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Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives
Where conservatism stiffly holds the fort, Asia’s gatekeepers are miffed that much has changed about the way we know ourselves and even about our current self-definitions. For one, today we enjoy greater access to and experience of things Asian, without the cap. Think of the Internet, of Channel News Asia playing 24/7, of imported cup noodles, serialized Koreanovelas, even foreign maids doing the laundry. And readily, we know that our identities have been stretched to accommodate plural selves, becoming transnational along the way.
And why would it be a big thing if we do go transnational? We’ll have to deal with interests that cross the borders, too. And we’ll stretch that spirit of vigilance, watching not just over the beloved country but also after the vast spaces of the greater region, too. More than ever, we now keep track of waves and movements directing spaces and sensibilities in the region. And we are curiously attuned to events that fire up the political and material lives of the continent. Because of this, we have evolved as willing collaborators, working with other partners in Asia on projects that could benefit shared interests. And swiftly, we are growing old as citizens of the region, ready to guard and defend that space where our peculiar interests lie.
A risk arising from pluralism is that anarchic mood where anything goes and where terror rears up its ugly head where someone insists that “Might is right.” But where our options abound, we also welcome the intriguing possibility of adopting new ways to finish old tasks, coming into order and efficiency, peace and well being, at last. And there’s the measure of gratitude, too, for forces and cultures out there, sharing with us masterful ways of doing things, from whom there is, indeed, a great deal to learn.
The pluralism that engages Asia today is fraught with possibilities and risks both. But in their common badge, the scholars featured in this issue stand truly commendable for their open minds—that fearless disposition to lengthen the gaze, never resting the case that other strokes are as effective, and that in a world smitten with best practices, it is a pleasure, indeed, to choose and pick out what we think is sweetest.
The survivors of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime are Akbar Meirio’s research focus. He regards prospects for their own healing and recovery by examining whether the structure of transitional justice as it operates now is the appropriate response to their memory of trauma. Held as a type of monitoring research, the paper reveals the tensions between the justice system and the irrefutable culture of suspicion and distrust. Inevitably, the perception of survivors guides this research as it deems whether the existing platforms of democracy really do deliver fundamental social expectations like justice and the redress of human misfortune.
A keenly related undertaking is Vinita Ramani Mohan’s cogent and well-written account, detailing how civil society has become the guardian of social memory, also in Cambodia. She credits steadfast organizations in civil society for sustaining initiatives to locate and engage survivors of the Khmer Rouge attrition program and to inscribe individual memories of the torture and the terror. The effort has yielded two crucial gains: the tribunal’s decision to admit recorded memory as evidence for trial and the gradual evolution of a literature of testimony and witness, trouncing the notion of Cambodia as being literarily bereft and locating the expression of collective anguish as both history and literature.
Md. Asiuzzaman locates the role of the press in a place of intriguing cultural diversity such as Malaysia. While the idea of a pluralistic media is a clear given in democratic societies, the researcher points to daily expressions of cultural dominance and hegemony, where the media must contend with aligned interests and protect its relative autonomy. In the same breath, the research compels the press to be self-reflexive about its own ideology. Media’s mandate is to cover, explore, and make sense of the interest of manifold sectors, veering away from the unwarranted loyalty to power hierarchies and pressure groups.
Chen Yihua looks into the struggle of subaltern groups as only an able fictionist like R.K. Narayan would portray them against the post-colonial condition. The paper ponders the question “How have marginalized groups understood and carried out the experience of transition in India?” The research regards Narayan’s fiction as an unblinking representation of life in the lower depths, a rendition of history from below. As a representational catalogue, it recognizes various marginal forces that comprise India’s daily life, taking quotidian incidents as figural representations of historical struggles and the keen tensions informing the project of national consolidation.
Nazima Parveen offers one of the most thorough papers in this issue. She traces the very same concern for the consolidation of national consciousness while accounting for majorities and minorities in Nepalese society. Her paper looks into the matrix of Muslim hegemony—into culture, religious persuasion, and collective affiliation—and the pressures that such a superstructure exerts on the unfolding social history of Nepal. What gives hope in this radical discourse analysis is the scholar’s eye for indigenous political resources and the counter-efforts mounted consistently, curbing preferential treatments that sidetrack or even silence all together the interest of cultural minorities.
While Niranjan Sahoo turns his eye on the private sector, the undergirding motive for such a deflection are still the interlinked issues of social inequality and exclusion. In a multi-racial state like Malaysia, confronting the reality of exclusionary discourses matters all the more where the private sector takes part in averting it. Within and beyond the fellowship, this research excels as a compelling analysis of how the technostructure grapples with the contemporary outcry that it articulates its conscience and assumes social responsibility—a trajectory in economics that is at once post-modern and post-colonial.
Pratyush Om Shankar evokes yet another fine link—between the earliest cities and the formation of socio-cultural identity. Engaging the relative isolation of Nepal, the research outlines an insightful semiosis of the morphological uniqueness of its urban spaces—where the pressure to modernize and run apace with contemporary architecture is tempered by the inextricable elemental rootedness of Himalayan cities. Along the way, the paper reinforces its core in environmental sustainability, reminding readers that even the firmest ventures in traditional architecture and urban anthropology have adhered to it as indestructible value.
Chandra Sekhar Silori traces the link between biodiversity conservation and the alleviation of poverty. The connections may not seem so manifest, at once. But we only have to remember that nature is the tableland of plenty that sustains us and that from it arises various trades and occupations that enable each one of us to make a living. And thus, where certain resources are swiftly depleted and where certain economic activities must be regulated, we make sense of a 2-way effect—the tilting balance in nature and the human impoverishment that it triggers. And not subtly at all, we see a keen interconnectedness between material demographics and the state of the world’s ecology.
Ravichandran Nataraj assesses efforts in public health in a developing nation like the Philippines. His paper’s optimistic tenor draws from the recognition of equity mechanisms, platforms that may be shut out in other health care systems but are radically tried out in Asian societies with even more limited resources and clearly mired in disturbing circumstances of health poverty. Given his medical narrative, the researcher does not shirk from tracing a political line through the principle of decentralization, its beneficial gains and liabilities where scores of human lives are at stake.
Equally formidable is the argument of Susmita Chattopadhyay, as she undertakes an economic valuation of diabetes in Thailand. She remarks upon a glaring shift—that as lifestyles have changed swiftly the world over, developing nations, too, have shown a marked increase in the number of its citizens afflicted with diabetes. In Southeast Asia, the rise in demographics point to the more economically productive age group. As a cost-of-illness study, the paper outlines a comprehensive social perspective, underscoring how the private and public sectors both, as well as the undocumented components share in the social cost, as public health negotiates a turning point, due to changing lifestyles and altered eating habits.
Danilo Francisco M. Reyes
Issue Editor
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