Workshop: The Anthropology of Southeast Asia 2004
CALL FOR PAPERS
Shifting places, moving people:
Practices and narratives of mobility and identity
in Southeast Asia
University of Sussex, Brighton
Friday, July 9th - Saturday, July 10th 2004
Anthropologists working in Southeast Asia are confronted with movements of people,
goods, and meanings that challenge theoretical perspectives based on an unproblematic
correspondence between place and belonging. Migration studies have often focused on
‘flows’ of people between and through ‘localities’ which themselves are seen as fixed. In
order to engage with processes of movement in a more nuanced manner, we suggest
viewing both places and people through the prism of mobility. Such a perspective allows
for a recognition of the multiple meanings of locality, acknowledging that places, being reconfigured in discourses and practices, shift as much as people.
Conversely, as people move through places, in changing local, national and transnational
contexts, the creation of senses of self and other is in flux. They are mediated by particular
notions of distance and proximity, diverse tropes and levels of belonging, and new
communicative strategies, which are themselves shaped by political and economic
circumstances. The supposition of the local and the alien also gives rise to new hierarchies
and confrontations, which can take on a violent character.
While neither migration nor globalisation and their multifarious effects on the production
of identities are restricted to Southeast Asia, we aim to explore the particular forms they
assume in the societies of this region. Negotiations of the identity/alterity interface have
acquired a new significance in the wake of the economic crisis of 1997, and the political
reforms undertaken by countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We
hope to encourage debate about whether local and regional negotiations of these changes
also have consequences for the practice of anthropology of Southeast Asia.
We invite papers that combine theoretical and ethnographic perspectives on these themes.
Please submit abstracts of max. 250 words by the 31st March 2004 via email to
Kostas Retsikas and Anne-Meike Fechter
Dept of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SN
A.Fechter@sussex.ac.uk, kostasretsikas@yahoo.com
Tel. 01273 678018 or 877668
Anthropology Department in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies