• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.133-153
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• 2015

The Rakhine (Arakanese) from present-day Rakhine State (Arakan) in Western Myanmar and the Marma from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Southeast Bangladesh originated from the same region, share the same culture and practice the same religion. However, the people from CHT have developed a distinctive identity and are individualized by a different name "Marma". This development raises a number of historical questions. This paper explores how the Arakanese descendants became "Marma" in Bangladesh.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.229-254
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• 2023

This study observes the language attitude and maintenance of the border community in Telok Melano, Lundu (Sarawak, Malaysia) and Desa Temajuk, Sambas (West Kalimantan, Indonesia). The main objective of this study is to study the language attitudes of two cross-border community who shares the socio-cultural, language, and economic realms. The research data is collected qualitatively through conversation recordings, face-to-face interviews, and participant observations. In this preliminary study, twelve informants (six from Telok Melano and six from Desa Temajuk) were chosen based on the quota sampling method. The questions for the interview were set according to three characteristics of language choice proposed by Garvin and Mathiot (1968), namely language loyalty, language pride, and the awareness of norms. The result of this study indicates that language loyalty, language pride, and awareness of the norms towards the speakers' mother tongue and national language are relatively high. In terms of identity maintenance issues, this study found that the community in Telok Melano (Sarawak), originally identify themselves as "Sambas Malays," shifted to "Sarawak Malays" after the formation of Malaysia in 1963. This preliminary study serves as a basis for further research particularly on the complexity of issues concerned with the border communities in the Southwest of Sarawak.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.149-174
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• 2018

Southeast Asians participate in elections eagerly, a fact indexed by the high electoral participation rates across a range of political conditions in the region. What gives elections in Southeast Asia such high legitimacy? Using data from Indonesia and the Philippines, this article emphasizes the need to understand peoples' rationalities, which are informed by meanings generated by prevailing cultural practices. From this perspective, electoralism can be understood as a cultural phenomenon that conforms to the structure of a ritual. Despite the democratic deficit in many electoral exercises, elections share the attractiveness and fun of traditional community festivities. Voters participate in elections as a testament to membership in a community. Although they do not always transform the existing social arrangements, elections embed contradictory impulses in the same way that cockfights do. A procedure of formal democracy authored elsewhere, electoralism has been localized in Southeast Asia and invested with indigenous significance.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.3-18
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• 2014

With natural resources-terrestrial or coastal-fastly diminishing, governments are now resorting to biodiversity conservation, fast-tracking the introduction of new legislations, as well as the amendment of existing ones, and laying out programs that interpret existing practices and research agendas. This paper examines how biodiversity conservation-in addition to eco-tourism-has become an important symbol of the modernizing state of Sabah, Malaysia. It further examines the effects of biodiversity conservation on state and community management of natural resources, with particular reference to the management of natural resources by the indigenous peoples of Sabah. Citing case studies and focusing on a forest community at Kiau Nuluh, in the district of Kota Belud, Sabah, this paper evaluates strategies used by indigenous groups to maintain access and control over the management of natural resources-and by implication to livelihoods-via ecotourism, making creative alliances with non-government organisations as well as forging cooperation with government agencies which act as custodians of these resources. For a majority of indigenous groups however, the practice of biodiversity conservation has meant reduced and controlled access to natural resources, considering the fundamental issue of the lack of security of tenure to the land claimed under customary rights. New initiatives at recognizing Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) by international conservation groups provide a means for tenure recognition, for a price, of course. The recognition of ICCAs also faces obstacles arising from developmentalist ideology which upholds that forests are valuable only when converted to other land use, and not left to stand for their intrinsic value.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.131-152
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• 2023

In analyzing the Chinese diaspora, this paper explores losses that are encountered within the family in the nation. It argues that increased social and spatial mobilities that contribute to losses can be reconfigured through the productive lens of supermobility, as Laurence J. C. Ma conceptualizes it. Supermobile identities are significant avenues to consider the way that losses traditionally associated with migration and assimilation are revisited in view of new flows of migration and identification. In examining K. H. Lim's debut novel Written in Black (2014), this study addresses pathways from debilitating losses to productive losses journeyed by the family from the child's perspective. It offers a critical analysis of the Anglophone Bruneian novel in terms of its exclusive portrayal of an ethnic Chinese family. Departing from a fixed notion of home as cultural and physical rootedness, it explores flexible identities that are tied to shifting concepts of belonging. Rather than a magnification of social and spatial losses, the analysis highlights the way that the literary imagination of ethnic Chinese in Brunei Darussalam accommodates progressive ideas of the agency and advancement of the Chinese diaspora as a supermobile community.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.133-167
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• 2019

The Chinese began migrating to Vietnam very early (in the third century BC) and continuously underwent either mass or small migration afterwards. Their long processes of living and having contact with different ethnic communities in Vietnam made the Chinese worship of Goddess Tianhou change radically. By examining these practices of worship in two areas where the Chinese settled the most, Thừa Thiên Huế province (central Vietnam) and Hồ Chí Minh City (southern Vietnam), this paper aims to understand the patterns of acculturation of the Chinese community in its new land. An analysis of information from both field research and archival sources will show how the Chinese have changed the worship of the Tianhou goddess during their co-existence with ethnic communities in Vietnam. It argues that there is no "peripheral fossilization" of the Chinese culture in Vietnam.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.205-227
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• 2023

This study seeks to examine how the West, particularly United States (US), influences the narratives about terrorism, radicalism, and combating violent extremism (CVE) in Muslim majority nations such as Malaysia. We contend that some local institutions and researchers in Malaysia may have assumed the Faustian bargain by agreeing with the Western narrative that Islam's teachings promote violence and extremism in order to meet the demands of survival, whether it be funding for everyday operations or meeting the demands of universities or research institutions to sustain themselves and meet their performance indicators. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) from 2001 to 2021 and used Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand the role of the US in purposefully supporting workshops and research activities of particular institutions with the intent to influence national discourse on securitization and prospective policy implications. More importantly, we wish to alert Malaysian policymakers to pay particular attention and scrutinize ongoing programs such as the "Building Community Resilience" as these may inadvertently foster Islamophobia.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.1-16
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• 2012

In 2010, nearly thirteen hundred Buddhist monks from all over the world converged on to the small Indonesian resort town of Berastagi to celebrate the inauguration of the Taman AlamLumbini, a replica of Myanmar's most iconic Theravada Buddhist temple, the ShwedagonPaya. Nestled on Christian lands within a predominantly Muslim country, the building of the Taman AlamLumbini marked several years of negotiation amongst various religious communities, local government mediators, and patrons. This study makes a preliminary assessment of the ways in which cultural and historical discourses were used by participants to evoke a sense of transnational connectedness outside the realm of formal bilateral diplomacy. Through particular Buddhist ceremonies, rituals, and imagery, Myanmar sponsors and Indonesian patrons promoted a sense of broad pan-Asianism that linked monks, state officials, and local lay practitioners into a single community. A brief examination of the key speeches during the opening ceremony reveals that national interest and identity were still very much in play.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.39-80
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• 2024

Guided by the prism of cultural studies, this paper takes a look at the Manila Korea Town in Malate, Manila. The location, Manila Korea Town, figures as the paper's object of study by exploring, theorizing, and reflecting on its presence and location within the horizon of the signifying powers of Korea-Philippine relations in the contemporary period. With the subject position of this essay, the paper theorizes by responding to the following questions: How does the meaning-making of South Korea fare with other Koreatowns in the world from the scale of Koreatown in Manila? Subsequently, what happens to a place when a global cultural phenomenon evolves into a form of placemaking in a different nation and territory? As Koreatown finally grounds itself in the anarchic lifeworld of Manila, what does this historical development in our urban lives reveal about our contemporary times? Responding to this set of questions led this paper to foreground the idea of a modular imagined community within a four-part discussion. The body of the essay begins by theorizing on the concept that this paper proposes, modular imagined community, and such a concept work draws from the theories of nationalism by Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee. Subsequently, the antinomy between Anderson and Chatterjee is pursued by looking at the history of such a place, and through this step, the paper unravels the character of the place of Manila Korea Town, which explains the conditions of possibility of such social and communitarian formation. Yet as the public is caught by the presence of such development especially at the heart of Manila, the paper expands the scale and viewpoint by shining light on the globality of South Korea in relation to the Philippines. Lastly, this paper closes with a discussion on the food culture facilitated by this recent development, which also pushes us to imagine its potential, especially in light of the critique raised against South Korea and the popular culture associated with this phenomenon.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.101-124
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• 2017

This study is to examine the current situation of the AEC (ASEAN Economic Community) and analyze macroeconomic situation of Vietnam since the launch of AEC. According to recent trade indicators, Vietnam is expected to be more productive in the manufacturing and processing sectors because it is at the heart of the global value chains (GVCs) in electronics, telephones, and textiles and shoes industry. Vietnam has signed or is negotiating free trade agreements with various countries around the world including Korea, Israel, EU and RCEP and so on. Therefore, it is expected that Vietnam's trade dependency and FDI inflows to Vietnam increase more and more. However, the fact that the proportion of exports by foreign-invested companies accounts for about 70% of the total exports implies the uncertainty of Vietnam's economy in the future. Attracting FDI investment can further reduce the competitiveness of domestic companies in Vietnam. Therefore, in order for Vietnam to maintain sustainable development in the future, it is necessary to reform the momentum of foreign-invested enterprises to the development of Vietnamese companies.