Introduction: Reconsidering Agency—Feminist Anthropologies in Asia

Anne-Marie Hilsdon                                                                                                                                                                                                               

127-137

The five articles in this Special Issue are introduced by contextualising them broadly within feminist poststructuralist, postcolonial and anthropological approaches. After a brief exploration of methodologies that link ethnography with poetics and historical analysis, a general theoretical critique of modern Western forms of agency, especially liberal notions of autonomous rational choice, is offered. Western philosophy and theory, argues the author, have implications well beyond social formations in the West and she outlines their impacts on the agency of women in Asian societies. While cautioning against the pitfalls of both under and overvaluing agency, the author then offers a reconsideration of its analytical utility. Agency needs to address the gaps between everyday reflection and practices and hegemonic discourses or symbolic structures. In this gap, where women who fall outside the parameters of dominant notions of womanhood are considered ‘unstable’, both resistance and constraint are possible. Dominant discourses certainly have durable effects but their tools and symbols have been reinscribed to produce agency in hybrid forms. Agency is thus thought to arise from within existing societal discourses and symbolic structures rather than in opposition to them. In this process multiple positionings for women, all of which are performative, are created. These reconsiderations of agency are mirrored in the articles which follow. Agency in its modern forms is deemed inadequate by these authors to explain the agency of women in Asia. Rather than proposing a hierarchy of agency in its significant and insignificant forms, the authors in this Issue provide much needed accounts of socially and culturally situated agency, significant in both their breadth and depth.                                                                      

Untimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women’s Use of Lament as Life Narrative

Kalpana Ram                                                                                                                                     

138-153

How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women’s responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman’s life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition, and must be socially shaped and tended in order to bring about an auspicious confluence for both woman and the social order. The women also made use of the structure and tropes of several styles of performance that have tragedy at their emotional heart, and which gain their force against the normative construction of life cycle as temporality. By using these forms, women were able to bring into discourse several aspects of their experience of marriage that would otherwise gain no social recognition. In particular, they highlighted the prematurity of their marriage, having wed while still children themselves. The wider argument of this paper engages with two very different versions of agency¾one predicated on the use of reason and consent by the individual, the other derived from an examination of the Dalit women’s narratives.

Outside the Moral Economy? Single Female Migrants and the Changing Bangladeshi Family

Santi Rozario                                                                                                                               

154-171

Unmarried female migrants, travelling overseas for work, form a small proportion of Bangladeshi overseas migrants. Their situation is anomalous and suspect, since unmarried women should remain at home under male protection and control. The stories of Dipti, a single woman who migrated to Australia in the 1980s, and of two other single women from her native village, demonstrate clearly some of the contradictions of these women’s lives. Like other single female migrants I knew, Dipti retained close links to kin in Bangladesh, contributing significantly to the income of parents and siblings back home. Indeed, her constant and generous gift-giving can be understood as an attempt to counter her anomalous position and remain part of the moral economy of the village. However, Dipti’s longing to remain part of an ‘ideal’ extended family conflicted with her relatives’ desire for autonomy. This is because families in Bangladesh were themselves changing over this period, due to the intersection of the developmental cycles of domestic groups, dispositions towards the autonomy of children from their parents and each other, and through the economic pressures of contemporary Bangladeshi society, which provide a strong further impetus towards the financial autonomy of the nuclear family. These changes within the structure of their families result in alienating further these single female migrants. Thus, ultimately, both Dipti’s attempts to maintain her extended family in Bangladesh and her efforts to recreate it in Australia were doomed to failure. The brief stories of the other two single women I use in the article are parallel to that of Dipti’s.

Transnationalism and Agency in East Malaysia: Filipina Migrants in the Nightlife Industries

Anne-Marie Hilsdon                                                                                                                                                                                  

172-193

East Malaysia’s vibrant nightlife is a lucrative industry employing many Filipina migrants. The paper addresses the impact on Filipinas of discursive regimes of work, the state and family. These are derived from national discourses of ethnicity, class and nation intertwined with dominant discourses of womanhood in both Malaysia and the Philippines. The paper argues that in transnational space disciplinary regimes are heavily constraining, but resistance and negotiation are possible. The paper follows a feminist poststructuralist approach, which finds that disciplinary forces, rather than being coercive, are subtly inculcated in the migrant subject. This embodiment is never absolute and everyday actions of women initiate an instability in the category ‘Woman’ offering the opportunity for agency. Ethnographic methods are used to explore the tensions and constraints of the Filipinas’ everyday experience of migration. In the setting of a largely non-Muslim East Malaysia, ethnic identity seems differently constructed than in a predominantly Muslim Peninsula Malaysia. Through friendship and marriage with Malaysians, and integration into local communities, Filipinas are able to resist and negotiate their migrant status. The actions of Filipinas and their local Malaysian partners contest conservative notions of ethnicity, gender, class and nation in both the Philippines and Malaysia. This offers a potential for agency for Filipinas, the possibility for which could also extend to the largely non-Muslim local Malaysians with whom they share their lives.

Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia

Larissa Sandy                                                                                                                                                                                   

194-206

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the ‘sex slave’ has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as ‘victims’. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of ‘victim’ or ‘agent’ are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of ‘trafficking victims’ and the image of ‘defiled’ or ‘duped’ women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women’s lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women’s choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio-cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities.

The Reversible World of Japanese Coalmining Women

Sachiko Sone                                                                                                                                                                                                  

207-222

This paper illuminates the social world of Japanese coalminers, with special attention being given to women miners as told through their oral accounts and work songs, which historians have not used before. These coalmining women constituted the second largest single occupational category in the early part of the 20th century, yet they still continue to receive little scholarly attention. This investigation has led to a new concept of the world of women coalminers, the so-called ‘reversible world’, which operated in a specific social and economic context¾the dark underground world of the mine and the light world above of conventional society. Uncovering this underground world has enormous significance in fleshing out the identity and spirit of the miners. It challenges historians’ stereotypes of the miners as apolitical, apathetic and unaware of the inequities in their work situation. Mining women created their own world under the ground where normal gender roles were partially reversed.

Book Review Essay
Peter Sutton. The Unwavering Eye: David McKnight’s Ethnographic-Historical Legacy.
A review of David McKnight, 2004. Going the Whiteman’s Way: Kinship and Marriage among Australian Aborigines. Aldershot: Ashgate.                                                                  

227-230

Book Reviews

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Fear. [Michael Humphrey]                                                                                                         

231

Adrian Franklin. Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia. [Barbara Noske]                          

232

Holger Jebens (ed.). Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. [Andrew Lattas]                                      

234

Vivienne Kondos. On the Ethos of Hindu Women: Issues, Taboos and Forms of Expression  [Caroline Osella]                                                                                   

236

Aihwa Ong. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. [Pál Nyírí]                          

238

Peter H. Russell. Recognising Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism. [Paul Burke]     

240

Monique Skidmore. Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear. [Lenore Manderson]    

242

Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (eds). Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates. [Michael Goddard]         

244

Linda Whiteford and Scott Whiteford (eds). Globalization, Water, and Health: Resource Management in Times of Scarcity [Sandy Toussaint]      

246

Book Notices (Readers and Reprints)                                                                                      

248

Film Review Essay

Koriam’s Law: Film, Ethnography and Irreconcilable Accountings. Review of Koriam’s Law-and the Dead Who Govern [Jennifer Deger]                

249