Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia PDF
Preview Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Spirited Politics Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia This page intentionally left blank Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George, editors Spirited Politics Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS Southeast Asia Program Cornell University Ithaca, New York 2005 Kl Editorial Board Benedict R. O'G. Anderson Tamara Loos Stanley J. O'Connor Keith W.Taylor Andrew C. Willford Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications 640 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850-3857 Studies on Southeast Asia No. 38 © 2005 Cornell Southeast Asia Program All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Printed in the United States of America ISBN-13: 978-0-877277-37-8 / ISBN-10: 0-877277-37-0 Cover Design: by Robin Werner. Cover illustration: Detail from "Bulan Sabit Merah" (Red Crescent Moon), by A. D. Pirous, 1998. By permission of the artist. Digital photograph courtesy of Kenneth M. George. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: Religion, the Nation, and the Predicaments of Public Life 9 in Southeast Asia Kenneth M. George and Andrew C. Willford The Priestess and the Politician: Enunciating Filipino Cultural Nationalism 23 through Mt. Banahaw Smita Lahiri The Modernist Vision from Below: Malaysian Hinduism and the “Way of Prayers” 45 Andrew C. Willford Fraudulent and Dangerous Popular Religiosity in the Public Sphere: Moral 69 Campaigns to Prohibit, Reform, and Demystify Thai Spirit Mediums Erick White Islam and Gender Politics in Late New Order Indonesia 93 Suzanne Brenner A Sixth Religion?: Confucianism and the Negotiation of Indonesian-Chinese 119 Identity under the Pancasila State Andrew J. Abalahin Relocating Reciprocity: Politics and the Transformation of Thai Funerals 143 Thamora Fishel Immaterial Culture: “Idolatry” in the Lowland Philippines 159 Fenella Cannell Picturing Aceh: Violence, Religion, and a Painter's Tale 185 Kenneth M. George Contributors 209 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As the volume's editors, we would like to thank Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program Publications Editorial Board for its unflagging support, and our contributors for their collegiality, cooperativeness, and scholarly care. Benedict Anderson's interest in this volume has been pivotal, and he offered several very helpful suggestions during the earliest stages of our work. Our thanks also go to the entire staff at SEAP Publications, and in particular, to Deborah Homsher, who has been a delightful source of editorial critique and expertise. Her steady and patient interventions in the face of our numerous delays, travels, and debates are evidenced throughout. We are extremely grateful to her for her enthusiasm, energy, and formidable editorial talents—they made this a better book. This volume has roots in two conference panels. The first occurred at the New York Conference on Asian Studies, Association of Asian Studies, which took place at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in fall of 1999. This panel, entitled "Spirited Politics," was organized by Smita Lahiri, Thamora Fishel, and Erick White, and was chaired by Smita Lahiri. Andrew Willford served as discussant. Plans and ideas for this volume emerged at that conference. A second panel followed at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago, in the spring of 2001. Ken George served as discussant on this subsequent panel, which included papers by Andrew Willford, Thamora Fishel, and Andrew Abalahin. The conversations and papers launched at these two panels provided the basic blueprint for the core themes addressed in this book. Later, Suzanne Brenner and Fenella Cannell kindly accepted our invitations to contribute their respective chapters. From Andrew Willford: I wish to thank Vasantha, Rabindra, and Anisha for their constant supply of laughter, joy, and love. Vasantha, moreover, has been more than a life partner; she has been oftentimes my harshest and most helpful critic. I also wish to thank my parents and sister for their remarkable faith and help over the years. Last, I want to thank Ken George for his insight, hard work, frank advice, and good judgment. His patience, sense of humor, and intellectual generosity have been both inspiring and delightfully stimulating. From Ken George: I would like to thank Andrew Willford for inviting me to serve as co-editor of Spirited Politics. I have learned much while working with him and the other contributors. It happened that I fell gravely ill about a year after joining the project and had to bring all work to a stop for nearly six months. Andrew and the others were wonderful medicine; they waited for me to recuperate and helped reawaken my energies. They were part of the cure. To my wife, Kirin Narayan, go affectionate and unending thanks for the love and care it took to get me back on my feet, and for all the companionship before and after. ACW&KMG This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION: RELIGION, THE NATION, AND THE PREDICAMENTS OF PUBLIC LIFE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Kenneth M. George and Andrew C. Willford The essays in this book all call attention to the salience of world religions in Southeast Asian public life. Modernization, it was once argued, should have led to the "disenchantment" of Southeast Asian social life. Specialists reckoned that nationalism and nation-building, the global rise of capitalist markets, and the broadening reach of mass media, along with the other cultural, structural, and ideological features of modernity, would so swamp religious communities, institutions, and ideas that they would become unmoored from their once-prominent place in defining and legitimating political and cultural orders. Religion, in this scenario, was to become a "private" concern, and, for this reason, largely sequestered from the central and transcendent, "secular" energies of public culture and the modern nation-state.1 Spirited Politics joins a growing list of studies that see religion differently—as an enduring and increasingly significant precinct of Southeast Asian politics and public life.2 1 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) for a critique of treating the "religious" and the "secular" as fixed and opposed categories. The "secular," for Asad, is conjunctural—a bringing together of diverse practices and knowledge—and so, "secularism" and "secularization" need to be investigated as political projects, not as the emptying of religion from social life. 2 See, for example: John R. Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2003); Robert W. Hefner, ed., The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich, eds., Islam in an Era of Nation States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997); Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and Helen Hardacre, Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994); Rita Smith Kipp and Susan Rodgers, eds., Indonesian Religions in Transition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987);
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