• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.175-203
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• 2024

With the enactment of international free trade and economic agreements and cooperation, BIMP-EAGA is an opportunity to accelerate development and economic growth in eastern Indonesia. This subregional cooperation could be used to reduce the development gap or inequality between the western and eastern regions, which are geographically, demographically, and economically different. This cooperation also may accelerate development in the border area. This study analyzes Indonesia's policies related to connectivity in BIMP-EAGA subregional cooperation and its implementation. The study results show that the National Secretariat of Sub-Regional Economic Cooperation has encouraged cooperation clusters ranging from natural resources, transportation, infrastructure, ICT, and tourism to MSMEs. In terms of connectivity, Indonesia is also involved in the development program of three economic corridors, namely West Borneo, East Borneo, and Sulu-Sulawesi. Indonesia's involvement in the three corridors has boosted the connectivity of Indonesia's territory, especially border areas, with neighboring countries. Connectivity has covered not only physical but also institutional and people-to-people dimensions. However, there are still several challenges, ranging from the standardization of the Customs, Immigration, and Quarantine (CIQ) mechanisms, improvement of institutional quality, and consistent strong political will among the involved parties. In addition, considering the vulnerability of the BIMP subregion to transnational crimes and acts of radical terrorism, BIMP-EAGA needs to think about solutions to overcome these cross-border security problems so that the momentum of development in the subregion may be sustained.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.215-261
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• 2024

In the 1960s, the Aoheng, a small tribal group with immense territories on the upper Mahakam River, began out-migrating to downstream settlements in search of better living conditions. A trickle of young men, then their families, and more sizable groups, they settled in various towns along the river. In Samarinda, the provincial capital, they came to form a community of several hundred. When the powerful forest product boom (c. 1990) for the P. R. China market opened up the hinterland to extractive ventures, many Aoheng returned home to protect their rich natural resources from forceful outsiders. After 1998, decentralization policies established scores of new provinces, regencies, and districts across the country. Soon, West-Kutai was created as the interior "Dayak" regency, upstream and autonomous from the Moslem-Malay coastal regions. Coal mining and oilpalm plantations massively intensified, while Sendawar, its capital, offered hundreds of civil-service jobs and business opportunities. In 2012, West-Kutai was split to create yet another regency, Upper-Mahakam, prompting robust Aoheng reflux/return moves toward its upstream capital, Ujoh-Bilang. Already open to wild-frontier-style inroads by outsiders, it will soon be flooded by industrial ventures. The Aoheng, bound to become a minority in their own district, are struggling to defer their inevitable final dissolution.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.147-184
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• 2024

At the dawn of the 20^th century, Southeast Asian female poets increasingly delved into introspective reflections on gender, giving rise to a heightened self-awareness in their artistic contemplations. This shift in perspective brought forth numerous crucial topics for discussion, such as the historical role of female poets, women's experiences, feminine language, female voices, and female identity. The exploration of language has empowered female poets to discover a "third space" that allows them to exist and eliminate the pervasive gaps of women in Southeast Asia, creating social changes, fostering concepts of feminine culture, and establishing progressive social institutions. Marjorie Evasco (1953-) and Dư Thị Hoàn (1947 - ) are exemplary representatives of contemporary Southeast Asian women's poetry due to their significant artistic contributions and pivotal roles in promoting feminist literature in their respective countries. This study compares their poetic works, focusing on three crucial aspects: self-awareness of femininity and feminism as an identity autonomy, writing between two languages to express their identities, and constructing the image of mother and motherhood from personal and historical perspectives. Hence, the article highlights that Southeast Asian female poets, throughout different historical contexts, persistently forge their identities and strive for equal footing with men in society. Also, their invaluable contributions have significantly enriched the feminist literary tradition in Asia.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.53-80
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• 2020

Students of global development are often introduced to Southeast Asia by reading many of the influential authors whose ideas were derived from their experiences in the region. John Furnivall, Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James Scott have made Southeast Asia relevant to comprehending developments far beyond the region. It might even be added that others come to the region because it has also been the home to many key historical events and seminal social developments. However, when many of the best-known writings (and textbooks) of global history are examined, treatment of Southeast Asia is often scarce and in the worst cases non-existent. It is within this context that this paper will examine Southeast Asia's role in the interpretation of global history. The paper will consider the 'global history' as a historical production in order to depict the ways in which the construction of global narratives can be a reflection of the immediate needs of historians. Furthermore, the discussion will be historiographic, exhibiting the manner in which key global histories portrayed the significance of the region. Particular importance will be placed on the ways in which the region is used to present larger historical trajectories. Additionally, the paper will consider instances when Southeast Asia is either profoundly underrepresented in global narratives or misrepresented by global historians. Last, since the discussion will probe the nature of 'global history', it will also consider what the subject might look like from a Southeast Asian point of view. The paper will end by exploring the ways in which the region's history might be augmented to become visible to those who live outside or have little knowledge about it. Visual augmented reality offers great potential in many areas of education, training and heritage preservation. To draw upon augmented reality as a basic metaphor for enquiry (and methodology) means asking a different kind of question: how can a region be "augmented" to become (at least in this case) more prominent. That is, how can the region's nations, histories and cultures become augmented so that they can become the center of historical global narratives in their own right. Or, to put this in more familiar terms, how can the "autonomous voices" associated with the region make themselves heard?

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.109-134
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• 2021

Indonesia has undergone the rapid deforestation largely as a result of practical consequences of human overexploitation of the forest. Between 1950 and 2015, around 43% of the forest area in Indonesia had been lost (68.0 million hectares). The process of deforestation has partly been a response to the rapidly intensifying 'global' and 'domestic' economic demands. Deforestation in Indonesia is also indirectly due to 'materialism-driven' value system and the corresponding weakening of Indonesian ethics. Therefore, given that socio-cultural expressions of modern Indonesian value systems have mostly taken place within a framework of Islam, the aim of the paper is to attempt to find Islamic ethics in general, which can provide the basis of ecological ethics to prevent rapid deforestation in Indonesia. The paper is composed of the followings. First, following the 'Introduction', it outlines the historical process of deforestation in Indonesia and also its corresponding socio-economic contexts. Then it moves on to talk about ecological ethics in general, thereby emphasizing that the phenomenological problem of deforestation needs to be conceived at a philosophical level beyond ecological phenomena. After discussing the ecological ethics, the paper proceeds to examine Islamic ethics as a canonical framework of ecological ethics in Indonesia. In doing so, it attempts to apply the Islamic ethics to the diverse Indonesian society and then considers 'Pancasila' as a potential framework for a pragmatic link between Islam ethics and Indonesian society. Having said that, in conclusion, the paper argues that there is a need for 'concrete' translation of 'Pancasila' into implementation in an Indonesian context, thereby various agents (government, policy-practitioners, concessionaires and also all the Indonesian) may agree in saying 'no' to overexploitation of the forest, to rapid depletion of the forest and to 'unsustainable' development practices.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.157-200
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• 2020

This paper explores critically and historically some of the popular academic views concerning the development of the study of Southeast Asia through the lens of the contributions of particular scholars and institutions. Within the broad field of Southeast Asian Studies the focus is on the disciplines of geography, history and ethnology. There are certain views concerning the development of scholarship on Southeast Asia which continue to surface and have acquired, or are in the process of acquiring "mythical" status. Among the most enduring is the claim that the region is a post-Second World War construction primarily arising from Western politico-strategic and economic preoccupations. More specifically, it is said that Southeast Asian Studies for a considerable period of time has been subject to the American domination of this field of scholarship, located in programs of study in such institutions as Cornell, Yale and California, Berkeley, and, within those institutions, focused on particular scholars who have exerted considerable influence on the directions which research has taken. Another is that, based on the model or template of Southeast Asian Studies (and other area studies projects) developed primarily in the USA, it has distinctive characteristics as a scholarly enterprise in that it is multidisciplinary, requires command of the vernacular, and assigns special importance to what has been termed 'groundedness' and historical, geographical and cultural contextualization; in other words, a Southeast Asian Studies approach as distinct from disciplinarybased studies addresses local concerns, interests, perspectives and priorities through in-depth, on-the-ground, engaged scholarship. Finally, views have emerged that argue that a truly Southeast Asian Studies project can only be achieved if it is based on a set of locally-generated concepts, methods and approaches to replace Western ethnocentrism and intellectual hegemony.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.91-129
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• 2023

This paper reports the findings of a multimodal study conducted on 10 travel blog posts about Vietnam by seven British professional travel bloggers. The study takes a sociolinguistic view to tourism by seeing travel blogs as a source for linguistic and other semiotic materials while considering language as situated practice for the social construction of fundamental categories such as "human," "society," and "nation." It borrows concepts from Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics for interpersonal metafunction to develop an analytical framework to study how the co-occurrence of text and still images in these travel blog posts formulated the portrayal of Vietnam as a tourism destination and indicated the main sociolinguistic features of the blogs. The analysis of appreciation values and interactive qualities encoded in evaluative adjectives and still images show that Vietnam is generally portrayed as a country of identity and diversity. It provides tourists with positive experiences in terms of places of interest, food and local lifestyles and is cost-competitive. Strangerhood and authenticity are two outstanding sociolinguistic features exhibited in these travel blog posts. The findings of this study also underline the co-contribution of the linguistic sign, in this case evaluative adjectives, and the visual sign, in this case still images, as interpersonal meaning-making resources. To portray Vietnam, still images served as integral elements to evidence the credibility of verbal narrations. To unveil sociolinguistic characteristics of travel blogs, still images supported the linguistic realizations of authenticity and strangerhood on the posts, and in some case delivered an even stronger message than words. Not only does the study present a source of feedback from international travelers to tourism practice in Vietnam, but it also provides insights into multimodal analysis of tourism discourse which remains an under-researched area in Vietnam.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.121-142
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• 2018

Area studies are sometimes framed as focused on specific localities, rooted in deep linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge, and hence empirically rich but, as a result, as yielding non-transferable/non-translatable findings and hence as theoretically poor. In Europe and North America some social science disciplines like sociology, economics and political science routinely dismiss any reference to local specifics as parochial "noise" interfering with their universalizing pretensions which in reality obscure their own Euro-American parochialism. For more qualitatively oriented disciplines like history, anthropology and cultural studies the inherent non-universality of (geographically constricted) area studies presents a predicament which is increasingly fought out by resorting to philosophical concepts which usually have a Eurocentric pedigree. In this paper, however, I argue that concepts with arguably European pedigree - like religion, culture, identity, heritage and art - travel around the world and are adopted through vernacular discourses that are specific to locally inflected histories and cultural contexts by annexing existing vocabularies as linguistic vehicles. In the process, these vernacularized "universal" concepts acquire different meanings or connotations, and can be used as powerful devices in local discursive fields. The study of these processes offer at once a powerful antidote against simplistic notions of "global"/"universal" and "local," and a potential corrective to localizing parochialism and blindly Eurocentric universalism. I develop this substantive argument with reference to my own professional, disciplinary and theoretical trajectory as an anthropologist and historian focusing on Vietnam, who used that experience - and the empirical puzzles and wonder encountered - in order to develop theoretical interests and questions that became the basis for larger-scale, comparative research projects in Japan, China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Europe. The subsequent challenge is to bring the results of such larger, comparative research "home" to Vietnam in a meaningful way, and thus overcome the limitations of both area studies and Eurocentric disciplines.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.63-91
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• 2018

One of the goals of this article is to continue the momentum begun by emerging scholarship on theory and practice of writing about visual culture of and in Southeast Asia. I hope to offer culturally sensitive and embodied ways of looking at images and objects as sites/sights of cultural knowledge as further theoretical intervention. The argument put forward in my essay is three-fold: first, I critique the prevailing logocentric approach in the field of Southeast Asian Studies and I argue that in a postcolonial, global, and transnational period, it is important to be inclusive of other objects as sites/sights of social, political and cultural analysis beyond written and oral texts. Second, I argue that although it has its own political and theoretical problems, the evolving field of Visual Studies as it is practiced in the United States is one of many ways to decolonize the prevailing logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Third, I argue that if one reads these Euro-American derived theories of vision and visuality through the lens of what Walter Mignolo calls "colonial difference(s)," then Visual Studies as an evolving field has the potential to offer more nuanced local ways of looking at and understanding objects, vision, and visuality. Last, I point out that unlike in the West where there is an understanding of pure, objective and empirical vision, local Southeast Asian perspectives on objects and visions are more embodied and multi-sensorial. I argue that if one is ethically mindful of the local cultural ways of seeing and knowing objects, then the evolving field of Visual Studies offers a much-needed intervention to the privileged, lingering logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Moreover, these alternative methods might help to decolonize method and theory in academic disciplines that were invented during the colonial period.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.1-28
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• 2010

This paper offers a brief introduction to Vietnamese folk paintings. The discussion compares Vietnamese folk paintings with the Korean folk painting tradition. Among the main purposes of this paper is the exploration of directions for future research on Vietnamese folk paintings. Vietnamese folk paintings, although extensively influenced by their Chinese tradition of minjian nianhua (folk New Year pictures), form an independent tradition, reflecting the local lifestyle and religious practices of Vietnam. However, compared to Korea or Japan, China remains the dominant source of influence for Vietnamese folk paintings. They were either created using a combination of painting and woodblock printing techniques, which was also the case with minjian nianhua, or using multicolor woodblock printing techniques. In cities like Hang Chong, the combination of painting and woodblock printing techniques was used mainly, following the customary practice in Yangliuqing in Tianjin, China, in which colors were added to the drawing printed from the woodblock. Meanwhile, folk paintings produced in rural areas such as Dong Ho are wholly color woodblock prints, similar to minjian nianhua from Yangjiabu in Weifang. In Lang Sinh, simple drawings, intended for casual purposes, were also created using the combination of woodblock printing and painting techniques. Folk paintings produced in cities and rural areas were distinct from each other, not just in techniques, but also in terms of style and theme. Vietnamese folk paintings show a certain degree of thematic similarity with Joseon folk paintings. This is mainly due to the fact that the two countries' folk paintings developed and evolved in parallel with their Chinese counterparts, minjian nianhua. Also noteworthy is the fact that Vietnamese folk paintings, while they share the simplicity and candidness of Joseon folk paintings, are at the same time somewhat more decorative than the latter. For best results, future research on Vietnamese folk paintings should be conducted together with research on minjian nianhua. Traditional pigments constitute an important area of research in this field. Attention should be also paid to the religious paintings of ethnic minorities in Vietnam, as they are discovered in the future.