?" How do individuals hold on to some measure of interpretive control of their past when the enduring significance of events in their lives is determined by processes that are beyond their control? How does the individual's effort fit into the larger national project of interpreting the events of "Pol Pot Time," events that in their violence and horror resist narrativization? This paper explores the mix of the personal and the political in the ongoing task all Southeast Asians face in constructing historical narratives about their lives. It considers how we as ethnographers are to interpret the stories told to us, and how personal narratives fit or don't fit into the construction of national "versions" of key historical events.
Toby A. Volkman, Social Science Research Council
Books enter the world and move in sometimes surprising ways. Even academic ethnographies may affect not only readers, but subjects as well as authors. This paper recounts the circulation of one ethnography (my own) situated (initially) in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Over the last decade, the book has moved back and forth across several oceans, becoming a medium and catalyst for rediscovering kin and cultural connections between Europe and Indonesia, and for complicating those connections-and the writing of ethnography-by bringing the anthropologist herself into the unfolding story of diasporic lives.
Kenneth M. George, Harvard University
How do political sympathies complicate the way Indonesian works of art are made, put on display, critically received, and historically understood? This paper traces the "life history" of The Sun After September 1965 (Mentari Setelah September 1965), an abstract canvas by painter A. D. Pirous. An exhibit centerpiece when first shown in Jakarta in 1968, the canvas conveyed the hopeful outlook of an artist who had been reluctant to show his work in public during the LEKRA dominated years prior to 1965. Twenty six years later, art historian Astri Wright identifies the canvas as a potentially dissident work, one that speaks out against the silence of Suharto's New Order. Yet how is it that a canvas once painted and displayed in welcome of the New Order should now hang in opposition to the regime's program of censure and endorsement? Pirous himself has some things he can tell us about the ideologically inflected (mis)understandings that surround the painting. The "life history" of this particular work, then, may offer a compass for exploring the cultural politics and political cultures of contemporary Indonesian art and art history.
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