Category Asia
How are Foreign Domestic Workers Implicated in the Pro-Democracy Protests in Hong Kong?
by Charlotte Brill ‘’My eyes were very painful’’, said an Indonesian migrant worker who was caught in a cloud of tear gas on her day off. This tear gas came from nearby pro-democracy protests, which rapidly intensified since they started in June 2019. Riddled with fear, over 380,000 Foreign Domestic Workers (FDWs), comprised predominantly of […]
Different ‘Developments’: Japanese Anthropologists and Development
by Kazuki Horiuchi Non-western countries, such as China and India, have become in the last decades major actors of international development (Madwsley 2013). Yet, distinguishing between traditional and emerging donors, might be an over-simplified dichotomy, as donors are not unified in their purposes, and their policies have changed considerably over the years (see Gu and […]
Liminality: Unfixed Culture, Unfixed Selves
by Gertrude Lamare It was June of 2015, and we were on the road, travelling down to Umwang village in Assam, to witness the completion of a much-delayed burial of a woman who had died a hundred years ago. She was a member of the Makdoh clan of the Khasi-Bhoi tribe. Umwang village technically fell […]
Becoming Human: Malala Yousafzai and the Politics of Representation
by Carlo Ceglia Malala. It is enough to say her first name. How did this 21-year-old Pakistani girl – the youngest, as well as the only female Pakistani, to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2014) – become one of those very few people to be known just by their first name? What about her story […]
China’s Uyghur re-education centres in Xinjiang will not produce a loyal and obedient population
by James McMurray **Previously published on The Conversation UK.** The Chinese government’s denials of its mass interment of Xinjiang’s Uyghur citizens have evaporated as international pressure has piled up in recent weeks. In their place has come propaganda extolling the “re-education centres” in which the Uyghurs are held, and which new evidence from the BBC […]
The Spinners of Boyanese Bhavacakra
by Danang Nizar Long outside the radar of anthropology, there was an ethnic group in a secluded island called Bawean, located in the middle of Java Sea, Indonesia, which has a distinctive transnational migration culture. Bawean people (or Boyanese) have a longstanding tradition of migrating to the Malay Peninsula. As early as 1845, the ethnic […]
Creating a World Without Poverty?
By Hannah Feldman Sat on the floor of a small shared room on the outskirts of Metro Manila, Mae* and her sisters are hurriedly crafting necklaces, while their small children treat them as their personal jungle gym – climbing around their shoulders with giggles of glee. The only light comes from a crack in the […]
Shadow over Burma: the Rohingya crisis in context
By Elisa Sandri In late August, alarming reports and harrowing images started to surface from Myanmar. It soon became clear that Rohingya people—a Muslim minority living in a remote region of Rakhine State, bordering Bangladesh—were being killed, tortured, and their villages burnt down. Official Myanmar state outlets reported that Rohingyas had attacked local communities and […]
Death in Mazar-I Sharif
by Magnus Marsden The brutal killing of up to 140 Afghan Army soldiers on April 22nd at an army base located near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in the north of Afghanistan raises profoundly troubling questions about the state of the country and wider region. The killings in Mazar come shortly after an attack (claimed […]
Who Is Ecotourism’s Winner – Nature, Culture or Capital?
by Sara Loh ‘Capitalism thrives on crisis. This is its engine of innovation and creativity’ – Sian Sullivan For neoliberal conservationists around the world, the environmental crisis has been produced (and will be saved) by none other than capitalism itself; for nature, ecotourism is one of many neat solutions that flattens and deadens nature into […]
