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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
155715
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores domestic volunteer tourism in Thailand and how it relates to moral politics and recent political struggles. Volunteer tourism typically entails middle class Thais, who reside in the country's capital or other urban cities, traveling to remote villages to perform volunteering activities. Through an ethnographic account, the article shows how these trips provide an opportunity for volunteers to experience and embody the ideals associated with the notion of the ‘volunteer spirit’ and how volunteer tourist trips tend to reproduce the kind of subjectivity and power relations that help to preserve, rather than challenge, the political status quo. In particular, the article highlights the ways in which popular volunteer discourse and practice correlate closely with the politics of ‘good people’ (khon di), which promotes ‘moral rule’ by ‘good people’ rather than a more democratic and inclusive kind of politics.
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| 2 |
ID:
155718
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the meaning of volunteering among professional aid workers. While they experience disenchantment in their daytime work, volunteering provides them with benefits lacking in their paid jobs. At the same time, a compensatory model does not capture the complex dimensions of this relationship. One motive behind their professional work – bringing about positive change for others – is also the driving force behind their voluntary practices. Such excess of doing good may be indicative of their overall commitment. If aid workers make sense of their actions within a framework of alienated labour, rendering their waged aid work as a commodity, volunteering emerges as a remedial response. At the same time, their paid and unpaid work is animated by the impulse of giving. Such co-existence implies that gifts and commodities are not mutually exclusive; or indeed that both can be understood, following Parry (1986), as emerging from a highly developed capitalist system.
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| 3 |
ID:
155719
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| Summary/Abstract |
The attainment of religiously informed and socially responsible wealth is a desire widespread in the metropolises of Java, Indonesia, especially amongst the pious middle classes. This article aims at an understanding of the emergence and effects of an early 21st century desire for pious entrepreneurial success, by focusing on the practices people consistently and regularly undertake in order to actualise this. It claims that the religiously informed desire for entrepreneurial success is permeated by a mode of temporality that privileges the future at the expense of the past and the present. This temporal orientation has important consequences for subject-making, as it forces the subjectivities created to take a distinctively asymptotic form, resulting in the production of self-differing subjects; that is, subjects in which past, present and future actualisations lack coincidence and complete convergence.
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| 4 |
ID:
155720
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| Summary/Abstract |
Unskilled migrant workers and their families represent a crucial human resource in Sabah (Malaysia) as cheap labour, but also as religious believers. Christian organizations belonging to various denominations have started to cater to this community in recent years by providing educational services. Based on an ethnography of two schools led by charismatic South Korean missionaries and patronized by a Lutheran church with roots in Sabah, this article argues that ‘salvation’, as it is understood and practiced through education in these institutions, falls short of empowering migrants as a whole and rather contributes to reproducing their subordination as a community within Sabahan society.
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| 5 |
ID:
155716
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| Summary/Abstract |
Anthropological interest in giving, including religious charity, has grown in recent years. However, studies of philanthropy have largely been confined to activities relating to human-to-human sociality. By contrast, this article explores conceptions of giving and acts of charity from the perspective of interactions between the living and the dead. Drawing on Buddhist traditions and popular rituals in contemporary Việt Nam, it takes an in-depth, ethnographic look at a series of ritual performances that seek to provide relief to ‘orphaned’ restless ghosts. Forms of religious charity constitute the unfortunate dead as the impoverished ‘other’ and strive to create a nexus of reciprocity that associates the living with the dead, and the human with the non-human. Further, the article argues that Vietnamese charitable acts for ghosts are not driven simply by an awareness of the needs and sufferings of others. Such concerns and sensibilities are undeniably instilled by moral and religious training in Buddhist disciplines. However, they are supplemented and reinforced by the menacing influence that the neglected dead are believed to be capable of exerting upon the living, in terms of the threat they pose, and the power they often exercise, putting one’s prospects for a prosperous future and general well-being in jeopardy.
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| 6 |
ID:
155714
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| Summary/Abstract |
This Special Issue of South East Asia Research sets out to explore the complexities that arise from the contemporary intersections of religion and the economy in the region, with particular regard to public projects that seek to transfer value to the poor for the purpose of alleviating their suffering and improving their condition. The Special Issue provides new evidence of the significance that religious interventions in the field of poverty alleviation are assuming in South East Asia in the era of neoliberal reform. Case studies draw upon ethnographic materials, from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in the north, and Malaysia and Indonesia in the south.
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