Southeast Asian Identities

Nationalism, cultural identity, the politics of representation, culture wars, cultural globalization -- these are some of the themes explored in this collection of essays on Southeast Asia. Instances of cultural identity formation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are examined by authors from the region as well as Australia and Canada. They draw on insights developed in the relatively new fields of cultural and post-colonial study, but at the same time attuned to the rather specific histories of Southeast Asian cultures and society. At the same time, by making the very notion of "culture" upon which such identities are based problematic, these essays offer important criticisms of those regimes of power that point to the unique cultural features of the region in order to ward off all challenges to their authority.

In June 1985, a symposium, "Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II" was held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This volume includes many of the papers from that symposium presented by ANU scholars and those from universities elsewhere in Australia, North America and Southeast Asia. Participants looked at the current thinking about the parameters of identity and shared their own research into the complex issues that overlapping categories of identity raise. Identity was chosen as the focus of the, symposium because perceptions of self - whether by others or by the individual Chinese concerned - appear to lie at the heart ' of the present-day Chinese experience in Southeast Asia, It is also evident that identity wears many guises and that we cannot talk about a single Chinese identity when identity can be determined by the different political, social, economic or religious circumstances an individual faces at any given time. One of the distinctive characteristics of all the essays in this volume is that they are written from an historical perspective. While the papers forcus on how recent developments in Southeast Asian society have shaped Chinese identity, they also discuss those changes in terms of the historical matrix from which they developed. Because many of the essays in this volume combine an historical overview with more recent statistical data, it should serve as a useful companion to the increasingly popular case studies in which much of the writing about the Chinese in Southeast Asia is now cast.

Modern nation states do not constitute closed entities. This is true especially in Southeast Asia, where Chinese migrants have continued to make their new homes over a long period of time, resulting in many different ethnic groups co-existing in new nation states. Focusing on the consequences of migration, and cultural contact between the various ethnic groups, this book describes and analyses the nature of ethnic identity and state of ethnic relations, both historically and in the present day, in multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation states in Southeast Asia. Drawing on extensive primary fieldwork in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, the book examines the mediations, and transformation of ethnic identity and the social incorporation, tensions and conflicts and the construction of new social worlds resulting from cultural contact among different ethnic groups.

This book—an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of an after-school video-making project for 1.5- and second-generation Southeast Asian American teenagers—explores the relationships among stereotype, identity, and ethnicity that emerge in this informal educational setting. Working from a unique theoretical foundation that combines linguistic anthropology, Asian American studies, and education, and using rigorous linguistic anthropological tools to closely examine video- and audio- recorded interactions gathered during the video-making project (in which teen participants learned the skills for creating their own video and adult staff learned to respect and value the local knowledge of youth), the author builds a compelling link between micro-level uses of language and macro-level discourses of identity, race, ethnicity, and culture. In this study of the ways in which teens draw on and play with circulating stereotypes of the self and the other, Reyes uniquely illustrates how individuals can reappropriate stereotypes of their ethnic group as a resource to position themselves and others in interactionally meaningful ways, to accomplish new social actions, and to assign new meanings to stereotypes. This is an important book for academics and students in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics with an interest in issues of youth, race, and ethnicity, and/or educational settings, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of education, Asian American studies, social psychology, and sociology.

Southeast Asia has in recent years become a crossroads of cultures with high levels of ethnic pluralism, not only between countries, sub-regions and urban areas, but also at the local levels of community and neighbourhood. Illustrated by a series of international case studies, this book demonstrates how the forces of 'post-colonialism' in their various manifestations are accelerating social change and creating new and 'imagined' communities, some of which are potentially disruptive and which may well threaten the longer term sustainability of the region. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book brings together geographers, historians, anthropologists, architects, education specialists, planners and sociologists to make connections and new insights and to provide a truly comprehensive view of heritage, culture and identity in this dynamic region.

A staple of postwar academic writing, “nationalism” is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction. It is generally treated as something “imagined,” “fashioned,” and “disseminated,”as an idea located in the mind, in printed matter, on maps, in symbols such as flags and anthems, and in collective memory. Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it hasbeen abstracted by looking at how the concept shapes the existenceof people in border zones, where they live between nations. Noboru Ishikawa grounds his discussion of border zones in materials gathered during two years of archival research and fieldwork relating to the boundary that separates Malaysian from Indonesian territory in western Borneo. His book considers how the state maintains its national space and how people strategically situate themselves by their community, nation, and ethnic group designated as national territory.Examining these issues in the context of concrete circumstances, where a village boundary coincides with a national border, allows him to delineate the dialectical relationship between nation-state and borderland society both as history and as process. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences will learn from this masterful linking of history and ethnography, and of macro and micro perspectives.

This book—an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of an after-school video-making project for 1.5- and second-generation Southeast Asian American teenagers—explores the relationships among stereotype, identity, and ethnicity that emerge in this informal educational setting. Working from a unique theoretical foundation that combines linguistic anthropology, Asian American studies, and education, and using rigorous linguistic anthropological tools to closely examine video- and audio- recorded interactions gathered during the video-making project (in which teen participants learned the skills for creating their own video and adult staff learned to respect and value the local knowledge of youth), the author builds a compelling link between micro-level uses of language and macro-level discourses of identity, race, ethnicity, and culture. In this study of the ways in which teens draw on and play with circulating stereotypes of the self and the other, Reyes uniquely illustrates how individuals can reappropriate stereotypes of their ethnic group as a resource to position themselves and others in interactionally meaningful ways, to accomplish new social actions, and to assign new meanings to stereotypes. This is an important book for academics and students in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics with an interest in issues of youth, race, and ethnicity, and/or educational settings, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of education, Asian American studies, social psychology, and sociology.

New perspectives on the past and present contributions of the 25 million strong Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia to the development of contemporary society. Case studies feature organisational, community, religious, and other arenas of Chinese activity and identity definition, and the book analyses the interplay of local, regional, global and transnational networks and identities.