Organizer: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii
Chair: Evelyn Blackwood, Purdue University
Suzerain and Vassal, or Elder and Younger Brothers: The Nature of the
Sino-Burmese Historical Relationship
Laichen Sun, University of Michigan
The traditional "Chinese world order," which is characterized by Sinocentrism, has already been challenged. However, there is no doubt that more detailed studies are still needed, and the Sino-Burmese historical relationship is a perfect example. First of all, the two countries had a very close relationship and relatively rich sources regarding their intercourses have survived. Secondly, Burma, unlike Korea and Vietnam, used a different written language to communicate with China, and this allows us to see how the Burmese perceived Sino-Burmese relationships by looking at Burmese records. Set under a broader context of Sino-foreign relations, this paper examines the Sino-Burmese relationship from the 9th through the late 19th centuries and means to render another challenge to the "Chinese world order." Throughout the whole period under question, China consistently regarded Burma as one of her vassals. Burma, however, considered herself as China's equal and termed this relationship as one between "younger brother" (Burma) and "elder brother" (China). Nonetheless, neither side realized, at least officially, this discrepancy, and each thought that their own view was accepted by the other. This is because credentials from one side were so revised and adapted based on a certain format that it would be totally acceptable to the ruler of the other side. Last but not least, this paper reveals that while the basic concept of "younger brother" versus "elder brother" had probably been almost always maintained by Burma, her attitude towards China changed as her strength increased since the rise of the Toungoo dynasty in the mid-16th century.
The Japanese Policy Toward Christian Churches in the Philippines During World War
II
Takefumi Terada, Sophia University
The Philippines has been predominantly a Christian country. One major concern of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II was how to integrate influential church leaders into the framework of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." For this purpose, a Religious Section was organized as an integral part of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces to the Philippines, to deal with the Christian churches there. The Japanese demanded that the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines "filipinize" its hierarchy and exclude foreign clergy. The military also suggested to the Protestant churches that they unite and form a single, pro-Japanese Protestant Church curtailing the influence of American missionaries. This paper is based on archival research and interviews conducted in Japan, the United States, and the Philippines, as well as primary source materials discovered by the author.
Powerful Connections: Sumbanese Textiles and Global Exchange
Jill Forshee, University of California, Berkeley
People in eastern Sumba, Indonesia have produced strikingly pictorial and technically complex textiles for centuries. Images within these fabrics vividly portray symbolic elements of the animist conceptual system of the island. Long important in local social and ritual contexts, such cloth has also traveled within a trade system that has frequently involved people from regions of the world distant from Sumba's shores. Notions of social status and prestige are integral to the caste-based, animist belief system of eastern Sumba, and also extend to the attitudes of Sumbanese people toward connections with outsiders. In recent decades, Sumba's fabrics have become commodities within a growing "ethnic art" market in Indonesia. Although the textiles of the region have long been prized in international collections, the development of tourism in Indonesia has greatly stimulated demand for them. Simultaneously, this demand has facilitated increased interactions between Sumbanese people and foreign consumers. This paper examines how the production, use, and expanded trade of Sumba's textiles reveal how local people are negotiating power, identity, and meaning in the current world. Such negotiations involve issues of class, gender, and ethnicity. Concerns of prestige and identity are basic, motivating forces in Sumba, which become visible through the creativity involved in local fabrics. This inventiveness goes beyond the artistry involved in textiles to include the social strategies, behaviors, and identities which surround them. Such creativity plays off of the local and the foreign, providing an ongoing flux within Sumbanese "traditions."
Understanding "Japayuki" or Japan-bound Entertainers in the Gender
Context in the Philippines
Eri Fujieda, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This paper will deconstruct the public image of Filipino female "japayuki" or Japan-bound entertainers by analyzing the narratives of entertainers themselves as a representation of gender context of the Philippines. The public discourse on "japayuki" since the mid-1980s has largely standardized the image of Japan-bound female entertainers as the victims of Third World poverty and sexual exploitation. My recent fieldwork conducted in Metro Manila suggests that this image of "japayuki" is shared not only among the Filipino public, but also among the Filipina entertainers who have worked in Japan. In fact, Filipina entertainers' own interpretations of their transnational migration experiences tend to overturn the negative public image. They emphasize their motives for overseas work as delineated from the family-centered gender context in the Philippines, i.e., women's labor for production and procreation is appreciated as the basis for the decent family. Thus, in the hope to attain this socially defined gender goal, they come to see through their kinship and friendship networks, Japan as an "advanced Asian country" with many opportunities and resources that allow them and their families to experience upper social mobility toward a "decent" family. Their work and social life in the night entertainment establishments in Japan are interpreted according to their family and gender context, also.
The Golden Rules: Reinterpreting Wealth, Class, and Success Through El Shaddai
Katharine L. Wiegele, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
El Shaddai DWXI-Prayer Partners Foundation International, Inc. is a homegrown religious group that rose in popularity in the Philippines in the 1980s and 90s during a period of rapid social, political, and economic change. At present, approximately five million Filipino Roman Catholics are part of this charismatic movement in the Philippines or in overseas Filipino communities. This paper views El Shaddai as an arena in which attitudes toward economic mobility, class relations, and material wealth are constituted and contested. This is occurring in the context of a transforming religious ethos, in which various groups, class factions, and institutional factions struggle over the meanings of certain Catholic symbols and traditions, and where normative gender and family relations are likewise being debated and redefined.
This paper is part of a dissertation in progress based on ethnographic data gathered in the Philippines in 1996. Through the analysis of collective ritual, preaching, testimonies, public and private dialogue, and personal histories, it shows how El Shaddai both redefines class relations and obscures structural inequalities. El Shaddai is seen as providing new cultural idioms within the Catholic faith for interpreting upward mobility and economic success. Differently-situated groups in Manila in turn struggle over the meaning of these new idioms, and of the El Shaddai "phenomenon" itself.