Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemLanguage shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia(International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
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ItemThe political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia(Elsevier, 2018-07-01)Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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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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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.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis(INCAA, 2013)Questions concerning the relative importance to Indian civilisation of the Brahmana-dominated model of religious status hierarchy and the royal model of divine kingship and associated hierarchies of state power have been referred to as ‘the central conundrum of Indian social ideology’. These two models of hierarchy nonetheless derive from a broader Indian worldview and both shape, and are shaped by, the existential realities of Indian social life and of life in general. They represent an attempt to respond to a ‘central conundrum’ of human sociality – how to differentiate between the members of a society in terms of status – and a central dilemma of human existence – how to be at once engaged with the world and elevated beyond the ordinary conditions of embodied existence. This paper endeavours to achieve a more unified perspective on Indian kingship and Brahmanism by exploring their relation to the world of social action, and action more generally. Indian civilisation has struggled for millennia with the fundamental existential conflicts of ‘being in the world.’ Hence what is to be gained from unravelling the products of this struggle is not only a better understanding of Indian culture alone but of human experience in general.
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ItemThe emerging core characteristics of Vietnam's political economy(WILEY, 2017-11)This paper offers an understanding of the core drivers of the political economy of the ruling Communist Party in Vietnam. In the absence of political reform, the regime does not possess the powers required by the new conditions of a market economy and an increasingly open society. Designed for Soviet totalitarianism, and without popular support or authority, the formal political institutions are anachronistic and thus limit the range of powers available to the Party. As the regime is thus unable to reliably deploy policy unless it feels threatened, politics becomes a competition over spoils. Thus, if macroeconomic instability actually or potentially threatens the regime, the Politburo gains authority to act, and policy is deployed. Yet, as popular discontent mounts over corruption, favourable treatment of politically connected businesses, public education and health, and other areas not seen as regime‐threatening, the disequilibrium leads to use of the security forces and increasing violence against popular opposition.
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ItemChina's Marine Fishery and Global Ocean Governance(WILEY, 2017-05)Abstract This paper first examines two most significant structural shifts in China's marine fishery sector in the past decades, namely, expanding outward and going after high market value species. It then explains how domestic policies and development strategies have shaped the trajectory of China's marine fishery sector, and analyzes the obstacles rooted in both domestic socio‐political settings and global governance that have impeded policy reform and effective enforcement in China to ensure marine sustainability and international cooperation. Lastly, the paper explores possible options for transnational advocacy actors that are concerned with the global impact of China's growing fisheries.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGendering cosmopolitanisms: Hospitality and the asylum seeker Other(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2018-03-01)Debates about cosmopolitanism have pointed both to its exclusionary character as a problematic child of western modernity, analytically and politically dubious, and to the possibilities offered by the new cosmopolitanisms stressing cosmopolitan practice and ethics. This paper suggests that a gendering of such arguments can add important dimensions to these debates. Exploring the gendered character of the hospitality at the heart of cosmopolitanism's founding arguments, the discussion is grounded in an examination of the situated cosmopolitan hospitality offered by several prominent women-centred asylum seeker and refugee support and advocacy groups in Australia. These groups have created significant spaces of hospitality welcoming “Others,” deploying explicitly feminine imaginaries against the counter-cosmopolitanisms of the increasingly securitized and militarized border politics of the Australian state, and xenophobic anti-refugee nationalisms. The situated cosmopolitan hospitality and affective politics of these practices are linked to feminist arguments about political mobilizations of the feminine, especially the maternal, in social movements.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBook review: Migrant Returns: Manila Development, and Transnational Connectivity(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018-11-01)
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ItemParticipatory natural resource management in rural China: Making and unmaking environmental narratives(John Wiley & Sons, 2018-01-01)Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Environmental and development discourses in China can be categorised into three narrative motifs framing human–nature relationships: peasant, indigenous, and community. Indigenous and community narratives have been widely adopted by environmental NGOs (eNGOs) in China in promoting community-based natural resource management projects, but there has been very limited critical research on such phenomena. Analysis of socio-economic change in two ethnic minority communities in Yunnan shows that neither narrative theme is fully internalised by the relevant communities. Instead narratives may be strategically modified or even rejected by local communities. This is due to different agendas being held by local communities and eNGOs, and two factors pertinent to rural China: the incompatibility of concepts of ‘community’ in Chinese and international contexts results in confusion, and a lack of recent territorial and cultural claims by rural communities since the collectivist era makes it difficult to construct the identity of a community. It remains challenging for eNGOs in China to advocate either community or indigenous narratives in contexts of rapid socio-economic change.