Conceptions of Community in Colonial Southeast Asia

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Stockwell

It is a commonplace that European rule contributed both to the consolidation of the nation-states of Southeast Asia and to the aggravation of disputes within them. Since their independence, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have all faced the upheavals of secessionism or irredentism or communalism. Governments have responded to threats of fragmentation by appeals to national ideologies like Sukarno's pancasila (five principles) or Ne Win's ‘Burmese way to socialism’. In attempting to realise unity in diversity, they have paraded a common experience of the struggle for independence from colonial rule as well as a shared commitment to post-colonial modernisation. They have also ruthlessly repressed internal opposition or blamed their problems upon the foreign forces of neocolonialism, world communism, western materialism, and other threats to Asian values. Yet, because its effects were uneven and inconsistent while the reactions to it were varied and frequently equivocal, the part played by colonialism in shaping the affiliations and identities of Southeast Asian peoples was by no means clear-cut.

Author(s):  
Maximiliano Korstanje ◽  
Bintang Handayani ◽  
Hugues Seraphin

The chapter starts from the assumption that in spite of the abundance of research about Southeast Asia, they are published by native English speakers such as Australians or Britons, instead of genuine Southeast Asians. In addition, they emulate long dormant discourses forged and used during the colonial rule to domesticate the non-Western “Other.” Alternating among the fields of heritage consumption, dark tourism, a post-colonial landscape, and of course the scourge of terrorism, these studies obscure more than they clarify – most probably replicating the essence of colonialism. This book aims to discuss new themes and horizons allowing youth researchers to produce knowledge from the bottom up.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 67-104
Author(s):  
Bruce B. Lawrence

In this article Lawrence examines the elusive yet decisive role of the public square. He explains that the “public square” is the crucial category for understanding the scale and scope of citizenship. Both Indonesia and the Philippines resemble other contemporary polities in so far as their subjects/citizens project public faith, or religion in the public square. Minorities, like their majority neighbors, are ‘pious patriots,’ but they are patriots first. Lawrence demonstrates that to understand minority citizenship, individual voices from both polities must be analyzed. In doing so, he questions whether they can be simply categorized as full-fledged citizens of nation-states. Key terms that define minority relations are IP (Indigenous People) for the Southern Philippines, and adat (native practices) for many of the newly autonomous regions within Indonesia. By examining both IP and adat, Lawrence underscores the benefits, but also reveals the shortcomings, of the public square as it functions throughout the Phil-Indo Archipelago. This study concludes with a projection of what future changes in the public square will augur, not only for the region but also for its neighbors.


Author(s):  
R. Michael Feener

Southeast Asia has been a historical crossroads of major world civilizations for nearly two millennia. Muslim traders were sojourning along the shores of the Indonesian archipelago from at least the 8th century, and by the turn of the 14th century local Muslim communities had taken root, and the region’s first sultanate was established in northern Sumatra. Since then, Muslim communities had been established across many other parts of Southeast Asia, where in the 21st century they comprise demographic majorities in the nation-states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei and significant minority populations in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Singapore. The Islamization of these societies, and their inclusion into an expanding constellation of Muslim societies in the medieval and early modern periods, was facilitated by intensifications of activity along the maritime trading routes linking Southeast Asia to ports on the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Swahili Coasts with those of India and China over the medieval and early modern periods. Over the course of this history, the expansion of Islam in the region was not dominantly directed from any single source but rather the result of diverse, interlaced strands of commercial and cultural circulations that connected the region to multiple points in an expanding Muslim world—adopting local traditions to produce diverse and dynamic vernacular forms of Islamic cultural expression.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis

AbstractThe social history of colonial Southeast Asia has often been narrated through the lens of ‘plural societies’, where various ethnic groups rarely mixed. This article challenges that narrative by pointing to traditions of multi-ethnic interaction, particularly in port cities, dating back to an early modern age of commerce. Although colonialism introduced new racial hierarchies that reinforced stark ethnic divides, it also created arenas where these could be transgressed. In the interwar era, international organizations, such as Rotary clubs, provided a way of breaking the colour bar of colonial society and a venue for multi-ethnic representation in a shared associational space. They converged with existing notions of civic duty, while promoting a public intellectual culture in cities for both men and women, as well as a new sense of regionalism. In ethnically divided Malaya, Asian Rotarians questioned the importance of race and debated the possibilities of a multi-ethnic future for the nation. While such cosmopolitan ideals were more vulnerable in the post-colonial era of nation-states, the organizations of the interwar era left important legacies for civil society in the region.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-223
Author(s):  
S.Yu. Storozhenko

Seven new species of the genus Zhengitettix Liang, 1994 are described: Z. hosticus sp. nov., Z. mucronatus sp. nov. and Z. spinulentus sp. nov. from Vietnam; Z. albitarsus sp. nov. and Z. extraneus sp. nov. from Thailand; Z. palawanensis sp. nov. and Z. taytayensis sp. nov. from the Philippines. Two species, Z. curvispinus Liang, Jiang et Liu, 2007 and Z. obliquespicula Zheng et Jiang, 2005 are firstly recorded from Vietnam. An annotated check-list and key to species of the genus Zhengitettix are given. Position of Zhengitettix within the family Tetrigidae is briefly discussed.


Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.


2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virgil Henry Storr ◽  
Bridget Butkevich

Entrepreneurs are cultural creatures and culture affects how they conceive their opportunities and how they determine and pursue their interests. Understanding entrepreneurship in any particular context thus requires attention to be paid to prevailing cultural beliefs as well as the formal and informal institutions that affect economic behaviour. This paper adopts the important but seldom used approach of focusing upon the tales of entrepreneurship prevalent in a given culture. The authors argue that to get a sense of the economic culture in a particular context, it is crucial to focus on what a culture's success and failure stories tell about how to get ahead. Arguably, this approach is particularly important if the goal is to understand entrepreneurship amongst subaltern/marginalized groups. Using fiction from the former Soviet bloc, where a one-dimensional form of entrepreneurship flourished even within the command economy, and literature from anglophone Africa and the British Caribbean where black entrepreneurship had to contend with brutal colonial rule and post-colonial corruption, this paper highlights how entrepreneurs were influenced by culture in these contexts, and explores the origins of these cultural factors.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 8007
Author(s):  
Lintang D. Sekarlangit ◽  
Ratna Wardhani

This study aimed to analyze the board of directors’ commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by looking at the influence of the characteristics and activities of the board of directors and the existence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) committees on disclosures regarding the SDGs. The directors’ characteristics that were analyzed in this research included the board size, the proportion of independent directors, the presence of female directors, and the presence of foreign directors. The activities analyzed included the number of board meetings held in one year and the percentage of directors in meetings. The context of this study was companies in five Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines—during the 2016 and 2017 reporting years. This study was an initial research work aiming to empirically examine the effect of the board of directors on SDG disclosures in public companies from five countries in Southeast Asia. The study shows that the percentage of attendance of board directors’ meetings and the existence of CSR committees positively affected SDG disclosures. It also indicates that the presence of the board at the meeting can encourage more intensive SDG disclosures. Companies with a high commitment to sustainability, as shown by their forming of CSR committees, also tended to have a higher level of SDG disclosures.


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