Papers

• Ethnography as the Art of Storytelling: Pujo Semedi on Andrew Beatty’s A Shadow Falls in the Heart of Java Pujo Semedi Universitas Gadjah Mada

  I hold the view that anthropology, as part of the humanities, is the art of storytelling. Whatever the label and whatever claims we anthropologists put forward, our ethnographic and theoretical accounts will, in the end, circulate and function in human discourse as stories. This art is exemplified by Andrew Beatty, a first-class anthropologist and an excellent storyteller. A Shadow Falls in the Heart of Java is based on rich ethnographic data and is written skilfully, not only revealing sociocultural structures but also describing the complexity of social tensions in rural Java as the new Islam, what Robert Hefner called new piety, emerges, and the human experiences of those who operate within and are operated on by those structures. This is the kind of ethnography that I have always wanted to write.

  A Shadow Fall is the fruit of hard labor, combining an anthropologist’s total immersion in the everyday life of his research site with the wit only a British storyteller could possess. Writing A Shadow Fall as a literary work gives Andrew Beatty at least two advantages and some drawbacks. First, it provides ample space to fully explore the richness of humanity in a rural community. Second, it offers the opportunity to make maximum use of the old anthropological adage of presenting culture ‘from the native’s point of view’. Storytelling that is overly intimate and empathetic toward the characters risks missing the opportunity to develop a more general theory by identifying the social structures within which these figures live and how those structures shape them, their actions, and the life choices they make.

  Andrew Beatty’s work is significant because it has the potential to free ethnography from an excessive theoretical burden, in which every researcher is driven to create new concepts and construct complicated theories to understand human life. As a result, ethnography becomes like a soup with too many spices and not enough main ingredients. Over-theorized ethnography makes such written works exclusive, serving only as an intellectual feast for a limited group and distancing them from a broad readership. Or it might not even catch readers’ attention. If that happens, all the hard work that went into compiling the ethnography will have been for nothing.

• Zones of Awkward Engagement: Esther Leemann on Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Esther Leemann University of Zurich

  I have come to think of anthropology as the craft of following connections that are never as smooth as policy documents and other powerful imaginaries suggest. In Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing gives a vocabulary for this craft by showing how global capitalism, conservation and state making depend on “zones of awkward engagement” where universal projects meet stubbornly particular worlds and generate both violence and unexpected openings. Working with Bunong communities in the uplands of northeastern Cambodia, I encountered similar frictions when economic land concessions, conservation projects and the Sustainable Development Goals arrived as global solutions that had to be translated into Bunong notions of land, spirit landscapes, matrilineal descent and lived histories of displacement and struggle, producing new maps and legal entities that often sat uneasily with local understandings of community and territory.

  Friction has been formative for my work in two ways. It sharpened my ethnographic attention to the small moments where Bunong elders, young intermediaries, NGO staff and state officials negotiate who counts as “the community”, which forests are “protected”, and whose idea of territory is inscribed on the map—encounters where global agendas for indigenous rights, sustainable development and conservation become real, and are contested, refused or reworked. At the same time, Tsing’s insistence that global connections depend on friction helped me make sense of what I have called “leftovers”: fragmented indigenous territories that emerge when fast tracked concessions and conservation zones are prioritised over slow, contested collective land titles. It has taught me to see land titling, SDGs and forest protection not simply as technical or legal instruments, but as travelling projects that create their own frictions, hierarchies and possibilities.

• What Is Written History For? Jean Michaud on James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Jean Michaud Université Laval

  For scholars of upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed has been both a provocation and a rich source of inspiration. Scott argued that the upland populations of the Southeast Asian Massif, referred to as Zomia, built and maintained social orders and cultural forms that took shape through practices of evading the state.
  My own engagement with Scott’s arguments has been both sympathetic and critical. Drawing on decades of research among Hmong and other highland groups, I have argued that the relationship between Zomia, orality and state evasion is more complex than a simple geography of “runaway peasants” might suggest. Highlanders have at times strategically embraced writing and “written history” to assert claims, negotiate with states and pursue their own political futures, just as they have sometimes cultivated forgetfulness or narrative drift. The Art of Not Being Governed is significant because it forces us to ask what written and unwritten histories are for in upland Asia, and how far we can push the idea of deliberate non‑governance without losing sight of the diverse cultural logics, egalitarian ideals and shifting power relations that shape life in the Southeast Asian Massif.

• Gendered Resistance on the Factory Floor: Annuska Derks on Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia Annuska Derks University of Zurich

  Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline was one of the first ethnographic studies to trace rapid capitalist transformation in rural Malaysia from a distinctly feminist perspective, focusing on young Malay women entering multinational factory work. The book shows how existing concepts of femininity, family duty and Islamic morality do not simply dissolve with wage labour, but are reworked and redeployed as these women move from kampung life into industrial production. Central to Ong’s analysis is the idea that resistance takes multiple, often indirect forms: spirit possession attacks on the shopfloor, everyday slowdowns and “careless” work emerge as ways of pushing back against capitalist labour discipline without openly breaking with family loyalties, Islamic values or male authority.
  What struck me most when I first encountered Ong’s work was her refusal to cast these women either as victims of capitalist exploitation or as straightforward agents of emancipation — a binary that had frustrated me in much of the development literature of the time. Her insistence on ambivalence resonated with my own ethnographic work with Khmer women in Phnom Penh’s garment factories, brothels and street trade, where gender norms, aspirations and economic pressures intersect in equally complex and ambivalent ways. Ong famously proposes that we “conceive of workers’ experiences as cultural struggles” in which women grapple with new forms of domination and craft new senses of self and community that can, potentially, unsettle the constitution of civil society. Yet, I have also come to sit with a certain unease about the analytical move of reading spirit possession primarily through the lens of resistance — there is something seductive about recovering a politics in what might equally be genuine suffering, or simply the body’s refusal to cope.
  I return to this book in my teaching not because it provides answers, but because it modelled something methodologically and politically important: the willingness to stay close to women’s own accounts of their lives without reducing those accounts to illustrations of a theory. Spirits of Resistance continues to shape how I think about feminist perspectives on capitalist development and on resistance in specific social and cultural contexts — showing both how gender relations are reconstructed under new structural conditions, and how women and men, through practices of reproduction, resistance and reshaping, actively participate in making the worlds in which they live.

• From siblings and inheritance to public culture: Clash of Spirits and my love affair with kinship. Resto Cruz on Filomeno Aguilar’s Clash of Spirits Resto Cruz University of Edinburgh

  A key text in Southeast Asian studies that’s been of singular importance to me is Filomeno Aguilar’s Clash of Spirits. Published in 1998, Clash is a magisterial account of how elite sugar planters in the central Philippines obtained power during the late Spanish colonial period, and consolidated it when the country was under American occupation. It portrays this process as uneven and open-ended; it depicts colonialism and capitalism as intertwined with family dynamics, religion, cosmology, and much else besides.

  Clash taught me to historicise the nuclear family and property – even as these were crucial in the story of Filipino sugar planters. In dialogue with ethnographic literature on island Southeast Asia, Clash inspired me to look at the kinship-economy nexus from elsewhere and elsewhen: the role of siblingship in the economic lives of middle-class families after 1945. Likewise, Clash pushed me to understand how siblingship was transformed by the mobilities that it engendered. Following Clash’s refusal of easy categories, I considered how siblingship co-exists with vertical parent-child ties. I also adopted a broader view of inheritance that loosens the grip of property in imaginations of bequest. In these, Clash has enabled me take part in ongoing anthropological consideration of kinship as both generative and a site of profound relational difficulties.

  My love affair with kinship continues, and Clash remains an inspiration. Building on the idea that the family has political economic consequences, I’m preparing a new project on the role of kinship in contemporary Philippine public culture: in the age of digital and networked publics, how do kinship discourses enable or disable the critique of entrenched inequalities? What futures are imagined through the lens of the family? And how might kinship allow us to reconsider what are often taken for granted as certainties of public life?

Abstract