Cinema and history: critical reflections

Abstract

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien was invited to Singapore to talk about himself. In the speech, he focused on talking about his family background, his childhood memories, life experiences and how these experiences affected his life, and also how he made his films. Furthermore, as Taiwan had gone through many drastic political and economic changes, especially after the lifting of Martial Law, these conditions influenced Hou’s life and his films, too. That is, Hou’s films presented not only the changes in a rapidly urbanizing rural society, but also the important events of Taiwan’s history. At the end of the speech, Hou also mentioned that realizing the importance of social responsibilities, he would like to get more involved in the public sphere in order to make a difference in society.     

Culture and mediation: A contemporary processual analysis from southwestern Gambia

This paper draws on archival sources and data gleaned from over two years of intensive fieldwork in The Gambia to provide a processual analysis of culture in mediation. The literature on the salience of culture in facilitated dispute settlement includes several purported cross-cultural models, and, in some cases, these have been used to support assertions about the widespread applicability of generic approaches of conflict resolution.The results of this study uncovered remarkable variance in societal preferences for structuring mediation, thereby problematizing the notion of widespread cross-cultural process similarities in the process. The idea of an intrinsic structure to the mediation process was further contravened by the remarkable diversity found at lower levels of analysis. Gambian mediators—even those sharing many similar attributes—exhibited remarkable diversity in their approaches. Significant variation occurred in relation to all mediation activities except setting the stage and ritualization. In fact, individual mediators often reacted to situational constraints by employing divergent process structures in different cases.The project findings suggest that theorizing about peacemaking behaviors must delve much further than the meta-level of comparison and that constructs such as individualism versus collectivism and high- and low-context societies must be used cautiously. Societal perspectives are highly uneven and culture operates on multiple levels and is continually at work, although its effects may not always be observable. Mediators are impacted by structural constraints such as socio-cultural patterning, but they are also agents who are able to adjust their behaviors in reaction to contextual factors and according to their personal preferences.     

源远流长的彝族毕摩文化

凉山彝族的宗教信仰属原始宗教的范畴。其信仰主要有灵魂崇拜、祖先崇拜、灵物崇拜，等等。宗教的主持者有毕摩和苏尼两种。宗教活动包括占卜、祭祀和巫术等。     

Photography and Chineseness: reflections on Chinese Muslims in Indonesia

This paper takes my previous photobook, Chinese Muslims in Indonesia (2007–09) as starting point. The paper firstly details the motivations, methodology and findings of the work. It then advances some of my thoughts on photography, with its attentive focus on the particular. Photography, or documenting (as method), frames a performative and experiential space for the sitter and the photographer to project their desires in this collaborative encounter. Here, I discuss the performative in relation both to the issue of reactivity in sociological fieldwork and the cultural turn in dakwah amongst some Chinese Muslim leaders in the post-Suharto era. The subjectivity of each encounter helps to visualise and complicate the notion of Chineseness amongst the Chinese Muslim communities in Indonesia.     

Shifting spaces,frozen frames: trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India

Abstract

This paper is a comparative reading of two Malayalam films The Journey (Sancharram, 2004) and The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986) as representative of differing trajectories of queer politics in the Kerala public sphere. It uses an analysis of the representative strategies of these two films, to interrogate the limits of a universal language of sexual identity politics. The paper places the two films in the different historical contexts in which they are produced, and deploys a film from an earlier time period to problematize some of the assumptions of contemporary queer politics. For this purpose it undertakes a close reading of the cinematic codes of both these films, especially the spatial arrangements in the films. I argue that the location of Sancharram in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so enmeshed in setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of setting up a stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of Kerala. The process of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that attempts to set up a particular subject position as the queer subject position. It sets out to trouble the naturalized construction of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into the social sphere itself. The paper examines how some of the taken‐for‐granted assumptions of transnational queer politics, like the celebration of visible bodies, gets radically questioned when we turn to non‐metropolitan sites of analysis. It aims to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual politics, as activists struggle to coin strategies to articulate the political possibilities of non‐normative sexual practices in Kerala today.     

Working and spending in South China: a methodological experiment with visual ethnography

Abstract

Art and architecture played a role in expressions of Malaya's nascent independent state in 1957, but the determination of what Malaya meant, ideologically, was different to different groups. Two types of nationalism were at work, namely that led by ethnic Malay leaders and political parties, and that led by a more ethnically-inclusive set of leaders and groups. This paper explores these concepts as frozen in mural paintings and the accompanying national architecture.