Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm

Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm PDF

Author: Shelly Errington

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1400860083

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The ruler in the Indic States of Southeast Asia was seen not as the "head of state" but as the center or navel of the world. Like polities, persons and houses were and are viewed as centered spaces (locations) where spiritual potency can gather. Shelly Errington explores the politics of constituting and maintaining such centered socio-political spaces in a former Indic State called Luwu, which lies in South Sulawesi (Celebes), Indonesia. The meaning of political life and the ways its cultural forms were and are sustained depend on locally construed ideas of "power" or spiritual potency and "the person," which the author explores in detail. She views the polity neither as a frame in which political actors pursue advantage nor as a structure for extracting wealth but as a hierarchical system of signs ultimately backed by force--but force which was not fully centralized and whose import must be understood within ideas about spiritual potency widespread in the region. Although focused on Luwu, the book's theoretical scope is wide, and it ranges comparatively over a broad geographical area, making a contribution to ethnographic, historical, and regional studies as well as to the study of politics in nonsecular societies. Part One traces how the person, the house, and the polity are constituted symbolically in everyday practices as centered spaces. Part Two examines how centers can be de-centered, while Part Three explores the structure that tended to hold centers together in Luwu and other Indic States. The introduction and the three conclusions (each of the three being broader than the last in comparative scope) locate the author's views with respect to other current theoretical approaches to power and culture. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia PDF

Author: James Robert Rush

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 0190248769

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Straddling the equator, Southeast Asia comprises Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as Laos, Cambodia, Brunei, and East Timor. Despite its extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, and political systems, Southeast Asia plays a keyrole in global economies and geopolitics, especially in light of its strategic position bordering China and India. This Very Short Introduction explores the contemporary character of Southeast Asia's national societies through the lens of their historical evolution, from the eras of indigenouskingdoms and colonies under Western rule to the present's independent nation states. Deftly combining historical analysis and geopolitical insights, the book paints a bird's eye view of contemporary Southeast Asia as a community of diverse societies and traditions as well as a politicaltheater-of-action nested between India and China and tangled in global economic traffic patterns, balance of powers, and environmental forces.As James R. Rush explains, archaic structures, such as religious and ethnic rivalries, tenacious feudal hierarchies, and age-old trade and migration patterns, remain rooted in today's Southeast Asia beneath the surface of modern national governments. The book draws on a wide range of examples fromthe major nations, including the ethno-religious violence in Myanmar, the Muslim-led rebellion in the southern Philippines, the Thai-Cambodian territorial rivalries, the Confucian-inspired governance in Singapore, the military rule and democratization in Indonesia, the environmental consequences ofagribusiness, mining, and unchecked urbanization, and the big-power alignments and tensions involving the United States, China, and Japan. By delving into the cultural, political, and geographical background of Southeast Asia, Rush shows that Southeast Asia is unquestionably modern, but it is modernin distinctively Southeast Asian ways.

Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power

Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power PDF

Author: Liana Chua

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-04

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1136337172

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Southeast Asia has undergone innumerable far-reaching changes and dramatic transformations over the last half-century. This book explores the concept of power in relation to these transformations, and examines its various social, cultural, religious, economic and political forms. The book works from the ground up, portraying Southeast Asians’ own perspectives, conceptualizations and experiences of power through empirically rich case studies. Exploring concepts of power in diverse settings, from the stratagems of Indonesian politicians and the aspirations of marginal Lao bureaucrats, to mass ‘Prayer Power’ rallies in the Philippines, self-cultivation practices of Thai Buddhists and relations with the dead in Singapore, the book lays out a new framework for the analysis of power in Southeast Asia in which orientations towards or away from certain models, practices and configurations of power take centre stage in analysis. In doing so the book demonstrates how power cannot be pinned down to a single definition, but is woven into Southeast Asian lives in complex, subtle, and often surprising ways. Integrating theoretical debates with empirical evidence drawn from the contributing authors’ own research, this book is of particular interest to scholars and students of Anthropology and Asian Studies.

The World Imagined

The World Imagined PDF

Author: Hendrik Spruyt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-02

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1108491219

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Spruyt takes an inter-disciplinary approach to explain how collective belief systems organized three non-European societies c.1500-1900, and how these polities engaged the European colonial powers.

The Art of Not Being Governed

The Art of Not Being Governed PDF

Author: James C. Scott

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0300156529

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From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Fluid Iron

Fluid Iron PDF

Author: Tony Day

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2002-08-31

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780824826178

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Fluid Iron is the first extended treatment of state formation in Southeast Asia from early to contemporary times and the first book-length analysis of Western historical and ethnographic writing on the region. It includes critical assessments of the work of Clifford Geertz, O.W. Wolters, Benedict Anderson, and other major scholars who have written on early, colonial, and modern Southeast Asian history and culture. Making use of the ideas of Weber, Marx, Foucault, and postmodern and postcolonial theory, Tony Day argues that culture must be restored to the study of Southeast Asian history so that the state and historical developments in the region can be returned to their own "alternative" historical contexts and trajectories. He employs a wide range of contemporary scholarship, as well as Southeast Asian literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and temples to explore the kinds of concepts and practices--kinship networks, cosmologies, gender identities, bureaucracies, rituals, violence and aesthetics--that have been used for centuries to build states.Highly readable and accessibly written, Fluid Iron demonstrates that Southeast Asian state building has taken place in a part of the world that has always been a crossroads of cultural and transcultural change. Day urges Southeast Asians to learn more about the history of their own state formations so they can safeguard not only human freedom, but also the "incongruity" of their unique region in the years ahead.

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