Organizer and Discussant: Webb Keane, University of Michigan
Chair: Fenella Cannell, London School of Economics
The concept of "the modern" is pervasive across Southeast Asia. It plays a critical role in official ideologies, the projects of states and non-governmental agencies both local and international, the arts and popular culture—as well as in casual talk in even the most unassuming and ordinary situations. But the concept is most readily formulated in discursive form, and those discourses are often elite in origin and highly abstract in character. How, then, do people experience and make sense of the idea of "the modern" in everyday life? This panel aims to explore the relations between the conceptual and the concrete, phenomenal forms in which people make sense of what they take to be "the modern." These aspects of experience might include aspects of character, such as thrift or rationality, roles like the civil servant or intellectual, institutions such as the school or church, pervasive objects like photography or money, or even the sounds of national or foreign languages. Such concrete forms often bear complex, even contradictory or paradoxical relations to the ideas of the modern with which people often identify them. They may also be sites of tension between general concepts of a global modernity and the specificities of Southeast Asian histories. By tracing out these relations, this panel hopes to shed light not just on Southeast Asian modernity and its complications, but also on the relations between speech and practices, the official and the casual, the public and the private, the global and the local.
Idolatry and Modernity in the Lowland Philippines
Fenella Cannell, London School of Economics
The lowland Philippines has commonly been thought of as overrun by "modernity." The concept of modernity here takes its terms from the development and conjunction of early-twentieth-century colonial politics and the kind of modernisation theory that dominated much social science in the 1950s. This view of the lowlands is due in particular to the way in which the region (in contrast to certain areas in the Philippine highlands, or even the lowland regions elsewhere in Southeast Asia) has been thought of as lacking a "culture," understood as a certain kind of authenticity which would protect it from the corrosive forces of the twentieth century. These ideas develop out of the particularities both of lowland Philippine history and of certain historically-rooted and persistent ways of understanding power relations and the process of change—of "culture" with no capitals, as it were. This paper concerns the ways in which the Philippines in the 1900s was conceived through a kind of repressed notion of idolatry. Historical materials from earlier in this century show interesting links to contemporary ethnography, especially certain aspects of kinship and spirit mediumship.
From "Wangsa" to "Bangsa": Subaltern Voices and Personal Ambivalences in Colonial Bali (1930s)
Henk Schulte Nordholt, University of Amsterdam
This paper focuses on "local intellectuals" and their perceptions of modernity. In the early colonial period, these men and women were born into a world that was largely dominated by a local culture with specific rules of behavior. When they grew up, they were often faced with rapid changes introduced through education, new forms of literacy, newspapers, increased mobility, new jobs, ways of dressing, etc. From the end of the nineteenth century on, the impact of colonial modernity on old ways of living and their moral foundation forced many people to rethink and reconceptualize their worldviews. The closing years of Dutch rule in Bali were characterized by a politics of invented traditions and cultural conservatism intended to keep the island under firm colonial control. A hierarchical order was framed in a seemingly immobile caste order that was backed by rigid religious dogmas and a Dutch judicial regime. Despite the efforts to immobilize Balinese society, and inspired by the arrival of colonial modernity and an awareness of political developments elsewhere, a consciousness emerged among Balinese intellectuals which eventually resulted in writings challenging the existing order. In my paper I focus on a pamphlet that was written in 1939 by G. Ny. M. Wiryasutha, in which he openly rejected the established caste order and tried to make the mental step from "wangsa" (caste) to "bangsa" (nation). I follow his intellectual journey and sketch his marginal position in society and his personal ambivalences which help to understand the dilemmas he confronted.
Feminism, Islam, and the Alternatives of Modernity
Suzanne A. Brenner, University of California, San Diego
In Indonesia, competing models of modernity, both Western-derived and those inspired by non-Western, especially Islamic sources, engender conflict as well as creative synthesis in the practices of daily life. One arena in which both conflict and synthesis can be seen centers on women’s roles in the family and the wider society. In recent years, both feminist and Islamist discourses on women’s roles have penetrated the consciousness and behavior of Indnonesians, especially those of the urban middle classes. Questions about how "modern" Indonesian women should behave are debated in the mass media and elsewhere; these debates are then taken up by individuals as they forge their own paths through modernity. This paper looks a how some Muslim women in Jakarta and Yogyakarta are bringing together the strange bedfellows of feminism and Islam, creating a new, controversial synthesis that simultaneously draws upon and critiques models of behavior provided by Western feminism and Islamic doctrine. As individuals and (sometimes) as community activists, these women seek to reconcile a non-Western, religious worldview that has often been hostile to feminism with a modern, secular, Western-derived ideology that tends to be critical of all world religions for their perceived patriarchal tendencies. This attempt at reconciliation often leads them into uncharted territory as wives, students, labor activists, advocates for battered women, and interpreters of the Qur’an, for instance, with feminist Islamic perspectives and methods. The paper also examines anti-feminist reactions and the debates surrounding feminism in Muslim circles.
The Cassowary Will Not Be Photographed: "The Primitive," "The Japanese," and The Elusive "Sacred" (Aru, Eastern Indonesia)
Patricia Spyer, University of Amsterdam
This paper explores the vexed place of photography in one seemingly classic anthropology-land in Indonesia. I argue that the refusal by Aruese of photography—and, more generally, inscription—in an annual performance goes hand in hand with their desire for what Benjamin called mechanical reproduction. At first glance, their adamant disavowal of all forms of inscription and emblematic celebration of uncontaminated Aruese autocthony in the form of the island’s cassowary give the impression of yet another conservative if "triste tropique." To establish the space-apart of the cassowary’s performance means, at the same time, however, to produce a frame that demarcates the difference between what is "Aru" and what is "Malay," between extractable "exterior" circumstances and self-enclosed "interior." Part and parcel of the emergence of an auratic "Aru" sacred is then the prefiguring through performance of a "Malay" audience. Put otherwise, there is no Aruese autocthony in advance of the experience and entanglement of the performers within a larger world. Even in a place positioned at the margins of mechanical reproduction, difference and alternity precede identity. Just as the cassowary furtively skirts the frayed edges of the "Malay," so too the Aruese refusal to be photographed in auratic settings operates within the repressions and displacements of modernity. For Aruese beholden to an audience which commits them to self-division and the objectification of an Aru identity, everything happens as if photography belonged to a Malay other for whom an Aru self is destined to pose.