Hard Bargaining in Sumatra

Hard Bargaining in Sumatra PDF Author: Andrew Causey
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082484355X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Hard Bargaining in Sumatra is an artfully written and penetrating examination of interactions between Western travelers and Toba Batak wood carvers in the souvenir marketplaces of Samosir Island, North Sumatra. Toba Batak carvings, ranging from simple human figures of wood to elaborately engraved water buffalo horns, are described in tourist guidebooks and by Toba Batak vendors alike as "traditional" and "antique," despite many recent changes and inventions in form. This pathbreaking work investigates how notions of place and self are constructed by the travelers and the Bataks in the context of ethnic tourism. The author proposes that these interactions be understood in light of Louis Marin's concept of utopics, suggesting that tourist venues such as hotels and marketplaces are neutral spaces where both locals and visitors can act out behaviors that would ordinarily be constrained by their respective cultures. The transformation of Toba Batak woodcarving is one result of such marketplace interactions. The Western tourist's desire for traditional art has encouraged Batak carvers to continue to make objects based on forms developed by their animist predecessors, the majority of whom converted to Christianity at the turn of the century. Toba Batak carving style, however, is far from static; artisans create innovative pieces that they frame within the same historically legitimizing narratives used for "traditional" objects.

Hard Bargaining in Sumatra

Hard Bargaining in Sumatra PDF Author: Andrew Causey
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082484355X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hard Bargaining in Sumatra is an artfully written and penetrating examination of interactions between Western travelers and Toba Batak wood carvers in the souvenir marketplaces of Samosir Island, North Sumatra. Toba Batak carvings, ranging from simple human figures of wood to elaborately engraved water buffalo horns, are described in tourist guidebooks and by Toba Batak vendors alike as "traditional" and "antique," despite many recent changes and inventions in form. This pathbreaking work investigates how notions of place and self are constructed by the travelers and the Bataks in the context of ethnic tourism. The author proposes that these interactions be understood in light of Louis Marin's concept of utopics, suggesting that tourist venues such as hotels and marketplaces are neutral spaces where both locals and visitors can act out behaviors that would ordinarily be constrained by their respective cultures. The transformation of Toba Batak woodcarving is one result of such marketplace interactions. The Western tourist's desire for traditional art has encouraged Batak carvers to continue to make objects based on forms developed by their animist predecessors, the majority of whom converted to Christianity at the turn of the century. Toba Batak carving style, however, is far from static; artisans create innovative pieces that they frame within the same historically legitimizing narratives used for "traditional" objects.

How Do We Look?

How Do We Look? PDF Author: Fatimah Tobing Rony
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147802190X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.

How to Behave

How to Behave PDF Author: Anne Ruth Hansen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861094
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia.

Investing in Miracles

Investing in Miracles PDF Author: Katharine L. Wiegele
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827953
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Since the early 1980s, approximately ten million people have turned to charismatic businessman-turned-preacher "Brother Mike" and his Catholic "prosperity" movement, El Shaddai DWXI Prayer Partners Foundation International, Inc. Investing in Miracles offers an in-depth look at this unique indigenous movement, characterized by its effective use of mass media and its huge, emotion-filled outdoor rallies. The book investigates the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts of El Shaddai's popularity among the Filipino urban poor and aspiring middle classes and explores its significance for its followers, which reaches well beyond promises of appliances, salary raises, jobs abroad, and healing. Katharine Wiegele argues that Shaddai's theology directly engages and affirms desires for the material signs of modernity in ways that the mainstream Philippine Roman Catholic Church and Filipino leftist movements do not. At stake for its many adherents are their place and identity within the broader society; the meaning of their experiences of poverty, suffering, and oppression; and the relevance of their very notions of God, Christian community, and Christian life. Wiegele evocatively captures the religious and everyday experiences of her informants' lives in poor squatter neighborhoods of Manila. She is particularly sensitive to El Shaddai's delicate and often contorted relationship with the Catholic Church, which accepts the movement reluctantly, fearful of losing the loyalty of millions of faithful Catholics. While anchored in the local realities of the Philippines, Investing in Miracles will be of great interest to readers elsewhere for its exploration of religious seduction and interpretation, the interface between religion and politics, and the relevance of religion for the urban disenfranchised.

Everyday Life in Southeast Asia

Everyday Life in Southeast Asia PDF Author: Kathleen M. Adams
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253001056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This lively survey of the peoples, cultures, and societies of Southeast Asia introduces a region of tremendous geographic, linguistic, historical, and religious diversity. Encompassing both mainland and island countries, these engaging essays describe personhood and identity, family and household organization, nation-states, religion, popular culture and the arts, the legacies of war and recovery, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the focus is on the daily lives and experiences of ordinary people. Most of the essays are original to this volume, while a few are widely taught classics. All were chosen for their timeliness and interest, and are ideally suited for the classroom.

Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300_1800

Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300_1800 PDF Author: John N. Miksic
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9971695588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city. The picture that emerges is of a port where people processed raw materials, used money, and had specialized occupations. Within its defensive wall, the city was well organized and prosperous, with a cosmopolitan population that included residents from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Fully illustrated, with more than 300 maps and colour photos, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea presents Singapore's history in the context of Asia's long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800: it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore's pre-colonial past.

Rural Livelihoods, Regional Economies, and Processes of Change

Rural Livelihoods, Regional Economies, and Processes of Change PDF Author: Deborah Sick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136029206
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
For centuries, new technologies and expanding networks of production and consumption have been changing the face of rural economies in significant ways. Millions of rural dwellers have found survival increasingly difficult and have fled to urban centres. Others have remained: some retrenching, struggling to just subsist, others attempting to innovatively redefine their place within ‘new’ rural economies. Over the past 30 years, rural economies have largely been ignored by policy makers, but recent growing concerns about food security, environmental degradation, climate change, continued rural poverty, and high rates of out-migration have sparked renewed interest in rural regions. Covering a range of geographical and socio-cultural contexts, the case studies in this book draw on actor-oriented in-depth field studies, which provide detailed, locally focused perspectives on the nature of rural livelihoods today. The collection highlights the ways in which rural livelihoods are being redefined, the multiple ways in which rural dwellers draw on distinct social, cultural and environmental resources to formulate their livelihood strategies, and the factors which facilitate or limit their abilities to do so. This volume will be of interest to development practitioners and policy makers, and scholars working in rural development and economic anthropology.

Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia

Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia PDF Author: Patrick Daly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136582037
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
This Handbook is the first major volume to examine the conservation of Asia’s culture and nature in relation to the wider social, political and economic forces shaping the region today. Throughout Asia rapid economic and social change means the region’s heritage is at once under threat and undergoing a revival as never before. As societies look forward, competing forces ensure they re-visit the past and the inherited, with the conservation of nature and culture now driven by the broader agendas of identity politics, tradition, revival, rapid development, environmentalism and sustainability. In response to these new and important trends, the twenty three accessible chapters here go beyond sector specific analyses to examine heritage in inter-disciplinary and critically engaged terms, encompassing the natural and the cultural, the tangible and intangible. Emerging environmentalisms, urban planning, identity politics, conflict memorialization, tourism and biodiversity are among the topics covered here. This path-breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in the fields of heritage, tourism, archaeology, Asian studies, geography, anthropology, development, sociology, and cultural and postcolonial studies.

Textile Economies

Textile Economies PDF Author: Walter E. Little
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 0759120633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Textiles have been a highly valued and central part of the politics of human societies across culture divides and over millennia. The economy of textiles provides insight into the fabric of social relations, local and global politics, and diverse ideologies. Textiles are a material element of society that fosters the study of continuities and disjunctions in the economic and social realities of past and present societies. From stick-loom weaving to transnational factories, the production of cloth and its transformation into clothing and other woven goods offers a way to study the linkages between economics and politics. The volume is oriented around a number of themes: textile production, textiles as trade goods, textiles as symbols, textiles in tourism, and textiles in the transnational processes. Textile Economies appeals to a broad range of scholars interested in the intersection of material culture, political economy, and globalization, such as archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, economists, museum curators, and historians.

Global Markets and Local Crafts

Global Markets and Local Crafts PDF Author: Frederick F. Wherry
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801887949
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Today it is not uncommon to find items in department stores that are hand-crafted in countries like Thailand and Costa Rica. These "traditional" crafts now make up an important part of a global market. They support local and sometimes national economies and help create and solidify cultural identity. But these crafts are not necessarily indigenous. Whereas Thailand markets crafts with a long history and cultural legacy, Costa Rica has created a local handicraft tradition where none was known to exist previously. In Global Markets and Local Crafts, Frederick F. Wherry compares the handicraft industries of Thailand and Costa Rica to show how local cultural industries break into global markets and, conversely, how global markets affect the ways in which artisans understand, adapt, and utilize their cultural traditions. Wherry develops a new framework for studying globalization by considering the phenomenon from the perspective of the supplier instead of the market. Drawing from interviews and extensive fieldwork shadowing artisans and exporters in their daily dealings, Wherry offers a rare account of globalization in motion—and what happens when market negotiations do not proceed as planned. Considering economic and political forces, flows of people and materials, and frames that define cultural and market situations as they play out in the artisan communities of these two countries, Wherry uncovers how authentic folk tradition is capitalized or created.