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Session 6: Individual Papers: Intersections of Religion, Culture, and Politics in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: R. Anderson Sutton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Many Meanings and Uses of "Asia" for Philippine Catholicism
Coeli Maria Barry, Thammasat University
The religious landscape of the Philippines has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years. With the growing popularity of new Christian groups (both Protestant and Catholic) and the assertion of Islamic communities, the Catholic Church’s preeminence has increasingly been undermined. Throughout this period, Church leadership mounted a response intended to re-evangelize "lost" Filipinos while pushing for more vigorous evangelization of Asia on the part of Filipino Catholics. The paper will examine the construct of "Asia" both as a geopolitical entity and as a field of potential spiritual conquest. Through the dual faceted evangelization effort, church leaders assert that the catholic Philippines is inextricably bound not only with the local and the national but with the region known as "Asia."
This paper offers an historical perspective on the uses of Asia for Philippine Catholicism throughout the twentieth century. In the imperial vision of the Philippine Church led by Euro-Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, for example, the Philippines was the Christian light of an Asia in darkness. By the 1960s when a full-blown Filipinization movement took place becoming more Asian was a welcome alternative to more radical indigenization efforts on the part of priests and nuns. Until the present "Asia" has been invoked to legitimize the local and to reinforce or redress the national as needed.
The Struggle over Women: Gender Ideology in Two Indonesian Islamic Organizations
Rachel Rinaldo University of Chicago
Since the 1980s, Indonesia has experienced a tremendous resurgence of Islam. Islamic religious practice has become more orthodox, Muslim political parties have proliferated, and Muslim student groups were a crucial part of the 1998 reformasi movement that helped topple former president Suharto. But the Islamic movement in Indonesia is also exceedingly diverse, and many of the differences pivot on issues related to gender and women. This paper will discuss two organizations, a liberal Muslim NGO and a conservative Muslim political party, and examine their conflicting beliefs regarding gender and women. Although these two organizations draw their members from a similar milieu, mostly the urban middle class, their respective liberal and conservative positions represent two of the major strands of the Islamic movement in Indonesia. Moreover, gender is central to both of these organizations. The NGO was founded in order to disseminate a particular version of Islam that emphasizes gender parity and women’s rights. The political party’s crusade against corruption encompasses a fight against "hedonistic" lifestyles and "pornography," and for family values, all of which represent a broader concern with sexual morality and gender roles. This paper examines how these two organizations are maneuvering within Indonesia’s unsettled and ever-shifting social and political context. The differences and similarities between their gender ideologies demonstrate that issues of women, gender, and the family are key to Indonesia’s contemporary Islamic movement. This paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in Jakarta between in 2002 and 2003.
MIB: Twenty Years of Ethnic Nationalism
Kathryn Gay Anderson, Library of Congress
This paper examines the development of the Bruneian national ideology, Melayu Islam Beraja (Malay Islamic Monarchy or MIB) since its articulation as an integrated concept in the 1984 Declaration of Independence until present day. Based on textbooks designed for educating Bruneians, other Bruneian publications, foreign secondary works, and my own semester-length observation of the MIB class as taught at the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD), the paper looks at the ideology’s origins among the conservative intellectuals associated with Sultan Omar; the use of UBD as a think tank; the dissemination of MIB in schools and in the media; the presentation of Malay as the country’s high culture; the credibility that Islam lends to the ideology; and the ideology’s similarities to Southeast Asian counterparts such as Malaysia’s Rukun Negara and the Thai philosophy of Chat, Sassana, Kasat (Nation, Religion, Monarch). In that MIB reduces Bruneian culture to those aspects directly related to that of the ethnic majority, the national religion and the monarchy, it would be a valuable subject of comparison for a discussion about ethnicity, religion, and the nation-state in Southeast Asia.
Seeking Accountability for Violations of Human Rights: The International Tribunals for Cambodia and East Timor
Lilian A. Barria, Eastern Illinois University
This paper explores the rationale and mandates of the International Tribunals for Cambodia and East Timor. While much has been written about the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the International Criminal Court, less scholarly attention has focused on the creation of institutions for international human rights in Cambodia and East Timor. While these are new tribunals, the East Timor Court, for example, has already issued indictments and carried out some trials.
We examine the authorizing resolutions of these tribunals in order to understand the goals of the international community in establishing them as well as the differences between these tribunals and the earlier tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. This paper is organized into four sections. First, we outline the nature of the conflict in both countries. Then we examine the international response to these conflicts and examine the debate on the creation of these tribunals. Third, we analyze the structure of the tribunals and their initial problems in organizing the rules of procedure. Finally, we turn our attention to assessing why the structure, jurisdiction, and staffing for these tribunals is different than the earlier tribunals of the 1990s and how this might affect their effectiveness in accomplishing their missions.
Colonial Hostages: Opium, Banditry and Captivity Narratives in Turn of the Century Tonkin
Lorraine Paterson, Cornell University
During the French administration of Vietnam, China remained an unstable and contested territory; a site where hostage deals could be struck or thwarted, revolutionaries apprehended or aided, and the reach of French authority extended or undermined. This instability was particularly highlighted in the case of kidnapped French citizens, taken from Tonkin into Chinese border areas by various factions of so-called bandits. This paper examines the captivity discourses constructed around the kidnapping and ransom of French citizens in Vietnam at the turn of the twentieth century and how it affected perceptions of this morally and racially degenerate border region.