CRASSH

Abstracts

Continuity and Change: (Re)conceptualising Power in South-east Asia

26-28 March 2009 

Keynotes

Shelly Errington (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
Cosmic Centers and the Subject of the 21st Century

Introducing "Zomia": Site of the Last Great Enclosure Movement of (relatively) Stateless Peoples in Mountainous Southeast Asia
James Scott (Political Science, Yale)

"Zomia" is a shorthand reference to the huge, massif of mainland Southeast Asia, running from the Central Highlands of Vietnam westward all the way to northeastern India and including the southwest Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and western Guangxi. Zomia has, I contend, been peopled over the last 2,000 years largely by runaways from several state-making projects in  the valleys, most particularly Han state-making projects. They have, in the hills, acquired, and shifted, their ethnic identities. Far from being 'remnants' left behind by civilizing societies, they are, as it were, "barbarians by choice", peoples who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state-centers. It is in this context that their forms of agriculture, their social structures, and much of their culture, including perhaps even their illiteracy, can be understood as political choices.

Other speakers 

Landscape, potency and agency in eastern Indonesia
Catherine Allerton (LSE)

Kala defanged: the end of power of Java
Andrew Beatty (Brunel University)

The waning of the Suharto regime brought an upsurge in local political activity and a rash of witchcraft accusations and spirit attacks, as local actors - alus and kasar - vied for mastery on the emptying political stage. Like doctors during an epidemic, the dukuns had their hands full. But power had long resided elsewhere and the democratisation of violence did not last. This paper looks at the performance of exorcisms in Banyuwangi, East Java, and places them within Java’s changing political economy. It shows how spirit activity, marginalized in Javanese society generally, had a brief, florid revival on Java’s eastern periphery. Legitimate local authority - the camat, the headman and his team, the modin and mosque committee - long deprived of real power, proved ill-equipped to confront - or even understand - the problem. Yet the challenge could not last. In the shadow of orthodox Islam, the unruly spirit world has been confined within ritual frames that allow only a minor supporting role to non-Islamic practitioners. At the climax of the exorcism show, the puppeteer defangs Kala, the son of Durga and source of evil. But Kala now poses little threat in the village world. The discourse of power has largely vanished from the village scene, as syncretist ritual serves less as a means of channelling power from the other side than as a theatre for playing out cultural rivalries. 

From the Power of Prayer to Prayer Power: Religion as Politics in the Contemporary Philippines
Deidre de la Cruz (University of Michigan)

This paper will attempt to think through the shift from the ‘power of prayer,’ which implies some reflection upon the nature and source of divine efficacy, to the rhetoric of prayer power, which has emerged in the contemporary Philippines as a particular brand of political action.  Coined as the spiritual counterpart to “People Power” during the 1986 revolt that ousted the Marcos regime, prayer power today acts as both historical citation and countervailing discourse, attempting at once to invoke the spirit of revolt that carried the monumental event and cover over its actual failure to bring about social and political transformation.  As such it instantiates a curious ambiguity vis-à-vis the much longer history of prayer in the Christian Philippines: posing several paradoxes of agency, oratory rites and devotional texts have often occupied a central place in acts of revolt.   By tracing this history, one of the questions this paper asks is whether prayer power represents the terminus of this enduring association, or reconfigures these paradoxes to counter-transformative ends.  Moreover, in focusing on prayer both in its cultural mutability and as a form of address irreducible to context, the paper considers anew the long-standing approaches to understanding religion and power in the Christian Philippines that have been grounded in a constellation of robust cultural idioms.

The power of a Burmese general
Nicholas Farrelly (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University)

In this paper I delineate the various forms of “power” exercised by Lieutenant-General Ohn Myint.  Formerly Northern Commander, with overall responsibility for the Kachin State, he was recently elevated to Burma’s 12-member State Peace and Development Council to lead Bureau of Special Operations Command 1.  In this role Ohn Myint has formal oversight of Kachin State, Chin State, Sagaing Division, Magwe Division, and Mandalay Division. Charting his rise through the ranks, this paper’s analysis of power in modern Burma identifies both the military and non-military outlets for his ambitions. Using Ohn Myint as an exemplary case, I provide a general analysis of the places, people and practices that are most valuable to power-brokers in Burma today.  As a steward of ceasefires, a keeper of the “peace”, and a negotiator of mega-projects, Ohn Myint has rarely been missing from the public eye.  But what is his power?  Where does it come from?  How is it used?  How is it threatened?  How should scholars understand it?  With these questions in mind I highlight how Ohn Myint mimics feudal patterns of patronage alongside his status as a contemporary military and political supremo. During the current Naypyidaw (“abode of kings”) period, his explicitly regal posturing is particularly worthy of further explanation.

State Power at the Margins: Thinking about Sovereignty and Jurisdiction in Indonesia's Borderlands
Michele Ford and Lenore Lyons (University of Sydney and University of Wollongong)

The Expatriate State: Authority and Citizensip Among Indonesians in Sydney
Nicola Frost (School of Oriental and African Studies)

In Western political theory, states and civil society are understood to have a dialectical relationship predicated on the dominance of the nation-state in the modern political imagination. This dominance is defined in large part through the relationship between space and power. But what happens when an element of state authority is ‘displaced’? Diplomatic and consular missions operate on foreign soil, defined by their expatriate status. They exist beyond the conventional markers of state authority, lacking both territory and bureaucracy, and with only limited legal jurisdiction over their citizens. What can an examination of ‘ex-centric’ state bodies, and their relationship with individuals, tell us about the maintenance of state power? This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sydney between 2002 and 2004, and considers in particular the preparations for the 2004 Indonesian general election. It examines the pervasive significance of the Indonesian diplomatic and consular authorities in the life – and especially organisational life – of Indonesians in the city. The paper suggests that this close association relies on a level of collusion, maintained through a combination of mutuality and threat. The authorities’ need for community cooperation in the absence of a civil service is balanced by individuals’ fear of supervision and sanction. Relations between mission and expatriate community are frequently expressed in terms of the metaphor of family, as is also common in Indonesia. However, the study suggests that, far from replicating domestic state-citizen relations, an expatriate framework generates a flexible sense of national affiliation that cuts across conventional conceptions of citizenship and nationalism.


The power of the gift: Motivations for donations in the south of Laos (and beyond)
Holly High (University of Sydney)

In this paper I examine how residents in a rural village in the south of Laos deployed competing notions of giving and goodness as they negotiated relationships with their anthropologist. In this locale, exchange is central to obtaining everyday necessities and is also a powerful metaphor in understandings of key relationships. While carrying a clear dimension of self-interest for both donor and recipient, exchanges are explained as arising from the donor’s “goodness” (virtue, a capacity for pity, and/or conforming to kinship expectations). Ethnographic fieldwork also involves exchange. “Gifts to informants”, “giving back to the field”, or a sense of duty to be a “companheira” to informants have been suggested as appropriate models of return. These too evoke images of idealised “goodness”, including the fieldworker’s degree of acceptance, local competence and ability to deliver useful help.  Throughout my fieldwork, the perception of myself as someone who could or should help was ever present, both in the urgings I identified in myself and those of my informants. The expectations for help that I was held to were subjects of contest and debate, not consensus: it was never quite clear to me or my informants, even the ones I came to know best, how much of what kind of exchange was appropriate between them and their anthropologist. In their awkwardness, these exchanges are revealing of the precariousness of fieldwork and exchange relationships.
 

Music as an instrument of subversion in the colonial Philippines
David R. M. Irving (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge)

The policies of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines (1565-1898) effected a radical transformation of indigenous cultures and social structures. Although Spaniards represented less than one per cent of the archipelago’s entire population, they remained powerful agents of colonialism by means of brute military strength, political negotiation with influential indigenous leaders, and the imposition of Roman Catholicism on the majority of urbanized communities. Music played a crucial role in religious conversion, and the hundreds of churches established in the islands relied on local musicians for the celebration of ecclesiastical rituals and ceremonies. In exchange for their services, Filipino musicians conversant with Western styles of performance were offered financial advantages as well as the potential for social elevation and access to certain educational opportunities. These circumstances prompted auditions for posts in every one of the islands’ parishes, with the result that almost all professionalized church musicians in the Philippines were indigenous. Musical performances ordered or endorsed by colonial authorities usually depended on cooperation with Filipinos, and a subtle but significant shift of power took place in the relationship between colonizers and colonized. This paper will examine the emergence of Filipino musical and dramatic genres that became important tools in contesting, subverting and even inverting social, political and religious orders. Furthermore, it will explore the extent to which colonial authorities attempted to curb and censor the practice of these artforms.

Moral Politics, Anti-Politics and the Garrison State in Burma:  The Power of Virtue in State-Making and Resistance
Ingrid Jordt (University of Wisconsin, Milaukee)

Governing the Aesthetic Domain – Neoliberal Constructions of Seamlessness, Iconicity and Expertise in Singapore
Lee Kah Wee (U. C. Berkeley)

In the experience economy, governance demands more than legibility. If legibility aims at the transformation of its object into something calculable, practicable and visible, then a new rationality has arisen that aims at sensibility – transforming the governed object into something desirable, marketable and palpable. I focus on the regulation of architectural and urban aesthetics as a domain of governance overlooked in the usual bundles of ‘public services’ targeted for privatization under neoliberal economic principles, and yet critical in the urban restructuring of Singapore after the Asian economic crisis of 1996-7. By comparing the design guidelines for the sale of a parcel of land in Singapore before and after the crisis, I analyze how ‘aesthetic’ is made legible as numbers and prescriptive clauses on the one hand, and made sensible through rhetorical excess on the other. This comparison also illustrates how the quest for iconic buildings and seamless environments of leisure in the aftermath of the crisis altered the techniques of regulating aesthetics. Yet, such subtle deviations do not radically alter the power relations between the state, experts, developers and consumers – indeed, one important point I wish to append to Aihwa Ong’s (2002) conceptualization of neoliberalism as exception is that exceptions are made in order to preserve the norm. It is precisely the one-sided and seamless reconfiguration of existing technologies by the centralized planning authority in order to create a new globalising aesthetic that speaks most eloquently of a kind of ‘homegrown’ neoliberalism with authoritarian characteristics.
 

Chasing the dragon: opium and the transformation of state power in mainland Southeast Asia
Tomas Larsson (SPS, University of Cambridge)

The basic premise of this paper is that opium is a lens through which we can trace changes in the nature of state power in mainland Southeast Asia. Historically, opium frequently served as an economic source of state power, but in more recent decades a flourishing opium trade has more often been viewed as an indicator of state weakness and a failure to legitimate state power. With a particular focus on the area popularly known as the Golden Triangle, this paper seeks to demonstrate that changes in the relationship between the state and opium as commodity mark critical junctures in processes of state formation and reformation on the Southeast Asian mainland. Tracing the rise and the recent dramatic fall of the opium economy in the Golden Triangle, the paper argues that the relationship between opium and state power is contingent on the wider geopolitical context. Rather than viewing opium as a crop with inherent political implications, the paper seeks to show that the political potency of the opium poppy in Southeast Asia is dependent on the (shifting) interests and ideologies of global and regional great powers. Today, the decline in opium production serves as a proxy indicator for the extent to which Bangkok, Vientiane, and Naypyidaw (with the help of Washington DC and Beijing) have been able to extend the state’s “infrastructural power” into the geographic margins of the polity.

Burmese Pop Musicians and the Censors:  An Ethnography of Power Relations
Heather MacLachlan (Cornell University)

Foucault (2003) argued that the relationship of power that exists between the state and its citizens is fundamentally a relationship between two free subjects, and that it implies a whole range of possible interactions between those subjects.  This presentation will delineate the relationship of power that exists between the military government of Burma/Myanmar and Burmese pop musicians.  It will detail a variety of approaches adopted by both musicians and censors.  The presentation will show that Foucault's analysis is an appropriate frame for understanding this contemporary Southeast Asian society.  Contrary to Western media accounts, the Burma/Myanmar case does not consist of one actor (the state) denying all possibility of agency to the other (pop musicians), but rather, it consists of a complex and varied series of interactions between two free agents.  This understanding of power in Burma/Myanmar, which is governed by one of the most repressive governments in the world, is germane to the ongoing scholarly debate about the possibility of democratic transition in that country:  this ethnographic case study shows that even people who are intently surveilled by the government can and do work together to promote a progressive agenda.  Importantly, these influential pop stars do not confront the government directly in their song lyrics; instead, they use their fame to promote activities and institutions which serve the common good, consciously working toward the construction of a civil society.  The presentation is based on dissertation fieldwork conducted in Yangon in 2007 and 2008.


Indonesian CSO network: Instrumentum or locus of power? 
Yanuar Nugroho (University of Manchester)

The proliferation of civil society organisations (CSOs) and the emergence of civil society activism across various issues have been evident in South-east Asia (SEA) over the past few decades. In Indonesia, CSOs have been playing a pivotal role in society, both as development institutions and as advocacy groups. On issues ranging from globalisation-led development to human rights, to democratisation to labour conditions and corporate malpractices, Indonesian CSOs and activists represent an increasingly important constituency in a non-state as well as non-business environment in the country. With CSOs being seen as a power bearing actor in society, civil society is thus seen as a source of power, including power to bring about social and political change. Indonesian CSO networks are increasingly associated with values related to grassroots participatory democracy and thus have become a powerful cultural ideal. Particularly among civil society groups, networks have become a guiding logic that provides both a model of and a model for emerging forms of directly democratic politics. However, surprisingly, only few scholars have begun to realise and consider CSOs and their networks in their scholarly work on Indonesia. Based on a country-scale fieldwork involving survey, workshops and interviews, this research is an attempt to empirically portray Indonesian CSOs as a power-bearing actor in Indonesian society. Informed by theory of structuration (Giddens, 1984) and literature in civil society and social movements (Deakin, 2001; Crossley, 2002; Della-Porta and Diani, 2006; among many others), this research investigates the proliferation of CSO movement and network in the country. Engagement in power contestation in Indonesian society is a two-way process for CSOs. It both affects and is affected by CSO network, which evolves from time to time. While societal setting changes (as outcome of power contestation) Indonesian CSOs themselves evolve, including their internal dynamics. The landscape of Indonesian CSOs is thus a result of the engagement in power contestation, and at the same time, of the dynamics of the organisations themselves. Here, as time-space is not only an arena where the change takes place but a constitutive element of change, the Indonesian CSO network too has ‘evolved’ from a mere instrument for organising movements and actions into a locus of power itself.

'Transformative’ or ‘Toothless’?:  The ASEAN Charter and the ‘Expectations Gap'
Avery Poole (University of British Columbia)

The first Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) came into force on December 15, 2008.  Its proponents and several officials involved in its drafting have described the Charter as ‘transformative’, and as heralding a ‘new era’ for ASEAN.  However, not everyone agrees with this assessment.  The Charter is a distinct disappointment to some observers and analysts, who have described it as ‘toothless’ and a ‘letdown’.  Why were their expectations not met?  Were they reasonable in the first place?  This paper assesses the varied analyses of the Charter, which reflect different visions of ASEAN’s future.  I focus on the Charter’s references to the principles of democracy and human rights and to increased ‘institutionalization’ of ASEAN, and consider the criticism that has followed its adoption.  This criticism is borne in part of frustrated expectations, which had been raised by early discussions about the Charter and in particular, by the ‘bold and visionary’ recommendations of the Eminent Persons Group (EPG).  These expectations were deflated following the ‘watering down’ of these recommendations in the adopted text.  However, this does not necessarily suggest that the Charter should be dismissed as insignificant.  It indicates that certain principles, including democracy and human rights, are ‘on the agenda’ for dialogue and debate.  Sovereignty and non-interference undoubtedly remain important to Southeast Asian governments.  However, security and humanitarian challenges in recent years – particularly in Myanmar – provoke both instrumental and normative motivations to at least ‘open space’ for debate about the possibility of institutional and normative change.  This has implications for the power dynamics among member states, and for regional security.  The Charter may, for example, provide a legal basis for ASEAN members to challenge the non-interference norm by becoming more involved in the internal affairs of one another.

Cultural Constitutionalism and Emergency Powers  in Thailand
Victor V. Ramraj (National University of Singapore)

While the “war on terror” is said to have contributed to the erosion of human rights protections and the rule of law in many parts of the world, it has not done so to the same extent in Southeast Asia largely because western-style constitutionalism had not fully taken root. This paper considers contemporary arguments against western-style constitutionalism and their implications for state power in times of emergency. In particular, it examines the argument that that indigenous forms or “cultural” understandings of constitutionalism as limitations on state power may be more appropriate in Southeast Asia than western “legal” constitutionalism.  With specific reference to contemporary Thailand, it shows how emergency powers pose a distinct threat to the viability of cultural constitutionalism. The goal of constitutionalism—whether legal or cultural—should be viewed not in terms of formal institutional structures, but in functional terms. The challenge of constitutionalism in any form is to promote a culture of self-restraint, humility, and accountability on the part of those in power. In a society such as Thailand with a mixture of indigenous and Western-style institutions, it would be unsurprising if hybrid institutions were regarded as the most effective means of restraining the arbitrary exercise of state power, while being socially more acceptable.


Privateers, Politicians, Prowess, and Power
Loren Ryter (University of Michigan)

Recent studies of power in Southeast Asia tend to be limited by a disciplinary lacuna. Political science generally limits its scope to the state, related institutions, and subjects constructed as voters with given preferences.  Anthropologists tend to treat states as cultural artifacts, seeking an understanding of power in local specificities or, for some, in terms of capillary, discursive networks. The former approach widely misses the informal exercise of power, while the latter tends reify autochthonism or overly privilege the diffuse. My broad work on the figure of the Œpreman¹ (very roughly, gangster) in Indonesia in part constitutes both a critique of a formal / informal binary and of ahistorical and depoliticized readings of the trope of the ³man of prowess.² Understanding the significance of the figure of the preman, which currently indexes both feared, violent street criminals and also corrupt, ruthless, and self-interested politicians, has been a core component of this work. Originally from the 17th century colonial Dutch vrijman, or free man, by the early postcolonial period, preman came to refer to a state officer in his civvies. Later this private capacity grew to connote a privateer, returning to something closer to its original meaning through the detour of a transgression of nationalist public service.  If Suharto¹s regime had emphasized paternalism for the good of the whole while the practice of privateering grew ever more obvious and institutionalized, subsequent years have thrown preman into open competition for office and seats under the banner of democratic reform.  My contribution, then, aims to bridge this disciplinary gap by elaborating these ideas in terms of both universal theory and particularistic tropes of power in Southeast Asia.

The Power to Support: State welfare and the rise and fall of a spirit medium in a rural Vietnamese community
Markus Schlecker (MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany)

In this paper I examine the case of a villager who claimed to be possessed by spirits, but whose authority soon came into conflict with that of the state. The data derive from recent fieldwork in a Vietnamese rural community, where support from the emergent welfare state is central and yet perceived as inadequate. Villagers seek out forms of power, which hold promise for providing more effective support. The challenge posed by regional, ethnic, and religious diversity to the integrative authority of the nation states in Southeast Asia has been frequently commented on. What has received much less mention is the emergence of state-welfare regimes in this region, which has given rise to a diffuse organizational modality of state power. In this paper, I examine the relationship of this modality to a pervasive aesthetics of power in Southeast Asia, where the chief concern seems to be with the effective display and recognition of power. 

Bureaucratic migrants and the power of prosperity in upland Laos
Sarinda Singh (University of Queensland)

A key theme informing understandings of power in Southeast Asia has been the contrast between upland frontiers and lowland centres. This paper suggests that the upland-lowland contrast can be valuable when combined with an awareness of social boundaries as continually disrupted and reproduced through personal experiences as individuals move and live across supposedly distinct social arenas. Significantly however, amongst continual flux and change is an underlying conceptualisation of power as the ability to grant prosperity. In demonstrating these points, the specific focus is on low-ranking government officials in upland areas of Laos who are positioned at the nexus of state authority, development schemes and the rural poor. As agents and recipients of development, these officials migrate from the lowlands to the uplands as a requirement of their employment by the Lao state. At the field site on the Nakai Plateau in central Laos, the patterning of internal colonisation is further complicated by the presence of the World Bank supported Nam Theun 2 dam, where a complex milieu of international, national and local interests has recently emerged. Globalisation theorists could see development in this context as re-shaping local power relations in line with the worldwide growth of capitalist enterprise. Alternatively, political analyses would likely point to the expansion of the lowland-based state into the upland frontiers. Yet neither of these formulations fully accounts for the experiences of marginalised officials who ostensibly represent the vanguard of these changes. Bureaucratic migrants in the Lao uplands offer possibilities for re-thinking (im)permanence within upland-lowland distinctions.

The Anthropology of a Necessary Mistake: The Unsettled dead and the Imagined State in Contemporary Singapore
 Ruth Toulson (Denison University, Ohio)

 In Singapore, Hokkien speaking Chinese families blamed the difficulties of everyday life on the unhappiness of the unsettled dead, cremated without necessary ritual or raised from their graves as the state reclaimed burial grounds for housing. My explanations of their misfortunes differed: I placed the Singaporean state at the centre. Such differing interpretations may seem to create a troubling interpretative boundary, yet both interpretations rest on the same mistake, a mistake of fetishism made in parallel. In my and their descriptions, the Singaporean state, global capitalism, and the dead, both individual and in the generalized abstract, became the authors of and actors in a particular Singaporean moment. Haraway describes such fetishism as the making of an ‘interesting mistake’, a mistake necessary to and defining of the global capitalist world in which my informants live. For my informants, death was both a place where the power of the State became visible—in legislation governing funeral ritual and cremation, for example— but also where it could be questioned. When the dead spoke, they revealed not only state power, but also the phantom nature of the state itself. They gave voice to unauthorized desires and unspeakable memories, the non-translation of discursive orders, and the inherent impossibilities of capitalism. In accounts of fears of the unsatisfied dead, I trace the connections between forms of familiarity, expressions of longing and forms of governance, and examine fetishism as the necessary mistake which links divergent imaginings of power.
 

Power and the ‘quest for life’
Dimitri Tsintjilonis (University of Edinburgh)

In this paper, arguing against Foucault’s conflation of the emergence of ‘bio-power’ with the rise of modernity, I attempt to explore ‘power’ as being intrinsically linked with the ‘quest for life’ – that is, I suggest that ‘life’ (the bio in ‘bio-power’) has always been the ultimate object of politics and the main challenge evoked in different power imaginaries. Echoing the work of Giorgio Agamben and Maurice Hocart, I focus on Aristotle’s distinction between ‘bare life’ (zen) and the ‘good life’ (eu zen) – a distinction that been the foundation of Western political thought - in order to illustrate the articulation of such a quest within the tradition of the Sa’dan Toraja (Indonesia). In depicting the Toraja ‘quest for life’, both in ethnographic and more comparative terms, I engage with a number of inevitable questions. Do different kinds of ‘life’ give rise to different kinds of ‘power’? Which kind of agency epitomizes this ‘power’ and in what form? Is ‘power’ an attribute of empirical actions or an aspect of the discourse within which such actions become intelligible? If the Western quest for the ‘good life’ embodies and manifests a specific kind of metaphysics, as a number of commentators have suggested, in what sense can it be used as an axis of comparison and contrast? Perhaps, pointing to the need for careful contextualization, this last question is by far the most important one - in any case, it is what lies at the heart of this paper.

The symbolic appropriation of war associated objects in a post-conflict Jorai community of Northeast Cambodia Krisna Uk (University of Cambridge)

Sakti reconsidered: Power and the disenchantment of the world;examples from Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia
Adrian Vickers (University of Sydney)

The horror genre in Indonesian film and television has burgeoned at the same time that public expressions of rationality have seemingly undermined belief in what might be called 'magic power'. The first significant account of Indonesian public discourse on 'magic power' or sakti was Benedict Anderson's famous article on power in Java, an article that blurred traditional Javanese and Balinese concepts of sakti with Sukarnoist ideology. More recently two Indonesian scholars, Onghokham and Nyoman Darma Putra, have identified further changes in the ways that sakti is conceptualised, identifying its problematic relationship with forms of modernity. Drawing on the work of these three scholars, I attempt to demonstrate the relationship between notions of magical power and changing forms of commodity relations in Indonesia.
I argue that sakti has been made more 'concrete' in popular forms such as films, at the same time that new forms of gender and class power are being examined in Indonesian society.

String: binding self to state in Southeast Asia
Andrew Walker (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University)

String is a common element in many Southeast Asian rituals. String is used to link people and objects to sources of sacred power. String unites ritual participants in a single field of auspiciousness. String binds bodies and souls.  And, on certain occasions, string is ritually destroyed to sever connections with accumulated misfortune. In this paper the motif of string is used as starting point for exploring local manifestations of state power. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in northern Thailand, the paper argues that rural people seek to bind themselves to the auspicious, productive and munificent power of the state, and in doing so participate in localised processes of state formation. The state is bound to the self in many different ways:  displaying signs and pictures, wearing particular clothes, entering into personal relationships, sharing food, and attending meetings. My focus here will be on the ways in which rural villagers bind themselves to the state by participating in modern rituals of administration and development, principally through the creation and implementation of "projects" (krongkan). Considerable attention has been given to the ways in which state development projects create a legible population.  The bonds created by string are often anything but legible. But they do highlight a local preoccupation, not with legibility, but with eligibility. To bind oneself to the state is to declare oneself an eligible participant in an auspicious field of power.

 
Power, Cacique Democracy, and Post-Colonial Imagination among the Bugkalot (Ilongot) of Northern Luzon, Philippines
Shu-Yuan Yang (Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University)

The Bugkalot, or the Ilongot, as they are known in the previous literatures, have been one of anthropology’s classic case studies. Their distinctive headhunting practice, and its relationship to local emotional idioms and political consciousness, has been sophisticatedly explored in the nuanced ethnographies of Michelle Rosaldo and Renato Rosaldo. However, the Ilongot concept of power has never been explicitly investigated, and its intertwining with local notions of personhood and political leadership remains obscure. This article aims to explore Ilongot concept of power, to situate them in wider regional ethnographic traditions, and to show how the Ilongot have been actively reshaping and reassessing local forms of power in light of post-colonial rule and drastic social change. 


 

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