Kyoto-Hawaii Workshop on Plural Coexistence and its Discontents

Date: January 10th, 2014
Venue: Rakuyu Kaikan, Kyoto University

Plural coexistence has often been held up as both ideal and goal in managing political and social relations between states and in avowedly multiethnic and multireligious societies. But how do specific strategies of classification, negotiation, contestation, mobilization, and redistribution bring “plural coexistence” into play and, just as important, into question? This workshop focuses on how “plural coexistence”—particularly in its ethnic and state-mediated dimensions—is operationalized (to use Cathy Clayton’s phrase) across East and Southeast Asia. What happens when “difference”—and the capacities, resources, networks, and circulations (whether human, material or ideational) it indexes and taps—is codified, institutionalized, and enforced by a variety of so-called “stakeholders”, including the state, ethnic groups and their representatives, the organizations that act on their behalf, and individuals? How are “differences” (in religion, ethnicity, and literacy, for instance) overlaid, intentionally or merely by consequence, towards mutual articulation or mediation? In what ways do the concept and practice of “plural coexistence” travel and circulate; simultaneously unify and fragment populations; erase divisions while producing new ones or deepening existing chasms; provide the terms not only for empowerment, resistance, accommodation, and evasion, but also for reproducing relations, often asymmetrical, at different geographical and social scales; create new—or reconfigure historical and existing—connections across borders; and engender a variety of cultural, political, religious, and social visions for (re)thinking and (re)making particular communities and the world?

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