Suchergebnisse

Among lowlander Vietnamese, spirit possession is a growing phenomenon that reserves a prominent ritual place for deities and practices that refer to ethnic groups imagined to have preceded the Việt in their habitats, or to be living in remote places. In this way, ethnic boundaries are simultaneously constructed and transgressed in ways that both spatialize and temporalize cultural difference in embodied ritual practice and the national imagination. The ritual ways in which the boundaries of the ethnic group or nation are imagined and delineated produce ambiguity over ethnic minorities as "imagined predecessors" who must be domesticated—both ritually and politically.

AbstractThis essay focuses on the political dimensions of the Festival Huế, which is claimed to be significant as a celebration of the nation. Although socialist state rituals have lost their relevance in the Đổi Mới era, the revival and re-invention of ritualised tradition create fertile ground for new ritualised events that legitimate and lend significance to the current regime. I argue that despite the unfamiliarity of many spectators with the symbolic contents of these new forms, they are effective because of their aesthetic resemblance to, and association with, familiar rituals.

Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, exemplary scholar-activist / Charles Keyes -- Highlanders' mobility and colonial anxieties, a political history of the Khmu laborers in Siam / Olivier Evrard -- A mat-weaving cooperative and a military coup, the challenges of fieldwork in the 1970s in Thailand / Katherine Bowie -- Revisiting ethnic and religious factors in Thailand's southern discomfort / Christopher J. Moll -- Resistance through meditation, hermits of King's Mountain in Northern Thailand / Shigeharu Tanabe -- Learning across boundaries, grantmaking activism in the Greater Mekong Subregion / Rosalia Sciortino -- Scholarship, expertise, and the regional politics of heritage / Oscar Salemink -- The rise and fall of UNODC's alternative development program / Ronald D. Renard -- Meeting educational needs in marginal areas of the state, reflections on research in Myanmar / Mandy Sadan -- Modest reflections on extraordinary virtue, Chayan Vaddhanaphuti and the ethics of engaged scholarship / Michael Herzfeld

This paper presents a group of Muslim descendants of Bawean people living in Hồ Chí Minh City who formalized their citizenship status and as a consequence their official ethnic identity. Much current scholarly literature presents state classification as a state's hegemonic instrument, as an instrument of state power alone. This case study balances the widespread view of the contemporary Vietnamese state as classifying the "motley crowds" within its boundaries, showing that the state leaves room for "indiscipline." Rather than denying their agency in terms of ethnic identification, sympathetic local officials helped these people of Bawean origin to "classify back."

Since the inauguration in 1986 of the reforms known as Đổi Mới, ritual and religious practices have proliferated in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This renewed interest in religious and ritual practice has been the object of intensive scholarly interest both in Vietnam and outside, and has been interpreted in terms of revival (phục hồi), invention and politics of tradition. This collection of articles deals with this phenomenon of ritual revival in Vietnam as well but attempts to go beyond the – by now common – approaches that connect it with the emerging religious practice and political liberalisation, economic reform and the emerging market in the context of Đổi Mới. Instead, these papers explore in more depth the ritual dimensions of life from the central state down to the individual level.

"The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there has been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies"--

Since the 1980s globalization has taken on increasingly neoliberalizing forms in the form of commoditization of objects, resources, or even human bodies, their reduction to fi nancial values, and their enclosure or other forms of dispossession. "After dispossession" provides ethnographic accounts of the diverse´ways to deal with dispossessions by attempts at repossessing values in connection to what has been lost in neoliberal assemblages of people and resources and thus how material loss might be compensated for in terms of subjective experiences of restoring value beyond the fi nancial. Th e analytical challenge we pursue is one of bridging between a political economy concerned with the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, and the profound changes in identity politics and subject formation that are connected to these. We therefore argue that any dispossession may trigger acts of repossession of values beyond the fi nancial realm, and consequently that suff ering, too, entails forms of agency predicated on altered subjectivities. This move beyond the suff ering subject reconnects the study of subjectivities with the analysis of alienation, disempowerment, and impoverishment through dispossession and attempts at recapturing value in altered circumstances.