[Anthropgrad] Wednesday seminar

[Fay castles]

Wednesday's Anthropology Seminar, 9.30-11 am Coombs Bldg, Seminar Room A:


String: binding self to power in Southeast Asia

Andrew Walker
Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program
College of Asia and the Pacific

String is a common element in many Southeast Asian rituals. String is 
used to link people and objects to sources of sacred power. String 
unites ritual participants in a single field of auspiciousness. String 
binds bodies and souls. And, on certain occasions, string is ritually 
destroyed to sever connections with accumulated misfortune.

In this paper the motif of string is used as starting point for 
exploring local manifestations of state power. Drawing on 
anthropological fieldwork in northern Thailand, the paper argues that 
rural people seek to bind themselves to the auspicious, productive and 
munificent power of the state, and in doing so participate in localised 
processes of state formation. The state is bound to the self in many 
different ways: displaying signs and pictures, wearing particular 
clothes, entering into personal relationships, sharing food and 
attending meetings. My focus here will be on the ways in which rural 
villagers bind themselves to the state by participating in modern 
rituals of administration and development, principally through the 
creation and implementation of “projects” (/krongkan/).

Considerable attention has been given to the ways in which state 
development projects create a legible population. The bonds created by 
string are often anything but legible. But they do highlight a local 
preoccupation, not with legibility, but with eligibility. To bind 
oneself to the state is to declare oneself an eligible participant in an 
auspicious field of power.


-- 

Dr Assa Doron
Research Fellow
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
ph: 61-2-6125-3870
fax: 61-2-6125-3023
email: Assa.Doron at anu.edu.au
ANU CRICOS # 00120C