Browse

Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians—this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century. This book seeks to recover some of anthropology's global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier—the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884–1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone. Colonial administrators there were drawn to approaches partially inspired by anthropology. Anthropologists and museum officials exploited this interest by preparing large-scale expeditions to German New Guinea. The book explores the interactions between German colonial officials, resident ethnographic collectors, and indigenous peoples, arguing that all were instrumental in the formation of anthropological theory. It shows how changes in collecting aims and methods helped shift ethnographic study away from its focus on material artifacts to a broader consideration of indigenous culture. It also shows how ethnological collecting could become politicized and connect to national concerns.

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.

This ethnography examines the colonization of the Pacific island of Rapa Nui/Easter Island by the Latin American country of Chile. It also discusses the Rapanui people’s growing emphasis on cultural difference. The first part, entitled “Challenging the nation-state”, gives an historical account of Chile’s political relationship with the island, from the moment of annexation in 1888 up to the present day. In the second part, “Polynesian cultural politics and global imaginaries”, I describe various contemporary forms of cultural politics. To express their difference, the Rapanui are increasingly engaging in cultural performances such as sculpting, dancing, body painting and other cultural expressions, as well as a yearly festival. They are also revitalizing their Polynesian language and traditional concepts of land and territory, and strengthening contacts with other Polynesians and the international community. This emphasis on cultural politics creates tensions between the Rapanui--who increasingly claim their right to self-determination as a people--and the Chilean nation-state, which insists on its supposed rights to sovereignty over the island. Moreover, I discuss how the global fascination with Rapa Nui has resulted in a blooming tourist industry, which commodifies Rapanui difference and creates a possibility to loosen economic and, potentially, political ties with Chile. The realms of the cultural and the political have thus become entangled in subtle but important ways.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. The stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of “homework”—ethnography that directly engages with issues and identities in which the ethnographer finds political solidarity and belonging in fields at home—the book contributes to growing trends that complicate the distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders.” The obligations that fieldwork engenders among researchers and local communities are exemplified by contributors who are often socially engaged with the peoples and places they work. In its focus on Asia and the Pacific Islands, the book offers ethnographic updates on topics that range from ritual money burning in China to the militarization of Hawai‘i to the social role of text messages in identifying marriage partners in Vanuatu to the cultural power of robots in Japan. These cultural encounters will resonate with readers and provide valuable talking points for exploring the human diversity that makes the study of ourselves and each other simultaneously rewarding and challenging.

Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and nation-building—on customary land tenures, and customary communities, in two Pacific countries. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners explores the entanglements of custom and modernity that emerge from these processes. These entanglements are deeply ambivalent, giving rise to competing cartographies of power. They lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy but also, importantly, create new possibilities for reasserting that autonomy, and for rearticulating the forms and sites of authority to which customary connection to land gives rise. Pacific peoples are becoming landowners, the book argues, both in the sense that modernising processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power and culture are reconfigured and reimagined.

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 sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. It examines these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis. Following a critique of how tradition has been viewed in terms of dichotomies like authenticity vs. inauthenticity, the book takes a novel perspective in which tradition figures as context-bound articulation. This makes it possible to view cultural traditions as resulting from interactions between people and the ambient contexts. Such interactions are analyzed from the past down to the Oceanian present—with indigenous agency being highlighted. The work focuses first on early encounters, initially between Pacific Islanders themselves and later with the European navigators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to clarify how meaningful actions and contexts interrelated in the past. The present-day memories of Pacific Islanders are examined to ask how such memories represent encounters that occurred long ago and how they influenced the social, political, economic, and religious changes that ensued. Next, the book addresses ongoing social and structural interactions that social actors enlist to shape their traditions within the context of globalization and then the repercussions that these intersections and intercultural exchanges of discourses and practices are having on active identity formation as practiced by Pacific Islanders.

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.

This book investigates the nature of long-term resistance in a longitudinal study of more than fifty Japanese women over two decades. Between 25 and 35 years of age when first interviewed in 1993, the women represent a generation straddling the stable roles of post-war modernity and the risky but exciting possibilities of late modernity. By exploring the challenges they pose to cultural codes, the book builds a conceptual framework of long-term resistance that undergirds the struggles and successes of modern Japanese women. It establishes long-term resistance as a vital type of social change in late modernity where the sway of media, global ideas, and friends vies strongly with the influence of family, school, and work. Women are at the nexus of these contradictions, dissatisfied with post-war normative roles in family, work, and leisure and yet—in Japan as elsewhere—committed to a search for self that shifts uneasily between self-actualization and selfishness. In an epilogue, their experiences are framed by the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which is already shaping the future of their long-term resistance. The book posits that long-term resistance is a process of tense, irregular, but insistent change that is characteristic of our era, hammered out in the in-between of local and global, past and future, the old virtues of womanhood and the new virtues of self-actualization.

This book wrestles with Hmong Americans' inclusion into and contributions to Asian American studies, as well as to American history and culture and refugee, immigrant, and diasporic trajectories. It negotiates both Hmong American political and cultural citizenship, rewriting the established view of the Hmong as “new” Asian neighbors. Following a summary of more than three decades' of Hmong American experience and a demographic overview, chapters investigate the causes of and solutions to socioeconomic immobility in the Hmong American community and political and civic activism, including Hmong American electoral participation and its effects on policymaking. The influence of Hmong culture on young men is examined, followed by profiles of female Hmong leaders who discuss the challenges they face and interviews with aging Hmong Americans. A section on arts and literature looks at the continuing relevance of oral tradition to Hmong Americans' successful navigation in the diaspora, similarities between rap and kwv txhiaj (unrehearsed, sung poetry), and Kao Kalia Yang's memoir, The Latehomecomer. The final chapter addresses the lay of the land in Hmong American studies, constituting a comprehensive literature review. The book showcases the desire to shape new contours of Hmong American studies as Hmong American scholars themselves address new issues. It represents an essential step in carving out space for Hmong Americans as primary actors in their own right and in placing Hmong American studies within the purview of Asian American studies.

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.

Although the author first went to Papua New Guinea in 1973, in 2008 it had been ten years since he had been back to Kragur Village, Kairiru Island, where he was an honorary “citizen.” He finds in Kragur many things he remembered fondly, including a life immersed in nature and freedom from 9–5 tyranny. And he again encounters the stifling midday heat, the wet tropical sores, and the sometimes excruciating intensity of village social life that he had somehow managed to forget. Through practicing Taoist “not doing” the author continues to learn about villagers' difficult transition from an older world based on giving to one in which money rules and the potent mix of devotion and innovation that animates Kragur's pervasive religious life. Becoming entangled in local political events, he gets a closer look at how ancestral loyalties and fear of sorcery influence hotly disputed contemporary elections. In turn, Kragur people practice their own form of anthropology on the author, questioning him about American work, family, religion, and politics. The author returns to Kragur again, in 2011, to complete projects begun in 2008, see Kragur's chief for the last time (he died later that year), and bring Kragur's story up to date.