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CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung Thwin, Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Because of their essential role in high-value transnational logistics and symbolic economies, airline workers are located at a complex nexus of class politics, national identity, and state reinvention in Southeast Asia. It is through ethnography amongst airline workers in Myanmar and Thailand that this paper examines airports and airplanes as fields for anthropological inquiry. Part of what has hindered ethnographic study of airline workers’ full cultural and political agency is what I will call sector bias: a subjectivity limitation, but one which is situated in the interlocking mobile apparatus of global aviation logistics. Components include: 1, value-laden assumptions from experience and aspects of semiotic sameness across aviation logistics; 2, the presumed liminality of the aircraft cabin; and finally 3, techno-juridical and financial approaches to the industry and its participants which design and govern according to role expectation and devise policy in response to disasters and threats. With participant observation-based knowledge of Southeast Asian cabin crews and ethnographic interviews, this paper will discuss the 1990 hijack of Thai Airways TG 305 and the 2008 seizure of Suvarnabhumi Airport from the perspective of participant airline employees. Extreme experiences serve not only to bring into light and challenge how workers might see their own political selves, but also how they internalize aspects of role ethos in relation to their own participation in the transnational logistical apparatus.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jane M Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Southeast Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork on Shan ethno-nationalism, done archival and oral history research on Burmese cinema, and has published on Burmese rock music and unpopular culture. This presentation on aviation is connected to a current research project, part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, entitled “Heritage of the Air”. Dr Ferguson is the Editor of the Journal of Burma Studies, and chair of the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

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