Anthropologists @ Monash 2006
| Current Seminar Series | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 |
Seminar Series, Semester 1, 2006
|
Date |
Presenter |
Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 9 March |
Dr
Trudy Jacobsen |
Paying through the nose: Punishment in the Cambodian past and lessons for the present. |
| 23 March |
Dr David Mitchell |
Understanding and Misunderstanding the Shrinking Penis Disease |
| 6 April | Dr
Ivan Inderbitzin |
|
| 27 April |
Dr Thomas Reuter |
The Fragmented Self: A reflection on the politics of culture and the ethnographic experience |
| 9 May |
Dr Gay Breyley |
Seeking the Simorgh: Persian-language rap music in Brisbane's Iranian-born community |
| 25 May | Petra
Andits |
The Trianon Treaty in 2005: an anniversary protest by the Hungarian diaspora in Melbourne |
Semester 2, 2006
| Date |
Presenter |
Topic |
|---|---|---|
27 July |
Em.
Prof. Clive Kessler |
|
10th August |
Mark
Schubert |
|
| 24 August | Prof
Lenore Manderson |
|
7 September |
Dr
Trudy Jacobsen |
Dabbling in Dhamma? The Lives of Theravada Buddhist Nuns in Cambodia |
Tuesday, 19 September 3.00pm |
Prof Gillian Cowlishaw, ARC Professorial Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Technology in Sydney |
Erasing Social Trauma: Contemporary Australian History and Ethnography NB This seminar only will be held on a Tuesday at 3.00pm at the regular venue |
| 12 October | Dr Bianca Smith |
A Prophet, His Daughter, and Those Who Love Them: Interpreting Susila Budhi Dharma (Subud) as Muslim Praxis in Indonesia. |
Abstracts and Speaker Information
Dr Trudy Jacobsen - "Paying through the nose: Punishment in the Cambodian past and lessons for the present" 9th March 2006
About the speaker
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology (School of Political and Social Inquiry) and the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies (Monash Asia Institute). Trudy's ARC APD project is entitled "Sexual Contracts in Burma and Cambodia: Intersections of Desire, Duty, and Debt". She has a BA Hons (1999) in history and anthropology, a Graduate Certificate in Classical Languages East and West (2004) and a PhD in history (2004) from the University of Queensland. Her PhD thesis is being published as "Women, Time and Power in Cambodia", Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2005. Before coming to Monash, Trudy held positions as a Lecturer, University of Queensland and a Research Fellow, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University.
Abstract
Cambodia is preparing to relive the horrors of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) as the surviving leaders of the regime brace themselves for trial. Consensus on what constitutes an appropriate punishment for those responsible for the deaths of millions, however, eludes Cambodians and international observers alike.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, punishment in Cambodia usually consisted of fines, enslavement, amputation of the nose or ears, or death. Guilt extended to the entire family of the perpetrator. Incarceration was used to determine guilt or innocence, rarely as a punishment in itself. During the colonial period (1863-1953), the French reinforced the notion of imprisonment as a penalty for crime, already underway in the nineteenth century. Although assimilated into the penal system, the concept of incarceration was no deterrent for criminals - guards frequently allowed prisoners to leave the prison compound in order to attend to personal business.
The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 saw further externally imposed changes implemented by the international community in an attempt to bring the Cambodian penal system into line with recent developments in western human rights discourse. This paper asks whether western notions of appropriate punishment can be reconciled with the Cambodian Buddhist tenet of dharma, and how the imposition of western values on the Cambodian penal system, through colonial and more contemporary forms of imperialism, has altered traditional ideas of Cambodian punishment.
Dr David Mitchell - "Understanding and misunderstanding the shrinking penis disease" 23rd March 2006
About the speaker
David is attached to Monash's Faculty of Medicine, as well as Honorary Research Associate in Anthropology/Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. A medical doctor, practising psychiatrist, medical and socio-cultural anthropologist, David has published in major journals like the 'Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies' and has a chapter on ritual language in a book, edited by Prof James J. Fox and published by Cambridge University Press.
Abstract
Dutch doctors in the Netherlands East Indies were assiduous in delivering the benefits of medical science to the colonial population, but often had difficulty understanding what traditional healers had to teach them. They were intrigued by healer Daeng Rahing's 1935 description of his experience treating the shrinking penis disease and it was published in some detail in the colonial medical journal. Yet they interpreted it in their own cultural terms, missed the chance of developing an understanding of the physiology of the shrinking penis, and appropriated the Makassarese term koro' for an exotic new psychiatric disorder. Subject to the reductionist processes of biomedicine, koro' was stripped of its glotal stop and its connections with Makassarese culture. It has become known in standard medical texts as a condition in which a man falsely believes that his penis is shrinking and fears it may disappear entirely causing his death.
This paper reviews some of the problematic biomedical literature and some of the problems faced by medical anthropology, and describes the experience of three contemporary traditional healers dealing with the shrinking penis disease.
Dr Ivan Inderbitzin - "Multiculturalism and foreignisation in Switzerland" 6th April 2006
About the speaker
Lecturer in International Studies, Monash University, 2003-2005. Ivan is heading off to Zurich soon to continue his research and teaching in his other "homeland". This paper stems from Ivan's research for his Monash PhD in anthropology and a paper delivered at the 'Mobile Boundaries/Rigid World' conference at Macquarie University in Sydney 2004.
Abstract
Recent clashes between migrant youths and police in France, the London sub-way suicide bombings last July and the violent events on Cronulla's beaches have renewed debates about the relative success or failures of various models of 'multiculturalism' or 'integration ' in different countries. In this context, it is interesting to look at debates surrounding the case of multiculturalism and migration in Switzerland.
Modern Switzerland has long been celebrated for its cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, combined with its democratic ethos and institutions. Recently, some authors have suggested that this unique history of diversity and democracy provides a tolerant, multicultural basis for the incorporation of migrants.
However, a closer examination of the discursive construction of the Swiss nation and of immigrants to Switzerland throughout the 20th century reveals a different picture. While Swiss policy has indeed led to the entry of significant numbers of labour migrants and asylum seekers, it has largely excluded them and their children from the nation and from political citizenship. I argue that a comprehensive 'process of foreignisation'(consisting of discourses, policies and institutions) has represented migrants as permanently different 'foreigners', and frequently as a potential threat requiring control and supervision by the state. Even regular calls for the greater 'integration' of migrants in fact serve to stress a supposed 'cultural distance' between migrants and the Swiss. The paper analyses the history of this foreignisation process and explores some of the reasons for its remarkable persistence.
Dr Thomas Reuter - "The Fragmented Self: A reflection on the politics of culture and the ethnographic experience" 27th April
About the speaker
Dr Thomas Reuter, recent past President of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS), has just completed a five-year ARC Queen Elizabeth 11 Fellowship for research on "Revivalism and Religious Conflict in Javanese Society: an ethnographic investigation of changing identities and political aspirations in contemporary Indonesia". He has now joined the School of Political and Social Inquiry as a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology. Thomas has a BA Honours (1991) in anthropology and social theory from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in anthropology (1996) from The Australian National University. Thomas has published extensively on the highland people of Bali, as well as his research interests in Java and Islam.
Abstract
Encounters between people with different cultural backgrounds and sometimes incommensurable values have become a more common occurrence in this post-modern age of globalisation. Such encounters are not necessarily experienced as pleasant by all parties involved. This may explain why it has become convenient to incite local or international conflicts by evoking ethnic, religious and other forms of cross-cultural differences, and how easily demagogues have been able to raise popular support for violent forms of political action by appealing to associated resentments. Culturism, it appears, is becoming the idiom of choice for political hate-propaganda worldwide. This paper explores what potential there is for anthropology to serve as an antidote to divisive culturist ideologies, and why this potential has not been harnessed until now.
Anthropologists may be able to create alternatives to culturism for themselves. Before the lessons anthropologists learn in the course of their ethnographic research can actually be transferred to others who find themselves exposed to similar experiences, however, it must first be demonstrated that these experiences are no more than a specialised form within a general class of human experiences. I then explore some of the unusual psychological phenomena that accompany experiences of culture-crossing. Unfortunately, until now, their own coping mechanisms have remained largely opaque to anthropologists or are not freely discussed by them in public, mainly because the anthropological ethos of celebrating cultural diversity does not easily accommodate the idea that encounters with cultural others can pose a serious challenge.
My basic contention is that anthropologists and others in similar circumstances are compelled to allow a deep fragmentation of identity to occur within themselves. While this fact may remain concealed most of the time, it becomes visible whenever we are required to cross over between different cultural worlds. I therefore identify the associated psychological phenomena as 'cross-over effects'. It is precisely the fear of such inner fragmentation, I shall argue, that is exploited by divisive, culturalist ideologies.
Dr Gay Breyley - "Seeking the Simorgh: Persian language rap music in Brisbane's Iranian-born community" 11th May
About the speaker
Recently appointed Monash University Faculty of Arts Postdoctoral Fellow, 2006-2007, Gay is researching poetic and musical texts of Persian-speakers in Australia. Her work combines a focus on Australian literature, especially that of displaced people, with an interest in immigration history. She has a BA and MA from the University of Sydney, a Graduate Diploma in Adult Education from the University of Technology, Sydney, and a PhD (2005) from the University of Wollongong. Before coming to Monash, Gay had worked for SBS and has taught English literacy and literatures to a range of migrants to Australia.
Abstract
"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," said Condoleezza Rice in March this year. Rice's "we" is the US government and her "challenge" is the Islamic Republic's imagined military plans. For others, such as migrants from Iran, the challenges represented by an imagined and remembered Iran are more complex. This paper examines the work of two rappers, Vafa and Shahrooz, who were born in Iran in the 1980s, during the Islamic revolution's baby boom and the Iran-Iraq war.
As teenagers, Vafa and Shahrooz migrated to Brisbane, where thoughts of Islam, revolution and war were generally relegated to "other" times and places. This abrupt change of cultural environment informs the rappers' music, as does the rather sudden Western "interest" in Islam since 2001. While indifference prevailed in the 1990s, the rappers, through their imagined and real associations with Islam, now sometimes meet with fear and hatred. Vafa and Shahrooz respond to this in their texts and music. To read their texts, I will use Farid ud-Din Attar's twelfth-century epic poem The Conference of the Birds as a frame. The Conference of the Birds is an allegorical poem that engages with the themes of the self and the world, and the individual's search for unity, truth and love. It employs Persian poetic conventions such as ambiguity, paradox, hyperbole and metaphor. Vafa and Shahrooz also use these in their texts, as they face the "challenge" of their Iranian memories and their Australian futures.
Petra Andits - "The Trianon Treaty in 2005: an anniversary protest by the Hungarian diaspora in Melbourne" 25 th May
About the speaker
As a PhD candidate in Anthropology, Monash University, Petra is researching Hungarian transnationalism. She has previously conducted field research in the Faroe Islands and completed a Masters Degree in Scandinavian Studies (2001) and a Masters Degre in Cultural Anthropology (2002) at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest in Hungary.
Abstract
In this paper, I scrutinize a demonstration that was organised on behalf of Hungarians in Melbourne to mark the 85th anniversary of the Trianon Treaty on 4 th July 2005. I draw on ethnographic research following Hungarians through preparation for the demonstration and participation in the rally, including their evaluation of and reflection on the protest. I will suggest that those who supported the demonstration articulated an urge to redefine their social positioning not only in Australia, but also transnationally and globally. They argued for a need to change from passive Hungarian immigrants in Australia to active citizens. Those who cautioned the organizers and the enthusiastic participants of the possible destructive outcomes of the demonstration did not welcome a reformulation of Hungarian positionality and did not want to present the Hungarian diaspora as a highly politicized social formation.
Em. Prof. Clive Kessler, University of New South Wales
Cartoons and caricatures: dignity
and respect, sanctity and humour; or, is there 'Something rotten
in the state of Denmark'? 27 July 2006
Abstract:
The meaning and far-reaching implications of the worldwide controversy early 2006 over the publication in Denmark of a series of cartoons that were widely perceived, and vehemently denounced, as anti-Muslim have yet to be thoroughly explored. The basis for any adequate discussion of the course that the controversy took and of the issues that it raised must be an acknowledgement of the "new globalization of Islam".
Islam as a civilization has always seen itself as, and has always aspired to be, global. For a while it did create, constitute and define its own world, together with much of the neighbouring worlds that others inhabited. But "the world of Islam" has now become part of a wider world, one that is subsumed within and has been made subject to a wider history than its own. Not only were Islam's heartlands subjected to some centuries of foreign rule. In recent generations large numbers of Muslims have migrated from the core heartlands of the Islamic world to live elsewhere, especially in the lands of the so-called "West", as members of growing but in many ways still marginalized minorities.
As a result of the development of this far-flung "Muslim diaspora" where Muslims live among others, rather than in Muslim majority societies, Islam has again "gone global", but in a way different from that in which it first launched itself into world history.
In the past, Islam was long accustomed to live within and engage with the world on its own terms; throughout its first millennium and more it had the capacity, according to its own script, to create its own world and also fashion the wider world, if not in its own image then in relation to its own requirements, consistent with ideas of its own centrality and supremacy. Its present situation is different. This new situation now poses questions of unprecedented kinds both to those non-Muslim host societies where many Muslims live and to their Muslim minority inhabitants.
The tensions behind these questions and how they are to be addressed also have direct implications for, and effects upon, the states, societies and civilization of the Islamic heartlands, which in modern times have also been made to experience historical marginalization and peripheralization, though in a way quite different from that to which the Muslim minorities of the Euro-American world are subjected.
The tensions in this fateful "triangle of relations"--between Muslims and non-Muslims in "the West", between the "West" and the "lands of Islam", and among Muslims themselves in their own historic lands and beyond--were impelled into prominence, but in confused form and amidst much acrimony, by the "Danish cartoons controversy".
That controversy posed but failed to clarify some central issues that have been created by the "new globalization of Islam", and especially by the growth of a large Muslim diaspora whose members live in ways that do not sit easily with the "majoritarian assumptions" of Islam's historical and civilizational self-understanding.
How are Muslims and non-Muslims to live together in societies where Muslims are but a minority? What claims may the host society and its non-Muslim majority legitimately make upon the Muslim minority? What kinds of claims for understanding and sensitivity can members of the Muslim minority reasonably make upon the non-Muslim majority (and what not), and on what basis may they legitimately and effectively do so? These urgent questions need to be addressed from within "the problematic of globalization".Mark Schubert, Anthropology, University of Queensland and Sociology, Monash
A battle of classifications: Fijian
responses to and uses of being classified 'illegal' migrants
in Griffith, New South Wales
Abstract
The inability of many Fijians to meet the requirements for documented permanent migration to and settlement in Australia, tempts many of them to disappear into the many Fijian and other Pacific Island networks in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Many resurface on eastern Australia's 'harvest trail' and settle on the edge of the Australian desert in Griffith, a town with a long established Fijian community, which is also a long way from the Immigration Department and has abundant, cross-seasonal agricultural work.
Griffith 's Fijians, who have already documented their migrations, have formed a community in which their undocumented kin are protected from detection from Immigration authorities, materially supported and out of which they need not move.
A large part of Fijian life, especially its religious practices and discourses, is reproduced in a way that normalises it to the point where Griffith's Fijians frequently say: "This is just like Fiji".
However, the Immigration Department's division of Fijians into documented and undocumented - 'lawful' and 'unlawful' - can create a power differential between them, sometimes the very inverse of their relations in Fiji. For some, this new order of relations provides a range of opportunities to settle old scores, punish the unworthy, protect relationships and suppress competition for the opportunities that their migrations are supposed to deliver to them."
Prof. Lenore Manderson, Monash University
Replaceable parts: The end of a
natural life
Abstract
Men and women who have transplants have a particular need to separate their physical and social self, body and soul, in order to maintain a sense of self, of personal continuity following changes in corporeality. The context of transplant surgery is one of scientific advancement and heroic medicine, but also of cultural anxieties about bodily substance, individual consubstantiality, the nature of creation and being, and the ethics of experimentation. In this paper, against a backdrop of 20th century film, I consider the physical nature of bodily experience for men and women with end-stage renal disease who require dialysis, and the unique surface tensions that exist as they rely on technology to do the work of an inner organ. I then discuss the centrality of the social body in the context of kidney transplants: how people choose to give or receive a kidney, feel about the donor or the context of life and death when the kidney is from a cadaver, and contemplate on the genesis of the organ and the component parts of the physical body that contribute to their being.
Dr Trudy Jacobsen, Monash University
Dabbling in Dhamma?
The Lives of Theravada Buddhist Nuns in Cambodia
Abstract:
Silent, ubiquitous, the white-clad and shaven-headed forms of the daun chi, or Theravada Buddhist nuns, are a constant feature of Cambodian pagodas. Yet few people, even in Cambodia, understand the roles and responsibilities of daun chi, or what drives women to seek positions in the patriarchal world of Cambodian Buddhism. Casual observers see daun chi in Cambodia as another example of a regional phenomenon wherein women search for personal and spiritual fulfilment away from the pressures and concerns of secular existence. Other Southeast Asian countries have found nuns to be engaged and effective intermediaries between government policies and people at the grassroots level. Could this also be the case in Cambodia, where violence is a common mechanism of dispute resolution and burdens on women are high? A project carried out by the Buddhist Institute and the Heinrich Böll Foundation Asia in 2005-2006 sought to answer this question; the findings, however, revealed that Buddhist nuns in Cambodia face serious obstacles themselves that may impact upon their abilities as social workers - if indeed this is an appropriate avenue.