Organizer and Chair: Yogesh Grover, Winona State University
Kanishka Goonewardena, Cornell University
This paper is a critical study of the rise of "Jathika Chinthanaya" ("National Ideology") in Sri Lanka, which is a potentially formidable political and cultural response to contemporary globalization. Within the general context of the worldwide consolidation of multinational capital and the concomitant transformations in nation-states, the paper provides an assessment of the recent mutations in the terrain of political opposition in Sri Lanka to laissez faire ideology in particular and to colonial/imperial modernization in general—from a social democratic and socialist and ideological framework dating from the 1930s independence movement of what was then Ceylon to the powerful ascent of "Jathika Chinthanaya" in the late 1980s, with a special emphasis on the latter’s thorough-going anti-modernism and deep-seated mistrust of anything "western," coupled with its uncompromising "Sinhala-Buddhist" nationalism and its militant call for an environment-friendly "socialism." While outlining its role in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict and noting its similarities to the ideology of the BJP in India, the paper will focus strongly on how this post-colonial, post-marxist political tendency conjures up specters of Nietzsche and Heidegger, thus recalling the political and ideological contexts of European fascisms in the interwar period and demanding the scrutiny of "Jathika Chinthanaya" as a Sri Lankan variety of National Socialism.
Shallini Ann Chopra, University of Virginia
Economic reforms essentially transform extant economic and political institutions. Basic analytic premises attribute this change to a shift in preferences of key social groups or to the disruptive impact of exogenous factors such as an economic crisis. Even though institutionalists focus on the mediating effect of domestic political structures in these areas, an explanation of endogenous factors of change remains underdeveloped. An examination of the politics of economic reforms in India attempts to redress this imbalance in interest-based and institutionalist perspectives. Clearly, the balance of payments and fiscal crises precipitated the implementation of economic reforms; however, these proximate causes were not sufficient to ensure a continuation of reforms. Electoral competition in a democratic system motivated politicians to redefine the nature of state control and preferential politics that supported the initial phase of implementing economic reforms. In the process, this emerging institutional context altered the opportunities and constraints faced by key corporate leaders. Their strategic interpretation of self-interest and adjustment to the multinationals sustained economic reforms even after the political momentum had dissipated. The conclusion explores the normative implications of economic reforms for mass welfare.
Maurice Eisenbruch, CNRS, France
Cambodia may have the most serious HIV epidemic in Asia. The campaigns for 100 percent condom usage face cultural barriers. In this paper, a new approach is presented which offers culturally valid data on which to tune the anti-AIDS campaigns.
Methods: In a clinical ethnographic study carried out in 13 (ME1) provinces of Cambodia, the beliefs and practices of 153 traditional healers (kruu, monks, traditional birth attendants, mediums) and their patients regarding STD and HIV/AIDS were documented. Healers were observed treating patients, and followed up with semi-structured interviews focusing on taxonomy, aetiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, treatment and prevention.
Findings: The Khmer language absorbed the term AIDS, but there was no notion of asymptomatic HIV infection. The stereotype was that women give syphilis, and men get syphilis (or mango). Prostitutes created syphilis or AIDS germs and developed leucorrhoea while clients developed syphilis or AIDS. Menstual blood, or vaginal discharge, also harbored it. Syphilis and AIDS crossed by sweat, steam of urine, breast milk and mosquitoes—believed to be blood-based—against which condoms were useless. Gonorrhoea could transform into syphilis. A man contracted "normal mango illness," which became "emergent mango" and "crouching mango illness"—critical because of the misconception that the advanced form is AIDS. Women with leucorrhoea were seldom thought to have an STD, but developed tuberculosis or uterine cancer, not AIDS. Syphilis crossed from father to foetus and the child could develop furunculosis, and the descendants leprosy.
Interpretation: The local cultural logic of infection explains why the AIDS campaign is at cross-purposes with local notions of infection, and why AIDS patients benefit from healers who remoralise them and try to prevent families from ejecting them. Efforts to change men’s behavior should exploit local beliefs, such as the loathing of menstrual "black blood" to encourage consistent condom use. Health systems can harness healers as adjuncts to health education, and as collaborators in anthropological research. This refocusing may help to reduce the spread of STD and AIDS, and add to the understanding of gynaecological and contagious diseases including tuberculosis and leprosy, in Cambodia and neighboring countries facing similar cultural issues.
Pierre P. Lizée, Brock University
The opposite of war in Cambodia is not peace, Douglas Pike once remarked, it is government. Building on this view, the international community has tried since the operation conducted by the United Nations in 1991–93 to develop in the country credible means of democratic governance able to allow the articulation of Cambodian politics in an institutionalized, non-violent framework. Peace, in a word, has been seen as coextensive with democratization. The goal of this paper is to analyze the strengths and the weaknesses of that position, and to use this analysis to highlight the lessons that the international community should gather from the 1991–93 experience as it attempts to define its involvement in the 1998 electoral process in Cambodia.
The text first examines the precise nature of the involvement of the United Nations in Cambodia during the 1991–93 period. Four sectors of activity are studied: the attempt to centralize the state apparatus, efforts to render Cambodia’s bureaucaratic machinery more politically neutral, the capitalization of the economy, and the support given to the development of human rights in the country, either directly through groups dedicated to action on this issue, or indirectly through the development of an independent media.
Areas of resistance to these efforts within the Cambodian polity are then outlined in the second section of the paper. Three are studied in a more detailed fashion: (1) Structural tensions, for instance having to do with the nature of the social dislocation brought about by the international program of economic rehabilitation conducted under the aegis of the UN; (2) Changing social contract. Tensions between the model of politics promoted by the UN and the one which had hitherto prevailed in Cambodia are examined; (3) Political resistance. The paper outlines how Cambodian elites resisted the UN intervention not so much by opposing it outright, but rather by trying to reorient it so that the model of peace on which it was based could become more consonant with the traditional modes of politics in Cambodia.
The lessons for future international initiatives aimed at furthering the democratization of Cambodia which can be learned here are then outlined in the third section of the text. It is argued that the failure of the UN operation in Cambodia was not due to problems of will and resources—would more means and a better organization have made a difference?—but to an intellectual failure, in that the nature of the encounter between different understandings of peace, democracy, and politics which it entailed was not properly understood. This section then introduces policy recommendations aimed at directing such encounters between different traditions of politics in Cambodia towards more productive ends. More particularly, the spaces for democratization opened up in this perspective by the elections scheduled for May 1998 are delineated.