Theorizing Modernization and Development from the Margins: Local and Peripheral(ized) Knowledge in Southeast Asia

Type

Double Panel

Part 1

Session 8
Wed 17:00-18:30 Classroom NT-159

Part 2

Session 9
Wed 18:30-20:00 Classroom NT-159

Convener

Lermie Shayne S. Garcia Ateneo de Manila University

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Part 1

Southeast Asia’s Peripheralized Communities as a Source of Governance Theories: Case Studies from the Philippines and Indonesia Lermie Shayne Garcia Ateneo de Manila University
This paper looks at how marginalized communities and political outsiders in the Philippines and Indonesia understand and respond to what I call “tangible leadership”—a kind of leadership people can see and experience in their daily lives. In places where the state has long been absent or unreliable, people tend to trust leaders with tangible track records such as building infrastructure, providing aid, responding to crises with empathy, and improving access to education and healthcare. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and community narratives, the paper shows how these everyday actions shape political behavior, with voters often supporting candidates who deliver concrete results, especially those outside elite circles or who present themselves as political outsiders. These leaders build trust through hands-on engagement and are held accountable by the same grassroots communities that back them. Overall, the study highlights how tangible leadership becomes an important way for communities to claim visibility and negotiate representation and accountability in contemporary Southeast Asia.
Centering the margin and the autonomous social sciences in the post-colonial Indonesia, as part of the panel Theorizing Modernization and Development from the Margins: Local and Peripheral(ized) Knowledge in Southeast Asia Riwanto Tirtosudarmo Independent Scholar
Where is democracy? People wondered after three decades following the step down of Suharto Indonesia is returning to authoritarian politics. This paper attempts to look at the discursive aspects rather than following the usual analysis of who gets what and how or why? The paper revisit the classic debate between Harry Benda, a historian, with Herbeth Feith, a political scientist, concerning the decline of constitutional democracy in the late 1950s in Indonesia. This paper is questioning the relevance of implanted western concepts such as liberalism, civil society and human rights in the post-colonial Indonesia. In his review of a book by Herbeth Feith (The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia) Harry Benda argued that western scholars tend to ask with a wrong question, as if Indonesia is just like the west where democracy exist. With that historical backdrop the paper will specifically look into what happened during the reformation periods in which foreign agencies influence the direction of reform by inducing concepts and institutions to form liberal democracy. What is happening is just the procedural democracy without really change in its political substance. In the aftermath of Suharto authoritarian regime in 1998 under the promise of democratisation various form of resistance movement emerge ranging from urban peaceful civil disobedience, insurgence of oppressed marginalised communities and mass mobilisation protest to the armed separatist movement. In the meantime, we also noted an alternative narration of modernity away from a centralistic and elitist top-down approach slowly emerging and challenged the dominating paradigm that mostly induced through the adoption of various western concept particularly in social sciences. This paper hopefully could therefore contribute to the increasingly more autonomous social sciences development by looking at the Indonesian experience as representing the global south, especially in Southeast Asia.
Co-building a Coastal Community: kampung dwellers’ everyday engagement of development in Indonesia Wenjing Qiu Leiden University
This paper aims to contribute to development studies by revealing the agencies of the urban poor in community development. In Indonesia, eviction discourses lingers on kampung settlements, where residents face the persistent threat of eviction and hardly experience the state infrastructural investment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025 in a coastal kampung in Jakarta, this paper shows how residents co-build their community through waste management, reclaiming land, housing regeneration, economic and religious self-organization. These local practices give rise to a vibrant environment in their everyday life, where residents also develop creative forms of entertainment to enjoy leisure beyond their daily labour. Development, as this paper argues, takes diverse forms, and national and urban development agendas should recognize vernacular practices as integral to the broader process of development. Kampung dwellers, though living in an area outside of dominant governing aesthetics, proactively engage in development and hope for more investment and social assistance from authorities and elites. Grounded in local perspectives and everyday life, this research challenges meta-discourses that neglect infrastructural citizenship and everyday developmentality.
Disenchanting the Divine: Bureaucratising Buddhism in Modern Thailand and Beyond Joel Chong London School of Economics and Political Science
This paper is part of a larger comparative study of Thailand and Turkey that examines how the bureaucratisation of religion has produced new notions of the modern pious subject and shaped ontologies of religion in Thailand and Turkey. This paper introduces a theoretical framework of specific mechanisms that have been employed to bureaucratise religion. These include, but are not limited to: (1) restructuring and consolidating religious authority into hierarchical, formal chains-of-command; (2) defining doctrine and frameworks for doctrinal deliberation, codifying religious norms and practices; (3) creating insulated and self-sufficient religious ‘ecosystems’ for the reproduction of the religious bureaucracy, including the production of structured religious education pathways, licensing the ‘right-to-practice’ and formalising a religious political economy. Crucially, this study argues that the bureaucratisation of religion is tied intimately to notions of modernity defined by processes of interaction, rupture, displacement, and reformulation. Rather than purely a ‘state’ or ‘state-driven’ process, this study argues that ‘bureaucratisation’ should be conceptualised as a social process, being ultimately a negotiated product born from ‘bottom-up’ resistance, appropriation, and manipulation of the state’s ‘legibility’ efforts. This study thus examines how these dialectical processes (i.e. the bureaucratisation of religion) has transformed not only orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but also conceptions of power, identity, statehood, and notions of modernity itself in Siam/Thailand and Turkey.

Part 2

Searching for Significance: A Methodological Inquiry on Cultural Heritage Mapping/Inventory Approaches to Cultural Heritage in the Philippines Jan Jacob Carpio University of the Philippines, Diliman
Acknowledging the significant progress made in the promotion of Cultural Heritage (CH) in the Philippines since the enactment of Republic Act No. 10066, could the exploration of alternative and complementary methods for cultural heritage inventory-building (mapping) yield new insights into how everyday Filipinos understand, appreciate, and embody CH beyond the confines of expert-driven CH management/governance practices?
To address this question, the author returns to his hometown, guided by a recently compiled Cultural Map/Inventory developed by its local non-government history and culture organization, and qualitative research tools not typically used in cultural mapping activities. Through this two-fold methodological approach, he will attempt to reorient the search for the significance of his hometown’s CH from one shaped by dominant heritage discourses/approaches to one grounded in the individual and community-level lived experiences of his fellow Bulakeños.
Maslaha between Unity and Division: A Critical Reflection on Green Islam in Indonesia Natsuki Chubachi Keio University
This study explores the principle of maslaha within environmental ethics in Indonesia. While maslaha originally refers to a classical principle in Islamic jurisprudence, commonly understood as “public good” and “well- being” in Indonesian, its interpretation has diversified within the expanding “Green Islam” discourse since the 2000s. In contemporary debates, maslaha is invoked both to support grounded visions of community well-being— encompassing non-human entities and the rights of marginalized groups—and to legitimize national development agendas framed as benefiting the broader public. Although existing scholarship has highlighted the doctrinal significance of maslaha, the ambivalence of its logic and its social outcomes remain under-researched. Drawing on contested interpretations among Muslim intellectuals on mining, climate change, and other environmental issues, this study traces maslaha’s variability and its application in Islamic jurisprudential discussions. By critically reviewing these discourses, it demonstrates how Muslims are practically employing religious concepts in environmental ethics, while the multivalent usage of maslaha can serve both grassroots rights and the state’s developmentalism, thereby risking the reinforcement of social and ecological hierarchies. This approach broadens perspective on the relationship between developmentalism, environmentalism, and the marginalized, through the lens of Muslim ethics.
Constructing the Third Space: The Orang Rimba’s Ontological Struggle, Hybrid Negotiation, and Existence under Development Pressures in Jambi Aditya Dipta Anindita IPB University
Since the 1970s, development and conservation policies have drastically reshaped the ecological landscape and tenurial systems of the Orang Rimba, a semi-nomadic forest-dwelling group in Jambi Province, Indonesia. Projects such as transmigration, monoculture plantations, and the establishment of national parks have imposed rigid land categories that conflict with the Orang Rimba’s cosmology of hutan tano, a living forest landscape where social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions are interwoven.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this study examines how the Orang Rimba respond to the territorialization of their ancestral space. The findings reveal that, rather than retreating or fully assimilating, they actively construct a “third space” as a fluid zone where they negotiate access, maintain subsistence practices, and assert their presence across state and private land.
This space enables the coexistence of Orang Rimba’s tenurial logic within modern land-use systems while resisting the modern ontology that fragments land into discrete zones. Interstitial mobility, adaptive hunting-gathering, as well as how they navigate state and market interventions through their everyday practices, illustrate the forms of resistance. The study challenges dominant paradigms that frame indigenous peoples as passive or obstructive, and instead highlights their agency in redefining spatial boundaries. The findings emphasize the importance of integrating the livelihoods and spatial logic of indigenous communities in designing spatial planning and development policies that are inclusive while ensuring their ecological, social, and cultural sustainability.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

This panel explores how local and peripheral(ized) actors across Southeast Asia have generated distinct knowledge systems and conceptual frameworks in relation to themes such as modernity, urbanization, religion, and development. It challenges dominant models that conflate modernization with centralized state planning and top-down development and instead emphasizes alternative pathways shaped by the everyday experiences, epistemologies, and innovations of those often positioned at the margins such as rural communities, ethnic minorities, indigenous groups, and non-elite actors. Far from being passive recipients of externally imposed knowledge, these communities have actively reimagined and reshaped modernization by integrating local customs, religious practices, and social norms with state-driven initiatives, resulting in hybrid forms of modernity. The panel also foregrounds the role of local religious movements and indigenous knowledge systems in articulating culturally embedded visions of progress. Collectively, the papers argue for reclaiming theory from the ground up and show how Southeast Asia’s peripheries are not passive recipients of modernization but are active contributors to its meaning. In doing so, the panel contributes to broader efforts to provincialize global theory and center the vernacular in development discourses.