Organizer and Chair: Lorraine V. Aragon, East Carolina University
Discussants: Clark E. Cunningham, University of Illinois, Urbana; A. Thomas
Kirsch, Cornell University
Highland Southeast Asian groups historically have been characterized by frequent geographical movements propelled both by shifting subsistence strategies and political pressures. In connection with these roving communities, settlement founders have received elevated social status and often have been deified through their presumed special relationship to local spirit owners of their lands. This panel will explore the relationship of political and religious authority as it is grounded within territory. Panelists will discuss "religious movements" in two senses of the term: first, with respect to founder cults and their associated geographic mobility of political formations; second, with respect to millenarian movements and religious conversions that have occurred in conjunction with interethnic pressures experienced by Southeast Asian highlanders in their twentieth-century national circumstances. Through ethnographic data drawn from the Chinese-Southeast Asian border, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, panelists will examine twentieth-century transformations of earlier ideas and practices concerning community founders, social hierarchy, and ethnic group relations. Our discussants will add a comparative perspective to augment both mainland and insular examples.
Pedestrian Politics: Upland Migrations, Ritual, and Social Identity in the
Sino-Southeast Asian Borderlands
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Cornell University
Taking the case of the Mien (Yao) migration from Kwangtung (South China) to Nan (Thailand) in the last century, I discuss aspects of worldview and social organization among upland groups. My emphasis is on the political significance of migrations, and how such politics have been grounded in ritual. Migrations establish new social and ritual units, through links to cadastral and ancestor spirits. Drawing on cases from across the upland areas, I show various continuities among so-called millenarian movements, founder cults, migrations, and more mundane events such as the establishment of a new household. These highlight commonalities in the dynamics of ritual and social identity among upland groups in this cross-border region. An account of how Mien in contemporary Thailand relate to their ancestors' migration reveals the way in which upland social dynamics are informed by lowland political culture, and the kinds of upland dynamics that are emerging in the nation-state context of immobilized upland groups.
"The Dying God" Revisited: The King of Fire and Vietnamese Ethnic
Policy in the Central Highlands
Oscar Salemink, Ford Foundation
In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazier described "the King of Fire" among the Jarai of the Vietnamese Central Highlands as a living example of primitive, divine kingship. In reality the office of "king of fire" is largely of ritual significance among the Jarai but this often misunderstood position has been caught up in governmental interventions since the colonial period. The successor to the last "king of fire" has not been able to take office despite official plans and pronouncements. I will discuss the ritual versus secular political significance of this position among the Jarai and other minority populations in the Vietnamese Central Highlands, and the ways in which this position is entangled in official discourses and policies towards the highlanders. The presentation will juxtapose local and national agendas as they relate to the stalled succession, and consider how these factors interact with the politics of ethnic unity, national development, sedentarization, and ritual feasting.
Spiritual Territories: "Owners of the Land," and Migration in Central
Sulawesi, Indonesia
Lorraine V. Aragon, East Carolina University
The Tobaku and other Uma-speaking peoples of Central Sulawesi's Kulawi district historically have venerated swidden settlement founders and associated them after their death with spirit "owners" of the land. In this paper, I examine how ideas based in these ancestral founder cults have been transposed to accommodate both early Christian converts (who often violated the precolonial social hierarchy) and recent Tobaku migrants who find themselves to be newcomers in the provincial capital of Palu and in local transmigration settlements. My aim is to explore intergroup relations in the increasingly integrated and development-oriented state of Indonesia given a local Central Sulawesi vantage point where chronology of arrival defines both spiritual and secular hierarchy. This interpretation of events catapults community movements and their leaders into high risk, high stakes gambles, as first arrivals become low status migrants compared to prior residents of other ethnic groups and yet potentially high status founders of their own splinter communities with greater access to "national" or urban resources.