Date: 5 February, 2016 (Friday) 15:00 – 18:00
Venue: Kyoto University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, East Building, Conference Room 107 (1st floor)

PROGRAM:

15:00-15:10
Introduction by Noboru Ishikawa

15:10-16:00
“Rethinking the Hill-Plain Divide in Southeast Asia: Putting Geophysical and Cultural Landscapes to Good Use” by Noboru Ishikawa (Kyoto University) & Masao Imamura (Kyoto University)

16:00-16:10
Comments by Rohan D’Souza (Kyoto University)

16:10-16:20
Break

16:20-17:10
“Unsubjugated Margins: A Genealogy of a Maritime Creole and its Spatial Settings in Southeast Asian Maritime World” by Kazufumi Nagatsu (Toyo University)

17:10-17:20
Comments by Yukti Mukdawijitra (Thammasat University and Kyoto University)

17:20-18:00 Open discussion

ABSTRACTS:

Rethinking the Hill-Plain Divide in Southeast Asia: Putting Geophysical and Cultural Landscapes to Good Use

Noboru Ishikawa (Kyoto University) and Masao Imamura (Kyoto University)

The hill and plain (or the upland and lowland) distinction has been an exceptionally enduring conceptual binary in the scholarship of Southeast Asia. The literature on highland Southeast Asia from Edmund Leach to James Scott has drawn a sharp distinction between the hills and the plains. This binary view characterizes the former as a “frontier” (Leach 1960 “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”) or a “non-state space” (Scott 2009 The Art of Not Being Governed) and the latter as the state and civilization. Scholars have emphasized that the hill-plain division refers not only to geophysical differences but also to profound cultural divisions. In advancing this binary, scholars have also arguably projected certain values and norms over the hill-plain landscape. This presentation investigates where, when, and how the hill-plain distinction makes sense—or not—both in emic and etic terms.
This presentation attends to the geophysical, cultural, and even discursive aspects of this binary. We start with a simple but fundamental question: to what extent can we attribute the hill-plain distinction to purely geophysical conditions of upland and lowland. Then the relationship between the geophysical and social categorization will be examined through historical and anthropological studies from both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia.

Unsubjugated Margins: A Genealogy of a Maritime Creole and its Spatial Settings in Southeast Asian Maritime World

Kazufumi Nagatsu (Toyo University)

In his discussion on “Zomia,” or the mountainous areas in mainland Southeast Asia, James Scott presents a series of cases of ethnic formation and examined messiness, plurality and plasticity of ethnic labels and identities among the uplanders. As he insinuated, these qualities have been well observed in maritime Southeast Asia as well. James Warren has indeed shown that heterogeneous immigrants including “slaves” have formed ethnic groups with new ethnonyms.
This presentation explores the ethnogenesis of a group of “sea peoples” and the political and ecological settings in which the ethnogenesis has taken place in Southeast Asian Maritime World. I will firstly demonstrate the highly creole and hybrid nature of the maritime folks, tracing the historical formation of their maritime zone and illustrating their interaction with the authority. Then I will show the characteristics of the political and ecological settings whereby the sea people have formed and repeatedly reconstructed their maritime zone. In doing so, I employ the concept of “maritime frontier,” with a specific focus on the Bajau (or Sama).
With an approximate population of 1,100,000, many of the Bajau live along coasts or on islands. Their settlements are dispersed widely over the southern Philippines, Sabah, Malaysia, and eastern Indonesia. They have constituted one of the most distinctive maritime folks in Southeast Asia. The central question in this presentation is how the Bajau as a group of sea peoples emerged and in what sort of political and ecological settings the ethnogenesis took place. The study pays particular attention to the case of the Bajau in the northeastern coast of Kalimantan and the eastern coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia.