Hasil untuk "Unlocalized maps (Asian studies only)"

Kei Koga

How has Japan developed its Southeast Asian strategy in the context of the intensifying US-China rivalry since the 2010s? This article argues that the rapidly changing strategic environment brought about by the assertive rise of China prompted Japan to adopt a new strategic vision that went beyond the traditional geographical focus on East Asia. Japan has gradually positioned Southeast Asia as one of the most important strategic theatres in the Indo-Pacific. Utilising its existing economic and diplomatic leverage in Southeast Asia, Japan has been pursuing various types of capacity-building strategies to empower Southeast Asian states and ASEAN to maintain regional autonomy, which the author calls “strategic empowerment”. While Japan has engaged in similar cooperative activities in the past, it has renewed its commitment through three main means: building a strategic partnership in Southeast Asia; promoting international rules, norms and values; and strengthening ASEAN-led institutions.

Marco Zappa

Éva Rozália Hölzle

War-Khasis, who live in Bangladesh, earn their subsistence from the production of pan (betel leaf), which is cultivated in the forest. By exploring the betel leaf cultivation practices of War-Khasi farmers, the types of knowledge they mobilise to grow betel leaf successfully, and how they acquire these forms of knowledge, this ethnographic study draws attention to the collaborative, multi-­layered and temporal dynamics of agricultural knowledge. Betel cultivation, far from being an independent human enterprise, is a collaborative and relational effort involving multiple species. The War-Khasi word sumar, meaning to cultivate and to take care, exemplifies the relational aspects of farming through multispecies collaboration. Although pan can grow naturally in the forest, cultivating betel necessitates the mastering and mobilisation of complex agricultural knowledge, as well as physical dexterity. Throughout the life of a farmer, such knowledge forms are in constant flux. The intergenerational transmission of agricultural knowledge, the adjustment of knowledge to the seasons and changing circumstances, the revision of knowledge as life experiences accumulate, and the transformation of the self during the effort to become a good farmer reveal movements of knowledge with different temporalities.

Katsuo Nawa

The main inhabitants of Byans, Chaudans, and Darma, three adjacent Himalayan valleys in the Mahakali (Kali) drainage system, call themselves ‘Rang’ in their own languages. Their homeland, which has long constituted part of the extensive frontier between South Asia and Tibet, has been politically divided between Nepal and India for nearly two centuries. Even though the Rang have maintained their socio-cultural unity across the international border, the Rang in India and the Rang in Nepal have had to deal with different minority policies and discourses, coping with various ‘foreign’ ethnonyms as well as meta-level categories like ‘scheduled tribe’, ‘jan(a)jāti’, and ‘indigenous people,’ as most Rangs live as citizens of either one of the two states. Primarily based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Darchula district in Far Western Nepal and elsewhere, I discuss in this paper how Rang in Nepal have coped with changing institutional frameworks and discourses on minority populations on both sides of the Mahakali or Kali River.

Anas Ansar

Ngeow Chow Bing

Amanda tho Seeth

This article presents a qualitative content analysis of the instruction material used by the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta for its mandatory civic education course, which was introduced in the year 2000/2001 in collaboration with US-based The Asia Foundation. Kicked off during the Indonesian democratisation process, the so-called Reformasi (1998–2004), the course aimed at socialising Muslim students into the values and norms of democracy, human and civil rights, and critical thinking. By focusing on the content of the chapter on “Democracy” in the course’s original and revised textbook, it is shown that the Islamic academics involved in the creation of the course acted as cosmopolitan brokers between Islamic, Indonesian and Western culture, but in the course of time shifted to promote democracy from an increasingly Islamic and Indonesian perspective, thereby engaging in a practice of localisation. However, the textbooks also featured several biases, inconsistencies and contradictions that mitigated their pedagogic quality and that are critically assessed in this article. Despite these shortcomings, it is argued that due to the course’s overall strong pro-democratic commitment and its strategic institutionalisation on campus, the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, with its academic milieu, must be understood as a pro-democratic actor whose political agency during as well as after Reformasi deserves more scholarly attention.

Benedikt Christoph Staar

Despite the growing literature on the securitisation of North Korea, securitisation in the authoritarian state has been understudied thus far. Through analysing North Korean primary sources, this article presents the complexity of North Korean securitisation by examining how the United States is securitised in the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun and by North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, looking at data from between 2017 and 2020. By expanding a framework that is centred in the illocutionary logic of securitising speech acts and by incorporating socio-political authority into its analysis, this article shows that securitisation in North Korea goes beyond the sole purpose of leader-legitimation. Instead, North Korea strategically (de)securitises by having certain governmental speakers utilise only specific strands of securitisation in such a way that potential contradictory changes in securitisation content do not substantially harm the credibility of the North Korean leadership. As a result, if there is a political, economic or other gain to be had, the North Korean government can change its depiction of the US with a negligible legitimacy loss and can comparatively easily resecuritise the US again when external conditions change.

Tilman Frasch

Peter A. Jackson, Andrea Fleschenberg

Prof. Dr. Peter A. Jackson (Australian National University) has written extensively on modern Thai cultural history with special interests in religion, sexuality, and critical theoretical approaches to mainland Southeast Asian cultural history. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant for the project “Religion, Ritual and Health in Thai Gay and Transgender Communities”. His article “South East Asian Area Studies beyond Anglo-America: Geopolitical Transitions, the Neoliberal Academy and Spatialized Regimes of Knowledge”, published 2019 in South East Asia Research 27(1), pp. 49–73, was the starting point for this interview on his reflections on New Area Studies.

Farah Purwaningrum

Manisha Rao

Traditionally, the concept of the commons implied a rural commons, an area of common usage for agricultural or pastoral purposes. As increasing numbers of people migrate to cities, however, sociological studies have focused on urban issues, of which the urban commons is one area of emerging research. In crowded, underdeveloped cities, residents must often rely on these shared public areas for their livelihoods or basic needs. This paper provides an overview of the literature on the urban commons in India, illustrating the relevance of a feminist political ecology perspective to sharpen its critical edge. The article begins with an overview of the commons debate and then moves on to analyse the question of the urban commons. After mapping the research on the urban commons in India, it analyses the issue of the urban commons within the context of the gender and environment debate that emerged in the 1980s. This is followed by alternative conceptualisations of gender and the environment as put forward by feminists in the Global South. Finally, a plea is made to engage in the study of the urban commons through the lens of feminist political ecology.

Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger

With Hindus in Mauritius as a case study, this article will show how Thaipusam Kavadī, a festival of piercing and procession of ancient Tamil origin, has become not only a modern expression of religious affiliation in diaspora, but also a way of coping with fear by trying to gain dispensation for possible religious or ethical misconduct in a time and a place where religion has become compartmentalised. To understand this development, the article gives a short introduction to the overall theme of fear, including theoretical considerations as a prism to understand the factors at play. This is followed by an introduction to Hinduism in Mauritius from a general point of view. Then, using a particular case study and participant observations as a point of departure, the article will explore how Thaipusam Kavadī is conducted and what kind of meaning the participants attribute to their participation.

Nina Bagdasarova

The high level of homophobia in society and a contradictory state policy towards sexual minorities define the specific mode of existence of the LGBT community in Kyrgyzstan. The need to socialise and spend some time together is a big part of building and maintaining an LGBT identity, which requires collective security practices. The concept of “securityscapes”, based on Arjun Appadurai’s idea of “scapes”, was used as a main instrument for the analysis of ethnographic data. LGBT people in Kyrgyzstan navigate quite complicated landscapes of security and insecurity, defined by encounters with various agents, and engage in different strategies of adaptation. During the field research two types of threats within LGBT securityscapes were identified: “outer” threats (such as the homophobic environment) and “inner” threats (such as some behavioural patterns that might expose community members to this hostile environment). LGBT people navigate within their securityscapes individually, yet community life requires specific measures. The collective securityscapes of the LGBT communities in Bishkek and Osh were examined, and it will be shown that despite the differences according to local conditions, similar strategies were developed in both places when responding to “inner” and “outer” threats.

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

Markus Keck, Matthias Schmidt

Stefanie Lotter

Transformation is apparent in Nepal, a country that underwent a decade of civil war 1996–2006, abolished the monarchy to become a republic in 2007, agreed on a new constitution in 2015 and is currently struggling to implement federalism. Decentralisation and minority repre-sentation are being put on the political agenda alongside efforts to rebuild infrastructure dam-aged through two major earthquakes. Beyond this, Nepal appears to have developed into South Asia’s beacon of gender equality. Since 2016 Nepal has had a woman president, a woman chief justice and a woman speaker of parliament. Implementing a quota of 33 per cent women in politics, women politicians now come from a great variety of backgrounds reflecting Nepal’s ethnic, cultural, regional and educational diversity. This study takes the entry of 197 female members into the constituent assembly of Nepal in 2008 as a baseline to study the transforma-tion of “patriarchy” and its impact on the heterogeneous group of women politicians in high office in Nepal.

Christian Tagsold

Mirjam Lücking

Pierre Gottschlich

Despite a promising start after independence, bilateral relations between India and Myanmar have had a long history of mutual neglect and obliviousness. This paper revisits the developments since the end of colonial rule and points out crucial historical landmarks. Further, the most important policy issues between the two nations are discussed. The focal point of the analysis is the question of whether one can expect new directions in the bilateral relationship since the election of new governments in India in 2014 and in Myanmar in 2015. While there have been signs of a new foreign policy approach towards its eastern neighbour on the part of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it remains to be seen if the government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy will substantially alter Myanmar’s course on an international level.