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Quality-of-life research leans toward measuring placed-based attributes of a locale while less attention has been given to understanding what people mean by quality of life. This paper reiterates that quality-of-life research is intrinsically about juxtaposing life conditions and life evaluation, thereby unveiling critical issues immanent in a society (Castells, 1983). This paper draws on interviews conducted in public housing neighbourhoods in Singapore to examine the colloquial meanings of quality of life and the normative connotations that people attach to it. It unveils the efforts to reconcile fast and slow and discusses the different temporalities underpinning life domains and how spatial planning could engage with the issue of time to improve quality of life. The Singapore case is insightful to contemplate the challenges of reconciling the increasing needs of going slower amid an accelerated pace of life, which is a contradictory yet pervasive characteristic of life in contemporary capitalist societies.

This paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted in a public hospital in Bangladesh. The study shows how the social dynamics necessary to deal with the structural realities of the hospital give this cosmopolitan institution a local character. In this paper, we describe this local character by focusing on the lower-level hospital staff, such as ward boys, cleaners, and gatemen. Social inequality and exclusion are rampant in Bangladeshi public hospitals. Doctors and nurses are unwilling to communicate with patients and their relatives, while the latter are unable to approach the former for specific help or information. Our research, shows how low-level support workers fill the void between the two “factions” and act as brokers transporting information and activities between these factions. By doing so they do not only make a crucial contribution to the functioning of the ward, but also gain considerable influence in spite of their low position.

At present, a great deal of the scholarly research on Indonesia focuses on the processes of Islamisation. This paper will discuss a phenomenon that seems to point in a different direction, namely the contemporary reconfiguration of dukun/spiritual experts called paranormal. These mystics indicate a peculiar form of pluralism. They are an assemblage of tradition and modernity, locality and translocality, religion and mysticism, spirituality and business, and global esotericism and popular psychology. Most of them belong to the urban middle class, are highly professional, and make extensive use of modern mass media to advertise their supernatural skills. Yet, how do they position themselves in Indonesian and global cultural contexts? This paper identifies the ongoing ambivalence between cosmopolitan ideas and their rupture in polarising, orientalist, and occidentalist imaginaries. Finally, a new understanding of cosmopolitanism is suggested that expands the reference beyond the world of humans by also including a plurality of supernatural powers.

Migrant children are an unintended consequence of the widened rural-urban gap in China. In Dengfeng, a county-level city in central China, many of the 70,000 full-time martial arts students were rural-to-urban migrant children ‘floating’ with their parents from one place to another. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores why these migrant children ‘migrated’ to martial arts schools for educational purposes and how they and their parents seek to establish a new value system within which different forms of capital can be accumulated, disseminated, and transformed as society expects. This paper argues that the (imaginary) transition between and flow of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital construct a path to an aspirational future used by both these martial arts students and their parents.

Identity of Banaras was once again back in the limelight with the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) Prime Ministerial candidate Mr. Narendra Modi choosing to represent the city. Known also as Kashi and Varanasi, Banaras indeed played a strategic role in representing the politics the incumbent party believed in. With the overwhelming majority to Modi, the city of Banaras is further idealized as an archetypal city of the Brahminical Hinduism with the spectacular images of temples and ghats that remain teeming with Pandas and devotees. This particular Hindu identity of the city has been constructed through the selective images over time from the colonial period onwards in the 19th century. Identity formation, whether of a community or a city, social or symbolic is spatially situated process and spatial centrality is important in understanding the identity of a city in general and Banaras in particular. We in this paper argue that how in case of Banaras some spaces were mobilized and centralized to create this hindutva identity. In this representational mobilization of identity, the city of Banaras represents a spectacular space removed from its own spatiality. Proclaimed space of Banaras seems not to be a product of social practices rather it is symbolic spaces generated through the trajectories of ideologies of certain groups. This process of formation of identity is not a radical departure, rather it as a culmination of re-emerging Hindu nationalist movement during 19th and 20th century. In this paper, we bring forth the celebration of Ravidas Jyanti as the performance of possibilities and we try to identity the spaces of hope amidst the overarching outcry. Thinking through the categories of space and performance and their interpolations in Banaras, this article attempts to reconfigure the identity of this city beyond the Hindu right-wing rhetoric and pretension.

This paper examines the wari as a discursive terrain produced by the interface of folk and Hinduised cultures. We focus on socio-religious interactions and divergences as crucial sites for the production of a discourse on the economy of worship, devotion and social equality. Popularly understood as a procession to Pandharpur, wari is understood here as a social force mediating the transmission of ideas and practices through the interface of various publics. We interpret wari as a process generated through the reflexivity of productive castes interacting with Brahminical Hinduism, and the articulation of social ethics reflecting specific realities and aspirations of allied communities with an emphasis on worldly relationships. The wari’s grammar of devotion subverts abstract notions of the spiritual by embedding them in the local and everyday. Its emergence from regional counter-hegemonic agitations reflects the existential crises and agency of Maharashtra’s productive castes, and the instrumentality of local parlance in demystifying Brahminical representations of society. The term discursive comprises a vocabulary of devotion addressing cultural material alienation, social disparity, agency and the formation of intentional publics in constituting sites for social reform. This paper relies on field data and existing literature to consolidate its argument.

Philanthropic organisations are engaged in diverse welfare and development works including community development in India. A substantial number of these organisations are faith-based organisations (FBOs). While religion impacts people in many ways, religious tenets and practices have shaped, and in many cases strengthened, much of philanthropic activity. This paper focuses on the socio-economic change impacted by a philanthropic organisation called Bettiah Parish Society, successively managed by two FBOs since 1745, for the development of a Christian community, located at Bettiah, West Champaran District, in the State of Bihar, eastern India. The two FBOs were the Capuchin Mission Society (1745–1921), and the Patna Jesuit Society (1921–2000). The paper explores the influence and impact of these two external, goal-oriented FBOs on the 265-year-old Bettiah Christian community in Bihar. Aside a brief discussion on the missionary agents and their religion-induced ideologies, vision and motivations that seem to have goaded them engage in philanthropic works, the main discussion will be on the second aspect, namely the impact of their philanthropic action on the recipient community. The overall impact was (1) the construction of a Christian community (the Bettiah Christians) from among disparate convert groups, formerly belonging to different Hindu castes, and (2) changes in the socio-economic structures of the community through development aid and education. I have used an inter-disciplinary method for this study, relying much on historical, sociological and anthropological data, collected during a field study in 1998, and again in 2010.

The aim of this paper is to the study of the role of women Buddhists in the delivery of Buddhist compassion and the micro-politics of volunteerism from a feminist perspective. It sets out to ask a simple question: What attracts and motivates the Chinese women Buddhists to become actively engaged in religious volunteerism and commit their time, energies and resources into doing philanthropic works for the greater needs of their local and transnational communities. Ethnographically, I want to explore how through their understanding of the Buddhist teachings, these women Buddhists interpret and integrate their status, role and actions within their local socially-engaged Buddhist community. At the same time, to understand how, in today’s globalised world, these women focus and frame themselves as performers of emotive compassion in the local and global societies. Through this study, this paper argues that using a feminist perspective will shed light on the micro-politics of women’s involvement in Buddhist volunteerism in three areas: empowerment, social visibility and emotive philanthropy.

This Introduction pulls together the main themes of the papers in this special issue, which covers major regions in Asia from Japan, Korea and China to Indonesia, India and Iran. The papers are all critical of the implications of imposing Eurocentric and metropolitan frameworks on the diverse assemblages of practices of producing, distributing and engaging with Asian media and film. Bringing a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to bear, the contributors question existing approaches and concepts, reconsider what should count as objects of study and propose new theoretical approaches appropriate to the study of such large and rapidly changing industries. What emerges, however, is the extent to which issues of knowledge and power permeate not just the debates, but also the critiques. Drawing upon the papers, the Introduction concludes by suggesting the possibilities of a more rigorous and sustained analysis in terms of practice.

This paper offers an ethnographic account of the self-formation experiences of Mainland Chinese undergraduate students as “foreign talents” in a Singaporean university. While extant scholarship often points out that international educational sojourn has transformative effects on the student-sojourners, detailed empirical examination of how such transformations take place is still lacking; this paper furnishes a microscopic case study in this vein. By looking at Chinese international students in the (Southeast) Asian city-state Singapore, the paper is also an effort to offer a relatively rare glimpse into the subjective dimension of intra-Asia student mobility. Furthermore, with regard to the Singapore local context, this account seeks to throw some new light on the hotly-debated “foreign talent” issue from the perspective of the scholarship-receiving students (“scholars”). With the title being a playful riff on G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical canon, this paper uses Hegelian notions such as self-consciousness, the “other”, desire, and negation to narrate and analyse those aspects of the Mainland Chinese scholars’ self-(trans)formative experiences revolving around the idiom of “very China”-ness.

Scholarship on Christianity in Malaysia has been dominated by denominational church history, as well as the study of urban, middle-class and English-speaking church congregations in the post-Independence period. In focusing on the vernacular Chinese Protestant church in Malaysia, and one of its most prominent para-church organisations, called The Bridge, this paper draws attention to the variegated histories of Christian conversion and dissemination in Malaysia, and the various modes and meanings of Christian identity as incorporated into different local communities and cultures. The history of the Chinese Protestant church suggested in the first part of the paper takes as its point of departure the distinction between mission and migrant churches, the latter being the origin of the vernacular Chinese churches in Malaysia. The second part of the paper traces the emergence of a Chinese para-church lay organisation called The Bridge, and the Chinese Christian intellectuals behind it, in their mission to engage the larger Chinese and national public through literary publications and other media outreach activities. In so doing, these Chinese Christian intellectuals also drew on the resources of an East Asian and overseas Chinese Christian network, while searching for their destiny as Chinese Christians in the national context of Malaysia. By pointing to the importance of regional, Chinese-language Christian networks, and the complexity of vernacular Christian subjectivity, the paper hopes to fill a gap in the existing literature on Christianity in Malaysia, as well as make a contribution to on-going debates on issues of localisation, globalisation and authenticity in global Christianity.

Psychoanalysis is gaining popularity as a tool for interrogating political problems. This paper applies the three fundamental diagnostic categories of neurosis, psychosis and perversion to Malaysian socio-political discourse. This endeavour is urgent given the political upheavals in the country since the 2008 general elections where the ruling National Alliance regime lost its two-third majority in parliament, a result repeated again five years later at the thirteenth general elections. Nevertheless, democratic abuses and religious extremism remain strife (and has arguably grown worse) in the country. Political action is thus rendered even more urgent and thus, arguably, the need for fresh lenses with which to view the present (and even past) injustices perpetuated by the reigning administration. As such, this paper will analyse issues and events like the ‘Allah’ controversy, Mahathirism, Ops Lalang and cronyism in Malaysian politics, and seeks to do so using conceptual tools of a Lacanian-Žižekian nature. If the nature of the problem can be reviewed and rethought, perhaps a new way of thinking about the solutions may also arise, leading even to a reimagining of the very idea of the political.

Although religious diversity is legally supported in Indonesia, incidents of attacks on religious minorities and anxiety towards the practice of religious pluralism have continued to plague the country. This paper will analyse factors limiting the practice of religious diversity in post-Suharto Indonesia with a focus on two types of important grass-roots religious institutions. The first type is religious philanthropic organizations, which provide social services for natural disaster victims and the poor. The second type of religious institution is traditional Islamic schools known as pesantren salaf, one of most the important educational institutions for Islamic scholars. This paper will show that increased religiosity has contributed to the growth of socially-engaged religious organizations being used to address social problems, but these religious institutions are naturally developing their operational links within their own religious affiliations and communication beyond their religion is restricted because of mutual anxiety. This paper will also examine the challenge presented by traditional Islamic educational institutions. In order to protect Islam from secularism, these institutions are promoting theologically conservative Islamic teachings that curtail the practice of religious diversity at the grassroots level. Our case studies show that religious education has unintentionally limited the development of religious diversity in Indonesia.

This paper examines the dynamic boundaries of Chinese identities and the role of family narratives in their formation. It examines the interplay between history and memory, focusing on traditions regarding ancestors of the Fujian Guo lineage of Muslim descent in China, Taiwan and the Philippines, over six centuries. Existing scholarship approaches these traditions in ethnic terms, corresponding to the ethnic discourse prevalent in the P.R.C., focusing solely on mainland groups, but overlooking other variations found overseas. Hence, scholars portray the changing narratives as reflecting a linear process: from past sinicisation, to today’s more “historically authentic” Hui identity. The present analysis offers a broader socio-cultural overview, showing how the pan-Asian Guo lineage re-imagines familial history across time and space by highlighting the forced assimilation narrative in which their early Ming ancestors falsely adopted Guo Ziyi, a Han-Chinese national hero, as their ancestor. The paper follows the narrative’s continuous transformations, analysing different interpretations of assuming Chinese identity among Muslims’ descendants within different contexts of contemporary Asia.

Abstract Nearly four decades after the Khmer Rouge genocide, the Cambodian people have found some solace to a tragic past that forever has defined their personal and collective identities. The first of five defendants on trial in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the ECCC), Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch, Chief Warden of S-21) was found guilty of crimes against humanity and Grave Breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 February 2012. Aside from his criminal reputation as the head executioner of S-21, what other legacy does Duch leave behind? In particular, what psycho-emotional legacy does he leave his children? This paper focuses on the social and political legacy passed on to Duch’s eldest son as it affects the possibilities for his contributing to reconciliation, forgiveness, and ‘healing justice’ in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. The paper also warns against casting perpetrators’ children as bystanders to their own history or as being guilty of their parents’ crimes, and provides an alternative Khmer Rouge narrative: that of the children of perpetrators and how their identities fit within the larger Cambodian national identity and search for justice.

Based on a close reading of Malay textual sources, this paper looks at the nature of the trading system in place in the Western Malay World towards the end of the 18th century and in particular the role Francis Light played within this system. Touching on Braudel’s broad concept of world theatre and world economy and on Van Leur’s seminal work on the periodization of Southeast Asian history post-Melaka, the paper intends to challenge established notions of the exercise of power and the nature of economic relations in the Malay World during the late 18th century.

Applying Bourdieu’s theoretical framework on the correspondence between mental structures and social structures, this paper examines the persistence of educational underachievement among working class Malay youths in Singapore. Accordingly, my first objective is to document the social structure, namely a largely working class neighbourhood where these Malay youths have grown up. My second aim is to analyse how everyday cultural practices and interactions among peers in the neighbourhood significantly reinforced these youths’ levelled aspirations. I maintain that by believing in ‘taking the gravel road’, which is symbolically rough, uneven and uncertain, these youths justified the irrelevance of doing well in school. Succinctly, this essay demonstrates the close correspondence between the perceptions of the odds of success and the educational underperformance of the Malay youths. Hence, this paper would be of interest to scholars in the Malay Peninsula, as well as experts concerned with the intertwining of education with class and ethnicity.

Abstract In response to difficulties faced by families in caring for the aged, the government of Taiwan launched a foreign live-in caregiver programme in 1992. This paper draws upon literature on family, domestic work and motives for caregiving to examine how the long-term co-residence of migrant live-in elder care-workers reconfigures Taiwanese families. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews conducted in the summer of 2009 with 20 Vietnamese migrant live-in care-workers, uses the concept of ‘social family’ to document the close emotional and quasi-familial relationships between foreign care-workers and members of Taiwanese families. Narratives shed light on the dynamics of these relationships and show the limitations of the concept. The inherent asymmetrical employer-employee power relationship remains, while workers constantly negotiate contradictory feelings and positions in the intimate sphere of the employers’ private homes. This paper emphasizes the mutual dependency that migrants experience as both workers and members of a new family. Rather than being seen as cheap, disposable labour, migrants become indispensable to the families. It is this dependency and intimacy that make them part of the family, but also continues to make them vulnerable to abuse.

This paper describes the contemporary context of Zikir Maulud, a popular, religiously-inspired musical practice that has a long history in Sambas, a regency in West Kalimantan. The formation of a Zikir Maulud association several years ago resulted in the establishment of a monthly, inter-village circuit, one in which women figure prominently as performers and the representatives of their village. Despite this initiative, there is little evidence that Zikir Maulud is attracting new performers. The paper outlines three broad approaches to the study of Malay cultural forms, before arguing that people’s interest in Zikir Maulud is best understood in relation to changes associated with urbanisation, social mobility and new media. These social forces not only erode the forms of sociality that support Zikir Maulud as a village-based cultural performance, but result in new cultural sensibilities and modes of textuality, which shape people’s level of interest and participation in cultural forms. Here Zikir Maulud and its association with older, village-based forms of entertainment cannot compete with vernacular forms of digitalised and audiovisual entertainment that situate people in broader, translocal contexts.

One of the outcomes of the radical decentralisation policies accompanying political reform and democratisation in Indonesia is a sustained administrative programme known by the term pemekaran, or a ‘blossoming’ of new administrative and budgetary units that extend to the farthest corners of the nation. This paper explores aspects and impacts of the pemekaran process as it unfolds in two remote corners of Indonesia, namely the sub-district of Routa in Konawe Regency of Southeast Sulawesi and the newly-established district of Bintuni in the swamp lands of Bintuni Gulf, West Papua. In both regions the strategic possibilities that accompany pemekaran have fostered a vibrant local politic based around appeals to established patterns of landed authority. But the logic of pemekaran can lead to fragmentation and confusion over jurisdictional authority. Critics argue that the process dilutes capacity and political authority. Supporters acknowledge the limits but applaud the extension of development funding into areas which otherwise would remain isolated and impoverished. The paper explores some of the dimensions of this debate and the role of pemekaran in shaping local experience on the margins of the state.

Globalisation and social inequalities are the central research interests of a number of scholars in the world today. This Special Issue, Social Stratification Studies in East Asia, offers selected papers presented at the Tohoku University — National University of Singapore Joint Forum of Sociology and Stratification Studies held in Singapore in February 2009. This journal issue introduces five enthusiastic research projects presented at the forum on a variety of social stratification issues. These papers highlight the studies of sociologists who delve into inequalities and disparities in globalised Asia today.

[, The Middle Kingdom, as a relatively unknown advanced civilisation, held a unique position in Enlightenment thought, as Europeans tried to understand a widening world and their own place in it. European views of China in the early modern period have been widely studied. While the predominant paradigm has been to analyse a shift from sinophilia to sinophobia, disagreements over the extent, nature and timing of this shift suggest that the rigid juxtaposition may not always be useful. In order to highlight the importance of the particular topic to the constructions of China in eighteenth-century European thought, this paper examines the way primary sources and scholars viewed one particular aspect of China: Its system of government. This paper will consider views of China related to Adam Smith’s main duties of government (the art and science of war, the administration of justice and public institutions) and how these duties were to be paid for (the public revenue). Discussions of China’s government married interest in the advanced civilisation of China with that characteristic Enlightenment project to define, explain and reflect on the meaning of civilisation and progress. A surprising degree of consensus is found, calling into question the conventional juxtaposition of sinophilia and sinophobia. Moreover, eighteenth-century European observers did not approach China with assumptions of superiority; on the contrary, there was a degree of civilisational relativism in their outlook, and at times China was seen as offering useful lessons. This approach also allows us to consider those questions with which Enlightenment thinkers did not turn towards China for answers, and ask the reasons for such omissions. China was dismissed as a useful model because it was deemed in many ways to be a unique case that could not be worked into the universal models that characterised the European Enlightenment.]

Since the issue of human trafficking is subject to judicial, moral and political constraints, this research chose to study Vietnamese sex workers in Phnom Penh as a common migration phenomenon in order to see when, how and why some women ended up in situations of bondage. On the basis of four months of research in the Mekong delta, the paper explores the journeys leading Vietnamese women to Phnom Penh. It concurs with the recent literature that debt-bonded sex work is not always an unending situation and that it could be an effective means to cope with socio-cultural pressures. We argue that, in addition to labour arrangements, some women find in sex work a way to deal with their (in)dependency with regards to their families, achieving greater control over their resources and experimenting different meanings of womanhood. Far from denying human trafficking, the paper tries to explore the grey area that lies between this extreme and voluntary migration. While the results of this research are not representative of the whole phenomenon, we argue that these few elements help explain why women keep taking the risks of migration for sex work and expose themselves to situations of bonded labour.

This paper complicates the notion of the suicide bomber as represented in mental health literature. Most authors apply Western psychiatric concepts to understand suicide bombers without accounting for value differences around life and death or terrorism and martyrdom. Accordingly, these researchers replicate arguments to explain individual behaviour from a particular epistemological perspective. In contrast, critical approaches to this literature can expose the worldviews of the analysers and the analysed to devise sounder interpretations. This paper scrutinises mental health discourse on suicide bombing to ask: (1) What do we learn about the authors of suicide bombers in these articles? (2) How do their analyses demonstrate the relationship between knowledge and power? These conclusions can enable researchers to reduce biases and devise behavioural models that more accurately reflect the realities of their subjects.

Much has been written about Indonesia's decentralisation since the fall of Soeharto. Scholars have developed different perspectives and provided useful analyses on 'right governance', but they seem to have largely neglected the organisational problems of civic organisations engaged in governance reform. By employing the concepts of legitimacy, organisational field and networks familiar in the sociology of organisation, this paper explores ways in which they develop and transform their organisations and networks, creating political issues and, mobilising the public. Three cities — Padang, Bandung, and Yogyakarta — were chosen as the study locations for the conspicuous and even prominent engagement of civic organisations in the struggle for reform of public governance. A qualitative method was used to collect data from various actors who are directly and indirectly engaged in contesting and cooperating with organisational actors in this area. This paper shows that the principles of independency and freedom within civic organisations have developed rapidly at the expense of organisational accountability. Such development has hampered the transformation of civic organisations into more influential social actors.

The Sungei Buloh Leper Settlement in British Malaya was established in 1930. It served the purposes of housing, controlling, and curing of leprosy patients. In this paper, Foucault's thesis of disciplinary power is employed to examine the settlement's techniques of leper control and to analyse the modus operandi of the leper settlement. The analysis of this paper points to a shift of emphasis in the mid-1920s in the administration of leper settlements in Malaya, from one that exercised predominantly coercive power of control of lepers to one that used primarily persuasive means. The central argument of the paper is that the changing technique of control of lepers was mainly due to the recognition of the leper settlement as being an establishment with an ambiguous identity, hovering between a total and health institution. While resembling a total institution, the leper settlement nevertheless was not a prison, and leprosy patients, like patients in hospitals, needed to be treated as ordinary citizens both on humanitarian and legal grounds. However, the need for mandatory segregation of lepers meant some degree of compulsion was necessary. The challenge to British colonial administrators was how to maintain hegemony over the lepers with minimum use of physical force and the least violation of lepers' civil rights. The investigation of the paper points to the application of a persuasive technique of social control that encouraged the voluntary enrolment and participation of lepers in the leper settlement. To promote the voluntary admission and stay of lepers, the settlement was organised in such a way that it provided a 'natural and fair atmosphere' that was akin to the external social environment. Inmates, as a result, felt comfortably at home in the settlement.

Discussions of everyday Islamic religiosity commonly distinguish two distinct forms of Muslim religiosity, one 'normative' and 'formal,' the other 'accommodative' and 'informal.' It is invariably the latter form that is identified as the site of engagement with other religious traditions. This paper sets out to question the common association of 'popular' Islamic religiosity with 'syncretism' by analysing the methods by which Muslims defend contentious practices in everyday life. Drawing on fieldwork among Tamil-speaking Muslims in India and Southeast Asia, various strategies for defending contentious practices will be analysed, most important among which are references to Islamic scripture and scholarly tradition. Concomitantly, the discourse surrounding the defence of contentious practices and beliefs shows a heightened concern with authenticity, resulting in an often stridently anti-syncretic rhetoric. Finally, the paper will deal with an alternative way of defending contentious practices particularly salient in Southeast Asia, which tries to remove contentious practices from the sphere of 'religion' to that of 'culture.' In all cases, the respective defensive strategies clearly inhabit the same discursive space as the criticism levelled at contentious practice, revealing the problematic nature of the assumed binaries of Muslim religiosity.

One issue that has launched Nigeria into international réclame and public ignominy, especially in the last decade, is the Advance Fee Fraud (a.k.a. '419'), a code which refers originally to the section of the Nigerian Penal Law that deals with specific fraud schemes. The paper located the economic and socio-political upheavals in Nigeria from the late 1970s as the leverage for the advent and consolidation of fraudulent schemes. It demonstrated how youths have increasingly appropriated the Internet as a gateway to the world and as conduits for information enhancement, economic empowerment or a means to achieving their own ends. Through a careful analysis of 150 documented scam letters, this paper describes the emerging variations of a theme. As a transnational organised crime, this paper demonstrates how its increasing complexity and sophistication, with the target audience of individuals and corporate bodies within the domestic and international frontiers, has attracted local-global security attention and action. The paper concludes that the changing anatomy and the elasticity of the criminal transnational networks can be better grasped, and the preventive measures by individual, government and corporate security agencies prove efficacious, when understood and located within local-global contexts and wider operational frameworks.

In this paper we examine whether discourses of tropicality were affected by paradigm shifts in Western thinking about medicine. If tropicalist thinking reflects latent Western assumptions about the 'Other', tropicalism should persist through major shifts in Western thought. Here we explore whether or not such persistence is evident in representations in the scientific literature of mosquito-borne diseases on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion and where discrete epidemics occurred before, during and after a paradigm shift in Western thinking about disease causation. Late in the 19th Century, miasma theory (epidemics caused by unhealthy air) was replaced by microbial theory (epidemics caused by transmission of microbes) as the dominant scientific understanding of disease causation. We analyse representations of mosquito-borne epidemics in the contemporaneous scientific literature about Réunion for evidence of both tropicalism and a shift in the scientific paradigm. In pre-microbial representations, the unhealthy tropical environments thought to be responsible for miasmatic disease transmission are associated predominantly with the non-white population; in microbial representations non-whites are directly blamed for the spread of tropical infections. The paper argues that the persistence of tropicalist thinking through a major paradigm shift in the Western understanding of disease causation supports Said's (1979) contention that 'Othering' is a generalisable ahistorical phenomenon, and discusses issues of economic exigency that may have supported an ongoing tropicalist influence on public health practice in French overseas departments.

One of the most violent conflicts of the post-Suharto era took place in the Moluccas, Eastern Indonesia, from 1999 until 2003. Due to a strategic mobilisation process, it was mainly fought out between Christians and Muslims. After the conflict, local actors in the Moluccas hoped to build up sustainable peace through the revival of traditions that are supposed to overcome religious differences and enable harmonious living together. Taking up these local voices or voices that claim to be local, this paper wants to discuss the option of a cultural approach to conflict solution and to reflect on the reconciliatory potential of the revival of tradition. The prominent village alliance system in the Central Moluccas called pela serves as an example how 'traditional' mechanisms were used in order to foster reconciliation. This paper also analyses challenges and problems of the revival-reconciliation interplay in order to reveal both the integrative, as well as the exclusivist, character of revived traditions that are supposed to overcome religious differences.

The Habermasian notion of the public sphere is an independent area free of government intervention. In the Iranian case, the ownership and management of radio and television is with the government. Therefore, no programme can harshly criticise basic government policies. There are news sections, news reports, political commentaries, and interviews with political experts, first, second, or third ranked politicians and government officials, or even interviews with the public in which administrative inefficiencies, commodity shortages and even people's complaints and grievances are discussed. However, television productions, whether political, economic or cultural, cannot be oppositional. To change national television from being (mostly) propagandistic in nature to more public sphere in orientation needs time and more economic and political changes. Unlike television, in Iran we do not categorize the function of newspapers as a monologtype or one-way communication. Reformist papers do present alternative political and economic views. Nonetheless, financial and political problems such as opposing expectations and demands from readers and the judiciary system, low readership figures, a limited advertising market, and the shortage of imported and domestically produced paper prevent them from functioning as an effective and influential part of the Iranian public sphere. Recently, however, there have been some changes in the broadcast policy of Iranian television in terms of more channels, more dialog-type content, and an apparently non-biased and neutral position regarding reformists and conservatives. To assess how this new policy may change national television from (mostly) a propaganda type to a public sphere type requires more time and reliable evidence still not available.

In this paper, I develop a detailed consideration of ways in which Chinese religious practitioners, including Daoists, Christians, and spirit mediums, deploy syncretism in complex fields of practice. Rather than focusing on doctrinal blending, this study emphasises the ways in which these practitioners combine elements from diverse religious traditions through the media of ritual performance, visual representation, story, and landscape. After considering the diverse ways in which syncretic processes may be deployed in a field of practice, the paper investigates three ethnographic cases, exploring ritual co-celebration at Wudang Mountain in South-central China, charismatic Christian practices in Singapore, and the recent development of Holy Mount Zion as a Christian pilgrimage site in Taiwan.

This paper will look at converted Christian communities on the Indian subcontinent and the emergent rich bricolage of religious traditions. A narrative of Indian Christianity takes us almost imperceptibly into the realm of cultural convergence and communication. While the concepts of 'syncretism' or 'composite culture' have framed many discussions regarding this interaction, newer perspectives have begun to emerge. Syncretism sometimes implies the harmonious interaction of different religious traditions, while ethnographies bring up a far more complicated picture of contestation and struggle. We also need to look closely at patterns of religious interaction and engagement. Christianity may take from Hinduism, but this is not always the case. Sometimes both Christianity and Hinduism simultaneously engage with a different religious and cultural environment. Processes are more complex than they at first sight appear and, as this paper will attempt to show, some amount of historicisation is essential when understanding the ways in which they work.

Teenage marriage within the Malay community of Singapore was thrust under the national spotlight by the government in recent years. Though identified as one of the major social challenges confronting the Malay community, there is still at present, a gross lack of research necessary for an objective understanding of the phenomenon. The adverse implications of the lacunae are reinforced by instant solutions and prescriptions aimed at eradicating the problem. Utilising data obtained from interviews and responses to a survey administered to Malay teenage married couples, this paper examines dominant perceptions of teenage marriage in Singapore and their ramifications on policies and programmes. It is hoped that this paper can contribute towards a more objective understanding of the problem so vital for effective policy making.

A theoretical orientation toward 'strategies' is proposed in this paper. This theoretical approach suggests that we study both the context for immediate decision-making and the broader context in which reflection and deliberation occur. Whilst these are very broad concerns, the paper itself is based on fieldwork about land rental relationships in rural South India. The paper introduces strategies as a solution to the theorists' dilemma of choice vs. constraints. We treat tenants (as both households and as individual agents) in their structural contexts whilst respecting the complexity and co-mutuality of their agency. The strategies that people use involve an orientation to current and future events, including possible events which are imagined or which could happen. Both structural relationships and concrete past incidents act as reference points for decisions made today in a given relationship. The strategies of tenants include being pliable vis-à-vis landlords but some tenants make this conditional upon landlords' proper behaviour. Agents negotiate and enforce proper behaviour and, thus, both create and change the system of norms that exists. In Macintyre's terms (1985), the virtues intrinsic to the socio-economic practices are continually being re-worked. The theory of strategies reframes 'virtue' in dynamic structure-and-agency terms. Agents are not simply individuals. The debate about rational choice vs. holism can be augmented by looking at agency supra-individualistically. The strategy of a household is an emergent property of the household as an agent. It includes detailed first-order strategies along with more reflective second-order strategies which reconcile goals in the education, migration, household work, and marriage domains. The paper is, thus, interdisciplinary and contributes to sociology, while pluralistically drawing upon other disciplines.

Due to advancements in telecommunications and transportation over the past century, the world is shrinking and physical boundaries are being eroded. The advent of globalization has facilitated the flow of ideas, values, goods, and people from one part of the world to another. This hyperbolic human activity has altered the structure of inter-civilizational relations and has spawned a spirited debate on how to create a multi-civilizational world order. This paper is critical of contemporary approaches on the subject that envisage the primacy of one civilization on the one hand and a clash among civilizations on the other. By examining Ibn Khaldun's theory of 'Umrān and the discipline of Fiqh, it argues that these concepts remain relevant for our understanding of the human condition today. While the theory of Umrān analyzes political and economic relations at the macro-level, Fiqh tries to arrange societal relations at the micro-level. This paper also studies the Ottoman legacy since the Ottoman state was founded on Fiqh and the Millet system. It proved to be successful in preserving pluralistic communities based on principles of autonomy and mutual coexistence. Even though Ibn Khaldun was one of the pioneers in the field of civilizational studies, his seminal work is largely neglected in scholarly circles today, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The present inquiry seeks to address this shortcoming.