Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Monographic journal issue | Supplemento 60 | 2024
Research Article | The Militancy of Kinship, Intimacy, and Religion
The Militancy of Kinship, Intimacy, and Religion
New Approaches for the Study of Social Movements in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Abstract
What are the specific features of political dissent in Southeast Asia? And how may scholarly insights from the region contribute to the study of social movements in other world areas? In this article, we scrutinize the florescence of social activism in contemporary Southeast Asia by bringing together examples of popular protest in countries as diverse as Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as in transnational arenas of mobilization that connect local struggles to globally relevant issues and forms of dissent. We discuss applications of social movements literature to specific Southeast Asian historical, political and socio-cultural modernities, arguing that anthropological scholarship, postcolonial and feminist theory, as well as the social scientific study of power ontologies in non-western societies, are necessary references to expand our understanding of social movements in the region. We simultaneously advance that Southeast Asian expressions of dissent often double as “alter-politics”, or alternative re-imaginings of the common good. Their study benefits from careful examination of situational arrangements of power in specific locales, with particular attention to domains of feeling, thought and practice that are commonly deemed as apolitical in modern political philosophy: intimacy, religion, and kinship. With this essay, we finally aim to treat Southeast Asia as a site for the production rather than the mere reception of theories of resistance.
Submitted: Dec. 22, 2023 | Accepted: May 7, 2024 | Published Dec. 4, 2024 | Language: en
Keywords Social movements • Southeast Asia • Alter-politics • Kinship • Religion • Intimacy
Copyright © 2024 Giuseppe Bolotta, Edoardo Siani. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2024/02/001
