Globalization in Southeast Asia

Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives

Shinji Yamashita, J. S. Eades, Shinji Yamashita, J. S. Eades

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781571812568
• eBook ISBN: 9781782384816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

The rapid postwar economic growth in the Southeast Asia region has led to a transformation of many of the societies there, together with the development of new types of anthropological research in the region. Local societies with originally quite different cultures have been incorporated into multi-ethnic states with their own projects of nation-building based on the creation of "national cultures" using these indigenous elements. At the same time, the expansion of international capitalism has led to increasing flows of money, people, languages and cultures across national boundaries, resulting in new hybrid social structures and cultural forms.

This book examines the nature of these processes in contemporary Southeast Asia with detailed case studies drawn from countries across the region, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At the macro-level these include studies of nation-building and the incorporation of minorities. At the micro-level they range from studies of popular cultural forms, such as music and textiles to the impact of new sects and the world religions on local religious practice. Moving between the global and the local are the various streams of migrants within the region, including labor migrants responding to the changing distribution of economic opportunities and ethnic minorities moving in response to natural disaster.

Chapter 1

Introduction: “Glocalizing” Southeast Asia

Shinji YAMASHITA

Southeast Asia in Motion

Until the onset of the financial crisis at the end of 1997, the Southeast Asian countries had experienced several years of critical change due to rapid economic growth. In Indonesia during the three decades from 1961 to 1990, for instance, the agricultural sector of the work force decreased from 71.9 percent to 55.9 percent in numerical terms, and from 52.2 percent to 19.6 percent in terms of Gross Domestic Product, while the urban population increased from 14.8 percent to 30.9 percent of the total population. In 1991 the industrial sector (19.9 percent) overtook the agricultural sector (18.5 percent) in terms of GDP. Indonesia was therefore transforming itself from an agrarian to an industrial society. As an example of this new industrial strength, on the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, in August 1995, a new Indonesian-made aircraft called the N250 was officially announced by B.Y. Habibie, at that time Minister of Science and Technology, and was displayed to the media and the public.

The Indonesian case was only one example of rapid development in Southeast Asia. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand developed even faster, helping make the Southeast Asian region one of the most rapidly developing and industrializing areas of the world during the 1990s. In the latter half of 1997, beginning with a serious currency crisis, this economic growth came to a sudden halt. Some countries of the region were hit worse than others, and were able to recover relatively quickly, though Indonesia itself remained dogged by political and economic problems. But what the crisis showed, paradoxically, was just how strongly Southeast Asia had become connected with the rest of the contemporary world system.

Despite the boom-and-bust cycles of the capitalist world economy, the Southeast Asian countries during recent decades have generally experienced massive inflows of goods, money, information and people. Metropolitan centers such as Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok were flooded with imports from elsewhere in the global economy, with people busily coming and going between the newly constructed skyscrapers. As Richard Robison and David Goodman (1996: 1) have neatly described it, we have now become familiar with “images of frustrated commuters in Bangkok and Hong Kong traffic jams, Chinese and Indonesian capitalist entrepreneurs signing deals with Western companies; white-coated Malaysian or Taiwanese computer programmers and other technical experts at work in electronics plants; and, above all, crowds of Asian consumers at McDonalds or with the ubiquitous mobile phone in hand.” These new images of Southeast Asia remain in spite of the 1997 crisis, for Southeast Asia cannot revert to its position before the economic takeoff.

Furthermore, thanks to parabolic antennas, television programs from around the world are now enjoyed not only in the big cities of Southeast Asia but also in remote villages such as those in the Tana Toraja region of the Sulawesi Highlands with which I have been familiar for more than twenty years. When asked his opinion on whether the tourism introduced to Tana Toraja in the early 1970s had been a major agent of cultural change, a Toraja man answered, “tourism is not important in our lives – we see the world on television every night” (Smith 1989: 9).

The people themselves also move, not only from villages to cities within national boundaries but also across national boundaries. In 1995 I was surprised to find a great number of Toraja migrant workers living in Tawau, a town located on the border between Sabah, Malaysia and East Kalimantan, Indonesia. In terms of mobility, the Filipino people are perhaps the most active in the region: over four million of them, or approximately 7 percent of the national population, are abroad, whether in Japan, Hong Kong, the Pacific region, the Middle East, or the United States. In Japan, Japayuki migrants from the Philippines, many of them women working in the entertainment sector, became a conspicuous phenomenon in the 1980s.

In 1991 Kuwahara noted that there were between twenty-five and thirty million guest workers and eighteen million refugees worldwide (Kuwahara 1991: 15–16). In 1995, there were over five hundred million international travelers worldwide, of which approximately one tenth, or fifty million, were guest workers or refugees. By 2000, these figures had risen to 750 million and seventy-five million respectively. Within this context of global migration, Asians – not only the Overseas Chinese, of whom there are about twenty million, but also the Southeast Asians – are now emerging as among the most active migrants in the contemporary world. It has become part of everyday reality for contemporary Asians to leave their places of origin for urban centers, or to move on further across national boundaries in order to be able to pursue better lives. Southeast Asia is thus in a new age of motion, and this trend may even be accelerated by economic crises such as the recent one, as could be seen for instance in the increasing number of illegal Indonesian migrants in Malaysia after the collapse of the Indonesian rupiah.

The Transnational Anthropology of Southeast Asia

In a related development in anthropological theory, Arjun Appadurai has described the global movement of people using the concept of “global ethnoscape.” He writes that “the landscape of persons who make up shifting worlds in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers, and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai 1991: 192).

The “global ethnoscape” is one of five dimensions of the “global cultural flow.” Appadurai argues that the new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order. It cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models, or simple models of push and pull, surpluses and deficits, or consumers and producers. Within this “global cultural flow” he looks at the relationship between five separate dimensions which he calls (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990: 296).

If we accept Appadurai’s observations on contemporary people and culture in motion, then it is not possible to maintain the conventional aim of ethnography which is “to record coherent, patterned cultural worlds enclosed within discrete territories, languages, and customs” (Rosaldo 1989: 201). In other words, within the landscape of the global cultural flow, it is apparently no longer possible to study culture as a discrete closed system. In my previous work (Yamashita 1988), I suggested the need for a “dynamic ethnography” to examine the cultural dynamism of the Toraja people of Sulawesi in relation to the Indonesian nation-state. However, if we consider that a great number of the Toraja people are now guest workers in Sabah, Malaysia, we have to widen the scope of “dynamic ethnography” to include observation of transnational human and cultural movements.

We therefore need, as Appadurai has proposed, a “macroethnography” or “transnational anthropology” which can respond to the transnational age (Appadurai 1991: 197). In macroethnography, culture does not constitute either a coherent or a homogeneous system as the classic functionalist ethnographers assumed. Instead, we have to see culture as a “global ecumene” within which people, goods and information all flow (cf. Hannerz 1992: 217–67).

It is this kind of cultural dynamism that this book attempts to examine, focusing on Southeast Asia. In doing so, we hope to shed new light both on the interface between new and traditional cultures in the region, and to contribute to a new anthropological theory of culture in an age of globalization.

Globalization and Two Conceptions of Culture

Like other popular catchwords, the meaning of the term “globalization” is vague and elusive. I follow Roland Robertson (1992: 8) who defines it as a “compression of the world” due to increased global (international/interregional) interdependence. Since the mid-1980s, the term has been used to describe current ongoing changes in this direction, even though, according to Robertson, the origins of these processes can be traced back a long way, to a period even before the modern expansion of Europe.

So far there have been many discussions of the phenomena of globalization in the fields of economics and politics, but rather fewer examinations of the outcomes of globalization in the field of culture. Taking cases from the Southeast Asian region, this book investigates these ongoing cultural processes in relation to economic and political globalization. As agents of cultural production, national, ethnic, or subregional communities have long been the most important factors in cultural change. They are, however, no longer the same entities that they were. As the boundaries of those communities have become more fluid owing to the process of globalization, the cultural homogeneity within each community has been called into question. Cultural identities are being contested everywhere, as multinational agencies, states and governments, different social classes, and groups based on gender, ethnicity and locality attempt to redefine and assert new cultural forms. As a result, the voices we are hearing are increasingly culturally diverse.

The rise of new lifestyles among the urban middle classes is a particularly striking feature of Southeast Asia today. Young, well-educated middle-class city dwellers, who only a few decades ago firmly believed that they belonged to national and local communities, now perceive that they may have more in common with the middle classes in the older industrialized countries than with their own fellow countrymen on the periphery. This gives rise to a number of questions: Is global culture prevailing over local and national cultures? What is going on on the peripheries of states? What are the roles of nation-states in these changing circumstances? And what other cultural agencies are gaining in importance?

It is helpful in this regard to consider the distinction between the concepts of “territorial culture” and “translocal culture” proposed by the Dutch sociologist, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1995). “Territorial culture” refers to situations where culture is seen as being essentially territorially based and is assumed to stem from a learning process that is localized. The implication is that cultures can be distinguished from each other, such as a Japanese culture, a Balinese culture, or whatever. This notion goes back to the nineteenth-century German romanticism of J. D. Herder, but it was later elaborated in twentieth-century anthropology, particularly in relation to cultural relativism, through the work of Franz Boas, the German scholar who became a founding father of American anthropology. “Translocal culture,” on the other hand, refers to culture as a general form of human behavioral “software” which is acquired during a translocal learning process. This notion of culture has been implicit in theories of evolution and diffusion through translocal learning.

In the present era of globalization we observe that translocal phenomena have been developing in almost every dimension of our lives and have resulted in the “creolization” or “hybridization” of culture. Pieterse mentions examples of the “global mélange” such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap music in London, and a Shakespeare play performed in Japanese kabuki style for a Paris audience at the Theatre Soleil. Less conspicuous expressions of the “global mélange” can be observed everywhere in our lives today: Japanese wear shirts made in China, eat shrimp imported from Indonesia, and live in houses built in a mixture of Japanese and Western styles. American children play Nintendo games, London businessmen listen to Sony Walkman tape and disc players, and Indonesian children watch Doraemon on television.

During my stay in Jakarta in 1994 I was very much impressed by the sight of Indonesian children reading Japanese comics in Indonesian translation at bookstores, from Doraemon to Dragon Ball Z, and from Candy-Candy to Sailor-Moon (cf. Shiraishi 1997). These characters appear on television as well. A Javanese newspaper reported that Javanese children today are crazy about Doraemon and Ksatria Baja Hitam (“Iron Soldier”), but are not interested in the wayang puppet theater (Sekimoto 1995). Even in ketoprak, a form of Javanese popular theater, Ksatria Baja Hitam appears instead of Javanese princes. These foreign-made programs, therefore, can have a great influence on children who come from a different cultural background.

We can observe examples of translocal culture in Southeast Asia today just as we can anywhere else in the contemporary world. However, it must be noted, as Pieterse points out, that translocal culture cannot exist without a place – indeed, there is no culture without place. Culture has to be localized. Therefore, just as Japanese baseball, which is American in origin, has become “Japanese” for the Japanese, Nintendo games have become “American” for American children, and Doraemon has become “Indonesian” for children in Indonesia. It is therefore one of the basic tasks of contemporary anthropology to study such processes as the translocalization and relocalization of culture within the global cultural flows.

“Glocalization”

It is useful to refer to the notion of “glocalization” discussed by Roland Robertson (1995). The word is a combination of “globalization” and “localization” which appeared in the 1991 edition of the Oxford Dictionary to New Words (Tulloch 1991). Here the term “glocal” and the related processual noun “glocalization” are defined as being “formed by telescoping global and local to make a blend.” According to the dictionary, the notion is modeled on the Japanese concept of dochakuka, “becoming autochthonous,” derived from dochaku, meaning “aboriginal,” or “living on one’s own land.” This was originally used to refer to the agricultural principle of adapting one’s farming techniques to local conditions, but it was also adopted in Japanese business as a term to refer to “global localization,” which means a global outlook adapted to local conditions.

The thinking behind the word “glocalization” is quite interesting, because it presupposes not the opposition of globalization and localization but their simultaneous occurrence. In this perspective, globalization is not a unidirectional homogenizing process, but a dual process of hybridization. Conversely, localization is viewed as a process which is caused by globalization. Likewise, but from a slightly different angle, Marshall Sahlins has discussed the “indigenization of modernity.” He writes: “the very ways societies change have their own authenticities, so that global modernity is often reproduced as local diversity” (Sahlins 1994: 377).

Let me cite examples of glocalization in Southeast Asia. The first example is taken from contemporary Indonesian music: dangdut. This is a form of Indonesian popular music developed by Rhoma Irama (“the king of dangdut”) who established it as a distinct musical style by the mid-1970s (Frederic 1982). It is a hybrid of Malay, Indian and Western popular music. At first it had low status as a musical genre, but it has since developed into a form of Indonesian national music, and it plays an important role at Indonesian national ceremonies, as was seen on the occasion of the 1995 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence.

The second example is taken also from Indonesia, and is that of Bali in the 1930s. Following Robertson, globalization is not necessarily a recent phenomenon of the “postmodern” era, but may go back to an earlier period of modern history. In this sense colonialism was also a form of globalization. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Yamashita 1995, 1999), Balinese art forms which are now famous, such as the kecak, kris (sword), or barong (lion) dances, were “invented” during the colonial period under the influence of Western artists, scholars and tourists. A major figure in this development was Walter Spies, a German artist who settled in Bali at that time. His circle came to include people such as: Miguel Covarrubias, a New York artist of Mexican origin, who wrote the now classic book, The Island of Bali (1937); Colin McPhee, a New York musicologist; Jane Belo, McPhee’s then wife and an anthropologist who wrote Trance in Bali (1960); Margaret Mead, the famous American anthropologist, who carried out research with her then husband Gregory Bateson, following earlier work in Samoa and New Guinea; and Reloi Goris, a Dutch archeologist. These people contributed not only to the introduction of Balinese culture to the West, but also helped “invent” it by studying and staging it. In other words, Balinese arts and dances emerged as an outcome of Bali’s encounter w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction: “Glocalizing” Southeast Asia
• Part I: Southeast Asia in Globalizing Perspectives
• Part II: The Local, the National, and the Transnational in Southeast Asia
• Part III: The Periphery of Nation States
• Index