Reflections on the class in 2020

What have we done in this course? We have followed an intellectual circuit, marked by what I have tried to construct as three major stages or movements through knowledge: (1) old fashioned appreciation – (2) iconoclasm, or critical pessimism – and, (3) finally, a return to appreciation.

This circuit begins with a very basic, straightforward kind of cultural appreciation for Southeast Asia; but then it is followed by destructive iconoclasm – literally, the irreverent destruction of received icons and uncritically accepted truths which we take up by engaging in the sober accounting of modernity’s dark side. I like to think of this as a kind of “radical pessimism”, a form of scholarly critique that refuses to succumb to the ideological imperative to always look on the bright side of things when the empirical realities we see are in many cases not especially bright. And then, at the end of the course, we come full circle, back to the beginning, albeit in changed fashion, through a process of critical reconstruction and renewed appreciation. Not everything we have read in this course has been a work of anthropology, but organizing the texts in this way has been my way of introducing you to what I understand to be an anthropological way of understanding, which is founded on fundamental and core appreciation for cultural differences but also on a critique of cultural essentialism and a constant attention to relations of power and inequality.

At the very beginning of the course, I insisted on a contradiction: Southeast Asia does not exist, I told you, but then I invited you to spend a whole semester agreeing that it is a place worth thinking about. We can appreciate this contradiction best if we recognize the dangers that come with overemphasizing cultural distinctiveness at the very same time that we appreciate cultural distinctiveness and the fact that there are simply a lot of interesting things to learn about this region of the world. Every time I teach this course, with a new group of students who are interested in different paper topics and different blogging exercises, I’m quite astounded at how much there is to learn about Southeast Asia. I feel that it’s precisely by not essentializing the region and the range of human experience that we are constantly able to be fascinated by the place.

More concretely, we began the course by looking at the diversity of Southeast Asian cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and political difference. We reveled in these differences like children in an anthropological candy shop, hoping to taste as many sweet flavors as possible. This first step is, of course, founded in a fascination with the world we live in, a genuine interest in humanity – what is it like to live in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines? My feeling is that without a bit of that simple interest in different ways of being—without that simple curiosity—we lose that sense of wonder that sometimes makes anthropological study interesting in the first-place. We looked at the very important differences between upland and lowland regions, between deltas and mountains, as well as Island nations and mainland. We paid attention to rural and urban distinctions, linguistic families, and the way languages play a role in national identities as well as interpersonal relations.

But even as we allow ourselves to cultivate this wonder, we must always remind ourselves that this celebration of difference itself can risk collapsing into a naïve form of what the great anthropologist Edmund Leach has called anthropological “butterfly collecting”, which amounts to nothing more than a collector’s impulse for finding pretty things, putting them on display and looking at them in purposeless, perhaps even self-indulgent, rapture. As scholars situated in a privileged position like we are here at Yale, we have to be very careful about this process, and the modes of representation and engagement that come with learning about different parts of the world. The butterfly collecting impulse can turn ethnicities and nations into simple commodities to be consumed like any other pretty thing. It is also an impulse that is founded on a legacy of imperialist power relations in which “the West” always feels emboldened to control the means of representing the rest of the world, or in which rich nations come to dominate the power dynamics of the region. As scholars, we need be critical of this, we need to be more than naïve cultural fetishizers, and be interested in something more than simply becoming shoppers at “Ethnicity, incorporated.” We need to do more than that for this project of studying Southeast Asia to have any relevance.

In fact, the more we look at the pretty cultures on display, the more we realize that there are fictions and ideological projects behind them. This is what we began to unravel the minute we questioned the salience of national differences. We realized that the very national borders and nations we have come to take for granted are themselves constructions founded in relations of colonial history, power, political economic inequality, and ideology. “Asian values” and other purported cultural essences are often only identifiable for the value they have in propping up the power ambitions of particular regimes intent on solidifying their rule. This was the powerful insight of Benedict Anderson’s justly famous work, Imagined Communities, a work which was itself made possible by Anderson’s study of Southeast Asia. It’s also an insight that we have started to see playing out quite frightfully with the ways in which a kind of essentializing Buddhism is being deployed by vitriolic monks and other xenophobic nationalists against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and increasingly against Muslims all across Myanmar, or conversely with the way certain fundamentalisms in Southeast Asia—not just religious, like we see in Malaysia or Indonesia, but politically conservative ones like in Singapore or the Philippines—are reacting to LGBTQ rights.

Indeed, little by little, certain aspects of the pretty cultures we set out to enjoy began to emerge as ideological apparatuses. Embedded in the sweet sounds of the Javanese language we saw hierarchy and status, in the relations between national languages and local tongues we saw relations of state power and the suppression of local identities, as was clear in the Singaporean Speak Good English Campaigns that denigrated the use of Singlish. But we also see how Singlish and Taglish can be expressions of identity and counterhegemony. Language is power. The multicultural mosaic of Ethnic diversity in Southeast Asia itself conceals real relations of domination that have underscored top-down civilizing projects asserted by lowland ethnic majorities onto the highland minorities living within the same geopolitical boundaries of national states; rural urban divides were not just symbolic relations between country and city but also relations of power and exploitation.

Nevertheless, we saw the potential for agency and creative adaptive responses to “official” representations in the dynamic anthropological study of kinship, which increasingly gives weight to everyday practices of building relationships and constructing kin, and which shows how people thwart strict gender dynamics in the non-official realms of everyday life. The male centered notion of “rational” Muslim men in Indonesia was countered by everyday beliefs in masculine philandering and dignified female comportment; we saw that the alus or refined power of Javanese males depended on the deep economic power and domestic rationality of Javanese women, who in Suzanne’s Brenner’s evocative phrase “rule the roost”. In the Philippines, we learned that ideas of “beauty” which on the surface seem to evidence of having submitted to a Western form of hegemony, also enable expressions of local cultural systems that enable expressions of power. In the world of religious practice, which in Southeast Asia is so much more than that which is depicted in official religious texts, we saw syncretic interactions between World religions and Southeast Asian spirit beliefs, and we mused on the ways in which religious revival is not evidence of irrationality (as Western modernization theorists would once have had it) but a truly modern response to the conditions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Just remember the sassy and catty action of master Duc, the Vietnamese spirit medium from Hanoi who bends our ideas of gender identity and of religion.  When we were thinking about cases like that, we also debated what it means to be “truly Buddhist,” whether syncretism challenges culture or supports it. Guided by scholars like Nancy Smith Hefner and Dar Rudnyskzi, we smashed stereotypes about the seemingly universal forms of Islam, and came to see religious debate and discourse as exceedingly diverse; these debates are signs, in fact, of a robust public sphere that is often much more dynamic than the actual political sphere. Many of you expressed great interest, for example, when you learned that Javanese women could find expressions of modernity in veiling practices, or that covering the body could be linked to feelings of liberation. As the course progressed, however, I noticed in your conversations that such revelations were not so striking, as you became quite familiar with anthropological approaches that turn our expectations upside down and force us to question all of our assumptions.

When we turned to politics, the course took a sobering shift towards the “dark side of modernity,” where the very seeds of essentialism sewn in the celebratory phase of the course, turned out to produce not only a hundred blooming flowers but also thornbushes and poison ivy. Our critical look at the rhetoric of Lee Kwan Yew showed us how cultural essentialisms may be used to justify authoritarian rule, and while economic successes in Singapore often allows us to ignore the potential danger in the late Prime Minister’s forms of self-legitimizing rhetoric, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s suppression of the film industry and the arts, and the deep tragedies of Burmese cultural chauvanism, reminded us that essentialist cultural rhetorics cannot compensate for brute misuse of power.

With these sobering examples, the course dipped for a while into misery and desperation, a social space of powerlessness. In an old article that I no longer use in this course, an anthropologist named Monique Skidmore once tried to describe the dark feeling of helplessness Burmese used to feel under the junta (before 2011) by using a Burmese proverb: If you want to know how dark it is, ask yourself “What is darker than midnight?” That’s how dark some of the conditions in that country were, and why so many people placed so much hope on the democratic transformations that are now letting so many people down. To this we might add, what is darker than the fact that, as Norman Owen reminded us in his history of industrialism in the region, that at one time Michael Jordan earned in one year more than the wages paid to the entire Indonesian shoe-industry making his air-Jordans? What is darker than the wholesale massacre of Communists in Indonesia in 1965-1966, and the subsequent erasure of this history in the Suharto era? The xenophobic treatment of Chinese across Southeast Asia? The legacy of US imperialism on the landscape of Lao and Vietnam and in places like Subic bay in the Philippines. What is darker than the stigmatization of migrant domestic workers romantic relationships in Singapore? The massacre of radical Thai students at Thammassat university, on 6 October 1976? The challenges of ecological devastation, the massive rise of urban developments without corresponding infrastructure, the constant jailing of activist bloggers in today’s Vietnam, the rise of Duterte and his love of extrajudicial killings, the unscrupulous rise of military power in Thailand, and the proliferation in almost every country of rich real estate developers who happily displace marginalized peoples in the name of development?

And we didn’t even touch on the Vietnam War, a dark tale of modernity’s arrival on attack helicopters and gunships that would require a course of its own. Or, the history of colonialism in Southeast Asia… 

There is a common denominator to all of these forms of darkness. To answer the Burmese proverb, What is darker than midnight, we might answer confidently: the dark side of modernity. Blinded by lights on the bright side, the dark side becomes darker still…

But Mary Beth Mills reminds us, quoting from Marshal Berman, that modernity is itself a carrier of both darkness and light:

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world–and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. (Mills 1999: 13)

Indeed, with the work of James Scott we discover a language of critique that – while never shying away from exposing the dark side of modernity – nevertheless allows us to see the vibrant light of human spirit as people carve out responses to the contradictions of modernity. We can be radical pessimists in our study of power dynamics and histories of injustice, but the human beings we meet in the ethnographic record often force us to pause and attend to the strength of their resistance to hegemony. Mary Beth Mills shows cogently how Thai villagers marginalized by global labor conditions experience catharthis by controlling the widow ghosts. While this is not without contradiction, and while the challenges they face negotiating their traditional gender roles within the demands of a new political economic reality are not always easily reconciled, these folks are resilient—they know how to deal with the apparations of modernity. Like the peasants Jim Scott taught us about in Sedaka, Malaysia, they game the system as much as they suffer under it. They may be struggling against often unfathomable structural odds, but they are struggling nonetheless, and it is this spirit of struggle that proves most enduring and inspiring. This double edge of exploitation and resistance was central to the message in the story of Malaysia migrants as well, where we saw the story of young bugis migrants seeking out better lives through migration, but also encountering great structural odds.

We also saw this double edge of power and resistance in the theme of spirit possession, and how it appeared in Malaysia as a kind of response to the contradictory impulses of modernity. Aihwa Ong told us of spirit possessions on the factory floor of Malaysian electronics companies, where women from the kampong are forced to negotiate contradictory demands of submissiveness and autonomy. In the face of these contradictions, they became stricken by hantu, and their ultra-modern factory managers were forced to call in spirit mediums to exorcise the factory. It is, strangely enough, by commiserating with spirits and the supernatural that these women could exercise their rights as human beings.

All semester long, as we read about those spirit possessions, the world has been gripped by the devilish spirits of the COVID monster, as well as an orange-faced crazy-haired monster who is eating away at the souls of good-hearted people everywhere, and right wing movements have been gaining ground across the globe. I have felt like we too have been possessed by spirts in need of exorcism—if only the United States and other countries could enlist a bomoh like the Japanese factory managers in Malaysia, then maybe we could perform a series of spirit cleansings of our own. But in the intellectual space of the classroom, I always feel a certain escape from the darkness going on in our world—as if the conversations we have are a kind of reckoning with the hantu of modernity, and our reckoning a way of putting those dark spirits in their place. I have felt an extraordinary joy all semester when entering this classroom.

So, while I think that any class must be pessimistic when pessimism is called for, we don’t necessarily have to end with a sour note. That is why I try to construct the readings in a way that makes us come full circle in this class. In the end we still celebrate diversity, but this time the diversity we celebrate is not some superficial and saccharine sense of “love,” or some postcard picture of Southeast Asia seen from the sky, in the museum, in the craft shop window. Instead we celebrate the diverse ways in which the human spirit confronts adversity. We aren’t collecting butterflies so much as learning from ordinary people as they confront extraordinary circumstances, and we might learn a thing or two from them as we learn to live in our own extraordinary times. People like the Borneo small-farmers who critiqued industrial rubber plantations with folk-story-like-dreams of “Rice Eating Rubber.” The logic of their dream was much more consistent with the economics of rubber production than the International Rubber Regulation Agreements promulgated by states in collusion with corporations. There are people like all the brilliant Cambodian film makers and movie stars in Davy Chou’s film Golden Slumbers, whose memories of days of grandeur speak volumes about the genocide and their will to survive, as well as the creativity of Davy Chou himself, whose inquisitiveness inspires through a simple will to discover alternative ways to speak about the unspeakable. We learn from all the quirky characters in the short stories we read: The Thai elephant tour operator who knowingly keeps his signs in broken English because he knows the tourists like it that way, the broken-hearted boy longing for farang lost love while pelting crude American tourists with coconuts while his little pig Clint Eastwood, which is of course his little pink manhood, runs amok through the village; the women who manage to continue living with their “old goat” husbands in Vietnam, A young boy has a flower grow out of his ass, freaking his idiotic father out,  and a narrator speaks of rampant death in his Jakarta kampong neighborhood, in a story called my Kampung by the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Pramoedya writes through the voice of a narrator who witnesses and speaks of all that putrid death with an arrestingly calm and matter-of-fact tone, as if cataloguing events can detach him from his emotions. It is a feeling I have turned to quite often during these difficult times. In that world of clogged drains, filled with defecation, and of stagnant air, filled with “fecal gas and drain gas,” the narrator nevertheless describes every death with detached, exceedingly modern dignity, by saying — “of course”.

“Of course, Dear Mother loved the healthy one more. On one occasion the healthy one was given worm medicine and because of her love she increased the dosage of the medicine. Of course the intestines of the small child ruptured when attacked by worm medicine beyond her strength. And one evening the child died. Of course many tears were shed because of her death, as customarily happens among human beings” (26).

Of course COVID ravaged the land. Of course lives were upturned. Of course we miss being in the real classroom with each other, and we shed tears, as customarily happens among human beings.

This course, of course, one might say, has been an exploration of what “customarily happens among human beings.” It is about normal life in circumstances which for us often seem to be quite abnormal, but which we must also understand, for better or for worse, to be part of the normal course of modernity. To our own current condition, which many of us find abnormal and in many ways unbearable, we might in fact learn from Pramoedya, and remind ourself that of course this is how the world is: why have we been deluding ourselves with false optimism? Or, borrowing from the magical fantasy of Ho Anh Thai, we might just realize that we are all just goats after all, always have been, and always will be. Of course.

But of course, in this course, when these pessimistic strains get a bit too overbearing, there is the music and the art, and your writing…

I always love how student writing forms the end of any course, because a course is only as much as you, the students make of it. Your final papers are the true measure of whether or not you found any of this inspiring, because the art of teaching is also the art of letting go and hoping that your students will find their own intellectual and aesthetic pathway into knowledge and thinking. It is how I always like to make the shift towards the end of the course, with the arc of the course coming back around focused on art, (and of course, the music, ah the music!) where we return to an aesthetic appreciation of so many diverse topics. But in this return to the beginning I like to think that we have also undergone a transformation. What we appreciate is not so much the epiphenomenon of images and pictures, or some essentialized or reductive notion of culture, but the critical analysis of social life. We try to understand culture as the embodied performance and enactment of social life, and the deep contextual knowledge of Southeast Asian lives as more than pretty pictures. Like the essay on the shadow puppet that accompanied the visit to the gamelan, these cultural forms are more than a picture. The deep abiding aesthetic contained within these cultural productions only emerges in the practice of making use of cultural forms in lived experience, in the way human being use these cultural apparatuses to give meaning to practical lives. The aesthetic is as beautiful as the subtle curves of a puppet handle, a beauty that is manifest not outwardly, but becomes manifest most specifically to those who live and experience it as a something penak (comfortable) and awet (durable). This is the kind of appreciation I hope you might have achieved through the circuit of this course, a kind of appreciation for the profound existential sensibility that comes from seeing people making comfortable and durable lives out of some often rather stark conditions.

I look forward to reading your papers! Of course.