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Organizer and Chair: Carol J. Compton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Thomas John Hudak, Arizona State University
Keywords: Southeast Asia, poetry, history, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand.
Traditionally poets have played an important role as critics and commentators in Southeast Asian societies, and poetry has been the foundation of much of the literature in the area. Poetic license has allowed poets to comment critically on culture and history, providing us with windows on Southeast Asian societies at particular points in time. Contemporary poets and songwriters in Southeast Asia have continued in this tradition, creating and adapting their poetic styles to reflect sociocultural, economic and political changes in the region.
This panel provides a sample of the views to be seen through the window of contemporary poetry. Ruth Mabanglo discusses the power of poetry to give voice to the issues and suffering of those Filipino women at the margins and in diaspora. Chiranan Pitpreecha, a student activist and poet, presents poetry that was a means of recording vividly the details and emotions of people’s lives during a critical period in recent Thai history. Khe Iem traces the changes in poetic themes and approaches in North and South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and then discusses the current transformations taking place in the work of Vietnamese poets both in Vietnam and in diaspora. Finally, John C. Schaefer discusses the life and work of the famous poet and songwriter Trinh Công Sơn, whose poetry in song spoke of love, war, and the human condition. In each presentation, the historical changes of recent times are viewed through the eyes of the poets of the period.
Filipinas in the Margin: Metaphorizing Women in Diaspora
Ruth Mabanglo, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The presentation will deal with the works of Elynia S. Mabanglo, an award-winning poet. Since the mid-seventies, Mabanglo, the first Filipina poet who seriously delved into the writing of Tagalog poetry in the Philippines, has been writing poems about Filipino women. Through her poems, common housewives, rape victims, the comfort women, mail-order brides and migrant domestic helpers are given voices. The poems became the medium with which these women can express their thoughts and feelings about the abuse, oppression and injustice committed against them. What caused Mabanglo to write the poems and how these works affected other women writers will also be discussed.
Recording Motion and Emotion: Poetry as History
Chiranan Prasertkul, Cornell University
Historical poems, among other traditional art forms in Thailand, constitute a rich source for scholarly research of the past. In contrast to the official records of important people and major events, these writings depict an emotional depth, with vivid details of life as it happened. Without poetic license, much of Thailand’s past intrigue would never have been known.
A former student activist and guerrilla fighter and now a distinguished, award-winning poet, Chiranan will present samples of her work, which captures both the motion and emotion of her country over the past three decades. Her presentation focuses on the tradition of Thai historical poetry, a tradition which has continued and developed over time. Special attention is paid to the voices of women and the underprivileged.
Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry: On the Path of Transformation
Khe Iem, Poet and Editor-in-Chief, Tap chi Tho (Poetry Magazine)
This presentation focuses on two periods of modern Vietnamese poetry. During the period from 1960 to 1975, Vietnam itself was divided, with North Vietnam under a communist regime and South Vietnam under a capitalist regime. Khe Iem discusses how Vietnamese poetry was transformed, in both the North and the South, during those war years. In the period from 1975 to the present, Vietnam became one country. Analyzing the situation of recent Vietnamese poetry, Khe Iem explores who and what can reconcile the differences that have developed between North and South Vietnamese poetry; how and why Vietnamese poetry is being transformed; and the role of the poets, in and out of Vietnam, who are contributing to this change.
Trinh Công Sơn: A Songwriter and a Poet
John C. Schafer, Humboldt State University
When Trinh Công Sơn died three years ago, news of his passing spread rapidly throughout Vietnam and to all the cities of the Vietnamese diaspora. Vietnamese mourned the passing of a singer and composer who had moved them deeply with his songs about love, war, and the human condition. Some antiwar songs composed in the 60’s made him famous in central and southern Vietnam, where he became a spokesperson for all those who yearned for peace and the reunification of the country. Because he remained in Vietnam after the war and continued to compose, he eventually became a national figure, known and loved not only in the South but throughout Vietnam.
While there are several reasons for Trinh Công Sơn’s popularity, chief among them is the fact that he was a poet and used poetic techniques skillfully. He first demonstrated these techniques in some early love songs written in the late 50’s, songs whose lyrics broke with the clichés of pre-war songs. He continued to reveal his poetic skills in songs written during and after the war. In my remarks I will attempt to reveal his talent by looking closely at several songs: "Diem of the Past," "Lullaby of Cannons for the Night," "A Place for Leaving and Returning," and "Like the Wing of a Flying Heron." I will provide translations of these songs and play one or two if time allows.
Session 7: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Performance and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: R. Anderson Sutton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
When the Civet Cat Catches the Rooster: Torajan Poetics and Politics
Stanislaus Sandarupa, University of Chicago
A number of Southeast Asian ethnographies have investigated ritual speech parallelism, drawing on a contextual approach. The Sa’dan Toraja of South Sulawesi, Indonesia have a culture rich in ritual acts and ritual speech; however, few contemporary anthropologists have examined this terrain. Based on several years of fieldwork in Tana Toraja, this paper explores the conjunction between poetics and politics in Toraja ritual speech. Specifically, this paper examines the Toraja genre of ritual performance known as retten, ‘poem,’ or more precisely, ‘arguing with one another through poetry composition.’ Siretten is performed in the larger context of Toraja death rituals. This verbal conflict performance has no predetermined structure; however, the concepts of role, voice, frame, identification and persuasion are crucial to understanding its meaning. As this paper illustrates, this genre of ritual speech identifies people with certain social categories through metaphorical persuasion, but such speech acts may also provide others with political resources and grounds for evaluating claims that generate challenge. Unlike other ritual speeches, the ritual form embodies both the seriousness of the matters at hand while simultaneously masking the dangerousness of these issues with ‘play and gamesmanship’. A poet’s genius lies in his ability to poetically create indexical relations between the presupposed semantic cosmology of ancestors and his pragmatic interests, whereby he transforms roles, persons, objects, rules and relations, thus creating a new frame of interaction. In this fashion, real-world conflicts are addressed implicitly via meta-communication. Focusing on discourse practice, and attempting to capture Siretten’s dynamic interactive qualities, the main goal of this paper is to understand Toraja social action via context-bound performances, as such performances index values, concepts and tensions among community members.
The Four Names of a Javanese Diva: Remembering Nyi Tjondroloekito
Nancy I. Cooper, University of California, Santa Barbara
"I am a human, not a water buffalo," the mother of twelve exclaimed to her husband, who was born of a maternal commoner and paternal royalty. He relented, allowing her to sing commercially; thus she began her rise to fame in the eyes of ordinary consumers of the modern gamelan industry in Java.
Tracing her life course from farmer’s daughter, court singer and dancer, wife and mother, and market seller to radio and recording star through her name changes, I show how this Javanese woman of humble beginnings became one of the most celebrated singers of her time. All this she accomplished in a musical genre exuding masculine ideals and practices and a country with official policies to keep the arts and women in their "places." Having attained national celebrity status, Nyi Tjondroloekito still struggled until her death in 1997 to have her innovations and style accepted by the musical elite in the courts and art academies.
With indomitable spirit, desire, and perseverance, she overcame or simply plowed through poverty, gender, class bias, and academic hubris. She sang for kings and presidents as Indonesia passed through colonial and neocolonial regimes. While highlighting such an example of individual agency in no way legitimizes oppressive political systems or social structures, it can be a beacon for others struggling to survive or make a mark in the face of overwhelming powers. These experiences that Nyi Tjondroloekito revealed to me in interviews in the 1990s provide cultural insights into twentieth century Java.
Peranakan Musical Cultures in Singapore
Tong Soon Lee, Emory University
The Peranakan community in Singapore has made many concerted efforts in enhancing public understanding of their culture. With a mix of Chinese and Malay heritage, the roots of the Peranakan communities can be traced back to 17th-century Malacca. Since the 1980s, Peranakan culture has been represented in the form of restaurants specializing in their cuisine, revival of Peranakan plays, and permanent exhibits of their architecture, dress, household paraphernalia, and crafts in museums. Such efforts complement, and indeed constitute the broader State’s effort to create interest and concern for local heritage, thereby affirming the community as an integral part of the State’s conception of a national culture. The musical culture of the Peranakan community in Singapore is largely centered around three institutions: The Peranakan Association, The Gunong Sayang Association, and the Catholic Church. Specifically, Peranakan musical practices include the performance of music and songs in Baba plays, singing of Peranakan hymns and translations of English hymns in than Baba-Malay patois for Catholic masses, and dondang sayang (vocal genre) sessions.
This paper examines different music genres and practices of the Peranakan community in Singapore to explore the motivations, attitudes, and approaches toward affirming individual and group identities through music. Much of the State’s representation of Peranakan culture is inclined toward nostalgic and reified perspectives of Peranakan culture and belies the current state of anxiety the community faces in asserting their cultural identities. Peranakan musical practices offer insights into various approaches in affirming Peranakan traditions and the simultaneous development of new expressive idioms to reflect and enhance Peranakan identities.
Images of Ethnic Chinese in Malaysia: A Study on History Textbooks of the Independent Chinese School, 1975–95
Chih Hsien Lee, National University of Singapore
My paper will focus on the changing images of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia through the history textbooks of the Chinese Independent Secondary School from 1975 to 1995. It will also pay attention to what kind of memories and identities have been preserved and changed in the history of its education through the two decades. The study will analyze the issues involved and changes in history textbooks in the context of the interactive and dialogic relationship between Chinese education and Malaysian society. Furthermore, as the editor and organizer of the curriculum and opinion leader of the Chinese community, the role of Dongjiaozong, better known in English as the United Chinese Schools Committees’ Association (UCSCA) and the United Chinese Schools Teachers’ Association (UCSTA), will also be taken into account in this investigation. It will be an empirical and analytical study based on history textbooks, documents published by Donjiaozong, newspaper articles, etc., examining how the changing images of ethnic Chinese Malaysia in history textbooks interact with the developing Malaysian society.
On Display: Filipino Nationhood and Encounters with the "Native Other"
Benito M. Vergara, Jr., San Francisco State University
In this paper, I will explore the constitution of Filipino nationhood as seen during two particular historical instances: the Madrid and Paris Expositions of 1887 and 1889, respectively, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. For the latter, I will focus on two groups of Filipinos, caught up in the turmoil of colonial representation, who were themselves human exhibits at the Exposition: the ethnic minority "Igorots," who embodied Filipino "primitiveness," and in particular, the pensionados, who were students sent to the United States for education, to become "better" Filipinos according to the logic of colonial tutelage. Both were seen as personifying the two extremes in a racialized, evolutionary hierarchy of Filipinos at the fair.
Sons and daughters of the Philippine elite, many of the pensionados actually advocated independence for their country, but espoused a vision of Filipino nationhood that manifestly excluded their fellow Filipino Igorots. I examine the pensionados as liminal figures, as ambiguous Filipinos occupying the space between an incomplete independence and a modernity ushered in by new colonial masters.
This encounter has its historical echoes, however, in the experience of Filipino ilustrados in Madrid and Paris. These educated intellectuals were themselves faced with similar encounters with "Igorrotes" and Native Americans performing at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, albeit with dissimilar results. My paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of Spanish and American colonialism and the formation of national identity.
Organizer and Chair: Michael Feener, University of California, Riverside
Discussant: Syafa’atun Al-Mirzanah, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago
Keywords: Indonesia, Arabic language, Islam, history.
A new generation of scholars are beginning to make more use of Arabic-language sources in their studies of the history and culture of the Indonesian archipelago. This panel seeks to provide a forum for an introduction to and exploration of such sources to highlight some of the ways in which such materials might contribute to ongoing and new research projects in Southeast Asian Studies. This panel will call attention to previously under-utilized source bases that extend well beyond the rich body of materials relating to Islamic religious sciences to other types of texts, including modern fiction and journalistic pieces.
A pre-selected set of our papers will discuss aspects of Arabic biographical literature, jurisprudential writings, novels, and works of non-fiction from a range of trans-disciplinary perspectives. Each of these studies not only presents material from sources that have been relatively neglected by Indonesianists, but they also highlight various social and cultural issues that arise in the contexts and experiences of diaspora and polyglossia among both Arabs in and from the Middle East and Southeast Asians traveling to Arab countries and/or engaging with the textual traditions of Muslim scholarship originating there. The crossings of geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders involved in the production and reading of such texts can thus lead to the achievement of new perspectives on the history of Indonesia and its relationship to the world beyond the archipelago.
Tracings of Southeast Asian History in Texts of Tabaqât Literature
Michael Feener, University of California, Riverside
This paper will explore aspects of the Arabic tradition of biographical dictionaries (tabaqât) relevant to studies of Indonesian history. A significant body of texts from the early modern and modern periods contains material rich in potential for contributions to such studies. However, the reading and interpretation of these sources is a more complicated matter than simply mining these texts for ‘facts’ like names and dates. For as with works in any genre, tabaqât are constructed according to a set of stylistic and formal conventions that need to be taken account of in constructing critical readings of these texts.
Through a reading of one example from this genre—an entry on a prominent Sumatran scholar contained in the nineteenth-century tabaqât entitled Al-Nafs al-Yamani, compiled by ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Sulayman al-Ahdal—this paper will provide both an introduction to the genre for Indonesianists and a discussion of some of the issues related to its interpretation. These aims will be pursued with regard to the different kinds of information that such sources might yield for historical studies of the exchange and transformation of religious and intellectual culture between the Indonesian archipelago and the Arabian peninsula. In this, particular attention will be directed toward the ways in which various markers of identity such as names, geographical origins, and doctrinal affiliations are configured and deployed in such texts as reflections of understandings of the complex relationships between religion and ethnicity in the diasporic Muslim scholarly networks of the Indian Ocean region.
Arabic as a Vehicle for Domestication and Liberation of Indonesian Muslim Women
Nelly van Doorn-Harder, Valparaiso University
In 1912, Reformist Muhammadiyah Muslims started a process of Islamization intended to wean Indonesians away from backward syncretistic beliefs and introduce Islam as a transforming societal force. Part of the new program was a different use of Arabic, the sacrosanct language of Islam. Before the onset of Reformist Islam, the Qur’anic message in Indonesia was transmitted formally in Arabic via sermons in the mosques and study in the pesantren. Indigenous expressions of Islam, often syncretistic, were practiced in local languages. To close this gap between the two fields of Islamic experience, Reformists translated the religious message into the local languages and simplified the Jurisprudence that can only be developed using Arabic. This approach proved successful in the short run for the teaching Islamic rituals, ethics, and ideas. Over time, however, it became problematic on the level where a deeper knowledge of Arabic is necessary to create new interpretations of the Islamic sources.
This new kind of summary knowledge of Arabic influenced views on the role of Muhammadiyah women in surprising ways. This paper will discuss two developments related to the use of the Arabic language. First, it will analyze how Muhammadiyah managed to Islamize the Javanese culture by merging central ethical Javanese concepts with Islamic concepts. Thence it will go on to discuss how paying scholarly attention to the ways in which Arabic textual sources are used by Indonesian Muslims can help us to better understand the role of Islam in modern Indonesian culture.
Self and Other: Identity Construction in an Arabic-Language Indonesian Novel
Ulrike Freitag, Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin
The South Arabian Hadhrami diaspora in Southeast Asia greatly increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when for many Hadhramis Jawa came to be seen as the green and fertile, but morally questionable, new frontier where poor scholars and tribesmen became millionaires. Once in Jawa, tendencies to preserve the Arab identity countered others which favored integration, an issue which can be observed in the significant body of Arabic writings produced in Jawa, notably the journals. As Jawa also became a place where new ideas and literary forms were encountered—not only from Arab lands but also from China and Europe—it is not surprising that the first Hadhrami plays and novels stem from authors who lived (for at least some time) in Southeast Asia.
This paper explores one such novel, Fatat Garut, written by Ahmad Abdallah al-Saqqaf and published in 1929 in Surakarta and Batavia. It will primarily consider an Arab (diasporic) perspective on society in the Indies in the framework of a (for Hadhrami and Malay authors) novel genre of literature.
Redefining Jawa: Shifting Arabic Understandings of Southeast Asia
Michael Laffan, IIAS, Leiden
With the expansion of a Southeast Asian community in Mecca in the nineteenth century, and also of the Hadhrami diaspora in the Indies, there was increased interest in the distant archipelago of Islam. Mecca’s Southeast Asians had long been known as "the Jawa," from the toponym that served in Arabic to define both Java the island, and Southeast Asia the region. And if the boundaries of that toponym were far from clear in the 1890s, so too were the parameters of the related ethnic and linguistic coverall of "Jawi." However, with the rise of new nationalisms in the late nineteenth century, and the advent of a Southeast Asian presence in Cairo, more and more printed works—first articles and then books—began to answer a public need to define Southeast Asia. This was especially so as there was a growing awareness of a shared colonial threat and the usage of competing or overlapping terms like Malay and then the rise of the very idea of Indonesia.
In this paper I will sample various Arabic representations of Southeast Asia to track the shifting awareness of it as a region with a shared faith and destiny. I will show how these representations enunciated a need to know about Jawa, its peoples and its past, revealing in turn how Southeast Asians interacted with the Middle East, and how their region was assigned a place in the changing world and as a domain for further Islamization.
Organizer and Chair: Oona Thommes Paredes, Arizona State University
Discussants: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii, Manoa; Charles O. Frake, State University of New York, Buffalo
Keywords: collective violence, identity, Southeast Asia.
Sectarian violence is a fact of daily life in some parts of Southeast Asia, and it is often attributed primarily to "ethnic" or "religious" differences, despite the presence of significant economic, political, or historical realities that may have created or escalated the actual conflict.
This panel contributes to the evolving discussion on the nature of indigenous warfare and collective violence in Southeast Asia, with a focus on the social and political organization of ethnic and separatist conflict, revenge killing, and mass violence in Outer-Island Indonesia and the southern Philippines. Utilizing identity as a general analytical tool, these four papers examine the cultural and political contexts within which such violence has taken place, and the manner in which warfare may structure or frame certain aspects of human culture, such as gender, religion, and group identity. Incorporating cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary theories of collective violence, this panel aims to generate a historically embedded, multidisciplinary discussion on the development of small-scale or non-state violence in the region.
Drawing from a wide range of perspectives within the social sciences (cultural anthropology, political science, history, ethnohistory), our panel continues the discussion generated by two previous panels on the social-historical study of warfare (AAS 2002 session 149: "Aspects of Warfare in Premodern Southeast Asia," and the 2003 International Workshop on Indigenous Warfare in Precolonial Monsoon Asia at SOAS), while moving its time frame from the precolonial to the modern historical period. To encourage an interactive discussion, each presentation is being strictly limited to 15 minutes or less.
Indigenous Warfare? How Media, Transnational Religious Networks, and Global Markets in Chocolate and Ebony Touched the Conflict in Poso, Indonesia
Lorraine V. Aragon, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In contemporary Indonesian regional conflicts, identities that have been polarized for violent purposes demonstrate a melange of distinctive features that define them as historically conditioned, locally constrained, and globally transformed. Muslim and Christian communities participating in these regional struggles are inspired and influenced by locally powerful rhetoric about ties to ancestral lands and traditions, as well as by the pressures generated by global economic markets, transnational religious movements, new electronic media, and machinations of the post-Suharto governments. But exactly how did on-the-ground, postcolonial and post-Suharto resentments—now characterized as ‘Muslim versus Christian,’ ‘insider versus outsider,’ and ‘ethnic group X versus ethnic group Y’—get twisted and turned within the context of an electronically-linked, globalized economy, and the discourses of transnational Muslim terrorism or Christian aggression?
After recounting the historic political dimensions of Poso’s collective violence (1998 to present), this paper will address some proximal national and transnational facets of economic politics that interfaced deleteriously with local rivalries and ethnically-linked alliances. These synaptic connections between ‘indigenous’ and supra-local interests helped escalate and turn a ‘nuisance conflict’ of the Indonesian hinterlands into an infrastructural wasteland, a contemporary peace-making dilemma, and a recurring nightmare for most of the district’s civilian population.
A Carnival of Crime: The Enigma of the Abu Sayyaf
Christopher Collier, Australian National University
They have been recently linked to Al-Qaeda, but there is far from unanimous agreement on the nature of the Abu Sayyaf. Besides being labeled international terrorists, they have also been described as ‘social bandits,’ ‘outlaws with an agenda,’ ‘new entrepreneurs in violence . . . neither rebel nor revolutionary,’ a ‘revolutionary group’ fighting for an Islamic state, a ‘CIA creation,’ and a ‘splinter group’ of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and even the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
A classic case of ethnonationalist separatism situated on a ‘civilizational fault-line,’ the ongoing conflict in the southern Philippines lends itself easily to primordialist accounts that emphasize intractable and ancient hatreds. This paper aims to unravel the enigma of the Abu Sayyaf through detailed analysis of key episodes in the centuries-old conflict. It highlights the process by which the ‘rational’ pursuit of interests is reframed or publicly encoded in ethnic terms that serve to polarize mass audiences along ‘everyday primordialist’ lines.
An identity tied to a reputation for ferocity (isug) is the principal form of sociopolitical capital in the Hobbesian enclaves over which the Abu Sayyaf holds sway, and its returns have been boosted by the intrusion of wider national and international forces. These forces have their own interests, which are served equally well by the reappropriation of the isug stereotype. Like the members of a theatrical cast, each of these players has a mutually supporting role to play in an ongoing "carnival of crime."
Ethnic Riots and Ethnic Cleansing: Anti-Madurese Violence in West and Central Kalimantan
Jamie Davidson, National University of Singapore
In mid-2001, when large-scale anti-Madurese violence erupted in Central Kalimantan, comparisons to neighboring West Kalimantan were inevitable. There, Dayak and Madurese have waged riots intermittently since 1967. This violent dynamic was touched off by clashes over lands vacated by fleeing Chinese who had been forcibly relocated to coastal locales on account of the army’s counterinsurgency campaign against local communists. While Dayak-Madurese riots continued sporadically over the next three decades—most infamously in 1997 and 1999—Central Kalimantan remained remarkably quiescent. Of course, ethnic tensions existed and fights did occur; but the intensity and scale of the 2001 violence was unprecedented.
This paper begins a comparative exploration of riots in West and Central Kalimantan. It seeks to understand why violence in the latter broke out when it did, especially given the more riotous history of similar ethnic groups (broadly conceived) in the former. Furthermore, it gives credence to the forms of violence that materialized. In particular, in West Kalimantan, following a riot, Madurese on the whole returned home, usually to rebuild razed houses. Not until 1999 were they "cleansed" from the afflicted areas. In Central Kalimantan, however, aligned Dayaks expelled Madurese from the province amidst the region’s first major outburst in independent Indonesia. I posit that the politics of decentralization in the post-Suharto state—which gave local groups greater access to financial and political resources but has also ignited a fierce contestation over the question of local indigenousness—played a formidable role in both ethnic cleansings.
Blood Brothers and the Enemies of God: The Impact of Early Christian Missions on Lumad Warfare and Identity in Mindanao
Oona Thommes Paredes, Arizona State University
This paper explores early Christian missionization (1596–1768) among the Lumad in colonial northeast Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, and the manner in which it may have restructured critical aspects of Lumad social and political organization. The emergence of new "Christian" or mission-based identities resulted in the transformation of warfare and social organization in several Lumad populations, and appears to have directly affected specific incidents of collective violence, including the deadly "Karaga Revolt" (1631), punitive raids into neighboring Lumad and Moro settlements, and the frequency of Moro raids against missionized settlements.
The presence of new allies—Recollect and Jesuit missionaries, some with professional military training—resulted in the creation of military alliances between Lumad leaders and Spaniards and political federations between previously warring groups. This re-framed warfare within the context of Lumad society, creating new categories of enemy and ally which, ultimately, resulted in the realignment of power vis-à-vis more organized and powerful Moro groups, in particular the Magindanaw under Sultan Kudarat (1619–1671), giving limited yet notable advantage to their former tributaries, the Lumad.
Conversion efforts by Spanish missionaries also re-framed Lumad identity in other ways, bringing about new ethnicities and political forms, the most significant and enduring of which were related to the management of collective violence.
Session 46: ROUNDTABLE: What Became of Southeast Asia’s Liberal Moment?
Organizer and Chair: Greg B. Felker, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Discussants: Bridget Welsh, Johns Hopkins University; Edmond Terence Gomez, University of Malaysia; Blair A. King, National Democratic Institute; Karl D. Jackson, Johns Hopkins University
Keywords: Southeast Asia, liberalism, authoritarianism, reform.
In post-9/11 Southeast Asia, prospects for rapid political and economic liberalization seem suddenly remote. After the financial crisis of 1997–98, observers of the region anticipated major changes as markets were opened, authoritarian regimes discredited, civil society strengthened, and political reforms advanced. Current trends, however, suggest a re-assertion of strong-state politics and economics. In Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra has centralized executive and legislative power, reined in the media, embraced populist economic policies, and asserted control over civil society through extra-legal security campaigns. In Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamed is retiring from office in a succession that promises to consolidate his system of corporatist economics and authoritarian political control. Singapore, too, prepares for a leadership succession by fine-tuning its mechanisms of political and economic control. In Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri has rebuffed calls for greater democratization within her party, aligned her administration with the military, and lagged in promoting economic reform.
What remains of the reformist impulses that animated the region’s politics during the immediate post-crisis period? Are neo-authoritarian tendencies significant and durable, or merely rearguard reactions to more fundamental changes that will yet sustain major reforms? Are these trends a reassertion of long-standing historical patterns, or do they signal a new configuration of state, society, political and economic institutions and/or political culture? The roundtable will adopt a multi-dimensional scope, embracing human rights, economic liberalization, institutional changes, electoral politics and the strength of civil societies. Roundtable members will make brief précis of their remarks available to the audience in advance, so as to provoke a lively and productive discussion from the floor.
Session 47: Youth and Sexuality in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Boston University
Discussant: Rita Smith Kipp, Kenyon College
Keywords: youth, sexuality, gender, Southeast Asia.
Large-scale studies by demographers, sociologists, and other researchers have drawn attention to what appears to be a recent and sometimes dramatic increase in sexual activity among unmarried Southeast Asian youth. This activity is typically explained with reference to the impact of formal education, later age at first marriage, declining parental control, and growing geographic and social mobility. Sexual trends among Southeast Asian youth have raised concerns among various segments of society, leading in several well-known instances to public moral panics over the putative moral degeneration of youth. Many proponents of moral reform blame the change in sexual norms on Westernization and globalization and call for a return to "traditional" sexual mores defined with reference to national or religious values, almost always defined in stark contradistinction to those of the West. The papers in this panel examine the changing discourses and practices of sexuality among Southeast Asian youth and explore the implications of these changes for gender identities, national subjectivities, and contemporary social change.
The Social Demography of Urban Youth in Southeast Asia
Peter Xenos, East-West Center
This paper in a session devoted to Southeast Asian sexuality and sexual risk-taking among urban youth seeks to provide two kinds of background for exploration of the topic. Attention is given to the basic demography of Southeast Asian youth. There are common regional themes but of course also elements of national distinctiveness. Both are important. The common features tend to flow from the similar national histories of fertility decline, combined with the urbanward press of youth that is found everywhere. The novel features generally flow from national differences in the pace, continuity and depth of the fertility declines and in the differing urban histories and demographies of urban movement of the young. One of the latter differences, relating to the sex composition of youth migrants, bears quite directly on urban sexual cultures and behavioral profiles that have been emerging in Southeast Asian urban settings. Closely related to this basic demography is an ongoing transformation of social composition. There are many such transformations, but two underlying ones are emphasized here: the shift toward higher proportions single (reflecting progressively later marriage) and the shift toward higher proportions in school (reflecting extended durations in school). Both these trends are most prominent among females, leading to a degree of gender convergence with, again, important implications for the cultures and social structures of urban youth that help to shape sexual cultures.
Youth, Gender, and Sexuality in Malaysia: The Pink Triangle and the Struggle for Sexual Equality
Michael Peletz, Colgate University
This paper examines dynamics of gender and sexuality in Malaysia in relation to state policies seeking the formation of modern middle-class families and subjectivities—an effort which is part of a more encompassing project to create a pliant citizenry and a globally competitive workforce conducive to national development. I focus on the emergence of "gay" and "lesbian" sexual and gender identities among urban youth, beginning in the late 20th century. These identities are in many respects concomitants of state-sponsored projects of urbanization and globalization but are nonetheless viewed by Muslim and other political and religious elites as profoundly threatening to the health and future of the Muslim community and the nation as a whole. AIDS further complicates the situation because it is widely recognized as a major health problem with serious implications for national security. The Pink Triangle, an NGO whose official charter involves assisting people at risk for AIDS, offers a critical window on these dynamics. For while it is generally assumed to be "a gay organization" and operates above ground, it exists in a milieu dominated by political and religious elites endeavoring to institutionalize heterosexism and homophobia as national policies.
Drawing on recent interviews with members of Pink Triangle and Marina Mahathir (President of the Malaysian AIDS Council), I emphasize that official discourses concerning equality generally reject the goal of sexual—as distinct from gender—equality, and that this signals some of the ways Malaysian projects of modernity and civil society differ from their Western counterparts.
More Sex in the City: Muslim Youth, Sexuality, and Moral Panic in Yogyakarta
Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Boston University
Indonesians widely assume that urban youth are far more sexually active today than their predecessors in past generations. The assumption is supported by salacious media accounts of high school call-girls, sex-pagers, and teenage prostitution, as well as by the very real evidence of a youth culture whose sexual behaviors seem at odds with those of their elders. In cities like Yogyakarta, young people can be seen at cafes, fast-food restaurants, and malls; wearing Western-style fashions; holding hands; and even hugging and kissing in public. All these behaviors violate traditional Javanese and Muslim norms. Periodic public moral panics surrounding youth sex and drug-use exacerbate parental fears and are cited by moral reformers as proof of the pernicious effects of Westernization—and of the need far radical moral revival. In 2002, one such moral reformer presented the results of a survey that alleged that 97.5% of Yogyakarta’s female college students are no longer virgins. His research was immediately endorsed by the leadership of several conservative Islamist parties.
This paper examines social trends as well as recent public controversies involving youth, Islam, and changing sexual norms in the south-central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It highlights the ways in which Javanese youth have attempted to balance the circumstantial opportunities for new gender and sexual norms with a more pious and normative Islamic model. The study suggests that the effort to balance conventionally Islamic and alternative or pluralist sexual norms is still a work in progress, one subject to the vicissitudes of public cultural politics.
Strength of the Nation? Disciplining Female Youth and Sexuality in a Northern Thai NGO
LeeRay M. Costa, Hollins University
Processes of modernization and globalization have resulted in profound anxieties over the sexual behavior of Thai youth, especially young female bodies. Sexualized styles of dress, public displays of intimacy, co-habitation of unmarried couples (university students in particular), and pre-marital sex are perceived by many adult Thai as examples of cultural and national identity loss among the young, largely resulting from an encroaching and threatening west. Such anxieties are exacerbated by Thailand’s notorious reputation in the global imaginary as a popular site for the sale and consumption of sex and by allegations of international and national agencies that the numbers of both child and university student (i.e., "covert") prostitutes are increasing.
This paper examines one local response to such anxieties by a village-based NGO (non-governmental organization) in the north called The Project for Tomorrow (PFT). In a two-year project ostensibly aimed at eliminating child prostitution, PFT members constructed young female bodies as symbolic expressions of cultural integrity and moral difference from the West, thereby challenging the threats of globalization to both Thai youth and the nation. Specifically, PFT members sought to discipline rural female youth through discourses and practices centered on the "preservation of traditional culture" and the "protection" of youth as "national resources." Male youth, on the other hand, were largely un(re)marked upon in PFT work. This notable difference reveals that the (sexual) behavior of Thai youth can "strengthen the nation" only when young female bodies are denied agency and novel forms of sexual subjectivity.
Session 67: Autonomous Histories in South Vietnam’s Republican Era: 1955–1975
Organizer: David A. Biggs, University of Washington
Chair: David Elliott, Pomona College
Discussant: Ngô Vinh Long, University of Maine
Nearly three decades after the fall of Saigon, the history of South Vietnam’s Republican period (1955–1975) remains poorly understood. If they were not actively involved as "patriots," then most Southerners appear in historical works as counter-revolutionaries or neo-colonials. These histories lack what John Smail once described as a local "autonomy." Works that focus on American intervention and the war frequently marginalize the actions and visions of local people during this era. Southerners made difficult, often contradictory choices in their forts to build a nation that was still very much Vietnamese. While none of the papers deny the profound impact of the Revolution or the "American War," they re-examine diplomacy and economic development during this period from local, South Vietnamese "thought worlds" where these projects occurred.
David Biggs (University of Washington) discusses Vietnamese projects to reconstruct the rural landscape through new infrastructure and massive resettlement. While Americans played a role supporting the Public Works Ministry and projects were often derived from earlier, colonial-era documents, each implementation was wholly Vietnamese. Edward Miller (Harvard University) presents a view of Ngô Đinh Diem, examining how Diem and the U.S. government tried and failed to collaborate in administrative reform. Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen (Yale University) examines how President Thieu (1968–1973) steered not only an independent course from Nixon and Kissinger, but oftentimes collided with Washington’s policies as the allies pursued different ends. The panel will feature two experts on modern Vietnam, historian Ngô Vinh Long and political scientist David Elliott, who will critique the papers and connect them to broader trends and problems in the study of the Republican era.
Engineering Peace in the Countryside: The Rise and Fall of Land Development Projects, 1954–1960
David A. Biggs, University of Washington
One major economic and strategic issue for the Saigon government was the "rural problem": disposessed farmers, abandoned lands, and an infrastructure crippled by neglect and sabotage during the First Indochina War. Public Works engineers and officials were soon overwhelmed in 1956, not only by the demands of postwar reconstruction but also by the sudden, exponential growth in American material and financial aid. During the "six years of peace" from 1954 to 1960, engineers and administrators experimented with various forms of resettlement and land redistribution, especially in more remote parts of the Mekong Delta that were strongholds for the Viet Minh.
While Americans associated with USAID, the American Embassy, and the U.S. Operations Mission enjoyed influence at higher government levels, the trials and failures associated with these projects were intensely local problems. After thousands of families had relocated to these areas, quite often the irrigation schemes failed, causing severe flooding as well as epidemics and infestations. While American advisors and diplomats envisioned a New Deal form of hydrologic development that was politically neutral and technically specific, the RVN government was very careful to construct each resettlement area as a modern garrison or "don dien" a bulwark against communist insurgency. This paper draws from archival sources in the Public Works folios of the National Archives No. 2 in Ho Chí Minh City to argue that despite involvement at higher levels by Americans and other foreign players, success and failure in each project was tied more to the handling of locally specific environmental and political conflicts.
My versus Diem: American and Vietnamese Approaches to Nation Building and Administrative Reform in South Vietnam, 1955–1963
Edward G. Miller, Harvard University
It has long been supposed that the "nation building" strategies pursued by Ngô Đinh Diem during his tenure as leader of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) were American in inspiration and design. At first glance, this seems reasonable; after all, the U.S. provided huge amounts of aid to Diem’s government and also dispatched legions of advisors to South Vietnam to assist in various nation-building tasks. While most historians have rejected the notion that Diem was a puppet of the United States, many still argue that the largesse he received from the US obliged him to tailor his programs and policies to conform to American ideas and assumptions about development and modernization.
This paper presents an alternative view: Diem refused to let the Americans take the lead on nation building because he had very different and definite ideas of how South Vietnam could and should become a modern nation. Specifically, this paper examines how the U.S. and the Diem government tried and failed to collaborate in the field of administrative reform. Though the two sides agreed that the South Vietnamese ship of state needed to be overhauled at the national and local levels, they clashed frequently over the form and content of the changes. This paper uses these clashes to reveal the key differences between the Diemist and American visions for South Vietnam, and also to suggest how these differences contributed to the unraveling of the U.S.-Diem alliance in 1963. This paper is based on research in both U.S. and Vietnamese archives.
Saigon Diplomacy, 1968–1973
Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen, Yale University
Saigon diplomacy during the Second Indochina War has received scant attention from scholars in the field of Vietnam studies. The historical scholarship that does exist on the foreign policy of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) consists primarily of memoirs and accounts by former officials of the Saigon regime. Based on archival materials in Vietnam, the U.S., and France, as well as secondary literature in both Vietnamese and English, this paper will examine what it calls Saigon’s "international strategy" in the latter half of the Second Indochina War. In particular, this paper will trace the course of Saigon’s diplomacy towards South and Southeast Asia during the period of negotiations from late 1968 to early 1973. In an attempt to shore up world support for its war against Vietnamese communists both north and south of the seventeenth parallel, the RVN embarked on an accelerated diplomatic struggle during this period.
Not only did the RVN wage war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF)-Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), Saigon undertook a battle of wills against its major patron, the United States. This paper will argue that RVN diplomacy following the Tet Offensive to the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement originated in Saigon and not Washington. In other words, the Thieu administration from late 1968 to early 1973 was no puppet of the United States. The foreign policy of the RVN steered not only an independent course from Nixon and Kissinger, but oftentimes collided with Washington’s policies as the allies pursued different ends in the war against Vietnamese communists.
Session 68: Trees Falling in the Forest: Theme, Tradition, and Audience in Modern Khmer Literature
Organizer and Discussant: Frank Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Teri Shaffer Yamada, California State University, Long Beach
Keywords: Khmer, literature, Cambodia, poetry.
Cambodia has a rich literary tradition dating over a millennium, including folk tales, proverbs, royal chronicles, and adaptations of Buddhist tales and Indian epics. The majority of traditional Khmer literature was written in verse, concerned with limited themes, and read predominantly by an elite minority.
In the second half of the 20th century, "modern" prose fiction began to be written in Khmer, dealing with Khmer social themes. The influences of older, verse literature continues to be felt in modern prose in content and sometimes style. The issue of who constitutes the audience of modern Khmer prose also presents itself, especially in light of the slow development of printing and education in 20th-century Cambodia.
Relatively recent developments in Cambodia, such as the wars and social upheavals of the 1970s (which effectively ceased the production and consumption of literature for a time) and the rapid rise in popularity of new media in the 1980s and 1990s, have had a profound effect on the reading habits of Khmers and propensity of potential authors to consider writing a viable pursuit. Thus, the questions of literary production and consumption become more complex. Finally, the writers and audiences of modern Khmer literature in diasporic communities further complicate considerations of what constitutes "Khmer literature today."
The papers in this panel will touch upon all three of the major tissues described above: modern literature as reflection of current social themes, modern literature in the continuum of traditional literature, and the issue of audience in modern Khmer literature.
Engraving Angkor: The Narration of the National Icon in Traditional and Modern Khmer Literature
Klairung Amratisha, Chulalongkorn University
The fiery outburst of anti-Thai demonstrations in Phnom Penh on 29 January 2003 left the Thai Embassy and Thai business establishments ablaze and official Cambodian-Thai relations in deep peril. The rioting was triggered by a story published in a local newspaper that a Thai actress, who was very popular among Cambodians, had accused Cambodia of stealing Angkor Wat from Thailand. This rumor sparked widespread outrage throughout the country where Angkor Wat is regarded as the national symbol and source of pride.
This paper seeks to explore the Khmer sentiment towards Angkor, Angkor Wat in particular, as reflected in Khmer literature from the traditional to modern. The classical verse literature of the 16th and 17th centuries as well as modern prose writings of the colonial period dealing with Angkor will first be examined with relation to their sociopolitical and cultural context. However, the paper will pay more attention to the analysis of the modern novel and poetry, which base their themes and other literary elements on Angkor in order to see the continuity and variations of Cambodian perception of Angkor as the primary locus of national sentiment.
Modern writings to be studied will range from historical novels of the post-independence period to contemporary short poems and will cover works of both local and exiled writers.
Social Criticism in Modern Cambodian Literature: The Case of Kong Bun Chhoeurn
George Chigas, Independent Scholar
This paper focuses on two recent texts by the Cambodian writer and poet Kong Bun Chhoeurn, one of the few eminent writers who survived the genocide and continues to be a major force in Cambodian literature today.
In the aftermath of the genocide, Kong Bun Chhoeurn returned to Cambodia in 1981, but he fled the country again in 2000 after publishing "The Fate of Miss Tat Marina" in which he describes the December 1999 acid attack on his niece by the wife of a high-ranking government official. The paper will analyze Kong’s book about that event, along with a collection of his poetry entitled "Cambodian Ills," as a contemporary example of social criticism in Cambodian literature.
In an attempt to place Kong’s work in a broader context, the paper will also consider previous examples of social criticism in modern Cambodian literature, beginning with "The Story of Tum Teav" and continuing with the works of major novelists of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Nou Hach, Rim Kin, Gnok Thaem, and Soth Polin.
Finally, the fact that Kong Bun Chhoeurn felt compelled to flee the country after writing about the story of his niece’s disfiguring injury tells us many things about the role of literature and its readership in Cambodia today. With this in mind, the paper attempts to draw some conclusions about the influence of literature and social criticism in Cambodian society and its role as a force for change following years of government-sponsored propaganda.
Khmer Poetry in the 2000s: Barriers to New Beginnings
Yin Luoth, Independent Scholar
Modern Khmer poets, influenced by a French colonial education, emerged in the 1940s. This growing literary activity was halted during the civil wars of the late 1960s and completely destroyed during the Khmer Rouge era, 1975–1979. New beginnings for poetry occurred with the UNTAC period (1991–93) when censorship laws were reduced.
Currently, there are problems with the distribution of all forms of literature, since there is no central book distribution system in Cambodia. Poetry collections are typically self-published and distributed by the author to other writers. Printing runs are usually very limited. Due to these circumstances, the audience for poetry remains small. Poets do not have many venues for the performance of their work, such as conferences, workshops, or coffee shops. There are few bookstores in Cambodia where authors may be invited to discuss or perform their work. Newspapers and popular magazines, which may infrequently publish poetry, typically do not remunerate the poet for his or her work.
Irrespective of these barriers, Cambodia remains a land of many poets. This is indicated by the number of contestants, from both urban and rural areas, who submitted their poetry for consideration in the 2003 Nou Hach Literary Awards. New strategies for the publication of their work in both print and over radio are under development while some of the younger or more avant-garde poets are moving beyond the traditional themes of romance and didacticism, while struggling with the strong pull of traditional verse forms as opposed to a free-verse style.
Cambodia’s Culture of Song: Contemporary Lyrics and Audience
Teri Shaffer Yamada, California State University, Long Beach
The report "Publishing in Cambodia" (2002) provided information on the publishing industry, current writers, and reading public. All three sectors experience significant barriers. The lack of a central organized distribution system exacerbates the problem of the profit margin for publishers. Many writers cannot get their poetry or novels published and have little access to a fair peer review process. The reading public remains comparatively small in relation to other Southeast Asian countries, because of the high illiteracy rate, 80% in the rural areas.
The intent of this paper is to offer evidence for another literary genre: the song lyric. Traditional song lyrics and folktales form the heart of Cambodian literature. Contemporary song is an eclectic mix of traditional melodies and new lyrics and influence from contemporary musics of other Asian countries and the West. Hundreds of videocassettes, DVDs, CDs, and tapes are available for public consumption in a market uninhibited by copyright restrictions.
The production of song lyric books had became quite popular by 1998. Originally, booksellers produced their own song lyric publications. By 2003 three song lyric publishers based in Phnom Penh had replaced this system of multiple production. The size and cost of the songbooks had been reduced to 3" x 4" booklets. One publisher produces up to 10,000 copies of the most popular song lyric books. The synergy between mass media entertainment and the long-standing popularity of song has produced a vibrant market and growing audience for this genre.
Session 69: Islam and Popular Culture in Post-Soeharto Indonesia
Organizer and Chair: Andrew Weintraub, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: Michael Gilsenan, New York University
This panel will examine the contested terrain of Islamic discourse and popular culture as the ground upon which struggles over ideology (ideas, meanings, and values) and shifting relations of power are negotiated in mass-mediated texts of post-Soeharto Indonesia. Panelists will focus on representations and meanings of Islam that circulate through language, sound, movement, theater, and visual texts. The panel seeks to address the ways in which mass-mediated forms help to define Islamic discourse in post-Soeharto Indonesia. Media analyzed in this panel include popular literature, television, video, music, and dance. The panel identifies the ways in which mass-mediated texts have the potential to transform Muslim identities within particular social and historical conditions.
Socializing Conspicuous Piety: "Love the Prophet" Videos for Indonesian Children
Benjamin G. Zimmer, Kenyon College
Since 1999, the Indonesian performing duo of Haddad Alwi and Sulis has marketed a series of enormously popular cassettes and videos of Islamic music for children under the rubric "Cinta Rasul" ("Love the Prophet"). Through their performances, Alwi, an ethnic Arab man, and Sulis, a twelve-year-old girl, have helped popularize the salawat genre of pious Arabic-language songs in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. On the heels of the success of the first "Cinta Rasul" music cassette, said to have sold more than 1.5 million copies since its June 1999 release, Alwi and Sulis collaborated on karaoke-style videos of their songs that were broadcast regularly on television stations during the fasting month of Ramadan. Compilations of videos also circulated in the popular VCD format and rapidly became top sellers in many parts of Indonesia. In this paper I discuss how the ultra-pious imagery of the "Cinta Rasul" videos, in which Alwi and Sulis are joined by a choir of children performing choreographed prayerful gestures, provide a new mass-mediated model of conspicuous Muslimness for Indonesian children. Furthermore, I analyze how the scrolling romanized transliteration of the Arabic-language lyrics, intended to allow children to sing along at home karaoke style, offers an orientation to the sacred language of Arabic that stands in marked contrast to traditional, institutionalized forms of Islamic pedagogy in Indonesia.
Bodies That Drill: Dangdut and Islam in Indonesia
Andrew Weintraub, University of Pittsburgh
Inul Daratista is a 25-year-old dangdut singer from East Java whose stage shows and performative discourse emphasize a style of dancing she calls goyang ngebor ("drilling moves"), "gyration of the hips at break-neck speed that some people have likened to a tornado." Her dancing was recently described as "pornographic" and therefore haram, forbidden by Islam. In February 2003, the Indonesian Council of Ulemas (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, or MUI) declared that her dancing and costume were circumscribed by its July 2002 fatwa (edict) against pornography. Dangdut superstar and Muslim cleric Rhoma Irama called a virtual, but not enforceable, ban on her, stating that she was degrading dangdut and Islam. The calls from MUI and Rhoma Irama sparked a huge debate in the popular press among politicians, intellectuals, celebrities, fans, and even doctors, who warned fans not to try the dangerous drilling move at home without warming up properly. This paper will interrogate the value and meaning of the Inul phenomenon (Inul-mania or Fenom-inul) as it articulates with discourses about class, women, and the nation in contemporary Indonesian society. I argue that the debates over Inul’s dancing represent struggles over cultural authority, and that these struggles have important ideological stakes.
Gaul Tapi Islami: The Rise of Popular Islamic Youth Literature
Putut Widjanarko, Ohio University
During the last several years, a remarkable number of fiction books for Muslim urban youth have been published in Indonesia. This new literary genre, called "Islamic youth-literature" (sastra-remaja Islami), represents a new trend in Indonesian literature. Previously, literature for Muslim youth conspicuously demonstrated and taught Islamic values; for example, many texts presented Islamic stories of the prophets and their companions. Sastra-remaja Islami adopts a style of youth literature from widely popular youth magazines including Hai, Gadis, and Anita Cemerlang. The stories focus on the daily life of Muslim youth culture and are written in a language style common among youth called bahasa gaul. Indonesian Muslim youth welcome this genre, as demonstrated by market response and support by Forum Lingkar Pena, an organization of some three thousand young writers that has promoted this genre. In this paper, I discuss how this new genre has helped Muslim youth to form a kind of "hybrid" identity in which readers identify as Muslim but have also appropriated symbols of global popular youth culture. At the same time, I argue, this phenomenon illustrates a shift of Islamic authority from traditional clerics and sources to mass-mediated texts.
Islam for the Holidays: The Shifting Roles of Religion on Indonesian Television
Gareth Barkin, Washington University, St. Louis
While Indonesia’s burgeoning private television industry has prospered through the country’s lingering economic malaise, it remains ideologically constrained by many of the content restrictions established during Soeharto’s New Order era. One area in which producers have broken from these norms is in the field of religious imagery and the adaptation of religiously-themed forms and narratives. This paper—based on an ethnographic study of television producers in Indonesia and the structures that influence them—discusses the strategies and goals behind the industry’s handling of the various, self-delineated, religious audiences. It examines the institutionalized prayer shows that private stations have aired since their inception, as well as new genres and conventions that are invoked by producers in their efforts to both placate and exploit religious sentiment among Indonesia’s culturally heterogeneous population. Attention is placed on the relationship between major Islamic organizations and commercial television, as well as the sharply contrasting methods of Christian broadcasters. I argue that the tension of appeasing cultural conservatives has been redirected by the industry into content that appeals to the much larger demographic of moderate Muslims through the local adaptation of narrative conventions and stylistic forms that are "borrowed" from an array of global media.
Session 87: Muslim Experience in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Organizer: Anna M. Gade, Oberlin College
Chair: Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Daniel Gold, Cornell University
Ideals of piety and transcendent authority are increasingly significant within regional and global systems of Muslim discourse. This is sometimes a result of labeling moral, legal, and interior dimensions of social experience as normatively "Islamic," characteristic of contemporary Islamic revitalization. Our papers explore how an interiorized and esoteric piety has become a salient feature of contemporary Muslim politics, culture, and experience in Southeast Asia. Papers draw on data from local, national and transnational Muslim communities across island and mainland Southeast Asia and beyond to show how transcendental and ordinary Muslim piety interact to shape contemporary Islamic social change in a global context.
Rozehnal describes transnational linkages structured by networks of a Sufi order that extend across Southern Asia, using these connections to explain systems of contemporary religious revitalization in Malaysia. Gade’s paper compares contemporary Islamic revitalization in island and mainland Southeast Asia through the interiorizing aspects of Qur’anic education. Treating ideas of local Acehnese identity, nationhood, and aestheticized Islamic piety, George explores the subjectivity of a Muslim painter, including the boundaries of interpreting the religiously transcendent along with the representation of violence. Woodward describes how religious and esoteric discourses inform understandings of contemporary political and economic culture in Indonesia. Overall, the panel contributions invite comparison of contemporary Islamic movements, their ideals and expressions, as well as connections with and among local, national, and transregional systems. By considering the intersection of ordinary and extraordinary modes of Muslim experience across Southeast Asia, each presentation reveals how Islamic religious commitments inflect contemporary Muslim lifeworlds.
From Karachi to Kuala Lumpur: Charting Sufi Identity across the Indian Ocean
Robert Rozehnal, Lehigh University
As a case study of transnational religious identity, this paper examines how a South Asian Sufi order has rooted itself in Southeast Asia. The Chishti Sabiri order (silsila) is grounded in a long and storied Indo-Muslim past and now thrives in contemporary Pakistan. In the past twenty-five years, the silsila has also progressively expanded eastward via an interpersonal teaching network. Today a dynamic group of Malaysian disciples (murids) lives and works in and around the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. Comprised of ethnic Malays, Chinese, and Indians—many of them converts to Islam—they fit a general profile: both men and women, they are predominantly educated, middle-class, and mobile urbanites. Fully enmeshed in the contingencies of twenty-first century life, these adepts move fluidly between multiple epistemological, linguistic, and geographic universes. At the same time, as followers of Pakistani Sufi masters, they are linked to a distinctively South Asian identity. Drawing on recent fieldwork, this paper traces the complex processes of cultural accommodation and adaptation involved in transplanting the Chishti Sabiri silsila. With attention to continuity and change, I explore how transnational Sufi identity is publicly expressed in mass media publications (from printed texts to Cyberspace web pages) and privately experienced in ritual practices (meditation, music, and pilgrimage). An examination of this complex Indian Ocean network of piety and practice illustrates that in today’s Malaysia—as in contemporary Pakistan—Chishti Sabiri Sufism is imagined and inscribed anew in texts, even as it is continuously embodied and performed in ritual contexts.
Qur’anic Education and Interiority in Island and Mainland Southeast Asia
Anna M. Gade, Oberlin College
Global systems of contemporary Islamic revitalization are often characterized by educative strategies and goals. Considering modes of Islamic education that relate to the Qur’an in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority Southeast Asia, this paper explains distinctive regional systems of religious revitalization in terms of long-standing Islamic patterns of interiorized piety. Data draw on fieldwork on a widespread revitalization movement in Indonesia in the late 1990s as well as research among Muslim-minority communities in Cambodia. In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, a movement of religious revitalization in the 1990s was Qur’an-focused; educative and emotional structures of interiorized piety that were conveyed through strategies of teaching, learning, and performance explain the energy and salience of this expression. In Cambodia, where Cham Muslims were killed at a rate greater than the population at large in the Khmer Rouge era, multiple processes now overlap in initiatives for Islamic and Qur’anic schooling. These revitalizing efforts at rebuilding selves and society are supported by regional and global Muslim communities, and are interpreted in terms of the lived social experiences of recovery. Together, the Indonesian and Cambodian cases show that within local, regional, and worldwide networks of Qur’anically-focused education and community-building, patterns of Qur’anic affect and interiority shape social systems of Islamic revitalization movements in contemporary island and mainland Southeast Asia.
Dzikir and the Acehnese Dead
Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Islamic visual culture is always shaped by the political and cultural circumstances in which it shows itself. Consider the political violence that haunts Aceh and Indonesia more broadly. Islamic visual culture is here a culture of predicaments, as violence and theological traditions refigure the prospects for the visible and the visionary. Such representational predicaments may be found at the heart of the "Aceh Series," a set of paintings by A. D. Pirous that were recently displayed at Jakarta’s Galeri Nasional. Known for his painterly explorations in abstraction and Qur’anic calligraphy, Pirous is also a troubled political subject, for he considers himself both Indonesian and Acehnese. This wounded subjectivity finds expression in the series, most generally in repeated and anguished rebuke over the culture of violence in Aceh. But a related predicament is cloaked in the ratios of abstraction and human figuration in this series. Abstraction and Qur’anic calligraphy may be read as exercises in "visual dzikir," a contemplative pursuit of divine and transcendent being through visible form. Visual dzikir is triply esoteric by virtue of the spiritual interiority it implies, its association with adepts in modernist aesthetics, and its ties to Sufi discourse. Should such transcendental gestures be reconciled with human figuration in these paintings, where the bodies and faces of murdered innocents or the martyrs of Acehnese history pull our attention to suffering, injustice, and political pursuits in the everyday material world?
Esoteric Knowledge and the Indonesian Economic Crisis
Mark R. Woodward, Arizona State University
It is generally accepted that modern Indonesian political culture has been profoundly shaped by traditional Javanese notions of kingship and authority. One of the central tenets of Javanese political theory is that heads of state, be they Sultans or Presidents, possess and embody esoteric knowledge allowing them to mediate between Allah and the general populace, serving as a conduit conveying Allah’s blessing and mercy to the people. Material prosperity is among the consequences of the monarch’s spiritual attainments and knowledge. So long as he maintains a proper relationship with Allah and follows the moral order in his behavior, the state will be peaceful and prosperous. Should the leader fall from this state of grace, however, chaos, economic decline, famine, and plague are among the predictable results. This paper examines Indonesians’ interpretations of the collapse of the Indonesian economy in 1997 and the subsequent mass movements that led to the collapse of the Soeharto regime; it demonstrates that Indonesian discourse about what came to be known as the "multi-dimensional crisis" wove together political, economic, and religious themes. Many attributed the crisis to Soeharto’s moral failings and subsequent loss of divine grace, arguing publicly and privately that the economic crisis could only be resolved and material prosperity restored through the emergence of a leader whose moral character and esoteric knowledge would reestablish the links between humans. To the extent that economic recovery is contingent upon public confidence, the view that prosperity and the spiritual qualities of political leaders are linked is correct.
Organizer: Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair and Discussant: Cuong Tu Nguyen, George Mason University
Keywords: vernacular, nôm, gender, Buddhism, Catholicism, folk religion, Trinh.
In every national history, certain features embody that country’s unique cultural heritage. In the literature on Vietnam, the emergence and use of a vernacular demotic script (nôm) since the medieval period has become a key signifier of contemporary national identity. While the script has been reified as a sign of proto-national greatness, most historical research (in any language) only makes use of classical Chinese or French sources, silencing vernacular perspectives present in the nôm sources. The papers lift local voices from the historical record by reading early modern Vietnamese literary, religious, and social history through nôm texts.
This panel challenges contemporary constructions of Vietnamese history through local narratives. Dr. Thi An Tran’s paper provides the theoretical background to exploring Vietnamese history and literature by examining how literary figures are transformed into cultic heroes. Dr. Thuân’s uses vernacular literature to trace the cultural, religious, and social transformations of the Le-Trinh period, particularly the revival of Buddhist practices and emergence of Christianity. Tran’s paper builds on Thuân’s findings by exploring the vernacularization of Buddhist and Christian feminine virtuousness, emerging from Trinh family support, in the seventeenth century. Finally, Nam Nguyen’s paper turns the narrative of religious transmission on its head by tracing the story of Lady Vu from forsaken wife to proto-national heroine to transnational cultic deity. His meticulous research demonstrates that traditional narratives of Vietnamese folk religious practices transcend regional and national boundaries. These four papers, all grounded in sources written in the demotic script, present rich [re]readings of local experience in Vietnamese history. While the first two papers revise the conceptual paradigms in Vietnamese history and literature, the second two explore the gendered dynamics of religious practice and transmission in the "Vietnamese context." They explore the links between language, text, and historical processes and provide a nuanced picture of early modern Vietnamese society.
Truong Hong, Truong Hat: Reciprocal Relations between Folk Legends, Cults, and Hagiography
Thi An Tran, Harvard University
Students of Vietnamese history, religion, and culture are familiar with fantastic narratives of heroines and heroes who embody Vietnamese cultural uniqueness. The stories, many of which emerged in the initial period of independence from Chinese domination (10th–15th centuries) have been employed as historical sources in the writing of Vietnamese linear history. Although these sources present rich pictures of the literary imagination, the details of the stories are often used uncritically to bolster contemporary narratives of national greatness. This paper seeks to move beyond this method by examining both content and form to explore Vietnamese religious history.
Using the example of stories of Truong Hong and Truong Hat, this paper examines the Viet Đien U Linh as literary narrative and studies how the stories informed and were transformed by folk religious practices. It draws upon field research from over three hundred sites of worship to the heroes and literary and narrative sources to present a theory on the transformation of Vietnamese hagiography and cult practices. The paper also explores the influences of such literary models on contemporary cults in Vietnamese society and presents a theoretical backdrop for understanding the relationship between "orthodox" and folk religious practices by exploring the links between the Vietnamese literary text and religious practice.
Re-representations of Trinh Family Rule through Nôm Poetry
Khac Thuân Đinh, Institute of Han-Nôm Studies
The period of Trinh rule in Vietnamese history (17th–18th centuries) is marked in the national narrative as one of usurpation of power by a rapacious family, spiraling the country into two hundred years of civil warfare. However, extant sources suggest that immense transformation in cultural, economic, and religious life accompanied Trinh rule. This paper modifies contemporary representations of Trinh family rule by exploring the cultural and economic development through nôm poetry of the period.
The poems, the majority of which were recorded in stone steles found throughout contemporary northern Viet Nam, describe a period of economic prosperity, peace in the kingdom, and religious revivalism. The paper specifically explores the rules of Trinh Can and Trinh Cuong and their economic and cultural policies and representations of those policies in vernacular poetry. During their rule, a Buddhist revivalism swept over the country as Vietnamese economic and cultural trade between the northern state (Đàng Ngoài), the Southern State (Đàng Trong), and Western countries filled the coffers of the state. While the Trinh lords promoted economic development at the state level, female members of the family extended the largesse into villages through direct and indirect support of Buddhist temples and Catholic churches. That the period of Trinh rule marked such drastic transformations in economic and religious life affords closer study, and this paper proposes to do so from the perspective of poetic sources.
Feminizing the "Orthodox": Images of Buddhist and Christian Deities in Seventeenth-Century Nôm Texts
Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Literature describing Buddhist and Christian practices in early modern Vietnamese society often notes the feminine character of practice but seldom addresses the links between the two. This paper explores the relationship between text, language, and religious experience by examining how Vietnamese monks and local and foreign missionaries retold stories of feminine virtue to their gendered audiences. The Buddhist narratives of Quan Âm Thi Kính and Nam Hai Quan Âm, feminine "Vietnamese" incarnations of the Avelokitesvara, and the feminine representations of saints in the Majorca and Philipê Binh documents serve as the two genres of writing to be explored.
The stories from Buddhist texts emerged out of a religious revivalism of the seventeenth century and detail stories of virtuous women who protect their female followers. The two incarnations, the Thousand Arm Buddha and the Mother Offering a Child, embody the hopes of sonless Vietnamese Buddhist faithful. Stories of virtuous feminine Catholic saints likewise appealed to female converts, whose adoption of Christian notions of an afterlife for all presented hopes for their spirits to survive. The paper attempts to determine how the two genres of writing influenced one another and why such texts (which were read to their audiences) resonated with the lives of the faithful.
Rubbings of stele inscriptions from Buddhist temples and Catholic burial grounds and ethnographic observations from local and European observers will be used to illuminate the religious texts. Research for this paper was performed in archives in Hà Noi, Paris, and Rome.
The Account of the Young Woman from Nam Xuong: Literary Texts and the Making of a Cult
Nam Nguyen, Harvard University
This paper explores the canonization of a woman by examining how folk religious practice becomes orthodox in early modern Vietnamese literature. It demonstrates how a story of a virtuous woman underwent a canonizing/mystifying process and emerged as a fixture in the Vietnamese canon.
"Nam Xuong Nu Tu Luc (The Account of the Young Woman from Nam Xuong) is one of the most appealing stories in Truyen Ky Man Luc (TKML, Collection of Chuanqi Tales Casually Recorded). It recounts the story of Lady Vu, who was wrongly accused of adultery, leading to her suicide. Moved by her tragic death, inhabitants of her local region built a shrine to her spirit. Official approval of the cult came with the emperor Lê Thánh Tông’s praising of Lady Vu in two of his nôm poems.
In TKML, she was first fictionalized, mystified, and canonized in a unique atmosphere that mixed Daoist and Southeast Asian religious factors. Later texts, such as Vu Thi Liêt Nu Than Luc (Hagiography of the Virtuous Woman from the Vu Family) and Nam Xuong Liêt Nu Vu Thi Tân Truyên (New Story of the Virtuous Woman Vu from Nam Xuong) carefully constructed her heavenly biographical background, describing her not only as a fairy exiled to this world, but also a divine rescuer and/or national heroine saving the emperor Lê Thánh Tông from dangers in his expenditory campaign against the Champa. In the twentieth century, Lady Vu was worshiped by Vietnamese and the French as a goddess of fecundity. The cult of Lady Vu continues to be popular today, and many other anecdotes have been incorporated into her "official" biography published by the local government.
Organizer and Chair: Mary P. Callahan, University of Washington
Discussants: Melford E. Spiro, University of California, San Diego; Catherine Raymond, Northern Illinois University; Monique Skidmore, Australian National University; F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; David I. Steinberg, Georgetown University
For nearly fifty years, the study of modern Burma has been shaped by the work of Dr. Sarah Bekker. Her pioneering fieldwork in cultural anthropology, her commitment to the arts of Burma, and her willingness to facilitate collaboration have influenced students of anthropology, politics, history, and art. In this roundtable, we will take a look back at Dr. Bekker’s systematic studies of cultural interactions, ranging from how schoolchildren relate to each other to how spirit mediums are depicted in art. Senior scholars David I. Steinberg and F. K. Lehman will reflect on Dr. Bekker’s unique career. Melford E. Spiro, who stayed with Dr. Bekker’s family during his fieldwork in Burma, will share his experiences of working with her. Roundtable member Monique Skidmore will discuss how junior scholars today draw upon Dr. Bekker’s innovative use of social psychology in their studies of contemporary social relations. Catherine Raymond, director of the Burma Studies Center at Northern Illinois University, will discuss the Konrad and Sarah Bekker Art Collection at NIU’s Art Museum.
The timing of this roundtable is appropriate, given expanding opportunities to conduct systematic research in Burma. Until recently, little access was available for any scholars, although a handful of historians were able to conduct research on bygone eras. As more students and young researchers are permitted greater access to Burma in the coming years, studies of contemporary culture are likely to flourish.
Session 106: Seeking Peace and Understanding: Indonesian Responses to Violence
Organizer and Chair: Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
Discussant: Andi Faisal Bakti, International Institute for Asian Studies
In response to the violence that has erupted in Indonesia in recent years, scholars have concentrated on analyzing and autopsying said violence. This panel departs from this tendency and suggests new avenues of inquiry, namely, the ways in which Indonesians seek to understand this violence and seek to construct peace. The papers range across the country with data from Bali, the national press, Sulawesi, Alor, and Muslim Java. Several of the papers examine how people seek to reconceptualize group identities. Of particular interest are the efforts of individuals and groups seeking to distance themselves from the violence and outside perceptions that they too are culpable in some fashion. Two of the papers touch on the place of media in the construction of these outside perceptions and efforts to mediate them. This activity includes Balinese rituals to restore cosmic order, Javanese Muslim discourse designed to define jihad as peaceful, the artistic efforts of Toraja to propagate peace between historical enemies, and the Alorese reinvention of a ritual to create a pan-island identity. These efforts are contrasted by the influence of Western media on how Indonesian media portrayed the Bali bombings. The panel seeks to examine the ways in which the concepts in use in the discourses around peace and violence are constructed and contested.
Strong and Weak Media? On the Articulation of "Terorisme" in Contemporary Indonesia
Richard Fox, Balinese and Javanese Research Archive (BAJRA)
The tragic bombings in Bali last October left some 200 dead and countless others injured. Commentators in the mainstream Euro-American media were at first cautious in attributing responsibility for the blasts, but their caution rapidly gave way to speculation; then ‘expert opinions’ were sought and invocations of al-Qaeda became the order of the day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, within hours of the blasts, the incident had been framed in terms of a familiar post-9/11 articulation of ‘terror’ and ‘Islamic extremism.’ Although the Indonesian media were not always uncritical of this drive to set the bombing within the framework of the now seemingly ubiquitous ‘war on terror,’ the gap between Indonesian and broadly Western coverage—at least with regard to what might be considered ‘the facts’ of the incident—seemed to grow progressively smaller as the days passed. Taking Talal Asad’s (1986) notion of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ languages as a point of departure, this paper will examine the transformation of Indonesian representations of the bombing, from the initial days through the arrests and eventual trials of the suspects. Particular emphasis will be placed on the notion of ‘terorisme,’ its transformation in the mainstream Indonesian media, and how this process might be related to journalistic practices associated with the broadly Western coverage of ‘the war on terror.’
Sweeping the Unquiet Dead: Violence, Surveillance and Ritual Politics in Bali
Leslie K. Dwyer, Haverford College; Degung Santikarma, Independent Scholar
In the months following the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002, media accounts framed Balinese responses to the events as primarily "ritual" in nature. The ceremonies performed at the bomb site and on behalf of the uncremated dead were described by both government organizers and foreign observers as restoring cosmic "order" and "cleansing" the island of the polluting influence of violence. Such narratives fit quite well with tourism industry images of an inherently peaceful Bali, yet they obscure how ritual has become a privileged site for both coalescences of identity and contestations over how to understand and address violence. Our paper raises several questions. How has ritual practice, and the increasing penetration of the state into the ritual domain framed violence in particular ways? How has ritual language, especially that of nyapuh, or "sweeping" rituals for the uncremated dead, come to articulate with state discourses of order and political cleanliness as well as the "sweepings" by Balinese militias (pecalangan) of non-Balinese residents of the island that followed the bombings? How has tourism produced particular images and subjectivities that shade speech about identity and violence in Bali? And how do memories of violence, especially memories of the 1965–66 killings of up to 100,000 Balinese accused of communism, articulate with efforts to make sense of contemporary violence?
Cultivating "Community" in an Era of Conflict: Artistic and Expressive Strategies for Producing Peace in Two Indonesian Locales
Kathleen M. Adams, Loyola University Chicago
Whereas most Indonesianists have concentrated on analyzing and autopsying violence, this paper examines how "peace" (or religious/ethnic accommodation) is produced. Just as it is important to ask why some places have been torn by religious, ethnic, and class violence, it is equally valuable to ask why other nearby locales seem to remain comparatively peaceful, despite economic and employment woes. This paper focuses on two Indonesian regions that have, at least for now, escaped eruptions of communal violence: the predominantly Christian Tana Regency in South Sulawesi and the ethnically and religiously-diverse Indonesian island of Alor. Specifically, this paper explores how, in these locales, words, ritual practices, and material creations have become vehicles for imagining ways in which to harmoniously engage with other groups as well as with the broader events transpiring in the world. My analysis builds on recent work by Mueggler (2001) and addresses the reworking of indigenous expressive traditions by local community members to foster ethical responses to the threat of violence and conflict. The cases examined include contemporary Toraja artists’ new genre of "ethical" carvings designed to propagate peace between historic enemies and some Alor islanders’ reconceptualization of the ritual tradition of bel-basa as a basis for a pan-island identity. I argue that these and other rhetorical and artistic strategies illustrate local people’s attempts to develop ways of speaking to, connecting with, and redefining potential enemies.
Defending the Peaceful Jihad: Indonesian Islamic Responses to Violence
Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida
This paper explores how Javanese Muslims in different groups have responded to acts of violence committed by other Muslim groups. This speaks to the issue of predictabilily: can we know who is likely to engage in, or support, violent actions against non-Muslims? Of particular interest is the question of how moderate Muslims negotiate identities vis-à-vis radical Islam and how the contours of communities become difficult to define. For example, in discussing groups like Laskar Jihad and other radical groups, certain religious leaders are hesitant to call them non-Muslims but claim that they have little religious education. This becomes a way of defining both themselves and others. Given a strong tradition of defining jihad primarily in peaceful terms, the paper will explore how the proponents of said interpretation have sought to shape the public discourse about the concept of jihad. What is clear is that the definition of jihad and conceptions of Islamic identity in Indonesia are hotly contested. Therefore, these data have clear implications for studying and understanding Indonesian Islam.
Session 125: Contending Alternative Modernities in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam
Organizer: Clarissa Adamson, George Washington University
Chair: Christophe Robert, Cornell University
Discussant: Suzanne A. Brenner, University of California, San Diego
Modernity in Southeast Asia has often been understood as a consequence of modernization and development, i.e., improvements in infrastructure, industry, agriculture, and education. Our aim in this panel is not to define "modernity," but to see how people "locally" view it, and what they try to articulate in debates about "development" and visions of the future. In Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam developmental modernity as a state project has led to ambivalence and anxiety about emergent forms of consumption, community, and belonging. Ideas of alternative modernities arise when groups imagine ways of being modern as correctives to hegemonic or nationalist models of modernity perceived as too Western or as benefiting only privileged segments of the population.
We argue that what social scientists and the people they study identify as alternative modernities often involves modes of social alignment and community building that appeal to notions of morality—whether based in religious resurgence, discourses of good and evil, defense of "authentic" culture (however reconstructed), or social justice. Does the idea of alternative modernities help us understand these social movements or does it reflect a misrecognition (from researchers and/or "local" people) of the broader economic and political contexts in which such movements emerge? We examine how negotiating modernity involves constructing a moral community and attempts to lessen anxieties about the rapid social changes resulting from the global reach of capitalist forms. Panelists analyze these questions with reference to debates about gender in Java, rural social protest in Thailand, and debates over sexuality in Vietnam.
Emergent Sexualities and the Search for the Modern in Urban Vietnam
Christophe Robert, Cornell University
The communist project involved a different orientation toward modernity. An alternative, communist modernity was going to be achieved through a radical, non-capitalist reorganization of relations of production and social life. In Vietnam this project entailed first of all establishing an independent nation after decades of French colonialism and subsequent American military intervention. The notions of modernity and progress the French and Americans imported into Vietnam were tainted with foreignness. They had to be expelled from the social body—by war if necessary—in order to build a new socialist society.
On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork on youth culture in Ho Chi Minh City, I examine the emergent discourses and changing practices of sexuality in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam after almost twenty years of market-oriented reforms. Sexuality has become a central issue through which Vietnamese articulate discussions of modernity. I argue that contentious debates about prostitution and the sexualities of urban adolescents and middle-class families are areas where the reformulation of gender roles are most visible. The proliferation and liberalization of new print and audiovisual media have multiplied the forums for these debates. Local anxieties about sexuality are linked to ongoing debates about the preservation and construction of a national Vietnamese culture in a rapidly globalizing economy. This indicates that the search for an alternative modernity is an abiding concern for both the ruling Communist Party and the people in whose name it is supposed to speak.
Mien Alter-Native Modernity in Thailand
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Arizona State University
In 1999, hundreds of highland ethnic minority Mien farmers destroyed official buildings in a Wildlife Sanctuary to press for their right to enjoy the benefits of modernity, the ideal that authorities had long used to discredit their cultural and agricultural practices as un-modern and un-Thai. Acting Modern Thai, the farmers had written letters and made cellphone calls to the authorities and sympathetic organizations and held many meetings aimed at enjoying the rights that are promised modern citizens of the democratic nation-state. They convincingly argued their case in terms of the official rhetoric of development and democracy and repeatedly anchored their rights in their official position on the national administrative terrain. Farmers’ violent demand for modernity (schools, healthcare, access to markets) has not resulted in any changes. After the act of sabotage, agents of the state insisted on their position as the source of temporality and agency. Their engagements with the would-be moderns consisted of intimidation and dismissal. The social embedding of Modernity mimics older forms of public spectacle and differentiation (Buddhism), that repeatedly have effected the agency and superiority of the state and the upper class as they marked the social membership and subordination of villages. In this setting, there can be no alternative to modernity as an index of state control and the translocal subordination of agricultural communities. Modernity’s alternatives, while recurring, are repeatedly suppressed.
Protecting the Family: Women, Modernity, and "Being Left Behind" in Indonesia
Clarissa Adamson, George Washington University
In Indonesia, fears about the ability to control the effects of globalization and social change inform popular thinking about the relationship between governance and religious and cultural values. Critics blame the former administration for embracing globalization through the import of Western-style modernity. But though for some the specter of modernity poses a threat, there is a simultaneous fear of ‘being left behind’ (ketinggalan) by the global economic community if Indonesia does not ‘modernize.’ As a response, Muslim groups—from fundamentalists to moderates—support ‘alternative’ notions of modernity rooted in Muslim values as a way to counter the perceived corrosive influence of Western modernity. At the center of this debate is the issue of women’s rights and roles and the ways in which globalization effects economic realities for both sexes.
In this presentation I draw on ethnographic research to examine the centrality of gender and a notion of ‘moral woman’ to concern about modernization and the recurrent trope of ‘being left behind’ in Java. Anxieties about new social roles for women—such as the ‘career woman’—and concerns about the ways that such roles and globalization are feared to reconfigure the family inform discourses about developing a new modern vision in order to avoid ‘being left behind.’ I show how Muslim women’s rights advocates and fundamentalist Muslims employ the notion of ‘being left behind’ to argue for different Muslim visions of modernity. My analysis reveals the ways in which notions of modernity are best understood as ‘strategic narratives’ to explain ways of facing the challenges of being part of a global capitalist system.
Session 126: Cultural Biographies of the Morally Suspect
Organizer: Jennifer Foley, Cornell University
Chair: Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
Discussant: Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: Southeast Asia, morality, historiography.
Desire, demand, power, and sacrifice interact with each other in specific historical and cultural milieus to create different forms of economic value. Arjun Appadurai has previously described this process, where objects move and out a commodity situation as "regimes of value." This panel will draw upon his idea, originally proposed to describe the social life of things, to explore how people similarly acquire and lose value, especially moral value, over time and space. We draw upon recent archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Cambodia to explore how different men acquired cultural biographies as their lives and achievements moved through different political and historical contexts. Each of the papers is concerned with how these biographies shape and hide the production, exchange, and consumption of moral currency in often unexpected ways, particularly with regard to activities that are considered to be illegitimate in one moment and not another. What strategies have been used to control the impact of the morally suspect on broader social norms? What are the consequences of these shifts on culturally specific understanding of credibility, authenticity, legitimacy, and the past? The papers will examine these issues by focusing on the struggles which have redefined how we perceive and value the lives of General Tran Do, a war hero turned dissident, Alexandre Yersin, a renowned Pasteurian whose research for the good of man often harmed many, André Malraux, who parlayed a criminal record into a ministry position, and former ARVN troops, some of whom have gone from being traitors to entrepreneurs.
Patriot or Apostate? Debating the Life and Writings of General Tran Do
Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
This paper explores the rapid transformation of retired General Tran Do from a national hero to a suspect citizen. A decorated war veteran, the General had held numerous high-ranking posts during the course of his long career, including the head of the Communist Party’s Ideological and Cultural Committee. Increasingly disenchanted by pervasive corruption and other abuses of power by Party cadres, the General began writing "open" letters in 1995 to high-ranking officials. These long and often scathing letters called on the Communist Party to make radical reforms and to abandon socialism if that was what was necessary to ensure the country’s economic development. The General was finally expelled from the Party in 1999 after 58 years of loyal service. Although the General’s writings were censored at home, they circulated privately among Party elites and widely on the Internet where he became a potent symbol of political dissidence to members of the Vietnamese diaspora and international human rights community. This paper draws upon the General’s letters and memoirs and interviews conducted with and about him, as well as other relevant materials. This information is used to analyze how the General’s life and writings have been used by different actors inside and outside Vietnam to shape competing narratives about the legacy of socialist revolution. Specifically, I will illustrate how the themes of "sacrifice," "betrayal," and "debts" form the common currency for this contentious debate over political and moral legitimacy, a debate which offers interesting insights into neglected aspects of the reform process.
Alexandre Yersin: A Misanthropic Man of the People
Sokhieng Au, University of California, Berkeley
In every major Vietnamese city, amongst streets named after Vietnamese national heroes, one often finds a Duong Pasteur or Yersin. While Pasteur’s name is familiar worldwide, Alexandre Yersin’s reputation is obscure outside of the history of microbiology. Yet, in Vietnam, no scientist seems more beloved than Alexandre Yersin. Standard historiography portrays him as a selfles