Showing papers in "Sojourn in 2010"

Commemoration and the State: Memory and Legitimacy in Vietnam

Abstract: ��� The commemorations of historical figures, both public and private, have become a powerful tool for politicians and historians in Vietnam to reconfigure the past, national heroes, and revolutionary martyrs. One of the state’s commemorative projects is devoted to glorifying the Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) soldiers, and preserving all temples and relicts related to their activities on Ly Son Island. This state project may be seen as a strategy to claim sovereignty in the face of competition from several nation states, including China, for control over the two archipelagos. Conversely, the Vietnamese state is also challenged by alternative accounts from the Ly Son people, who have introduced their own narratives. This essay analyses contestations over memory and the attempts of the Ly Son villagers to establish continuity with the past through their ancestors in order to demonstrate solidarity, patriotism, and their own prestige.

State and Social Christianity in Post-colonial Singapore

Abstract: In the context of Christianity's rapid growth in post-colonial Singapore, why has Pentecostalism replaced liberal Christianity as the dominant form in the last few decades? Going beyond existing cultural explanations of Pentecostal affinity with Asian folk religions and the modernization thesis, I look at the Church as social movement, as social Christianity engaging, specifically in Singapore, the post-colonial developmental state. Pentecostalism became popular after the state consolidated its rule in the 1980s and suppressed nascent liberal Christian movements. This is because, compared to its fundamentalist evangelical competitor, the Pentecostal development of Asian contextual theologies of spiritual warfare and blessings provided young Singaporeans with practical ideologies to make sense of the spiritual telos of the post-colonial nation and engage the developmental ethos of the state. Singaporean Pentecostalists are at the crossroads today, faced with a decision between the social justice emphasis of liberal Christianity and fundamentalist moral activism.

Transnational, Translocal, Transcultural: Some Remarks on the Relations between Hindu-Balinese and Ethnic Chinese in Bali

Abstract: In the course of the spatial turn in the social sciences, new terms and categories have emerged. This paper applies categories like translocal and transcultural to the way the Hindu-Balinese perceive themselves in order to bring out certain principles of their ethos and world view. This world view is symbolically expressed through a pair of black and white figures, Barong Landung, who are venerated as sacred by many Hindu-Balinese and perceived as representing their first ancestors or Kawitan. This multiethnic couple reminds the Hindu-Balinese that their origin as a people lies outside their island, that their religion derives from India, and that parts of their culture once came from China. Against the background to this rather global self-understanding of a local culture, the paper asks how the Hindu-Balinese define their relations with the ethnic Chinese in Bali.

Church and State in the Philippines: Tackling Life Issues in a "Culture of Death"

Abstract: ��� This paper reflects upon the “life issues” of population growth and reproductive health in the Philippines in the context of the ongoing congressional deliberation of House Bill 5043. Specific attention is paid to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church upon this process, through an analysis of the institutional pronouncements and edicts made by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). It still remains to be seen whether HB5043 will be passed into law. What can be observed even at this stage, however, is that there may well be a discordance between Church proclamations regarding faith-based sexual morality on the one hand, and popular opinion and actual practices under difficult economic and social circumstances on the other. In this respect, sustainable population control in the Philippines continues to be an uphill battle, given the Church’s persistent association of artificial contraception with a pernicious “culture of death”.

Sketching an Institutional History of Academic Knowledge Production in Cambodia (1863-2009) — Part 1

Abstract: This paper focuses on the institutional mode of academic knowledge production in Cambodia since the beginning of the colonial period. It addresses the importance of French official orientalism represented by the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient and its role in constructing a reified narrative of the nation state of Cambodia centred on the Angkorian "golden age" while orientating intellectual "modernization" through the renovation of Buddhism. This top-down approach was pursued by the successive post-independence regimes — to the exclusion of the Khmer Rouge who systematically destroyed Cambodia's intellectual and cultural life. In contradiction with state initiatives, a few researchers — mostly French and Cambodians — chose to orientate their research toward ethnographically relevant subjects, taking Cambodian society as principal agent of cultural and historical meaning. This trend, referred to as "Khmer studies", found its programmatic autonomy among exiled Cambodian intellectuals in the 1980s, paving the way for grass-root initiatives developed in Cambodia in the wake of its reopening in the 1990s.

Vietnamese Party-State and Religious Pluralism since 1986: Building the Fatherland?

Abstract: While religion continues to be kept under close scrutiny by the Vietnamese state, an undeniably positive state discourse on religious practices has emerged since the 1990s. The current state approach towards religious practices and ceremonies has transformed religion from a strictly private affair to a matter of public interest, with political leaders participating in religious festivals on behalf of the state, and religious institutions being recognized as a lasting contribution towards "building the fatherland". This essay looks at the Vietnamese state's management of religious activities and explores the extent to which religious attitudes and practices are co-opted for nation-building and state-affirming purposes. It concludes with a discussion on the relations between the religious and the political sphere in doi moi Vietnam.

Missionary Intent and Monastic Networks: Thai Buddhism as a Transnational Religion

Abstract: Buddhism, like other world religions, is a transnational religion. Its popularity and expansion are built around intensive religio-cultural networks across nation-states' boundaries. The subject under investigation in this essay is the expansion of Buddhism from Thailand to international communities abroad. I argue that the transnationalization of Thai Buddhism since the late twentieth century has emerged out of global cultural junctures, where missionary intent and monastic networks have joined forces. The transnationalization of Thai Buddhism should be understood under the triple entwining forces of (1) the growth of Thai migrant communities abroad; (2) the Buddhist missionization abroad policy sponsored by the Sangha and the Thai government through the Ministry of Education and, recently, the Office of National Buddhism under the Ministry of Culture; and (3) the growing global interest in Buddhism in international communities and subsequent travel and exchanges concerning Buddhist ordination and meditation as well as commodification between Thailand and its transnational Buddhist communities.

Surabaya Kampung and Distorted Communication

Abstract: In 2002, kampung communities on the Kali Wonokromo riverbank were forcibly evicted and their kampungs cleared on the declared grounds of flood mitigation. The clearance, however, coincided with a programme of re-imagining the city as a green and waterfront global city. These events led other riverbank kampungs into a new (and "un-Indonesian") form of coalition of resistance which, moreover, adopted its own strategies of re-imagining. There was, in effect, a "distortion" of communication on both sides of the conflict. The subsequent events have thrown some light on aspects of Jurgen Habermas's notions of manipulation and distorted communication.

Zee TV and the Creation of Hindi Media Communities in Singapore

Abstract: Indian communities in Singapore, especially of non-Tamil sub-ethnicity, have received renewed impetus to replenish their cultural ties with India as a homeland with the advent of Hindi Cable channels such as Zee TV, Sony Entertainment, and Star Plus. The availability of cable networks in the early 1990s and the proliferation of Hindi media channels have led to a renaissance of Hindi culture, fashion, cuisine, custom, and ritual among the Indian communities in Singapore. Timed against the background of India Rising, this has also fueled the impetus for Hindi speaking communities in Singapore to travel back to India to witness locations that have been included in the shooting of soaps, shop for specific fashion items introduced via the cable, participate in pilgrimage locations, and donate towards political and social causes that affect India. The Hindi cable channels have created new diasporic spheres that facilitate a sense of belonging with the homeland which was previously unimaginable.

Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia

Abstract: The articles and research notes in this Special Focus issue of SOJOURN were part of the proceedings from the international conference, “Religion in Southeast Asian Politics: Resistance, Negotiation and Transcendence”, held at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 11–12 December 2008. The conference, co-sponsored by Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Programme and generously supported by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, saw paper presenters from different parts of the world converge to examine the nexus between national politics and religion in the Southeast Asian landscape. During the conference it was clear that the presentations fell into two broad categories — the politics of Islam and the rest. This should not be surprising given the political and cultural history of the region, as well as the deep scholarship on Islam in the disciplines of contemporary history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. The editorial decision was made to hive off the papers on Islam and politics into an edited volume to be published by ISEAS, with the more interesting and noteworthy “non-Islam” papers to be published in this Special Focus issue. The papers here cover the countries of Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore and the religions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism and ancestor worship. Despite the diverse papers in this Special Focus issue, three general points can be observed from the findings presented. The first is the increasingly public role that religion is assuming, both in politics as well as in civic life. The traditional boundary between private and public spheres is clearly

Anti-colonialism in Christian Churches: A Case Study of Political Discourse in the South Indian Methodist Church in Colonial Malaya, 1890s-1930s

Abstract: This paper will highlight attitudes to British colonialism among some middle-class Indian Christian communities and will use as a case study the anti-colonial discourse within the Methodist Church. It will illustrate how diverse shades of political resistance existed among this Church community despite fears of state retribution. Discourses such as Dravidian Nationalism, Eastern Nationalism, and even the Methodist Church itself were influential in creating oppositional space and fostering intellectual freedom at a time when such expressions were frowned upon. This study thus challenges the perception that middle-class Indian communities were so pro-British that others often derogatorily referred to them as "Black Europeans".

Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma (review)

Abstract: This fascinating collection of chapters on Myanmar’s non-Burman (non-Bamar) ethnic communities stems from an international Burmese studies conference in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2002. It consists of a preface and nine chapters, beginning with a discerning introduction by the book’s editor and chief contributor, Mikael Gravers of Aarhus University. Issues of ethnicity are crucial to the formation of any modern nation state, sometimes a source of disagreement, but also as a key aspect of development, democratic or otherwise. These features are important in the case of Myanmar, where one third of the fifty million population is non-Burman. Even the physical or territorial infrastructure of the nation (seven regions with non-Burman ethnic majority and forty-seven per cent of the geography, and seven states with Burman majority) indicates something of the ethnic complexity. Gravers questions why the existential and emotional dimensions of ethnicity become engulfed in violent conflicts in some states and not others. Myanmar has seen its share of ethnic discord but, importantly, it could be argued that ethnicity was not part of “the pre-colonial power model” (p. 13). The political alliances established on tributary relationships between the “royal realm of Burma” (Myanma Naing Ngan) and various ethnic groups were more harmonious than what evolved after the British began mapping parts of the country in 1826. Gravers sets down a brief historical survey of ethnic relationships, including the impact of World War II; the key Panglong Conference of 1947 (with its confirmation of the “cultural autonomy and democratic rights of all groups”); the 1982 limitation of citizenship to descendents of ethnic groups living in Burma before 1823; the state’s “re-mythologized” history aimed at establishing an early Burman ethnic origin and identity; the various ceasefire agreements between the state and armed ethnic groups beginning in 1989; and the