Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute and the Department of History, National University of Singapore

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Yong Mun Cheong , Department of History, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

Following the formation in 1999 of the Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) its members, drawn primarily from the ‘Outer Islands’, called for a seemingly retrogressive shift from Suharto’s ‘New Order’ development model to an envisioned ‘Old Order’ premised on customary (adat) rights. The subsequent move towards decentralization was a powerful comment on the newly-empowered peripheral voice in national politics. Pertinent, therefore, is an historical understanding of the provenance of power at the margins.

I examine the agency of centre-periphery relations within a specific geographical and environmental space configured in the national imagination as Nusantara. How far did such relations contribute to shaping the economic and the ideological dimensions of the new nation state? Crucially, how far does past and present experience bear witness to the resonance of adat within a globalized 21st century state?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeyamalar T Kathirithamby-Wells is affiliated to the Centre for South Asian Studies and Clare Hall, Cambridge. A student of University of Malaya (in Singapore), she received her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, and held the Chair of Asian History at University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, where she taught for many years. Her numerous publications on trade and state formation in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean and, more recently, the environmental history of the Malay-Indonesian region, include The British in the West Sumatran Presidency, 1760-85 (1977), The Southeast East Asian Port and Polity (ed. with John Villiers), (1994), Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia (2006), as well as contributions to the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (ed.) N. Tarling (1991), and the Handbook of Southeast Asian History (ed.) N. Owen (2013).

She has a broad interest in Southeast Asian historical interconnections – local, national, and global – in natural resource extraction, utilization, and trade and is currently exploring their environmental and socio-economic implications for post-colonial development and nation building in Indonesia.

REGISTRATION

Registration is not neccessary, all are welcome to attend.