IIAS_Newsletter#37 22-06-2005 14:03 Pagina 1 IIAS Newsletter 37 | July 2005 | free of charge | published by IIAS | P.O. Box 9515 | 2300 RA Leiden | The Netherlands | T +31-71-527 2227 | F +31-71-527 4162 | [email protected] | www.iias.nl Based on an image from the IISH Stefan R. Landsberger Collection; www.iisg.nl/~landsberger Collection; Landsberger R. Stefan IISH the from image an on Based 37 China’s new pride / Publishing in Asian Studies Does culture matter? Ravni Thakur inate. Strange-looking rocks, horses ridden with flair on the beach, an ordinary middle class scene like anywhere in India modern airport, like in any other country, far better than or elsewhere. I drive through Clifton and on to the Bhutto res- Aour Indian ones. A lady at the visa counter in a smart blue idence. There is no visible presence of the Bhutto PPP domi- uniform scans my face in quick movements. She chats light- nation - it is army rule. A photo of Zardari, though, hangs out- ly with me. ‘So you are from India - your films are very popu- side the house. lar here’. A quick smile and my passport is handed back to me. I have an onward flight to Karachi. Delhi to Lahore is fifty min- I am here to attend a conference organized by the Pakistan utes, Lahore to Karachi, one and a half hours. Institute of Labour Research. The conference is made up of a diverse set of participants from the SAARC countries, here to Karachi. The night air is warm, a faint tinge of sea breath. It discuss and debate the kind of interventions civil society can pp.5-10 is a city of approximately seven million, Pakistan’s largest make in the SAARC social charter. It is a two-day conference, industrial town, its answer to Mumbai. Home to the Sindhis, the focus being on human security and making SAARC states the Muhajir Punjabis, and Pashtuns. The site of devastating nuclear free. NGOs, trade unions and, of course, journalists violence, hard to imagine as one whizzes through the streets and academics from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and on to the conference site. I can only focus on the brightly Bangladesh. The issues are real: massive poverty, escalating coloured trucks and buses. Superb popular art. Colour erupt- military budgets, regionalism within nations. The key note ing all over the tin. Here, the roads are better. The traffic chaos, speaker, Prof. Saith, talks about changing the way poverty is pp.36-39 the mixed bag of animals, three-wheelers, two-wheelers, measured and making it a category of fundamental human Hyundai’s (Santros) and Suzukis’s (Marutis), beggars, street- security, measured in health, education, nutrition and leisure pp.24-28 pp. 15-18 hawkers, jostling for space, just the same as in India. - anything other than the ‘under one dollar paradigm’ imposed on the third world. People comment on the UPA’s employ- Clifton is the defense area and my companion Karamat Ali, ment-guarantee scheme in India. Just another scheme. Pop- p.3 an active social worker and prominent trade unionist, very ulism at its best. Humour the left. active in SAARC solidarity, points out the differences in the defense colonies and the rest. ‘The Pakistani army is like your ... Indian politicians,’ he says to me, ‘they grab the best deals’. We laugh as we go to visit a friend of his, it is party time. That The Baluch are unhappy with the Gawadar port and city proj- too is just like here. Politics, books, a little Murree beer, Indo- ect. ‘We don’t want Chinese condominiums’ says one partic- Pak relations, Afghanistan, the role of America in the sub-con- ipant, ‘we want basic security and rights for our people’. Pun- tinent, regionalism within Pakistan. ‘Change always starts jabi domination is a constant theme, filtered through jokes, China’s new found pride in text and image: & arts agendas: Conference from Karachi’, says the host, ‘and things are better now. Zia through bonhomie, and sometimes, outright anger. Tensions > > really finished the left. Today Musharraf is facing American simmer under the surface, control too tight, America, China, Publishing in Asian Studies: ICAS4 supplement matter in this issue: Words pressure where civil and political rights are concerned. He the Taliban, all extra categories that figure under the discourse > > can’t hang a Bhutto and get away with it’. of social justice. They also talk about whether the PPP has Letters from our readers: Publications & books received: made a deal with Musharraf. A PPP delegate points out a deal > > In the daytime, the sea and the defense colony next to it dom- continued on page 4 > IIAS_Newsletter#37 22-06-2005 14:07 Pagina 2 Off-shoring Asian Studies? Contents #37 he revamped Far Eastern Economic Review in its new monthly format has sev- Teral advantages: its articles have become even better, and now that it is a month- 1&4 Does culture matter? / Ravni Thakur ly, we can keep up. Robyn Meredith’s article ‘The Next Wave of Offshoring’ in the 3 Letters March 2005 issue drives home a message most people in the West turn a deaf ear to. In the near future this may no longer be possible as the message reads: you are China’s new pride fired! 5 Will China’s rise be peaceful? / Willem van Kemenade 6 Power and energy supply security / Mehdi Parvizi Amineh Off-shoring is the substitution of foreign for domestic labour and is one of the main 6-7 Yearnings / Shi Yong effects of globalisation. Why would a company hire a $100,000-a-year computer 7 The new Chineseness: great leap forward or backward? / Yue Tao programmer while the same work can be done by a programmer in India or China 8 China in the world economy / Wang Ping who is equally educated, more motivated, and earns $10,000? Off-shoring or out- 9 Environmentalism and civil society / Peter Ho & Richard Louis Edmonds sourcing is by no means a new phenomenon - blue collar work has been outsourced 10 State vs. market: media in transition / Sigrun Abels since the 1970s. But now that it is hitting the middle class, it is attracting attention and debate. Research 11 A bird’s eye view of the Bird’s Head Peninsula / Ger Reesink & Jelle Miedema, The Lisbon goals of the European Community stating that Europe should be the interview by Flip van Helden world’s most competitive knowledge economy by 2010 is losing momentum. One 12 Cleavages, electoral systems and the politicization of Islam in Indonesia and reason is that this goal remains thwarted by national research agendas. Science is Malaysia / Andreas Ufen inherently universal in nature; until well into in the eighteenth century, only natu- 13 Whose nation? The illusion of national unity in the Philippines / Iben Trino- ral barriers stood in the way of cooperation. From the beginning of the nineteenth Molenkamp century, nationalism together with imperialism cast the humanities and social sci- 14 Technologies of feeling and being: medicines in contemporary Indonesia / Margot ences into national straightjackets (the hard sciences partly escaped the nationalist L. Lyon encroach due to their abstract language, which eluded the bureaucracy and thus 15 Particles and intonation: the expression of information structure in Manado Malay note Director’s censorship). It gave birth to national research traditions, which were increasingly / Ruben Stoel embedded in conservative research institutions using the national language, a tra- 16 Nouns, imperative and irrealis in Old Javanese / Alexander K. Ogloblin jectory that has clearly run its course. 17 Script and identity in Southeast Asia / Kees van Dijk 18 Linguistic strategies of de-Islamization and colonial science: Indo-Muslim This is largely due to diminishing research budgets at the national level. The time physicians and the yûnânî denomination / Fabrizio Speziale when any single country, no matter its size, could support full-fledged research in 19 ‘For us Joyce is a nightmare’: a conversation with Hindi poet Vishnu Khare / all scientific domains is long past. If we look at developments in Asian studies over Jeroen van Nieuwland the past decade, we see the gradual development of institutionalised cooperation in 20 Shah Datta - a Hindu god in Muslim garb / Dus˘an Déak the European Alliance for Asian Studies. But regional European Asian studies asso- 21 Dravidian Studies in the Netherlands part 3 (1980-present): the rise and fall of a ciations have remained largely unchanged: no debate has developed on the future discipline / Luba Zubkova of Asian studies in a European context, let alone at the global level. There is thus no 22 Isidore van Kinsbergen: photographs of Java and Bali, 1855-1880 / Gerda Theuns- vision - and where there is no vision, crisis lurks, a crisis which could become the de Boer midwife of change. 23 Gender, myth and mythmaking / Thera Giezen Instead of sitting back to watch the withering away of Asian studies in Europe, we Publications might begin to see the development of Asian studies in a global context. Europe 24 New developments in Chinese and Asian environmental history / Kenneth J. could tender out research to centres in India, China and other Asian countries, Hammond retaining several flexible and agile centres of excellence as their counterparts. The 25 Nation-centric academic communities / Kurt Radtke cost of living in many Asian countries remains relatively inexpensive; wages could 26 Contesting Malayness: the quest for the elusive Melayu / Md. Salleh Yaapar be a third of what they are in Europe. Off-shoring’s biggest advantage, however, 27 Toward an eclectic peasant historiography / Manish K. Thakur would lie in the greater number of (PhD) students and scholars pursuing their 28 Books received studies in an Asian environment.