Individual Papers: Modern Development and Popular Culture

Risky Business: Gambling in Flores

Jayne Curnow, Australian National University

Gambling is fantastically popular amongst a wide cross section of the community on the predominately Catholic island of Flores in Eastern Indonesia. While gambling is illegal, regular police busts of the White Coupon lottery make for interesting news copy. However the media does not report on the many other forms of gambling, such as cards, cockfights, and board games ubiquitous at funerals. Gambling as an economic activity does not sit well with development paradigms of the Indonesian State or overseas aid agencies. Cast as greedy and wasteful, gambling evokes lazy and nefarious characters.

To Flores players who oscillate between agricultural subsistence, wage labour and a market economy, gambling is a viable economic strategy. During recent fieldwork I was told "plant 1 seed and you may get 10 back, bet Rp 1,000 you may get Rp 10,000 back." This enticing logic links agriculture and gambling through the common thread of risk. I analyse gambling as part of a diversified economic strategy and as a hub of social interaction. Gambling also provides the added bonus of being ‘refreshing’ a word that has come to mean ‘relaxing’ in Indonesian parlance. The Catholic Church denounces gambling, regarding it as the most pressing community problem. Ironically gambling is most popular on Sunday, the prescribed day of Christian rest. This paper will argue that in this conservative society, the risky business of gambling is also a form of resistance to the authority of Church and State.

Artisans of Resistance: Cambodian Sex Workers Re-examine the Ethical Subject in International AIDS Drug Trials

Margery Lazarus, University of California, San Francisco

How did a few Cambodian sex workers, leery of participating in a clinical trial of an AIDS drug, provoke an international movement to re-examine the ethics of medical research?  Conflicts erupted last fall when the Prime Minister of Cambodia abruptly terminated the country’s first randomized controlled drug trial.  This ethnographic case study examines the attempted launch and demise of the Cambodian trial, using methods of participant observation, interviews, and news reports involving sex workers, trial staff, community stakeholders, and treatment activists.  Despite sex workers’ highly marginalized status, an emergent alliance of Cambodian sex workers and activists in Thailand and France mobilized international press conferences and protests to decry the trial, leading to its closure, along with two related trials in Africa. A clash between AIDS activists, involving those who promote human rights of research subjects and those who support novel treatments for AIDS sufferers, has polarized the debate over how to conduct ethical medical research in developing countries with marginalized populations.  As AIDS research shifts from a politics of identity (of risk groups, sexuality, and gendered risk behaviors) to a politics of access to life-saving medicines, the debates are shifting to address the concerns of potential subjects of medical research.  To engage the rich contextual history of sex, gender, power, and neo-colonial medicine in Southeast Asia, this paper opens a dialogue with scholars of Southeast Asian politics to consider how future trials of AIDS medicines might better address the concerns of research subjects and beneficiaries in local and global contexts.

Ghostly Desires: The Aesthetics and Politics of Femininity and Loss in New Thai Cinema

Arnika Fuhrmann, University of Chicago

This paper investigates the popular trope of female death in contemporary Thai film as a nexus of contemporary rhetorics of loss about nation, sexuality and futurity in Thailand. Examining fantasies of the feminine in the ‘negative’ sphere of death in Thai ghost films, the paper analyzes these fantasies’ relations to visions of the future in the political sphere. The representation of women as figures of loss coincides with an official politics that mourns the loss of an imagined traditional Thai femininity and female sexual propriety. As Thai official nationalism propagates cultural revival as a strategy for the country’s successful reentry into global capitalism, femininity has to perform the work of embodying futurity.
The paper elaborates how a politics of loss and recuperation in Thailand recurs to female bodies and to an invasive intimacy with those bodies, and clarifies how a nationalism that increasingly mobilizes tradition and religion while strongly gearing itself to capitalist development, relies on complex manipulations of female bodies, sexualities and public personhood. Finally, the paper examines contemporary Thai ghost films as a terrain in which female haunting in part underwrites the Thai state’s current agendas of social engineering and sexual normalization, but ultimately also illustrates the inherent instability of such endeavors and the untenability of the demands for transparency and sexual exemplarity currently made on public female personhood in contemporary Thailand.

Doing Their Duty, Achievement Motivation in Vietnamese Children and Teenager

Kathleen Carlin, Tulane University

Vietnamese children learn from birth that their families are the center of all that is important to them.  Notable achievements in their schooling and in their careers are due to fulfilling their daily family responsibilities as students or breadwinners.  The more they achieve, the more their families allow them to control their own lives.   Fifty Vietnamese-American fifth graders who had arrived as boat people in the 1980's were asked to  tell stories  in  both Vietnamese and English  explaining T.A.T. pictures.  Since they were good students, it was expected that they would have high scores in achievement motivation; however, they were uniformly very low in any need to achieve and instead showed very high scores in both need for family affiliation and for need for power and control.   Half of these students were interviewed again five years later in high school and had fairly similar results as to motivational needs.  Also, high school records were available for a third of them.  Although one was valedictorian of her class and several received academic scholarships to good universities, it seems clear that they achieved much more because of duty to their families than for the individual personal satisfaction of winning.

Call Centres: Engines of Social Change in New Delhi

Papia Raj, McGill University, Canada

This paper explores the micro-dynamics of call centre employment in New Delhi (India), and portrays how these centres act as catalysts of socio-economic and cultural change. New Delhi is now one of the most favoured destinations for outsourced call centres from various parts of Western Europe and North America. With attractive salary packages and promises of new career opportunities, these call centres have emerged as major employment providers for young adults in New Delhi. The conditions of employment in such call centres are unique. Principle among these is that differences in time zones require employees to work at night to cater to the needs of their European and North American customers. Another distinctive feature is that, at work, those managing the telephones have English language pseudonyms and are expected to mimic Western accents to put their customers ‘at ease’. During working hours they are encouraged not only to speak like their customers but, if possible, for a few hours a day, also to think like them. Fieldwork conducted between November 2004 and March 2005 with New Delhi call centre employees and employers, reveals that such expectations and requirements have a great influence on the daily lives of employees, impacting upon their lifestyles, consumption patterns, social relations and health. This paper is an analysis of a range of these impacts and highlights how such micro-level changes have a cumulative effect on the society as a whole.