Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) or cigarette tobacco markets. A legacy of colonial and postcolonial agricultural improvement projects, tobacco companies use the term as an accolade, indicating their preference for collaborating with some farmers over others - usually affluent farmers with the resources necessary to invest in improving farming practices. In a cash crop economy dominated by a few large buyers, these preferences also strongly influence the direction of state regulation and infrastructure projects. The paper argues that “progressive farming” practices geared toward producing standardized commodities reinforce the rural hegemony of affluent farmers while masking the infrastructural changes that have, over the years, shifted the financial burden of producing a quality crop from producers onto farmers. On the other hand, farmers, particularly affluent farmers, negotiate evolving metrics used to evaluate farming practices to variously align with the state and corporations and further their own goals of accumulating wealth and prestige.

Amrita Kurian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Her ethnographic research is based in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, where she studies experts’ scientific and affective mediation of markets and agrarian relations of production. Her articles titled “Flowers of Deception,” “Expert Disenchantment,” and “Progressive Farmers” are at various stages of review in Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, and Geoforum. Her essay “Accusations of Corruption: A Cautionary Tale from Indian Tobacco Auctions” was published in India in Transition and Scroll.in.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Jenny Hedstrom, (Associate Professor in War Studies, Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University), who will discuss women's labour and the Kachin conflict.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This book explores insurgency warfare from the vantage point of women’s social reproductive and productive labour. The research combines feminist political economy and war studies to explain why and how war is sustained and reproduced. Developing the concept of militarised social reproduction, I examine how women’s underpaid or undervalued household duties enable and sustain the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), a poor insurgent group fighting for political rights and a degree of autonomy in the north of Myanmar. Based on more than one hundred semi-structured interviews and participant observations collected between 2013 and 2023 in Myanmar and Thailand, I show how women’s labour (re)produced from the household provides a critical, if overlooked, piece to the puzzle that is the war in Kachinland. I argue that while dominant accounts of the Kachin conflict are preoccupied with the conduct of States or the actions of military leadership, it is more instructive to focus on the activities of the household. Focusing on women’s reproductive work helps to explain how and why the Kachin conflict has been maintained for so long, despite the superior strength and resources of the Burman military force.

About the Speaker

Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. Jenny’s research and teaching concerns the relationship between households, gender, and warfare; gender, transitions, and peacebuilding; women’s activism and resistance; and ethics and methods when researching war, often with a focus on civil wars in Myanmar. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Peacebuilding, Critical Military Studies and International Studies Review, and other outlets. Together with Elisabeth Olivius, she is the editor of the edited collection “Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions” (NIAS Press, 2023). Jenny is the Principal Investigator for the Swedish Research Council-funded project “Women’s Labour in Civil War” and co- Principal Investigator for the project “Gender Experts in Peacebuilding”. Together with Hilary Faxon she leads the “Land, Labour, Love and Revolution” project - a collaboration with farmers, artists, students and activists to trace and understand gendered relations of land, labour and love in the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

Talk by Adeem Suhail (Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College)

This talk is based on ethnographic explorations of the broken worlds the denizens of contemporary Karachi, Pakistan, inhabit. It examines the period between two catastrophic floods in 2020 and 2022. By observing the efforts of the Wasted to piece together new realities amidst the ruins, the study seeks to understand the everyday processes and practices involved in conjuring through faith a commons as an infrastructure for troubled times. In Karachi, the ruptures caused by a convergence of crises have disrupted the city's function as a labor-driven engine of value creation. With the demise of postcolonial modernity, the city has entered a different temporality, characterized by multiple broken worlds experienced by its inhabitants. Engaging in cosmological speculation, conspiracy theories, and mythopoesis, individuals grapple with uncertainties and possibilities rooted in post-colonial and decolonial practices that produce ambivalent outcomes. Crises here manifest in jagged details that cut. Highlighting the vitality and creativity of the marginalized in contrast to the oppressive practices of the ruling classes who have dubbed these multitudes as being already-sacrificed (nazar hona) and thus Wasted (zaya hona), the talk proposes the idea of a new politics of the Sacrificed and the Wasted.

Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence and transnational kinship networks contribute to order-making in urban South Asia, especially in the context of ecological and political fracture. He is concurrently working on another co-authored book project with David L. Nugent, titled Sacropolitics, which addresses how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation. His recent publications include Urban Rearrangements: A Movement in Five Suites (IJURR, 2023) and Unarchiving Baloch History: ‘Small’ account of Baloch women that make waves in the Indian Ocean (2023).

Filmmaker Rea Tajiri (Temple University) and comparative ethnic studies scholar Vince Schleitwiler (University of Washington) consider the challenges of critical storytelling and speculative history.

The discussion examines their individual and collective work in documentary film, public art, and hybrid scholarship, including Tajiri’s latest film, Wisdom Gone Wild, which explores the creative, time-traveling reflections on her life by Tajiri’s mother, Rose—previously seen in Tajiri’s landmark work on Japanese American incarceration, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. Inspired by the unruly wisdom of Rose’s critical remixing of past and identity, Tajiri and Schleitwiler discuss their own work on the visual archives of intersecting histories of race, migration, confinement, and empire.

Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who was born in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Her ground-breaking, award-winning film, digital video and installation work, has been supported by numerous grants, fellowships and artistic residencies, has been exhibited widely in museums, on television and in international film festivals.

Vince Schleitwiler teaches comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific (NYU Press), and critical essays in African American Review, Film Quarterly, Black Agenda Report, The Margins, and elsewhere. He has collaborated on public art and humanities projects for the Smithsonian APA Center, the Washington Trust for Historical Preservation, the Center for Art and Thought, and others. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he is a descendant of incarcerees at Salinas, Santa Anita, and Poston.

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This event is part of the Migrations Summer Institute.

As part of the Migrations Summer Institute, Crystal Baik (UC Riverside) and Ma Vang (UC Merced) will discuss their work on militarized migration through the lens of collaborative and public scholarship. The conversation will explore

the role of imagination, play, and experimentation play in one’s research, work, and teaching;how scholars of U.S. war, empire, and anti-colonial resistance "orient" themselves in relationship to the neoliberal settler university;how researchers might interrogate and shift the forms of their work, the methods of its dissemination, and its accessibility for various audiences.Crystal Mun-hye Baik is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside. Baik is the co-director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory at UCR; a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective, and a co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies book series at University of Michigan Press.

Ma Vang is an associate professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Merced. She founded the program in critical race and ethnic studies as a new major at UC Merced and served as the program’s inaugural chair from 2017-2020. Vang is also a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Vang is also co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies book series with the University of California Press.

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Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lisandro Claudio, (Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley), who will discuss imperialism and good governance in the Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

The near collapse of the Philippine National Bank (PNB) in the early 1920s is often held up as proof of how Filipino corruption derails economic development. It is an important case study in works that analyze the Philippines through the lenses of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. Unfortunately, much of this analysis has been derived from imperialist sources. More importantly, these imperialist sources were empirically incorrect. The PNB was in crisis not because of corruption, but because of a postwar global deflation—an event that has been called the most underrated economic crisis in world history. Using the PNB crisis, this lecture challenges the dominant form of political-economic analysis in the Philippines (and many other parts of Southeast Asia and the developing world), which reduces issues of economic development to questions of corruption and good governance. If scholars, credulous over imperial sources, got this event wrong, what else have they misinterpreted?

About the Speaker

Lisandro E. Claudio is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Vicente L. Rafael, (Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Washington in Seattle), who will discuss authoritarian imaginary in the Contemporary Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

President Rodrigo Duterte's term ended in May 2022 amid a violent drug war and the hardships of the COVID pandemic. Yet, surveys indicated that the president’s astronomic popularity did not suffer significantly. His job approval rating remained high—as much as 91% according to one poll--even as the majority of the people had become increasingly pessimistic about the state of the country.

Why this massive popularity amid the most catastrophic of conditions? How was it that a mass murderer continued to register such highly positive ratings? Why did his governance by fear meet with such widespread approval? Or is it the case that by focusing on Duterte, we’ve missed something much more fundamental, namely the persistence of structures of power that envelop and enable the survival of sprawling urban communities where his support was most evident? How did his authoritarian imaginary circulate and reinforce existing notions of community? That is, how did a certain fantasy about sovereign power—the power to decide who shall live and who shall die—oscillate between ruler and ruled? Indeed, is there something about the construction of community that preceded and will continue beyond Duterte’s regime-- something about the logic and logistics of living together--that also create the conditions for cultivating violence and spreading death?

About the Speaker

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022) as well as several other works on the history and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines. Recently, he also co-edited with Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: the Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (2023).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Meredith Weiss, (Professor, Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy), who will discuss Malaysia's dominant-party system.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Malaysia’s 15th general election in November 2022 decisively ended the country’s dominant-party system. What might take its place, however, remains hazy—how competitive, how polarized, how politically liberal, and how stable an order might emerge will take some time to become clear. The opposition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), having secured a plurality of seats, but with a sharply pronounced ethnic skew, formed a coalition government with the previously dominant, incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front) and smaller, regional coalitions. This settlement resolved an immediate impasse, but relied upon obfuscation of real programmatic, ideological, and identity differences, raising questions of longer-term durability or results. Examining this uncertainty suggests three broad queries, with resonance well beyond Malaysia. The first is the fragmentation and reconsolidation of Malaysian party politics, and how party dominance transforms or falls. The second is the extent to which its dominant party defined or confirmed Malaysia as electoral authoritarian, and whether we should consider it still to be so. And the third is what possibilities Malaysia’s apparent party-system deinstitutionalization opens up for structural reform beyond parties. Does the deterioration of that system—more than simply the previous dominant party’s electoral loss—clear the way for more far-reaching liberalization? All told, Malaysia’s incremental dismantling of its dominant-party system does not also spell the end of electoral authoritarianism. Party and party-system deinstitutionalization leave the system in flux, but illiberal reconsolidation is as plausible as progressive structural reform.

About the Speaker

Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In four books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She is the inaugural Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series on Southeast Asian Politics & Society.