Rights as Wrongs: Legality and Sacrality in Thailand

Abstract

Interviews with injury victims in northern Thailand (Lanna) conveyed a pervasive sense of injustice in their daily lives but a notable absence of the language of rights. Despite the proliferation of rights-based discourses, organisations, and institutions in Thai society, interviewees tended to disfavour the pursuit of rights because they believed that resort to the legal system would subvert Lanna traditional practices and would add to the bad karma that caused their suffering in the first place. This article traces fundamental contradictions in northern Thai concepts of justice arising from the imposition of “modern” systems of law and religion by the central Thai (at that time Siamese) government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It views the legal modernisation project as a continuation of earlier efforts to impose central control over outlying regions by curtailing what were viewed as deviant cultural practices in order to weaken rival political, religious and legal traditions. The transformation of law in Lanna – from the Mangraisat tradition to a European-style legal framework – should therefore be viewed in conjunction with other cultural and political transformations initiated from Bangkok. Current expressions of disaffection and confusion about justice are rooted in this broader historical process.     

Tuna karya,jilbab and cow-boy hat: Youth in Suharto's Indonesia as reflected in the works of Remy Sylado and Emha Ainun Nadjib∗

The construction of social coherence out of cultural and ethnic diversity is one of the major challenges faced by Indonesia. It is necessary to work in harmony like musicians in a gamelan group. Two Indonesian cult figures, Remy Sylado and Emha Ainun Nadjib have tackled this dilemma when addressing their audience. During the Suharto period, these two figures, despite their different backgrounds, came to be known as iconoclasts or mbeling. Their unconventional expression enabled them to harmonise the various strands of Indonesian youth and to direct them towards projects which united them in the ideal of one and the same Indonesia. Like all gamelan players, they settled into a shared rhythm, before setting the tone for change.     

Who and what is Canada? Constructing cultural identities in health care research

This paper concerns the negotiation of cultural categories embedded in and informing the ongoing nation formation of Canada. It discusses the construction of cultural identities by health care professional students as they participated in a qualitative study concerned with health care practice in an increasingly culturally diverse society. The study methodology, embedded in layers of narrative about «difference», fostered a negotiation of «self» and «other» on the part of the students and provided an intense site for reflection on cultural identities and social categories in a period of rapid demographic change in Canada. As the students defined and interpreted cultural issues during their fieldwork placements they interrogated and contested various dimensions of difference, including their own sense of Canadian-ness as this played out in «lived» multiculturalism in a specific Canadian city. It is argued that the students» negotiations of boundaries of the cultural «self» were closely linked to a changing place narrative and identity of Canada, expressed in discourses and material practices around difference at local and national scales.     

‘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.     

Iranian University Students' Politics in the Post-Reform Movement Era: A Discourse Analysis

Based on the discourse analysis of the statements of the university student organizations in the period between 1996–2006, this paper will address the pros and cons of five approaches to politics in the post-reform movement era based on five discourses among university students in the past decade of Iranian politics and their consequences for reshaping the Iranian polity. This article first discusses five socio-political processes, i.e., Islamicization, social differentiation, limited political competition, transformation of Shi'ite authority, and personalization of power, which led to four social and political schisms in Iranian society; inequality; political, social, and cultural discrimination; and secular/Islamist tension. Referring to these schisms, political discourses shape the ideologies and actions of Iranian student movements. These discourses are social justice, tradition, totalitarianism, pluralism, and Islamic democracy. Even if these discourses were no more than intellectual pronouncements by the university students, they have been powerful enough to extend to the Iranian political society.     

The STSI-SOAS Indonesian television project

The Balinese Television Project is a collaborative venture between STSI Denpasar and SOAS, starting in 1990, to record, document, preserve archivally, and transcribe important Balinese cultural television broadcasts for educational and research purposes. The project now has an archive of some 1,500 hours of selected broadcasts, and is supposed to be among the largest archives on non-Western television in the world. Although Indonesia has a very important, active, and rapidly changing television broadcasting network, which is central to its role as a developing Pacific Asian country, the social and cultural implications of television on people's lives have remained largely unstudied. Among the problems is a relative lack of materials and of research on contemporary mass media in Indonesia. Television companies have virtually no archival facilities. So the project began as a pilot scheme in Bali to preserve broadcasts of particular cultural and religious value from destruction, by recording, transcribing, and establishing an archive for the use of both Indonesian and foreign scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The aim was that archive should also form a basis for more extensive research into Indonesian media.     

Sexual harassment in Korean college classrooms: how self-construal and gender affect students' reporting behavior

This article examines the reasons why women students may hesitate to report sexual harassment. The research draws on the notion of ‘self-construal’. Self-construal is a form of self-identification in social relationships, which in this case relates, in particular, to gender within cultural environments in Korea. For the purposes of this research, a survey was conducted with 298 Korean college students from 7 to 14 March 2006. The results showed that different types of self-construal had different influences on Korean college students' and their reporting of sexual harassment, whereas gender did not. Grounded in the theoretical framework of self-construal, people with independent self-construal were found to express their uncomfortable feelings and to report to the university counseling center, whereas people with interdependent self-construal did not. Furthermore, we found that women were more likely than men to directly express their opinions and report sexual harassment to the university counseling center. Men are also harassed by women colleagues or students but are often more reluctant than women to recognize their experiences as ‘sexual harassment’ because of the stereotype that men are the perpetrators of this behavior, not its victims, and because they fear ‘loss of face.’ It is necessary to engage not just with femininity but also with masculinity and the relationship between these constructs because they are both temporally and geographically contingent.     

试论日本华侨学校的法律地位及其所带来的问题

作为日本华侨社会的主要教育设施,华侨学校不仅为华侨子弟的教育做出了贡献,也为整个华侨社会的统合和稳定发展以及中日文化的交流立下了汗马功劳。华侨学校具有持日本国籍的学生增多、学生总体趋向多元化,毕业生去向以升人日本学校为主流,以民族教育和升学教育为两大教学目标及注重培养学生的国际化观念等特点。但由于华侨学校长期处于边缘化的法律地位,故在学生入学、升学及学校财政等方面都受到了极大的限制。这也直接影响到了华侨学校教育活动的实施。     

Cosmopolitan or ethnically identified selves? Institutional expectations and the negotiated identities of international students

The identities of young people, including students, are influenced by their institutional contexts. In central Melbourne over the past decade, international students largely from Southeast Asia have been presented with the expectations of universities in which they are enrolled and churches with which many are affiliated. But the subject positions offered to students by universities and churches diverge: universities expect of their students cross-cultural interaction and a forming global cosmopolitanism, whilst churches expect devoutness to be exhibited through close interaction amongst international students, often in national and ethnically specific groupings. Drawing from lengthy interviews with students and institutional service providers, this paper finds that the influence of religious organisations on the social forming of students is more direct and effective than the influence of universities. The churches draw their student members tightly and persuasively into ethnically identified groups, whose members enact a sociality almost entirely conducted in relation to those churches. The universities, in contrast, are less directive and insistent about their expectations of cosmopolitan interactions. Students whose sociality seems compliant with university statements are those whose plans to be cosmopolitan were developed independently of university expectations.     

The career aspirations and expectations of geography doctoral students: establishing academic subjectivities within a shifting landscape

The PhD forms a watershed period where candidates' professional identities are formed, and their career aspirations and expectations are developed. Yet little is known about Australian geography doctoral students' career aspirations and expectations. Drawing on findings from a 2016 survey of those students, the paper establishes that while a majority of students aspire to work in academia, many also feel quite pessimistic about their prospects of being able to do so. The paper argues that the uncertainty and anxiety that many Australian geography doctoral students feel about their future careers is the product of a wider cultural shift that is occurring in relation to the purpose of the research doctorate. Geographers need to critically engage with these changes and the academic subjectivities they are producing to ensure that, as a discipline, geography continues to make a positive contribution to the careers of the individuals who undertake these degrees.     

The nation,the élite and the Southeast Asian antiquities trade: With special reference to Thailand

Abstract

The dealings that the Thai nation state has had with archaeological sites and antiquities appear to fit at least as well within the framework of antiquarian collecting as within that of modern archaeology. It is argued that this reflects the potential that sites and antiquities have to function as cultural capital. Citing Pierre Bourdieu, it is proposed that there is a commonality of interests between the state and the many private collectors among the Thai elite and that this derives partly from the emphasis that is placed on the display or performative potential of sites and antiquities. An appreciation of how antiquities function as cultural capital is surely a prerequisite for any successful effort to counter the looting of sites and the illegal trade in antiquities.

‘There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic.’[1]     

Does Diversity Matter? Measuring the Impact of High School Diversity on Freshman GPA

At the heart of arguments for affirmative action in university admissions are various claims about ethnic diversity. One assertion is that a diverse student body improves the quality of the educational experience: all students learn more. Further, a diverse educational experience better prepares students for the pluralistic society in which they will live. Previous studies examining these issues have been based on informal and survey methods. To better assess the impact of diversity we utilize a data set that allows us to measure student performance at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a function of the diversity of a student's high school. Do students from diverse high schools do better in the ethnically diverse environment at UIC? After controlling for other factors that affect GPA, such as ACT, high school rank, and high school quality, we find significant diversity impacts. Depending on the diversity measure, a student from a very diverse high school has an expected first semester GPA that is a one‐fourth to one‐half point higher than a student from a nondiverse high school. The diversity impacts tend to be greater for students in the lower tail of the GPA distribution. There are also large gender differences with females helped most by diversity. Although the results represent outcomes at only one university, they nevertheless serve as a starting point for quantitatively assessing the impact of a diverse learning environment.     

Boundary spanning in social and cultural geography

This article situates interactions between German- and English-language social and cultural geographies since the mid-twentieth century within their wider intellectual, political and socio-economic contexts. Based on case study examples, we outline main challenges of international knowledge transfer due to nationally and linguistically structured publication cultures, differing academic paradigms and varying promotion criteria. We argue that such transfer requires formal and informal platforms for academic debate, the commitment of boundary spanners and supportive peer groups. In German-language social and cultural geography, these three aspects induced a shift from a prevalent applied research tradition in the context of the modern welfare state towards a deeper engagement with Anglophone debates about critical and post-structuralist approaches that have helped to critique the rise of neoliberal governance since the 1990s. Anglophone and especially British social and cultural geography, firmly grounded in critical and post-structuralist thought since the 1980s, are increasingly pressurized through the neoliberal corporatization of the university to develop more applied features such as research impact and students’ employability.     

网络对大学生思想道德的影响及其对策

随着互联网渗透到社会的各个层面和领域,对新生事物历来敏感的高校大学生受其影响日盛。网络在改变着当代大学生学习、思维和生活的模式,影响着他们的政治态度、道德风貌和价值取向。如何借助互联网,因势利导,做好高校思想政治教育工作,是我们面临的一大课题,本文指出了网络对大学生思想观念的正、负影响并提出了应对对策。     

云锡公司印尼归侨社会适应研究

以云南锡业公司归侨为研究对象,通过历史资料和研究文献,结合深入访谈,从工作、婚姻、教育和福利等方面阐述了这些归侨五十年来的生活、生产情况;分析了七十年代部分归侨移居香港的原因和移居模式以及归侨群体对新社会环境的适应过程;并对云南锡业公司归侨群体鲜明的特点进行了归纳。     

From water to tears: extra-curricular activities and the search for substance in China’s universities

ABSTRACT

Why do university students participate in extra-curricular activities in China? What do they seek in a meaningful education? This paper explains the rising interest in extra-curricular activities by looking into students’ frustration about classroom-bounded education in China’s universities. A transforming socio-economic landscape and increasing imagination about global modernity have inspired new neoliberal demands for practical knowledge and personal meaning. And yet, China’s universities have failed to keep up with students’ changing visions of education, success, and productive personhood. This paper explores students’ agentive pursuit of sociability and emotional sensitivity through extra-curricular activities as a lens to examine the fluidity of meaning-making in contemporary China. In the process, I discuss why self-reported aspirations in skill cultivation cannot encompass the range of motivations that have driven students to extra-curricular participation, and explain how the ethnographic method can help to address gaps of knowledge in inquiries about youthful aspirations.     

Developing Geographers through Photography: Enlarging Concepts

This paper explores how photographs can be used to teach urban social geography to second- and third-year university students. In it the author describes her work acquainting students with the skill of ‘directed observation’. She argues that teaching geography through photography is not merely asking students to take pictures but rather, the process of looking with intention. Capturing what is seen on film encourages students to engage with geography by seeing how ideas ground themselves on the landscape. This work also challenges how geographers think about what they require of students and calls into question normative classroom practices. Most importantly, it adds to our understanding of concepts that are central to geographic analyses and heightens our awareness of how well students understand. Photographs provide an opportunity to hear multiple voices in multiple ways. The author suggests that the methodological and pedagogical contributions of photographs have been overlooked in geography.     

The Azazo Project: Archaeology and the Community in Ethiopia

Abstract

In this article we discuss the motivations, aims, and preliminary results of working with a local community in Ethiopia. Trying to escape from the (neo)colonial archaeology that is still practised in Africa, this project aims to achieve a cooperative and participative archaeology. This work with the community has been one of our main priorities in our last seasons, and although we have focused on elementary school and university students, we have opened up a number of different paths to follow in future years. The experience has been very positive, and engagement with local people has helped us to create awareness about the importance of cultural heritage, hopefully ensuring the future protection of the sites.     

Cultural Engineering Under Authoritarian Regimes: Islamization of Universities in Postrevolutionary Iran

The purpose of this article is to analyze the efforts that have been made to Islamize Iranian universities, specifically since the emergence of hardliners in 2005. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic regime relentlessly intensified its efforts to Islamize universities to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. In the three decades following the Revolution, three major periods of university Islamization have been implemented. The Cultural Revolution, which started in 1980, was the first step in the Islamization of Iran's universities: to cleanse the higher education systems from students and professors who criticized the new established Islamic regime. By increasing the number of students and the development of universities throughout Iran in the Rafasanjai era, the second wave of the Islamization of the university was triggered by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1994. During the reform era, the Islamization of universities slowed because of the many confrontations between the Supreme Leader and the reformist administrations. With the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, the Islamization of universities intensified. While there are a few publications about the Islamization of universities, they mainly focused on the first and second decades following the 1979 Revolution. Focusing on the third period, this article will investigate the different strategies and tactics for the Islamization of universities, as well as reasons for its failures.     

Playing with digital gender identity and cultural value

In cyberspace, anything is possible. Playing with digital gender identity has particularly flourished in digital dating games. Women can become the ‘masters,’ while men are the ‘pets’ when fabricating and manipulating digital gender identity to develop alternative heterosexual relationships. This implies that the breaking down of social and cultural barriers in cyberspace is possible if the digital dating game is seen as playful or a potential liberation from the barriers of digital gender identity to challenge the existing masculine power base. The current study attempts to fill the gap in knowledge related to challenging heterosexuality as the masculine dominant norm in cyberspace by examining Taiwanese online heterosexual relationship developments between gender identity and cultural value while playing a ludic digital dating game. The study employs netnography and recruits 40 people total, including Taiwanese workers and full-time university students, for participation in this research. The results highlight that the digital dating game is in some ways liberating, enabling Taiwanese users to present themselves as they want to express emotions, establish online heterosexual relationships in a nontraditional way, and engage in alternative digital gender play. These ‘ludic gaps’ allow for a fleeting, but unsustainable escape from traditional Taiwanese gender cultural values and practices. It is suggested that culture is inescapable, regardless of whether we are in the real world or cyberspace.