Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. CSEAS Lecture Series. Drawing Borders in Blood: DNA Testing, Citizenship, and Statelessness Prevention in Thailand (October 9, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76312 76312-19687505@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 9, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Virtual lecture via Zoom Webinar. Please register at:
http://myumi.ch/NxgZN

Despite its authoritarian commitments, the Thai government is regularly lauded by the UN for its statelessness prevention and eradication efforts. Photographs of happy “hill tribe” youth receiving their national ID cards are widely circulated by both the Thai government and human rights advocates, and are often invoked as examples of “best practices” for statelessness prevention. A relatively recent hallmark of this highly celebrated agenda is DNA testing. How is this test performed and adjudicated, and what logics underlie a program that promotes citizenship by blood? More importantly, what are the political and theoretical implications for pursuing these logics in citizenship adjudication? Drawing on extensive ethnographic and survey research, I argue that DNA testing, while “verifying” the citizenship claims of thousands of individuals on case-by-case bases, also produces an increasingly powerful and expansive infrastructure of body/border drawing, maintenance, and surveillance. Moreover, the research indicates that even as state and humanitarian advocates applaud the “objectivity” of DNA tests in adjudication of citizenship claims, the DNA test is carried out in connection with a range of highly contingent, subjective, and uneven practices at individual, local, and bureaucratic levels. Ultimately, the logics that underlie the DNA test are those of ever-expanding, yet ever-incomplete territorialization—a project that seeks complete, but ultimately unattainable, knowledge of, authority over, and reconciliation between individuals to territory.

Amanda Flaim is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in James Madison College and the Department of Sociology. She studies problems and paradoxes in human rights and development policy in Southeast Asia among indigenous, highlander, and migrant communities in particular. Her research agendas include the politics of borders, statelessness, and citizenship, labor exploitation and human trafficking discourse, and livelihoods transformations associated with dam development and climate change along the Mekong River.

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Livestream / Virtual Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:17:25 -0400 2020-10-09T12:00:00-04:00 2020-10-09T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual Flaim_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. The Indies of the Setting Sun: Asia and the Early Modern Spanish Geopolitical Imagination (October 23, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76307 76307-19685534@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 23, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free event; please register in advance at: http://myumi.ch/3qV0m

Ricardo Padrón will be discussing his new book, *The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West *(Chicago, 2020). Against established historiography that emphasizes the ways in which America was “invented” as a continent separate from Asia relatively early in the history of European contact with the New World, Padrón looks at the ways in which early modern Spaniards imagined the two continents as connected spaces. Crucial to this effort was the concept of the “Indies,” which retained a powerful transpacific dimension throughout the sixteenth century, in Spanish-speaking circles at least, serving to figure East and Southeast Asia as the western frontier of Spain’s New World empire.

Padrón is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. His earlier monograph, *The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain* (Chicago 2004) established his reputation as a scholar of early modern cartography, broadly conceived, and on the relationship between visual and verbal mapping. His work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America.

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:33:52 -0400 2020-10-23T12:00:00-04:00 2020-10-23T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual padron_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Uprooting the Diasporic Histories of Southeast Asia (November 13, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76308 76308-19685535@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 13, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free event; please register in advance at: http://myumi.ch/mnbRl

What can diasporas teach us about the history of Southeast Asia as a region, dominated as it is by narratives of hospitality and receptiveness to other cultures and peoples? Remarkably, the Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia demarcated their own legal jurisdictions by anchoring their kinship obligations and commercial interests that they had developed over several centuries across the Indian Ocean. During the nineteenth century, links between homeland and destination faded into the background in the colonial period as the diasporic elite remade their lives in Southeast Asia often according to new colonial moulds. Indeed, the Arab diaspora deliberately chose to lean on bureaucratic infrastructure in their effort to construct new scales of responsibility, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. At the same time, colonial rulers yoked their identities outside of the region viewing them as hybrid, creole, mixed and sometimes even outright foreign, effectively uprooting their histories from the region. This lecture will look at emblems of diasporic lives in the form of legal sources to explore the relationship between indigenous Southeast Asians, diasporas and colonial authorities.

Nurfadzilah Yahaya is assistant professor of history at National University of Singapore. Prior to this, she was an Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia is published by Cornell University Press (2020). Her articles have appeared in Law and History Review, Journal of Women’s History, Indonesia nad the Malay World and Muslim World.

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:35:29 -0400 2020-11-13T12:00:00-05:00 2020-11-13T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual Yahaya_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. What Kind of Ecological Culture Do We Need?: Drought History and Lessons from Premodern Southeast Asia (December 4, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76315 76315-19687507@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 4, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free event; please register in advance at: http://myumi.ch/O4kB0

Have we been making the environment worse while knowing more about how it works? Since the nineteenth century, the rapid advancement of technologies has led to an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the natural world. Science has helped explain the vast array of environmental processes. However, we, the human species, have also become the frontal force of worsening conditions of the natural environment. In order to call for a reflection on our ecological culture, this talk examines the history of drought from an area in eastern mainland Southeast Asia, the core of what would later become modern Vietnam. It shows, on the one hand, why drought would stir up the most pressing social and political crises in the premodern period. On the other hand, it explores the historical context that helped consolidate the premodern Vietnamese people’s resilience to drought. Most importantly, this history uncovers a sustained ecological culture which compellingly asks us to rethink the way we have bonded with nature.

Hieu Phung (PhD, University of Hawaii) is a historian of premodern Vietnam and Southeast Asia. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University, and she will be teaching for both the University of Michigan and the University of Hawaii in the Fall of 2020. Before coming to the United States, she taught at Vietnam National University-Hanoi and carried out extensive archival research at the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between the environment and state building, with a particular interest in the historical agency of water and climate in stimulating social and political change. In pursuing environmental history, she makes extensive use of traditional maps and texts that reveal the production of geographical knowledge. She is working on a book project entitled The Realization of a Water Space: An Environmental History of Late Medieval Vietnam, using documents written in both classical Chinese and the demotic Vietnamese Nôm script. Her recent article, “Naming the Red River - Becoming a Vietnamese river,” will be published by the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies this December.

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:36:56 -0400 2020-12-04T12:00:00-05:00 2020-12-04T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual Phung_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Moments of Silence: the Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok (January 22, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80034 80034-20548978@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 22, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Event is free and open to the public; please register at http://bit.ly/3oS7YLq
Friday, Jan 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM EST

This talk will be a discussion of Professor Winichakul's latest book, *Moments of Silence: the Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok* (University of Hawai`i, 2020).

The ‘October 6 massacre’ remains enigmatic to Thai society. The unforgetting—the inability to remember or forget, or to articulate memories in a meaningful way—has been due to the state’s suppression, shame and guilt, historical ideology, and the changing politics. This book is the story of the changing memories and the variable conditions for silence over the past forty years.

Thongchai Winichakul is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book, *Siam Mapped: a History of the Geo-body of a Nation* (1994), was awarded the Harry J Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS, USA) and was translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Thai. He was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Award in 1994. and was President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013/14. He has also published eight books in Thai.



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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 11 Jan 2021 14:19:15 -0500 2021-01-22T12:00:00-05:00 2021-01-22T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion speaker_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand (January 29, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/79670 79670-20444320@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 29, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free event; register at https://bit.ly/39sKIiE

From his recently released book, *The Spirit Ambulance*, Dr. Stonington will share stories from the deathbeds of Thai elders: their children’s attempts to pay back their “debts of life” via intensive medical care, and the ensuing “spirit ambulance,” a rush to get patients home from the ghost-infested hospital to orchestrate their final breath in a spiritually advantageous place. Out of these stories, Dr. Stonington will abstract outward from Thailand to Southeast Asia and the globe to examine the effects high-tech medicine on vital life transitions.

Scott Stonington is an anthropologist and physician. His primary appointment at U-M is in Anthropology and International Studies. He also practices hospitalist medicine at the VA Ann Arbor and primary care at Neighborhood Family Health Center in Ypsilanti. He has published on end of life and pain management in Thailand, Buddhism and the body, and the roles of improvisation and emotion in medical expertise in the U.S. He is also lead editor of the *New England Journal of Medicine*'s "Case Studies in Social Medicine."

Stonington’s new book is a great read for anyone interested in the global dynamics of healthcare and biomedicine, globalization, rapidly expanding technology, comparing cultures and systems of meaning, and the way global forces act upon the lives of individuals worldwide.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:00:44 -0500 2021-01-29T12:00:00-05:00 2021-01-29T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion event_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Film-screening of *Ghost Tape #10* followed by a Q&A with the Director (February 12, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80547 80547-20738200@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 12, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

At this CSEAS Lecture Series, we will screen the film "Ghost Tape #10," which will follow with a Q&A with the Director Sean David Christensen.

Free and open to the public. Please register at http://bit.ly/38nadB7

Film Synopsis:

Created by the U.S. Army during the American War in Viet Nam, *Ghost Tape #10* was one of many audiotapes engineered to psychologically intimidate and demoralize the North Vietnamese Army through its depiction of the Buddhist afterlife. By re-examining this weaponization of religious belief, reflections on this artifact of American propaganda lead to meditations on relationships between the living and the dead, asking what truths, if any, still echo within this recording.

Film Director Bio:

Sean David Christensen (b. 1985) is a visual artist who works in music & film. His work has been featured at the Hammer Museum, San Francisco International Film Festival, Austin Film Festival & Pictoplasma Berlin. His films have screened at the Angelika Film Center, Phoenix Art Museum & the Musée des beaux-arts in Montréal. His artwork has been presented on Rolling Stone, and his experimental documentary *The Duel*, based on a true story by actress Lili Taylor, was named a Vimeo Staff Pick in 2018. Amy R. Handler of Moving Pictures has described his filmmaking as, “Brilliant...fragile & hypnotic,” and Sundance Award-winning director Jay Rosenblatt has described Christensen's short films as, “Evocative...they do what many short films fail to do, make you wish they were longer.” Christensen is a graduate of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California and lives & works in Los Angeles.

Film website: https://filmfreeway.com/GhostTape10


*If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact jessmhil@umich.edu*

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 08 Jan 2021 14:49:31 -0500 2021-02-12T12:00:00-05:00 2021-02-12T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Film_poster
CSEAS Lecture Series. *A Village Called Versailles* film screening followed by a discussion with Mark VanLandingham, Cam-Thanh Tran, and Aurora Le (February 18, 2021 7:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/81014 81014-20832807@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 18, 2021 7:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free and open to the public; register at http://bit.ly/2XVakxD

In a New Orleans neighborhood called Versailles, a tight-knit group of Vietnamese Americans overcame obstacles to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, only to have their homes threatened by a new government-imposed toxic landfill. *A Village Called Versailles*, is the empowering story of how the Versailles people, who have already suffered so much in their lifetime, turn a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change and a chance for a better future.

The film screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Mark VanLandingham (Tulane University), Cam-Thanh Tran (Tulane University) and Aurora Le (University of Michigan).

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Film Screening Mon, 15 Feb 2021 10:44:53 -0500 2021-02-18T19:00:00-05:00 2021-02-18T20:30:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Film Screening Film poster
CSEAS Lecture Series. Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia (February 19, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80120 80120-20564751@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 19, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free and open to the public; please register at http://bit.ly/3raW5lZ

During the late nineteenth century, opium was integral to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The taxation of opium was a major source of revenue for British and French colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a tax on a peculiar vice of their non-European subjects. Yet between the 1890s and the 1940s, colonial states began to ban opium, upsetting the very foundations of overseas rule—how did this happen? This talk explores the history of this dramatic reversal and colonial legacies that set the stage for the region’s drug problems today.

Diana Kim challenges the conventional wisdom about opium prohibition—that it came about because doctors awoke to the dangers of drug addiction or that it was a response to moral crusaders—uncovering a more complex story deep within the colonial bureaucracy. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence across Southeast Asia and Europe, she shows how prohibition as made possible through the pivotal contributions of seemingly weak bureaucratic officials. Comparing British and French experiences across today’s Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, Kim explains how the everyday work of local administrators delegitimized the taxing of opium, which in turn made major anti-opium reforms possible. This talk is based on her book, *Empires of Vice *(Princeton University Press), which reveals more generally the inner life of colonial bureaucracy, illuminating how European rulers reconfigured their opium-entangled foundations of governance and durably shaped Southeast Asia’s political economy of illicit drugs.

Diana Kim is Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and formerly held a Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and CAORC fellowship with the Center for Khmer Studies. She teaches comparative politics and transnational histories of colonialism and empire in Southeast and East Asia; and her first book, *Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia* was published in 2020 by Princeton University Press.

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The following text will be included on all II events unless you indicate otherwise:If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:58:33 -0500 2021-02-19T12:00:00-05:00 2021-02-19T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion speaker_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Making Property Out of Air: Experiments in Urban Form in Phnom Penh (March 12, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80820 80820-20793350@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 12, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free and open to the public; register at http://bit.ly/3qqzVLl

Runaway land prices, market euphoria, and an open economy together generated effects that continue to reverberate throughout Phnom Penh today. Beginning in the 2000s, Asian capitalists gave new buoyancy to Phnom Penh’s built environment when land once again became an object of intense speculation. But unlike earlier booms, the relationship between land and space was fundamentally reworked by foreign developers proposing large construction projects theretofore unseen in Cambodia’s otherwise low-slung capital. These projects would not only physically transform the city but required the fabrication of new things. Over the last decade, condominiums have become the most explosive part of Phnom Penh’s real estate market evidenced in the swell of units across the city. In this talk, I highlight the making of Phnom Penh’s first condominiums to argue how the condominium as a go-to urban form was never self-evident nor guaranteed despite its proliferation. The condominium — recognizable in cities across the globe from Singapore to New York — is a tenure category even though it is often treated as a residential type, usually in high-rise buildings. I track the real estate strategies and logics to argue how formatting urban space is born out of social and technical experiments that are part of the messiness in making markets and building experiments that are constitutive of Phnom Penh’s speculative urbanism. The built environment not only indexes the volatilities and vibrancies of the market, it is the mundane terrain through which ambitions, values, and forms are negotiated and made material. I situate the condominium as a property form born out of experiments to fabricate property able to capture values.

Sylvia Nam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in cities, markets, and expertise. Her work brings together anthropological engagements with value alongside geographical theories on the production of space as the cutting edge of accumulation.

She is currently working on a book project, Phnom Penh, City of Speculation, which is an ethnographic examination of speculative practices of real estate in Cambodia’s capital, the role of Asian investment in radically reshaping the city’s landscape, and the regulatory regimes that enable speculation and investment.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:34:25 -0500 2021-03-12T12:00:00-05:00 2021-03-12T13:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion CSEAS Lecture Series speaker: Sylvia Nam
CSEAS Lecture Series. Tradition Never Dies: “Lắng nghe,” Active Listening, and Activism in Contemporary Vietnam (March 19, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80035 80035-20548979@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 19, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

This event is free and open to the public; please register at https://bit.ly/3lzI791
Friday, March 19, 2021, 12 PM EST

Tradition always seems to be dying, or so say “the experts.” Scholars at academic conferences, diplomats at UNESCO, and government policy makers have belabored tradition’s downfall for decades as evidence of the necessity of intervention. Frequently, however, these interventions hide ulterior motives—for scholars, codifying traditions advance their careers; for diplomats, supporting the documentation of art bolsters tradition for consumption; for policy makers, selectively supporting certain practices over others serves nation-building strategies. These experts also tend to ignore the voices of practitioners themselves. Had these experts listened, they would have understood that tradition remains firmly tied to everyday life and even activism.

In this presentation, I examine how “tradition” lives a vibrant life in contemporary Vietnam and suggest that we retire the trite adage that tradition is dying. Tradition is tested, certainly, and frequently is reframed and revised; indeed, one genre of southern Vietnamese opera, cải lương, includes renovation (cải) in the genre name. Television shows, films, and popular music present many examples of how tradition does not simply inspire but is actively practiced and carried forward. In the television show Tài tử miệt vườn (Countryside Amateur), singers of southern Vietnamese traditional music from all walks of life receive praise from a panel of established singers and teach traditional music to viewers within a flashy gameshow format. In the film Song Lang (2018), director Leon Le tells a love story of two men in the 1980s and uses sounds of cải lương to give voice to LGBT voices on screen. In the music video for “BET ON ME” by the rapper Suboi, sounds of the đàn tranh zither mix with a Beyoncé-like delivery of lyrics to advocate for particular kinds of listening in an increasingly modernized Vietnam. All of these examples advance activism through tradition for forms of living to which we need to listen more closely.

Dr. Alexander M. Cannon is Lecturer in Music at the University of Birmingham (UK), where he teaches classes in ethnomusicology, critical musicology, and the traditional musics of Asia. He further serves as Co-editor of Ethnomusicology Forum, the journal of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), and sits on the BFE Committee. He formerly served as Book Reviews Editor for the Yearbook of Traditional Music and as Secretary of the Board for the Society for Asian Music. An alumnus of the University of Michigan, he holds an MA and PhD in ethnomusicology from the School of Music, Theatre and Dance, where he wrote a dissertation on the southern Vietnamese traditional music genre đờn ca tài tử (music of talented amateurs). He recently completed a book manuscript titled “A Music Without a Name”: Creativity from Seed to Ruin in Southern Vietnam, and also has an article forthcoming in the journal Ethnomusicology. He has previously published in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Asian Music, and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 15 Dec 2020 15:41:03 -0500 2021-03-19T12:00:00-04:00 2021-03-19T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion speaker_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Ruptured Ecologies: How Thai Settler Colonialism is Reshaping the Northern Uplands & Indigenous Futures (April 2, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/80549 80549-20738204@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 2, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free and open to the public. Please register at http://bit.ly/3q8h5sf

The literature on colonialism in mainland Southeast Asia tends to focus on the European colonial project, in part because of unease among scholars around applying the concept of indigeneity in the region. However, an increasingly robust scholarly and activist conversation around indigeneity in Southeast Asia (see: Morton et al. 2016; Baird 2018) invites a parallel examination of the states and politics against which indigeneity is articulated. In this paper, I examine the Thai state’s upward expansion into the northern uplands over roughly the past half-century through the lens of settler colonial theory (Wolfe 2006; Veracini 2011; Whyte 2017, 2018). Focusing primarily on state conservation and development interventions, I argue that this upward expansion has been – and continues to be – a settler colonial project. I draw on extended ethnographic fieldwork in and beyond two Akha communities in Chiang Rai Province to show how state interventions rupture and replace Indigenous ecologies with settler ecologies; facilitate (ethnic) Thai settlement while continuing to deny Uplanders’ land claims; disadvantageously integrate Uplanders into the market economy; and create generational rifts between elderly Uplanders and the youth on whom they depend to both care for them and carry on their cultural traditions. Together, these interventions reshape upland landscapes and social relations in ways that reinforce state claims to upland spaces and threaten both the place-based livelihoods and “collective continuance” (Whyte 2017, 2018) of Upland Indigenous communities – a hallmark of settler colonialism. In closing, I briefly discuss emergent forms of adaptation and resistance in Upland communities.

Daniel B. Ahlquist is an Assistant Professor in Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public Affairs. As a teacher and a scholar, he is motivated by an interest in human-environment relationships and the ways political and economic inequalities between social groups play out through uneven relationships to the environment. His current research projects explore the cross-cutting themes of state conservation and development agendas, agrarian change, displacement, and changing forms of inequality in Southeast Asia. He holds a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University.


*If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact jessmhil@umich.edu.*

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 08 Mar 2021 10:20:48 -0500 2021-04-02T12:00:00-04:00 2021-04-02T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion speaker_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. Stemming the Nationalist Tide: Imperial Control and the Protection of Traditional Islam in British Malaya (April 16, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/81006 81006-20832765@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 16, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free and open to the public; register at http://bit.ly/38V5uGZ

While early nationalist movements led by modernist Muslims were brewing on the coasts of the Malay Peninsula in the early decades of the twentieth century, a competing project – sponsored by the British colonial administration – was underway inland in the Malay states. In the Malay states, the authority of traditional rulers was enhanced through the systematic protection and regulation of Islam and Muslim subjects. Uncovering administrative reports from the colonial archives, I show that there was unprecedented surveillance over two classes of religious activities: conversions into and out of Islam, and the publication and sale of religious materials, both of which served to strengthen and protect traditional authority. With these materials, I explore a hitherto under examined yet concerted imperial project of state-led traditional religious nationalism devised to stem the tide of modernist Muslim and anti-colonial movements in British Malaya.

Hanisah Binte Abdullah Sani is a comparative-historical and political sociologist of empire and state-formation, modernization and development. She studies how law and religion organize elites and build states and specializes in the colonial and modern histories of Southeast Asia. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2019 and is currently a National University of Singapore overseas postdoctoral fellow. As visiting associate at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, she is working on her book project, *Sacred States and Subjects: Law, Religion and Colonial State-Building in Malaya*.

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If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 13 Apr 2021 10:56:55 -0400 2021-04-16T12:00:00-04:00 2021-04-16T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Speaker Image