Social Media and the Successful Anti-Mining Campaign in Bangka,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article elaborates on the functionalities of Facebook and WhatsApp, and the possibilities and limitations of their usage in the anti-mining campaign in Bangka, Indonesia, with special focus on the participation and offline–online intertwining of communication processes. The research reported in this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between social media and political protest in the context of discriminatory natural resource extraction in Indonesia. In 2017, the alliance against the mining activities of the Chinese company PT Mikgro Metal Perdana in Bangka, which consisted of villagers, activists, tourism operators and divers, succeeded in ousting PT MMP from Bangka. Social media enhanced mobilisation, communication, knowledge transfer, transparency, and solidarity in this anti-mining campaign. Through WhatsApp, the rapid transmission of information and communication was facilitated when urgent action was needed. The Facebook group Save Bangka Island not only provided general information but also enhanced solidarity, cohesion and the creation of an “imagined community.” However, it is also found that social media sites are stratified spaces where villagers – the primary affected group – are excluded because of their lack of Internet access.     

Pre-capitalist Reproduction on the Nepal Tarai: Semi-feudal Agriculture in an Era of Globalisation

This article highlights the continued significance of pre-capitalist formations in shaping the trajectory of economic transition in peripheral regions, even in an era of neo-liberal globalisation. There is a tendency for Marxist scholars to assume the inevitable “dominance” of capitalism over older modes of production. Using a case study from Nepal's far eastern Tarai, this paper seeks to understand the reproduction of feudal social relations in a region which is both accessible and integrated into regional and global markets. The paper traces the early subordination of indigenous groups to feudalism from the eighteenth century onwards, and the political and ideological processes through which these social relations were reinforced. Through examining the historical role of feudal-colonial alliances, however, the paper notes that pre-capitalist reproduction in Nepal is a dynamic process, actively negotiated and reinforced by the external imperatives of capitalist expansion itself as well as through the entrenched political power of landed classes. Today feudal and capitalist formations co-exist and articulate, with surplus divided between landlords and non-farm employers. Understanding the complex dynamics of feudal or “semi-feudal” reproduction in an era of globalisation is crucial if one is to identify avenues for collective mobilisation against inequitable pre-capitalist and capitalist class relations.     

Casuistry,Commentary and Killing Cattle: Transgressing Notional Borders of Belonging

In 2011, ABC Television’s Four Corners broadcast “A Bloody Business”. The program’s confronting subject was the live cattle trade to Indonesia, and in particular, disturbing slaughtering practices. Notable was repeated use of the phrases “Australian cattle”, “Australian livestock” and “Australian animals”. The inference was that these were “our” cattle, some of which suffered shockingly cruel deaths. The implicit nationalism informing the program’s emotional provocation begs the question in what sense were the cattle, an introduced cloven-hooved domesticated animal, Australian? This raises related questions: if cattle are “ours”, why not other exotic flora and fauna, and what of settlers and more recent immigrants too? After briefly discussing this program, the paper considers a range of different engagements with Australian landscapes. Of principal interest are affinities to landscape based on social organisation. Pivotal to this are notions of lifescapes and emotional geographies. These notions form the foundation for following discussion on several disparate entanglements with landscape. The discussion ranges across cattle, pastoralists, Aborigines, water buffalo, other exotic flora and fauna, kangaroo shooters, shearers and immigrant responses to national parks. In doing so, the paper explores the vexed issue of who and what can be included in the embrace of Australian nativeness.     

From sacrum to profanum: reinterpretation of communist places of power in Baltic cities

Places always represent the social and cultural dimensions of societies, seen through relationships between ideas, beliefs, and hopes. Places and their social practices are interwoven into the urban fabric and have become vital components of urban and ideological identities. Ideological systems create unique arrangements and classifications of those special places, which can be called “hallowed” or “profaned.” This project focuses on the recent transformation of the communist system of “sacral” spaces and their recent “profanation.” The transformation of meaning, together with the use and attitude toward landscape, has become visible due to spatial and functional manifestations of post-socialist cities.     

Introduction: Assessing the Social and Political Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia

This paper introduces a special issue on the social and political impact of new information communications technologies (ICTs) in Asia, with specific attention paid to new social media. This paper provides some contextualisation of the broader questions that the principal literature on the subject raises, namely questions about the effectiveness of ICTs as tools for mobilisation and information exchange; mechanisms of censorship and control; and the nature of public discourse on the Internet. In doing so, the paper introduces and locates the articles that comprise this special issue within these debates.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.     

The ambivalent Apostle of 1953: a liminal reading of the centenary of José Martí

This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot José Martí. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban “national narrative” at a critical moment of the island’s historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial “rite of passage” punctuated by a series of turning points, or “limens,” within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Martí’s centenary stimulated a re-examination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.     

The Japanese Movement to Protest Wartime Sexual Violence: A Survey of Japanese and International Literature

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes a genealogical perspective to the social sciences study of robots in Japan, proposing a widely applicable research on “robot cultures.” The author discusses the corporate and governmental strategies and mechanisms that are shaping a national robot culture through establishing robot “lineages” and a national robot history which can have significant implications for both humans and robots. The paper contributes discussions on monozukuri (manufacturing) and Nihonjinron (theories on “Japaneseness”) to the existing anthropological consideration of robots, by examining links between monozukuri and robots, robot genealogy, popular culture and robots, and different social rituals and sites that help the enculturation of robots. The paper draws attention to the power relations and hegemonies of robot culture which also imply the existence of plurality and diversity that will require further scholarly attention as the robot phenomenon unfolds.     

Gorbachev's Social Contract

The Soviet economic slowdown is explained in the context of an eroding “social contract” between regime and society, established in the 1950s and defined as a set of norms, constituency benefits, and political-economic institutions which elite and public have regarded as legitimate means of regulating their mutual relations. Gorbachev must rebuild state legitimacy; the “objective,” mutually constraining relationship between economic system and state legitimation implies that a new social contract can serve as a “test” of Gorbachev's intent to pursue “radical” economic reform. Evidence suggests that prospects for radical reform have risen substantially since Gorbachev's election as General Secretary. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 830.     

Auflösung des Liberalisierungsdilemmas

Scholars and unionists often claim an “excessive” flexibility and unilateral manager power in the labor relations system of Central Eastern Europe, while others observe “insufficient” flexibility and etatism. Beyond mere political reasoning the article provides an explanation for these contradicting diagnoses by reconstructing the varying influence of three conflicting concepts within the institutionalization process: economic liberalism, etatism and the continental European idea of social partnership. Focusing on Poland and the Czech Republic, it is argued that the varying influence of the three concepts contributed to permissive labor relations that clearly differ from Anglo-Saxon voluntarism: The labor relations are not permissive by formal standards but by deviation. During the 1990s the weakness of actors in regulating interaction and establishing powerful sanctions created a dilemma for liberalization. On the one side strong formal regulation by the state provided little incentives for employers to bargain. On the other side, a further withdrawal of the state from regulation did only ease unilateral decision-making of management as collective bargaining is weak. The impacts of harmonization with the EU regulatory regime are ambiguous. While establishing new minimum standards and regulations in new areas it also provided an opportunity structure for actors to push for the dissolution of the liberalization dilemma without compensating employees with more bargaining strength.     

Reading twentieth century urban black cultural movements through popular periodicals: a case study of the Harlem Renaissance and South Africa’s Sophiatown

There exists a long history of debate among scholars in the humanities and social sciences regarding the potential of literature and popular culture to be socially transformative and to generate collective identities that empower a community. This transformative power of literature and popular culture, particularly in terms of the value granted to oppressed peoples seeking expression or catharsis, represents perhaps the truest value of cultural production. Its long-term contributions to the resilience of racially oppressed communities both in the USA and worldwide cannot be overstated. In Sophiatown and during the Harlem Renaissance, two periodicals, Drum and The Crisis, allowed black writers and readers alike to share in the formation of new modes of identity that spoke back in a firm voice to the long-standard stereotypes of blackness that permeated white-dominated popular culture. In both South Africa and Harlem, these publications gave voice to a distinctly black and urban culture, resisting notions of the “tribal” or “plantation” black subject. These movements were historically significant both within the study of black culture and literature and within the trajectory of socially transformative political movements.     

The Study of Religion and Society in Contemporary Asia: Colonialism and Beyond; Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modem States of East and SoutheastAsia

Abstract

In 1989, the Islamicist Bruce Lawrence suggested that, in a global context, the term fundamentalism should be replaced by the term antimodernism, which, to Mark Juergensmeyer, “suggests a religious revolt against the secular ideology that often accompanies modern society.” The papers in this volume are similarly concerned with the social implications of “religious revolt,” i.e., of continued religious vitality in lands that had presumably adopted “modern” patterns of secular nationalism. Such thinking, however, raises deeper issues about the very notion of “modernity.”     

Cross-Border Families in Hong Kong: The Role of Social Class and Politics

The massive relocation of industrial activities from Hong Kong to mainland China that followed in the wake of China's acceptance of foreign investment has given rise to two different sets of cross-border familial relations. In the first case, middle-class managers and technicians from Hong Kong have taken “second wives” during their stay in southern China. Hong Kong's mass media have been generally tolerant of this second-wife phenomenon, seeing it merely as a case of funglau (sexually potency), justifying it in terms of middle-class men's “soft spot,” and blaming the first wives for neglecting their duties. In the second case, workers from Hong Kong have crossed into the mainland in search of spouses because they believe that women in China are more affordable than those in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's restrictive immigration policies result in these mainland wives and children having to wait for ten years or more before receiving a one-way permit to migrate to Hong Kong. When they do arrive in Hong Kong, they have been discriminated against and condemned as causing Hong Kong's social and economic problems. This article examines how social class and politics have affected the way in which the mass media and the Hong Kong government have dealt with these two sets of cross-border families.     

The Politics of Land Acquisition in Haryana: Managing Dominant Caste Interests in the Name of Development

ABSTRACT

Anti-Special Economic Zone (SEZ) mobilisation in Haryana failed to generate a mass movement. This is despite the political strength of farmers and their deep resentment of the government’s policy to build up land reserves for industrial purposes. This article argues that there are two main reasons for this outcome. First, the state government put in place a series of significant policies to compensate landowners and give them a stake in the industrial project, primarily through payment of an “annuity.” Second, the main anti-SEZ movements were led by dominant landowning castes who did not incorporate the concerns of landless labourers and tenant farmers who faced equally or even more dire consequences from the government’s land acquisition policy. Moreover, mobilisation relied on traditional caste institutions such as khap panchayats and farmer unions strongly associated with Jats, rather than adopting a more broad-based approach. Entrenched caste animosity and pre-existing conflicts of interest between landed Jats and Dalits, who have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers, further explain the limited scope of the mobilisation among rural groups. The analysis underscores how hierarchical relations shape social movements, define the claims they make and ultimately impact their effectiveness.     

World Market Regionalism at the Asian Development Bank

Accounts of the “new regionalism” two decades ago identified a growing trend towards co-ordinated state action at the regional level in pursuit of both security and political economy concerns – new in terms of its “bottom-up” character, post-Cold War logic, heterogeneous focus, and relation to globalisation. More recently, proponents of “regulatory regionalism” have suggested that regional projects reshape and transform states themselves. This article identifies an emerging “world market regionalism,” within which regions are addressed in terms of their position within the world market, and regional projects are strategically oriented towards the “completion of the world market” in its dual aspect as expansion of trade and transformation of social relations of production. The focus is on the purposive transformation of the region in pursuit of global competitiveness. A detailed account is given of such a project of world market regionalism developed over the last two decades at the Asian Development Bank. It is aimed at transforming the region, and individual states within it, into a space contributory to a wider global project aimed at “completing the world market” and transforming both the social relations of production and individual attitudes and behaviour.     

At the Verge

This essay responds to the idea of “living the boundary” that Stephen Clingman develops in “A Story of Identity for our Times” and The Grammar of Identity. In mythical and wisdom traditions, revolutionary tricksters are often associated with thresholds, because travel across spatial, perceptual, or political limits is what allows cultural transformation to take place. In South Africa and elsewhere, boundaries are where culture is re-made.     

Reign-seeking and the Rise of the Unelected in Thailand

ABSTRACT

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and the minimisation of rent-seeking. This idea has been rationalised in Thailand since the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution resulting in the rise of technocratic and judicial bodies designed to discipline elected politicians and political parties. However, such institutional reconfigurations have consolidated the incentive for people considering themselves to be prospective candidates to “reign” in these organisations. As evident in the 2014 coup, these unconventional political actors – academics, doctors and civil society leaders – made collective efforts to topple the elected government in exchange for gaining selection into the wide range of unelected bodies. Governance reform in Thailand has hitherto reinforced the status quo, although the article further argues that reign-seekers should be seen as contingent, rather than consistent, authoritarians.     

From tragedy to comedy: Political reform in Thailand

Thailand's democracy has been profoundly influenced by mass struggle and tragic bloodshed. The political freedom now exercised by Thai citizens ia a direct result of continuous mass struggle against dictatorship, the high points of which were the 14th October 1973 and the May 1992 popular uprisings. Yet, at the same time, this freedom has also had its limits defined by the brutal crushing of Thailand's socialist movement on the 6th October 1976. This has meant that the present day parliamentary system is devoid of any element of class politics. It is this, more than anything else, which is responsible for the corruption and vote-buying in the electoral system. Recent attempts at political reform, culminating in the drafting of the 1997 Constitution, results from the work of a coalition between two separate and conflicting class factions in Thai society. On the one hand, “the People's Organisations” (N.G.O.s, campaigns for democracy, peasant and labour groups) demanded more rights and participation in decision-making. On the other hand, “the modernist liberal wing of the ruling elite” wished to see more efficient and stable government. The contradictions between these two political currents can be seen throughout the reform process and in Thai politics today. Attempts to cleanse Thai politics using a reformed Constitution, new election laws and newly established “independent bodies,” such as the Election Commission and Constitutional Court, are unlikely to succeed, since they fail to address the real basis of money politics in Thailand and rely on a narrow structuralist approach. A more realistic route to political reform would rely on the mobilisation of social groups on a class basis. Only when such groups organise to push for more social equality and justice inside and outside the confines of the present structures can there be true progress.     

Dualistic Identity, Memory-encoded Norms, and State Emotion: A Social Constructivist Account of Chinese Foreign Relations

By tracing the origin and evolution of Chinese nationalism, this paper finds that the dialectical relationship between the Chinese “self” and the foreign “other” has provided the cultural-institutional context for the construction of its national identity. The positional change of the Chinese actor in the self-other interaction—resulting from the institutional shift from the tianxia order to the Westphalian system—and the consequent national humiliation have been embedded in the Chinese collective memory and given rise to the consensual norms ingrained in the national identity. Viewed through the lens of political sociology and identity politics, China’s tenacious struggle for national rejuvenation can be construed as a social practice guided by these memory-encoded social norms. Due to the protracted and ambivalent nature of the state’s purposive action in attaining great-power status on the international stage, the confidence of the resurgent state is compromised by an acute sense of frustration. This identity predicament has engendered a peculiar Chinese state emotion, which has profoundly influenced the in-group members’ evaluation and perception of out-group entities and their behavior in the antagonistic intergroup relations.     

Relationale Soziologie – Theoretische und methodologische Positionierungen zwischen Strukturalismus und Pragmatismus

Nowadays, relational sociology is represented by sociological approaches from the US and from France. These approaches share the aim of recombining the two “mega-paradigms” in the social sciences, structuralism and pragmatism. Relational sociology is thereby conceived as a project integrating the analysis of different forms of social practices and structures. The article aims to identify the specific properties of relational sociology beyond this common basis. Starting with the “New York school of relational sociology”, it is shown that this school can on the one side be regarded as a contemporary approach of relational sociology, having introduced innovative contributions, but also shows deficient developments on the other side. Thereupon “actor-network theory” and “economics of convention” in particular are presented as examples of the “new pragmatic sociologies” in France, which can also be regarded as modern versions of relational sociology. After characterizing and comparing these three versions of relational sociology, their metatheoretical and particularly methodological commonalities are presented. Finally, the article tries to define positively what constitutes relational sociology.