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Current Research Activities

Photo by Pam Nilan

MOBILITY AND EXCLUSION

Theme: Bordered Exclusions

Indonesian Islamic Masculinities (Richard Howson, Mike Donaldson and Pam Nilan)

The broad aim of this project is to develop an ethnographic understanding of the way Indonesian (adult) men re-configure their conceptions and practices of masculinity within contemporary Australian society and against the anglo-Australian hegemonic model of masculinity following immigration. This knowledge will then be used to understand both Islam and masculinities in a way that will inform social policy on men and masculinities in areas such as, religion, family, sexuality, leisure and work. The importance of this research to future masculinities studies is that it will contribute to:

thinking gender relations on the world scale;
addressing issues of “public” concern;
developing a more explicit understanding of the process of change (or ossification) in masculinities and;
to explore the ‘patriarchal dividend' as a feature of masculinities politics.

This project investigates Islamic Indonesian masculinities and Australia. Indonesia is viewed as a threat, previously for Communism, now for Islamist radicalism. Yet Australia has close links with Indonesia. The majority of Indonesian migrants are Islamic men. Research in Australia and Indonesia aims to: establish the characteristics of hegemonic Indonesian masculinity; describe how these men engage with hegemonic Australian masculinity; and grasp the role of the mosque in the construction of their masculinity. The project will advance the masculinity studies in relation to religion and social capital. In 2006 this project team was very active, producing 3 conference papers and 1 article submitted to a journal – Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (RIMA). The team obtained a positive response to a book proposal sent to the Monash Asia Institute and this will result in a collection edited by the three team members on Indonesian Masculinities. During 2006 an ARC Discovery Grant application was prepared for this project by the team members and submitted in February 2007.

Donaldson, M., Howson, R. and Nilan, P. (2006) ‘Comparative Masculinities: Why Islamic Indonesian Men are Great Mates and Australian Men are Girls’, paper presented to the 16th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Asia Reconstructed: From Critiques of Development to Postcolonial Studies Wollongong 26 June – 29 June 2006. Available online

East Timorese in Melbourne: Community and Identity in a Time of Political Unrest in Timor Leste (Hedda Askland and Linda Connor, supervisor)

Through empirical research with East Timorese expatriates in Melbourne this PhD study, supported by IPRS and UoN research scholarships, considers how political unrest and national disintegration affect exiles’ experiences of self, community and nation. The purpose of the project is to increase our understanding of East Timorese refugees’ lives after the realisation of independence in East Timor, and to improve our understanding of how violence and political crisis affect the East Timorese community in Australia and its members. The research is based upon participant observation field research, including the techniques of neighbourhood studies and semi-structured interviews.

Askland, Heather (2005) ‘Young East Timorese in Australia: Becoming Part of a New Culture and the Impact of Refugee Experiences on Identity and Belonging’ Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Social Sciences (Sociology and Anthropology), The University of Newcastle. Available online

‘Bananas, Bastards and Victims’? Hybrid reflections on cultural belonging in intercountry adoptee narratives (Kim Gray and Ellen Jordan, supervisor)

The highly contested domain of intercountry adoption emerged in Australia at the end of the Vietnam War with the 1975 airlift of nearly three hundred orphans known as Operation Babylift. In the contemporary context, adoptees symbolise the fragility, chaos and confusion associated with postcolonial identity construction. They are also exposed to numerous, complex and often contradictory discourses about what it may mean to be separated from birth family and ‘birth culture’, and to be racially different living in multicultural Australia. This PhD study considers the hybrid lives of a group of adolescent and adult intercountry adoptees - born in Vietnam, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Malaysia - and their families living in Australia in the last three decades of the twentieth century (and the first years of the twenty-first).

GLOBALISATION AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Theme: Social Impact Analysis

Keeping Body and Soul Together: Social Transformation and Health Inequalities in Rural East Java (Caroline Haksoro Campbell and Linda Connor, supervisor)

Rural resilience continues to play a key role in ameliorating the impacts of the Asian financial crisis on Indonesia. Although agriculture is still an important part of production, new forms of employment made accessible by stronger linkages to the broader global economy mean that livelihood patterns have become increasingly diversified. Within ongoing debates of the erasure, crossing, permeability or otherwise of borders this thesis draws on diverse documentary sources and ethnographic research to look at the importance of place in the constitution of historical processes and contemporary cultural practices in the regency of Ponorogo, East Java. This APA supported PhD thesis looks at differentiating factors through the practices of medicine and healing and the complex interrelationships between belief, morality, behaviour, access, economics, social structures, health, and wellbeing.

The Effect of Development Interventions on Power Relations in the Villages of Les and Penuktukan (Nazrina Zuryani and Terry Leahy, supervisor)

The research investigates the effect of development interventions on the empowerment of community and women in eight different community groups in the villages of Les and Penuktukan in Northern Bali. It compares groups set up on the initiative of a EU-managed development project with that of other local women’s groups. This almost completed PhD study, supported by an AUSAID scholarship, analyses the limits of the empowerment achieved as well as the pervasive presence of patriarchy. A key finding is that a deeper account should be taken of ecological and socio-cultural factors and mechanisms, instead of solely focusing on the economic side of development. At the decision making level, procedures should be arise out of community consultation, allowing participation not only of the rich and educated, but also of the poor and less privileged, men and women alike.

Theme: Environmental Change

Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “Climate Change, Place and Community: An Ethnographic Study of the Hunter Valley, New South Wales”, 2008 – 2011, (Connor, L., Albrecht, G.A. and Higginbotham, N.)

This project contributes to the National Research Priority of “An Environmentally Sustainable Australia” and the Priority Goal of “Responding to Climate Change and Variability.” The interdisciplinary approach will advance social research on climate change in Australia, enhancing Australia’s international profile in this crucial field. The research will contribute to public debates on policy initiatives relevant to global warming and climate change. The regional and community focus of the study has the potential to contribute valuable knowledge about adaptive practices at the local level that can be applied to other locations in Australia and overseas.

Photo by Linda Connor

Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “Open Cuts to Land and Culture: Rural Community Engagement with Large-Scale Industrial Development”, (Connor, L., Albrecht, G.A. and Higginbotham, N.)

The effects of coal mining and combustion on local communities have not been adequately researched even though export-oriented coal production is a key element of Australia's economy in the 21st century. Increasing numbers of rural Australian communities are affected by profound changes to climate, environment and social life associated with open-cut mining and coal-fired power stations. This research examines the impact of these developments in the Hunter Valley of NSW, from the point of view of local communities. The understandings we gain will offer government, corporate and community stakeholders the prospect of mutually beneficial outcomes in dealing with these impacts.

Land and sustainability in cross-national perspectives (Terry Leahy)

This project undertakes a comparative analysis of environmental attitudes, landcare and sustainability in regional and rural communities in Indonesia, Australia and South Africa, using fieldwork and survey analysis. This project has been initiated with a review of agriculture in Sulawesi, looking at the way various forms of cash crop agriculture had undermined the sustainable strategies employed in traditional subsistence agriculture (published at gifteconomy.octapod.org). The next stage was a project of research carried out with Nazrina Zuryani on mixed cropping in North Bali, looking at the way the European Union irrigation project was changing agricultural practices and considering the long term viability of this newly irrigated agriculture (Chapter Five of PhD by Nazina Zuryani and recent joint publication for RIMA). Most recently, working with Masters students in the MSCD, I have been compiling their research reports and my own observations as a book on sustainable agriculture and food security for the South African villages. I am approaching publishers with the completed manuscript which we are also using as a teaching resource and distributing to agriculture departments in South Africa.

Climate change, citizenship and cosmopolitanism in Bali, Indonesia (Linda Connor)

The increasing focus on climate change and global warming in Indonesia is monitored and analysed through media and other sources, using the province of Bali as a case study. This project investigates how local civil society groups engage tactically and discursively with transnational environmentalist discourses and institutionalised political systems.

Logging, corruption and protest in Papua New Guinea (Andrew Lattas)

Here, I am working on different forms of opposition to the logging operations of Malaysian timber companies. In the Pomio area of East New Britain, Kivung followers claim that the true company, which will change their existence, will come from the dead and the timber has to be kept for them. Unlike other parts of New Britain, which have had their forests wiped out by timber companies, this has not yet happened on the same scale in Pomio. Here, Kivung followers use the dead to provide the ideological resources for resisting some of the new coercive and exploitative forms of development that dominate parts of the economy of PNG. In other areas of West New Britain, resistance has taken the form of road blockades and physical attacks upon Malaysian logging company workers. This has resulted in heavy handed policing by the riot squad. Much of the funding for politicians is often provided by logging companies and this has meant that often the state does not provide a reliable way of addressing local concerns about logging.

AUSTRALIA IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

Theme: Colonial Encounters

Post-Colonial Education in Fiji (Pam Nilan)

Following fieldwork undertaken for this project in Fiji in 2005, in 2006 2 journal articles were published and 2 conference papers were presented. The CAPSTRANS researcher is working on further publications with a team of researchers from the Fiji Institute of Technology. A chapter has been invited from the team headed by Associate Professor Nilan to appear in the UNESCO-UNEVOC International Handbook of Technical and Vocational Education and Training, to be published in 2007 by Springer, Dordrecht.

Nilan, P., Cavu, P., Tagicakivarata, I. and Hazelman, E. (2006) ‘White collar work: Career ambitions of Fiji final year school students’ International Education Journal Volume 7, Number 7, pp.895-905. Available online

Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, “Government, Religion and the Problem of Moral Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea”, 2008-2010 (Andrew Lattas)

Successful Australian international relations depend in understanding the popular culture within which neighbouring people formulate grievances and desires for change. PNG is physically close to Australia; it was an administered colony and today as a regional ally it receives much Australian aid. Many Australian organisations, companies and citizens reside in PNG. This project will provide accurate knowledge of how popular religious movements can provide a political language for voicing everyday expectations and grievances. Social and cultural changes can produce new perceptions of injustice that are voiced as a moral critique of present day government, where the future kingdom of God or of the dead is used as a point of ethical contrast.

Indigenous Affairs in the Enabling State (Barry Morris)

In this research, I am concerned with the broader process of major change in forms of state governance. These changes in polity and policy reveal new forms of governance that redefine the social and regulatory functions of the state and the relations of citizens to the state. The abolition of ATSIC, the removal of CDEP and more recent the Northern Territory intervention signals more than punitive forms of state intervention. Such shifts would appear to reveal major changes from the Keynesian styled welfare state to market driven neo-liberal forms of governance. The research I am interested in would be in carrying out fieldwork research to consider the impact of these new policies and there implementation in one or more regional communities.

Theme: Women and Modernist Religion in Asia

and the Asian Diaspora

Muslims and Christians: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in the Asia Pacific Region (Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel and Hilary Carey)

Through ehnographic studies of minotiry women in mixed Muslim-Christian communities in Australia and Bangladesh, the project (2005-2007) investigates the impact of new "religious nationalisms" on women's behaviour as a boundary marker of religious identity at local, national and international levels. It studies changes in areas of religious life linked to the sustainability of family and community, often the responsibility of women and increasingly marginalized by new global religious forms. The project will advance an understanding of women's responses to these changes and the consequences for the sustainability of communities.

Bangladeshi Muslim Women and the Islamic Revival (Santi Rozario)

This project investigates the growing involvement of urban Bangladeshi women with purist and "fundamentalist" forms of Islam. A particular focus is the growing adoption of the burqa, previously little used by Bangladeshi women. It is intended to carry out further research on this project, either in the context of the ESRC-funded project on Bangladeshi marriage or with separate funding.

2008-2010 The Economic and Social Research Council, "The Challenge of Islam: Young Bangladeshis, Marriage and Family in Bangladesh and the UK", Cardiff University, UK (Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel)

Marriage and the family are central but largely neglected areas in understanding contemporary developments in Islam. They have been little studied in comparison with more 'dramatic issues such as terrorism or veiling, but they have much to tell us about the appeal of modernist and Islamist ('fundamentalist') versions of Islam. We believe that one of the main attractions of modernist versions of Islam is their ability to offer solutions to the problems faced by contemporary Muslim families in a rapidly changing world. In particular, they provide a model of personal identity that refocuses the individual's life around a vision of marriage, family and community. If we want to understand contemporary forms of Islam, we need to focus on transformations of marriage and the family as much or more than on political factors or religious imperatives. Our study examines how marriage and the family are changing among young female and male Bangladeshis within and outside Bangladesh. We are particularly interested in how young Bangladeshis before and after marriage think of themselves in relation to their future or actual husband or wife, wider family network and community, and to the role that both secular, Westernised images of the nuclear family and romantic love, and new forms of Islam, may have in forming their ideas. This is an anthropological study, involving field research in Bangladesh and the UK by Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel, along with a research assistant. Sophie Gilliat-Ray will advise in relation to contemporary Islam. We will be studying young people in three main locations: rural Bangladesh (a village close to Dhaka city); urban Bangladesh (Dhaka city and Dhaka universities); and the Bangladeshi community in the UK (recent migrants, principally in Cardiff and London), through extended interviews and participant observations. We will also be studying relevant Islamic organisations, both through their writings and through interviews and participant observation.

Theme: Religion, Health and the Body

Subtle Bodies in Indic Religions and Related Traditions (Geoffrey Samuel)

This project is a series of activities funded by Cardiff University Visiting Research Fellow Grant, relating to subtle body concepts in Indic religions and related traditions. Professor Samuel organized conference panels in Delhi in Dec 2005 and Austin, Texas in April 2006, a visit to Cardiff University by Jay Johnston of Sydney University in Nov-Dec 2006 and an associated workshop in Cardiff in Dec 2006. A book proposal is under consideration by Cambridge University Press. A joint funding application is also under consideration with Jay Johnston and Ruth Barcan of Sydney University.

Longevity Practices and Concepts in Tibet: A Study of Long-Life Practices in the Dudjom Tradition (Geoffrey Samuel)

This project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, is a study of Tibetan concepts and practices relating to health and long life. We are studying a representative body of texts from the 19th and 20th centuries (the Chimé Sogt'ig or “immortal Life-Essence” practices within the Dudjom tradition) and working with contemporary scholars and practitioners within the tradition to establish how this tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism understands issues of longevity and good health and what techniques and practices are used to achieve them. We are particularly interested in how mind, body and the social and wider environment enter into concepts of longevity and health within these texts and practices.

Musical Form and Ritual Meaning in the Phur-pa Ritual Cycle of the Tibetan Bon-Po Religion (Geoffrey Samuel and Ricardo Canzio)

Joint project with Prof. Ricardo Canzio, National Taiwan University. Funded by the British Academy and National Science Council Taiwan. The aim of the project is to analyse the relationship between musical form and ritual communication in a major genre of Tibetan ritual practice, the Phur-pa ritual cycle of the Tibetan Bon-po (or Bon) religion. The performative aspects of Tibetan liturgy have been largely neglected in the existing literature. This project aims at integrating the analysis of the complex musical forms and procedures involved in this ritual cycle with the ritual action, including the "internal" visualisations and meditative procedures involved in the practice and the various interactions with deities and spiritual forces implied and assumed by the practice.

CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION

Theme: Representing the Indonesian Nation

Young people, popular culture, identity and social change in Indonesia (Pam Nilan)

In 2006, Associate Professor Nilan was a member of an interdisciplinary team from four universities that received a an ARC grant for a project titled Ambivalent Adolescents in Indonesia. A key theme of this larger project is youth, popular culture, identity and change in Indonesia. In 2006 she produced 3 book chapters and 1 conference paper from this project. In October, a Symposium on Youth and Islamic Education in Indonesia (invited participants only) was held at The University of Western Australia by the larger project team. A short paper titled ‘Indonesian Pesantren and the Spirit of Education’ was presented by Dr Nilan.

From the Margins of History - A Long Babad of Jembrana, Bali (Mary Ida Bagus

and Linda Connor, supervisor)

The province of Bali in Indonesia currently represents a unitary Hindu domain adrift in a sea of equally contrived Indonesian 'diversities'. These diversities, known as agama, are compulsory official categories of religion. One area of Bali significantly excluded from many histories is the region of Jembrana in West Bali. This APA-funded thesis, completed in 2006, reunites Jembrana with Balinese history as a place occupied by historical subjects, identifying and analysing ritual interactions between people from discrete ethnic and religious groups. These interactions memorialise the 'cosmopolitanism' that is characteristic of Balinese history.

Theme: Post-Hanson Cultural politics:

ANZAC Nationalism, Asia-Pacific and Europe

ANZAC Nationalism and secular pilgrimages (Barry Morris)

The principal focus of this project is a revitalised ‘ANZAC nationalism’, its historical values and meanings. The ethnography focuses on the contemporary meanings expressed by those who participate in the organised tours to a number of war memorial sites in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. The force of nationalist sensibility requires a cultural understanding of the relationship between nationalist beginnings, commemorative rites, and the role of war in Australia's relationship with Asia-Pacific and Europe. This project seeks to understand this important dimension of Australian nationalism. The project will strengthen the understanding of Australia’s historical connections with its Asia-Pacific region and Europe.

"They Always Seem to be Angry": The Cronulla Riot and the Civilising Pleasures of the Sun (Andrew Lattas)

Contemporary ethnic rivalries often deny participation in racism and instead use the language of nationalism to formulate an etiquette of civility as defining national belonging. In contemporary Australia, world events such as the Bali Bombings, the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror have empowered a civilisational logic, which often becomes localised to provide the moral terms for culturally ranking who has the capacity to participate in the pleasures of a modern, enlightened nation. A culture of relaxation built around the beach, around the civilised enjoyment of the outdoors, is used as a point of contrast for a renewed Orientalism. It takes up breaches of everyday etiquette to create a psychological portrait of an uncivilised Arab Other who does not know how to relax and be peaceful.