WPS 158 Waxing the Korean Wave
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 157 Re-thinking Student Migration Trends, Trajectories and Rights
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 …
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WPS 156 From Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Challenges for Taiwan Youth Facing a Changing Society
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 155 A Drama of the Concepts of Religion: Reflecting on Some of the Issues of “Faith” in Contemporary China
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 154 Post-Disaster Urban Renewal: Memories of Trauma and Transformation in an Indonesian City
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 153 Remembering Java’s Islamization: A View from Sri Lanka
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 …
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Religion-State Encounters in Hindu Domains: From the Straits Settlements to Singapore
The historical and empirical project presented here is grounded in a desire to theorize ‘religion-state’ relations in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, secular city-state of Singapore. The core research problematic of this project has emerged out of the confluence of two domains, ‘religion, law and bureaucracy’ and ‘religion and colonial encounters.’ This work has two core objectives: …
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WPS 152 Women Writing about Marriage and Sexuality: Post-1998 Indonesian Fiction
This paper presents close readings of literary works by four Indonesian women writers and points to changes in discourses about marriage, families, sex and sexuality since 1998. Recent studies by social scientists address how sexual curiosity and erotic desire among Indonesian youth cause frictions between conservative religious attitudes and modern, globally influenced ways of life. …
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Ethnic and Racial Studies – Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Asia: Inclusion or Exclusion? (Vol. 34 No. 5)
This special issue, devoted to ethnic minorities in Asia, originated with the International Symposium on Ethnic Minorities in Asia: Subjects or Citizens, held at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. As one of the most ethnically-diverse regions in the world, Asia is the site of large indigenous minority populations as well as non-indigenous …