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Forging our Asian Commitment: Regional Perspectives on and Responses to the Global Crisis
When their turn for the end-of-fellowship conference came, all of Cohort 9 gathered under a pall of gloom, convening under cloud storms of a global crisis alluded to the world over as the Credit Crunch. Recession had plunged both Europe and the United States into unemployment, depressive suicides, welfare rescues, and radical bailouts in the banking system. The protective bubble of material ease had come to burst, indeed, without warning, with a fall out of menacing consequences everywhere.
At around the same time, Asia’s own powerhouse of China was warding off criticism left and right, under siege for the lethal quality of its export products (its dolls and toy guns were dusting off toxic powder and even its dairy products had been diluted with melamine). And nothing could ever dissuade the BBC and CNN both from undertaking an expose of the dismal labor conditions that workers in China had to endure.
But those quick to clear the depths and rear up from the muck had something else to say. They were of the mind that the world’s economic superpowers were getting paranoid about China. Given the downturn, what was to prevent the People’s Republic from raking in the profits, scoring it big, and ascending without fanfare as the world’s supreme economic power?
Looking at the global crisis on hindsight today, certain hard-edged opinions linger. Did not a confined mindset spur it on, insisting how the world must be measured mainly in terms of financial viability and profits? Did the cankerous boil not burst where a monolithic culture, in its obsession with world domination, spoiled its CEOs to a maniacal aggression over high-wire acts and high-risk financial ventures? And where the rest of the world must now bear the consequences of this reckless caper, is there no contrite reckoning, a belated openness weighing in how other cultures could have run the drill and how they might have averted the wreck?
Identifying a regional perspective and listing regional responses to the global crisis while drawing from the various strengths of these conference papers are in themselves acts of great daring. And really, how self-aggrandizing it is, to cull from our own experiences and to pass these off as solutions to a stunned corner where no one could stop the mess from seeping into the uncarpeted floors of our world.
But then, we lean upon the substance and gravitas of our own experiences. For are they not as real as the valor of the world’s other corners when its best minds parry with the difficulties? And are these not the known terms by which we survive and plod on in our part of the world?
But the papers gathered for this issue do yield certain inroads. They propose at least three possible approaches as to a manner of proceeding: by re-examining heritage and cultural movements, by giving deeper regard for the possibilities that women offer as actors in the material world, and by looking assiduously at the particulars of political economy.
The first proposes a revaluation of heritage and an inventory of persuasive intellectual movements. Zhou Guangrong talks about how language helps culture suffer the sea change, singling out the regimented journeys of the Buddhist monkhood as a primary platform for passing on ideas. With a keen sense of mission, monks have wandered far, and from India to China, they have made it possible for a cultural transfer to take place, alongside of spiritual outlook and philosophical belief. Here, the ability to speak a foreign language hastens the transfer, giving stress to its materiality and power as an instrument for breaking through a cultural paradigm.
Chen Bo tracks a curious reversal in the course of intimate relationships in Mustang, where women are let to live with more than one husband, finding its justification in the compelling need to sire children, the undying belief that previous partners could be reincarnated, and that surviving brothers must be their widowed in-laws’ keeper. Here, the culture regards marriage as an expansive scale of behaviors, ranging from the carnal to what is deeply affective.
Andi Faisal Bakti looks at efforts in establishing civil society in Cambodia as a way of addressing issues raked up by the genocide. He trains his focus on the mediation of Islamic religious forces in encouraging the rise of civil society. As it is, his paper recognizes aggressive forces at work in sustaining civil society. On the one hand, religion extends a spiritual basis for the political definition of the ideal citizen. On the other hand, the determined groups speak mainly for Muslim societal interests, challenging the possibility of going past religious differences on the way to regulating national interests.
Novita Dewi locates theater in Sri Lanka and the artistic productivity that it inspires as irrevocable genres for achieving peace in fractious territory. She classifies theater as a primary cultural movement, as a genre that conflates the artistic with the political, reformulating complex political issues for popular reckoning. Her paper singles out theater’s cultural workers as creative agents that mediate the cause of peace through their artistic efforts. Its visual culture adds up to a measure of biopolitical power and conscience of the race.
A second direction outlined here involves the recuperation of vital roles that women could play provided that they are freed from the shackles of patriarchal subjugation. Janet M. Arnado charts the life of domestic workers in Singapore from the framework of a dramaturgic narrative. Women negotiate a shifting hold on power, from being homemakers and figures of professional and domestic authority back home to accepting the servile tasks that they must render abroad. The paper sees economic activity in the diasporas as performative acts in the theater of labor, with consequential effects on the psychological agency of subjectivity and character.
Nguyen Ngoc Tho uses complementary lenses while looking at goddess belief in China—the persistence of a devotion deifying the feminine and the debt that such a tradition owes to the diasporic relocation of the Viet people. The paper asserts that the tradition flourishes because of the practical rootedness of ritual and worship in the material experiences of the people, as they found and sustain settlements far away from home.
Sohini Basu confronts domestic violence, even as NGOs interpose to restore social capital for battered women along the way. Where women literally lose their faces and are shattered to the core, the wound to their well being eclipses their power to engage society effectively, as well. The research credits NGOs for wisely advocating self-examination and risk-taking, so that battered women could extricate themselves from the tangled vines of guilt and shame.
The third dimension proposed here involves a thorough look at the particulars of Asian political economy, examining the matrix that entwines power with driven engagements in economic activity. T.G. Suresh surveys the intriguing wave that triggered a kind of material boom for China, arguing that the post-Mao reforms had really sprung from local initiatives and experiments rather than from headwork at the top. Along the way, he pays attention to how social groups have been swayed by the new attitude and how new spaces and hierarchies have appeared alongside of the perceived perks.
With the same fervor for China, Raviprasad Narayanan makes inroads into a different dimension as he explores changing dynamics in how China crafts its foreign policy. He undertakes an anatomy of the discourse’s structure, actors, interests, as well as its articulated and perceived norms. And going against the grain, his paper carefully accounts, too, for the domestic component—factoring into the equation the sway that internal political trends and energies hold on far-ranging issues.
Uttara Sahasrabuddhe uses comparative optics on South and Southeast Asia, to understand better the workings of regionalism. Hers is an important assessment of initiatives propelling Asia’s nation-states beyond the discourse of nationalism. Following their intractable goals of achieving regional security and development, the paper traces how the current platforms of the SAARC and ASEAN both have heeded national particulars of member countries on their way to fulfilling the binding aspirations of both regions.
Yuli Nugroho anatomizes participatory forest management in India, peering critically into strategies of decentralization and devolution. He is quick to commend the leverage that communities have acquired alongside of greater participation in formulating shaping of policies and in making decisions. But he is also quick to point out the risks, such as the formation of new hierarchies and the rut that everyone bears because of gaps in updating technological expertise.
Danilo Francisco M. Reyes
Issue Editor
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