229. AUTONOMOUS OR EMBEDDED STATES AND STATE THEORY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
229.
Panel Title : AUTONOMOUS OR EMBEDDED STATES AND STATE THEORY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Institution : Koninklijk Instituut voor-taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde (KITVL)
Chair : Gerry Van Klinken
Convener : Gerry Van Klinken
Discussant : Meredith L. Weiss
Panel Abstract :
The modern state in Southeast Asia has often been portrayed as autonomous, alien and detached from the society over which it rules. Among the reasons put forward for this view are the state's historical origins in often violent colonial administrations, its symbiotic attachment to predatory foreign capitalism, its inability to penetrate tenacious precolonial cultures, and the inequalities that characterise Southeast Asian societies. The most influential formulations of this image of the state were written in the 1970s and '80s, just when several states in Southeast Asian were at their most authoritarian, and coincidentally also just when the theoretical literature on states was dominated by the neostatist 'bringing the state back in' paradigm. Today, with the Cold War behind us, both the nature of many states in Southeast Asia and our thinking about states in general have shifted considerably. On the ground, democratisation has made serious inroads into militarism and developmentalism in Indonesia and the Philippines, although little appears to have changed in Burma, and Thailand recently had another coup. Money politics flourishes in the Southeast Asian democracies (Gomez 2002), but the idea that these states are insulated from their societies has become more difficult to justify. In the library, the state is no longer seen as the only superordinate institution within society, a rigid state-society distinction has become unsustainable, and research programs on states, markets and societies are turning towards 'strategic-relational' questions (Jessop 2001). The 'cultural turn', also in studies of the state, has led to it being seen as a culturally conditioned imaginary rather than a concrete reality (Steinmetz 1999). Neostatist positions within political science are giving way to more historically grounded studies of how states develop within society, also in Asia (eg Boyd and Ngo 2006). Doubts about the real capacities of state institutions (as opposed to the grandiose claims made by state officials) have turned attention towards actually existing state practices (Migdal 2001; Schlichte 2005). The latter are characterised by fragmentation and negotiation rather than by an aloof cohesion and autonomy. Anthropologies of the state based on local fieldwork (eg Sharma and Gupta 2006) are generating new perspectives. This panel aims to bring together a variety of new thinking about states and state theory in Southeast Asia and will ask just how embedded or autonomous it is.
Participants :
Garry Rodan
Mary P. Callahan
Meredith L. Weiss
Joshua Barker
