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The Conundrum of Identity: Marginality, Power and Agency in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Irving C Johnson, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Discussant: Oona Thommes Paredes, Arizona State University
This panel addresses the issue of marginality and identity in Southeast Asia. Drawing from a range of scholarly and theoretical perspectives the papers show how marginality is in fact an ambiguous category. Its meanings are constantly evolving in relation to the varied contexts social actors find themselves. Courtney Work, for instance, describes how rural Cambodian migrants make sense of the confusion of urban life through reimagining village nostalgia. Nishizaki Yoshinori looks at the way villagers in Thailand’s Suphanburi province, marginalized by class and location, reorganize their communities and develop a politically powerful pan-village identity through ceremonies organized by Thailand’s former Prime Minister. These marginalities, the papers demonstrate, are intimately associated with space and the mobilities that crisscross it. Despite living on the hinterlands of the nation-state, Southeast Asia’s marginal communities actively engage with the forces of globalization. Irving Johnson and Heather Maclachan both discuss the ways in which border communities (the Kelantanese Thai in Malaysia and the Karen in Myanmar) recount their history and identity in opposition to discourses of global violence. In so doing, they articulate a powerful agency that has strong historical antecedents. Oona Paredes tackles the issue of historical agency in Mindanao through a discussion of cross cultural encounter. She shows how indigenous people maintained an upper hand in their negotiations with Spanish colonizers through narrative interpretation. In lieu of a discussant, the panel aims to encourage active audience participation through a dialogue with the panelists and the ideas expressed.
Visions of Fear in a Small Community: Terrorism and News in a Borderland Village
Irving C Johnson, National University of Singapore, Singapore
With the globalization of media technologies, once isolated communities living far from sites of terrorist violence have found themselves enveloped in a discourse of fear that has transcended national borders. How then do these marginal groups imagine and interpret the surge of violent news images and reports in their midst? I answer this question through an ethnographic investigation of a small community of Thai Buddhists who live in the predominantly Muslim state of Kelantan, Malaysia. In these villages, news-making processes such as televised reports and radio broadcasts are held together through a web of informal everyday stories that attempt to reinterpret global events in relation to the everyday lived realities of village life. In my paper, I will explore how these villagers, living on the hinterlands of the Thai and Malaysian nation-states, speak of their identity through engaging with the discourse of terror. In particular, I discuss the creative agency of news spectacles of extreme violence e.g. 9-11 and the daily bombings and shootings in Thailand’s southernmost provinces. Images of terror emanating from metropolitan news rooms force villagers to rethink the borders of space and culture and of the meanings of nationalism, history, and modernity. Theoretically, my paper addresses the question of cultural production in small communities living amidst transformative and violent landscapes. I show how grand narratives of terror in faraway places impact on the way seemingly powerless social actors define personhood and strategize their meanings of identity.
Violence, Marginality and the Border in the Social Production of Karen Identity
Heather MacLachlan, Cornell University
The Karen are one of the ethnic minority groups of Burma. They have historically lived to the east of the Burman majority area, between what are now the countries of Myanmar and Thailand. Through centuries of Burman domination, Karen people have been enslaved and, more recently, have seen their languages and culture suppressed. Most recently, the war between the Myanmar military regime and the Karen National Union has driven many Karen people into refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. The Karen are being, literally, marginalized. This paper will discuss how, facing the forces of marginalization, the Karen have managed to tell their own story. Ironically, the very fact of crossing the border has made their recent attempts to articulate their own history and identity easier. These recountings of history and identity are of utmost importance: they have been instrumental in contesting the Myanmar junta’s characterization of their armed struggle as “terrorism.” The Karen have effectively refuted this charge, speaking on the world stage to the highest levels of government in the West. Their version of history has persuaded others who can, and are, making a significant difference in their lives.
Provincial Imagining at the Margins: Ceremonial Construction of Social Identity
Yoshinori Nishizaki, Australian National University, Australia
How do villagers located in the geographical and social margins come to identify themselves as members of a larger community that transcends their village? Scholars have highlighted a variety of instruments of collective identity formation, such as newspapers, novels, maps, language, and secular education. Drawing on Durkheim and using the case of one remote village in Thailand’s Suphanburi province, this paper spotlights another means of social identity production that has received relatively insufficient attention: ceremonial participation. Specifically, I spotlight an opening ceremony for a local primary school, held by Banharn Silpa-archa, Suphanburi’s member of parliament and Thailand’s former prime minister. This well-orchestrated ceremony served to make its main participants, ordinary villagers, aware and appreciative of Banharn’s mysterious yet enormous power to channel a developmental fund from what they see as the miserly and discriminatory central state. At the same time, the ceremony served as a site where the villagers came to realize and imagine the existence of numerous other villagers “out there,” where Banharn has built a similar school and has held a similar opening ceremony. Through this kind of popular imagining, a formerly marginalized ‘backward” village comes to be firmly incorporated into a broader provincial community developed by Banharn.
Rural Urban Migration in Cambodia
Courtney Work, Brandeis University
Rural migration is a global phenomenon rife with the tension between marginality and power. In Cambodia opportunities for education and wage labor require a move to the urban center. This preliminary research examines how such ‘forced’ migration plays out across genders in the identities of young rural Cambodians suddenly turned urban. Most migrants long for their rural lives, but many love the pulse and play of the city. Limited education and a desperate quest for social and economic capital can push some youths into behaviors unheard of in their rural villages, while others leap headlong into the freedoms of city life. I will discuss issues of social memory and forgetting and examine how the intellectual and social realities in the city conflict with and support the embodied knowledge and historical awareness carried from the villages. I will also untangle the ways in which the geographic and cultural shift from the rural to the urban landscape both empowers and endangers young men and women and how the educational and economic agendas of the state, village, and family hold sway over their lives and decisions.