Organizer: Mary McCoy, Northwestern University
Chair: Arnold Zeitlin, The Freedom Forum, Hong Kong
Discussants: Lin Neumann, Southeast Asian Press Alliance; Albert Gunther, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keywords: press freedom, democratization, authoritarianism, Southeast Asia.
In contemporary Southeast Asia, the press remains both an index of and a driving force for democratization. The economic crisis that has gripped the region for the past three years, sending currencies crashing and reversing previous patterns of economic growth, has become an impetus for reform and has served to legitimate demands for greater political and economic transparency. This pressure for opening has perhaps been most visible in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines; but is evident, in varying degrees, across the whole region.
By bringing senior journalists together with social scientists, this panel will examine the press as a key factor in this regional trend, exploring its role in the consolidation of central elements of democratic change, legal reform, regulatory transparency, and political openness. But rather than focus solely on evidence of growing press freedom in the countries the papers address, this panel seeks to move away from the conventional assumption of a lineal, or teleological, progress towards freedom and democracy, highlighting instead the atavisms, often hidden, that are blocking further democratization and institutionalization of freedom of expression.
The papers of this panel were selected to represent a range of countries at different stages of democratization. In his review of the Malaysian press, the least open among the region’s nominally democratic nations, Dan Slater will examine Malaysia’s move from a repressive-responsive state to a more purely repressive state. Focusing on a case bearing surprising parallels, Mary McCoy’s paper on the Philippines explores structural problems that are weakening the country’s much stronger system of press protections—the discretionary power of the executive over regulatory mechanisms and the country’s ongoing dependence on extra-institutional channels for influencing the political process. Her paper will then include a comparative discussion of similar phenomena in Indonesia. Similarly, in his study of the laws of lese majesty in Thailand, David Streckfuss examines the juxtaposition of the region’s most open press and an elaborate system of speech controls that has produced a succession of court cases and a media culture of self-censorship.
Pressed Into Service: Authoritarianism and the Malaysian Media
Daniel A. Slater, Emory University
Although Malaysia is yet to undergo a democratic regime change, important shifts are afoot within Malaysia’s ruling regime. This paper will examine three particularly important developments in contemporary Malaysian politics, and present the argument that the pro-government Malaysian media is intimately and fundamentally connected to all three phenomena.
The first noticeable shift has been the increasing personalization of governmental authority in the hands of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Throughout the 1990s, Mahathir has taken advantage of a sycophantic and increasingly electronic mass media to present himself as the very embodiment of the Malaysian state and nation. This has undermined the effectiveness and popularity of United Malay National Organization’s (UMNO’s) political machine, and shifted the Malaysian state towards a personalized type of semi-authoritarian ‘bossism.’ The dramatic collapse of support for UMNO among its Malay political base should be seen against the backdrop of this growing personalization of power, which would not have been possible without the complicity of the pro-government media.
A second, more recent shift is inextricably connected to the first. As Malay support for UMNO has dwindled, the Malaysian media have played an integral role in the Barisan Nasional (BN’s) effort to attract Chinese voters through persistent scare tactics linking recent violence in Indonesia with the threat of similar instability should ‘reformasi’ take hold in Malaysia. Malaysia’s press has thereby helped to re-racialize national politics, with disturbing long-term implications for the nation’s delicate ethnic balance.
Finally, the Mahathir regime’s recent crackdown on independent media, especially the Partai Islam Se-Malaysia’s (PAS’) newspaper, Harakah, can be seen as a bellwether in the BN’s growing authoritarian character. By continuing to tighten its strangulation of alternative media even after comfortably winning the 1999 elections, the BN is abandoning its longstanding ‘repressive-responsive’ approach to rule in favor of a more nakedly repressive strategy of regime maintenance. This shift places Malaysia in dramatic contrast to many of its neighbors, and highlights the need to examine the politics of the Malaysian media in a comparative context.
Lese Majesty and Press Freedom in Thailand
David Streckfuss, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In this study of the laws of lese majesty in Thailand, this paper will view the question of democratization through the prism of national security and the microscope of the legal system. Through examination of Thai speech control laws and their complex legal language, the paper will analyze the character of the country’s major national security laws and prosecutions of violators since the 1920s. Instead of subordinating these case histories to a conventional chronology demarcated by royal reign, this essay will weave them into a narrative whose plot is linked by the cases themselves, leading the audience into political-legal maze of a spiritually infused hegemonic monarchy and its laws of lese majesty.
The paper plans to place these and relevant anecdotes from the history of the Thai press within a theoretical frame and a thematic siting in Thai history. Beyond the particulars of censorship (lese majesty, defamation, and press controls), the paper explores the emergence of a public sphere in a modernizing state. Within this theoretical positioning, the introduction will address the literature on, in order of generality, press freedom, democratization, and the public sphere.
In terms of Thai historical themes, the paper will explore the contradictory cycles of freedom of expression during the past century; the chilling effect that these rigid controls, found within the laws of national security and lese majesty, have had on the development of Thai democracy; and, briefly, some pointed historical comparisons with Malaysia, Japan, and Nepal. More particularly, the paper will show, through a close examination of several selected prosecutions, how recent controversies over press freedom have had a longer-term gestation within the Thai legal system that remains largely unaddressed and uncorrected despite several decades of democratic reform.
Vestiges of Authoritarian Rule: The Philippine and Indonesian Press
Mary McCoy, Northwestern University
Although the Philippine press has long enjoyed a reputation for aggressive, relatively unchecked reporting, contemporary reality has grown more complex. After the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, the Philippines adopted a new constitution that guaranteed freedom of the press along with other civil liberties suspended during the prior fourteen years of martial law.
Over the next thirteen years and two subsequent regimes, the post-Marcos press withstood numerous challenges to its newly-recovered freedom, including a high-profile libel suit President Corazon Aquino lodged against the Philippine Star in response to an unflattering comment in an opinion column. The paper eventually won the suit on appeal, and the courts have, in nearly every case since, ruled in favor of the press, reinforcing this institution’s constitutional protections. By the time President Joseph Estrada took office in 1998, the press’s position and rights seemed secure. Within a year of his tenure, however, the administration and its entourage engaged in a series of deft maneuvers that forced the closure of the country’s oldest paper and placed strong financial pressure on Manila’s largest daily to moderate its coverage.
These events shifted the arena for resolution of disputes between the Executive and the media from the courts to extra-institutional channels, throwing into question the press’s newly-recovered position as a fourth estate capable of checking executive power. Thus, despite a nominal restoration of democracy, the Philippines is faced with vestiges of authoritarianism—in this case the Executive’s discretionary power over regulatory mechanisms—that restrain press freedom, making the country seem more typical and less exceptional within the regional context.
This paper examines the effect of one of these atavistic elements on the ongoing struggle to institutionalize press freedom in the Philippines. The paper then discusses these issues in the context of the country’s continued dependence on extra-legal/extra-institutional channels for effecting political change, and concludes with a comparative discussion of striking parallels in Indonesia.
Organizer: Shawn F. McHale, George Washington University
Chair: Helen R. Chauncey, University of Victoria
Discussants: Helen R. Chauncey, University of Victoria; William S. Turley, Southern Illinois University
Keywords: land reform, state, Vietnam, Marxism, dissent.
Vietnam from 1945 to 1965 has been the object of insufficient academic study and the period from the transition from colonial rule (1954) to massive American intervention (1965) has fared the worst. In one sense, then, the aim of this panel is modest: to fill a gap in the scholarship by examining the intellectual, political, and economic history of the 1950s. In another sense, however, the panel is more ambitious. Going beyond Cold War or revolutionary nationalist approaches, an international panel of scholars will explore how Vietnamese conceptualized, argued over, and implemented the DRV state.
Shawn McHale (George Washington University) examines the fascinating trajectory of the Marxist "dissident" Tran Duc Thao, punished in 1958 for speaking out against state abuse of power. His paper looks at the contested nature of state rule and the evolution of self-criticism as a tool to construct a national community and punish dissent. Tran Thi Lien (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, France) focuses on Nguyen Manh Ha, a Catholic who served in Ho Chi Minh’s first cabinet. Was Ha’s vision of a unified Vietnamese state that could transcend Cold War ideological confrontations utopian? Martin Grossheim (University of Lund, Sweden) gives a bottom-up perspective on state-village relations during the land reform (1953–1957). Despite its problems, land reform proved to be a decisive step in the development of post-1945 state-village relations and in the creation of a centralized administrative system.
Marxism, Dissent, and the State: Implications of Tran Duc Thao, 1945–1958
Shawn F. McHale, George Washington University
This paper uses the example of Tran Duc Thao, an erudite Marxist punished for his "dissidence" in 1958, to explore issues in state formation, the nature of the national community, and the state’s use of self-criticism to enforce new boundaries of this community.
Tran Duc Thao, now mostly forgotten in Vietnam, is well-known in Western philosophy for his work on phenomenology and Marxism. After returning to Vietnam, he became an important public intellectual and head of the Faculty of History at the new national university. He antagonized the communist party, however, when he criticized the state for its abuse of power and called for more democracy. By 1958, he was forced to undergo public self-criticism as he and over one hundred others were accused of involvement in a conspiracy against the revolution.
Thao’s trajectory shows, ironically, that the definition of national community, and the parameters of politics, were still up for negotiation in the mid-1950s: many Vietnamese, not just state agents, thought they had a role to play in this process. But Thao’s fate also points to the reassertion of autocratic rule by 1958, the weakness of the public realm, and the continued power of conspiracy thinking. Thao’s eventual fate has limited parallels to developments in the Soviet Union and China: the democratic promise of the revolution, so cherished by many activists, was pushed aside as self-criticism was used (abused) to make "suspects" implicate themselves in "hidden conspiracies" undermining the revolution.
"First Comes the Land Reform Team, then Heaven": State-Village Relations during the Land Reform in the DRV (1953–1957)
Martin Grossheim, University of Lund, Sweden
Drawing on local sources in Bac Ninh province, this paper focuses on the development of state-village relations during the land reform campaign in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). I argue that though the transformation of land property relations was the main aim of the land reform, it should also be seen as a new and decisive step in the development of state-village relations after 1945.
After the French failed to implement far-reaching administrative reforms in the North Vietnamese countryside, the DRV smashed old administrative institutions (like councils of notables) at the village level in 1945. But since the Viet Minh followed a moderate united-front policy during the war against the French, the state could only partly curb the power of the old village elite. This changed at the beginning of the 1950s, when the Hanoi leadership shifted to a "class against class" strategy to consolidate mass support and carry out radical land reform. The land reform campaign, by mobilizing poorer villagers and undermining the remnants of old hierarchical structures in the villages, helped government and party cadres gained insights into village property relations.
The DRV’s land reform was a forceful intervention of the central government in village life. It aimed to integrate the villages further into a centralized administrative system and prepare for an even more radical step: to transform rural society through the collectivization of agriculture.
Nguyen Manh Ha: A Voice for a Reunified Vietnam
Thi Liên Trân, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris
This paper focuses on Nguyen Manh Ha, whose political position had been forgotten in the spiral of the Cold War. Indeed, from 1954, he was the first ardent but isolated supporter of a peaceful reunification of Vietnam by setting up a neutralist solution in South Vietnam. This idea would be taken up again in the sixties by de Gaulle.
Nguyen Manh Ha staked out an original political position. After brilliant studies in France, he became a civil servant of the colonial administration. He was also a committed Catholic (he founded the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne in Vietnam), infusing his deep attachment for the Roman Catholic Church with his social conscience. Wanting to take part in the nationalist movement, he accepted Vo Nguyen Giap’s proposition to participate in the National Union Government in summer 1945 as a Secretary of the Treasury. Later, he was expelled from Vietnam by General de Lattre because of his relations with Viet Minh leaders. Ardent advocate of organizing elections and of a peaceful reunification of the country, he opposed his fellow Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem from 1954 onwards.
Nguyen Manh Ha tried to imagine a unified Vietnamese state which would transcend the logic of ideological confrontation. Given the Cold War, was his vision of a neutral Vietnam utopian? Did it realistically understand the strength of Communist Party and its leaders? These questions will be at the heart of my presentation.
Organizer and Chair: Allen Hicken, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Donald K. Emmerson, Stanford University
This panel brings together an exciting and diverse group of young scholars working on issues of democracy and governance in Southeast Asia. All four share an interest in uncovering the effects of different configurations of democracy on such things as policy making, democratic stability and democratic consolidation. More specifically, all four share a focus on the role political parties play in the developing democracies of Southeast Asia.
Mr. Kuhonta’s paper focuses on the social welfare effects of Thailand’s different political regimes. He argues that attempts of democratic regimes to provide social welfare policies have been hampered by the institutional weakness of political parties and the state’s excessive focus on growth. Ms. Kasuya’s paper addresses the question of why the stable two-party system that existed from 1946–1972 in the Philippines has not reemerged since the return to democracy in 1986. She focuses on key changes in presidential elections between the two time periods and argues that these changes have had an impact on the party system in the Philippines. Mr. Hicken’s paper compares the interaction of political parties and political structures in Thailand and the Philippines. He argues that this interaction shapes the incentives and capabilities of policy makers in both countries in predictable ways. Finally, Ms. Niles’ paper tackles Indonesia’s evolving party democracy. Noting that in the 1999 elections several 1955 parties re-emerged she considers whether differences between these longstanding parties and the dozens of new parties have any discernible effects on policy outcomes in Indonesia.
Democracy and Social Welfare in Thailand
Erik Kuhonta, Princeton University
In this paper I analyze the relationship between political regimes and social welfare. I will assess whether democracy creates better conditions for social welfare by comparing different periods in Thailand’s history. I compare the various authoritarian-military regimes with the democratic periods and look at the quality of the policy output during the different regimes. In particular, I examine a few significant policies targeted towards the poor and the working-class to examine the conditions under which these policies were initiated and implemented. I will show that under democratic regimes, policies geared to the powerless have gained greater momentum.
While there is a contrast between authoritarian and democratic regimes in the initiation and implementation of social welfare policies, it is not clear that democracy provides an optimal arena for meeting the interests of the poor. This is because democracy in Thailand and in many developing countries more generally, lacks institutional depth through which the interests of the poor can be articulated and channeled into arenas of bureaucratic and parliamentary power. What is lacking in Thailand is coherence among political parties and in particular, any institutional force that serves the needs of the poor. Furthermore, the state’s primary concern with economic growth limits the channels through which social reform can ensue. Thus, while democracy may provide greater space for political change relative to authoritarian regimes, it does not necessarily create a sustainable framework for social reform due to the institutional weakness of political parties and the state’s excessive focus on growth.
Presidential Connection: Parties and Party Systems in the Philippines
Yuko Kasuya, University of California, San Diego
The conventional theory about Philippine political parties stipulates the "upward linkage" model; local political groups (factions) amalgamate into national parties. However, this framework does not explain the change in the nature of party competition after the 1986 re-democratization in a satisfactory manner. Why did the stable two-party competition since the 1946 independence until the 1972 democratic breakdown change into a fluid multi-party competition after 1986 to the present? This paper attempts to provide an alternative explanation to this question. The argument is constructed in two steps. First, the paper will show that congressional candidates attempt to be nominated by the party of a viable presidential candidate, most preferably by the incumbent president’s party because of the various benefits the president can provide during and after the election. Secondly, while the number of viable presidential candidates was almost always two during the pre-martial law elections, it increased to more than three in elections after 1986. Thus, those who enter the congressional race come to have a greater number of choices in terms of party nomination. This as a consequence increased the number of parties competing at the congressional elections after the regime change. The paper will also discuss the reasons for the increased number of presidential candidates, such as the collapse of established party labels during the Marcos authoritarian period and the shortened presidential term limit. Data source includes the statistical analysis of election results and interviews with legislators and party officials.
Party Systems, Political Institutions and Policy: Policy Making in Thailand and the Philippines
Allen Hicken, University of California, San Diego
The question of this paper is how party systems and political institutions interact to affect the making of public policy in Thailand and the Philippines. I argue that the interaction of political institutions and the party system shapes the incentives and capacity of political actors/policymakers to produce certain kinds of public policies in Thailand and the Philippines.
I begin by classifying the party systems of Thailand and the Philippines in terms of two key elements: the number of parties and whether a party system is structured or unstructured. I define a structured party system as one that contains parties that are minimally disciplined and cohesive (no factionalization), and that have national constituencies. I argue these two elements (the number of parties and party system structure) influence the number of actors in the policymaking process and their preferences over policy.
Finally, I consider the larger institutional context within which policymaking takes place and argue that among multiple actor, unstructured party systems, presidential systems may out-perform parliamentary systems in terms of their ability to provide certain types of policies. To provide support for my argument I examine history and politics of privatization efforts in Thailand and the Philippines.
The Role of Political Parties in Building Effective Institutions: Indonesia in 1955 and 1999
Kimberly Niles, University of Colorado, Boulder
In many new democracies, voters must choose from a dizzying array of parties, the majority of which have no strong roots in society or ties to earlier periods of democratic rule. An abundance of parties associated with prominent individuals rather than party platforms can result in extreme fluidity and fragmentation of the party system, as well as impede the process of democratic consolidation. In comparative perspective, Indonesia’s current array of parties is fairly unique. Although dozens of brand new parties competed in the 1999 election, several 1955 parties re-emerged with close to their earlier levels of support (after having been forcibly consolidated first by Sukarno and then by Suharto). Do differences between new and longstanding parties have any discernible effects on policy outcomes in Indonesia? Is this re-emergence of earlier (non-Golkar) parties a troubling signal of the enduring power of elites? Or is it more likely to lead to a party system that is able to avoid the extreme fragmentation characteristic of many of today’s new democracies, as well as Indonesia in 1955? In particular, why haven’t Indonesian politicians been able to reduce ethnic conflict? Relatively how important are the total number of parties, the enduring nature of a few key parties, or the coalition incentives built into the (indirect) presidential selection process? Despite a prior failure, could federalism provide a solution to current ethnic conflicts in Indonesia by allowing the development of regional parties, but maintaining a "reasonable" number of parties with long-standing societal ties at the national level?
Organizer: Barley Norton, SOAS, University of London
Chair and Discussant: Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington
Keywords: epistemology, Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, social practice.
This panel seeks to address one central question: how have the dramatic cultural upheavals of the past fifty years affected the epistemological assumptions employed in social life in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam? While these three nations have gone through the similar experiences of warfare, revolution, and the recent reintegration into the international community, they have also experienced the introduction into social life of new definitions of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and in what ways one can legitimately know the world. Research has shown, however, that despite the introduction of these new definitions, they have not enjoyed universal acceptance and instead have had to contend with other concepts and definitions. This panel seeks to address how these multiple and competing definitions of knowing and legitimate knowledge interact with each other, and how they inform social practice. The papers presented will address a range of related themes, such as the nature of conflicting epistemologies (e.g., how does one know a national border? Can one know the world through ecstatic trance or only through empirical methods?), the institutions or social actors that have been responsible for the propagation of different knowledges (e.g., political parties, spirit medium groups, or international NGOs), and the way in which these divergent assumptions have guided particular forms of social action (e.g., the construction of official histories and individual biographies, or the formulation of development policies). The panel promises to provide a unique comparative perspective on the ways in which similar historical processes have affected the sociocultural worlds of these three nations.
Mediumship Versus the State: Conflicting Epistemologies in Vietnam
Barley Norton, SOAS, University of London
This paper will examine the conflicting epistemological assumptions regarding mediumship in post-revolutionary Vietnam. The anti-superstition campaign, implemented by the Vietnamese Communist Party, argues that for knowledge to be ‘legitimate’ it must be scientific (i.e. must employ empirical methods), and it ridicules the notion that intangible forces, such as spirits, can affect ‘reality.’ In contrast, mediumship rituals are based on the premise that spirits engage with, and affect, people’s everyday lives. When possessed, mediums transmit the ‘knowledge’ of the spirits in order to ensure prosperity, good health and happiness for their disciples.
The vigorous implementation of the anti-superstition campaign severely restricted mediums’ practices from the 1960s to the ‘80s. In the doi moi era, however, the authorities have been increasingly tolerant of mediumship. The contrasting knowledges of mediums and the state remain, in many respects, rigidly opposed, but during the 1990s there have been various attempts to reconcile ‘spiritual’ ways of knowing the world with the interests of the state. The paper will outline the ways in which mediumship is being appropriated by, and to a certain extent, legitimated through nationalist discourse. It will include discussion of how nationalist discourse depicts mediumship as a ‘folk culture activity’ which contributes to the construction of national identity, and how it downplays ‘non-empirical’ aspects of mediumship, such as invoking the spirits for the purposes of curing illness. The paper will also seek to show how some of the epistemological assumptions of the anti-superstition campaign have influenced mediums’ ritual practices and their conception of spiritual agency.
Buddha Power and State Power in Cambodia
William Collins, University of California, Berkeley
For the past decade, the social, economic, and political development of Cambodia has been a major goal of the international community. A wide variety of actors, ranging from foreign governments, international non-governmental organizations, and Cambodian governmental and non-governmental organizations, have played roles in the process. This paper’s objective is to examine the manner in which these different actors define and employ knowledge of Cambodian society and culture, and the way in which these diverse knowledges inform the creation and implementation of development policies, particularly the planned establishment of elected Commune Councils that will play a critical role in furthering rural development. As will be shown, many international actors in the development process employ a model of rural Cambodian society that pays insufficient attention to rural residents’ own knowledge and understandings of their society and culture, and also inadequately recognizes the importance of local Buddhist institutions. This same knowledge is also appropriated by Cambodian government officials at the national and local level as it is useful for supporting their own political objectives while limiting the role of other local actors. However, when faced with the issue of generating popular support for their policies and implementing them at the local level, the advocates of development policies must often engage these different systems of knowledge and the actors that endorse them. As will be argued, the creation of successful development policies for Cambodia requires a reconsideration of what the development community regards as legitimate knowledge of Cambodian society and culture.
"We Were Younger Then, And It Was Different": Vietnamese Factory Women Reconsider Their Past
Mila Rosenthal, London School of Economics
Factories in northern Vietnam constituted one of the most significant locations for the implementation of revolutionary policies. Not only did employees work together, they also lived together in collective factory living quarters, creating a tightly-controlled environment for socialization into revolutionary values and social roles. This paper will examine how the recent liberalization of Vietnamese social and economic life has affected the female workers of the state-owned Eighth of March Textile Factory in Hanoi, specifically how they construct and appropriate knowledges of their past, and how they employ these knowledges to adapt to their changing social world and understand their role as women in it. As workers in a state-owned enterprise, the workers have an intimate acquaintance with official ideology and are encouraged to forget the evidence of their own lived experiences and accept the Vietnamese Communist Party’s interpretation of the past; yet, at the same time, they must also contend with their own versions of remembered and recalled experience. This disjuncture becomes especially powerful with regard to how to appropriately respond to such contemporary concerns as status competition, consumer desire, class aspiration, and gender role expectations. By examining the factory’s official history, women’s own versions of their history in the factory, and the recent social changes in the factory’s collective living quarters, this paper will show the ways in which these women have negotiated their responses to these knowledges and histories, and how these diverse ways of knowing continue to inform their moral and social lives.
Creating Knowledge of the Border: The Meanings of the Mekong River Friendship Bridge in Laos
Takeko Iinuma, Cornell University
The 1994 opening of the Mekong River Friendship Bridge between Laos and Thailand marked the beginning of a new era in Lao history. After years of international isolation and socialist economic policies, the bridge provided a clear statement of the country’s new economic policies and its desire for greater integration with its neighbors. Drawing on a survey and interviews conducted in 1999 with households in the border-area communities, government authorities, and the private sector, this paper seeks to examine the epistemological consequences of this infrastructural project in Laotian life, particularly the manner in which the bridge as a material artifact has played a role in creating knowledge of the border between Laos and Thailand. As will be shown, the bridge, which is regarded by the state as a vital asset for the development of trade and industry, has been seen by many non-state actors as a constraining factor on their ability to ensure their own security and maximize their limited opportunities to sustain their livelihoods. As a result, a large gap has emerged with respect to state and local perceptions and attitudes about the bridge and the border, a gap which has the potential to actually limit opportunities for socio-economic development. As will be discussed in conclusion, contrary to the widely held view that the world is becoming more borderless and the role of the state less significant, the Friendship Bridge has provided an important context for the Lao state to extend and reorganize its territory of influence.
Organizer and Chair: Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
This panel looks at multiple Islamic political visions found in the Indonesian Islamic "community." Although Indonesia has a majority Islamic population and the current president is a Muslim cleric, there is staggering variation in how Islamic symbols and theories are used to construct visions for an Indonesian polity. The papers look at a variety of Islamic communities: traditionalists, modernists, fundamentalists and examines how each uses Islamic concepts to construct their political vision of Indonesia. Further, within each community there is contention of over how to shape a 21st-century Indonesian polity. The paper on Islamism examines the emergence of a party dedicated to peacefully and democratically establishing Islamic law as the solution for Indonesia’s multiple crises. Not all groups are committed to peaceful political processes. The paper on jihad examines the emergence of a movement calling for holy war against Christians in Maluku. By examining the reactions of other Muslims, this paper explores the growing divisions amongst Indonesian Muslims. The third paper explores how traditionalist theories of leadership shape national discourse about the current presidency. It also examines how these theories are being shaped by discourses of democratization. Finally, whereas the majority of papers are focused on Java, the final paper examines similar processes in South Sulawesi where both Islamic notions of politics and a desire to counter the Javanese hegemony shape political visions.
Indonesian Jihad: Yogyakarta Muslim Responses to the Call for Holy War
Robert William Hefner, Boston University
Long regarded as a stronghold of moderate Islam, the city of Yogyakarta in south-central Java was startled in late 1999 by the rise of a heretofore little-known Islamist group demanding religious warfare (jihad) in Maluku against Christians involved in recent clashes with Muslims. The Yogya Muslim community was all the more surprised when this same group threatened to carry out violence against Christians in Java if it were not allowed to send warriors to the troubled eastern Indonesian province. Based on fieldwork conducted in 1999 and 2000, this paper examines the reactions of Yogyakartan Muslims to the proponents of jihad. The varied nature of those reactions provides insight into basic lines of cleavage in the Indonesian Muslim community as a whole. It also illuminates the deep divisions among Muslims on issues critical to Indonesia’s future: including attitudes toward the military, the idea of national citizenship, and the continuing relevance of the project of Indonesian nationhood itself.
Islamism in Contemporary Indonesian Politics: The Shari’ah Utopianism of Partai Keadilan
Mark Woodward, Arizona State University
Islamism is a complex, global phenomena that developed as a response to the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan war. Islamism has many faces and diverse strategies ranging from armed struggle to commitment to a democratic political process. What Islamist share the vision of a utopian future in which the establishment of Islamic Law (Shari’ah) as the basis of the nation state will lead to the emergence of just, prosperous and pious societies. In many Muslim societies student organizations and campus mosques have figured significantly in Islamist movements.
In post New Order Indonesia Islamism has emerged as a significant social and political force. Islamist organizations range from militant jihad campaigns advocating armed struggle against Christian and other non-Muslim communities to Sufi political parties (Partai Cinta Damai—Peace and Love Party) to those advocating the gradual and peaceful establishment of Islamic law. This paper concerns the Shari’ah Utopianism of Partai Keadilan—The Justice Party. It is based on the analysis of pamphlets and campaign materials produced during the period leading up to the 1999 elections and interviews conducted in Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Partai Keadilan is a campus mosque based party. Supporters are primarily students in technical and scientific fields. Most are extremely pious and idealistic, but have little formal training in Islamic theology or law. The party’s basic position is that the establishment of Islamic law is the key to resolving all of Indonesia’s social, political and economic problems. It is committed to a peaceful, democratic political process and to "leading by example." Party leaders explain that the party’s commitment to democracy and to development and social welfare projects, will lead the majority of Indonesians to understand the advantages of a society based on Shari’ah.
Kyai, President, or Wali: Contesting Islamic Notions of Leadership
Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
During Indonesia’s first 53 years of Independence, a handful of traditional Javanese theories of leadership and their accompanying symbolic set were important in legitimizing the regimes. The current president is the most democratically elected leader of Indonesia. He is also a kyai, a traditional Islamic leader who is part jurist, part mystic, and all educator. Today, there is cynicism towards previous uses of traditional models of leadership in the presidency and a strong desire to move towards an open, transparent, and non-corrupt government. In this context this paper explores the interaction of two models of leadership which means in the person of Abdurrahman Wahid: kyai and president. A particular interest are how the models are contested; have different groups understand these two concepts and how they may or may not combine fruitfully. This paper will look at the concept of kyai from the point of view of the traditionalist Islamic community and look at the variation found within. There are dimensions of "kyai" leadership model which are incompatible with democratizing—the idea that a kyai is a little king of his pesantren and his followers. The process of democratization has also started to change ideas about kyai leadership including demands for fiscal accountability. Theoretically, this paper will speak to shifting notions of leadership in times of political, economic, and social crisis.
Political Affiliation and Religious Commitment in South Sulawesi
Thomas P. Gibson, University of Rochester
Twice this century a beam of light has risen from the grave of Ara’s Islamic Saint, Bakka’ Tera’: once at the downfall of the Japanese Empire in 1946 and once at the downfall of Sukarno in 1965. Local informants explained to me this was a divine signal of the downfall of enemies of religion. No such light marked the downfall of Suharto in 1999. South Sulawesi was one of the few Indonesian provinces to cast a majority vote for Habibie, Suharto’s chosen successor, in the 1999 elections. Although explainable in part as a vote for a ‘favorite son’ who was not from the hegemonic Javanese center, I found that well-educated villagers in South Sulawesi were also attracted by his modernist Islamic credentials, scientific training and forceful personality. These were necessary for the continued stability and development of the nation. They viewed the successful candidate, Abdul Rahman Wahid, as deficient in all three areas: as lacking in both religious and scientific knowledge; as soft on successionists in Irian Jaya, Aceh and Kalimantan; and as soft on Communists. Many of my informants had been armed militants during the Darul Islam rebellion of 1952–1965 and remained apprehensive about a resurgence of the ‘atheistic’ Partai Kommunis Indonesia. This paper will explore the relevance of more than a century of political and religious struggles in South Sulawesi to contesting Islamic visions of politics in Post-Soeharto Indonesia.
Organizer and Chair: Shaun K. Malarney, International Christian University, Tokyo
Discussant: Richard P. Madsen, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: Indochina, ontology, post-revolutionary change.
This panel seeks to address one central question: how have the dramatic cultural upheavals of the past fifty years affected the ontological assumptions employed in social life in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam? While these three nations have gone through the similar experiences of warfare, revolution, and the recent reintegration into the international community, they have also experienced the introduction into social life of new definitions of what does or does not exist, and what has effective causal force in human life. Research has shown, however, that despite the introduction of these new definitions, they have not enjoyed universal acceptance and instead have had to contend with other concepts and definitions. This panel seeks to address how these multiple and competing definitions interact with each other, and how they inform social practice. The papers presented will address a range of related themes, such as the nature of the conflicting definitions (e.g., do spirits exist or not? Can an aborted fetus influence the lives of the living?), the institutions or social actors that have been responsible for the propagation of different definitions (e.g., rural residents, Communist parties, or diasporic refugee intellectuals), and the way in which these divergent assumptions have guided particular forms of social action (e.g., the formation of government policies, the conduct of commemorative rites, or debates on the nature of authority). The panel promises to provide a unique comparative perspective on the ways in which similar historical processes have affected the socio-cultural worlds of these three nations.
Do Spirits of the Dead Exist? Divergent Ontologies of the Dead in Northern Vietnam
Shaun K. Malarney, International Christian University, Tokyo
This paper’s purpose is to examine the diverse ontological assumptions regarding the dead that exist in contemporary Vietnamese society. The dead are an important part of Vietnamese social life. The socialist state regularly invokes them, whether in the form of official histories that glorify ancient heroes who set an example for the contemporary nation to follow, or official commemorative rites that celebrate those who gave their lives for country and revolution. Everyday Vietnamese people are also engaged with them, whether in the family ancestral altars that maintain a space for the dead in people’s homes, or the family ancestral rites in which the living contact the dead and care for them. This paper seeks to show that despite this shared focus, these different contexts employ divergent ontologies of the dead. The atheistic Vietnamese state, while mobilizing the dead as an important component for legitimizing their regime, employs an ontology that grants the dead no existence beyond the sum of their actions while alive. Many Vietnamese people, however, employ an ontology in which the dead continue to live as spirits, and these spirits have the ability to influence human life. The diverse conceptions, as will be shown, necessitate different forms of social interaction with the dead, and also place limits on the consequences the dead can have in human life. As will be argued, living social agents continue to engage the dead; but what they engage varies with the actors and social context.
Abortion Conventionalized, Abortion Ritualized: Competing Perceptions of Fetal Life in Contemporary Vietnam
Tine Gammeltoft, University of Copenhagen
In Vietnam today, induced abortion is a highly prevalent and apparently non-controversial solution to unwanted pregnancies. Particularly among unmarried youth, abortion rates are high and seem to be increasing. Although some have commented that young people "go for abortions like they go to buy chewing gum," induced abortion is for many socially stressful and morally problematic. This paper will examine one method through which youth attempt to resolve the emotional and moral dilemmas that abortion engenders, ritual practice. As will be shown, many women have begun to perform a variety of rituals for their aborted fetuses, such as prayers, burning of incense, and spirit medium sessions. While these rituals help provide relief from immediate personal troubles, they also reveal the conflicting ontological and epistemological assumptions regarding the fetus that exist in Vietnamese social life. From the socially and politically dominant "scientific" perspective, a first trimester fetus belongs to the domain of nature, being nothing but a morally neutral collection of blood and cells. Yet from the "spiritual" perspective which has considerable strength in the life-worlds of youth, a fetus at any stage of gestation belongs to the cultural domain and is considered as a human being worthy of moral recognition. Within this tense and politicized field where differing modes of knowledge compete over the social and moral limits to human life, rituals provide a way for young women to reconcile conflicting ontologles of human life, cope with profound tensions and dilemmas, and re-unite contradictory epistemologies of human life and personhood.
Do People Still Dream of Kings? Discourses of Monarchy in Laos
Grant Evans, University of Hong Kong
Twenty-five years ago, revolutionaries in Laos accomplished one of their greatest revolutionary goals, the overthrow of the Lao monarchy. In the years that followed, they augmented this achievement with the appropriation of royal properties, a prohibition against the set of rituals members of the royal family had performed to publicly restate their power, and a propaganda campaign designed to delegitimize the royalty and the justifications for monarchic rule. Recent research, however, has shown that traces of a discourse surrounding the monarchy still exist in Laos. This paper’s objective is to analyze the nature of this discourse and explain how and why it has continued to exist. At a micro-level, it will discuss everyday practices, such as linguistic forms or unsanctioned ritual practices, that assert the monarchy’s continued existence. At a macro-level, it will examine the impact of the Thailand and its monarchy in conceptualizing the Lao nation, and also the role of intellectuals and others in the Lao diaspora in perpetuating ideas regarding the monarchy’s existence. In conclusion, this paper will address the question of whether, despite the absence of an overt institutional structure to support it, the monarchy can still be said to exist in Lao social life.
(Re-)Constituting Hierarchy and Authority in Contemporary Cambodia
Lindsay French, Rhode Island School of Art and Design
Two primary objectives of the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia were the destruction of all previous forms of social hierarchy and their replacement with a two-tiered system of revolutionary correctness. In reality, this system was never fully implemented as force and its strategic deployment became the dominant factor for constituting authority in Cambodian life. This paper’s objective is to examine how, in the wake of the Khmer Rouge and the regimes that followed, hierarchy and authority are being renegotiated and reconstituted in Cambodian life, specifically with regard to the re-emergent role of experience as a marker for social status. The paper builds on the premise that hierarchy and authority have historically involved the existence and possession of different socially-recognized objects or attributes, whether wealth, education, age, piety, or control over force, and that the possession or absence of these socio-cultural objects have been vital for assertions of hierarchy and authority. Through an analysis of social practice in family and village contexts, it then examines the different ways in which experience is employed in contemporary constructions of hierarchy and authority, but in doing so seeks to disentangle the multiple elements, such as age, membership in particular social organizations, participation in particular social activities or movements, or the acquisition of certain knowledges, that are socially-recognized as constitutive of experience in particular contexts. As will be shown, debates over the defining characteristics of experience reveal the enduring legacy of the revolution and the preexisting cultural patterns with which it had to contend.
Organizer and Chair: Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Discussant: Henry Ginsburg, The British Library
Exploring the dynamics of power in pre-modern Southeast Asia is a course charted by our record of the creations commissioned, assembled, and appropriated as part of establishing authority. The paucity of other evidence has left the monumental architecture and sculpture, and the inscriptions associated with these and less permanent creations, to bear the weight of historical inquiry. As the history of Southeast Asia moved into the modern era, texts associated with the representation of rule—written, photographic, and performed—can be read in terms of their varied efforts to generate a seamless and coherent image of royalty.
Using both modern and pre-modern materials, participants in this panel will discuss four creative forms as the media for the communication or even the generation of power.
The interpretation of epigraphical data is the focus of Prapod Assavaviruhalkarn’s paper. He evaluates the interpretation of this material as political versus religious in nature, arguing for a grounding of interpretation in the study of larger societal issues.
John Listopad’s paper explores the visual evidence and political context of the mural paintings commissioned by King Mongkut at Siam’s Wat Somanat, paintings which confronted those who wished to ordain at this monastery for social or political reasons with the most basic tenets of Buddhism in a very graphic way.
Roxana Brown studies the political implications of Khmer bas-reliefs in a rethinking of the long-debated questions of the Khmer devaraja cult. In contrast to prevailing beliefs, the visual evidence of an actual 12th-century Angkorian king does not show him in any way as a divine being. Instead he is shown as one element in an interdependent power structure.
With the introduction of mechanical technology in Southeast Asia new forms of expression and communication offer means for the construction of a royal image. Caverlee Cary examines the photographic mode in nineteenth-century Siam in terms of both domestic nation-building and external diplomatic initiatives.
The practice of royal persuasion in mainland Southeast Asia has been periodically reinvented. With each medium of expression comes a different constellation of possibilities and limitations. Objects were presented for interpretation in the eras of their creation or royal appropriation. Today we view these representations in the context of the twenty-first century. In this panel participants engage in the interpretation of power in the double perspective of contemporary vision and the perilous exercise of imagining the past. Through these expressive forms we seek, as did their conjurers, the art of the possible.
Imprecation and Blessing: An Interpretation of Epigraphical Data
Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, Chulalongkorn University
Epigraphical data found in Southeast Asia, to the disappointment of historians, are mostly ‘religious’ in nature. They are usually records of meritorious deeds and lists of donations. In some of these ‘dedicatory’ inscriptions we find imprecation or blessing, sometimes both, normally at the end of an inscription. These are curses to the persons who vandalize the sanctuaries and blessing for those who help preserve them. The punishment of going to hell is cited sometimes side by side with the law of the realm and of course the reward of going to heaven.
It has been proposed that imprecations are for political purpose only and have nothing to do with religion. They are to be considered as a means to control and thus facilitate the centralized power of the king. But if we look carefully the concept of ‘cursing’ here bases itself firmly on religious thought and is closely related to cosmological structure. Detailed study of these imprecations and blessings might reveal religious behavior as well as social and political structure and legal application of a given society of Southeast Asia. This phenomenon shows that in Southeast Asia religion cannot be studied separately from other phenomena in the society.
God Kings of Angkor
Roxana M. Brown, University of California, Los Angeles
In any consideration of the Angkorian period of Cambodia the concept of devaraja or god king invariably arises. The literature on this subject is extensive but it has not yet included an analysis of one important piece of visual evidence: the portrayal of Suryavarman II as king and mortal on the bas-reliefs of the 12th-century Angkor Wat temple. He is shown twice in a single long mural carved on the walls of the southern gallery. The relief includes a host of actual historical figures from Suryavarman’s time, twenty-one of them named in small inscriptions on the mural itself.
Suryavarman and two of his military chieftains are each shown twice. The mural is thus divided into two scenes. The first shows Suryavarman seated in audience in the open air of a forested mountaintop. The second shows him as a member in a long procession of notables, each on elephant back and accompanied by their personal retinues.
Instead of showing Suryavarman as divine, even though the small inscriptions identify him by his posthumous title Vishnuloka, the relief graphically reveals the elements of an interdependent power structure. Suryavarman himself is not shown any larger than the other mortals of the relief. He is not shown being anointed by heavenly flying devas, nor does he sport a halo or any other divine headgear. He rides an earthly rather than mythical mount. In sum, the relief clearly shows the king as a leader, but one can easily argue that he is depicted as first among relatively equal military chiefs rather than as a divine being from whom, alone, all power emanates.
The Mural Paintings of Wat Somanat Vihan in Bangkok
John Listopad, Stanford University
This was the funerary temple for Queen Somanat, the chief queen of King Mongkut. She died a tragic and lingering death soon after their marriage at the time of his accession to the throne. This had a profound impact on the scholar king. He decided to dedicate a temple to her memory, using a portion of her vast fortune. There are two dramatically different themes depicted, depending on the audience they were intended for. The paintings in the Vihan, the public area of the monastery, depict scenes from the Inao, a popular drama in which the young queen would have participated or viewed with other women in the palace. In the Bot, the hall for activities that concerned the monastic order, the lower walls depicted the life of the Buddha, the funeral ceremonies for Queen Somanat, and the asubha khammathana, the meditations on the different manners in which a corpse can decay. Above, on the side wall were depicted the dhutanga ascetic practices and the daily cycle of monastic life. The asubha khammathana are a very unusual subject for Thai Mural Painting.
The reason for their choice lies with the political circumstances of the reign of King Mongkut. As the abbot of Wat Somanat, he chose a close friend from the Dhammayut order who was a great meditation teacher and who had resided in forest monasteries. As Wat Bowonivet was closed to general ordinations as it had been the King’s monastery, young men of standing who wished to ordain in the Dhammayut order for social reasons went to Wat Somanat. Overwhelmed with a host of young men wishing to ordain at his monastery for social or political reasons, the abbot stressed rigorous monastic practice. This paper explores the visual evidence and cultural context of the Wat Somanat mural paintings, paintings which confronted those who wished to ordain at the monastery for political or social reasons with the most basic tenets of Buddhism in a very graphic way during their ordination ceremony.
Mechanical Mediation and the Royal Subject
Caverlee Cary, University of California, Berkeley
Photographs, even the most casually snapped, can constitute rich sources of information. The more that is known of the historical context, the greater the potential for the photograph to be not only illustrative but revealing. Photographs as mechanical creations speak of states of technology and sophistication in the understanding and manipulation of persuasive possibilities. As images, their contents speak on many levels: as compositions within a frame, as composites of objects which may be of significance in their own right, of attitudes to the human body and the relationships among people and between people and environment.
There is nothing casual about the creation of the two photographs under consideration in this presentation. We know much more about the circumstances than many photographs chance has preserved from the nineteenth century. Both are revealing about their times and subjects in ways presumably intended and unintended. The reading of an image in terms of the dynamics visual, social, and political, suggests the potential for the reading of the large volume of less well documented images.
In these two cases the practitioners of politics engaged in a new rhetoric. Siam’s two latter nineteenth-century monarchs, King Mongkut and his son and successor King Chulalongkorn, were both interested in the newly-imported medium of photography, as they were in other forms of imported technology. Both were also concerned with constructions of themselves as royal subjects in the eyes of their audiences, local and global. In these two photographs we see two very different forms of engagement with the new medium: one created in the service of external diplomacy, the other probably for primarily internal consumption. Ultimately the two vastly different images suggest the rendering of the royal image as self-constructed subject in the context of their very different times and usage.
Ethics and Politics in the Art of Thai Boxing
Peter Vail, Miyazaki International College, Japan
Thai Boxing is by far the most popular martial art in Thailand. It has become, in its rationalized, competitive form, the national sport of Thailand, enjoying broad viewership and supporting a large gambling economy. Muay Thai is conducted almost exclusively as prizefighting, and it involves the participation of many children, especially in the countryside. Because of its popularity and embeddedness in Thai life, Muay Thai has become an important arena of politics. This paper will examine two dimensions of the politicization of Thai boxing, first, how Thai boxing matches are used as public forums by various politicians especially in rural areas; second, what political considerations inform recent attempts to legislate the practice of Thai boxing, especially amongst children practitioners. The paper concludes by arguing that the political struggle penetrating Muay Thai is an important facet of class disparity and cultural debate in Thai society.
Organizer and Chair: Julie Shackford-Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Michael H. Bodden, University of Victoria
Keywords: Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Southeast Asia, modernity, literature, drama, film.
In the study of Southeast Asian arts and culture, scholars have been confined by a language that divides cultural production into the categories of the "modern" and the "traditional." Even as "tradition" has been revealed as a construct of colonialism, or more broadly—and complexly—as a construct of the discourse of modernity, the term continues to be used as a catch-all phrase for the pre-, non-, as well as the contra-modern.
In our discussion of Southeast Asian literature and film of the last category—the contra-modern—we both acknowledge these linguistic constraints and attempt to redefine the terms of cultural critique in order to address what Homi Bhabha has described as that which "translates. . . the social imaginary" of modernity but is at the same time "discontinuous or in contention" with it.
As we will show, in each example scrutinized, the artists consciously dip into a reservoir of images and symbols associated with "tradition," but with various motivations. These images and symbologies are not employed with the purpose of rejecting modernity, but rather, understanding it in its variety of guises—the hyperrational; the foreign; Modernist Islam; Capitalism; Globalization—and critiquing it in terms of its limitations in artistic expression and in articulating and addressing social and political problems. In our papers we question the relationship between the artist(s) and the audience(s) to examine whether "tradition" is deployed in a romanticizing or ironic/deconstructive mode, and what political ends are served in either choice.
Revisiting and Reusing The Malay Annals and The Hikayat Hang Tuah
Soak Koon Wong, Universiti Sains Malaysia
The symbols and archetypes of classical Malay texts continue to acquire new resonances in the hands of contemporary Malay writers. Using The Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) and Hikayat Hang Tuah as a starting point, this paper examines the ways four writers (two men and two women) refigure various "traditional" issues, for example, the concept of "daulat" or divine authority; the definitions of levels of governance, e.g. in family, community, and state; bonding between men and women and same-sex interrelationships and the role of subjects. The two sets of texts are:
(a) the woman dramatist, Rahmah Bujang’s Princess Hang Li-Po (Puteri Hang Li-Po) which is read against Muhammad Hj. Salleh’s portrayal of women, etc. in Poems From The Malay Annals (Sajak-sajak Sejarah Melayu).
(b) Dinsman’s play, Jebat, may yield illuminating comparative insights read with the woman writer, Fatimah Busu’s Al-isra.
The fact that most, if not all, major contemporary Malay literary works are published by the Malay Academy of Letters (Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka) which is a state-run body gives rise to the assumption that these works cannot be deconstructive or critical and must be simply conformist. And yet, it is precisely because of this ostensible conformity (they need not be homogeneous or completely non-interrogative) that it is challenging to read them anew and even, against the grain. In looking at these four works, I analyze how the writers reinforce, expand, diminish, and interrogate the symbols, tropes, metaphors of the classical texts. In doing so they complicate the anterior and posterior temporality of "tradition" and "modernity."
Wise Spirits and the Limits of Modernity in Suwarsih Djojopuspito’s Siluman Karangkobar
Julie Shackford-Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
Suwarsih Djojopuspito’s 1963 novella Siluman Karangkobar (The Wise Spirits of Karangkobar), presents the author’s utopian vision of a female-centered spirit realm that resonates with the imagery of the agrarian-based cosmology of Java, and the author’s vision of Hindu and Islamic socialist/feminine principles. This text, which was last amidst the political turmoil of the mid-1960s introduces many of the issues that would come to occupy Magical Realists and postcolonial feminist writers in their critique of modernity and search for meaning in anti-modern discourses of orature, mysticism, and roots.
In the paper I argue that the author uses the "Russian doll" structure of the text—in which the narrator’s journey into a primordial, mystical interior is told through a series of embedded narratives—to articulate the problematic place of the modern, urban intellectual in Indonesia. I then show how Suwarsih’s reification of a localized mysticism in a work of modern literature makes us conscious of the ways in which Indonesian intellectuals, in their efforts to construct themselves as modern, created an Other in the form of the superstitious/traditional rakjat (masses), and how this Other underwent various forms of silencing and erasure in canonical modern texts. As the author taps into a reservoir of images and discourses associated with pre-modern "tradition" and infuses these images/discourses with a radical political vision, she illustrates the impotence of the modern, hyper-rational discourses of modern socialism in addressing immediate social problems. Suwarsih’s alternative mystical/feminist solution involves a fundamental transformation in worldview through a ritualistic opening of the senses.
De/Constructing Modernity: The Deployment of Tradition in Contemporary Southeast Asian Fiction and ASEAN’s "Realizing Rama"
Teri Shaffer Yamada, California State University, Long Beach
This paper will foreground the contrapuntal deployment of traditional Indic epic literary themes/protagonists (Ramayana and Mahabharata) in contemporary fiction by Southeast Asian writers (predominantly Indonesian and Thai) and by ASEAN. I suggest that many writers deploy traditional themes in modern fiction with a deconstructionist intent. The traditional and the modern are frequently intermeshed. When recognized elements of the traditional and modern are juxtaposed, it serves as an unexpected contradiction, a shock to the reader’s consciousness, bringing into view how much society has or has not changed. This technique is used as political satire in Yudhistira ANM Massardi’s "Interview with Rahwana," as social satire in Nay Win Myint’s "Thadun" and Win Pe’s "Clean, Clear Water," and as gender-role critique in Sri Dao Ruang’s "Sita Puts Out the Fire," Satyagraha Hoerip’s "After the Village Cleaning," and Mary Loh’s "Sex Size and Ginseng."
This deconstructionist technique is contrasted with the "constructionist" use of tradition by ASEAN. From December 1999 through spring 2000, the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information sponsored a "modernized" performance of the Ramayana, retitled "Realizing Rama" throughout most of Southeast Asia, beginning with its debut in Vietnam. This two-hour performance with the demon seductress Surphanaka costumed in a "dress similar to Madonna’s Material Girl" was deployed to help "unite artists" throughout the region while "re-introducing this classic piece of literature to young audiences in the region." This "constructionist" deployment of modernized tradition is an ideological deployment used to create a pan-ASEAN cultural identity. This attempt to construct a modern identity using tradition is socially relevant to the economic interests of ASEAN in an age of increasing internal migration caused by economic displacements due to modernization, and the resulting ethnic conflicts they create.
All Things Bawdy and Sexual: The Recuperation of Adat in Contemporary Malay Films
Gaik Cheng Koo, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
This paper examines a trend to recuperate adat (Malay custom) by representing the bawdy and sexual in Malay films from the 1990s. Recuperating adat is largely a response from progressive Malays to a resurgent Islam that is at times considered to be repressive of female sexuality, as manifested by the majority of Muslim women who now wear the tudung (head covering). Resurgent Islamic attempts to purify Muslim Malay culture of its Hindu and animistic elements has seen the banning of public cultural performances like the mak yong and wayang kulit (shadow puppetry). In retaliation, New Wave Malay filmmakers feature traditional dances and rituals that may contain magic, traditional healing, and the supernatural in their works. Moreover adat is embodied in the figure of the sexualized woman whose sexuality is symbolized by her wearing only a sarung tied around her midriff (the act of berkemban). It is Malay male filmmakers rather than their female counterparts who seem to unproblematically adopt this trope to evoke an earthiness and raw sensuality that is rooted in the imagery of the kampung (village), suggesting a kind of Malay essentialist femininity before the advent of urban modernity and dakwah activism (Islamic proselytization). In reclaiming an essential Malayness/ethnicity that is cathected onto the body of the gendered Other while simultaneously resisting a homogeneous global modernity and fundamentalist Islam, an elision or sleight-of-hand of another kind occurs for privileging ethnicity in this case means sacrificing gender politics.
Organizer and Chair: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
Discussants: John Kleinen, University of Amsterdam; Neil L. Jamieson, George Mason University
Keywords: Vietnam, village, ritual, tradition, community.
Since the Doi Mai reforms were launched in the 1980s, Vietnam has gradually been transformed from a socialist, centrally planned economy to a market-driven one. In the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, the new economy has profoundly transformed once remote villages that were largely engaged in subsistence agriculture. The transition from subsistence to commoditized economy has been accompanied by the resurgence of village traditions that had previously been discouraged as backward, superstitious, or wasteful. Until now, scholarly analysis of this phenomenon has concentrated primarily on issues of continuity and change, authenticity and re-invention, and changing relations between the socialist state and rural society. While village traditions are indeed being re-invented even as they are revived, they also, the three papers in the panel suggest, play an important transformative role of their own. Neither a rejection of current policies nor of the socialist past, the revival of tradition in rural northern Vietnam constitutes an imaginative and creative response by villagers to the new opportunities and uncertainties of the market economy. It is an attempt to negotiate new identities for themselves in a process that involves not only the different components of the village community but also outsiders (including foreign visitors), local cadres, scholars, and various levels of the state. As such, it is an effort to control both the past and the future.
"Village Affairs": The Making of Communal Identity Through the Revivification of Rituals in a Northern Vietnamese Village
Chi Huyen Truong, University of Toronto
This paper explores the ritual revivification process in Dong Vang village (Ha Tay) since the decollectivization and commoditization of agriculture. I will focus on the ways in which various groups with different and cross-cutting interests based on age, gender, and socio-economic status participate in Dong Vang’s annual festival as well as the year-round preparation for this event. I examine how village identity is formed through everyday negotiation over contributions of materials, time and labor as well as debates over the very meaning of participation in the festival within households, lineages, and at village-wide meetings. Competition to donate funds and labor for the renovation of religious buildings and the intensification of village rituals is not limited to a few elites from competing lineages. Instead, it represents a shared, albeit multivocal, set of interests for all members of the community. By extravagantly reviving their ritual traditions, Dong Vang villagers do not simply pursue symbolic distinctions, either at the level of the individual, household, lineage, or of the village-as-a-whole; more importantly, they seek to respond collectively to the uneven implementation of economic and political policies by the local authorities resulting from continuous tensions among the nine villages that make up Hoang Long commune.
Praying for Profit: The Cult of the Lady of the Treasury
Hong Ly Le, Institute of Popular Culture, Hanoi
In the wake of the Doi Moi reforms, the cult of the Lady of the Treasury in Co Me village (Bac Ninh) experienced an explosive growth, going from a purely local cult to a national one. Mirroring the larger transition of the Vietnamese economy from subsistence to market, the goddess was transformed from being the guardian of a granary to the keeper of a symbolic bank, making "loans" and collecting "interest." The paper looks at three groups affected by the cult’s new popularity: the mostly female urban petty traders who are her devotees, the villagers whose lives and interpersonal relationships have been transformed by the expansion and commoditization of the cult, and the local authorities who welcome the new prosperity but must also deal with a profoundly altered social, political, and economic landscape. Co Me village thus serves as a microcosm for Vietnamese society as it abandons the ethos of wartime austerity in favor of consumerism and profit-seeking. I argue that, far from being a vestige of superstitious traditions, for both devotees and villagers, the cult of the Lady of the Treasury represents an attempt to maximize profits, exploit new opportunities and negotiate the risks involved in the modern market economy.
Manure and Modernity: Villagers and Ethnographers in Dong Ky Village
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
In 1996, the villagers of Dong Ky (Bac Ninh) discovered that a book published by the Institute of Popular Culture in Hanoi depicted their village god as a one-time manure collector. The villagers indignantly complained to the highest echelons of the State and forced the Institute to produce new ethnographic materials that better reflected their own understanding of their current religious practices and ancient traditions. This paper locates the roots of the conflict between villagers and scholars in their clashing representational agendas. In their quest to document "authentic" Vietnamese traditions, urban ethnographers are also exoticizing customs rooted in a vanishing agrarian-based subsistence economy. From the perspective of villagers, however, the revival of these customs is a sign of the new prosperity which is rapidly transforming village life. As the new market economy and better means of communications give them unprecedented access to outsiders’ images of them, villagers have become self-conscious about their "backward traditions" and now have the means, financial and political, to control the production of these images. This self-consciousness, reflecting their desire to appear modern, leads them into a dialogic process of re-invention which is bringing their notions of proper ritual behavior closer to those of the State. For both scholars and villagers, the recording of tradition thus acts as a catalyst for both restoration and change.
Organizer: Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Katherine Bowie, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Reinventing Adat: Peasant, State, and Timber Industry in Indonesia: A Case Study from East Kalimantan
Mariko Urano, Georgetown University
This paper explores the role that indigenous cultural symbols play in facilitating or obstructing peasant collective action in agrarian societies. I will present the results of fifteen months field work that I conducted in Sungai Manis, a village in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. In this village, the peasants attempted to defend their control of land against logging activities by the timber industry to which the state gave concessions. The Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 has recognized their rights for community land ownership, but the legal security for their land holdings has become less effective as many of the population had effectively abandoned community ownership of land in favor of private land ownership. However, the peasants invoked traditional land owning laws and customs—adat—to defend their interests, and thus in effect reinvented tradition.
While instrumentalist or rational choice theory would suggest that this strategy was dictated by the calculation that such symbols provided the most effective and low-cost prism through which to organize collective action, my research suggests that this strategy was in no small measure dictated by the state and its dominant ideology, as manifest in the Basic Agrarian Law, which upholds adat. This reinventing of adat proved partly successful as a weapon against the timber industry. However, in adopting it, the peasants in effect admitted the State’s priority over the land rights, and thus remained vulnerable to state appropriation. This paradoxical dynamic suggests that state power plays a central role in defining the strategies and goals that peasants employ. The choice of symbols, and their relative effectiveness, has more to do with institutional or state power, as structuralists would argue.
The Politics of Representation: The Assembly of the Poor and the Use of Media Space to Challenge the Hegemonic Developmental Discourse in Thailand
Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, National University of Singapore
A growing civil society and dissident activism in Thailand are perhaps impossible in that the media is essentially an ideological system whereby consensus among the general public is produced toward the interests of the powers-that-be and big businesses. In this paper, I attempt to show a more complex picture of the manufacture of consent. I argue that media is a ‘public space of representation,’ in which elites, social groups and journalists play crucial roles in the production of public discourses. I examine the case of the "Assembly of the Poor" (AOP)—the most influential and farmer-based grassroots movement in Thailand in the late 1990s—to show that both the powerful and the powerless are enthusiastically involved in contests over notions of development. Media becomes a political site where the state attempts to manufacture consent, whereas the marginalized to make dissent. Also, the particular nature of the media industry that goes beyond the logic of profit-making facilitates the role of the media as a site for the production of meanings. Since media discourse is by no means constructed in a vacuum, I locate my analyses of the struggle over the media representation of the AOP within the larger political, economic, social and cultural contexts of contemporary Thai society. This paper will highlight how media representations of the AOP are shaped by the cultural politics of democratization in Thailand involving grassroots movement, media and the state.
Singapore’s ‘Middle Realm’: The Nanyang Shang Bao and the Jinan Incident of 1928
David L. Kenley, Marshall University
Recently, a few scholars have reopened the discussion of "civil society" in Asia (see note 1). While they often disagree as to its definition, most believe such a "civil society" possesses a high degree of autonomy from the state, regardless of whether or not it seeks to usurp the state. Instead it occupies a "middle realm," situated somewhere between the ruler and the ruled (see note 2). This definition is certainly applicable to Singapore’s colonial-era newspaper, the Nanyang Shang Bao. As a Chinese-language newspaper, the Nanyang Shang Bao was an important medium for the large Chinese immigrant community, often challenging the official pronouncements of the British ruling elite. At the same time, the Nanyang Shang Bao offered alternative viewpoints from those published in the English-language Straits Times. This autonomy is especially evident in the paper’s coverage of the 1928 Jinan Incident. By investigating the contents of the Nanyang Shang Bao during the crucial summer months of 1928, it is possible to understand this "middle realm" and the important role it played in British-occupied Singapore.
1. See, for example, Baogang He, The Democratic Implications of Civil Society in China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991) or Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan, In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
2. Joan Judge uses the term "middle realm" in this context as it applies to Shanghai’s early twentieth-century newspaper, Shibao. See Joan Judge, Print and Politics: Shibao and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Heritage as a Human Right: A New Style and Language of Civil and Community Activism in Penang, Malaysia
Judith Nagata, York University, Toronto
The intricate associations between political and economic elites at both national and local levels in Malaysia have exposed land and housing to unrestrained market forces, and made the development of once protected community lands the center of conflict. The existence of once-thriving "urban villages," including religiously endowed lands and rent-controlled working class residential areas, especially in Penang, is now severely threatened, but has succeeded in generating some novel and ingenious strategies of resistance. Some movements have managed to create support across traditional ethnic and religious lines in the form of spontaneous NGOs which contemplate appeals to the United Nations and to international charters of rights and freedoms and from other agencies offshore. More parochially, the residents of religious (Muslim waqf, church and temple) lands, whose tenancies are under threat from their own politically and commercially connected religious elites, are beginning to take refuge under the banner of "Heritage," and drawing on overseas links far reinforcement. Ethnic enclaves are likewise redefining themselves as "heritage communities," thus expanding and reframing what was once a middle class intellectual preoccupation with architecture and material culture to an arena for powerful grass-roots advocacy, civil action, and reform.
Organizer: Anne R. Hansen, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Chair: May Ebihara, City University of New York
Discussant: David P. Chandler, Georgetown University
Keywords: Cambodia, Chandler, narrative, moral order.
This panel seeks to honor David Chandler’s contributions to the study of Cambodian history and culture, marking the occasion of his recent retirement from Monash University, and to critically engage in reflection on themes raised in his most original and lyrical article, "Songs at the Edge of the Forest." The article analyzes tensions and incongruities in overlapping conceptions of moral order in 19th-century Cambodia, raising significant substantive and methodological issues concerning narrative, morality, suffering, and problems of meaning.
Characteristic of the scholarly approach evident in his recent work on Tuol Sleng as well, Chandler chooses, in this article, to tackle large questions about "...the gaps that open between what ought to happen in the world, what often happens, and the "normal," examining the constructions of order expressed in three narrative texts. Methodologically, his use of folk stories as historical source offers a fruitful approach for thinking about moral order, as well as for addressing the dearth of resources for understanding Cambodia. His metaphorical focus on the shifting identities in the twilight space that serves as the border between forest and settlement in the narratives is in some ways evocative of Cambodia itself and of Khmer studies, small and peripheral in certain respects, but raising profound questions of meaning.
The papers in this panel are woven around the three themes articulated in Chandler’s article: the use of narratives to understand problems of suffering and moral order; the relationship between ideals and praxis; the ambiguities and tensions of borders between historical periods, countries, ideologies, forms of discourse, and people.
Between a Song and a Priy: Tracking Cambodia’s History through its Forest
Penny Edwards, Australian National University
"[Angkor’s] ruins," wrote Louis Delaporte in 1872, are "invaded and enveloped by a powerful vegetation." This juxtaposition of ancient monument and jungle mayhem was the antithesis of la douce France (sweet France). "A ruined monastery in . . . a German forest . . . moves more deeply," wrote co-explorer Louis de Carné. The French Protectorate (1863–1954) leveled this disjuncture between European woodland and Angkorean wilderness by landscaping the temple complex to cohere with French notions of monumental space and thus maximize its appeal to European tourists.
These notions of landscape management jarred with Khmer cosmology. A preserve of yeak (demons), the priy (forest) was an unregulated but deeply spiritual place. Trees offered more than shade: they were the repositories of ancestral spirits. Angkor Park allowed a tangible measure of control over Cambodia’s environment which was unachievable in the country’s mass tracts of bushland. Road and rail projects cleaved these zones, but forests continued to function in the colonial imaginary as both a metonym of a "wild East" and a sign of the inaccessible zones of Cambodian culture and society. By contrast, the neatly manicured gardens of Phnom Penh conjured up a colonial utopia in miniature: a realm where the very fiber of colonial territory yielded to a European aesthetic.
From the clearing of Angkor to the forest warfare of Khmer Rouge guerillas; from the "K–5" deforestation campaign of the 1980s to the eco-vandalism of the 1990s, this paper will explore evolutions in the conceptual and actual domain of priy as a lens on modern Cambodian history.
Ways of the World: Harm and Suffering in Khmer Ethical Narratives
Anne R. Hansen, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
This paper examines Khmer responses to the problems of harm and suffering in Buddhist ethical narratives composed by the celebrated writer Ukna Suttantaprija Ind. Theorizing narrative as a Buddhist form of ethical thinking, this paper responds to the questions of meaning and moral order examined in Chandler’s article from a Khmer religious perspective at the beginning of the twentieth century. This period of social and political upheaval provoked Buddhist intellectual engagement with questions of what the natures of persons and the world really are.
Characters in Ind’s narratives live in a world determined by the consequences of their desires, thoughts, fantasies, words, and actions. Constantly shifting, these acts of mind, speech and body provide a precarious scaffolding for samsaric existence. A problem for many of the characters, however, is that they fail to recognize that the "structure" of their world is a process of causation, with one event or idea or reaction leading to the generation or cessation of another. Unable to see this chain of arising at work in themselves and the world, they perpetuate thoughts, speech and bodily acts that cause suffering and harm to themselves and others. The cultivation of the perception necessary for recognizing the reality of the world, its causal nature, its slipperiness or transience and the fragility of human beings within it, is understood in the stories and their commentary (drawing on Pali sources) as dhammannuta, the "recognition of truth," a way of seeing the world as it really is and living accordingly.
Constructing Narratives of Order: Religious Building and Moral Chaos
John Marston, Colegio de Mexico
In "Songs at the Edge of the Forest," David Chandler examines a verse chronicle composed in 1856 to commemorate the completion of a provincial wat. The poem celebrates the building of the wat and the restoration of order by the king, a contrast to the war and moral chaos also described.
The period since 1979, and particularly since 1989, has been a time of religious building in Cambodia, both figuratively and literally. Thousands of wats have been returned to active use after the socialist periods; building, always an important field of merit in Theravada Buddhism, has recently been particularly central to Cambodian religious consciousness. There have been at least four cases of monumental building projects around which cults have developed. These cults, drawing on traditional prophecies, have drawn on the belief that completion of the building project would coincide with the coming of peace.
My paper will focus on a series of bas-reliefs in a building connected to one of these projects. The building is one of four temple-monuments on the grounds of Wat Sovannathommareach in Kandal province. The bas-reliefs depict the process of raising funds and constructing the building itself, a process much like that of the construction of a traditional wat. By means of the bas-relief, the building celebrates its own process of construction. The paper will examine this visual narrative and explore the question of how Cambodian discursive systems, in the terms of Chandler’s article, contrast religious construction with memories of moral chaos.
The Buddh Damnay and the Meaning of Suffering
Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University
The Buddh Damnay are a group of 19th-century Buddhist prophetic texts that tell of a series of events that will occur at the end of a kalpa, a Buddhist cycle of time, in connection to the degeneration of the Buddhist Dhamma and the eventual destruction and rebirth of the cosmos. These texts are being used by contemporary Khmer to interpret collective suffering: the experiences of brutality and hardship they have endured over the last thirty years, the massive death and destruction of war, Khmer Rouge oppression that resulted in the death of nearly a quarter of the population, and the subsequent civil war throughout the 1980s and 90s.
This paper explores contemporary uses of the Buddh Damnay texts to answer the same questions of meaning, incomprehensibility and order raised in David Chandler’s "Songs at the Edge of the Forest" in relation to political events in Cambodia in the recent past. The unthinkable becomes a comprehensible narrative if the events are understood as part of the wider more encompassing sequence of events described in the texts.
The paper draws from first person narrative accounts of the Khmer Rouge period published in English, as well as on interviews in Cambodia conducted this year.
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Rachel M. Safman, Cornell University
Keywords: Southeast Asia, globalization, social change.
Southeast Asia, historically a crossroads of civilizations, has in recent years been pummeled by forces originating outside of the region. Political and economic change elsewhere in Asia and in other parts of the world combined with pressures exerted by international and multinational bodies such as the World Bank and World Health Organization are all impacting both the pace and direction of social change in many Southeast Asian nations. In this panel, we examine the changes going on in areas such as health policy, social service provision, migration, and labor organization in light of the pervasive, if often poorly understood, forces of "globalization." Looking internally within specific countries and cross-nationally throughout the region, we seek to understand how changes which manifest locally are, in fact, reflective of broader transnational processes and influences. We also examine how local individuals and institutions both contribute and respond to these changes.
The Development and Persistence of Illegal Labor Migration from Thailand
Teresa Sobieszczyk, University of Michigan
The social, cultural, economic, and legal realities of various countries interact in the global arena, and these interactions motivate international labor migration as well as the regulatory systems that aim to control it. Using Thailand as a case study, this paper attempts to tease out some of these interactions to understand the emergence and expansion of illegal international labor migration. It proposes several reasons why illegal international labor migration from Thailand developed and has persisted, including demand for illegal workers among potential overseas employers, demand among potential migrants for lucrative positions abroad (whether legal or not), poverty among some potential migrants, a flexible notion of the rule of law in Thailand, past and on-going problems with the legal recruitment and migration system in Thailand, the expansion of illegal recruitment institutions, and community factors such as social networks and social norms.
The Globalization of Public Health Policy in Southeast Asia
Jeremy Shiffman, Syracuse University
The influence of supranational and overseas organizations such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and USAID on the public health policies of developing countries, including those of many Southeast Asian nations, has become so large that it no longer makes sense to speak of these policies as exclusively or even primarily domestically determined. Rather, health policy-making in these settings is now effectively globalized, and best understood as deriving from an interaction of transnational and national influences. While many practitioners recognize these transnational forces, scholars have been slow to theorize the causes of globalization of health policy-making, its mechanisms, and its significance.
In this paper I use primary empirical research of the health policy-making process in several Southeast Asian nations to explain why health policy-making has become globalized and what this means for policy studies. Specifically, I examine efforts to attack malaria, polio and tuberculosis in the region and lay out the multiple transnational influences that have shaped the development of these initiatives. I pay particular attention to the development of Southeast-wide networks of medical officials, the influence of policy ideas emerging from supranational organizations, and the role of external funding.
Challenges to NGOs’ Domination of the Indonesian Labor Movement: Implications for Labor Representation in the "Era of Globalization"
Michele Ford, University of Wollongong, Australia
This paper examines structural and discursive changes to the representation of labor after the fall of Indonesia’s President Suharto in 1998 and the implications of the Indonesian case for the way in which labor representation is understood in the ‘era of globalization.’ The first part of the paper examines how NGOs came to be seen as the ‘voice’ of labor in late New Order Indonesia. In the second, the impact of changes to structures of labor control during the Habibie interregnum are discussed. External and internal discursive challenges to NGOs’ dominance of the labor movement are then examined. The paper concludes with an assessment of the possibilities for the future of NGOs’ role in labor representation in Indonesia and comments on the insights the Indonesian case provides for our understanding of labor representation in the ‘era of globalization.’
Working the Middle Ground: NGOs as Mediators of the National Response to AIDS in Northern Thailand
Vincent Del Casino, California State University, Long Beach; Rachel M. Safman, Cornell University
In recent years the proliferation of NGOs in Thailand has been taken as a harbinger of a new more participatory and open "civil society" created by the relaxation of government control over certain aspects of social and political life. Yet there has been little critical examination of the autonomy of these NGOs and how they position themselves and are positioned relative to the state and the larger society. In this paper we examine the proliferation of NGOs in response to the AIDS epidemic in Thailand, looking at how the organizations’ growth and development is emblematic of larger trends in Thai policy and governance.
Through an examination of the changing activities and mandate of one particular NGO called AIDS Organization, we will examine how NGOs have positioned themselves as "mediators and facilitators" of care programs for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As a meso-level organization situated in between the state apparatus and various target groups, AIDS Organization works as an intermediary between providers and clients, the state-sector and local community organizations, and the international funding community and their outreach sites. Their deliberate attempts to maintain a distance, between themselves and these various interests as they work to reorganize health care in ways that transform the local social, political and economic power structures demonstrate their conscious desire to maintain real autonomy from the Thai state and the global economy, but their actions nevertheless also render them at times unwitting vehicles for state penetration into local society.
Organizer: Lorraine V. Aragon, East Carolina University
Chair: Eugene Ammarell, Ohio University
Discussant: Imam Prasodjo, University of Indonesia
Keywords: Indonesia, violence, religion, ethnicity, land.
The outbursts of regional violence precipitated by Indonesia’s financial and political crisis of 1998 only increased following President Suharto’s resignation, as formerly "quiet" regions began to experience communal conflicts and neighborhood destruction. These events, which often begin as personal disputes or limited physical attacks, have escalated into bloody feuds and taken on distinctly religious overtones in areas such as Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Maluku. In some cases, Christian or Muslim attacks in one province are publicly justified on the basis of recent Muslim or Christian attacks in neighboring or even distant provinces. Many foreign and local observers conclude that there has been interference by malicious provocateurs who aim to cause chaos that will justify the aggressive military suppression of certain populations. Nevertheless, many questions remain. Why are communal resentments so readily provoked, and why have these neighborhoods become religiously polarized? Panel participants will address the dynamics of recent ethnic conflicts in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Maluku. Our theme of religious polarization is aimed at two goals. First we will examine the history and circumstances of religious resentments in particular areas of the archipelago. Second, we aim to move beyond this blinding divide to examine the economic, political, and cultural issues that beset particular neighboring communities who "happen to be either Muslim or Christian." Often the initial problems concern territorial precedence and political manipulation more than religious practices, yet religious ideology empowers vengeance in the ensuing feuds.
Conflict Over Land and the Dynamics of Violence in South Sumatra
Elizabeth F. Collins, Ohio University
This paper focuses on the interaction among activist NGOs, such as LBH-Palembang and WALHI, movements of workers and farmers in conflict with multinational corporations with operations in South Sumatra, and local government officials. Four cases of conflict over land are considered along with one case in which there was no conflict between villagers and a palm oil company which was given permits to establish a plantation on land they claimed. The cases are: (1) conflict between small holders in Kabupaten Muara Enim and PT Musi Hutan Persada, which controls almost 300,000 hectares of forest land in South Sumatra; (2) conflict between five villages in Muara Enim and PT Tanjung Enim Lestari Pulp and Paper, a corporation created to build the largest pulp and paper factory in Southeast Asia; (3) conflict between small holders in Kabupaten Muara Enim and PT Cipta Futura, which owns palm oil plantations and rubber estates in South Sumatra; (4) conflict between villagers in Kecamatan Muntok in Bangka and the palm oil company, PT Gunung Sawit Lestari Indah; and (5) the relationship between villagers of Kedondong in Kecamatan Jebus in Bangka and PT. Leidong West and the villagers of Terentang in Kecamatan Kelapa in Bangka and PT Bukit Perak Lestari, both owned by Sinar Mas. These cases allow us to examine the dynamics of violence in such conflicts and the role of activist NGOs and government officials in pressuring for and facilitating non-violent resolution of conflict.
Placing Claims to Land: The Grounds of Religious and Ethnic Conflict at Lake Lindu, Central Sulawesi
Gregory Acciaioli, University of Western Australia
Within the last couple of year ethnic tension between indigenous Lindu farmers and migrant Bugis fisherfolk and farmers at the Lindu plain in Central Sulawesi has risen, resulting in a number of open confrontations. Although local views, aired privately in homes and publicly in churches and mosques, often compare this situation to the recent conflict between Christians and Muslims in Ambon and elsewhere in Indonesia, the bases of this tension stem not from religious grounds, but from differing conceptions of entitlement to land. Indigenous Lindu notions of land ownership revolve around narratives centered on knowledge of (often secret) names of localities that encode precedence-oriented histories of occupation and use. Migrant Bugis claims derive from their understanding of ‘national land’ (tanah negara) and their legalisation of tenure through ‘compensation of loss’ (ganti rugi) payments to local Lindu people and sometimes their obtainment of government-issued certificates of ownership. This situation at Lindu is not unique, reflecting long-standing divergences between place-oriented, adat-rooted conceptual systems of highlanders and nonplace-based, legalistic orientations of mobile groups that have historically based their migratory occupation of new land on the legal non-recognition of customary claims to land not under permanent cultivation by a succession of governments, colonial and independent. The fact that the former highland groups have often become Christian due to patterns of missionization and the latter mobile groups have tended to be Islamic has lent the confrontations between such groups a religious cast. Similar considerations are adduced to argue for the primarily nonreligious grounds of comparable recent confrontations elsewhere in Indonesia.
Religious Tensions and the Flood of Blood in Central Sulawesi
Lorraine V. Aragon, East Carolina University
Muslim versus Christian incidents of violence in Central Sulawesi date back to the post World War II period (1950-1965) when the Dutch had been overthrown but the Indonesian Republic was not accepted by rebel groups in Muslim South Sulawesi and Christian North Sulawesi. These bands infiltrated Central Sulawesi, pulling villagers into religiously polarized conflicts until the Republican Army quelled the unrest. President Suharto’s military regime reestablished secure conditions and, with a few exceptions, violence did not occur between Central Sulawesi’s mostly Muslim coastal inhabitants and the mostly Protestant highlanders, who were missionized during the colonial period. Yet, ethnic and religious tensions brewed during the New Order, despite official restrictions on pronouncements of ethnic or religious dissent. New Order programs resulted in migrations and transmigration that created new competition for land resources, the use of Christian mission funds for economic development aid—angering Muslim groups, and Christian perceptions of discrimination perpetrated by Muslim government officials. Even before the end of Suharto’s presidency, small incidents of ethnically and religiously polarized conflict occurred around the provincial capital of Palu. Violence then increased after Presidents Habibie and Wahid took office. Between 1998 and 2000, religiously polarized fighting escalated in Poso, the city nearest where the first Dutch Reformed missionaries introduced Christianity to the province in the late 1800s. This paper will discuss background to the recent bloody conflicts and address why local personal disputes have exploded into vengeful "religious wars."
The Suharto Legacy and Religious Violence in Maluku
Jacques Bertrand, University of Toronto
Muslims and Christians in Maluku have been pitted in violent conflict since January 1999. More than 2,500 people were killed in a series of clashes that have erupted over the course of 18 months. Previously seen as a quiet province, Maluku has turned into one of the worst conflict areas in Indonesia. Why has this violence occurred?
This paper argues that the main source of conflict in Maluku can be traced to insecurities created by policies of the Suharto government. These policies include: three decades of depoliticization and political control that prevented various groups from addressing grievances through institutional means; religious policies designed to increase religiosity while containing the political expression of religion; encouragement of spontaneous migration; and most important, the gradual shift in support for Islamic groups with a corresponding reduction of the influence of Christians in the government. Although these policies had effects throughout the archipelago, they created a particularly explosive environment in Maluku. The paper argues against explanations based on intrinsic hatred between religious communities or dogmatic differences between Christianity and Islam. It also responds to socio-economic explanations of the conflict.
After presenting the main argument, the paper examines the brief history of relations between Christians and Muslims in Maluku. It describes some key structural elements in Maluku that have made it particularly prone to tensions between Muslims and Christians. It then examines the emergence of tensions in the mid-1990s, which eventually led to explosive violence in January 1999 and thereafter.
Organizer and Chair: Narquis Barak, Harvard University
Discussant: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
Since the 1920s, socialist revolutionaries and the Vietnamese state have used life history narratives to construct and promote visions of socialist personhood. Combining history and anthropology, this panel explores how state models and other frameworks for presenting life history have shaped the biographical narratives of various social groups in Vietnam. The papers address three central issues: What forms have influenced written and oral biographies in 20th-century Vietnam? How have these models determined what events, situations, and experiences are noteworthy in an individual life? How are these details deployed strategically in the rhetoric of self-presentation?
Philippe Peycam explores 1920s revolutionary biographies as a narrative form combining traditional life history with communist theories of self-development. Kim Ninh examines conflicting self-presentations in a celebrated writer’s memoirs; a literary genre often viewed as an alternative to state-sanctioned history. Ann Marie Leshkowich explores how a state-imposed system of biographical production both constrains and enables contemporary Saigonese marketwomen’s self-presentations. Narquis Barak explores how multiply-authored biographical narratives that do not abide by state models allow for the possibility of self-agency and recovery among peasants affected by madness.
Although focused on Vietnam, both the panel’s exploration of the relationship between individual narratives and state discourses about personhood and its combination of historical and anthropological perspectives are intended to spark inter-area discussion of the social, political, and experiential processes shaping the construction of life histories. To promote this dialogue, discussant Mary Steedly will offer insights from her extensive research in narrative experience, revolution, and the state in Indonesia.
Individual Stories and Social Commitment: The Case of Vietnamese Intellectuals in 1920s Saigon
Philippe Peycam, Center for Khmer Studies, Cambodia
My proposed paper derives from my study of the emergence of a Vietnamese ‘public sphere’ in colonial Saigon in the decade preceding the foundation of the Communist Party. This revolution of Vietnamese political culture was the product of a small group of Western-educated Vietnamese ‘intellectuals’ who used Vietnamese and French language newspapers to establish themselves as anti-colonial representatives of the ‘native’ population.
In this paper, I argue for the importance of prosopography—the attempt to expand individual ‘itineraries’ or ‘profiles’ into brief biographies—as a method for the historian examining a socially and politically defined group of people. Prosopography not only reveals the complexity and plurality of the individual’s experience and choices, but also helps to identify broad historical patterns, such as the links within, and tensions between, generations of intellectuals.
Discussions of biography and self are even more pertinent for understanding the ways in which intensive reflection on their own social role as individuals and their responsibility towards the wider community fueled intellectuals’ efforts to seize the political initiative. This tension at the level of the individual was particularly acute among the younger generation of urban Western-educated Vietnamese, who felt torn between Western norms of individualist behavior and a deeply felt sense of responsibility towards the majority of their ‘compatriots.’ For this reason, the reconstruction of individual stories in the writing of Vietnamese history must take into account awareness of social belonging and responsibility (often associated by Western scholars with the Confucian notion of ‘dependency’).
Conflicting Self-Presentations in the Memoirs of To Hoai
Kim Ninh, The Asia Foundation
In 1992 the writer To Hoai, one of the most respected writers in Vietnam who has achieved some measure of literary prominence before 1945, created a literary sensation with his memoir Cat Bui Chan Ai (Dust upon Whose Feet). To Hoai’s memoir provides a wealth of details about the intellectual community and offers glimpses into the tumultuous intellectual environment of the 1950s. After so many years in which the official line defines history in socialist Vietnam, To Hoai’s memoir, and the genre of memoir/autobiography in general, has become for many Vietnamese both at home and abroad a way to challenge state-sanctioned narratives. In other words, it presents the possibility of an alternative location for the truth.
To Hoai’s second memoir Chieu Chieu (Evening) was published in 1999, and the official guideline to the media was to ignore the book’s existence. Such a reaction further established To Hoai’s reputation as the voice of truth being undermined by an oppressive state. A close examination of Chieu Chieu, however, raises difficult questions about To Hoai’s own presentations of events in which he took part and his larger portrait of life under socialism. Using his two memoirs, this paper explores the shifting selves that make up his narratives and the conflicting political and personal motives that animate them. To take better advantage of the more relaxed intellectual environment in Vietnam today and understand the continuing tension between the communal self and the individual self, a much more critical reading of these works is essential.
State Tropes and Personal Tales: Telling and Writing Female Traders’ Lives in Vietnam
Ann Marie Leshkowich, Harvard University
In 1997, a Ho Chi Minh City boutique owner gave me a notebook in which she had written her life story. The narrative was organized into sections corresponding to key periods in the author’s life. At the end of her story, she signed her name, wrote the date, and affixed her photo. Clearly organized around some model of what a written life history should comprise, this last page seemed intended as a seal of authenticity.
Using the boutique owner’s life story as a starting point, this paper explores the narrative forms which contemporary Vietnamese marketwomen utilize in constructing written and oral accounts of their lives. Chief among these is a state-imposed system of autobiographical production which since 1975 has required most urban Southerners to submit accounts of their lives to local party cells. Submitted to officials for perusal, state-mandated biographies clearly constrain the form and content of personal histories. In other contexts, however, these same narrative frameworks can provide models for legitimate, authoritative, and compelling accounts of personal experience. The market traders examined in this paper have used the dominant narrative tropes enshrined in state-sponsored biographies in ways which both confirm them and subtly demonstrate how the authors’ lives have departed from government-sanctioned blueprints. This exploration of an official system of biographical production situates contemporary women’s life stories within the social, cultural, and economic currents of post-war Vietnam and highlights the political and personal implications of living, thinking about, and talking about one’s life.
"Remaking One’s Life" (Lam Lai Cuoc Doi): Biographical Construction as a Means of Survival in Rural Vietnam
Narquis Barak, Harvard University
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