Japanese Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
Online ISSN : 2424-1377
Print ISSN : 0563-8682
ISSN-L : 0563-8682
Volume 53, Issue 2
Displaying 1-9 of 9 articles from this issue
Articles
  • Yu-sheng Lin
    2016 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 189-216
    Published: January 31, 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper examines the relation between the organizational structure of Yiguan Dao (I-Kuan Tao) in Thailand and its members' network. This study aims at reconsidering the focus on Chinese identity of Chinese religious groups in Thailand and the supposition of “individualization” of religious practices in Thailand. Most studies on Chinese religion in Southeast Asia are concerned with Chinese communities or ethnicity but overlook the context of the host societies. However, Yiguan Dao in Thailand, with its many non-Chinese members, challenges this supposition. With economic development and social change in Thailand, people move from the countryside to urban cities and even abroad. In the context of traditional communities with high mobility, the much-divided organizational structure of Yiguan Dao offers members an opportunity to find a toehold when moving around. People who migrate for higher education, work, or overseas labor find an anchor in the trans-regional network of Yiguan Dao. This transregional network also supports people in the margins or excluded from their own communities. I argue that this challenges the supposition of “individualization” of the Thai religion.
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  • Focusing on the Connection to the Chinese
    Nara Oda
    2016 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 217-243
    Published: January 31, 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper aims to examine to what extent and how the government of South Vietnam (1954-75) institutionalized “Eastern medicine (Dong Y)” that is, traditional medicine, in its medical system. It also analyzes the social background of the significant Chinese influence, which prevented South Vietnam from institutionalizing Vietnamese traditional medicine as was the case of the North.
     Today, Vietnamese traditional medicine, which consists of Thuoc Nam (medicine of the south) and Thuoc Bac (medicine of the north), is institutionalized in the medical system. This has been attributed to the North Vietnamese policy to improve Vietnamese medicine, whereas South Vietnam purportedly did not take the initiative to make the most of Vietnamese traditional medicine. This paper reveals that South Vietnam did try to promote traditional medicine and to integrate it into the public health care system. However, due to the large population and influence of the Chinese, Eastern medicine in South Vietnam was not represented by traditional Vietnamese medicine but by its Chinese counterpart. In order to incorporate more of Vietnamese traditional medicine, the government had to restrict Eastern medicine practices to the Vietnamese. South Vietnam also attempted to institutionalize traditional medicine. However, it was premised on a more complex principle than the North's.
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  • Subjectivity of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Based on “Connection-Based Equality of Care”
    Shiho Sawai
    2016 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 244-278
    Published: January 31, 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In Indonesian literature, “baboe/babu (female maid/domestic worker)” appears recurrently as a prominent icon of lower-class women's submission and subordination. For instance, babu oftentimes symbolizes a victim, a vamp, or a bimbo in the text, in the authors' attempt to question the negative impacts of modernization processes in society. As a result, babu cements the derogatory images of women's intimate labor at the intersection of gender and class, as the figure in the lowliest position amongst nyai (concubine) and bini (wife).
     This links to the fact that the devaluation of female domestic work has occurred in tandem with the gendered division of the public and private spheres. Such gendered division assumes males as “independent” subjects and females as symbols of dependency. With intimate labor (including domestic labor) being defined as women's work, women's own need to be cared for has been stripped from “public” discourse. In this way, the welfare of domestic workers is oftentimes overlooked behind their care responsibilities.
     However, the rising tide of transnational migration of Indonesian women as domestic workers has been redefining the meaning of intimate labor. This paper examines an award-winning short story written by an Indonesian woman who used to work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong and Singapore, to indicate how her text resists the conventional image of babu to inaugurate a brand-new subjectivity of female domestic worker, based on Eva Kittay's notion of “connection-based equality of care.” For this purpose, I elucidate that this text underscores caretakers' right to equality in carrying out their duties without giving up their own safety and welfare, something that is embedded within the relationship between two Indonesian domestic worker protagonists.
     First, I examine the fetish of babu as presented in existing prominent literary works. Second, I explore the story in question to point out how it deliberately employs an outrageous domestic worker protagonist in a way that apparently deviates from the aforementioned stereotypes of the domestic worker. By doing so, I argue that this deviant protagonist effectually defamiliarizes the conventional image of a female domestic worker in a Freudian sense of unheimlich, to unveil the people's prejudice crystalized behind it. Third, I indicate how the two protagonists exchange mutual care and attention, although they do not give up their own dignity and reasons. Such portrayals remind us of the “care inequality” of caretakers, which in turn suggests their vulnerability in receiving their fair share of care in the name of work responsibilities. From these points, I conclude that the text successfully unsettles and contests the fetish of domestic workers as care servitude, thus radically questioning how to build up better definitions of equality, autonomy, and dependency in caring for others, by revisiting them from the viewpoints of the time of globalizing intimate-labor migration.
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