This Working Paper explores Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s book, Kentut Kosmopolitan (2008). I argue that Seno’s essays present a particular way of reading Jakarta and draw on and reflect practices of flânerie. His essays are both of contemporary urban conditions as well as an articulation of various specific social, cultural and political trajectories. In these essays, …

WPS 160 Writing Jakarta in Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s Kentut Kosmopolitan Read More »

This paper will examine one aspect of what I have elsewhere termed the economy of virtue, that is the field in which neoliberal logics and calculations have been incorporated into strategies for global health management as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of The Human. These neoliberal technologies and logics are a …

WPS 159 Digital Relics of the Saints of Affliction: HIV/AIDS, Digital Images and the Neoliberalization of Health Humanitarianism in Contemporary Vietnam Read More »

The shape of Korean Wave, which refers to the phenomenal popularity of Korean pop culture abroad, has changed noticeably in recent years. In the early 2000s, it was characterized by scenes of middle-aged housewives from East Asian countries chasing after Korean actors whom they were enamored, from watching television and VCDs (video cassette disks). Now, …

WPS 158 Waxing the Korean Wave Read More »

As a region, Asia is both a major source and destination for international students seeking higher education. Student migration, like most forms of population mobility, is a highly politicised issue, exerting economic, social and environmental effects in both source and destination countries. Student migrants are variously regarded as guests, strangers or interlopers. They are rarely …

WPS 157 Re-thinking Student Migration Trends, Trajectories and Rights Read More »

Taiwan Youth Project (TYP) is a longitudinal panel study taking the life course framework to examine the developmental process and life experiences among Taiwanese youth from early adolescence to young adulthood. Family, school and community as well as the interplay among them are regarded as salient social mechanisms affecting the growth trajectory of adolescence. In …

WPS 156 From Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Challenges for Taiwan Youth Facing a Changing Society Read More »

The paper deciphers a government organized symposium on “folk beliefs” in which the author took part in as an invitee. It is organized within a confined “ethnography of a conference”, but it engages constant interactions between the author’s own reflections on the concepts of superstition, folk religion, and civil solidarity and recent mainland Chinese political and …

WPS 155 A Drama of the Concepts of Religion: Reflecting on Some of the Issues of “Faith” in Contemporary China Read More »

This paper examines the vexed and sensitive issues of collective memory and trauma in post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh in Indonesia. It shows how Aceh’s provincial capital of Banda Aceh is a city of remembrance as well as of amnesia, and identifies common and fragmented threads in the retelling of stories about this city’s turbulent recent history. The …

WPS 154 Post-Disaster Urban Renewal: Memories of Trauma and Transformation in an Indonesian City Read More »

This paper considers the ways Java’s Islamization was imagined and remembered within the small ‘Malay’ community of Sri Lanka at the turn of the twentieth century. This community, descended from exiles, convicts, soldiers and others from across the Indonesian-Malay world who were brought to Sri Lanka first by the Dutch (beginning in the late seventeenth …

WPS 153 Remembering Java’s Islamization: A View from Sri Lanka Read More »