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Seminars/Symposia: FY2010

January, 2011

International Seminar on Radically Envisioning a Different Southeast Asia: From a Non-State Perspective
  1. This workshop addresses to what extent Southeast Asia can be reconceptualized, researched, and rewritten, from a non-state-centered perspective. The principal aim of the workshop will be to seek a radically different epistemological approach by taking the state out of Southeast Asia. Professor James C. Scott (Yale University), who recently published The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) will also participate.
  2. The nation-state-centered perspective has long generated a center-periphery dichotomy in the territory of the state, presupposing the spatially uneven expansion of the nation. The geo-ecological juxtaposition between hills and plains, has for instance, laid the basis for a societal model reinforcing stark differences between these two niches in terms of their political and economic status, agricultural modes, social mobility, civilization’s worldviews, religion, and kinship systems.
  3. In this conventional binary view on Southeast Asia, the upland tends to be a fixed passive periphery vis-à-vis river-mouth state formations. This dichotomous model is an archetypal case of “lived essentialism” in Southeast Asian scholarship (Scott 1999) and is regarded as problematic, as this simplifying narrative neglects regional complementarity and dynamism constraining scholarly analysis.
  4. What is the proto-typical social formation of Southeast Asia, where cultural plurality, ecological diversity, and economic development predominates beyond the confines of the state? Recent scholarship on Southeast Asia has suggested that a state-centered view often fails to investigate the dynamic responses emanating from the periphery and influencing the center as well as active agents on the ground. The understanding of upland-lowland interaction requires an alternative framework, which goes beyond a one-way diffusionist treatment of power.
  5. The turn of the century has seen newly emergent scholarship in search of a radically different Southeast Asian social formation that emphasizes “non-state space”, “border zone,” “hill-plain continuum,” “colonial arc,” and “Southeast Asian massif.” These concepts on the spatial configurations of Southeast Asia all pose fundamental questions on the ways in which ethnographies and historiographies of Southeast Asia have been produced and will be tackled in our workshop.
  6. Date:January 18th - 19th, 2011
  7. Place:Inamori Foundation Hall (Room No. 333), Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University
  8. Organizers:Asian Connections: Southeast Asian Model for Co-Existence in the 21st Century Asian CORE Program, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science/ Planted Forests in Equatorial Southeast Asia: Human-nature Interactions in High Biomass Society Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S)/ In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa, Global COE Program, Kyoto University,
  9. Program:PDF
 International Seminar on Rural Social Structure in Vietnam at Hanoi
  1. This is an announcement of an International Seminar on "Structure and Dynamics of Village Community in Vietnam" at Hanoi in the coming January 2011, jointly organized by Hanoi Agricultural University, Collaborative Research on 'Comparative Study on Rural Social Structure in Asia' in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University (Leader: Dr. Masayuki Yanagisawa, Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University), and the Initiative 1 of Kyoto University G-COE Program 'In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa'.
  2. Date & Time:January 6th (Thurs.), 2011
  3. Place: Hanoi Paradise Hotel (Hanoi City, Vietnam)
  4. Program:
    9:30-10:10 
  5.  Koichi Fujita (Kyoto University), “Rural Social Structure in Asia in Comparative Perspective”
    10:10-10:40 Discussions
    10:40-11:40
  6.  Yoshihiro Sakane (Hiroshima University), “Family and Kinship System in Vietnam”
    11:40-12:10 Discussions
    12:10-13:30 Lunch
    13:30-14:30 
  7.  Takashi Okae (Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Japan),
  8.  “Discussing Vietnamese Village Based on Yumio Sakurai’s Book ‘The Formation of Vietnamese Village' and others”
    14:30-15:30 Discussions
    15:30-16:00 Business Meeting
    Other participants:
  9.  Masato Hiwatari (Hokkaido University),
  10.  Kei Kajisa (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies),
  11.  Satoru Kobayashi (Kyoto University),
  12.  Akihiko Ohno (Aoyama Gakuin University),
  13.  Sumiaki Iwamoto (Tokyo Agricultural University),
  14.  Tamae Sugihara (Tokyo Agricultural University), and Huu Khanh and other participants from Hanoi Agricultural University.
  15. Contact:Koichi Fujita (CSEAS)