Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 5. October 2018

Front and back cover caption, volume 34 issue 5 Front cover TRUMP'S ‘ZERO TOLERANCE’ CHILDREN From early April to late June 2018, nearly 2,600 immigrant children – mostly refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Central America – were forcibly taken from their parents at the United States’ southern border following implementation of the Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Prior to being sent to detention facilities located throughout the country, children were held in Border Patrol ‘processing centres’ like this one located in a converted warehouse in McAllen, Texas. The US Department of Homeland Security released photos of the facility, some of which revealed small children huddled on mats, wrapped in Mylar blankets. Following a public outcry and growing protests, President Trump issued an executive order declaring an end to family separations on 20 June. Several days later, a federal court mandated that the government reunite immigrant families affected by the ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Even so, in mid‐August, more than 550 children who had been detained following the implementation of the policy remained in federal custody. Thousands more ‘unaccompanied minors’ – typically teenagers who were caught crossing the border without adults – remain in indefinite detention. The Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy raises broader questions about how refugees are treated – not only in the US, but in Europe, China, Australia and other parts of the world. At a time when many countries are experiencing resurgent forms of racism and the rise of authoritarian right‐wing politicians, how should anthropologists respond? Back Cover GANESHA in THAILAND For increasing numbers of Thais, the ritual worship of the elephant‐headed god Ganesha is providing new ways for attaining prosperity. Although Ganesha devotion is hardly new to practitioners of Theravada Buddhism, in the past five years, the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai has experienced a boom in the establishment and patronage of dedicated Ganesha institutions. With the new institutions come Ganesha‐related ritual events, merit‐making and the collective effervescence of festival revelry. At this 2017 Ganesha Chaturthi opening day parade at the Ganesha Museum in Chiang Mai province, devotees tow a giant float through the crowds. Here, sacred Ganesha dons distinctly Indian‐style attire as he lounges in a howdah atop an elephant. Other participants in the parade include teachers and students from three local elementary schools, and women from 11 local village housewives' associations. On the back of recent economic downturns, political and existential crises notwithstanding, what makes this Hindu god become the centre of a new Thai prosperity cult? Ganesha has long been worshipped as the god of new beginnings and the remover of obstacles. He is also associated with the creative arts. But today, Thais are increasingly turning to him for their physical and financial health problems, and new media and spirit mediums contribute to exciting new forms of enchantment. In this issue, Ayuttacorn & Ferguson explore how two Ganesha institutions in Chiang Mai facilitate these processes, and create new kinds of sacred, symbolic packages for spiritual assistance.     

Negotiating the nation: diaspora contestations in the USA about Hindu nationalism in India

ABSTRACT. Diaspora positions and identities are being continually constructed, negotiated and reframed. Nevertheless, many studies tend to focus on the ethno‐centric, exclusionary and/or nationalistic orientation of some groups. In this article, I will explore variations in the responses of the Indian American diaspora community to Hindu nationalism in India. The article will focus on the opposition of progressive groups to a particularly controversial Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi. They stand in contrast to those US‐based organisations that support Modi and his political ideology. The debate between the two sides shows a high degree of political polarisation within the community. This study illustrates the variations in interpretations of nationalism and identity that exist among groups operating in the transnational political space. In particular, it shows us that the political process that articulates these differences can impact policy in the home or adopted country.     

Celebrating the prophet: religious nationalism and the politics of Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals in India

The traditional honoring of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed (Milad‐un‐Nabi) has shifted in numerous Indian cities from private prayer and ritual meals in the home to grand public festivals that bear resemblances to Hindu religious processions. In 2010 in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, large‐scale Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals became implicated in Hindu–Muslim nationalist riots that erupted weeks later at the commencement of a Hindu festival for Hanuman Jayanthi. This paper explores the political production of Muslim ethno‐nationalism and the intra‐community debates over the legitimacy and piety of Milad‐un‐Nabi celebrations. It argues that Milad‐un‐Nabi as a public performance is a (re)invented tradition that is part of the struggle for material, political and symbolic goods of the nation‐state. It is shaped by local party politics and history of anti‐Muslim discrimination. However, as the festivals highlight community divisions and religious ambiguities, they ultimately reveal the fragility of ethnic groups.     

Between Religion and Superstition: Buddhism and Daoism in Guangzhou,China, 1900–1937

This paper illustrates how Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in Guangzhou, with their legal religious status, situated themselves within the new concept of the modern nation‐state, and how the distinction between religion and superstition affected ordinary people's religious lives. There were inherent tensions between religion and the modern nation‐state, and the survival of Buddhism and Daoism was determined by their subordination to the state ideology and to political authorities’ regulation. However, the government did not regulate the form of worship in government‐approved religious sites. Due to the syncretic nature of Chinese religion, the select few of the Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in Guangzhou, with government recognition as symbols of “true religions,” paradoxically served as a protective umbrella for the people to carry on with their “superstitious” practices. At the level of praxis, the line between religion and superstition was not as distinguishable as the government had envisioned.     

A Presence in the West: Religious Contributions to the Secular Ideology of an Australian University

Between 1972 and 1984, the rise of social justice and religious vocational movements in an increasingly self‐conscious Western Sydney intersected with the rise of an increasingly influential cadre of politicians, public servants, and educationalists. Mobilising a broader sense of grievance, and organising in community, political, and social groups, these people contributed to a widespread campaign for a university in Western Sydney which extended from the streets of Mount Druitt to the Prime Minister's Office. This article traces the contribution of these religious motivations to the secular legitimisation, mission, and implementation of the University of Western Sydney.     

State of mind: what kind of power will India become?

As its economic power, military strength and cultural influence expands, India draws ever closer to becoming a leading player in world politics. Yet relatively little is known about what Indians take to be the nature of international politics and, correspondingly, how their power and influence should be used. A survey of Indian political thought reveals sharp disagreements. Moralists wish for India to serve as an exemplar of principled action. Hindu nationalists want Indians to act as muscular defenders of Hindu civilization; strategists advocate cultivating state power by developing strategic capabilities; and liberals seek prosperity and peace by increasing trade and interdependence. This article argues that current trends indicate that India will increasingly prioritize its quest for prosperity and peace. But if this quest is thwarted by external threats, then calls to enhance India's military power will most probably grow louder, and be heeded more closely.     

Studies of Chiang Kai‐shek by mainland scholars since the 1980s

Chiang Kai‐shek was one of the most influential leaders of twentieth‐century China. Since the 1980s, perceptions of Chiang in mainland academic circles have been continually sharpened. As an important subject of research for the history of modern China, Chiang has increasingly emerged from the shadows as a real figure. The extent to which scholars can make an in‐depth, objective and comprehensive study of Chiang will have a direct relationship to the progress made in the study of the history of the Republic of China, the Chinese revolution, and modern and contemporary China. It will also determine the depth of our understanding of many important issues both past and present. Armed with a broader knowledge of Chiang and modern Chinese history, scholars and historians now face the larger challenge of setting the new image of Chiang in the context of the development of modern China.     

IDENTITIES AND URBAN SOCIAL SPACES IN LITTLE TOKYO,LOS ANGELES: JAPANESE AMERICANS IN TWO ETHNO‐SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES

Ethnic identities are expressed and articulated in particular places. These mutable identities are crucial sources of meaning in the lives of social actors. This article seeks to elucidate just how the contexts of specific institutions in an urban enclave will impact upon patterns of conflict and cooperation among different subgroups practising two religious traditions. Historical discourses of ethnic community and ‘race’, shifts in migration patterns and the changing nature of the Little Tokyo enclave provide the formative patterns of social spaces, in which ethnic actors seek to create lives of spiritual and material meaning and security. Barth's concept of the social organization of cultural difference encourages analysis of ethnic identities as a dynamic and mutable enterprise. Because the maintenance of boundaries is crucial to identities, the manner in which a group seeks to maintain difference is intermeshed with the social terrain of particular places. Through qualitative methods of semi‐structured and informal interviews and participant observations, this project engages Japanese American identities within the context of two religious communities in an urban enclave. Fieldwork was conducted in two institutions, a Protestant church and a Buddhist temple, with the aim of exploring how Japanese American identities are expressed and (re)negotiated within different ethno‐spiritual communities. Such communities are fundamental to the expression of ethnic identities, and to the emotional lives of worshippers, particularly seniors and new immigrants.     

Irish language education and the national ideal: the dynamics of nationalism in Northern Ireland

Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland conflict in the late 1960s, Irish nationalism has been identified as a prominent force in the political culture of the state. Recent studies have suggested, however, that the ‘Nationalist’ population has become increasingly content within the new political framework created by the peace process and the aspiration for Irish unity diminished. In placing the Northern Ireland situation within the theoretical framework of nationalism, this paper will analyse how these changing priorities have been possible. Through an analysis of Irish language study in Northern Ireland's schools, the paper will examine how the political ideals espoused by the nationalist Sinn Féin Party reflected the priorities of the ‘nationalist community’. It will be contended that the relationship between the ideology and ‘the people’ is much more complex than is often allowed for and that educational inequalities are a significant contributing factor to this.     

The construction of an ideological curriculum: The study of Emunah in the Har Hamor Yeshiva

Beginning in 1997, the Har Hamor Yeshiva, a leading Jerusalem-based institute for Torah learning, has become the center of a unique stream of thought in religious Zionist philosophy. This article examines how religious Zionist yeshivas have developed an educational curriculum that translates theological beliefs and values into political action. The article seeks to evaluate to what extent this ideology and curriculum will be able to survive in a political reality in which the rift between religious and secular Zionism is constantly increasing.     

Chiang Kai-shek’s faith in Christianity: the trial of the Stilwell Incident

Chiang Kai-shek’s faith in Christianity has long been a controversial issue. Some have held that his faith was genuine while others have claimed that it was merely a posture to curry favor with the Americans. Now that the Hoover Institution has released Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries, historians are in a better position to explore this long-ignored part of Chiang’s life. This paper will examine Chiang’s faith as it developed during the Stilwell Incident, the most serious crisis of US–China military cooperation during World War II. While facing American pressure to grant military command to General Joseph W. Stilwell, Chiang reveals in his diaries how he relied on his faith in the Bible, how he interpreted the Bible, and how he applied his understanding of the Bible to his political decision making. An examination of Chiang’s diary during this crisis will help us understand his practical relationship with Christianity, which in turn will provide insight into Chiang’s attitudes and methods in dealing with the Stilwell Incident.     

Natural hazards and religion in New Orleans: Coping strategies and interpretations

Socially disadvantaged people are more vulnerable and exposed to the effects of extreme natural events and the social disasters which follow. This article presents the coping strategies and cultural creativity of the most vulnerable (non‐conformist African American religious/spiritual) communities in New Orleans today and in the aftermath of Katrina. Rituals and religious practices play an important role in resilience‐building and for relief and recovery from disasters. Case studies are presented to demonstrate how these devotions, and the community‐building and mutual support that take place as a result (as well as individual practices), have assisted practitioners in their struggle for survival during Katrina and the yearly hurricane season. The article also examines how natural hazards are perceived and reflected in religious explanations and expressions, as well as in spiritual arts, and how they lead to change and adaptations. Here, affected people are not regarded as ‘passive victims’ but as creative and active agents.     

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT,CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.     

Agricultural Transformation and the Politics of Hydrology in Northern Thailand

Tensions over water resources in upland areas of northern Thailand are often attributed to reductions in water supply caused by forest clearing. This article argues that the hydrological evidence for such reductions in supply is very weak and that, rather, the key hydrological issue in upland catchments is a significant increase in water demand, especially during the dry season. The arguments are illustrated with a detailed examination of the Mae Uam catchment, located in Chiang Mai province, where the development of dry–season soybean cultivation appears to have tested the hydrological limit of the catchment, and even exceeded this limit in drier years. The author argues that a shift in focus from water supply to water demand has fundamentally important political implications. As long as the focus of public debate is on water supply, the regulatory focus will be on those resident in the forested upland areas that are seen as being crucial in securing downstream flows. But if the water management focus is shifted to water demand, then regulatory attention must shift to the diverse sources of demand that exist throughout the hydrological system.     

The politics of wetlandscape: fishery heritage and natural conservation in Hong Kong

The north‐western part of Hong Kong is a marsh with traditional freshwater fish farming; however, this brackish area has been agriculturally diversified to include cultivation of red rice, reeds, shrimp and fish, and has only largely concentrated on freshwater fish farming starting from the 1960s. By looking into the geographical and social changes that have taken place in the brackish area, I will explain how the coastal landscape was changed in the 1910s through the introduction of large‐scale rice production in Tin Shui Wai which has turned into a high‐density residential new town, and the wetland conservation of Mai Po marshes. This article aims at understanding the meanings of intangible as well as agricultural/fishery heritage and the local politics among indigenous communities, conservation groups, the government and developers in post‐handover Hong Kong society. Inland freshwater pond cultivation was actually a major industry in the 1970s since it supplied most of the freshwater fish for the local market. Nowadays, the industry is shrinking because of lack of manpower and high operation costs compared to the mainland. With various kinds of social, economic and physical pressures, the local communities which are located at the buffer areas of the wetland in Mai Po are actually facing the tremendous dangers of losing those fishponds; most importantly, the fishponds have been serving not only as mitigation zone and source of a traditional local food but also as a major food supplier for migratory birds, adding to the conservation value of the Mai Po marshes and Inner Deep Bay in Hong Kong at large.     

The Temple as a Symbol of Hindu Identity in America?

For overseas Hindu communities, the temple became an important symbol of ethnic regrouping. From the indentured expatriates of sugar colonies of the colonial era through the recent, highly educated, Asian Indian immigrants to America, the Hindu temple has served as a place of worship and, even more importantly, as a symbol of heightened cultural identity. Although the role of the temple in the Hindu regrouping in the diaspora has been previously examined, this paper reexamines this process in America in light of new data. Preliminary results indicate that the Hindu temple is not only an important religious focus for American Hindus, but also has generated links between Indian and expatriate Hindus in new ways. In fact, vigorous temple building activity among all Hindu diasporic communities could lead to a renaissance in temple building and possibly in Hinduism itself. We examine the Hindu temple as a component of the Hindu regrouping process in the postindustrial American context.     

Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy's Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3

Between 1961 and 1963, a political crisis in Iran prompted U.S. foreign-policy makers to briefly consider supporting political reform that would have pushed the Shah toward a more constitutional role and moved Iran toward democracy. Yet Washington instead decided to bolster the Shah's regime to carry out social and economic reforms that coalesced as the Shah's White Revolution in 1963. Policy-makers relied in part on a psychological profile of Iran to shape their decisions, believing that the Iranian people were psychologically unprepared to rule, and that the Shah was psychologically unprepared to give up power. This article encourages diplomatic historians to explore how the language and ideas of psychology influenced the modernization theories and policies that U.S. policy-makers applied to Iran, the Middle East, and the wider ‘Third World.’ After briefly exploring the history of U.S. racial, religious, and cultural perceptions of Iran - many of which fit traditional stereotypes of Orientalism - the article examines the influence of political and developmental psychology at a time when racial and religious bias were increasingly taboo. Psychology offered more acceptable, scientific ways to understand Iran and the Middle East, though it led to familiar conclusions. While attempting to modernize Iran, policy-makers modernized Orientalism.     

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.     

“This Greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop,Missionary Religion,and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827–1909

The history of nineteenth‐century missions provide a fruitful field to explore the development of religious thought and practice in a secular setting. This article shows how the religious views of the clergyman and educator Sereno Edwards Bishop, born in Hawai‘i of American missionary parents, were shaped by his childhood among the mission community in Hawai‘i and by his American college education. These instilled in him a liberal approach to theology that was informed by a spiritually alert sense of Hawaiian geography and environment. Contrary to the notion that he cast his faith aside in addressing matters of wider social and political importance, Bishop emerges as someone who thought critically about mid‐nineteenth‐century Protestant Christianity, grounding his perspective on politics, society, and natural history in Hawai‘i according to his religious principles. Given Bishop’s specific intellectual and cultural heritage, it is difficult to subsume his perspective within broader narratives of American expansion; rather, both Pacific and mainland American elements shaped the thought of such mission‐descended figures.     

Majority versus minority religious status and diasporic nationalism: Indian American advocacy organisations

Studies of the homeland-oriented activism of diasporic groups focus on cases where those who share national origins also share common political interests. But other literature indicates that ethnic majority and minority groups may have different attitudes towards their homelands. This paper examines how majority and minority religious status in the homeland affects the foreign policy activism of immigrant organisations. It also examines how competing groups mobilising around foreign policy concerns frame their issues in such a way as to resonate with their Western audiences. Using examples of the mobilisation of Indian American groups around religious issues in India, it demonstrates that there are fundamental differences in the concerns and goals of Hindu American organisations and those representing Muslims, Sikhs and Christian Americans of Indian ancestry. These differences often result in opposing patterns of mobilisation around homeland issues.