L Chua
Biographic Data
| ID | 15654 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Chua |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Chua |
| SIGNATURE | CHUA L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7518-8181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Ethics of Participation in Environmental Field Research: Inclusion, Collaboration, and Transformation
This book provokes important new discussions about ethical participation in environmental field research by bringing to the fore the fluid nature of both ethics and participation. Local participation is increasingly seen as a central and ethical part of environmental research; as such, many environmental efforts are becoming increasingly participatory. Participation, as a string of literature has shown, has many political, economic, social, and e…
‘Who owns these orangutans?’ And other feral questions
This co-authored chapter is the result of a conversation with Dr Liana Chua, a social anthropologist who has conducted research with Bidayuh communities in Malaysian Borneo on topics including conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, and experiences of development. Her current research on the politics of orangutan conservation is founded in collaboration with local communities and conservationists. In our conversation we explore the challenge…
The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia. By Faizah Zakaria
The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia. By Faizah Zakaria. 2023. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 280pp. $105 (hardcover), $32 (paperback)
Views from the Ground: Reflections on Studying Indigeneity in Southeast Asia
This roundtable took place at the end of a two-day workshop, \n‘Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia’, which was held on \n25–26 April 2019 at the University of Malaya. It was convened \nby the editors of this special section, Rusaslina Idrus and Liana Chua, as part of their British Academy/Newton Mobility Grant collaboration (NMGR1180433
Introduction: Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
If God Is with Us, Who Can Be against Us: Christianity, Cosmopolitics, and Living with Difference in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
This article puts the analytic of "indigenous cosmopolitics" (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous villagers' legal struggle to resist the scheme a…
Witnessing the Unseen: Extinction, Spirits, and Anthropological Responsibility
This article draws on two research projects - one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities - to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge…
Selfies and Self-Fictions: Calibrating Co-presence in and of ‘the Field
Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in 'the field'? And what happens when 'the field' becomes co-present in anthropologists' lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the m…
Only the orangutans get a life jacket: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus
In an era of mass extinction, who gets a life jacket, who is left to drown or swim-and on what basis? This article addresses these questions by analyzing how tropes and practices of responsibility are variously enacted, reworked, contested, and refused across the global nexus of orangutan conservation. Drawing on multisited, collaborative ethnography, we trace the mutually constitutive relation between multiple orangutan figures and commons imagi…
Viral Devotionality and Christian Solidarity in/beyond Borneo
As COVID-19 began to spread across Malaysia in early-2020, Jesus began to materialize with increasing frequency on my Facebook feed. A familiar figure with light skin, beard, long hair, and flowing robes, He appeared in many classic poses: praying, healing the sick, carrying a cross, crucified. Overlaid onto these images, however, were references to a disease that we have only recently come to know: ‘COVID: Christ Over Infection, Virus and Death’…
Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co-optation. A case study from orangutan conservation
Interactions between conservation and the social sciences are frequently characterized by either critique (of conservation by social scientists) or co-optation (of social scientific methods and insights by conservationists). This article seeks to push beyond these two dominant positions by exploring how conservationists and social scientists can engage in mutually transformative dialogue. Jointly authored by conservation scientists and social sci…
Durian diplomacies: Making liveable futures in a drowned Bornean landscape
What happens to a village when its material foundations are destroyed and its new incarnation is refused recognition by the state? This narrative explores the diplomatic strategies through which a recently displaced Bornean community has sought to create a liveable future in its new site above a dam, by reaching beyond the state to set up relations and alliances with non-state players. Drawing on long-term research, I trace how the villagers have…
La diplomatie du durian: La survie d’un village de déplacés à Bornéo [récit]
Qu'arrive-t-il à un village qui a été détruit et dont l'État refuse de reconnaître la nouvelle incarnation ? Ce récit explore les stratégies diplomatiques mises en place par une communauté de Bornéo déplacée afin de se créer un futur vivable sur son nouveau lieu de vie. Elle établit pour cela des relations et des alliances avec des acteurs non gouvernementaux. Liana Chua retrace la manière dont les habitants ont utilisé diverses entités non humai…
Anthropocene
The Anthropocene' is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth's bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have eng…
Small acts and personal politics: On helping to save the orangutan via social media
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest among political and media analysts in the value and utility of online activism. This article seeks to shed new light on this debate by thinking through popular responses to orangutan causes on social media. Rather than focusing on the (in)efficacy of such responses, the author describes a pervasive, public ethos of small acts - one built around the interactive affordances of social media - …
Gifting, Dam(n)ing and the Ambiguation of Development in Malaysian Borneo
This article seeks to move beyond the critical politicizing impulse that has characterized anthropologies of development since the 1990s towards a more open-ended commitment to taking seriously the diverse moral and imaginative topographies of development. It explores how members of four small Bidayuh villages affected by a dam-construction and resettlement scheme in Sarawak draw on both historically inflected tropes of gifting and Christian mora…
Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religious ignorance
Although ignorance has long played a critical off-stage role in anthropological discussions, controversies and theories about ritual and religion, it has only recently been cast under the analytical spotlight as an ethnographic topic in itself. Following a brief overview of the long-standing but largely implicit presence of ignorance in the anthropology of religion over the last century, this chapter explores three broad themes in the current lit…
Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating “in/dividualism” among Christian Bidayuhs
This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the "individualism" of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showin…
Troubled landscapes, troubling anthropology: Co-Presence, Necessity, and the Making of Ethnographic Knowledge
If 'co-presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry' (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a 'troubled landscape' in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co-presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities aff…
Artefacts in Anthropology
Conversion, continuity, and moral dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo
The nascent anthropology of Christianity highlights rupture as central to conversion. Yet thick ethnography of a Bidayuh village in Malaysian Borneo reveals how conversion can also foster modes of thinking and speaking about continuity between Christianity and "the old ways." Through a study of the shifting moral and religious topography of a community in which three churches coexist alongside a few elderly animist practitioners, I argue that suc…
Soul Encounters: Emotions, Corporeality, and the Matter of Belief in a Bornean Village
To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an 'impurely' Christian world
This article seeks to render ignorance analytically and ethnographically productive by exploring practices and tropes of knowing and not-knowing among young Christian Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. It argues that these Bidayuhs' professed ignorance of the old 'religion',adat gawai, cannot be dismissed as a simple lack of knowledge or reflection of sheer indifference. Instead, their invocations of ignorance could be understood as a product…
What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection
This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here …
Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System
This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the 'fluid' and 'shifting' nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as i…
Conversion, continuity, and moral dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo
The nascent anthropology of Christianity highlights rupture as central to conversion. Yet thick ethnography of a Bidayuh village in Malaysian Borneo reveals how conversion can also foster modes of thinking and speaking about continuity between Christianity and "the old ways." Through a study of the shifting moral and religious topography of a community in which three churches coexist alongside a few elderly animist practitioners, I argue that suc…
Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co-optation. A case study from orangutan conservation
Interactions between conservation and the social sciences are frequently characterized by either critique (of conservation by social scientists) or co-optation (of social scientific methods and insights by conservationists). This article seeks to push beyond these two dominant positions by exploring how conservationists and social scientists can engage in mutually transformative dialogue. Jointly authored by conservation scientists and social sci…
Troubled landscapes, troubling anthropology: Co-Presence, Necessity, and the Making of Ethnographic Knowledge
If 'co-presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry' (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a 'troubled landscape' in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co-presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities aff…
To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an 'impurely' Christian world
This article seeks to render ignorance analytically and ethnographically productive by exploring practices and tropes of knowing and not-knowing among young Christian Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. It argues that these Bidayuhs' professed ignorance of the old 'religion',adat gawai, cannot be dismissed as a simple lack of knowledge or reflection of sheer indifference. Instead, their invocations of ignorance could be understood as a product…
Only the orangutans get a life jacket: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus
In an era of mass extinction, who gets a life jacket, who is left to drown or swim-and on what basis? This article addresses these questions by analyzing how tropes and practices of responsibility are variously enacted, reworked, contested, and refused across the global nexus of orangutan conservation. Drawing on multisited, collaborative ethnography, we trace the mutually constitutive relation between multiple orangutan figures and commons imagi…
Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System
This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the 'fluid' and 'shifting' nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as i…
Anthropocene
The Anthropocene' is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth's bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have eng…
Gifting, Dam(n)ing and the Ambiguation of Development in Malaysian Borneo
This article seeks to move beyond the critical politicizing impulse that has characterized anthropologies of development since the 1990s towards a more open-ended commitment to taking seriously the diverse moral and imaginative topographies of development. It explores how members of four small Bidayuh villages affected by a dam-construction and resettlement scheme in Sarawak draw on both historically inflected tropes of gifting and Christian mora…
Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating “in/dividualism” among Christian Bidayuhs
This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the "individualism" of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showin…
If God Is with Us, Who Can Be against Us: Christianity, Cosmopolitics, and Living with Difference in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
This article puts the analytic of "indigenous cosmopolitics" (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous villagers' legal struggle to resist the scheme a…
Witnessing the Unseen: Extinction, Spirits, and Anthropological Responsibility
This article draws on two research projects - one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities - to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge…
Introduction: Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Selfies and Self-Fictions: Calibrating Co-presence in and of ‘the Field
Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in 'the field'? And what happens when 'the field' becomes co-present in anthropologists' lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the m…
What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection
This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here …
Small acts and personal politics: On helping to save the orangutan via social media
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest among political and media analysts in the value and utility of online activism. This article seeks to shed new light on this debate by thinking through popular responses to orangutan causes on social media. Rather than focusing on the (in)efficacy of such responses, the author describes a pervasive, public ethos of small acts - one built around the interactive affordances of social media - …
Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System
This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the 'fluid' and 'shifting' nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as i…
To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an 'impurely' Christian world
This article seeks to render ignorance analytically and ethnographically productive by exploring practices and tropes of knowing and not-knowing among young Christian Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. It argues that these Bidayuhs' professed ignorance of the old 'religion',adat gawai, cannot be dismissed as a simple lack of knowledge or reflection of sheer indifference. Instead, their invocations of ignorance could be understood as a product…
What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection
This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here …
Soul Encounters: Emotions, Corporeality, and the Matter of Belief in a Bornean Village
Artefacts in Anthropology
Conversion, continuity, and moral dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo
The nascent anthropology of Christianity highlights rupture as central to conversion. Yet thick ethnography of a Bidayuh village in Malaysian Borneo reveals how conversion can also foster modes of thinking and speaking about continuity between Christianity and "the old ways." Through a study of the shifting moral and religious topography of a community in which three churches coexist alongside a few elderly animist practitioners, I argue that suc…
Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religious ignorance
Although ignorance has long played a critical off-stage role in anthropological discussions, controversies and theories about ritual and religion, it has only recently been cast under the analytical spotlight as an ethnographic topic in itself. Following a brief overview of the long-standing but largely implicit presence of ignorance in the anthropology of religion over the last century, this chapter explores three broad themes in the current lit…
Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating “in/dividualism” among Christian Bidayuhs
This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the "individualism" of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showin…
Troubled landscapes, troubling anthropology: Co-Presence, Necessity, and the Making of Ethnographic Knowledge
If 'co-presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry' (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a 'troubled landscape' in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co-presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities aff…
Gifting, Dam(n)ing and the Ambiguation of Development in Malaysian Borneo
This article seeks to move beyond the critical politicizing impulse that has characterized anthropologies of development since the 1990s towards a more open-ended commitment to taking seriously the diverse moral and imaginative topographies of development. It explores how members of four small Bidayuh villages affected by a dam-construction and resettlement scheme in Sarawak draw on both historically inflected tropes of gifting and Christian mora…
Small acts and personal politics: On helping to save the orangutan via social media
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest among political and media analysts in the value and utility of online activism. This article seeks to shed new light on this debate by thinking through popular responses to orangutan causes on social media. Rather than focusing on the (in)efficacy of such responses, the author describes a pervasive, public ethos of small acts - one built around the interactive affordances of social media - …
Anthropocene
The Anthropocene' is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth's bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have eng…
Viral Devotionality and Christian Solidarity in/beyond Borneo
As COVID-19 began to spread across Malaysia in early-2020, Jesus began to materialize with increasing frequency on my Facebook feed. A familiar figure with light skin, beard, long hair, and flowing robes, He appeared in many classic poses: praying, healing the sick, carrying a cross, crucified. Overlaid onto these images, however, were references to a disease that we have only recently come to know: ‘COVID: Christ Over Infection, Virus and Death’…
Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co-optation. A case study from orangutan conservation
Interactions between conservation and the social sciences are frequently characterized by either critique (of conservation by social scientists) or co-optation (of social scientific methods and insights by conservationists). This article seeks to push beyond these two dominant positions by exploring how conservationists and social scientists can engage in mutually transformative dialogue. Jointly authored by conservation scientists and social sci…
Durian diplomacies: Making liveable futures in a drowned Bornean landscape
What happens to a village when its material foundations are destroyed and its new incarnation is refused recognition by the state? This narrative explores the diplomatic strategies through which a recently displaced Bornean community has sought to create a liveable future in its new site above a dam, by reaching beyond the state to set up relations and alliances with non-state players. Drawing on long-term research, I trace how the villagers have…
La diplomatie du durian: La survie d’un village de déplacés à Bornéo [récit]
Qu'arrive-t-il à un village qui a été détruit et dont l'État refuse de reconnaître la nouvelle incarnation ? Ce récit explore les stratégies diplomatiques mises en place par une communauté de Bornéo déplacée afin de se créer un futur vivable sur son nouveau lieu de vie. Elle établit pour cela des relations et des alliances avec des acteurs non gouvernementaux. Liana Chua retrace la manière dont les habitants ont utilisé diverses entités non humai…
Witnessing the Unseen: Extinction, Spirits, and Anthropological Responsibility
This article draws on two research projects - one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities - to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge…
Selfies and Self-Fictions: Calibrating Co-presence in and of ‘the Field
Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in 'the field'? And what happens when 'the field' becomes co-present in anthropologists' lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the m…
Only the orangutans get a life jacket: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus
In an era of mass extinction, who gets a life jacket, who is left to drown or swim-and on what basis? This article addresses these questions by analyzing how tropes and practices of responsibility are variously enacted, reworked, contested, and refused across the global nexus of orangutan conservation. Drawing on multisited, collaborative ethnography, we trace the mutually constitutive relation between multiple orangutan figures and commons imagi…
Views from the Ground: Reflections on Studying Indigeneity in Southeast Asia
This roundtable took place at the end of a two-day workshop, \n‘Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia’, which was held on \n25–26 April 2019 at the University of Malaya. It was convened \nby the editors of this special section, Rusaslina Idrus and Liana Chua, as part of their British Academy/Newton Mobility Grant collaboration (NMGR1180433
Introduction: Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
If God Is with Us, Who Can Be against Us: Christianity, Cosmopolitics, and Living with Difference in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
This article puts the analytic of "indigenous cosmopolitics" (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous villagers' legal struggle to resist the scheme a…
The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia. By Faizah Zakaria
The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia. By Faizah Zakaria. 2023. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 280pp. $105 (hardcover), $32 (paperback)
The Ethics of Participation in Environmental Field Research: Inclusion, Collaboration, and Transformation
This book provokes important new discussions about ethical participation in environmental field research by bringing to the fore the fluid nature of both ethics and participation. Local participation is increasingly seen as a central and ethical part of environmental research; as such, many environmental efforts are becoming increasingly participatory. Participation, as a string of literature has shown, has many political, economic, social, and e…
‘Who owns these orangutans?’ And other feral questions
This co-authored chapter is the result of a conversation with Dr Liana Chua, a social anthropologist who has conducted research with Bidayuh communities in Malaysian Borneo on topics including conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, and experiences of development. Her current research on the politics of orangutan conservation is founded in collaboration with local communities and conservationists. In our conversation we explore the challenge…
Sociology (21 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (13 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Asian Studies and History (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works)