Browse

Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island's economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes. Indonesians also move across the border in search of work in Malaysia and Singapore as plantation and construction workers or maids. Export-processing zones such as Batam are both celebrated and vilified in contemporary debates on economic globalization. The book moves beyond these dichotomies to explore the experiences of migrants and tourists who pass through Batam. The book portrays globalization in terms of relationships that bind individuals together over long distances. It offers a unique ethnographic perspective, drawing together the worlds of factory workers and prostitutes, migrants and tourists, and creating an account of everyday life in a borderland characterized by dramatic capitalist expansion. The book uses three Indonesian concepts (merantau, malu, liar) to shed light on the mobility of migrants and tourists on Batam. The first refers to a person's relationship with home while in the process of migration. The second signifies the shame or embarrassment felt when one is between accepted roles and emotional states. The third is used to identify those who are out of place, notably squatters, couples in premarital cohabitation, and prostitutes without pimps. These sometimes overlapping concepts allow the book to move across geographical and metaphorical boundaries and between various economies.

Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. This book explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. The family remains a pivotal feature of Singaporean society and the primary unit of support. It focuses on the middle generation, caught between elderly parents who grew up speaking dialect and their own children who speak English and Mandarin. In analyzing the forces that bind these generations together, the book deploys the idea of an intergenerational “contract,” which serves as a metaphor for customary obligations and expectations. It examines the many different levels at which the contract operates within Singaporean families and offers striking examples of the meaningful ways in which intergenerational support and transactions are performed, resisted, and renegotiated. The book provides insights into the complex interplay of fragmenting and integrating forces and makes a critical contribution to the study of intergenerational relations in modern, rapidly changing societies and the challenges that Singaporean families face in today's hypermodern world.

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. This book explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The book examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the custom of burning paper money has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology.

The moral practices and concepts that circulate in Minangkabau society in West Sumatra, Indonesia articulate and help manage tensions between conflicting values and conflicting experiences of selfhood, particularly the tension between social integration and individual autonomy. The book examines these tensions ethnographically in multiple arenas: the structure of the city of Bukittinggi and its economic life, the nature of Minangkabau ethnic identity, the etiquette of everyday interactions, conceptions of the self and its boundaries, hidden spaces of personal identity, and engagements with Islamic rituals and moral conceptions. Applying the lessons of the Minangkabau case more broadly to debates on moral life and subjectivity makes the case that a deep understanding of moral conceptions and practices, including those of Islam, can never be reached simply by delineating their abstract logics or outlining the public messages they send. Instead, we must examine the subtle, sometimes intentionally obscured meanings these conceptions and practices have for the people who live them. Whether in the context of suffering or flourishing, moral subjectivity always confronts the challenge of responding to and managing the enduring tensions of human selves, which necessarily entail bodily, relational, and reflective dimensions.

What are people's life experiences in present-day Japan? This book addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. The book examines work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in the book vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

This book explores the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” It describes the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume “tradition” in multiple forms. In the colonial period, commercial representations of Korea—tourist sites, postcard images, souvenir miniatures, and staged performances—were produced primarily for foreign consumption, often by non-Koreans. In late modernity, efficiencies of production, communication, and transportation combine with material wealth and new patterns of leisure activity and tourism to enable the localized consumption of Korean tradition in theme parks, at sites of alternative tourism, at cultural festivals and performances, as handicrafts, art, and cuisine, and in coffee table books, broadcast music, and works of popular folklore. This book offers insight into how and why different signifiers of “Korea” have come to be valued as tradition in the present tense, the distinctive histories and contemporary anxieties that undergird this process, and how Koreans today experience their sense of a common Korean past. It offers new insights into issues of national identity, heritage preservation, tourism, performance, the commodification of contemporary life, and the nature of “tradition” and “modernity” more generally.

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan's unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese-language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. This book explores Mandopop's surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC. It provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. An overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC is included, followed by a look at the manner in which Taiwan's musical ethos has influenced the mainland's music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop's exceptional hybridity. The book addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the United States, and Taiwan pop's appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, it explores how Mandopop's “songs of sorrow,” with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. The book examines the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and looks at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics and attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? In response answer, it highlights Mandopop's important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life.

This volume explores the cultural politics of gender and sexuality amidst rapid social, political, and economic transformations in contemporary Asia. To date, no edited books have brought together studies of gender and sexuality from across many different societies in Asia. Few books focus on the lived experiences of gendered subjects, or the interfaces between political economy and gender and sexuality. This volume fills a significant gap in the literature and makes major contributions by not only exploring the intersections of gender and sexuality, but also integrating it with cultural and political economic analysis. This volume offers a current, grounded, and critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across different societies in Asia, namely, China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. It centers on the stories of the gendered subjects themselves as an entrée into a systematic investigation of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia. Contributors in this volume have conducted intense ethnographic fieldwork in Asian societies, and their chapters unravel the ways in which intimate gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Their grounded, unique research sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences in the current era.

Educating Monks examines the education and training of novices and young Buddhist monks of a Tai minority group on China’s Southwest border. The Buddhists of this region, the Dai-lue, are Chinese citizens but practice Theravada Buddhism and have long-standing ties to the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. The book shows how Dai-lue Buddhists train their young men in village temples, monastic junior high schools and in transnational monastic educational institutions, as well as the political context of redeveloping Buddhism during the Reform era in China. While the book focuses on the educational settings in which these young boys are trained, it also argues that in order to understand how a monk is made, it is necessary to examine local agenda, national politics and transnational Buddhist networks.

This book is a study of an Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century, Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries. This book challenges the unidirectional model of assimilation and acculturation commonly found in immigration studies. In its depiction of the transnational experiences of Okinawan-Bolivians, the book argues that transnational Okinawan-Bolivians underwent the various racialization processes—in which they were portrayed by non-Okinawan Bolivians living in the Colonia and native-born Japanese mainlanders in Yokohama and self-represented by Okinawan-Bolivians themselves—as the physical embodiment of a generalized and naturalized “culture” of Japan, Okinawa, or Bolivia. Racializing narratives and performances ideologically serve as both a cause and result of Okinawan-Bolivians' social and economic status as successful large-scale farm owners in rural Bolivia and struggling manual laborers in urban Japan. The book is a critical examination of the contradictory class and cultural identity (trans)formations of transmigrants; a qualitative study of colonial and postcolonial subjects in diaspora, and an attempt to theorize racialization as a social process of belonging within local and global schemes.

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews, Essential Trade looks beyond the façade of essentialism to analyze traders’ performances of expected styles of gender, kinship, social networks, spirituality, and class as processes of subject formation that have helped them to navigate four decades of volatility caused by war, socialism, and market socialism. The book provides a compelling account of a “political economy of appearances” in postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have built their businesses in the stalls of Bến Thành market and joined the ranks of Vietnam’s growing urban middle class.

This book offers a compelling view of sexual and gender difference through the everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends (“femmes”) in the city of Padang, West Sumatra. While likening themselves to heterosexual couples, tombois and femmes contest and blur dominant constructions of gender and heterosexuality. Tombois are masculine females who identify as men and desire women; their girlfriends view themselves as normal women who desire men. The book shows how these same-sex Indonesian couples negotiate transgressive identities and desires and how their experiences speak to the struggles and desires of sexual and gender minorities everywhere. It analyzes the complex and seemingly contradictory practices of tombois and their partners, demonstrating how they make sense of Islamic, transnational, and modern state discourses in ways that seem to align with normative gender and sexual categories while at the same time subverting them. The book reveals the complexity of tomboi masculinity, showing how tombois enact both masculine and feminine behaviors as they move between the anonymity and vulnerability of public spaces and the familiarity of family spaces. It demonstrates how nationally and globally circulating queer discourses are received and reinterpreted by tombois and femmes. Their identities are clearly both part of yet different than global gay models of sexuality. In contrast to the international LGBT model of “modern” sexualities, this work reveals a multiplicity of sexual and gender subjectivities in Indonesia, arguing for the importance of recognizing and validating this diversity in the global gay ecumene.

Feasting emerges from the pages of this book as far more than gustatory and social diversions from daily work routines. Instead, feasting in tribal societies plays a critical role in village social, political, and economic dynamics. Alliances are brokered by feasts, debts created, political battles waged, and large amounts of food are produced. A main argument of the book is that feasting has been one of the most important forces in creating cultural changes since the end of the Paleolithic. Enormous pressures are created by feasts and their promoters to increase food and prestige item production to achieve social and political goals. The domestication of plants and animals probably resulted from such feasting pressures. This volume documents the dynamics of traditional feasting and the ways in which the bewildering array of feasts benefits hosts. It argues that people’s abilities to marry, reproduce, defend themselves against threats and attacks, and to defend their interests in village politics all depend on their ability to engage in feasting networks. As such feasting in these societies has important survival and fitness consequences. To be excluded from feasting networks means to be subject to attack from social predators, in some cases leading to enslavement.

This book reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, the book concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the domain of the exotic, the book uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships. In doing so, it uncovers fundamental instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, human agency, and political emancipation. The book interrogates the modern assumptions about gender, agency, and subjectivity that underlie the social improvement projects circulating in Tamil Nadu, assumptions that directly shape people's lives. It pays particular attention to projects of family planning, development, reform, and emancipation. Combining ethnography with philosophical argument, the book fashions alternatives to standard post-modernist and post-structuralist formulations. It argues that magic is not a monopoly of any one culture, historical period, or social formation but inhabits modernity—not only in the places, such as cinema and sound recording, where it is commonly looked for, but in “habit” and in aspects of everyday life that have been largely overlooked and shunned.

Numerous reports of “cancer villages” have appeared in the past decade in both Chinese and Western media, highlighting the downside of China's economic development. Less generally known is how people experience and understand cancer in areas where there is no agreement on its cause. Who or what do they blame? How do they cope with its onset? This book offers a bottom-up account of how rural families strive to make sense of cancer and care for sufferers. It addresses crucial areas of concern such as health, development, morality, and social change in an effort to understand what is at stake in the contemporary Chinese countryside. Encounters with cancer are instances in which social and moral fault lines may become visible. The book is an exploration of the social inequities endemic to post-1949 China and the enduring rural–urban divide that continues to challenge social justice in the People's Republic of China. In-depth case studies present villagers' “fight for breath” as both a physical and social struggle to reclaim a moral life, ensure family and neighborly support, and critique the state for its uneven welfare provision. The book depicts their suffering as lived experience, but also as embedded in domestic economies and in the commodification of care that has placed the burden on families and individuals.

In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia's Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of civil war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. This book tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O'Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998. The book uncovers the experiences of the people of O'Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. It examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O'Thmaa with villages in a neighboring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. It argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers' responses to changes in recent years. The book illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation, which is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the architectural ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline, signs of a trauma, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, that haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, manifest in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of urbanity and sacrality. Cities, in this cosmology, were centers where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Via revisiting Clifford Geertz’s “theater state,” I argue that new ideas of urban revitalization and questions about history’s forward trajectory reflect anxieties within older, animist and Buddhist ideas of sacred space and centralized power rooted in older, animist and Buddhist models.

Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades—these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts. The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. This book argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society. The book offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society.

In Pursuit of Progress explores how meta-narratives of development become entangled in people’s identities and life trajectories; how they weave their way into people’s imaginings of their histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for their future. The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinised as a “Western” metaphor ordering global difference and change, and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. Less attention has been given to the diverse ways the “subjects” of development interpret the concept. This monograph draws on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, to explore myths, meanings and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It considers development not just as a collective project but recognises that, as a cognitive tool for organizing relationships between people, it is personal. Through this, In Pursuit of Progress offers fresh insights to debates in anthropology, sociology and development studies regarding the ways in which discourses of development act upon local and global power relations.