Papers (Part 1)

• Belonging and Personhood Among Noncitizen Vietnamese Children in Cambodia Charlie Rumsby Coventry University

  Using various qualitative research methods and emphasising children’s perspectives, this paper puts forward a three-dimensional framework of belonging as something that is imposed from above, inherited from below, and appropriated from beside, to understand how and why personhood can and does change. Using the case study of noncitizen Vietnamese children living in a peri-urban slum in Phnom Penh, we can understand how 'belonging from above' is informed by socio-historical discourses about Cambodia’s largest minority group, and how this discourse has affected interactions among people within communities at a local level in different ways.

  For children in these communities, a sense of belonging and identity reflects the framing of ‘Vietnamese-ness’ by the dominant powers, from above children encounter negative discourses of what is means to ‘be’ Vietnamese, ‘illegal’, ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘thieves’, leaving them with feelings of otherness and exclusion. ‘Belonging from below’ refers to children’s belonging as inherited socio-cultural beliefs, and identity signifiers from the family and the local community. Children encounter local spiritual practices and narratives about the supernatural that causes anxiety. To resolve the negative aspects of belonging from above and below, children appropriate new forms of belonging. Children’s 'belonging from beside' is revealed, in this case, at the transnational-religious nexus. The introduction of 'the God School' - an unregistered Christian school targeting the Vietnamese community - as a transnational space brought extraneous or outside elements, offering children new ritual forms, new sets of ideals, and new possibilities for sociality (Austin-Boos 2003). This paper will focus on how children appropriated these outside elements and what this means for their personhood.

• Salvation as Violence: Anti-Trafficking and the Rehabilitation of “Fallen Women” into Moral Neoliberal Subjects Sharmila Parmanand Homerton College

  The common thinking in Philippine feminist and anti-trafficking circles is that women in prostitution are victims of violence and incapable of legitimately consenting to sex work because their agency is undermined by poverty and desperation. The implication of this assumption on policy is that women’s agency that has been lost in prostitution can only be reclaimed when women are rescued, rehabilitated, and redirected to other acceptable forms of employment, a process that transforms them into new kinds of virtuous and productive persons.

  This paper interrogates the ideological projects behind rescue and rehabilitation strategies, such as the regulation of women’s sexuality and the creation of ‘moral subjects’ within an essentially neoliberal order that requires poor women to practice responsible citizenship and motherhood by engaging in low-paid, labour-intensive morally acceptable alternatives to prostitution, such as domestic work, factory work, and small-scale entrepreneurship. This paper draws on life history interviews with ten women who were rescued from prostitution in the Philippines about their reflections on their encounters with the state, their experience in rehabilitation shelters, the process of being reconstituted from ‘victims’ to ‘survivors’, the violence involved in transacting with their rescuers for survival, and their reintegration into society as ‘empowered women’.

• The Artivist as Figure: Devising Relations in the Face of Urban Precarity in Contemporary Indonesia Lukas Ley Heidelberg University

  This paper discusses insights from ongoing collaborative research with Indonesian urban art collective Hysteria. Drawing on ethnographic data from participatory observation and interviews conducted with the collective in Semarang, Indonesia, and Heidelberg, Germany, the paper considers emerging relationships between activist art, (inter)national audiences, and the urban. In Semarang, Hysteria actively links itself to social problems that are distinctly urban, such as water scarcity, flooding, or gentrification. Their themed art exhibits in select neighbourhoods experiment with various forms of public expression and story-telling that link remote communities and spaces within the city and across regions. Their artistic interventions become social events that connect marginalized subjects, urban space, and the political in new ways. To make sense of Hysteria’s winding road from barely surviving to international recognition, I draw on Simone’s notion of devising relations and Barker and Lindquist’s concept of the figure. According to Simone (2014), urban collectives in Indonesia, such as households, kampungs, or whole cities function as hinges; connective devices that increase maneuverability to produce economic opportunity. However, Simone’s theory leaves the individual underexposed. If the practice of devising relations is an urban mechanism specific to Southern cities, what are the ethics and politics of these relations and how do they fashion the city? Drawing on Barker and Lindquist (2013), I consider the artistic activist (“artivist”) as an emerging figure able but also forced to master membership in multiple social milieus: creative economy, academia, as well as (non-)governmental sectors. This figure is not a mere by-product of a particular form of the urban. Instead, as the artivist communicates, mediates, brokers, and promotes, it is dialectically related to the ground of social life.

Papers (Part 2)

• Bargain the Past and Craft Your Way: On Being a Village Headman in Contemporary Myanmar Stéphen Huard Centre Asie du Sud Est

  My ethnographic research in the villages of central Myanmar explores how village headmen craft their position and their authority in daily life. Village headship is an institution created during the colonial period in Upper Myanmar (1886-1942) and which has been empowered in different ways by the successive governments. To some degrees, the position is constrained by the past and headmen could be seen from a variety of options such as government brokers, buffers against state demands, charismatic patrons anchored in a local, corrupt officials, or political entrepreneurs depending on the person and the period. But even if headship get folded into existing ways of being, following one headman in his daily life in the aftermaths of the democratic transition (2011) shows that it is a matter of craftmanship, or bricolage. My contribution proposes to study how Ko Kyaw, headman of Myinmilaung village tract, is constantly creating his position by articulating references to morality and practices of previous persons of power while dealing with shifting forms of sociability. For him, being a headman means curving obligations while abiding by local ethics, being responsible while dodging various forms of contention. On a day to day basis he has to dissemble as he is representing layer upon layer of individuals through the institution, and not simply his own authority via the institution. The tools at hand are his family reputation, his way of haranguing, smiling, being silent; of accepting, refusing and giving things; of forming, avoiding and manoeuvring factions; and also, of complying with the village bigmen and having a fair idea about the lines he should not cross. As one follows Ko Kyaw in his routine, it becomes clear that he transforms and gives arms and legs to an institution that has a new role in a network of personalities. By exploring how a person crafts village headship in central Myanmar, I seek to contribute to the ongoing debates about personhood in Southeast Asia by connecting the anthropology of morality and uncertainty with an historical perspective focusing on ethical shifts.

• How Cousin Patrick Didn’t Become a Seaman: Social Mobility and the Afterlife of the New Resto Cruz University of Manchester

  In this paper, I trace ethnographically how the new might arise from what exists, if only slowly and over a long duration; how it might create ruptures in people’s sense of personhood and relations; but also how it might get absorbed into these. I do so in the context of social mobility in postwar and contemporary Philippines. Here, social mobility entails the production of new kinds of person; it is enabled by prior relations and modes of being a person, while also transforming these, including in less positive ways. Taking the vantage point of those born in the wake of upward mobility, I examine the place of refusal to follow established and valued (but previously, novel) paths to upward mobility. I focus on the story of my classificatory cousin, Patrick, who, on the cusp of becoming a seaman, decided to pursue other lines of work, thus creating new, and deepening existing, breaks in his kinship universe. Alongside these breaks were various suspicions, accusations, and explanations that held open the possibility of repair. In attending to Patrick’s story, I argue for the need to broaden the temporal horizon of the new beyond the immediate; and to see how multiple kinds of the new emerge in and get folded into persons, their lives, and relationships.

Abstract

Keywords

• History
• Philosophy
• Theory