The Birth of a Noble Tea Country: on The Geography of Colonial Capital and The Origins of Indian Tea

This paper looks at the origins of the British tea industry of India from the standpoint of colonial and semicolonial involvement in, respectively, British India and Qing China. The imposition of the tea industry in Assam was integrally tied to the wars in East Asia fought in order to open markets for the movement of opium and other commodities. British officials championed both policies in the name of modern economic progress, liberalizing trade with the Qing and establishing a productive industry in Assam. The agricultural science of political economy aimed to extract the value of various objects which could then be united in a land hitherto considered a wasteland. Plants, soil and labor were each viewed as isolatable things whose values were objective and calculable. Such static representation, however, was already belied by the dynamic process of gathering and transporting these "things" across the vast and unevenly developed regions of Asia, ultimately valorizing them as a breakfast drink commodity enjoyed worldwide. The origins of the Assam tea plantations, mirroring developments elsewhere, relied upon spatio-economic connections that force us to reevaluate how the specific histories of British India, Qing China and Southeast Asia are inseparably linked.     

唐宋时期中阿交往及其历史意义与当代价值

公元7世纪到13世纪，中阿两大文明同处于世界文明的顶端。在长达数百年间，中阿双方在政治、经济、文化各领域的频繁交往，有力地促进了中华文明和阿拉伯—伊斯兰文明两大不同文明的繁荣和发展。唐宋时期中阿文明的交往，不仅在中阿关系史和人类文明交流史上具有重要的历史意义，而且具有弥足珍贵的当代价值。这种交往对今天中阿关系的进一步发展及对世界不同文明之间的对话与交流都有可资借鉴的启示。     

A New Perspective in Guiding Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century: ‘De-politicization’ of Ethnicity in China

All multiracial and multi-ethnic nations are confronted with the important issue of how to handle ethnic relations and of the role that government should play in guiding the direction of such relations. In viewing ethnic minorities, ‘culturalization’ has a tradition of thousands of years in China. Until the late Qing dynasty, that tradition resulted in a united-pluralistic polity with a huge population by assimilation and prosperous economy. Under the new historical conditions of the twentieth century, however, China has adopted the policies of the former USSR since the 1950s and given ethnic minorities more political emphasis, what is called the ‘politicization’ of ethnic minorities. This paper proposes that, in the twenty-first century, China should learn from its own historical heritage and the lessons of the US, the former USSR and other nations, and redirect its policy from ‘politicization’ to ‘culturalization’ of ethnic issues so as to strengthen national identity among its ethnic minorities. This new perspective might also be insightful to other multiracial or multi-ethnic nations around the world in the new century.     

Perspectives of Culture-Bearers on the Vitality,Viability and Value of Traditional Khmer Music Genres in Contemporary Cambodia

Previous studies have explored the historical and social context for the endangerment and subsequent revitalisation of Cambodian performing arts, but little work has focused on music, or the views of culture-bearers themselves on these issues. By thematically analysing qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in early 2013, this research explores the perspectives and motivations of a group of master-musicians, teachers and performers who are making efforts to sustain and revive their music traditions. Participants emphasised five factors that they believed significantly interplayed with the vitality of traditional Khmer music genres. Four of these were generally perceived to have an overall adverse effect on vitality: ‘outside’ influence; loss of interest and knowledge among younger people; low market demand for performances and teaching; and perpetuation of limiting constructs and belief systems. Only one factor identified was perceived to have a beneficial effect on vitality: the strength of infrastructure for learning and teaching. Somewhat surprisingly, then, opinions about the viability of traditional genres were on aggregate highly optimistic, though with some concern expressed about the impact of government action (and inaction) on this issue. Justifications given for sustaining and revitalising traditional Khmer genres included the role of these traditions in education and ritual, Cambodian national identity and musicians’ livelihoods. The study confirms the perceived value, among one group of culture-bearers, of revitalising Khmer music traditions.     

Where does guanxi come from? Bao,shu, and renqing in Chinese connections

Practices commonplace in mainland China, of individuals seeking favor from persons who control resources and, if successful, generating expectation of a return favor, characterized as guanxi, is widely held to be based on principles located in China's cultural traditions, including Confucianism. In these terms it is claimed that guanxi is based on certain connected moral principles, including bao (norm of reciprocity) and renqing (norm of human feelings), which can only be understood in terms of such cultural traditions. It is shown in the present article that claims regarding the classical roots of guanxi and related practices cannot be sustained and, further, that they are not required for the understanding or operation of guanxi. The origins of the concept of guanxi in late Qing and Republican China, and development of the term in post-1949 China, are outlined.     

An Eleventh-Century View of Chinese Ethnic Policy: Sima Guang on the Fall of Western Jin

Abstract  At the start of the fourth century, China's Western Jin dynasty (265–317 AD) faced insurrection from non-Chinese ethnic groups that resided as its internal clients. It fell to these barbarian usurpers in 317. Throughout the eleventh century, the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) felt its sovereignty endangered by foreign states to the north. Parallels between the ethnic policies of Western Jin and Northern Song emerge from the representation of Western Jin's dynastic fortunes that the eleventh-century statesman and historian Sima Guang (1019–1086) offered in his famous chronicle, Zizhi tongjian ( A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid Government ). The present article takes that text as its focus. It examines the textual and ideological spin that Sima Guang gave his account of fourth-century ethnic tensions. It argues that his characterisation of the barbarians that threatened Western Jin resonated with his response to eleventh-century foreign relations. And it shows that for Sima Guang the integrity of the Chinese imperial state, and even Chinese identity, was at stake.     

The UN Global Compact for Safe,Orderly and Regular Migration: Its Impact on Asia

This article focuses on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), a landmark international document that builds on the momentum of a decade of initiatives at the international level on migration governance, and its impact on Asia from the perspective of South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and South Korea. While none of these countries voted against the adoption of the GCM, there are significant differences in how individual countries approached the commitments made in the GCM. These perspectives were articulated in a webinar hosted by Metropolis Asia on 20 June 2018 and in governmental statements made at the UN international conference when the GCM was adopted. This article also discusses the challenges confronting the implementation of the GCM. While the Compact resulted from inclusive and intensive negotiations and many compromises, the road towards realizing its goals will be at least as challenging as the road that led to its adoption. In spite of these challenges, the GCM is a ground‐breaking representation of the first multilateral framework for migration governance. Its success rests upon the recognition that addressing the challenges and maximizing the benefits of migration require true international cooperation, renewed commitment and meaningful action on the commitments agreed to.     

Invisible Women in History and Global Studies: Reflections from an Archival Research Project

This article questions the continuing invisibility of the significant scale of the involvement of women in historical movements/moments. The focus is on Mahatma Gandhi-led Civil Disobedience movement (1930–1933), which was a historic turning point enabling the political involvement of masses of women in South Asia. Using an individual narrative, multi-archival research, and secondary literature survey, this article contends that the thriving subaltern and feminist historical traditions have had limited impact on historical ‘gender mainstreaming’. Furthermore, the paper argues that revealing the diverse nature and the substantial scale of women's involvement in social/political change is important for two reasons: firstly, it contributes to a fuller understanding of history and, secondly, because historical research is essential for contemporary policy-making. Reclaiming the role of ordinary women in disparate history writing traditions thus can be a tool to understand and counter persistent gender inequality, in South Asia and in the larger global community.     

The City God Returns: Organised and Contagious Networks at the Xiamen City God Temple

This paper explores the revival and current networks of the Xiamen City God temple in Southeast China. I divide the networks into two forms: the first is organised and composed of systematically and consciously structured networks; the second is contagious, made up of networks that are more unwieldy and impossible to fully map as they are formed through the affective intensity of ritual events. The two forms of networks are mutually dependent: without the donations and participation generated through organised networks, the ritual events would never take place; without the ritual events that generate networks of contagion, there would be no interest or reason to support the temple and the god’s efficacy would be seen in decline.     

Old and New Forms of Giving: Understanding Corporate Philanthropy in India

Corporate philanthropy in India is burgeoning due to a fast growing economy, rise in the number of billionaires, and the recent introduction of legislation that mandates spending 2 % of company profits on corporate social responsibility. Through analysis of key historical and anthropological texts, we argue that ‘business philanthropy has a long and honorable history in India’ (Sidel, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 12(2):171–180, 172, 2001), and explain this with reference to Indian giving practices from Hindu, Mughal (Muslim), British Raj, and Gandhian traditions. We then move into a review of the emerging field of literature on corporate philanthropy, to explore how these traditions synthesized with contemporary global business and economic practices to create a distinct form of Indian corporate philanthropy. We necessarily also include an overview of its salient critiques. This will be of interest to those concerned with Indian philanthropy and of culturally specific scholarship of philanthropy.     

Liberal dreams: Materialism and evolutionary civil society in the projection of nation in Southeast Asia

This article focuses on the introduction of ethnicity into Southeast Asia, as a component of the nineteenth century British projection of empire. The argument is that rather than projecting a cosmopolitan vision of community, British liberalism naturalised ethnicity through the concept of civil society. This presented a global vision of societies being independent and emerging from the local landscape. These liberal notions of civil society represent an early incarnation of self-determination. The British Empire in Southeast Asia emerged within this intellectual climate, and its early construction reflected this vision. In essence, the British Empire in Southeast Asia was founded on the nebulous idea of providing self-determination to Southeast Asian nations. This notion of self-determination was a qualified concept of independence, framed around opening these civil societies to British trading hegemony.     

STRATEGIC RITUALIZATION AND ETHNICITY: ATYPOLOGY AND ANALYSIS OF RITUAL ENACTMENTS IN AN ITALIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

This investigation utilizes a theoretical framework that focuses on ritual enactments to examine the ways members of an Italian American community in southeastern Oklahoma use social rituals to achieve different outcomes. Several methodological strategies (especially interviews and historical analysis) are utilized to document how individuals within this ethnic community have, for over the last century, employed numerous rituals to, among other things, express their ethnicity, create community ties, enhance personal gain, and survive. Building upon the theory of structural ritualization, the concept of strategic ritualization is employed and expanded upon to examine this issue. A typology of three types of strategic ritualization is presented and defined: ritual legitimators, ritual entrepreneurs, and ritual sponsors. This conceptualization represents the first elaboration of structural ritualization theory addressing this topic. In focusing on this little studied ethnic community, the importance of ritualized practices and their strategicuse throughout society are emphasized. The relation of this research to broader concerns dealing with the social constructionist approach to ethnicity and the intersection of decision-making, culture, and structure are briefly highlighted and directions for future theory development and research are indicated.     

Understanding Nonprofit Advocacy in Non-Western Settings: A Framework and Empirical Evidence from Singapore

Research on nonprofit advocacy in non-Western settings is still rather limited. In this article, we address this limitation by examining the advocacy practices of nonprofit charitable organizations in Singapore, a non-liberal democratic city-state in Southeast Asia with a history of colonial rule. We ask the following questions: What are the key environmental and organizational factors that influence the scope and intensity of advocacy activities of nonprofit organizations? In particular, what is the effect of the political context on the advocacy strategies and tactics among these organizations? To answer these questions, we present a three-factor explanatory model of nonprofit advocacy incorporating cause, capacity, and context. The research methodology entails a survey of nonprofit executives from a random sample of Singapore human and social service organizations. Our findings shed light on how the various aspects of the political context—perceived opportunities and threats from government intervention and dependence on government funding—shape nonprofit advocacy in a non-Western setting.     

Navigating communities: race,place, and travel in the history of maritime Southeast Asia

This paper examines intersecting notions of distance, place and community across Insular Southeast Asia for the last several hundred years. The piece is not an attempt to chronicle all these affiliations over time and space, but is rather an effort to re-think how people have moved in Southeast Asian history, who they did this with and why. The essay is divided into three parts. The first section looks at some of the meanings of place in the last five centuries, as place has pertained to communities in ‘centers’ and maritime ‘peripheries’, as well as in several supposedly discrete arenas. The second section focuses on people, and how different communities in Southeast Asia have envisioned the terms and conditions of movement in divergent ways. The last third of the paper concentrates on period, or how conceptions of community, distance and travel have changed over time. It is hoped that this essay will show how all three of these variables – people, place, and periodization – have intersected in specific, complicated ways in shaping local notions of ‘community’.     

Women’s political pathways in Southeast Asia

While Southeast Asian women’s socioeconomic status and formal political rights have improved significantly in recent decades, women remain under-represented in the region’s political institutions, especially at local levels of governance. Although interest in Southeast Asian women’s political representation has increased in recent years, our understanding of women’s experiences in their pursuit of elected office remains limited. Through a critical reading of the literature on women and politics and an examination of experiences in Southeast Asia, this article highlights gaps between normative theories and elite-biased empirical studies of women’s political advancement and the conditions, processes and outcomes observed across several Southeast Asian countries. Drawing on original ethnographic research in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, this article identifies three major pathways by which women in Southeast Asia have sought election and re-election to political office. In so doing, the article highlights the significance of understanding women’s varied experiences and suggests an agenda for further research.     

Rewriting Singapore and rewriting Chineseness: Lee Guan Kin’s diasporic stance

This study proposes to view Lee Guan Kin (the former director of the Center for Chinese Language, Culture, and Division of Chinese at Nanyang Technological University) in the historical context in which the identity of Southeast Asian Chinese has transformed from overseas Chinese to ethnic Chinese, from Straits Chinese to Chinese Singaporeans. Based on the interview with Lee and the study of Lee’s numerous publications, this article exemplifies Lee’s enduring efforts on researching diasporic Southeast Asian Chinese and their ties with Chinese language and culture is a meaningful choice rather than an essentialist returning to ‘roots.’ In this article, Lee’s continuous engagement with China, Chinese language, and culture is illustrated by analyzing Lee’s assertion of ‘doing justice’ for Lim Boon Keng and Tan Lark Sye. Accordingly, this study is divided into four parts. First, the concept of Chineseness is reviewed and explored in the context of Southeast Asia. Second, the historical background of English-educated and Chinese-educated Chinese groups and their varying degrees of Chineseness are introduced. Then this study analyzes how Lee does justice for Lim Boon Keng, a baba who served as chancellor of Xiamen University for 16 years, and Tan Lark Sye, who was the founder of former Nanyang University. Lee believes that both prominent figures were unfairly and relentlessly treated by Chinese and Singaporean historiography, respectively, and therefore, Lee wants to do justice to them as a way to relocate their position in the context of Chinese diaspora and to redefine Chinese accordingly. Finally, this study argues that locality defines Lee’s Chineseness, her relation with China, China studies, Chinese identity, or Chinese culture. While locality defines Lee’s Chineseness, a diasporic stance characterizes her articulation, which challenged the homogeneous threat of identity imposed by the nation-state and the kind of Chineseness traditionally shaped by the authority of a sino-centric core.     

Ritualizing the Routine: Collective Identity Affirmation

Groups use rituals to create and preserve collective identities. Separation of sacred practices from customary activities has long been considered a key property of ritual. However, customary activities form the basis of some ritual celebrations. We explain how a different process of identity creation results: identity affirmation. We find that groups affirm their customary practices on ritual occasions when they intend to celebrate practices already associated with the sacred, and we explain the structure of such rituals using a case study of a university centennial celebration. We argue that attention to variation in ritual casts light on the values and collective identity of groups.     

China’s flexible overseas food strategy: food trade and agricultural investment between Southeast Asia and China in 1990–2015

Using the UN Comtrade database and multiple sources of agricultural investment data, this paper outlines the emerging patterns of food trade and agricultural investment between Southeast Asian countries and China. The paper shows that China has adopted a flexible overseas food strategy. First, China has increased food export and shifted its food trade with Southeast Asia from a dependent relationship towards a complementary relationship at the regional level in recent years. Second, China tends to adapt to the existing conditions of food production and trade in Southeast Asian countries instead of fundamentally altering them. Finally, Chinese overseas agricultural investment is less driven by domestic food demand but more oriented for profit making, and this gives it flexibility in diversifying investment. An adequate understanding of China’s flexible food strategy in bilateral and multilateral relationships holds implications for global food security.     

Dress and Cultural Strategy: Tai Peddlers in Transnational Trade along the Burma – Yunnan Frontier

This paper explores transnational trade carried out by the Tai, an ethnic nationality spread across the border area between Shan State in Myanmar and Dehong Prefecture in Yunnan province in China. The Tai who live in this border region belong to a linguistic group that has long shared cultural and linguistic traits with the Thai in Thailand and other Tai-speaking groups in Vietnam, Laos and other parts of Southeast Asia. This paper focuses on the Tai peddlers who conduct trade between Thailand and Shan state in commodities such as Thai and Tai traditional clothing and entertainment VCDs featuring Shan and Thai songs. The focus is on peddling in traditional Thai dress styles that are popular with Dehong Tai customers. The author contends that dress practices have gained a meaning and status in displaying acquired wealth, and this has resulted in shifting status hierarchy among members of Dehong Tai society. Wearing certain clothes becomes a self-identification that the Dehong Tai use to manifest their social position in public. This in turn helps them to destabilize both their lower-status position in the Han-dominated Chinese society and the cultural imbalance between themselves and the Chinese.