When massive foreign capital flight from the Southeast Asian nation-states occurred in mid-1998, and their economies fell into crises marked by sudden devaluation and deflation, bankruptcies, and unemployment, other aspects of everyday life in these nation-states also changed drastically. In Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, these changes invariably called state legitimacy into question, challenged popular and elite narratives of "development" and "modernization," provoked new critiques of "the West" and globalization, reconfigured domestic units and gender roles, and threatened the uneasy citizenship status of minority groups such as ethnic Chinese and Christians. Middle-class calls for democratization echoed by Western interventions cast into question the meaning of citizenship, family, and nation-state.

The papers in this panel seek to deal with these cultural and social changes associated with the onset of the crisis, and/or undertake to assess the preexisting discourses, practices, and policies which were brought into question as these nation-states entered into economic crisis. Research findings from ethnographic anthropology and cultural studies will be presented in the papers.

The aim of the panel is to illuminate in comparative perspective the shifts that took place in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand with the onset of the crisis.

Michael G. Peletz, Colgate University

This paper examines state narratives on "Asian (Family) Values" and "the West," and is primarily concerned with the ways in which these narratives reinforce, contradict, and otherwise articulate with state policies and nationalist and transnational discourses in Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Special attention is devoted to the narratives espoused in recent years by Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Mahathir in particular has been a key player in the construction and dissemination of narratives emphasizing a timeless, tradition-bound, tightly-structured, patriarchal, strongly heterosexual, and otherwise essentialized Orient—which is cast in sharp relief to an equally timeless and essentialized West that is represented as bereft of tradition, largely unstructured (except by capitalism and avarice), sexually egalitarian and permissive (if not anarchic), and terminally decadent. This paper will consider some of the tensions, contradictions, and floating signifiers in these narratives, along with the more general phenomenon that Aihwa Ong (1993) refers to as "self-Orientalizing." It will also analyze the narratives in question as components of elite strategies to legitimize the state-sanctioned transformations in kinship, gender, and sexuality that have been foregrounded in the course of the Asian financial meltdown and the political crises, cultural struggles, and wars of position to which it has given rise.

Robert William Hefner, Boston University

In Indonesia, the financial crisis of August–September 1997 quickly turned into the most severe crisis the Soeharto regime had faced since its establishment in 1966. This paper examines the chain of political events that took place as the crisis unfolded. It pays particular attention to Soeharto strategists’ efforts to mobilize anti-Chinese sentiments among Muslims for the purposes of regime power. It also explains why those efforts failed, and how it was that a coalition of moderate and progressive Muslims united with secular democrats to topple Soeharto in May 1998. The paper ends with an assessment of the challenges of maintaining the reform alliance in the aftermath of the national elections of June 1999. It suggests that consolidation of a pro-reform government will depend on the ability of leaders to draw on the lessons of the democracy movement so as to strengthen the terms for an inclusive citizenship even while acknowledging the special place of Indonesian Muslims in civil society.

Erick D. White, Cornell University

Thailand’s recent decade-long economic boom expanded an urban-based consumer culture while also firmly legitimating the ideology of capitalist development. As the state retreated during the boom from its historic task of regulating popular forms of Buddhist religiosity, a multitude of unconventional devotional movements emerged and flourished. Endorsing wealth acquisition as much as spiritual salvation, these groups frequently embraced the values and logic of the capitalist market in their efforts to reinvent traditional Buddhist ideology and practice as meaningful in and for commercialized popular culture. After the financial crisis and economic downturn beginning in 1997, however, public intellectuals intensified their previously restrained criticisms of this "commercialized Buddhism," while the state reversed course and renewed efforts to regulate various religious practices seen as dangerously deviant.

This paper will examine the case of Wat Dhammakaya, a prominent Buddhist movement well-known for its unusual doctrines, considerable wealth, vigorous pursuit of donations, and self-proclaimed goal of marketing Buddhism to the contemporary Thai public better than anyone else. Through an examination of Dhammakaya’s history, criticisms of the movement, and the state’s recent effort to crack down on it, I will explore the changing social and ideological relations between state, market, civil society, and Sangha in Thailand’s boom and post-boom eras. The debates over Dhammakaya will also serve to exemplify the wider moral crisis produced by the crash, as disagreements over the direction of future social and economic development provoke critical reflections about how to reform Thailand’s underlying ethical and religious culture.

Donald M. Nonini, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

With the onset of the financial crisis of 1998, the legitimacy of the Mahathir administration’s "development" programs in Malaysia, and their relationship to private enterprise, have come increasingly into question. Prime Minister Mahathir’s sacking of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrihim brought into public view schisms within the Malaysian governing elite over the nature of the relationship between "demokrasi" and capitalist development. Conventional wisdom in the West, as exemplified by U.S. Vice President Gore’s call for more "democracy," held that political liberalization—represented by Anwar—requires the economic liberalization (e.g., openness to foreign capital flows) which Anwar also supported.

This paper argues that this view is profoundly ethnocentric, for it has to take into account the contrasting forms of liberalism in the West and in Southeast Asia (Ong, 1999) that predicate radically different relationships between the state and civil society, including private enterprise. In Malaysia, capitalist development has been state-guided; and up to now the legitimacy of the state—and its governing elite—has been tied to their paternalist strategies for satisfying popular definitions of economic "success" and prosperity. In this sense, Anwar’s challenge to Mahathir in favor of a more "open" economy challenged not state paternalism as such but the very role of the state in assuring the conditions for "success." This paper describes the division within the forces for political liberalization between Anwar and his supporters, and those opposition groups (e.g., human rights, environmental, women’s and consumer NGOs) and political parties supporting the state’s role in "development." These opposition groups and parties demand the state guide economic growth but that "demokrasi" requires more accountability by the state to its multiple constituencies (minority groups, women, consumers, et al.)—rather than merely to the governing elite.