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Organizer and Chair: Charles Hirschman, University of Washington, Seattle
Discussant: Hy Van Luong, University of Toronto
Keywords: Social change, modern Vietnam, family, sociology.
This panel will present new empirical research based on a large household sample survey of 1,855 households (and 4,464 adults in the selected households) in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. The 1995 Vietnam Longitudinal Survey, based on a stratified probability sampling design, covers the old province of Ha Nam Ninh (currently three provinces), one of the largest and most populous areas of the densely-settled Red River Delta. The sample design includes the three largest towns in the province and seven rural communes, stratified by distance from major highways. The papers presented in this panel will cover a range of demographic and sociological topics on contemporary social change in Vietnam, including mortality decline, arranged marriage, educational stratification, and occupational attainment. In addition to presenting baseline description of social and demographic change, each of the papers will test a major hypothesis about the sources of social change. The presenters on the panel are recent Ph.D.’s and graduate students who represent a new generation of international researchers with both strong disciplinary skills and in-depth knowledge of Vietnamese society. Professor Hy Van Luong of the University of Toronto, a distinguished scholar of Vietnamese society, will discuss the papers.
Mortality Decline in Northern Vietnam following Independence
M. Giovanna Merli, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Jonathan London, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper uses an innovative approach to reconstruct historical trends in adult mortality by using data on the birth and death dates of parents and siblings of the respondents in the 1995 Vietnam Longitudinal Survey. Vietnamese survey respondents appear to give very accurate demographic reports of dates, perhaps because birth and death dates have significant cultural importance. This analysis documents the rapid decline in mortality following independence. Even with the rise in deaths due to war-related causes in the 1960s and early 1970s and slow economic progress in the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnam has maintained low levels of mortality by international standards. Explanations of mortality decline are evaluated in light of Vietnam’s distinct historical stages since 1954.
From Traditional to Modern Marriage and Mate Selection
Huu Minh Nguyen, Institute of Sociology, Vietnam
One of the most dramatic changes in Vietnamese marriage patterns has been the shift from traditionally arranged marriages where the marital partners were matched by parents to the modern practice where young marriageable adults select their own spouse. For the oldest marriage cohort in the Vietnam Longitudinal Survey, the majority of respondents report arranged marriages, while "free choice" of spouse is almost universal among the youngest marriage cohorts (freedom is usually tempered by parental approval of marriage choices). Education is the most important factor explaining the historical change of mate choice during the last 50 years. The Marriage and Family Law of 1959 and broad policies aiming at restructuring socioeconomic structure after 1960, as well as religious affiliation also appear as important factors in shaping the patterns of mate selection. Catholics are more associated with arrangements by their parents in mate selection process. Family influence also remains significant as measured by the continued role of family participation in the introduction of prospective marriage partners. The most important new source for the introduction of couples is "friends." These results are similar to findings on marriage selection from other East and Southeast Asian societies—perhaps suggestive of an Asian style of limited courtship with only one person prior to marriage. This Asian style of courtship is different from both the Asian past and the Western present.
Educational Opportunity and Stratification in Socialist Vietnam
Lan Phuong Nguyen, University of Washington, Seattle
Although socialist ideology claims to promote equality and to reduce the impact of family background on life chances, this study shows that patterns of educational stratification are very similar to those of most other countries. Urban residence and parental socioeconomic status (father’s and mother’s education and occupation) have significant effects on educational attainment in northern Vietnam. Having a parent who is a member of the communist party has a significant positive effect on education, net of other family status variables. This study, based on the 1995 Vietnam Longitudinal Survey, was able to trace the trend in educational attainment for successive birth cohorts of Vietnamese who reached school-going age from the 1950s to the 1990s. Following independence in the 1950s, there was a significant increase in average levels of education as primary school became universal. The traditional gender gap in schooling has all but disappeared. Over the last few decades, there has been little further progress in average levels of schooling, and some signs of declining rates of secondary schooling, particularly for boys.
The Impact of Social Origins, Human Capital, and Political Capital on Occupational Attainment: A Test of the Market Transition Hypothesis
Kim Korinek, University of Washington, Seattle
Although the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese men, and especially women, continue to work in the family agricultural economy, there is an increasing minority who work in household non-agricultural enterprises, employees for private businesses, and as government workers. As Doi Moi, the policy of economic reform, takes root in the countryside, more individuals will respond to emerging opportunities in market economy. Victor Nee, a specialist on China, has proposed "market transition theory" to explain emerging patterns of social stratification in post-socialist societies. Nee predicts that human capital (education) will become a more important predicator of socioeconomic attainment relative to traditional status in the socialist system (communist party membership). This hypothesis has met with only mixed support in China, but it has stimulated considerable research in other post-socialist societies. I will test the market transition hypothesis for Vietnam with the VLS data in a preliminary fashion. The survey analysis will be supplemented with in-depth accounts of occupational careers based on interviews conducted by the author in a rural and urban community in the Fall of 2000.
Organizer and Chair: Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin, Madison
State, Appropriation of Cultural Symbols, and Peasant Resistance Movements to the Timber Industry in East and West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Mariko Urano, Georgetown University
Based on eighteen months of field research (1998–1999) in East and West Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia, this paper discusses the appropriation of cultural symbols by peasants in resistance movements. Through interviews and participant observation, I will question the deterministic argument of many New Institutionalist scholars, who argue that the state subordinates opposition not only by physical coercion, but also by completely monopolizing symbolic resources via ideological incorporation.
Threatened by state-promoted timber development projects, peasants in Kalimantan began to assert their land rights in the early 1990s with the aid of environmental NGOs. Although peasants in East and West Kalimantan shared same economic interests in the resistance movements, their tactics showed a marked difference.
In predominantly Catholic West Kalimantan, peasants fully exploited the animist tradition that highlighted their emotional attachment to their land as the ideological basis of their movements. The Catholic Church was tolerant of local animist tradition. By contrast, peasants in predominantly Protestant East Kalimantan were restrained by the churches’ stricter position on animism: they could assert their rights only by statist notion of land tenure.
The different religious affiliations that influenced the strategy of peasant resistance are in part the product of state policies that forced the peasants to choose one of the officially recognized religions in the 1960s. Due to the colonial legacy, a large number of peasants chose Protestantism in East Kalimantan, Catholicism in West.
The research finding modifies overly-structuralist New Institutionalist views on how the state controls symbolic resources. The state is not always successful in ideologically incorporating subordinates, as the peasant elites acted rationally to advance their economic interests. However, the state still exerts influences on the range of cultural symbols that social actors can appropriate in the strategy for action. In short, I argue that long-term state building legacies create constraints on peasant action, but differences within such legacies can widen or narrow the space for the creation of collective action.
The Political Economy of Decentralization in Thailand and the Philippines
Gavin Shatkin, University of Michigan
This paper will present a comparative analysis of decentralization initiatives in the Philippines and Thailand focusing on the following questions: Why have reforms for decentralization been undertaken in the two countries? And, what historical, socioeconomic, and political factors explain the extent and nature of decentralization initiatives undertaken, and the issues that have emerged in each place? Decentralization of authority from central governments to local governments, the private sector, and organizations of civil society is a pervasive phenomenon in developing countries. Yet such initiatives have often been undermined by conflicts between these various entities. The existing literature on decentralization focuses almost exclusively on identifying the optimal roles for various institutions under decentralized governance, and on approaches to building the capacity of these institutions, as the main approaches to improving the outcomes of these reforms. This paper will argue that these approaches are inadequate because they ignore the political contexts in which decentralization occurs. Specifically, it will argue that the problems that have emerged in decentralization reflect country-specific socioeconomic, political and cultural forces that have deep roots in history. The paper will draw on the extensive literature on the political economy of local governance in Thailand and the Philippines to demonstrate how such country-specific factors have influenced the course of decentralization in each place.
Humour as a Tool of Political Marketing in Reformasi Indonesia: A Case Study of President Wahid’s First Appearance in a Variety Show
Arndt Graf, University of Hamburg
President Wahid’s first appearance in a variety show, shortly after he came to power in 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of presidential rhetoric in Indonesia. In contrast to the high-minded, serious style of his predecessors, Sukarno, Suharto, and Habibie, President Wahid now presented himself to the Indonesian public as a thoroughly humorous personality who would entertain the audience in an almost clownesque way.
This paper departs from a rhetorical analysis of the typical strategies of humor of President Wahid in this variety show. Questions asked include the techniques of funny statements, as well as matters of content. This analysis leads into broader questions of the place of humor in contemporary Indonesia and its use as a tool of political marketing in the reformasi era.
National Investigations into Human Rights Violations in East Timor, 1999–2001
Kumiko Mizuno, Australian National University
This paper analyzes Indonesian government responses to domestic and international concerns over human rights problems in East Timor. Particular focus is placed on the problems resulting from the UN-sponsored referendum of 30 August 1999. The underlying question examined is why have human rights reform initiatives been proceeding so slowly and often taking steps backward in post-authoritarian Indonesia? Habibie put many human rights agendas in place—most significantly, the decision to give East Timor self-determination. However, in spite of these reforms, developments since his decision on self-determination have been very negative. We have seen serious human rights violations in East Timor on a scale that infuriated the world community. The Abdurrahman Wahid government also failed to address many human rights problems. Some studies argue that Habibie’s agenda was so drastic that it naturally caused backlashes from anti-reform forces and anti-Habibie forces. Others stress that the failure to address human rights issues is a cost of democracy, a result of the loosening of the central government’s grip. However, such arguments do not sufficiently explain why the government response varies across time. Through analyzing the nature of elite political competition; degree, credibility, and source of international pressure; and the role of extra-state actors, this paper suggests that the role of international pressure is critical. But it is critical because of the way in which the pressure is digested. in domestic politics and then manifested as a government response toward the problem.
Organizer: LeeRay M. Costa, Hollins University
Chair: Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., California State University, Long Beach
Discussant: Jim Glassman, Syracuse University
Keywords: Thailand, NGOs, local-global relations.
Scholars have for a long time examined Thailand from a "local" perspective. Village level studies, for example, have been vital to our understanding of contemporary Thai politics, culture, and economics. Few scholars however, have taken time to examine non-governmental organizations (NGOS) in Thailand, despite their grounding in and contribution to local practices. Moreover, those that have privileged NGOs as sites of analysis have failed to do so from critical perspectives. Thus, participants in this panel will argue that NGOs provide valuable sites through which to understand both how the "local" is socially and spatially organized and how it contributes to the circulation and practice of power. NGOs are meso-level organizations that work in and through the local, making direct connections to broader flows of global discourses, capital and culture. In this panel, therefore, participants will discuss the theoretical arid methodological implications of studying NGOs as a means for better understanding Thai society. Conversely, they will explore how theorizing particular NGO practices in Thai contexts illuminates NGO practices and local-global tensions in other Asian contexts. This will be achieved first by working across and through the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology and geography, and second, by drawing on a diverse body of fieldwork with Thai NGOs engaged in a variety of projects including AIDS-related outreach, the elimination of child prostitution, environmental conservation, and peasant social movements. Ultimately, the panelists seek to open up a broader, more critical and empirically grounded theoretical and methodological discussion of NGOs that will be of interest to scholars working throughout Asia.
People Politics in Mediascape: The Assembly of the Poor and Media Contestation in Thailand
Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, National University of Singapore
This paper attempts to interrogate the Assembly of the Poor’s political struggle as it unfolds in the realm of media representation. Marginalized groups abandon the unavailing struggle within conventional political institutions and enter a novel political terrain under an umbrella organization named the Assembly of the Poor (AOP), a nationwide rural-based movement in Thailand. The AOP brings the politics of the rural poor to the public arena, within which it manifests the poor’s grievances and concurrently proposes an ideological critique of state-imposed asymmetric development and articulates oppositional visions of alternative bottom-up development.
I contend that news visibility is a sine qua non for the AOP to mount its struggle, for media coverage permits the marginalized and other sympathizers to enter public discussion and articulate their causes. Besides, media attention pressures the state into confronting with the AOP’s appeals and creates a condition that is conducive to negotiation and heightens the possibility of change. I also argue that, while the AOP is an active player adept in making itself high-profile news as a device to forge a channel of public communication, the extent to which its political project could be achieved is significantly contingent upon media institutions and journalists. In a routine process of news manufacturing, journalists, consciously or otherwise, exercise their autonomy, albeit not absolute, in constructing the AOP’s media representations and framing a larger controversy arising in the wake of AOP demonstrations. Media is a contested site of consciousness construction, one that is instrumental for the AOP in bringing about social change.
Operating at the Center and the Margins: Analyzing the Geography of NGOs in Northern Thailand
Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., California State University, Long Beach
In Thailand, NGOs have increasingly become important social actors in the practices of development. Today, NGOs work in a number of sectors such as public health, environmental change, and resource management, to name a few. As neither fully ‘private’ nor fully ‘public’ organizations, however, NGOs operate through a number of other organizational spaces when conducting their outreach, from the international to the local level. Thus despite claims of "independence" and "autonomy," NGOs tend to function in a number of other spaces that do not fall under their direct auspices. They work in and through state-run spaces, such as hospitals and health centers, for example, as well as in community spaces, such as village and sub-district administrative organizations and other community-based organizations. Sometimes they even operate in international spaces, such as international workshops arid meetings. Tracing an NGO’s geography, therefore, is a challenging task, since it social and physical boundaries are often ambiguous and fraught with tension. Thus, one cannot simply map the extent of an NGO’s outreach on a Cartesian grid. Instead, one must analyze the ways in which organizational boundaries and outreach are structured both across time and through space in relation to other organizations and individuals. In this paper, I examine some of the complications one faces when trying to trace the geography of one NGO, AIDS Organization, in its outreach context. I look specifically at how ‘locally-focused’ research provides insights into the day-to-day geographies of AIDS Organization’s outreach as well as insights into the complicated organizational connections that mediate so much of an NGO’s work. It is argued that in the current Thai context we must consider not only what NGOs do but also how their activities are organized through a number of overlapping spaces, all of which are mediated by both global and local socio-cultural and political-economic relations.
Particularizing NGO Development Practice and Outcomes: A Case from Northern Thailand
LeeRay M. Costa, Hollins University
In this presentation I privilege local structures and practices in my analysis of the development work of one non-governmental organization (NGO) in northern Thailand, the Project for Tomorrow (PFT). Specifically, I consider how the pre-existing social relations between NGO members, their "target" communities, and local officials, as well as notions of reciprocity and merit-making, shape NGO practice among PFT members. However, recent inquiries into processes of globalization have demonstrated that aspects of the local are always inevitably shaped by their relationship to national and global forces. Thus, I also analyze how these specific social and cultural dynamics intersect with and are reinforced and/or challenged by broader national discourses of self-reliance and Thai identity, shifting national and economic arrangements, and the aims of the donor organization, Protect Our Youth (POY). In exploring how these various structures and practices manifest at the site(s) of one community-based development organization, PFT, and its project to eliminate child prostitution, I argue for cultural and historical specificity in analyzing NGOs and their outcomes in particular locations. At the same time, I consider some well-known aspects of "Thai culture" in relatively new contexts, i.e. NGO development work.
Time Crunch: The Pull of Multiple Field Sites in the Study of Asian NGOs
Henry D. Delcore, California State University, Fresno
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are creatures of transnational connection, tending to concentrate—in discrete institutions—a range of people, resources, and ideas drawn from local, regional, national, and transnational sources. How to study them? In anthropology, broad disciplinary interest in globalization and related calls for innovative conceptualizations of "the field" imply that a kind of "multilocale ethnography" (Marcus and Fischer 1986) is particularly suited to the study of NGOs. Indeed, a researcher from any discipline could justify devoting time and resources exploring, at various sites, the local and extra-local connections of the organizations and actors under study. One implication of such a strategy is that a single researcher would spend less time in a single community—i.e. students of Asian NGOs would not conduct "village studies." This paper explores both the costs and benefits of different forms of multi-sited fieldwork in the study of Asian NGOs, taking my personal experiences in northern Thailand and the experiences of other Asianists as examples. I propose that the key constraint on new forms of field practice remains "time." A multi-sited approach requires significant time away from an NGO’s local area of activity, perhaps costing adequate understanding of the social and cultural commitments of the organization. But rather than suggest the village study as an adequate approach to NGOs, I propose a middle ground of multi-sited research in related communities where NGOs are active, combined with a mix of participant observation, interviewing, and secondary or "long distance" research on other relevant sites.
Organizer and Chair: David I. Steinberg, Georgetown University
Discussants: Hazel Lang, Australian National University; Christina Fink; Josef Silverstein; Martin Smith, Chao Tsang Yawnghwe, University of British Columbia
The minority issues facing the successive Burmese governments since independence in 1948 remain the most intractable of national problems. Questions of the distribution of power and authority, levels and scope of administrative autonomy, the fruits of economic development, social mobility, status, and cultural survival have bedeviled all administrations and peoples; they have resulted in profound national traumas, including internal rebellions, continuing poverty and depravation, refugees, and economically, politically, and religiously motivated emigration.
These issues remain unresolved in spite of a series of tenuous ceasefires; they must be addressed in any new constitution and resulting political framework formulated by any successive government. No more enduring issue faces the state in spite of being obscured by the continuing political debate between the military and the opposition in that country.
The effects of minority unrest reverberate across borders, affecting the flows of refugees into Thailand and Bangladesh, illegal workers estimated at some 700,000, the trafficking in narcotics, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and smuggling of extensive but unknown proportions.
Professor Josef Silverstein, in his pioneering studies of minority issues in the Shan State in the 1950s, has led a generation of scholars in exploration of these issues. No other scholar of any nationality has contributed so much to the debate on these questions. This panel honoring Dr. Silverstein is designed to examine a variety of contemporary unresolved questions in their historical contexts.
The panel is composed of four individuals, all of whom have worked with and published on minority issues, and all of whom at this writing are outside of the United States. They are: Hazel Lang, in East Timor, Martin Smith in the United Kingdom, Chao Tsang Yawnghwe in Vancouver, Canada, and Christina Fink in Thailand. Professor Silverstein will be respondent on the panel.
Organizer: Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Katherine A. Bowie, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Intermarriage, Benefits, and Identity in Melaka, Malaysia
Timothy P. Daniels, DePaul University
In postcolonial Malaysia, the "classic" structures of the plural society have been breaking down and diverse social groups are mixing and combining. Patterns of segregation and exclusion co-exist uncomfortably with patterns of integration and inclusion. Government policies and political rhetoric and changing social structures, such as schools, businesses, and residential neighborhoods, have promoted greater social interaction among members of Malaysia’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious categories. In this paper, I focus on intermarriage as a site of such interaction and consider the negotiations that go into such unions and the resulting implications for the distribution and access to special privileges and benefits. Many local and outside observers assume that non-Malay partners obtain access to Bumiputera benefits through intermarrying with Malays, but to the contrary access to these resources are more problematic. The principle of patrilineality limits the flow of Bumiputera special privileges, although in some cases there are still opportunities for negotiation. Locals generally perceive intermarriages between people of two non-Malay categories as easier to negotiate than intermarriages with Malays. Religious and cultural similarities and differences are calculated and experienced in the on-going processes of intermarriage. In many respects, local interpretations of Malay privilege and exclusion in combination with non-Bumiputera identity and inclusion shape negotiations of intermarriage in Melaka.
On the Historicity of the Vietnamese Goddess Princess Lieu Hanh: A Prostitute or a Saint?
Olga Dror, Cornell University
Princess Lieu Hanh is one of the most famous "Mother" deities in Vietnamese popular religion. Her cult ostensibly originated in the sixteenth century in Northern Vietnam. The scope of the paper is to investigate the origins of her cult, its development and its transformation since the sixteenth century, considering the factors which played a decisive role in Lieu Hanh’s deification, such as personalities (her biography written by the eighteenth-century woman writer Doan Thi Diem), events (the internecine wars and dynastic recognitions of her cult) and popular religious tradition, in which context Lieu Hanh’s cult is now placed. The paper will address the contradictory accounts of Lieu Hanh’s cult, namely accounts written by European missionaries claiming Lieu Hanh to be a prostitute and the legends and literary works created in Vietnam sanctifying Lieu Hanh’s virtues. I will suggest some preliminary considerations to diminish this outward contradiction in the context of the process of deification in Vietnam. One more point which will be analyzed is the local or indigenous character of the cult in comparison with possible borrowings from neighboring cultures and similarities found between customs connected to Lieu Hanh’s cult and those among the Chinese and the Cham peoples.
The Problems of Kadazan Cultural Identity: Implications for National Development in Sabah, Malaysia
James F. Ongkili, University of Malaysia
The paper discusses the growth of ethnic and cultural awareness among the multi-tribal Kadazan (dusun) people of Sabah. A reconstruction of how Kadazan identity came to be is given based on local and colonial sources. Kadazan cultural consciousness is discussed by looking at the beginnings of inter-tribal interactions in the late 1880s and the attainment of formal education through British colonialism. The work of the Christian missions is discussed as a contributing factor in encouraging Kadazan cultural identity and ethnic awareness. Out of this new consciousness, local leaders emerged to promote a greater feeling of racial oneness among Kadazans. Consequently, the development of a sense of kadazaness among the non-Malay/Muslim bumiputra population of Sabah, became an important factor in Sabah politics. As the state moved towards independence via Malaysia, Kadazan cultural societies and political bodies emerged. Inevitably culture and politics became inseparable as the Kadazan elite allowed itself to be manipulated by forces beyond its control. The Kadazans would feel their cultural and political survival threatened within a predominantly Muslim Malaysia and thereon attempted to consolidate their position in the state. Although Kadazan unity did not prevail towards the end of the twentieth century, crucial challenges in this new millennium might stimulate an ethno-political revival advantageous to Malaysians in Sabah today.
‘Centre and Periphery’: The Ambiguous Life of the Khmer Kampuchea Krom in Postcolonial Southeast Asia
Marc Askew, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne
This paper investigates the construction and representation of ethnicity and place among the Khmer Krom minority of Southern Vietnam and its diaspora. The "Kampuchea Krom" as a territory, has played a crucial symbolic role in Khmer nationalist (fundamentally anti-Vietnamese) narratives (from the Sihanouk period through to the Pol Pot regime). But the people of this territory have occupied an ambiguous place in the postcolonial histories of Cambodia and Vietnam. The Khmer Krom, who occupy the Mekong Delta region, are a particular socio-cultural fragment of a larger cultural-territorial formation which was progressively appropriated into the neighboring states of Vietnam and Siam (17th–19th centuries), taken over by a European colonial power (France 19th century–1954), a post-colonial Vietnamese republic (1954–1975) and then a socialist state (1975 to present). Khmer Krom political and cultural mobilizations in the twentieth century (from covert everyday resistance to overt politico-ethnic opposition) were cumulatively shaped both by the pre-colonial past and developments during the period of French administration and then a combination of mounting local and external changes and pressures generated by the post WWII politico-ideological environment. French decolonization, the various nationalist independence movements, the establishment of the states of Cochinchina (1949) then South Vietnam (1954) and the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia from the late 1960s, have all resonated through the communities of the Kampuchea Krom and, its growing diaspora. This paper focuses on the critical period spanning 1945–1975, when Khmer Krom ethnonationalism was militarized and fictionalized in the context of South Vietnamese and Cambodian politics and U.S. intervention.
Organizer and Chair: Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington
Discussant: Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University
The volume, Social Suffering, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (first published in 1996), began with the recognition that many modern experiences entail a fundamental problem of meaning that has traditionally been left to religion to address. In the words of Arthur and Joan Kleiman in their introduction to Social Suffering "suffering is one of the existential grounds of human experience; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience in human conditions." The rise of modern societies organized around secular institutions, science, and rationalized action have not only failed to provide people with adequate means to address the suffering that pushes humans to the ultimate conditions of their existence but they have also generated new forms of social suffering. Those who conceived of and contributed to the book Social Suffering have redirected the attention of social scientists to what "political, economic and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems" (from the introduction to the volume).
Understanding social suffering always requires situating such suffering in particular cultural contexts. This panel has been conceived of as a forum for reflections on the innovative work on social suffering initiated by Kleinman and others. The presenters take up three contemporary experiences of peoples in Vietnam and Thailand who confront very modern manifestations of social suffering—abortion, the impact on humans of the use of defoliants, and the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. While each case is distinctive, each also deals with deep existential problems that underlie all manifestations of social suffering as Kleinman and his associates have shown.
Second Trimester Abortion in Contemporary Vietnam: Social Vulnerability and Moral Responsibility
Tine Gammeltoft, University of Copenhagen
With an annual number of 1.4 million induced abortions, Vietnam has the world’s highest abortion rate. Pregnancy terminations can be legally performed until the 22nd week of gestation and around 1% of abortions take place in the second trimester of pregnancy. Nearly all women obtaining late abortions are young and unmarried. In the spring of 1998, as an element in a larger study on premarital sexuality and abortion, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with young women who had recently undergone an abortion in their fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. These women told me about how it feels to kill one’s own child—this was what they felt they did—sometimes under brutal circumstances. Having to decide to terminate the life of another human being, and a human being that could have lived to become one’s own son or daughter was deeply existentially shattering. The pain suffered by these young women was moral at its core, stemming from having to inflict pain on another, from feeling forced to act against one’s own deepest moral convictions, from failing to act in accordance with one’s intentions to do good, from doing something that makes one feel inhuman.
In this paper I shall consider moral dimensions of the suffering experienced by these young women. First, seeing induced abortion as a moral practice rather than as an abstract ethical issue, I shall examine the young women’s moral deliberations as they opted for a late abortion as the most viable response to an unwanted pregnancy. Second, arguing that the most urgent ethical issue at stake here concerns the social conditions which compel women to opt for a late abortion rather than the act of abortion itself, I shall analyze the social forces which motivate young Vietnamese women to undergo a second trimester pregnancy termination, in spite of their moral qualms in doing so. Finally, throughout the paper I shall reflect upon my own role as a researcher and as a fellow female human being, as I listened to and recorded the young women’s accounts.
Agent Orange and Narratives of Suffering in Viet Nam
Diane Fox, University of Washington
"For the anthropologist, an inquiry into the meanings of illness is a journey into relationships," writes Arthur Kleinman in The Illness Narratives. In this paper, I consider relationships encountered in the process of trying to understand the ways Vietnamese have confronted illnesses and suffering that many believe may be traced to the effects of defoliants dropped by the United States from 1961 to 1971.
During that period, American forces sprayed 19 million gallons of chemicals over the south of Viet Nam, destroying twenty percent of the forests, three percent of the cropland, and causing an unknown and perhaps unknowable number of human health problems. What have been the human responses to these consequences?
Families living with the illnesses and disabilities thought to be caused by the spraying tell stories that are at times reflective, at times angry, at times inspiring as they define their experiences in terms of religion, science, or irreducible uncertainty.
The United States government, after thirty years of official silence and denial, has haltingly begun to engage in preliminary discussions with Viet Nam, though the two sides have yet to find a common language. While the U.S had insisted on scientific discourse, Viet Nam has refused to speak if humanitarian concerns are not considered simultaneously.
This paper is one step in a search for a language adequate to the subject. It is based primarily on interviews carried out in 2000 and 2001 with 38 families from the north, center, and south of Viet Nam, and with the community workers who have supported them these last twenty to thirty years.
Suffering, Community, and Self-Governance: HIV/AIDS Self-Help Groups in Northern Thailand
Shigeharu Tanabe, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka
The AIDS pandemic since late 1980s in Thailand had led to greater surveillance and control through the promotion of preventive medicine. Even with this attention, a great number of people living with HIV/AIDS have been unable to receive effective and affordable treatments of their illness and have often been confronted with severe social handicaps and discrimination. The necessity for more autonomous self-governance of their own health has opened up a contested space around ways of coping with the pandemic.
This paper will examine the activities of this new type of community/association that have emerged since the early 1990s in which people with HIV infection acquire knowledge and organize practices for survival given the prevailing social discrimination, and the overwhelming influence of the established medical power of the state and its discourse. Self-help groups that have been formed in Northern Thailand by those who have publicly identified themselves as having HIV or AIDS urge other infected people to participate in their activities; especially providing counseling and conducting negotiations with medical institutions, administrative authorities, and other forces. The activities of these groups is perhaps best defined by what J. Lave and W. Wenger call the ‘community of practice,’ a matrix of learning and organizing social practices through participation.
The self-help groups have developed an open-ended identity through negotiations for survival with the practitioners of external sources of knowledge. This particular feature of identity formation, which enables the members to cope with their ever-changing, uncertain and contingent circumstances, results in a multiplicity of subject positioning. However, the emergence of such a negotiable, therefore non-identical, subject is only possible at the contested space at the interface between, on the one hand, their attempts to assert the validity of their own personal experiences, and, on the other hand, the dominating discourses and practices of the medical institutions of the over-growing nation-state. In this contested space the people living with HIV/AIDS have developed self-governance involving alternative, self-fashioning styles of practice by means of continuous assessments of whatever medical information and expertise they have access to.
This paper thus highlights the ways in which the people living with HIV/AIDS can widen their survival activities in a newly-opened maneuverable social space between individual suffers, the state-defined medicine, and their home communities to which they intend to return. Finally, I will consider the ‘governmentality’ involved in the current position of the people living with HIV/AIDS as negotiating subjects, who are situated between the state-defined technologies of public health and their own technologies of the self.
Organizer and Chair: Harry W. Blair, Yale University
Discussants: Harry W. Blair, Yale University; Steven Rood, The Asia Foundation; Julkipli M. Wadi, University of the Philippines; Gwendolyn Bevis, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Vincent G. Boudreau, City College of New York; Paul Hitchcroft, University of Wisconsin, Madison
By mid-2000, the Philippines gave every appearance of having established itself as a functioning democratic polity. Some tarnish remained, to be sure—excessive power in the hands of a long-entrenched elite, pervasive corruption in the public sector, questionable electoral behavior in many areas, unresolved minority grievances in the Muslim southwest, etc.—but the positive signs seemed much more persuasive to most observers. The country had passed successfully through two well-contested presidential elections since its "People’s Power Revolution" had overthrown dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, civil society exuded a powerful vibrancy, the media exercised an unfettered liberty, a bold democratic decentralization program had made great strides in devolving power to lower levels, and the last official component of the colonial era had ended with the closing down of the American military bases in 1991. The multifold attempted coups of the immediate post-Marcos years had evidently faded irretrievably into the past. Perhaps most impressively, all the major players in the polity—business elites, the landed oligarchy, the leading politicians and their parties, the military, trade unions—seemed to have accepted the fundamental idea of a constitutional democracy as "the only game in town" to be played. In sum, the Philippines had navigated a democratic transition and seemed well on the way to consolidating its democracy as the country’s permanent political structure.
The dramatic events surrounding the ouster of President Joseph Estrada in early 2001 have cast this picture into serious doubt. The huge demonstrations characterizing "People’s Power II," the sudden shift in the business community’s allegiance, the military’s extra-constitutional withdrawal of support for the president, and the Supreme Court’s ex-post ratification of the sudden change all indicated that the earlier picture of the polity’s smooth passage along a democratic trajectory was at best incomplete. For many Filipinos, observing that chaos and coup were averted and that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ascended peacefully to office with Supreme Court approval, these events demonstrated that the country had risen to the challenge posed by the Estrada regime’s corruption and mismanagement, and had proven itself a true democracy indeed. For other observers focusing on the transition process, these same events raised very grave doubts regarding any Philippine claim to be a functioning democracy; for them, too many players went too far outside the rules of a democratic game.
Can we say that in 2001 the Philippines is in fact a democratic system? Should it be removed from the ranks of acceptably democratic systems? Or perhaps has the country shown us a different kind of democracy, one in which civil society and direct mass action count for more and the constitutional branches of the polity count for less? In various ways the "EDSA1 Revolution" offered a powerful model to other peoples yearning for democracy in the late 1980s and 1990s; could it be that EDSA2 will do so as well? (The attempted counter-revolutionary "EDSA3" in May and then Indonesian events in July 2001 with the military and police defying the president may be indicators here.) These are the questions to be addressed by this panel. It will include a number of different viewpoints and should be of interest to both Southeast Asianists and an audience beyond.
If you expect to attend this panel, please plan on downloading and reading in advance the brief answers to this question by roundtable members Robert Cribb, Don Emmerson, A. Malik Gismar, Mohamad Ihsan Alief, Lesley McCulloch, and Goenawan Mohamad. These statements, each no more than two pages long, are accessible at http://aparc.stanford.edu/roundtable
Organizer and Chair: Donald K. Emmerson, Stanford University
Discussants: Robert Cribb, University of Queensland; Rizal Mallarangeng, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Lesley McCulloch; Goenawan Mohammad, Tempo
Keywords: nationalism, Indonesia, history, politics.
Tumultuous events in Indonesia since 1997 have raised serious questions about the nature and future of "Indonesia." Perhaps the most basic of these questions is a deceptively simple one: "What is Indonesia?" The question implies two others: "What has Indonesia been?" and "What will Indonesia become?" This "paper roundtable" (explained below) will explore the historical background, present status, and future prospects of Indonesian identity.
Each of the five members of the roundtable will write an answer to the core question. The answer will not exceed two single-spaced pages. The five answers are available at http://aparc.stanford.edu/roundtable. Hard copies of the answers will be available on a literature table at the convention. The roundtable will convene on the assumption that those present have already read the answers (or are scanning them as the event gets underway). Each member of the roundtable will speak very briefly. She or he will not summarize her or his own answer, but will instead comment only on the answers of the other members. The floor will then be open for an extended discussion.
Goenawan Mohamad, the founder of Tempo magazine, has written eloquently on the roundtable question. So has historian Robert Cribb, whose essay-in-progress, "A Good Idea at the Time," compares the idea of "Indonesia" in 1945 and now. Rizal Malarangeng, a recent Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University, may represent the "new nationalism" that has grown popular among some younger Indonesians. Lesley McCulloch is completing her dissertation on the military and business in Indonesia while teaching in Australia. Her field experiences in Aceh will be particularly relevant to our discussion, for it is there among all the provinces that centrifugal pressures are strongest. Don Emmerson, the chair of the roundtable, is now writing an essay entitled "What is Indonesia?" Alongside differences of age, specialty, and gender, the roundtablers’ residence in three different countries should further assure a diversity of views.
Organizer and Chair: Kimloan Hill, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University
Keywords: World War I, Vietnamese diaspora, transnational identity, France, Indochina.
In World War I, due to a shortage of manpower, France had to turn to its neighbors and the colonies in Africa and Asia to recruit volunteers for its army and factories. In effect, this practice opened a floodgate that had previously kept the people in the colonies from entering France. Since then, the Vietnamese immigrants have arrived in France in many waves for different reasons and with different purposes.
In France, these immigrants were given a glimpse of the constraints and potentials of the French social, political, and legal institutions. They utilized such knowledge to advance their economic interests, to serve their political agenda, to preserve their culture, and to build the country they had left. In doing so, the Vietnamese immigrants have actively participated in the making of both countries’ history and have constantly redefined their identities in order to find their places in both societies. As a result, Vietnamese identity in diaspora has taken many forms and meanings to fit the immigrants’ visions and images.
Hence, this panel seeks to examine the developments of Vietnamese diaspora in France and its contribution to history. It focuses on France and Viet Nam from the point of view of sociology, literature, anthropology, and military, social, and economic history. Kimloan Hill examines the labor markets in France and Indochina (Viet Nam) and the participation of the Vietnamese soldiers and workers in World War I to argue that the war was a watershed in the history of French colonialism and Franco-Indochinese relationship. For the first time, people from Indochina could enter the French labor market en masse and joined the French people and members of the Allied Forces in a "sacred union" against the Germans. The war experiences, however, changed their lives and altered the course of the colonial enterprise in postwar period. Marie-Eve Blanc analyzes how the Vietnamese immigrants in France utilized a Southeast Asian tradition, the associative practice, to re-establish their identities, rebuild their communities, and maintain many cultural practices in diaspora. The function of this practice, she points out, changed with social and political developments and the immigrants’ visions and needs. Henri Eckert studies the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers who came to France in the 1920s. The military leaders in Paris wanted the people from Indochina to assume a greater share of the "national" defense burden. This attempt, however, backfired. Although the experiences of the sojourn in France turned the men from Indochina from "peasants to Frenchmen," like the Frenchmen at the time, they engaged in many anti-colonial and anti-government activities. Finally, Dan Duffy offers a different way to examine the transnational identity of Vietnamese immigrants and the culture of Vietnamese diaspora in France; that is, through the examination of Vietnamese literature and the organization of libraries and bookstores in Paris. His recent research reveals that although these institutions differ in goals and operations, their activities have facilitated the diversity of Vietnamese culture, provided the immigrants with community support, and contributed to the foundation of the modern nation of Viet Nam.
World War I and the Developments of Indochinese Colonies in France: A Historical Perspective
Kimloan Hill, University of California, San Diego
During World War I, to meet the demand for more manpower on the battlefields and in the factories France had to turn to its neighbors and its colonies in Africa and Asia to enlist volunteers. In Indochina, poverty, social disorder, and economic crisis prompted nearly 100,000 men to volunteer. In France, they adopted many French values (i.e. the value of labor) and exercised many rights that did not exist in the colonies (i.e. the right to protest and to form political associations). Their experiences also changed their worldview. In their eyes, France was no longer a superpower and the French people were no longer a superior race. When the war was over, while most of these men returned to Indochina, a few hundred remained in France to get married, to work, and to pursue a higher education. In the 1920s, as France continued to recruit more manpower from Indochina, Indochinese colonies began to appear on French soil; and the immigrants formed a significant political bloc. They utilized the existing political and legal practices to establish their place in the Metropole and remove French yoke from Indochina.
In short, this paper examines the economic conditions and the labor markets in France and Indochina before and after the outbreak of World War I to argue that the war was a watershed in the history of French colonialism. It set the stage for the downfall of the colonial enterprise in Indochina. The Vietnamese diaspora, on the other hand, contributed to its downfall.
Indochinese Soldiers in Europe, 1920–1939
Henri Eckert, Lycée de Crépy en Valois
In 1920, General Charles Mangin, a military leader of the colonial army felt that the colonies should have had contributed more troops to the defense of the "Greater France." Starting in 1922, small groups of Indochinese troops were sent to Europe on a three-year duty. Some served in the colonial infantry units in the remote Vosges Mountains. Others went to Lebanon or Morocco and helped local troops to put down native revolts. Several thousands, however, were employed as military workers in the metropolitan army.
To help these military workers cope with their new living and working conditions, military leadership in Indochina gave them lessons in French language and culture and some professional training in clerical work, truck driving, health services, and some other special skills before sending them to Europe. As a result, during their sojourn in France, these Indochinese soldiers were accorded a better treatment and enjoyed a greater freedom than the men who served France in the First World War. They had more opportunities to participate in French social life and to make contacts with the communities of Indochinese civilians in France. Their participation in French way of life and their contacts with other Indochinese immigrants changed their perceptions about France and Indochina and led to their participation in anti-French activities.
In the end the leaders of the Metropolitan Army decided to replace these Indochinese military workers with French civilian workers when it realized that the Indochinese soldiers had become a political liability.
Vietnamese Immigrants’ Associations in France: A Tool for Shaping Identity
Marie-Eve Blanc, Institut de Recherche sur le Sud-Est Asiatique, Marseille
In most Southeast Asian societies, associative practice is a common tool to organize the community, not only to foster religious, cultural and political life but also to build solidarity among the members of the association. During the colonial period, the French changed the law concerning the right of association to control associations with political aims. But the practice forming association continued to flourish, especially among those who left their native villages to work overseas or to live in new resettlements. This practice was particularly prevalent among northern immigrants who resettled in South Viet Nam during the colonial era.
In the 1920s and 1930s France, the Vietnamese immigrants’ associations were the places to manufacture nationalist identity and breed anti-colonialism activities. After 1954 and more so after 1975, Vietnamese immigrants have accepted the idea that they will never return to their native country. In that sense, their associations have been tie places to preserve their memories and "real traditions," and to build a polyvalent identity—the identity of a Viet Kieu.
In summary, this paper will first show how in the first period of the immigration into France "association" is a tool to promote democracy and shape nationalist identity. It then will explain how, after the war, "association" is a tool for the immigrants to re-establish and maintain their identities.
Strands and Contexts in Vietnamese Identity in the Diaspora: Vietnamese Literature in the Libraries and Bookstores of Paris
Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina
The presentation investigates Vietnamese identity in the diaspora by focusing on libraries and bookstores, institutions of Vietnamese literature in Paris, France. Vietnamese books, and the institutions that bring them into being and pass them around, are material evidence of the activity of Vietnamese identity. Paris is a site of Vietnamese diaspora that pre-dates the modern nation of Viet Nam.
Searching for Vietnamese literature in the bookstores and libraries of Paris reveals the diverse institutions that came together to found the modern nation of Viet Nam. There is a store in a Buddhist temple, two lending libraries in Catholic churches, stores sponsored by the Vietnamese government and others by exiled nationalists. Meanwhile, French research libraries and mainstream bookstores locate Vietnamese literature firmly in the Orientalist discourse that governed the French conquest of Indochina.
However, in the diaspora, diverse Vietnamese cultural institutions stand alone and articulate separately with the world outside of Viet Nam. One store that came into being as a place to rally Western support for Ha Noi against the United States’ intervention now sells crafts to help artisans in the homeland succeed in the liberal economy. Other sites engage with the discourses of social welfare and cultural diversity within France.
To recapitulate, looking at the Vietnamese books of Paris brings attention to different strands in Vietnamese national identity. Looking at the social life around these books shows different contexts in which Vietnamese identity now makes itself in the world outside of the nation.
Organizer: Teri Yamada, California State University, Long Beach
Chair: Patricia B. Henry, Northern Illinois University
Discussant: Mary S. Zurbuchen, University of California, Los Angeles
Keywords: Southeast Asia, censorship, cultural studies, modern literature, press.
Although Southeast Asia, as a geographic entity, has been loosely linked through ASEAN’s sputtering attempts at economic integration, the disparities among its ten member nation-states often seem more remarkable than their commonalties. This panel "Censorship and Culture in Modern Southeast Asia" seeks to examine through a case study approach of four SEA nations—Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia—some common patterns of censorship, and the impact of censorship on cultural production and politics in Southeast Asia.
The paradigm of censorship examined by the panelists has modalities ranging from conscious self-censorship to violent governmental suppression of artistic freedom of expression, often highly politicized in Southeast Asia. Panelists will present research that explores this range, the political economy of power that nurtures and enforces censorship, and the impact of censorship on the "form and content" of literary and artistic production in popular culture. The methodological approach is a cultural studies model. This model analyzes cultural productions—music, song lyrics, art, literature, comics, newspapers, etc.—as "artifacts" interactively produced within a nexus of power relations in a specific cultural context and historical moment.
Finally, the panel format will be organized according to the AAS guidelines encouraging "creative" panels. The discussant will provide a comparative overview of the papers’ issues at the onset, and panelists will present a synopsis of the highlights of their research to allow time for an anticipated lively discussion. A copy of panelists’ papers will be made available over the World Wide Web.
The Pen, the Press, and Politics: Censorship in Suharto’s Indonesia
John H. McGlynn, Lontar Foundation
Censorship in Indonesia did not begin with Suharto’s New Order government (1966–1998). It has much deeper roots—in the country’s feudal past, in Indonesian reticence towards dispute, and in colonial strictures on freedom of speech. Nonetheless, the New Order government refined censorship to such an art that almost all opposition to the government and its policies during most of its tenure was effectively silenced.
Early forms of protest against government censorship generally came from individuals, many of them literary writers. But as the years progressed, even the once cowed press began finally to air public grievances against the government’s blatant suppression of freedom of expression. It was reports in the mass media on nepotism among government officials, massive corruption by government leaders, and human rights abuses by the police and military, which led to a crack down on the mass media itself.
In this, the banning of Tempo weekly newsmagazine in 1994 can be seen as one of, if not ‘the’ most pivotal event in the demise of Suharto’s New Order government. Thus, whereas previous acts of censorship by the government could generally be seen as instances of the State against the individual, the censorship of Tempo (and other magazines) was a case of the State against the very institutions that had built up the government’s legitimacy. By cracking down on Tempo, Suharto’s New Order government effectively undermined public support of its policies. Eventually, this led to Suharto’s resignation and the ouster of the New Order Government in May 1998.
Open Secrets, Hidden Meanings: Censorship and Contemporary Literature in Burma
Jennifer Leehey, University of Washington
Strict and repressive censorship has been in place in Burma for nearly four decades. The main legal instrument, the Printers and Publishers Registration Law of 1962, was promulgated shortly after the military coup, which brought General Ne Win and the Burma Socialist Program Party to power. Under the present SLORC-SPDC government, state censorship works in concert with techniques of surveillance and intimidation to stifle political debate and suppress criticism of government policies, as the regime seeks to impose on the populace its own particular vision of the "Myanmar" nation.
This paper details the peculiar dynamics of Burma’s labyrinthine censorship system and explores the impact of censorship on literary and intellectual life. I discuss the complex negotiation of meaning which goes on among Burmese writers, readers, and the censors, and the role of literary devices such as ambiguity and irony which invite multiple interpretations and leave meaning open and unfinalized. I also discuss the so-called "post-modern" writing, which has gained popularity during these past twelve years of SLORC-SPDC rule. I view this new writing with its chaotic syntax and fantastic imagery as an expression of disillusion with the older "socialist realist" literature of the 60s and 70s, and an ironic, almost desperate, response to monologic state propaganda and the absurd rigidities of the censorship system.
The relation between censorship and literature in Burma ultimately opens on to larger questions of political culture—the "open secrets and hidden meanings" of everyday life under military rule. The paper presents Burma under the SPDC as a place where the shared meanings that constitute social life are profoundly in flux.
Denial and Re-Invention: Censorship and Thai Literature
Susan F. Kepner, University of California, Berkeley
The Thai experience of censorship in the twentieth century differs in several respects from that of neighboring countries, where the issue of censorship and the struggle for independence from British and French colonial rulers were inextricably linked. This paper will demonstrate how the development of a Thai nationalist paradigm during the twentieth century, and the tastes of the reading public, have produced a "censorship of denial and re-invention."
At the onset, censorship under the absolute monarchy of King Vachiravudh (1910–1925) consisted of a diffuse, disorganized, and vague collection of assumptions, rather than a policy of any kind. It was only during the administrations of military leaders Phibul Songkhram and Sarit Thanarat that the subject of censorship was viewed seriously, and addressed in a purposeful and orderly matter.
Censorship during the Phibun administrations (1938–1944 and 1948–1957) operated both to deny aspects of Thai history and social interaction that were disapproved, and to promote the leadership’s view of the Thai future. During the administrations of Sarit Thanarat (1957–1963), and the subsequent administration of Thanom Kittikachorn (1963–1974), government censorship laws mitigated against fiction displaying inequities and injustices in Thai society.
During the past two decades, writers have generally censored themselves, not only because certain taboo subjects are automatically avoided, but because of the small market for works of fiction and poetry. Thailand is no more a "reading society" than it ever was. Most writers write what readers want to read—another variety of "censorship."
Violence and Ideology: The Censorship of Literary Arts in Modern Cambodia
Teri Yamada, California State University, Long Beach
A violent form of official censorship during the Khmer Rouge era (1975–1979) devastated the comparatively delayed modernization process of both Cambodian language and literature. This paper will examine the impact of this censorship on the literary arts of Cambodia, predominately narrative (short story and novel) and song lyrics.
During the Khmer Rouge era, all songs from the 1950s and 1960s—theoretically contaminated by French colonial and other Western influences—were banned while the Khmer Rouge created a new style of song and dance performance promoting the glories of Angka (The Organization). In the area of narrative writing (short story and novel), there was an absolute prohibition of "uncontrolled" prose concomitant with the development of a new literary genre for Cambodia: forced confessions. I suggest possible influence from the censorship ideology deployed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1965–1975), with its similar pattern of struggle sessions, forced confessions, and stipulated songs and performance. A comparatively similar pattern of social-realist censorship was also deployed in Vietnam during the post-1975 period.
After the Khmer-Rouge era, Cambodia’s culture of song quickly returned to its creative vibrancy whereas the nascent literary culture did not. This paper traces the lingering impact of Khmer Rouge censorship on contemporary Cambodian literary culture, where violence and self-censorship continue to suppress literary development, along with a literacy rate of less than 30%. In contrast, the culture of critical song continues to develop under the guise of anonymous lyricists as popular oral culture.
Organizer: Elizabeth Coville, Hamline University
Chair: Nancy M. Lutz, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
Discussant: John A. MacDougall, Indonesia Publications
Keywords: Indonesia, media, journalism, literature, Internet, online communities.
The Internet, like the newspaper and novel of an earlier generation, is associated with the "imaginings" of new forms of social; political, and intellectual identity, communication, and community. In Indonesia today, in particular, a key issue is what Benedict Anderson has called "the common project" of the nation.
One resource for scholars of Southeast Asia is the large mailing list and website known informally as ‘apakabar,’ moderated by John A. MacDougall. This started in 1990 as a ‘regional newsgroup on Indonesia’ (reg.indonesia) and carries current events, opinion, fiction, policy documents, analysis, etc., in Indonesian and English. The site’s homepage (http://www.indopubs.com) currently provides access to ten mailing lists, three databases, and three modules consisting of links for investigative and scholarly research on the Internet.
With a wide and varied international readership, the core community of active users of ‘apakabar’ is Indonesian, in Indonesia and abroad, writing about what they see as their country’s serious problems. For academics, this ongoing online conversation offers a privileged look at a complex society as seen from the inside out. Since one of the goals of ‘apakabar’ is the expression of democracy and pluralism (kemajemukan BI) as Indonesia emerges from three decades of authoritarian rule, these themes are central to our panel. In these papers, journalists, writers, and researchers show some of the reasons why Indonesians have turned to ‘apakabar’: to circumvent media control, to broach sensitive subjects, to educate themselves and each other, and to engage in the ordinary give and take of pluralism.
From the Inside Out: The Public Discourse of Apakabar
Elizabeth Coville, Hamline University
One of the central questions raised by a globalized Internet is whether the groups of users that flourish through this medium are, on the one hand, narrowly based, specialized, and homogenous, consisting of people with largely converging and overlapping interests, or, on the other hand, are broadly based, pluralistic, and heterogeneous, inclusive of diverging interests, positions, and values, and oriented toward a larger universe of discourse?
This paper, based on selected past and current postings on the interactive mailing lists of ‘apakabar’ (i.e. INDONESIA-L and INDONESIA-VIEWS), and on e-mail correspondence with some of the netters about why they read and write on this list, argues that, in the face of forces that tend to draw people into smaller, more narrowly focused groups, ‘apakabar’ has maintained a relatively heterogeneous discourse. These posters generally employ what the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein has termed ‘elaborated’ (or outsider-oriented) codes as compared to ‘restricted’ (‘condensed’ or insider-oriented) codes (see also Clifford Geertz on ‘experience-distant’ and ‘experience-near’ terms). These posters’ reflections on their involvement in what some have called ‘forum apakabar’ show one way in which contemporary Indonesian Internet-users (many of whom are past, present, or future students) come to think of themselves as readers, as writers and as participants in a culture of democracy.
The implication of this paper is that such a style of public discourse—characterized by verbal explicitness and explication, in which messages are relatively autonomous of particular local situated contexts of communication—embodies a culture of pluralism with its attendant benefits and risks.
The Economic Crisis of 1997–98, Journalism, and the Internet
Andreas Harsono, Pantau Media and Journalism Review
At the height of the economic crisis of 1997–1998, information channeled to the Internet played a crucial role in shaping elite opinion in Indonesia. Many journalists sent their reports to Internet-based news organizations like www.indopubs.com. They did this because their reports could not be printed in their respective newspapers due to the tight media control during the authoritarian rule of General Suharto.
Internet users in Indonesia were relatively few, but that did not discourage journalists from using the Internet. The news created its own multiplier effect through the distribution of print outs and their display in public spaces like bus stops, university campuses, etc. The idea of using the Internet was especially to let those in power know that someone was watching.
It was rather difficult to control these journalists as most of them were operating behind the official credentials of their mainstream news organizations. They also operated in secrecy, and their anonymous reports required self-discipline in order to verify each published report.
Journalists knew that the influence of their works increased after counter-information produced by the Suharto regime appeared on the Internet. Officially, Indonesia’s foreign office produced and responded on the Internet. And, unofficially, many secret arms of the regime also used the Internet to propagate their views on the crisis. People close to the aging president also used the net to circulate their interpretation of the crisis as a conspiracy by the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, Jewish bankers, and overseas Chinese businessmen to bring down the Suharto regime.
The Internet Factor in Indonesia: Was that All?
Waruno Mahdi, Independent Scholar
If the 1997–1999 developments in Indonesia were a revolution, it was the first revolution in world history to be ushered in through the Internet, which was instrumental in breaching the wall of total censorship. The initial "heroic" phase has given way to a sobering "post-heroic" phase, in which the country is still not recovered from the economic and political crisis with which everything began.
Meanwhile, the Internet has become a normality even for the lighter genres, including sports, fashion, and gender-specific gossip; the conventional media use it to maintain contact with reader/listener circles. Since restoration of freedom of the press, the main use of the Internet for activists has shifted from an informational medium to an organizational medium for sociopolitical movements. The Internet has become important as a source of enlightenment, particularly for a younger generation that suffered greatly from the deterioration of education during the last three decades.
John MacDougall’s ‘apakabar’ project—having played a seminal role in the earlier period—undertook a timely reorganization that anticipated these developments, offering a more variegated range of mailing-list services. The potential pluralism of the Internet in general makes it a particularly suitable medium for acclimatizing a generation that grew up under an autocratic regime to the democratic normality of pluralism in public opinion. This lets ‘apakabar’ contribute to enlightenment not only through the factual content of transmitted information, but also through the liberal character of the medium in which this is transmitted.
East Timor, Aceh, and the Cybermedia
Aboeprijadi Santoso, Radio Netherlands
Drawing on the author’s experience as a journalist covering the conflicts in East Timor and Aceh, this paper explores the changing role of information technology in the development of these two conflicts. East Timor, for example, became the object of an international campaign when the Santa Cruz massacre of late 1991 was internationally publicized at a time when the Internet had just been introduced in many countries. The net helped many activists acquire information through the networks of both foreign and local NGOs, human rights organizations, and individual activists.
In contrast, by the time Aceh and its the past horrors and sufferings started to come into the open following the downfall of President Soeharto in 1998, the Internet had become more sophisticated and widespread, with e-mail exchanges and online conferencing common even in small towns in many areas of conflict such as Aceh, the Moluccas and Papua.
‘Apakabar,’ too, has changed following these trends: in the early period, it was a facilitator of underground debate and stimulated challenges to power while, in recent years, it has become a reservoir of ideas and an archive of data of varying significance. This database may facilitate analysis of particular aspects of conflict situations. The paper will ask how these changes in public discourse affect the roles of the state and civil society, and, inversely, how changes in the roles of the state and civil society affect public discourse? And what are the challenges faced by reform in newly-born democracies like Indonesia?
Internet Literature: A Way Out for "Wandering" Writers
Sobron Aidit
This paper will discuss the significance and development of the ‘Internet literature’ that emerged as an outlet for post-1965 Indonesian exiles in Europe. When the New Order outlawed the communist party and banned the circulation and publication of all literary work accused of being communist or leftist, no newspapers, magazines or publishers in Indonesia were willing to publish their work. Hampered by these policies and laws, and marginalized (terpinggirkan) from artistic and intellectual circles inside Indonesia, these exiles turned to the Internet, because it is free of licensing, ideology, and censorship. Mailing lists such as ‘apakabar,’ ‘mimbarbebas’ and others have thus become a forum and an arena for Indonesian writers who have been ‘wandering’ (kelayaban) for over thirty-five years.
Since the end of the New Order, the author has been able to travel to and from Indonesia, incorporating these experiences into his writing. Having recently published two collections of short stories in Indonesia—Cerita Dari Tanah Pengasingan (Stories from a Land of Exile) (Pustaka Pena, Jakarta, 1999) and Kisah Intel dan Sebuah Warung (Stories of Intelligence Agents and a Sidewalk Restaurant) (Garba Budaya, Jakarta, 2000), he continues to both contribute to, and reflect upon, this Indonesian literature of exile (sastra eksil).
Organizers: Frank Proschan, Smithsonian Institution; Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Arizona State University
Chair: Vinh Quoc Nguyen, Harvard University
Discussant: Frank Proschan, Smithsonian Institution
Keywords: Vietnam, ethnicity, representation, tourism, ethnography.
Ethnographic representation has never been the exclusive province of academically credentialed anthropologists. Rather, ethnicities constantly represent themselves to others and are just as constantly represented by others in diverse forms. Some of those representational forms approximate the forms of knowledge production employed by anthropologists: monographs, articles, or essays. Others take the form of tourist guides, military memoirs, paintings, advertising billboards, internet web sites, policy documents, or political tracts, to name but a few representational genres. How are Vietnam’s diverse ethnicities—both minority and majority—represented by themselves and others today, and how have they been in the past? How do these forms of ethnographic representation compare with the canonical representational genres of academic ethnography? And what are the effects and consequences of these representational acts on the people who are their subjects?
This panel draws together Nora A. Taylor and Hjorleifur Jonsson’s examination of how contemporary visual culture in Vietnam—billboards, posters, and paintings—depicts minorities as backwards contributors of diversity to the overarching unity insisted upon by the state; Duong Bich Hanh’s comparison of how Hmong in northwestern Vietnam are represented in international touristic literature and ephemera, and how they choose to represent themselves to those tourists; Jean Michaud’s discussion of the French military officers and missionaries who served to represent Vietnamese highland groups prior to the professionalization of ethnography as a science; and Philip Taylor’s consideration of how both ethnic groups and religious sub-cultures in the Mekong Delta are perceived and represented vis-à-vis state projects of defining national identity.
Other Attractions in Vietnam
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Arizona State University; Nora A. Taylor, Arizona State University
What is the attraction of Vietnam’s Others, representations of ethnic minorities and of pre-national populations that signify different regions of the now unified country? Our examination of this issue concerns the place of ethnic and regional diversity in Vietnam’s visual culture, particularly billboards, posters, and paintings, and the recent international tourist interest in highland minorities. For decades, artists have appropriated markers of ethnic difference in propaganda posters about national unity and progress. Contemporary Vietnamese notions of ethnic groups draw on a historical trajectory that involves colonial racial classifications as well as the anti-colonial notion of "the people." The inclusion of ethnic minorities in official portrayals of the people has roots in the historical conditions of Vietnam’s nation-building and the armed struggle for independence. Equally important, the visual appropriation of the markers of ethnic and national difference projects national unity and progress through the mapping of variety and backwardness on highland ethnic groups. We argue that the visual emphasis on ethnic and regional diversity in the Vietnamese public sphere is in fact about national unity and state control. The recent traffic in minority artifacts and in paintings of ethnic minorities, and the emergence of minority culture shows are fuelled by Western tourists’ interest in encounters with non-modern and non-Westernized peoples. We argue that the transnational traffic in culture reinforces the Vietnamese projection of backwardness on highland peoples, and suggest that the facilitation of cultural exchange is simultaneously about state officials’ control of the practices of identity.
Lonely Planet Comes to Sa Pa: Seeing the Hmong Through Others’ Eyes and Their Own
Duong Bich Hanh, University of Washington, Seattle
Not until the early 1990s was Sa Pa in northwestern Vietnam opened up again to visitors, after almost fifty years of no outsiders other than lowland Kinh (Viet) migrating into New Economic Zones in the 1960s and government officials enjoying subsidized holidays. But nowadays, due to its magnificent landscape, favorable climate and diverse minority communities, Sa Pa has once again become one of the most popular destinations within Vietnam. It is featured in every tourist guidebook, and dozens of tour agencies in Hanoi provide color brochures with detailed information and pictures of the Sa Pa area. In this paper I explore how Sa Pa and especially its ethnic minorities are represented in the recent tourist literatures, by analyzing a wide range of guidebooks, tour agencies’ materials, web sites, postcards, and other documents.
While outsiders are actively engaging in the new strategy of using ethnic minorities to draw tourists to Sa Pa, how do the Hmong in the area represent themselves to tourists? In many similar situations elsewhere, scholars claim that local people use "staged authenticity" or "constructed identity" as a way to attract tourists. Is this conclusion valid to the case of Sa Pa as well? Do the Hmong in Sa Pa wear Hmong clothes because they think that is what tourists look for, or simply because they are Hmong? The paper will discuss this question using young Hmong girls who have left their home villages to go live in town as a case study.
French Military and Missionary Ethnography in Upper Tonkin, 1885–1925: A Critical Assessment
Jean Michaud, University of Hull, England
At the time of France’s conquest of Tonkin at the end of the 19th century, the Third Republic was busy back home promoting republican values, pushing the aristocracy out of military command, and seriously curtailing the Church’s prerogatives. The professionalization of French ethnography had begun only with the 1789 Revolution, despite earlier systematic and prolonged contact of French observers with the ‘savages’ in New France (Canada). Through the course of the 19th century, while the evolutionist movement triggered further formalization of French anthropology as a discipline, political turmoil prevented it from reaching beyond academic circles. Even after a century of development, French ethnography in the colonies of Indochina still had to be incidental and instrumental.
Men without specific academic formation in observing unfamiliar cultures were pushed to the forefront of France’s encounter with the Other, and asked to record their observations. In Upper Tonkin, these ‘incidental ethnographers’ were diplomats, military officers from middle-class families, and missionaries with peasant backgrounds. The way they conceived and represented the populations in upland northern Vietnam and the texts they produced bear the marks of their individuality. I argue that understanding the biographical details of these early ethnographers is the first step in evaluating the intellectual context of production of their writing and methods in order to critically assess their texts as ethnography, test its validity today, and measure its contribution to current debates on colonial missionary and military ethnography.
The Predicament of Local Cultures in the Mekong Delta: Representing Colonialism and Ethnicity
Philip Kenneth Taylor, University of Western Australia
The Vietnamese portion of the Mekong delta is home to a number of ethnic groups and religious sub-cultures with a distinct history of settlement in the area. Members of these groups identify serious threats to their way of life, which include the erosion of cultural heritage, the undermining of human capacities and social marginalization. The state is often represented as in opposition to local ethnic and religious cultures, leading some to describe it as colonialist in nature. Yet the predicament of local cultures may not be as bleak as is sometimes presented, for the fonts of identity in the Mekong delta are particularly subtle, resilient and diverse. This parallels considerable flux and diversity in portrayals of the ‘national essence’ by the state and Vietnam’s social scientists.
Underlying these considerations, the majority of those living in the Mekong delta are poor and economically marginalized, environmentally vulnerable and subject to class and gender distinctions. The metaphor of colonialism, with its rich resonances in Vietnamese history, may be an apt way to describe the relations of domination to which local cultures are subject, but this process is best understood as multiple and overlapping. This brings into consideration not only inequalities within and between groups and their historically layered relationship to the state, but also the potent local effects of other distant loci of power such as large cities, distant centers of economic power and development projects along the course of the Mekong river, which further undermine the precarious conditions of life in the delta.
Organizer and Chair: Sharon A. Carstens, Portland State University
Discussant: Dru C. Gladney, University of Hawaii
Keywords: Malaysia, Singapore, anthropology, contemporary identities.
This panel explores the impact of transnational and global influences on cultural and ethnic identity constructions within contemporary Malaysia and Singapore. As a product of both colonial and post-colonial policies, ethnic divisions between Malays, Chinese, and Indians have come to be viewed as core features of these societies and a major source of personal and group identities. In Malaysia in particular, with the specific ethnic quotas of the New Economic Policy (NEP), considerable scholarly attention has focused on the perception and manipulation of ethnicity in economic, political, and cultural fields. Even when challenged by alternative theories that argue for the greater relevancy of social class analysis, ethnic identifications have usually been construed as a more primary determinant of social beliefs and actions within the Malaysian and Singaporean settings.
Identity theorists maintain that identities are defined in terms of perceived differences with "the other." Those who view ethnicity in more instrumental terms argue that ethnic identities shift in accordance with ongoing changes between groups at the local/state/ national level. This perspective, however, ignores the potential impact of global cultural influences on personal and group identities. In fact, the increasing exposure to transnational media, travel, business, and educational experiences has presented new possibilities for identity formation that transcend the ethnic categories of the Malaysian and Singaporean states. Such influences, however, are not uniformly available to people of all ethnic and social class backgrounds. Based on recent ethnographic research, the papers on this panel present case studies that explore diverse processes of cultural construction and identity formation in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore.
The Politics of Heritage: New Identities and New Strategies for Social Transformation in Malaysia
Judith Nagata, York University
Since Independence, the Malaysian state has cultivated and perpetuated a system based on ethnic and religious identities, as central to its own political agenda. In practice, official classifications do not always correspond with popular self-identifications or interests on the ground. Since 1998, following concerns over issues of development, urban land use, housing, good governance, political accountability and transparency, and human rights at all levels, have given rise to new alliances and formations, including a Justice Party, and a burgeoning array of tenants,’ environmental, women’s and heritage organizations. One of the most potent, yet seemingly innocuous, multi-purpose organizations operates under the rubric of "heritage," and serves as a center for a series of local, regional and global networks, addressing the above issues, while also highlighting the internal fragmentation between elites and other members of the traditional religious and ethnic communities. Illustrations will draw upon the realignment of identities in the rapidly changing urban development scene of Penang, Malaysia.
Strategic Ecumenism or Dialogic Process (?): Boundary Crossing and Hindu Reformism in Malaysia
Andrew Willford, Cornell University
Participant and scholarly representations of religious and artistic institutions in Malaysia often coalesce in ways that ultimately characterize the production of culture within them as extensions of ethnic identity within the political field, or, more conservatively, as conduits of tradition within state-sponsored modernity. While such approaches are not entirely invalid, given the highly charged politics of culture and ethnicity in Malaysia, they often belie both a more complex and syncretic history of boundary formation, and perhaps more significantly, of boundary permeability. Whether viewed as symbolic appropriation in a strategic sense, or as dialectically and dialogically produced ethnic subjects within a larger discursive terrain, the poetics and performance of identity in Malaysia is less stable and bounded than most culturalists assume, and yet more salient than many political economists grant.
In this paper I argue that Hindu reform-inspired movements and artistic organizations, particularly the much respected Temple of Fine Arts/Shiva Family, produce a multicultural and multiethnic narrative for Malaysia that simultaneously asserts difference while challenging both the state-sponsored and stereotypical boundaries of ethnic demarcation. The specifically ecumenical pan-Malaysian themes that they produce, as interpreted through the prism of a Hindu modernist philosophy, speak to a process of intensifying diasporic displacement among elite Hindus in addition to an ambivalence of the stigmas attached to the "Indian" ethnic label. In turn, I suggest that this process is instructive of the local contingencies of identity formation. The inter-ethnic, dialectics and intra-ethnic class ambivalences that Malaysian Hindu reformism reveal lead us to question the validity of the tripartite ethnic classification system in Malaysian politics and studies.
The Impact of Transnational Chinese Media on Chinese Malaysian Identities
Sharon A. Carstens, Portland State University
This paper examines the influence of Chinese transnational mass media, in particular television, videos, and films, on the creation of transnational Chinese identities among Malaysian Chinese. Drawing on ethnographic research and surveys of adults and high school students in four Malaysian cities in 1998, I argue that Malaysian Chinese audiences distinguish clearly between the various forms of transnational Chinese media produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. Differences in viewer preferences that correlate with gender, age, educational background, and geographic location suggest that there is no single Chinese Malaysian audience, and that identity formation linked to media consumption and preferences remains fluid and open to change. However, the relative popularity of Hong Kong productions among a majority of viewers is striking, and similarities between the experiences and perspectives of Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese are examined as possible explanations for this preference.
The paper concludes with the argument that while transnational media may not create specific attachments between Malaysian Chinese and the Chinese of Greater China, they are capable of enriching their identification with modern cosmopolitan Chinese cultural forms. Over reliance on transnational media can also, however, threaten support for more local productions that might explore and illuminate the more particular features of Chinese culture in the Malaysian setting.
Operation World: Singaporean and Malaysian Christian Evangelists at the Millennium
Jean E. DeBernardi, University of Alberta
In Southeast Asia, Christianity is one among many global cultural flows that have shaped personal and group identities. As a universal salvation religion, Christianity transcends national boundaries and ethnic differences, thereby offering a "supracultural" identity that (ideally at least) is not defined on the basis of race, language, and culture. But these "primordial" aspects of identity together with state-imposed restrictions on their activities remain significant obstacles to evangelical Christians’ goal of world evangelism.
While once a destination for Western missionaries, Singaporean and Malaysian Christian churches now support missionaries in all parts of the world (including North America and Europe). They also support missions work at home with immigrant workers, while their members enthusiastically join "vision journeys" that combine tourism in less developed areas of Asia (including Burma, China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam) with short-term efforts at evangelism. Singaporean and Malaysian Christians’ missionary and evangelical efforts sharpen reflexive awareness of the differences between themselves and those whom they seek to proselytize, but also lead them to reflect on their own identity as a small minority in societies where significant ethnic and religious revivals (some state-supported) have occurred among non-Christians.
Organizer: Frank Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Carol J. Compton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Thomas W. Gething, University of Washington
The fact that certain Southeast Asian languages (Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Thai, Javanese, Balinese and assorted Tai and Austronesian languages) are written in non-Roman alphabets of Indic origin poses several obvious problems for native speakers of languages (such as English) which are written using the Roman alphabet. A new alphabet must be learned, students must adapt to a syllabic (or semi-syllabic) system of representing words in various combinations of discrete consonantal and vowel units, and the unfamiliarity of reading phrases where no spaces are provided between words must be overcome. However, learning to read and write what is already a very foreign (phonologically and lexically) language in a script totally unrelated to one’s native language can be an advantage as well, as students cannot rely on highly imprecise assumptions and preconceptions about sound-symbol relationships based on a given symbol’s value in English—a problem that is present for students learning, say, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Pilipino. Both of these issues are further complicated by the use (or avoidance) of a phonetic transcription system in the teaching of literacy in the non-Roman script language.
This panel will examine both the above impediments/advantages to learning to read and write in a non-Roman alphabet and also specific techniques and methodologies which have been devised by teachers of Southeast Asian languages written in non-Roman scripts to facilitate efficient and productive learning of those languages in the university foreign language classroom and elsewhere.
Sight Words and Captured Birds: Multi-Methodologies in the Teaching of Khmer Literacy
Frank Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Research into the nature of reading and trends in literacy education over the past quarter century has left a generation of language teachers well-schooled in and committed to a contextualized, "whole language" approach to literacy instruction. Teachers trained in whole language instruction present written language in close conjunction with students’ current level of spoken language. The decoding of meaning at the word and phrase level is stressed, as are proven strategies of good readers such as prediction and use of background knowledge. The "phonics" or "phonetics" approach conceives of and presents written language as functioning primarily at the level of the phoneme. A phonics-based approach is a hallmark of traditional Southeast Asian literacy teaching. A fundamental conflict therefore exists when teachers trained in the whole language tradition attempt to coordinate instruction alongside those trained in a phonics-based approach.
In the Khmer Program at SEASSI, on and off for the past 8 years, I have tried to blend these two approaches, since each provides something of value to students. The whole language method makes students efficient readers more quickly, and the phonics method both introduces them systematically to a very foreign script and imparts important Khmer cultural knowledge.
Here I will outline some of the issues involved with the above dichotomy and its resolution. I will describe in detail how we ensure that these two often contradictory approaches to literacy instruction function side-by-side and complement each other.
Reading and Writing Thai at Michigan
Montatip Krishnamra, University of Michigan
Introducing the Thai alphabet from the first day of the introductory Thai class at Michigan, albeit on a small scale, culminates into the students’ ability to write a letter to their imaginary Thai host families at the end of the 16-week semester. Students are also able to write about themselves, their families, various aspects of their lives, and their classmates. Students with non-linguistic backgrounds find the phonetic transcription system to be more confusing than helpful in their endeavors to learn the non-Roman script language. Therefore, they are introduced to the alphabet and the different tones in the early part of the semester. Students learn to write and read the basic consonants in each of the three consonant groups, as well as the 32 vowels and four tone marks. Students are soon able to read Thai words based on this knowledge.
Authentic Thai materials are constantly provided for students. By the tenth week, they are able to read meaningful texts. Coupled with their ability to speak and listen, they apply these texts to their own situations. At the end of the first semester, students can read and write approximately 300 words. In the second semester, all texts are in Thai except for translation of unknown words. Supplemental materials are customized to relate to their campus surroundings. Written homework is given everyday to reinforce the speaking and listening skills they acquired in class. By the end of the second semester, students can read and write more than 1,000 meaningful words.
Decoding the Dying: Scholarly Resources for Minority Tai Scripts
John F. Hartmann, Northern Illinois University
There are a number of traditional Tai minority scripts for languages of the Southwestern Tai branch of the Tai family. These include Shan of Burma; Lue of Sipsong Panna, Yunnan; Black, White, and Red Tai of Upper Vietnam and Laos. This list may also include Lanna Thai and Ahom (a Tai script found in the buranjis [chronicles] of the Tai of Assam).
The purpose of this paper is to provide a regional overview of the scripts, the appearance and arrangement of letter shapes on a page of text, their historical source, and present vitality. In addition, a list of sources for studying these writing systems will be provided. For the most part, these scripts are dead or dying and can only be read with difficulty for several reasons: the minority Tai, the younger generation in particular, are largely minority bilingual speakers schooled in a majority, prestige language, the language of the state: Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Central Thai. However, where Buddhism has survived, there is something of a revival of interest in preserving and promoting the scripts by local communities as a mark of ethnic identity and religious and esthetic reasons as well.
Support from governments and foundations have been instrumental in preserving these textual traditions. Video clips of efforts at preservation and promotion of the scripts of Tai Lue and Tai Noi will be used to illustrate the presentation.
Syllable Structure Interference: Persuading Learners of Burmese Not to Read What They See
Justin W. Watkins, University of London
Burmese spelling reflects the phonology of Burmese several centuries ago. Syllable-final stops and nasals have disappeared, leaving behind them final glottal stops (analyzable as ‘killed’ tone) and nazalised vowels, respectively, though preserved in written Burmese. Additionally, syllable-final stops and nasals were involved in conditioning sound changes in the vowels preceding them, so that vowel quality is indicated in spelling by the identity of the final consonant letter.
Learners reading a syllable written with a final consonant letter have to suppress their knowledge of the letter’s syllable-initial value, instead using it and its context to determine vowel quality, and nasality or ‘killed’ tone. Learning to reanalyze the string of symbols in a syllable rime poses two specific problems: (1) Written CVC is commonly pronounced CVC, yielding bad forms (e.g. /hout/ for /hou?/; /lan/ for /la~/). This is exacerbated by transcriptions which typically represent ‘killed’ tone and nasalized vowels with a stop consonant letter and ‘n,’ respectively; (2) Written final consonants obstruct learners’ recognition of well-formed rimes. Burmese orthography normally uses only a small subset of the possible vowel+consonant rime spellings. The implications for teaching which follow from the above are: (1) Emphasize the difference between phonological and orthographical syllable structure, structure; (2) Reinforce recognition of well-formed written syllables by delimiting the matrix of well-formed vowel+consonant letter strings and portraying syllable rimes as unanalyzable.
Organizer: Wynn Wilcox, Cornell University
Chair: Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University
Discussant: Peter C. Phan, Catholic University of America
Keywords: Vietnam, Christianity, 17th and 18th centuries, culture.
Existing historical studies have tended to interpret Christianity in Vietnam as inextricably tied to the presence of Europeans in Vietnam. Therefore, Christianity has typically been depicted as something imposed upon unsuspecting Vietnamese from the outside. Not surprisingly, this perspective has oriented studies of Vietnamese Christianity toward European bringers of the religion, and away from Vietnamese practitioners of the faith. Consequently, we still know relatively little about the concrete realities of Vietnamese Christianity, particularly in the precolonial period, a gap the papers in this panel propose to address.
The papers in this panel suggest that both the development and the practice of Christianity in Vietnam were far more complex than has been previously understood. Christianity, as it developed in Vietnam, was very much the product of local adaptations, reflecting existing social and cultural realities. These papers explore these adaptive processes, both at the popular cultural and the elite political levels, revealing the complex negotiations that shaped emergent Christian practices in Vietnam. More specifically, the papers in this panel examine the relationships between missionaries and mandarins, catechists and ordinary Christians in Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In looking at these relationships we hope to be able to contribute to a more balanced and more nuanced understanding of Vietnamese Christianity in this period, and of the political and cultural context in which it developed.
Reassessing Vietnamese Christianity in the Tay Son Period, 1771–1802
George Dutton, University of California, Los Angeles
Christianity in Viet Nam has roots dating to the early seventeenth century, yet few studies have examined this religion in its local context or looked closely at pre-nineteenth-century aspects thereof. This paper will examine Vietnamese Christianity in a particular political context, that of the Tay Son uprising of the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Scholars of European missionary activity and of Vietnamese peasant movements have both examined this period in some detail, but the accounts of each have substantial flaws. Scholars of the missionary movements have too frequently ignored Vietnamese Christians as they focused on the spiritual struggles and occasional martyrdoms of European clerics. Vietnamese historians of the Tay Son uprising have equally distorted the realities of this period by portraying the rebels as very sympathetic to the new faith, when in reality Tay Son attitudes toward Christianity were far more complex, vacillating between tolerance and forceful repression.
My paper will consider both the constantly shifting actions and attitudes of Tay Son leaders toward this religious minority, and the responses of members of Vietnamese Christian communities during this period. In doing so, my paper will show that Tay Son actions with regard to Christianity most frequently reflected political and military calculations rather than ideologically-motivated suspicion of the faith. Moreover, the paper will demonstrate that rather than constituting an exceptional period in Vietnamese history in terms of attitudes toward Christianity, the period of the Tay Son regime was one of continuity, offering obvious parallels to regimes that preceded and followed it.
The Bishop and the Prince: A New Look at an Overblown Relationship
Wynn Wilcox, Cornell University
This paper examines one of the most analyzed personal relationships in Vietnamese history. It suggests that the relationship between Ba Da Loc (The Bishop of Adran, Pigneau de Behaine) and Crown Prince Nguyen Phuc Canh has become overemphasized in colonial and nationalist historiography because of the use of both figures as prototypical stereotypes of the French colonizer and the Vietnamese collaborator. In fact, neither figure can be seen as prototypically French or Vietnamese, because neither seems to be concerned with their respective ethnicities or national states. This relationship has also been used to generate a foundational myth about the connection between Christianity and the French colonization of Vietnam. Pro-colonial authors use the Bishop as an example of the French Catholic civilizing mission in Vietnam, while nationalist authors claim that the Bishop demonstrates the clear link between Christianity and the imposition of French colonial domination. Because of their desire to use the relationship between the Bishop and the Prince as an allegorical device, these interpretations make the relationship out to be more dramatic than it appears to have been. The relationship between these is best understood as an extended relationship between teacher and student. Canh, like many students, was at times in awe of his mentor; at others, he rebelled against the Bishop. This relationship saw many of the vicissitudes of a relationship between a middle-aged teacher and a bright teenage student, including resistance and the distraction of the temptations of sex and drugs.
The Outlook of Native Catechists in Jesuit-Led Christian Communities in Vietnam, 1629–1665
Brian Ostrowski, Cornell University
The existence of a well-trained corps of commissioned spiritual leaders, or catechists, has often been credited for the success of the early Jesuit mission in seventeenth-century Vietnam. The writings of both Jesuit missionaries and native catechists themselves suggest ways in which the catechists conceived of their role in the Jesuit community and a wider world Christendom. The catechists thoroughly enmeshed themselves in the international Jesuit community. They devoted themselves to the maintenance of spiritually fervent Catholic communities, were open to international travel for education and other purposes, and came to share many of the missionaries’ attitudes toward affairs not only religious, but political and social as well. At the same time, the catechists maintained a deep intimacy with Vietnamese customs, local geography, administration, and a popular sense of the past. Their ability to straddle the intellectual and emotive worlds both of Jesuit Christianity and of Vietnamese tradition uniquely qualified them to communicate the spiritual instructions of the missionaries to native Christians, and in turn to Vietnamese tradition, uniquely qualified them to communicate the spiritual instructions of the missionaries to native Christians, and in turn to communicate the needs and aspirations of the local faithful to the Church hierarchy.
Organizer and Chair: Teri L. Caraway, Northwestern University
Discussant: Greg Talcott, Independent Scholar
Keywords: Labor, Non-Governmental Organizations, Southeast Asia.
Workers in Southeast Asia, facing the constraints of authoritarianism, capital mobility, and labor surplus, have had great difficulty organizing in conventional ways. As a result, traditional measures such as union density and the number of dues-paying members would lead us to believe that little is happening on the labor front. The obvious weakness of trade unions does not, however, fully reflect the state of the labor movements of all Southeast Asian countries. While trade unions remain the main organizational vehicle for workers in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, labor activists in other countries in the region have devised innovative modes of organizing both inside and outside the factories.
As labor movements become more active, they face global market pressures and capital mobility, with employers threatening to move to other countries if workers exert their collective power. Capital is not, however, the only actor with global reach. Local labor NGOs, church-based labor organizations and newly-formed trade unions are linked into a global network of funding and activism, encompassing organizations as diverse as the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity, European churches, and international human rights-based NGOs. The papers in this panel will explore how workers have organized under these less than favorable conditions, paying particular attention to the new forms of labor organizing that emerged over the last two decades, and the impact of globalization and democratization on the labor movements of Southeast Asia.
The Squeaky Wheel’s Dilemma: New Forms of Labor Organizing in the Philippines
Steven McKay, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"In a labor surplus economy like the Philippines, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get greased, it get replaced." (see note 1)
Workers in the Philippines and other developing countries have always had a difficult time organizing due to the disciplining effects of high levels of unemployment. Organizing has become even more onerous with the decline in traditional union power and the concentration of many new manufacturing jobs inside mushrooming anti-union Export Processing Zones (EPZs). Workers thus face a labor control regime in which employers, national policies and local actors work in concert to actively thwart unionization. Under such conditions, workers and their supporters have had to take up new tactics to organize.
This paper will trace the rise of alternative, community- rather than factory-based strategies to organize young female factory workers laboring in EPZs. Based on participant observation in a church-based workers’ assistance center, the paper will detail how, despite repressive local conditions, a local workers’ organization went from providing workers’ masses and disco parties to becoming a full-fledged and militant labor federation with ten affiliated unions and over one thousand members in a span of just five years.
The combination of worker-centered, community-based tactics, ties to established labor federations and international linkages proved a potent and effective method in organizing individually vulnerable workers. The lessons from this case study have wider implications both for labor organizing and for sociological theories of social movements in other industrializing, labor surplus economies.
1. Richard Szal, International Labor Organization Country Director for the Philippines, 3-9-99.
The Place of NGOs in the Organized Labor Movements of Indonesia and Malaysia
Michele T. Ford, University of Wollongong, Australia
Labor-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly important role in labor affairs worldwide—in particular, in the labor movements of South and as a vehicle for the relationships between labor activists in the North and the South. As yet, however, they have no theoretically recognized place of their own in the organized labor movement.
This paper provides a schematic overview of the activities and orientations of local labor-oriented NGOs in Indonesia and Malaysia. It also examines their relationships with trade unions in their respective countries. This comparative data is then used to advance some hypotheses about the significance of labor-oriented NGOs for activists in—and students of—the organized labor movements of Southeast Asia.
Cambodia: At the Edge of the Global Economy
Bama Athreya, International Labor Rights Fund
The paper chronicles developments in Cambodia’s labor movement from the beginning of economic reforms and the restructuring of state enterprises in 1992 till present. The article will detail the involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and political parties in trade union activity in the country’s new garment industry. Cambodia’s garment sector has received much attention from international media and international labor activists in recent years, despite its relatively tiny level of exports. This is in part because of the strong presence of brand-name multinational retail corporations, and in part because of the extraordinary international focus on human rights in Cambodia in the post-UNTAC period. The paper presents case studies of strike activity in Cambodia in the late 1990s and 2000. In each case, the role of both local trade unions and NGOs, and international unions and NGOs acting as advocates and campaigners, will be explored. Through these examples, the paper describes the emergence of a new class consciousness in Cambodia, and examines changing Cambodian government reactions to this activism, including legal reforms and other policy responses undertaken by the government. The article will conclude by suggesting the pros and cons for Cambodia’s workers of coordinated international activism.
Transnational Labor Activism Before and After Suharto
Teri L. Caraway, Northwestern University
After the fall of Suharto, Indonesia entered a new era of labor politics. During the Suharto years the state only recognized one union, but after his fall a dizzying array of independent unions emerged. Previously, transnational labor activism centered on creating spaces for Indonesian workers to organize under authoritarianism. How have democratization and the emergence of independent unions affected transnational labor activism in Indonesia?
I will explore this question through an examination of links between American and Indonesian labor-oriented organizations, focusing on several types of activism: social clauses in American trade legislation, campaigns that highlight the abuse of labor rights in Indonesia, sweatshop monitoring, and the direct funding of Indonesian trade unions by the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity. I argue that different types of activism have varying consequences for Indonesian labor, both before and after Suharto. Furthermore, the post-Suharto labor terrain affected different kinds of activism in specific ways, creating new challenges and opportunities for some while changing little for others. I also find that the various kinds of activism have different consequences for the character of the links between American and Indonesian groups, with some facilitating solidarity and others fostering hierarchical and paternalistic modes of interaction. Finally, in most cases, transnational labor activism is initiated by American organizations, suggesting that labor in the Third World faces greater obstacles in accessing sources of power beyond the nation state.
Organizer: Daniel Goodkind, U.S. Census Bureau
Chair: David Marr, Australian National University
Discussant: Neil L. Jamieson, Independent Consultant
Keywords: Vietnam, ethnicity, policy, environment, population.
In recent decades, Vietnamese authorities have attempted to forge a sense of national unity within an ethnically diverse society, incorporating ethnic groups within an overarching political structure. Yet over the past few years, ethnic conflicts in Vietnam have drawn increasing attention. Riots in the central highlands, the proposed forced migration of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in Son La to make way for hydroelectric projects, and other inter-ethnic clashes threaten to spoil the image of a unified ethnic fabric. In addition to reflecting tensions which took root decades or even centuries ago, these conflicts have been sparked by current disparities in living conditions, development plans amidst market reforms, and mismatches between local and national policies.
Our panel examines the underlying dynamics and policies associated with interethnic relations in Vietnam as well as prospects for such relations in the future. Our wide temporal scope begins with an examination of ethnic policies in the colonial era that shaped the composition of military personnel. The colonial era provides a comparative foil for remaining papers which focus on contemporary Vietnam. The demographic aspects of ethnic group size, growth, and distribution are detailed through results from recent censuses. A review of public policies towards ethnic minorities over the past two decades illuminates strategies and challenges for encouraging national unity. Finally, recent ethnic unrest in the central highlands are traced to changes in local land rights policies.
Pan-Colonial Roots of Ethnic "Balancing" in the Colonial Army of Indochina
Sarah Womack, University of Michigan
This paper will explore colonial understandings and manipulations of ethnicity through an examination of ethnic "balancing" practices in the garde indigene and penal corps of Indochina. It discusses primarily the exploitation—or, in some cases, the invention—of inter-ethnic tension in the creation of both the garde indigene and the penal corps, a policy which was the result of the failure of the French to find a "martial race" among "effeminate" Southeast Asians whose blood had been weakened by either Indian or Chinese transfusions. This approach was a technology of colonial rule borrowed by the French from the British in India, whose use and mythologies of "martial races" such as the Gurkhas was much admired by other colonial regimes. One of the key divide-and-rule practices of the colonial regime in Indochina, this attempt to cultivate and employ a sense of alienation between peoples of the same land contributed to the development of both the character and practices of the colonial state and the history of ethnic relations in Indochina. This paper thus examines not only ethnic definition and tension, but also the role of race and ethnicity in strategies of domination, colonialism as a global network, and the use of "modular" technologies of rule.
Ethnic Counting: Growth, Distribution, and Change Among Vietnam’s Ethnic Populations Since 1979
Daniel Goodkind, U.S. Census Bureau
This paper examines the relative size and growth of ethnic group populations in Vietnam at the national and regional level. Data are drawn from national censuses of 1979, 1989, and 1999. In addition to analyzing past trends, the paper projects future ethnic populations as well as their regional distribution. A variety of simplifying assumptions underlying the projections are identified. In addition to offering empirical findings based on recent censuses, this paper emphasizes how the process of "ethnic counting" illuminates Vietnamese government authorities’ thinking about ethnic issues. Clues to such thinking include the form in which census questions are asked, stated rules for determining ethnicity (e.g., for children of parents from different ethnic backgrounds), and the ways in which results are tabulated, interpreted, and presented to the public. The census also establishes a kind of referendum on ethnic identification, and such identification is potentially fluid over time due to a variety of contextual factors identified herein. We can determine whether such fluidity has in fact existed in Vietnam by comparing our population projections of ethnic groups from 1979 onwards with actual data from 1989 and 1999. Prospects for future fluidity in ethnic identification and the general implications of these findings are discussed.
Becoming Socialist or Becoming Vietnamese: Ethnic Minorities in the Doi Moi Period in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
Pamela McElwee, Yale University
There are fifty-four official ethnic groups in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the treatment of minorities has always been a concern of the state, starting with the earliest proclamations of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s. Particularly following reunification in 1975, various policies were implemented to transform the minorities in the name of socialism, and eliminate harmful ‘feudal’ societies. It was through a common identity as socialist that national unity among the Vietnamese and the minorities would be achieved. However, many of these policies—including transmigration, resettlement of swiddening agriculturalists, and regulation of traditional rites and customs—had the opposite effect and contributed to discontent and strife between minority and majority populations. However, in line with the reformation of state policies towards market economics (known as Doi Moi) that began in 1986, many of these policies for ethnic minorities are also being reformed. This paper will review the state policies toward minorities over the last 25 years, particularly focusing on recent changes in policy, and will assess their implementation at the local level in several research fieldsites. The paper will particularly look at two recent events in Vietnam directly related to the national policies on minorities: a corruption scandal involving the national ministry for minorities, and large scale protests by minorities in the Central Highlands in the spring of 2001, which have prompted a security crackdown in that area. The paper will conclude with an assessment of future trends for ethnic minority policies in Vietnam.
Changing Land Rights and Land Use Histories: The Role of Forests in Ethnic Communities in Dak Lak Province, Central Highlands
Huu Nghi Tran, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development
The Central Highlands of Viet Nam contain some of the last remaining natural forests in the whole country, and are also the traditional homelands of many ethnic minorities. However, in the years since reunification, this area has been the site of rapid changes in land use, mainly attributable to in-migrants who have come as agricultural pioneers to plant coffee and other cash crops. The migration and deforestation has in many cases completely altered the traditional land use systems of the indigenous groups, who once practiced shifting cultivation and used the forests for various subsistence and spiritual purposes. This has caused tension and recent clashes over land rights.
Along with Viet Nam’s transition to a market economy, long-term land use rights are now being allocated to individuals, rather than continuing state control of all land. However, forest lands have not been allocated as quickly or successfully as agricultural land, and in most cases, forests remains under state control. However, in Dak Lak Province, allocation of stocked forestry land has been taking place, particularly allocation to whole communities of indigenous minorities. This is the only area in Viet Nam where this type of allocation is occurring. This paper will discuss this local experiment, and how state law is being adapted to the local realities of Dak Lak, a particularly important issue given recent land conflicts in the area. The paper will conclude with a look at the environmental and social effects of the new policy on indigenous communities such as the Jarai and M’Nong groups.
Organizer and Chair: Michael Peletz, Colgate University
Discussant: Shelly Errington, University of California, Santa Cruz
Keywords: Southeast Asia, transgender, sexuality, cultural history.
In recent years, scholars concerned with gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia have brought a good deal of attention to bear on women’s lives and experiences, representations of femininity and, to a lesser extent, normative female heterosexualities. The scholarly community concerned with Southeast Asia has accorded far less attention to constructions of men, masculinity, and normative male heterosexualities. Arguably most neglected in the literature on gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia is the study of transgendered phenomena ("gender crossing"). The marginalizing lacunae and silences are especially evident when one considers the relative dearth of studies framed in comparative historical terms. This panel aims to help rectify the situation by focusing on transgendered practices and identities in Southeast Asia since early modern times. The panel emphasizes historical perspectives that illuminate how transgendered patterns—associated with highly esteemed "ritual transvestites" of the early modern period as well as less visible roles, activities, tropes, and desires—have been transformed by state policies in conjunction with commercial and religious developments of various kinds. Drawing on material from Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, the papers thus examine some of the ways in which representations of gender and sexuality are imbricated with variably intertwined discourses of class, race, nation, and religion. More generally, the papers analyze historical processes entailing the widespread but regionally variable delegitimization, constriction, and criminalization of transgendered communities as well as the contestations and overall cultural politics bearing on the constituencies, scope, and reproduction of such communities in contemporary times.
Gender Pluralism, Transgender Practices, and the Long Dureé in Indonesia and Malaysia
Michael Peletz, Colgate University
Scholars involved in the study of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia have invested considerable energy in describing and interpreting recent changes in normative gender roles and experiences, but have been far less concerned to document and analyze transformations in the gender pluralism and sexual diversity that have long been characteristic of the region. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of these latter phenomena by providing long-term historical perspectives on sexual diversity and transgender practices ("gender crossing") in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to Indonesia and Malaysia since early modern times (circa 1500). Drawing on the accounts of early European explorers, colonial officials and missionaries, as well as anthropologists and national elites writing in the second half of the 20th century, the paper examines transgender practices and institutions associated with highly esteemed "ritual transvestites" in the early modern period and the ways they have since have been transformed by state policies in conjunction with economic and religious developments of various kinds. More generally, the paper has three goals. First, to analyze historical processes entailing the widespread but regionally variable delegitimization and criminalization of transgendered communities as well as the cultural politics bearing on the reproduction of such communities in contemporary times. Second, to show how, especially in post-Anwar Malaysia, these processes have seen the emergence of new discourses bearing on "the homosexual," "the sodomist," "the lesbian," etc. And third, to sketch out some of the similarities and differences between the latter discourses and their Western counterparts.
Amazons, Female Nakleng and Other Gender Nonconformists in Siam’s History
Tamara Loos, Cornell University
Important historical work on transgender or the third sex in Siam has concentrated on kathoey (male transgenderism), but there is a dearth of historical scholarship on female-embodied gender transgression. The introduction of the female subject to discussions of transgenderism in Siam necessarily involves a theoretical refraining of the debates on gender transgression from a straightforward concern with an identifiable third sex—a subject position that is historically occupied by male subjects in Siam—to an analysis grounded fundamentally in class/status. An individual’s class/status, rather than membership in a traps-class gender category, determined gender norms for men and women in Siam. For every gradated status position, slightly different gender norms pertained, which raises important questions about how we define transgender in the early modern period. If transgender is defined as the transgression of normative gender ideologies, then what were the normative gender ideologies, how did they differ for each class/status, and how does that alter our understanding of transgenderism in Siam? A focus on class/status allows for a more nuanced and encompassing examination of the range of behaviors that were transgressive, including the behavior of female subjects who contravened dominant gender ideologies. The paper studies various transgendered figures in Siam—from the "Amazons" guarding Cakri monarchs and audacious female nakleng (glossed as gangster) to the women of the Inner Palace forbidden from engaging in same-sex sexual intimacy. It also reflects on the degree to which gender performance still remains class-bound today despite efforts to create trans-class and transnational gender and sexual identities.
An Unremarkable History: Transgendered Females in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indonesia
Evelyn Blackwood, Purdue University
The islands of Indonesia are known for ritual transgendered practices historically. The near invisibility of transgendered females in contrast to the prevalence of transgendered males in this history raises some interesting analytical problems for assessing the historical constructions and transformations of female transgendered identities. Islamic and Dutch influences were formative in this history. With its strict division of the sexes and insistence on the roles of mother and wife for women, Islam delegitimated other forms of female subjectivity. Due to colonial preoccupation with "oriental sexuality" and exotic feminine bodies with their promise of libertine pleasures for men, the Dutch were less concerned about female gender transgressions.
Consequently female transgendered subjectivities for the most part passed below the horizon in the colonial record. The conditions of their production and transformations are yet poorly understood. An analysis of studies of transgendered females in the latter half of the 20th century, such as tombois and calalai’, will point out some of the ways that cultural, religious, state and transnational discourses both proscribe and produce female gender transgression in contradictory ways.
A Queer History? Bakla and the Quest for Modernity
Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Historical and ethnographic scholarship on the Filipino bakla have focused on male to female transgendered behavior and practices. Most contemporary scholarship harken to the pre-colonial ceremonial "invert" called the babaylan who possessed religious and healing powers. From the babaylan, most scholarly works locate the colonial and postcolonial bakla as the pre-modern antecedent to the emerging modern gay Filipino man.
Disagreements also abound in terms of the deployment of categories such as "invert," "homosexual," "tranvestite," "transgender" or gay. This paper aims to examine the complexities and complications of constructing the history of the bakla that is sensitive to the spatial and temporal contigencies of gender and sexuality. The overall goal of this paper is to provide a tentative examination of the parameters and issues around the historiography of the bakla. Utilizing archival and ethnographic research, I argue for a non-linear conceptual framework that focuses on the historical conjunction of several sex/gender systems and their articulation with class and race. Such a framework, I further argue, refuses cooptation into prevailing teleological schemas by refusing to consider gay and transgender categories as productive spaces for a politics of the past and a possible template for the future.
Organizer: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Chair: Lorraine Gesick, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Discussant: Victor B. Lieberman, University of Michigan
Despite a substantial body of material in local and European languages, the nature of warfare in early Southeast Asian societies remains largely unexplored. These three papers are all concerned with the reconstruction of native patterns of combat, and with understanding the cultural frameworks within which warfare operated. Only thus can we begin to evaluate the ways in which Europeans attempted to assert their own authority by exploiting existing ideas, while at the same time being themselves incorporated into indigenous conceptions of friend-enemy relationships.
Michael Charney argues that Burmese accounts of great battles in the past, often dismissed by colonial historians as fanciful, should be taken seriously and read on their own terms. Apparently exaggerated lists of armies, boats, weapons and so forth provide a key to important preoccupations in local society. The second paper, presented by Felice Noelle Rodriguez, focuses on an event in sixteenth-century Mindoro, when several chiefs requested assistance from the Spanish to attack their traditional enemy. In the chronicle of Juan de Salceda this campaign is presented as a Spanish victory, but a re-reading of the historical sources suggests that Salcedo’s native allies had themselves won in the "game" of warfare, pangangayao. The third presentation, by Gerrit Knaap, examines the ways in which early Portuguese and Dutch colonialism in Maluku introduced their own version of traditional sea raiding by adopting and adapting the use of hongi (fleets) and changing the ways in which expeditions were organized. Victor Lieberman, well known as a specialist of early modern Southeast Asia, will serve as discussant.
Precolonial Indigenous Warfare: Alternative Readings of the Burmese Chronicle Accounts
Michael W. Charney, University of London
Indigenous Burmese accounts of warfare, as recorded in precolonial chronicles and related texts, have been treated lightly in the secondary literature. Colonial historians, for example, pointed to the large numbers provided as fanciful, exaggerated, and unreliable. The rich array of different types and functions of indigenous boats and wagons, vital in the conflicts discussed in the indigenous texts, are reduced to generic references and otherwise ignored. The successors to the colonial historians, both indigenous and Western, have tended to follow suit. Chronicle accounts of Burmese warfare are judged solely by what "objective" data they can (or, more frequently, cannot) provide. Much of this valuable material thus remains untouched or unconsidered in the secondary literature.
Work on different kinds of precolonial documents in other areas of the word, increasingly suggests that seemingly exaggerated lists of numbers or "fanciful" descriptions of battles, for example, should not be taken at face value alone. In this paper, I argue that Burmese chronicle accounts of indigenous warfare can also be read in alternative ways. Lists of armies, their sizes, and their commanders, as well as long lists of different kinds of indigenous boats, wagons, and weaponry, for example, convey significant and complex indigenous views of precolonial Burmese history, culture, and society. This paper will consider accounts of indigenous warfare found in Mahayazawinkyi and the Hmannan Yazawindawkyi, and in the court historical treatise, the Shweibon Nidan.
Juan de Salcedo Joins the Native Game of Raiding, "Pangangayao"
Felice Noelle Rodriguez, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
The Spaniards came into Philippine waters chronicling their triumph over the native populace. In 1570 Juan de Salcedo demanded the subjugation of the districts of Ylin, Mamburao and Lubang in Mindoro Island. When local inhabitants failed to deliver the required tribute, Salcedo overcame their forts, took captives, and accepted the gold they offered as booty. This paper uses the Spanish account of Salcedo’s campaign, together with an examination of Mindoro forts and weapons, to discuss indigenous forms of warfare. The people in Mindoro had their own forms of defense and attack and a particular culture of warfare between rival groups conceptualized in terms of a "game" they called pangangayao.
Historians usually focus on Salcedo’s triumph over the people of Mindoro, symbolized by his acceptance of tribute and his extraction of a promise of "friendship." However, a closer look at the chronicle reveals the complexities of the local situation, for local leaders from the rival districts of Aklan and Ilog Bahay had asked Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, Governor-General of the Philippines, for assistance in an attack on Mamburao. Legazpi sent Juan de Salcedo together with a small contingent of Spanish soldiers who were joined by two native leaders with five-hundred warriors. The so-called Spanish "triumph" should be thus reconsidered in light of the concept and rules underlying pangangayao, the native game of warfare. This was not only Salcedo’s triumph: this was also a triumph for the people of Aklan and Ilog Bahay.
Warfare in Early Modern Amboina (Maluku)
Gerrit Knaap, Koninklijk Institut voor Taal-Land-en Volkenkunde
Historians of Maluku, the area between Sulawesi (Celebes) and Papua (West New Guinea), have generally given little attention to military history, even though considerable archival material is available. In Maluku the process of state-formation began relatively late, and by 1500 there were only two political entitles, Ternate and Tidore, which in size and structure resembled the riverine kingdoms of the western Malay-Indonesian archipelago. Elsewhere, communities were generally organized into small village federations located on mountain ridges or hill tops where they were relatively safe. While land warfare consisted of small-scale headhunting raids and larger attacks aimed at acquiring territory, maritime warfare was essentially amphibious, with a fleet or "hongi" sailing to an enemy beach where a village would be stormed or a few heads taken.
With a focus on Amboina, the intrusion of the Portuguese and Dutch, who used large sailing ships and a few formidable fortresses to control the area, brought changes to this general pattern. The most important change was an integration of indigenous state formation into the European colonial structure. The Dutch in particular developed their own "hongi" which consisted of local vessels and a few European ones. This new type of hongi had implications for both battle tactics and for socio-economic organization. This paper will examine the ways in which warriors were recruited and rewarded, the ways in which an expedition was organized, and the technology employed in the campaign.
Organizer: Webb Keane, University of Michigan
Chair: Patricia Spyer, Leiden University
Discussant: Henk Schulte Nordholt, University of Amsterdam
Keywords: language ideology, bahasa Indonesia, nationalism, media, ethnicity, language choice, history, documentation, democracy, transparency, violence, journalism.
The fall of Suharto’s New Order regime has put into play or simply defrosted a host of imagined futures for Indonesia. As the nostalgia for Sukarno suggests, some of these harken back to earlier visions, a past’s future. As suggested by invocations of the transnational community of Islam, or, in the moment of Reformasi, of "transparency" and "human rights," others draw on globally circulating discourses, with their own genealogies. One of the central problems these all face is the notion of an Indonesian "public." Mass media might take this to be the aggregation of opinions and polling. Anti-corruption movements might define the public as a domain untainted by private interests. Modernists commonly portray the public as superceding the "ethnic" community. Ethnic nationalists in turn may define their publics in increasingly exclusive terms. Early on, some early anti-colonial nationalists took the very use of the Indonesian language itself as instrumental in constituting public subjects. Whatever these visions may involve, they require some actual mediations, whose particularities in turn may shape how people imagine the future. This panel gathers case studies, ranging from new approaches to historical documentation to emergent forms of language, in the mediation of Indonesian discourses of the public.
Public Speaking: On Indonesian as the Language of the Nation
Webb Keane, University of Michigan
From its first adoption by the nationalist movement, bahasa Indonesia was supposed to do more than facilitate communication or serve the political needs of unity across the archipelago. Many of its proponents in the early years hoped that as it developed and spread, it would foster a new kind of speaker, the proper subject of a modern nation. The linguistic and sociolinguistic properties that distinguished Indonesian from local languages were to bring it into the community of global languages. Moreover, being supposedly transparent, available to all, and without overt marks of rank differences, Indonesian was to be the pre-eminent medium of the national public. Linguistic ideologies of modernity and development came to portray local languages, by contrast, as full of untranslatable meanings, embedded in what could be understood as a private world of kinship, culture, local knowledge, and entrenched social hierarchies. The sense of the public conveyed by these terms of contrast, however, was haunted by paradoxes and the danger of emptiness. This paper considers the ramifications for the idea of a national public implicit in the dominant language ideologies that attended the emergence of Indonesian.
Media and Sounding Native in Banyuwangi
Ben Arps, Leiden University
When I started research on discourse in Banyuwangi, East Java, it was common for speakers of the local language to identify themselves and their speech as Javanese (Jawa), the same as immigrants from further west and their descendants (who make up a third of Banyuwangi’s population, as do the Madurese). Two decades later this categorization is unusual. The people and language are called Banyuwanginese or Osing (from using ‘no, not’). Regional and cultural autonomy are highlighted. It is becoming fashionable to speak this language and to present oneself as Osing, irrespective of ancestry—at least in certain ways and in certain contexts. An important factor is that a genre of pop music with Osing lyrics has become tremendously popular on cassettes and radio and in karaoke. Album titles like "I Am an Osing Kid" (Isun lare Using), radio shows like "The Style of Osing Kids" and "Authentic Osing Kids’ Music," and promotional phrases like "The Osing Kids’ Radio" reveal that an audience for a musical genre and local radio stations is being constructed and maintained. But concurrent developments make Osingness more than a marketing ploy. The language is now taught in schools, the local university has established an Osing culture research center, etc. In this paper I examine how and why people in Banyuwangi use media to render themselves or others Osing. I focus on language use and audio mediation, but the problem of visualizing Osmgness—as on video CDs—is also addressed.
Documentary Acts and Documentary Fetishes: Invoking Participatory Futures in Reformasi Indonesia
Karen Strassler, University of Michigan
Amidst the turmoil of reformasi, the practice of documentation (dokumentasi) has become a focal point for elite imaginings of a participatory public and a transparent public sphere. Students became amateur journalists, photographing their own movement and investing in the promise that their collective documentary record would preempt future efforts to distort or erase their struggle. The newly emboldened press was treated as a public archive, a resource for photo exhibitions, calendars and books. Artists and lay people clipped texts and images in order to construct alternative histories and visual records culled from the transient flow of news. This intense interest in practices of documentation coincided with an elite discourse about Java’s "lack" of a "tradition of documentation." The public in Indonesia, it was said, was not yet aware of the value of documentation. Numerous historical controversies, most famously the case of Supersemar, were treated in the press as failures of documentation. According to this logic, such historical controversies could be resolved once and for all if only documentary proof were found, restored, or authenticated. This paper inquires into the politics of this fixation on the document as the locus of historical truth. The participatory rhetoric surrounding amateur practices of documentation—imagining history-making outside of official centers of power—fulfilled a certain democratic ideal, yet its proponents remained narrowly elite. Meanwhile, the fetishization of the document perpetuated New Order ideologies of historical authenticity, preferring an externalized guarantor of truth over the discomforting democracy of open debate, dialogue, and interpretation.
Media of Violence in War-Torn Maluku (Indonesia)
Patricia Spyer, Leiden University
Hijacked from IMF discourse by Indonesian students in the early days of reformasi in spring 1998, the term "transparency" was rapidly extended to the goal of making political events available to public view and scrutiny. This paper looks at the fate of this term approximately two years later among journalists who were involved in the short-lived project of a daily newspaper, Radar Kieraha. Radar Kieraha, which was launched in October 1999 to coincide with the declaration of the new province of North Maluku. Due to the outbreak of violence in Ternate several months later, the paper was forced to halt production. The journalists fled to Manado to resume their reporting on the Moluccas as a single page inserted in the Manado Pos. Highly self-reflexive if somewhat heroic about their role as reporters, they characterized their journalistic practice as explicitly not transparan. Rather, theirs was an effort to cover up anything but what they saw as the basic facts of a violent occurrence—the fact and number of dead or wounded, the destruction of generic "houses of worship" and so on. The paper considers the implications of such generalization and abstraction of violence by foregrounding the relationship between mediated representations of violence and its actual individual and collective occurrences.
Organizer: Patricia Martinez, University of Malaya
Chair: Barbara Daly Metcalf, University of California, Davis
Keywords: Islam, Southeast Asia.
This panel on Islam in Southeast Asia is an update about new contexts and configurations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Over the past few years in these nations, Islam has either shaped or been impacted by political shifts and developments. In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islam has been dominant in the evolution of a new politics of the state and its opposition. In Singapore and the Philippines, Islam is not at the center but has been defined by the state for marginal but significant communities. The papers that constitute this panel not only share new perspectives but also provide an interesting comparative study of Islam in both majority (Indonesia and Malaysia) and minority contexts (Singapore and the Philippines). The papers also explore Islam in various configurations across diverse fields—in political reformation, resurgent religious identity, in the dichotomies of tradition and modernity, and as ethnic signifier.
The two papers on Indonesia explore how Islam is deployed by groups and individuals who enable democracy and civil society. The paper on Malaysia argues that political Islam is inflected by other realities beyond the binaries posed by authoritarian and oppositional power. The paper on Singapore discusses the Malay Muslim community’s new challenges of national integration amidst globalization; and the paper on the Philippines explains the contested visions of an Islamic autonomous state, as well as the resources drawn upon for these visions.
Transition or Breakdown? Islam and Stalled Democracy in Indonesia
Robert William Hefner, Boston University
In May 1998, the world witnessed the downfall of one of the longest serving dictators of the late twentieth century, President Muhammad Suharto of Indonesia. Muslim youth activists and social organizations played a central role in bringing about Suharto’s resignation. However, since that period, Indonesia has been plagued by a seeming endless cycle of ethnic and religious violence. In the eyes of some observers, the great flower of Indonesian Muslim democratization has withered.
This paper draws on ethnographic and comparative research to examine the role of political Islam in Indonesia’s troubled democratic transition. It suggests that there are still significant Muslim constituencies in favor of democracy and a pluralist interpretation of Islamic tradition. At the same time, however, through several select case studies, the paper demonstrates that weak organization and personality-driven factionalism on the part of Muslim democrats, combined with skillful organization and lavish finances on the part of Islamist conservatives, have given the latter enormous tactical advantages over their rivals. These have allowed Islamist conservatives to exercise a disproportionate influence over the direction of social change in Indonesia as a whole. Indonesia’s democratic transition is in trouble. Its reignition will depend in the long term on the outcome of struggles between different visions of Islam.
NU and Civil Society: A Discourse of Opposition or Expedience?
Robin Bush, University of Washington
This paper seeks to make a contribution to the Islam and democracy literature by exploring the possibility of Islamic voluntary organizations serving as agents of civil society. The Nahdlatul Ulama is Indonesia’s, and the world’s, largest Muslim organization, with 35 million members. Long active as both a political and religious organization, in 1984 it withdrew from the formal political sphere in a move which allowed it room under the repressive Suharto regime to develop a discourse on civil society. Towards the end of the New Order and during the "reformasi" period, this discourse became more oppositional towards the state. At the same time this movement took on more momentum internally, and in many circles NU became associated with civil society. One element of this discourse was an opposition to "Islamist" politics—a stance which was deeply embedded in the historical modernist—traditionalist conflict coloring intra-Islamic relations in Indonesia for the past century. In 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid, revered NU leader, became President of Indonesia in a move which significantly complicated the position of NU’s growing civil society movement, which had gradually established for itself a critical "watchdog" role towards the state.
This paper will examine the response of the pro-civil society activists of NU to political developments under Wahid’s presidency, in particular analyzing the role of the modernist-traditionalist conflict in shaping not only understandings of "civil society" but also important movements within Islam in Indonesia more generally.
Political Islam in Malaysia: Perceptions and Realities
Patricia Martinez, University of Malaya
Perceptions about Political Islam in Malaysia in the government-controlled mainstream media, the opposition-inclined alternative media and the foreign press are premised largely on the dichotomies of PAS versus UMNO, Islamic state versus secular state, or Islamic modernity versus Islamic fundamentalism. This paper explores how these choices are false binaries, proposed by those with the power to define the discourse of Islam in Malaysia. The positions and influence of other groups and individuals who also constitute ‘Islam in Malaysia’—developments, conversations, rejections and aspirations are largely ignored in the race by UMNO and PAS to appropriate Islamic legitimacy and to define an Islam that is cohesive with their objectives.
Based on surveys, interviews, monitoring closely ceramah (meetings and rallies) and electronic discussion lists, the paper surfaces more complex and nuanced understandings of how Islam is evolving rapidly in the cauldron of political crisis since 1998: both inter and intra communally, and in the context of the cleavages of ethnicity. Islam is perceived and enacted in myriad ways by both non-muslims and muslims in Malaysia, beyond the dichotomies that contain it. This paper argues that Islam has emerged as definitive of the nation, but it is construed by the disjuncture between perceptions for and by political expedience and diverse realities on the ground.
Crafting Selves: Minority Muslims in Modern, Secular Singapore
Hussin Mutalib, University of Singapore
The modernization process in affluent Singapore has not diluted the ethno-religious identity pulls of the Republic’s minority Malay (Muslim) community. Despite constituting a small fifteen percent of the total population, the Singaporean Malay community’s plight continues to receive governmental attention because of the Malays’ indigenous position and Singapore’s geo-strategic location in the ‘Malay World’ of Southeast Asia. The Malays have been inundated by two principal tensions and dilemmas in recent times. The first relates to the persistence of their lower socio-economic profile vis-à-vis the majority Chinese, and the second is their zealous desire to retain their ethno-religious identity in an avowedly secular capitalist state. These tensions are bound to exacerbate given Singapore’s globalization push—as the digital and religious divide between minority Malays and mainstream Chinese majority, has all the potential to become even more pronounced.
This paper will begin with a brief background of the Malay/Muslim minority profile. This will be followed by an examination of the dilemmas and tensions confronting the community in recent years. Finally, we shall assess the government’s approaches in managing such ethno-religious pulls and their ramifications for national integration and the future stability and prosperity of the city-state.
Contested Visions of an Islamic State in Southern Philippines
Vivienne S. M. Angeles, La Salle University
In the last thirty years, various Muslim groups have agitated for the establishment of an independent Islamic state in southern Philippines. These groups—the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and more recently, the Abu Sayyaf assert their Islamic identity while pursuing their goals of an Islamic state as separate movements.
By studying the literature produced by the movements themselves, interviews and materials written on Muslims in the Philippines, this paper will examine the proposals for an Islamic state of these Muslim secessionist groups. This paper asserts that variations in their visions of an Islamic state are due, in large part, to the differences in the backgrounds of the leaders of the movement, ethnic issues, the dynamics of relationships among Muslim groups and the Philippine government and, more importantly, the linkage between specific Muslim groups and the international Muslim community. The paper also recognizes, that while Muslim groups present Islam as an agent of socio-political integration in southern Philippines, their interpretation of Islam is also a major cause for division among themselves.
Organizer: Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Jayne Werner, Long Island University
Discussant: Angie Ngoc Tran, California State University, Monterey Bay
Keywords: body, gender, class, race, war memory.
This panel examines Vietnamese bodies as the material sites where active agency intersects with social and historical structures of memory, gender, class and race in villages, cities, and diasporic spaces. One paper studies how village adolescents craft their identities as young men and women on the corporeal topography of male and female bodies, given the collective memories of past war violence. Another examines the contestations over truth and normative gender values by a group of village mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law after viewing a state-promoted film in which the state reclaims the female body as a site of mythical construction in the post-socialist era. The remaining two studies deal directly with how global processes play out on the intimate landscape of the body. One paper examines garment workers’ use of global body products in negotiations of class and femininity in rural/urban geographies and the shifting landscape of global production and consumption. The final paper analyzes how white Australians police the bodies of Vietnamese immigrants, marking their danger and disorder, as a mean of reasserting larger geo-political differences between East and West and to reinscribe the whiteness of Australians at a historical moment when Australia is dependent on Asian economies. Together, the papers explore how extreme categories of purity and danger are used in discipline and self-discipline of bodies. The panel is designed to encourage discussion across geographic and disciplinary spaces with its multi-disciplinary focus (anthropology, cultural studies, political science, geography) and its inclusion of rural, urban, and diasporic contexts.
Incorporated Warfare Memories and Sexuality: Vietnamese Adolescents’ Construction of Identities
Helle Rydstrom, Linkoping University, Sweden
This paper addresses the ways in which a violent past of warfare and dramatic bodily and sexual maturation influence rural Vietnamese adolescents’ ways of crafting their identities as young women or men. The paper draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in a rural community, which is located in northern Vietnam.
During the last century, Vietnam has been engaged in several wars. While generations of Vietnamese have been brought up in wartime, today’s adolescents represent the first Vietnamese generation of this century that has not been directly confronted with the violence of wars. However, collective memories of brutal warfare pervade adolescents’ perceptions of females, males, and their bodies. The reason is that ideas about femininity and masculinity are bound up to collective experiences regarding the ways in which violence neglects the boundaries of the human body and, by so doing, redefines the corporal topography of female and male bodies.
In addition, adolescents’ increasing bodily maturity, has a profound impact on their configuration of a female or male identity. Because adolescents undergo tremendous bodily changes, they encounter assumptions about female and male sexuality. An intact hymen at marriage is still highly appreciated by many Vietnamese, and both female and male adolescents acquire knowledge about blood taboos and female impurity, which include that females should observe certain taboos while menstruating.
In this way, collective memories of warfare violence and contemporary body changes provide significant conditions for adolescents’ constructions of identities as young women or men.
State Mythical Projection of Embodied Womanhoods: Mother-Daughter-in-Law Relations in the Red River Delta in Viet Nam
Jayne Werner, Long Island University
This paper examines the contestations over truth and normative gender values by a group of village mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law after viewing a state-promoted film in which the state reclaims the female body as a site of mythical construction in the post-socialist era. Using Altusser’s notion of interpellation, the paper examines how gendered and embodied subjectivities are negotiated by women in response to state "hailing" via a state-produced popular film. The film "Me Chông Tôi" is used to elicit commentary from a group of mothers-in-law and a separate group of daughters-in-law about norms governing the ideal features of both womanhoods. The data was obtained in 1996, ten years after the launching of dôi môi. The paper finds differences in the way the two groups of women react to the film, and thus the way they respond to the hailing of the state. Some tentative interpretations are provided for why this is the case.
Class Geographies: Vietnamese Garment Workers’ Consumption of Body Products
Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, University of California, Los Angeles
It is no longer news that garment workers in Viêt Nam, most of whom are women, are part of global production. But the questions regarding their class subjectivities have seldom been asked, perhaps because it seems self-evident that they would belong to a global (feminized) working class in the global economy. My investigation suggests we need to reexamine this assumption. The question I address is how these workers negotiate their class and gender subjectivities as consumers of global products in local contexts.
I interviewed garment workers in 2000, who came to Hô Chi’ Minh City and its outskirts from rural areas. This paper explores the workers’ consumption of globally and locally produced products to be used on the body—shampoo, soap, perfume, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing and accessories—to suggest that these bodies are sites where a balancing act takes place between the dreaming of a geographical and class elsewhere (e.g. overseas, Hô Chi’ Minh City, middle class), and the assertion of a geographical place and class somewhere (e.g. Viêt Nam, rural origins, working class). As the landscape of global production shifts them into urban spaces, these workers attempt to draft a new geography in their use of products on their bodies through categories of beauty, purity, and hygiene negotiated locally in relation to urban middle-class femininity. Their class signification suggests intersections with constructions of gender, nation, and locality rather than a simple class location in the global economy.
The Geo-Politics of Bodies: Defining East and West on the "Aberrant" Bodies of the Vietnamese Diaspora
Allaine Cerwonka, Georgia State University
The paper examines the mapping and disciplining of "Asian" bodies in Australia by the police. I look at how the production of Asian bodies as "filthy" and the production of the Vietnamese immigrant community in particular as criminal is a means by which Anglo-Celtic Australians reconstruct the division between "the West" and "Asia" in the international landscape. Imagined geographical categories have been a means of coding and naturalizing the international political hierarchies of states. They have also been a means by which individual states like Australia have defined their own national identity as white and civilized in the past. These fictional "neat" borders between "the West" and "Asia" have been disrupted by the presence of Asian bodies on Australian streets in the last thirty years. This paper aims to contribute to our theories and empirical understandings of how national identity and international geography are constructed on Vietnamese bodies in highly local contexts.
Organizer and Chair: David P. Chandler, Georgetown University
Discussant: May Ebihara, City University of New York
Keywords: Cambodia, ethnography, Ebihara.
This panel honors the career of Professor May Ebihara, the doyenne of Cambodian anthropology, by placing her ongoing ethnographic work in the village she calls Svay into the wider contexts of comparative ethnography and Cambodian studies. Panelists will examine her inspiring body of work in terms of its impact on later scholarship, its usefulness to anthropologists and political scientists, its clear-eyed empathy and its fine-grained methodological breadth. Ebihara’s field work in 1959–1960 led to the first in-depth study of a Cambodian village written in any language and her dissertation, published in 1969, is a benchmark for anyone working in the Cambodian countryside today.
Ebihara returned to Svay on several occasions in the early 1990s, to see what had happened to her former respondents and to assess the impact of the Khmer Rouge period and its aftermath on people whose confidence and affection she had gained thirty years before. The articles she wrote about her return are models of ethnographic research, movingly suffused with history. The trajectories of Svay and Ebihara’s career intersect in intriguing ways, and form the foci for the panel.
She Knew My Parents and She Knew Me in the Time Before: May Ebihara and the People of Svay
Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University
May Ebihara conducted fieldwork in "Svay" in southern Cambodia in 1959–60. I was fortunate enough to accompany her when she revisited the village in the early 1990s. During these visits, Ebihara recorded the stories of the villagers through the war years, the horrors of the Pol Pot time and the period of rebuilding their lives in the 1980s and 90s. The key to understanding her relationships with the villagers rests on the personal stories and memories that she shares about the individuals who were lost, as well has her knowledge of what things were like before the war and revolution.
Ethnographic fieldwork and writing, the classic anthropological method, has undergone a rigorous critique over the last two decades, but for anyone interested in Cambodia, Ebihara’s work is a bedrock upon which studies of Khmer society need to be based. Her studies of pre-war Khmer society are valued by Khmer, including the people of Svay. Dr. Ebihara came back to the village with pictures of the loved ones and detailed knowledge of family relationships. She never asked abstract questions about what had happened, but asked instead, "Where is Sok’s father?" and "What happened to Ming’s children?"
Her knowledge of individual people and her respect for their memories binds Dr. Ebihara to the community, a tie enhanced by the magnitude of personal loss, the gap in time since her previous visit and her own personality. She lives with the loved ones of Svay in the time "pi daoem," "in the beginning" before Pol Pot.
Peasant Culture and the Khmer Rouge: A View from the Work of May Ebihara
Alex Hinton, Rutgers University
From 1959–1960, May Ebihara conducted fieldwork in a Cambodian village. This study and later research during the 1990s formed the "cornerstone" for anthropologists and scholars from other fields—both within the United States and abroad. Ebihara has made detailed comparisons of Cambodian village culture before, during, and after Democratic Kampuchea, the period of Khmer Rouge rule. Drawing on her dissertation and an essay, "Revolution and Reformulation in Kampuchean Village Culture," this paper will reassess Ebihara’s contribution to our understanding of the brutal events that transpired during DK. In particular, I will focus on how the Khmer Rouge transformed Cambodian society, particularly in the areas of traditional family life, Buddhism, and economic production and consumption; how traditional peasant practices were also idealized by the Khmer Rouge and constituted somewhat of a structural constraint on DK ideology and policy; and, finally, how most Cambodian villagers, even the poor, suffered during this time. All of these issues demand an understanding of Ebihara’s work, which provides key insights and a baseline for further analysis of Cambodian peasant politics and society. Her admirable body of work is sure to influence anyone interested in Cambodia for years to come.
Gender and Revolution: A Reflection on the Work of May Ebihara
Kate Frieson, United Nations Mission in Bosnia-Hercegovina
This paper examines the gendered aspects of the revolutionary changes that took place in rural Cambodia during and after the communist years. May Ebihara’s landmark study of the village Svay in the late 1950s together with her subsequent publications on village social changes through three decades are the reference points for this paper.
In myriad ways, the relations between women and men were fundamentally altered by Khmer Rouge policies of enforced equality through labor regimes, abolition of kinship identities, and political activism. These policies will be discussed in the context of gendered changes in rural social relations that have transformed village life.
The research of May Ebihara and her exceptionally detailed study of social and gender relations in the village Svay are foundational works for scholars of Cambodia. This paper is presented in her honor.
May Ebihara and Village-Level Social Organization
John Marston, Colegio de Mexico
One of the most frequently cited statements in May Ebihara’s 1968 dissertation is that, other than the monkhood, "the family and household are the only enduring and clearly defined units" at the village level. This paper will examine what such a statement meant for the Cambodian rural society of the 1950s and 1960s that Ebihara encountered and what it means for Cambodian society as it is emerging in 2001.
The paper also considers what Ebihara’s observations implied at the time about the nature of Cambodian hierarchy, economic organization, and social mobilization, and the degree to which there was a social construction, at least in Svay, of private and public.
The paper will treat the processes of collectivization in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese protectorate that followed. It will explain why collectivization failed and will isolate the social processes that have emerged since the socialist that relate to the emergence of "civil society." Finally, the paper will consider the degree to which real change has taken place since the 1950 and 1960s, when Ebihara conducted her original research.
Organizer and Chair: Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
Keywords: Education, Indonesia, Islam.
This panel explores multiple issues surrounding education in the Indonesian context. The panel looks at educational institutions ranging from West Sumatran kindergartens to Javanese pesantren to Islamic universities, both public and private. We are interested in both pedagogical concerns and wider, more political matters.
In regard to pedagogy, one paper explicitly compares Indonesian and American strategies of teaching and learning. Another examines how curricula are influenced strategically to negotiate both modernity and tradition. A third explores how democratization is being Islamicized through efforts to create civics courses for Islamic university students. The fourth paper examines issues of gender in the teaching of classical Islamic texts.
Another theme in this panel is the notion that education is politics by other means. Hence, the panel will touch on how educational institutions and practices become part of multiple political discourses including those surrounding gender equality, democratization, and globalization.
The issues explored in the papers should set the stage for exciting discussions both on theories of education and on the place of education in the future of Indonesia.
Styles of Learning and Teaching in Kindergartens in West Sumatra and South Carolina
Karl G. Heider, University of South Carolina
Comparative ethnographic observations in kindergartens in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and South Carolina were carried out to reveal culture-specific styles of teaching and learning. Using Joseph Tobin’s "multi-vocalic" approach (see his "Preschool in Three Cultures"), the teachers in each culture critiqued videotape records shot in classrooms of the other culture. Of special interest were emotion expression, management of individualism/groupism behavior, and elicitation styles.
Negotiating Modernity and Tradition in Pesantren Education
Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
This paper examines the ways in which the Javanese Islamic community negotiates modernity and tradition through the interface between Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and "secular" education. In particular, it looks at the (re)invention and teaching of traditional morality in both formal and informal curricula. In this context, imagining tradition is a central element in the task of (re)inventing modernity. This ethnographic material expands theoretical considerations of education in the translocal processes involved in Islamization and globalization.
Re-Shaping NU Gender Discourse by Re-reading the Holy Texts
Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, Valparaiso University
During the past two decades, women in the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) tradition have started to analyze what shapes biased attitudes towards women generally found among NU leaders. They found that certain fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) texts studied at the originally all-male pesantren were among the most influential tools to transmit misogynic views. Texts such as the biased Kitab `Uqud al-Lujjain about the rights and duties within the marital relationship are still seriously studied by students in the pesantren. They are treated as valid educational material and considered exemplary for women in general and female pesantren students in particular. Many kiyai in rural areas generously quote from such texts when addressing women’s gatherings. These fiqh texts are considered part of the sacred NU tradition and in spite of their discriminating views hard to abolish. This has led NU activists, female and male, to start projects that leave the original text intact but provide alternative readings and interpretations. Several Niyai, female teachers at the pesantren, at the same time reconsidered their methods of presenting the text to their female students.
Currently, several initiatives have started from within and outside the pesantren. This paper will focus on the different methodologies and strategies of re-interpretation the Kitab `Uqud al Lujjain that aim at the creation of alternative educational processes. Leaving the text intact, they stress its positive remarks about women while deconstructing the biased teachings, thus creating a new discourse within the NU tradition.
Islam and Democratization in Indonesia: The Institutionalization of Civic Education in Islamic Universities
Richard G. Kraince, Ohio University
This paper is a comparative analysis of the efforts of both the IAIN and Muhammadiyah university systems to institutionalize democracy education within their respective Muslim constituencies. It is an exploration of how both public and private Islamic educational institutions have utilized religious symbols, concepts, and terminology to teach students about democracy and civil society.
Although recent political conflict has resulted in serious confusion within the democratic reform sector, institutions throughout Indonesia have quietly begun developing civic education programs designed to institutionalize the teaching of democratic values at all educational levels. At the forefront of this movement have been educational leaders associated with the nation’s public Islamic higher education sector (IAIN). While blatant religious intolerance, increased militancy among religious extremist groups, and sporadic episodes of inter-group violence have marred reform efforts, public Islamic institutions such as the IAIN have provided strong leadership in education circles in regards to sustaining the movement for democratic reform.
The Muhammadiyah University system has also taken steps to introduce civic education into its higher education system, which is comprised of 147 institutions. Taking a more cautious approach, members of its Higher Education Council (MPT) are planning to infuse civics gradually into its curriculum.
This paper is intended to reveal the degree to which Indonesian Muslims of various backgrounds are willing to go in their promotion of democratic reforms, and illuminate the level of compatibility that these groups see between democratic values and their conceptions of Islamic value norms.
Organizer: Lisa Brooten, Ohio University
Chair: Elizabeth F. Collins, Ohio University
Discussant: John A. Lent, Temple University
Keywords: information technologies, telecommunications policy, censorship, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand.
This panel explores the dilemma facing Southeast Asian governments pressured to develop new information technologies (NITs), yet also desiring to maintain control over the flow of information. Analysts and governments have seen in NITs such as the Internet a threat to governments’ ability to control power, wealth and morals. Terrorists, political rebels, human rights advocates and other groups critical of established governments are using the Internet to strengthen their causes.
Southeast Asian governments have responded in different ways to the internal and external challenges created by NITs. The telecommunications policy initiatives of those countries with the most developed IT industries have resulted from government priorities, global market pressures, and external influences such as foreign governments and financial aid packages. Malaysia and Singapore, for example, have aggressively promoted the development of NITs in their attempts to become regional centers of new technology. Thailand and Burma are positioned at opposite ends of a continuum measuring freedom of access and use of NITs. In Burma, with its tightly controlled information environment, market pressures as well as sophisticated use of NITs by the opposition-in-exile have forced the government to make use of the very technologies that threaten the status quo. Thailand’s comparatively open information policy means that the control of content in Thai media comes in subtler, culturally restrictive, and nationalistic forms. This panel examines the implications of these varying responses to the introduction of NITs into Southeast Asia, and their impact on democratization in the region.
Southeast Asia’s Information Technology Policies: Stressing Technology While Downplaying Information
Drew McDaniel, Ohio University
This paper reports on an analysis of information technology (IT) initiatives among the most developed countries of Southeast Asia. These countries built their economies on the strong performance of electronic industries, especially the production of consumer electronic and computer components. Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor and Singapore’s Intelligent Island initiatives epitomized their efforts to become regional, if not international trendsetters. The problem for these countries was that foreign investment, principally from the U.S. and Europe, was essential to reach their IT goals. But foreign investors were averse to providing IT funds to projects as long as restrictive information rules remained in place. This placed each country in a dilemma—it could refuse to surrender to these external pressures or dilute its authoritarian approach to information policies and gain foreign funding.
This study concludes that new technologies encouraged by IT initiatives are diminishing the capacity of governments to control the flow of information into their societies. This trend is accompanied by heightening public resistance to authorities’ guidance on social and political issues as more sophisticated citizens have an opportunity to sample alternative information sources. A new political environment is forcing political leaders to adapt to a situation of greater diversity of opinion and increased challenges to their leadership. In some cases this is weakening political "stability," a quality much prized by leaders because stability maintains the status quo and, thus, their power.
Information Warfare: New Information Technologies and the Burmese Response
Lisa Brooten, Ohio University
Concerned with controlling the volatile political situation within its borders, the Burmese (Myanmar) military government was slow to respond to the introduction of new information technologies (NITs). In 1996 it instituted the Computer Science and Development Law, which provides a jail term of 7–15 years for anyone that imports, uses or possesses a computer modem or fax machine without government permission. In December 1999, when anti-government material was found being downloaded by e-mail, the government stepped in and shut down the two private Internet service providers, announcing that henceforth it would offer the country’s only e-mail and Internet services. Control is being relaxed gradually: approximately 600 citizens are now allowed e-mail accounts, and the government has developed an "Intranet" of approved sites available only to those who can afford the U.S. $500 annual fee.
Despite its control of the Internet, the Burmese government has had to respond to market pressures to develop NITs at the same time that opposition parties have made sophisticated use of the new technologies outside of Burma. Sensitive to its international image, the regime developed its own website and posts regularly to several e-mail listserves, responding to condemnation from the democratic opposition and other critics. Although the government resisted opening talks with the opposition, it has been forced to respond through a dialogue on the Internet. In addition, the inability of the military to control information about conditions inside Burma has forced it to change or at least attempt to hide its more repressive practices.
Democratization and Freedom of Information in the Transition to Civil Society in Thailand
Busakorn Suriyasarn, Ohio University
In Thailand, new media such as the Internet must be understood in the context of an information policy that is officially open but exists in a culturally restrictive and politically nationalistic environment. The 1997 Constitution marked a watershed in democratic and constitutional development in Thailand. Designed to end the seemingly never-ending cycle of military coups and corruption in government, it aims to create greater transparency in government and to open up the political process to more public participation. It guarantees several new civil liberties including public access to media and to information at all levels of government, as well as civil rights to scrutinize public institutions and politicians.
The process of political and social reforms taking place in Thailand during the last decade provides a background for analysis of the triangular relationship among government, media, and society. While the media in Thailand is deemed among the freest in Southeast Asia, government control comes in subtler forms than those of its neighboring countries. Blatant government censorship is no longer possible, but ideological limitations exemplified by the "national interest" rhetoric—especially in politically critical times—continue to obstruct full and genuine freedom of expression by the Thai media. Content control fluctuates with political situations and who is in power but generally manifests as: (1) requests for media self-censorship by high-level officials; (2) management intervention in news reporting policy; and (3) official neglect of hostile media coverage of ethnic minorities and citizens of neighboring countries.
The Knowledge Economy and the Impact of the Net on Politics in Southeast Asia
Shyam Tekwani, Nanyang Technological University
When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had his deputy Anwar Ibrahim dismissed and arrested, the immediate outcry was amplified by online protest, both within and outside the country. Ironically, this Internet-aided mobilization would not have been possible had the Malaysian government not made a point of pushing technology as a development tool. Singapore has adopted a more sophisticated approach to handling the emerging conflict between "excessive control to the detriment of the users and excessive freedom to the detriment of society," according to a National Computer Board official. Print and broadcast media are restricted, but the government vows that the Net will stay free.
India and Sri Lanka provide interesting contrasts and comparisons to the situation in Southeast Asia. In Sri Lanka, with censorship laws in place against print and broadcast media, there are no controls over the Internet, which has been harnessed to the maximum effect by the Tamil militant movement. India on the other hand is accused of backdoor censorship by imposing restrictively high fees for Internet access, thereby limiting access to the elite and the upper-middle class.
This paper compares the policies of these governments as they attempt to encourage the growth of the ‘knowledge’ economy. while avoiding the disruption these freedoms may cause their delicate social fabric. Ultimately, the Net’s impact on the region’s politics may well be as diverse as its cultures.
Organizer: Christopher E. Goscha, Péninsule Indochinoise, Paris
Chair: Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
Discussants: Qiang Zhai, Auburn University; Stein Tonnesson, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
Keywords: military, technology, arms, foreigners, Southeast Asia, Ming China, Japan, Europe, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.
This panel has one main objective: To explore in pluri-disciplinary ways the importance of foreign military transfers in mainland Southeast Asian wars. As everywhere, external military technology, its transfer, and adaptations have played an important role in the history of mainland Southeast Asia. They will continue to do so. However, little research and reflection have gone into this subject. This panel would bring together three scholars, working on this question for mainland Southeast Asia. They would be asked specifically to reflect on the importance of foreign military transfers in critical and problematic ways, with special attention to questions of adaptation, rejection, and the overall importance of this phenomena.
Though focused on transfers to mainland Southeast Asia, this panel by no means excludes discussion of ‘Southeast Asian’ and ‘national’ technology transfers. This is a regional phenomena; the exchanges can flow in both directions, as these paper would argue. Moreover, this panel examines a variety of ‘foreign’ transfers, not just those coming from the West, but from other parts of Asia, and even those moving from one Southeast Asian state to another.
To get at this complex topic, this panel offers three critical studies, extending from the ‘premodern’ to ‘modern’ period: (1) The overland transfer of military technology from Ming China to upper mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390s–1526); (2) the maritime transfer of military technology from Western Europe to lower mainland Southeast Asia (c. 16th–19th centuries); and (3) Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese technology transfers during the wars for Indochina (20th century).
This wider perspective would provide a rare opportunity to discuss critically similarities and differences in technology transfers across the region and time.
Transfer of Military Technology from Ming China to Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390s–1526)
Laichen Sun, California State University, Fullerton
There are two assumptions regarding the spread of military technology to and from Southeast Asia. The first is that firearms appeared in Southeast Asia only after the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century, while the second one is that the Chinese learned from the Vietnamese artillery technology. Thus the role of the Chinese in the spread of military technology to Southeast Asia has been ignored. On the one hand, this paper shows that from the late 14th century (more than 120 years before the appearance of the Portuguese in Southeast Asian waters in 1511), Chinese firearms and cannon started to spread to upper mainland Southeast Asia, including the land of the Maw Shan, Lan Na (Chiang Mai), and particularly Dai Viet. In this technological dissemination, war and trade were the two major agencies and Chinese soldiers and traders acted as important agents.
On the other hand, this research demonstrates that the Southeast Asians actively adopted and adapted the Chinese technology for their own political consolidation and territorial expansion, which had significant implications for mainland Southeast Asian history. This paper argues that several major historical events during the period in question, including the emergence of the Maw Shans and the subjugation of the Mon-Khmer speaking people, the golden age of Lan Na, and Dai Viet’s southward expansion (the sack of Champa) and westward "long march" as far as the Irrawaddy River, and the rise of Mongmit and Mohnyn, need to be explained in the light of Chinese military technology and the absorption of it by the Southeast Asians.
Military Technology Transfers from Europe to Lower Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 16th–19th Centuries)
Frédéric Mantienne, Péninsule Indochinoise, Paris
During the 16th–18th centuries, the mainland kingdoms of Southeast Asia (Arakan, Burma, Siam, and Cambodia) were eager to enroll European mercenaries. These troops were used as royal guards, as well as elite force on the battle field. Their strength was based on their extensive use of firearms, muskets and guns. The two kingdoms of Dai-Viêt were not interested in mercenaries, but sought to import European-made guns and attract European founders. King Narai of Siam showed a real interest in importing European technology from Holland and France and in developing Western-styled manufactures in Siam (firearms and shipbuilding). In the 18th century, the Burmese army was still heavily relying on European mercenaries, mainly sailors and soldier-prisoners. They participated in the campaigns in Siam and in the capture of Ayuthia.
The ‘import’ of military technology was a particularity of Vietnam during the Tây-son civil war. Although the number of European soldiers and sailors who served with Nguyên Anh has been grossly exaggerated, this handful of Westerners nonetheless helped him to master modern European military techniques and deal with the much more numerous Tây-Son armies. Field artillery, infantry drill, fortifications, construction of European square rigged vessels were the main fields of this fascinating adaptation of European technologies to Vietnamese conditions. Although Gia long and Ming Mang tried to resist the increasing pressure of Europe in the early 19th century, they continued to purchase and build European type vessels and master the latest European military technologies and methods. From the arrival of Europeans in Asia until colonial conquest, Southeast Asian rulers made wide use of European military force.
The Asian Context of Mainland Military Science: Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese Military Transfers during the Vietnamese Resistance to the French
Christopher E. Goscha, Péninsule Indochinoise, Paris
This paper examines the Asian channels of the spread of military science into eastern mainland Southeast Asia during the 20th-century battles over Indochina. Most studies of modern military science in Southeast Asia assume either that the West or Western colonialism played the key role in military modernization or that there was little foreign influence during these wars of ‘national liberation’ against foreign intervention.
My goal is to muddy the waters methodologically and problematically. While Western military science was certainly important in the modernization of Southeast Asian armies, its entry and adaptation did not occur in the linear and simplistic ways colonial and nationalist writers would like us to believe.
Using the Vietnamese opposition to French Indochina, I argue there is an Asian context which needs to be taken into consideration when studying 20th-century military and technical transfers in Southeast Asia. I use three case studies to make my point. Part one argues that Japanese deserters who crossed over to the Viet Minh played an important early role in developing modern military science and training for the Vietnamese People’s Army. Part two examines the importance of Chinese military contributions to the Vietnamese army, examining the Vietnamese sent to China for technical and military training (Whampoa) and the Chinese advisors dispatched to Vietnam to help defeat the French. How the Vietnamese adapted or rejected these Sino-Japanese military transfers is analyzed critically. The last part shows that the Vietnamese Army would, in turn, try to export military techniques to Laos and Cambodia to create armies there. The question of Lao and Khmer adaptations and rejections of this Vietnamese-brokered military science is crucial to understanding the limits of these Asian transfers.