Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemDire straits: Chinese students in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2022)This article examines the experiences of Chinese students after Australia closed its national border on March 20, 2020 in an attempt to stop COVID-19 entering.
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ItemSouth Borneo as an ancient Sprachbund area(UNIV INDONESIA, FAC HUMANITIES, 2021-01-01)In South and Central Kalimantan (southern Borneo) there are some unusual linguistic features shared among languages which are adjacent but do not belong to the same genetic linguistic subgroups. These languages are predominantly Banjar Malay (a Malayic language), Ngaju (a West Barito language), and Ma’anyan (a Southeast Barito language). The same features also appear to some degree in Malagasy, a Southeast Barito language in East Africa. The shared linguistic features are the following ones: a grammaticalized form of the originally Malay noun buah ‘fruit’ expressing affectedness, nasal spreading in which N- not only nasalizes the onset of the first syllable but also a *y in the next syllable, a non-volitional marker derived from the Banjar Malay prefix combination ta-pa- (related to Indonesian tr- + pr-), and the change from Proto Malayo-Polynesian *s to h (or Malagasy Ø). These features have their origins in the various members of the language configuration outlined above and form a Sprachbund or “Linguistic Area”. The concept of Linguistic Area is weak and difficult to define. Lyle Campbell (2002) considers it little else than borrowing or diffusion and writes it off as “no more than [a] post hoc attempt [...] to impose geographical order on varied conglomerations of [...] borrowings”. While mindful of its shortcomings, the current author still uses the concept as a useful tool to distinguish between
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ItemRegular sound change: the evidence of a single example(Faculty of Humanities. University of Indonesi, 2018-01-01)The Neogrammarians of the Leipzig School introduced the principle that sound changes are regular and that this regularity is without exceptions. At least as a working hypothesis, this principle has remained the basis of the comparative method up to this day. In the first part of this paper, I give a short account of how historical linguists have defended this principle and have dealt with apparent counter evidence. In the second part, I explore if a sound change can be regular if it is attested in one instance only. I conclude that it is, provided that the concomitant phonetic (and phonotactic) evidence supporting it is also based on regularity. If the single instance of a sound change is the result of developments which are all regular in themselves, it is still in line with the regularity principle.
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ItemThe Lisbon book of pantuns(Imprensa Nacional, 2019)
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ItemA Historical-Contextualist Approach to the Joseph Chapter of the Qur’an(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2022-01-01)Abstract This article applies a historical-contextualist approach to analyzing the Joseph sūra of the Qur’an. It first explores the theoretical framework of this study and introduces the historical-contextualist methodology employed and then provides a brief explanation of the Qur’anic account of the story of Joseph. The Joseph sūra is analyzed in light of the context of its revelation and the use it makes of fundamental Qur’anic teachings. This article demonstrates that the revelation of the sūra of Joseph was closely related to the sociopolitical context in which Muhammad and the Muslims lived, and that the sūra highlights several fundamental theological teachings of the Qur’an, including God’s unity and omnipotence, revelation and prophethood, and the afterlife, all themes emphasized in earliest sūras of the Qur’an including those revealed before the Joseph sūra.
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ItemApples and oranges: Political crops with and against the state in rural China(University of Arizona, 2022-01-01)In this article we bring together conceptual threads from political ecology, commodity geographies and agrarian studies to enable an inquiry into the political nature of crops. This inquiry is underpinned by the idea that crops are not just a means or a target of political projects, but can have effects through their webs of relations, and that their different capacities might mean that they may differently engage in political projects. This article examines how specialized cash crops in rural China are enrolled in state projects. We explore the cases of orange orchards and apple orchards in different locations in Hebei by detailing flows of capital and expertise, and smallholder-crop relations. Our analysis demonstrates that a political ecology of cash crops can provide insight into the politics of successive state projects that have been rolled out in China's agricultural communities. We argue that through evolving relations with smallholders, the attributes of the crops themselves, and particular market dynamics, robust smallholder-crop complexes have emerged that are currently proving resistant to the latest state project to achieve at-scale, industrialized agriculture. If we take political crops and their relations seriously in the story of contemporary agrarian change in China, we find that apple and oranges, previously with the state, can also come to act against it.
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ItemTongzhi Sovereignty: Taiwan's lgbt Rights Movement and the Misplaced Critique of Homonationalism(Brill, 2022-01-01)Abstract This essay reviews the influential work of a group of Leftist ‘sex liberation’ scholars who pioneered queer sexuality studies in Taiwan in the 1990s. In doing so, it focuses on their post-2000 political rift with the mainstream Taiwanese lgbt (tongzhi) rights movement. What ostensibly began as a split over views of same-sex marriage has developed into a contentious politics of Chinese versus Taiwanese national identity and what I call ‘tongzhi sovereignty’. In bringing together both national identity and sexual politics in Taiwan as increasingly intertwined sites of contestation, I argue that the two must be theorised in tandem. As a fertile site for unpacking this contentious divergence, I examine and problematise the way that cultural theorist Jasbir Puar’s popular concept of homonationalism has circulated in scholarship of cultural/sexuality studies about Taiwan as a slanted and largely unchecked analytic to criticise lgbt sociolegal progress and, for some scholars, obscures a pro-unification agenda.
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Item[Review of the Book Histoire et voyages des plantes cultivées à Madagascar, by Philippe Beaujard](University of Hawaii Press, 2019-06-01)This book is written by one of the most prolific and versatile scholars of Malagasy culture and language of our era. Its French title translates as “the history and travels of the cultivated plants in Madagascar”, which is an understatement of the wealth of information it provides.
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ItemDual *Kita in the history of east Barito languages(Project Muse, 2019-12-01)In many Philippine, northern Sulawesi, and northern Bornean languages, Proto Austronesian *kita ‘first-person inclusive plural’ became a first-person inclusive dual pronoun. Robert Blust and Hsiu-chuan Liao attribute this semantic change to drift (a change happening in various related languages independently). However, Lawrence Reid contends that it had already happened in Proto Malayo-Polynesian, and that the ensuing gap in the pronominal system of this ancestral language had been filled by the formation of a new first-person inclusive plural pronoun, which was based on *kita combined with a pronominal clitic (or “extender”) *=mu. The latter was a second-person plural pronoun in Proto Austronesian, but after it had lost its plural meaning in Proto Malayo-Polynesian, it was often combined with or replaced by other pronominal extenders. In this squib I show that in East Barito languages (including Malagasy) the first-person inclusive plural pronoun also derives from a dual *kita with a second-person plural extender. Taken in conjunction with the fact that reflexes of *kita also have a dual meaning in various languages in northern Borneo, this suggests that *kita already had a dual meaning in the early history of the West Indonesian subgroup.
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ItemIs ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias(University of Indonesia, Faculty of Humanities, 2014-01-01)Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among Austronesian religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of “traditional knowledge” seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the “incremental dualism” of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the “transcendental dualism” of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a deeper appreciation of Ancestor Religion as the oldest and most pervasive of all world religions.