Putting the Mandala in its Place: A Practice-based Approach to the Spatialization of Power on the Southeast Asian ‘Periphery’—The Case of the Akha

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah E. Tooker
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Similar Form ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Concentric Circles ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Hierarchical Status

In this article, I argue that the ‘mandala’ and other spatialized concepts associated with the ‘cosmic polity’ in Southeast Asia (such as ‘exemplary center’ and ‘sinking status’, ‘galactic polity’, ‘concentric circles’, ‘nested emboxment’, etc.) are key concepts with a similar form that have dominated theories of premodern Southeast Asian political and social structure. I claim that previous approaches to the mandala polity have been defined from the perspective of dominant political groups, and thus are top-down or center-out models. As a result, theorists have inadvertently reified this perspective in a set of analytical concepts that reaffirm existing power structures. As such, they have skewed our understandings of the mandala away from that of a socially enacted set of spatial codes that communicate and index hierarchical status between individuals and groups, both dominant and nondominant.

scholarly journals Power from Below in Premodern Societies

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Hierarchical Networks ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts

This volume challenges previous views of social organization focused on elites by offering innovative perspectives on 'power from below.' Using a variety of archaeological, anthropological, and historical data to question traditional narratives of complexity as inextricably linked to top-down power structures, it exemplifies how commoners have developed strategies to sustain non-hierarchical networks and contest the rise of inequalities. Through case studies from around the world – ranging from Europe to New Guinea, and from Mesoamerica to China – an international team of contributors explore the diverse and dynamic nature of power relations in premodern societies. The theoretical models discussed throughout the volume include a reassessment of key concepts such as heterarchy, collective action, and resistance. Thus, the book adds considerable nuance to our understanding of power in the past, and also opens new avenues of reflection that can help inform discussions about our collective present and future.

scholarly journals KERJA SAMA PEMBERANTASAN PENDANAAN TERORISME DI ASIA TENGGARA

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Regional Cooperation ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Terrorism Financing ◽  
Southeast Asian Countries

This paper analyzes regional cooperation on Counter Terrorism Financing (CTF) among Southeast Asian countries. Various studies have discussed the factors that construct the response of Southeast Asian countries in fighting terrorism, along with factors that undermines the counter terrorism efforts in the region. Nevertheless, these studies have not specifically adrress the risk of terrorism financing that remains high in the Southeast Asia, particularly in the frame of regional cooperation. By using the Regional Security Complex theory, this paper will explain the polarity and social structure characterizing CTF cooperation in the Southeast Asia, as well as another influential external actor. The focus of this research is on the funding aspects of dominant transnational terrorist groups after September 2001 such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS). Therefore, the discussion in this research will be focused on five countries that faced the threat of those group, i.e. Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The findings in this article show that the characteristic of CTF cooperation in the region is largely affected by external power, while the social structure between the internal units of the region is not dominant. Thus, the efforts of the countries become ineffective in overcoming the problem of terrorism financing in the region.

scholarly journals Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva ◽  
Laurie J. Sears
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Top Down ◽  
South And Southeast Asia ◽  
Local Environments ◽  
Contested Meanings ◽  
The Caribbean

This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of “knowing”—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local environments and local knowledge; and (2) in thinking of storytelling events or inscriptions as situated testimonies (i.e., identifying the politics of location of a telling), it centers affect and emotion as the means for unraveling and connecting different, contesting registers of experience.

Deliberation, Southeast Asian Local Wisdom in Resolving Disputes

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-58
Author(s):  
Rahdiansyah Rahdiansyah ◽  
Yulia Nizwana
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Important Thing ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
The People ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Asian People

Cultural disputes, and others, often occur between neighboring countries in Southeast Asia and can be the seeds of disharmony, of course, this is not desirable. Southeast Asia as a cultural scope that is interrelated in history, has local wisdom in resolving disputes, resolving this dispute is known as deliberation. Deliberation is an identity that must be prioritized as a wise cultural approach for the ASEAN community. The purpose of this study is to explore the local wisdom of Southeast Asian people in resolving disputes in their communities and implementing them as a solution for the ASEAN community. Recognizing each other as cultural origins often occur between Malaysian and Indonesian communities. As a nation of the same family, this is commonplace, but the most important thing is how to solve it. Interviewing the people of both countries is the first thing to do in looking at this problem, how they understand and see culture in their culture. Questionnaires are distributed as much as possible, each data obtained will be processed and classified according to nationality, education, age, and others. The findings will be a study to see the perspectives of the two countries in understanding history, culture, and cultural results in addressing the differences of opinion that occur. At least the description of the root of the problem is obtained, why this problem occurs, what are the main causes, how to understand it, how to react to it, and lead to the resolution of the dispute over ownership of culture itself

Premises, Policies and Multilateral Whitewashing of Broad Security Doctrines: A Southeast Asia-Based Critique of “Non-traditional” Security

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2019) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Delphine Allès
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Multilateral Cooperation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Policy Transformation ◽  
Semantic Evolution

This article highlights the formulation of comprehensive conceptions of security in Indonesia, Malaysia and within the framework of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), well before their academic conceptualisation. These security doctrines have been the basis of the consolidation of state and military apparatuses in the region. They tend to be overlooked by analyses praising the recent conversion of Southeast Asian political elites to the “non-traditional security”? agenda. This latter development is perceived as a source of multilateral cooperation and a substitute for the hardly operationalisable concept of human security. However, in the region, non-traditional security proves to be a semantic evolution rather than a policy transformation. At the core of ASEAN’s security narrative, it has provided a multilateral anointing of “broad” but not deepened conceptions of security, thus legitimising wide-ranging socio-political roles for the armed forces.

The Costs of Regularization in Southeast Asia

Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Maryann Bylander
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Global South ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The State ◽  
Asian Context

In the Southeast Asian context, legal status is ambiguous; it enlarges some risks while lessening others. As is true in many contexts across the Global South, while documentation clearly serves the interest of the state by offering them greater control over migrant bodies, it is less clear that it serves the goals, needs, and well-being of migrants.

scholarly journals Postcolonial International Law Discourses on Regional Developments in South and Southeast Asia

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane A. Desierto
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Economic Order ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
South And Southeast Asia ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
International Legal System

The development of international law in South and Southeast Asia exemplifies myriad ideological strands, historical origins, and significant contributions to contemporary international law doctrines’ formative and codification processes. From the beginnings of South and Southeast Asian participation in the international legal order, international law discourse from these regions has been thematicallypostcolonialand substantivelydevelopment-oriented.Postcolonialism in South and Southeast Asian conceptions of international law is an ongoing dialectical project of revisioning international legal thought and its normative directions — towards identifying, collocating, and applying South and Southeast Asian values and philosophical traditions alongside the Euro-American ideologies that, since the classical Post-Westphalian era, have largely infused the content of positivist international law. Of increasing necessity to the intricacies of the postmodern international legal system and its institutions is how the postcolonial project of South and Southeast Asian international legal discourse focuses on areas of international law that create the most urgent development consequences: trade, investment, and the international economic order; the law of the sea and the environment; international humanitarian law, self-determination, socio-economic and cultural human rights.

‘Strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’: The sayyid in eighteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
Asian State ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Western Expansion

Sayyidi ‘strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’, borne on the eighteenth-century wave of Hadhrami migration to the Malay-Indonesian region, boosted indigenous traditions of charismatic leadership at a time of intense political challenge posed by Western expansion. The extemporary credentials and personal talents which made for sāda exceptionalism and lent continuity to Southeast Asian state-making traditions are discussed with particular reference to Perak, Siak and Pontianak. These case studies, representative of discrete sāda responses to specific circumstances, mark them out as lead actors in guiding the transition from ‘the last stand of autonomies’ to a new era of pragmatic collaboration with the West.

The dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: an attempt at chronometric hygiene and linguistic correlation

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 587-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Spriggs
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Agricultural Crops ◽  
Agricultural Economy ◽  
Island Southeast Asia

As with conventional definitions of the Neolithic anywhere, the concept in this region relies on there being an agricultural economy, the traces of which are largely indirect. These traces are artefacts interpreted as being linked to agriculture, rather than direct finds of agricultural crops, which are rare in Island Southeast Asia. This definition by artefacts is inevitably polythetic, particularly because many of the sites which have been investigated are hardly comparable. We can expect quite different assemblages from open village sites as opposed to special use sites such as burial caves, or frequentation caves that are used occasionally either by agriculturalists while hunting or by gatherer-hunter groups in some form of interaction with near-by agricultural populations. And rarely is a full range of these different classes of sites available in any one area.

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