Papers (Part 1)

• Political Genealogy of Creolism: The Sea Peoples’ Arts of Coping with the Authorities in Southeast Asian Maritime World Kazufumi Nagatsu Toyo University

  This presentation examines the ethnogenesis of "sea peoples" and its political environments in the Southeast Asian maritime world. The Southeast Asian maritime world is defined as a socio-cultural ecosphere of Southeast Asia, which is tightly bound through the seas. Geographically, it consists of the insular and adjacent coasts of the continent. The “sea people” in this presentation designates a prototypical group of peoples who emerged on the basis of the ecological environment of Southeast Asian maritime world, i.e., an archipelagic terrain predominantly characterized by tropical seas and rainforests. The discussion focuses on the Bajau (or Sama). The discussion focuses on the Bajau (or Sama). With an approximate population of 1,100,000, most of the Bajau live along coasts or on islands. Their settlements are widely dispersed over the southern Philippines, Sabah, Malaysia, and eastern Indonesia. Their livelihood is generally based on sea-oriented activities such as fishing, cultivation of coconut palms, and marine trade. The presentation aims at 1) demonstrating the geo-demographic features of the Bajau’s diasporic distribution and population flow, 2) tracing the ethnogenesis of the Bajau as a creole sea people, and 3) exploring their interactions with local authorities to draw the political settings whereby such an ethnogenesis has repeatedly occurred.

• Semi-Nomadic Fishing Communities and State Development During the Angkor Era Veronica Walker Vadillo University of Helsinki

  Since the discovery of the Angkor civilization on the shorelines of the Tonle Sap Lake, it has been assumed that rivers played an important role in the establishment of this polity. However, rivers and the communities that exploited their resources have largely been ignored in previous academic research, which has seen stronger focus on land remains. This has resulted in a biased interpretation of the data, favouring approaches that recognise Angkor as a mainly agrarian state. While the role of agriculture is certainly of great importance, novel research conducted during my doctoral studies suggests that the presence of semi-nomadic fishing communities played a key role in the establishment of Angkor, and that strategies of cost signalling were implemented by the kings to exert their influence over these semi-nomadic communities. Their importance for the state lied in their role in capturing fish during the short fishing season, which coincided with the rice harvest, a time when the majority of Angkor’s man-power was tied to the land. These fishing communities had to travel hundreds of kilometres annually to the Tonle Sap Lake following fish migration patterns, while at the same time land-based communities travelled to the lake to obtain the fish needed to produce prahok, a fermented fish paste that is at the heart of Khmer cuisine. This gathering provided opportunities for human interaction and likely acted as a conduit for culture dispersal and knowledge transfer.

  This paper seeks to analyse how ecological pressure affected the relationship between the Angkorian state and semi-nomadic fishing communities within the framework of Scott’s Zomias. It is expected that by understanding the ways in which the kings of Angkor tried to guarantee the annual return of semi-nomadic fishing communities into the Tonle Sap, we can gain a new perspective on how regional polities incorporated peripheral communities into their state projects.

• Wet Zomia, Watersheds and Connectivity in Malaysian Borneo Noboru Ishikawa Kyoto University

  This paper critically questions the dominance of state-centered perspective in the study of maritime Southeast Asia, that tends to emphasize differences between upriver (hulu) and downriver (hilir) socio-cultural formations. Based on a long-term field research in central Sarawak, Malaysia, I argue that such a binary model has understated empirical diversity and dynamics, thus leading to partial understanding of maritime societies in Southeast Asia.

  Cases abound. Studies from Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and islands including Borneo have shown earlier cities and states formed at the port and the river-mouth rather than the upriver interior. Royal chronicles such as hikayat and colonial documents have also been employed to illustrate and perpetuate the conventional understanding of the politico-economic relationship between hulu and hilir. The differences between the two spaces have thus become a prioi assumption and permeated discussions on political status, economic development, agricultural mode, social mobility, civilizational worldview, religion, and kinship system of maritime Southeast Asia. In such a binary view, a frontier region is portrayed as a periphery as opposed to the political, economic, and cultural center in the lowland coastal area. The peoples of non-state space who predated or exist outside the sphere of the downriver political power are either marginalized or essentialized.

  Through an ethnographic study of Borneo, particular based on field data concerning people’s migration history, ethnic and kin relations, and trading, I aim to rethink the existing upriver-downriver binary so as to present an alternative approach to better comprehend the social formation and capture the diversity of maritime Southeast Asia.

Papers (Part 2)

• Centrality of Christian Conversion to Kachin Nation Making Masao Imamura Yamagata University

  Two hundred years ago, countless small-scale autonomous polities existed between empires in Southeast Asia. During the past two centuries, these in-between spaces and middle grounds have been transformed into peripheries within nation-states in two centuries. Studies of this historical transformation tend to pay little attention to the religious conversions that have taken place among the inhabitants of these spaces. Take the Kachin people of Myanmar for example. Since the Kachin first encountered Protestant missions I the 19th century, the vast majority has converted to Christianity. The highly acclaimed monographs about the Kachin (Leach 1964; Sadan 2013), however, do not consider this Christianization as a significant historical event. While acknowledged as a historical fact, it tends to be seen as a superficial and derivative diversion. Contrary to these views, this paper addresses enduring secularist bias in the academic scholarship and offers a corrective towards a more balanced perspective, without endorsing the evangelical historiography, which is dominant and popular among the Kachin. Christianity has been a unique provider of multiple resources, very useful to an ethno-linguistic group like the Kachin, who find themselves increasingly marginalized under the new nation-state regime. Protestantism in particular has provided provide a minority group with a series of modernizing tools, ideas, and practices. While Christianity’s power has diminished dramatically in Europe during the secular age, its practical and symbolic resourcefulness appeal have made the religion extremely appealing in places like highland Myanmar where secular institutions such as public schools and government services have not been widely available. Conversion to Christianity should be understood as an adaptive action to delineate social boundary and establish a distinct and legible nation.

• From Refuge to Bride Source: Marriage and Migration Among the Lahu Across the Myanmar-China Border Mio Horie Nagoya University

  The history of the Lahu people, who mostly reside in the mountainous area of China-Myanmar-Thailand border, can be understood as a series of southwestward migrations. According to Lahu men living in southwestern Yunnan: “All the strong ones fled to the south, only the weak ones like us remain here.” The deep forests of northern Myanmar were to Lahu in China attractive as a suitable place for escape as they faced political and economic disturbances. While communism and collectivism were the main causes of Lahu’s migration first, the strengthening of the Chinese economy and the shortage of women later effectively pulled many Lahu back into Han-dominant areas of China. As China suffered from a shortage of marriageable women, Lahu women became affordable alternatives. Because the one-child policy was not strictly implemented among many of the ethnic minority groups, the imbalance of gender ratio did not immediately become an acute problem among the Lahu. Han men’s demand for Lahu women led to the shortage of brides for Lahu men in Yunnan, so Lahu women in Myanmar in turn became a new alternative source . Currently, many Lahu women from the Wa region in northern Myanmar cross the border to get married in Yunnan. This presentation will describe the transition of the space on the China-Myanmar border from a space for refuge to a source of brides.

• Mekong Delta as a Wet Zomia Hisashi Shimojo University of Shizuoka

  The Mekong Delta, most parts of which are today located in Southern Vietnam, is considered to have been a “water frontier” in the pre-colonial era (Li Tana 2004). The fluidity of the soil, caused by continuous erosions from river and sea water, makes land-based movement and habitation difficult. Historically, the Mekong Delta was a far-away periphery from the kingdoms in both Cambodia and Vietnam. By taking advantage of the fluid watery environment, however, certain groups of people with diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds from various regions flowed there continuously via river and sea, and participated in commercial activities to connect Southeast Asia with East Asia. After modern canal constructions and paddy cultivations were promoted by France in the late 19th Century, cultivable land rapidly expanded, and many migrants came from Vietnam and the coastal regions of China. Since then, the Delta has been developed as one of the world’s leading rice-producing areas, along with complexly stratified multi-ethnic societies connected with the rice-based economy. Althgouh it has been suggested by previous studies that the Delta, which experienced political turbulence originating from colonial development, warfare, and socialism, has lost the characteristic of being at the periphery since modern state formation, this presentation challenges this idea by focusing on stateless spaces where local people pursued survival strategies, even after the establishment of the nation-states.

• Narratives and Meta-Narratives of Lawa-Tai (Thai) Relations: An Analysis of the Historical Vicissitudes of a Hill-Plain Relationship Akiko Iijima Toyo Bunko

  While existing studies typically portray Lawa as a pitiful hill tribe (chao khao) and present an ahistorical picture of the small population, archival research covering a wide range of available sources reveal long and complex processes of modernistic segregation, during which (part of) the Lawa gradually came to be understood as a hilltribe. During this process, they were differentiated from the Tai and lumped together with other upland groups who had begun entering the Thai kingdom in the nineteenth century. While this transformation of the Lawa was taking place, the Tai, of multi-ethnic origin (including the Lawa), have become a “civilized” urban people (khon mueang). The Tai-Lawa relationship, originally egalitarian and symbiotic, has been thus bifurcated, due to multiple influences including Theravada Buddhism and academic ethnology. At the end of this historical process are the two dichotomous categories, which continued to be reproduced in both popular and academic publications today.

Abstract

Keywords

• Borderlands
• Zomia