Mahidol University International College, Thailand, and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, are jointly organising a conference with the theme, “Defining Harmony in Southeast Asia: Competing discourses, challenges and interpretations”. It will be held in Bangkok from 29 November – 1 December 2007. Abstracts are due on 31 June 2007.
The conference announcement “invites scholars from various disciplines to contribute to our understanding of harmony as a contested discourse, constructed and negotiated in the Southeast Asian region”.
The full announcement is certainly worth a read if you hope to gain some insight into the framework that shapes the conference agenda. They want to know “how can state harmony, a seemingly internal condition, be maintained in the face of neo-liberalism, regionalisation and globalization movements”.
According to the organisers, “Thailand celebrated in 2006 the 60th anniversary of H.M. King Rama IX ascendance to the throne, which in the Thai context represents and symbolizes harmony for the kingdom in the globalizing, changing world”.
One has to wonder just how deep the analysis of “contested discourse” will be when the host’s “Thai context” is given this predictable royal gloss. Are there questions about Thailand’s harmony (and “dis-harmony”) that are already off the agenda? Is that whole point of “harmony” discourse and its study? Or, to cut to the chase, can a “symbol of harmony” be the subject of critical academic enquiry at this kind of conference?
The announcement’s stated approach will not surprise New Mandala readers who have followed the debate about the International Conference of Thai Studies that will be held in Bangkok in December. Of course, your thoughts and ideas about this Mahidol conference are very welcome here. Any New Mandala readers who do submit abstracts are also welcome to post them if you feel they deserve a wider audience.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Republican // May 14, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Kind of strange that two Southeast Asian universities should choose a neo-Confucian concept from East Asia to apply to state-society relations in Southeast Asia, whose traditions of political thinking (not to mention present circumstances) one would have thought owe very little to Confucianism. I was also not aware that this theory had “gained ground” in analysing SEA politics in recent decades (as stated in the blurb), although I know that authoritarian regimes in East Asia were very susceptible to this type of argument at one time. Most of the governments of these countries now prefer the trappings and much of the substance of “liberal” political discourse, given the process of democratization or at least liberalization that has occurred throughout the region – Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, even to an extent Singapore (just ask young Singaporeans what they think about Confucianism). But instead of holding a conference on that terrifying model of state-individual relations known as “liberalism” these universities seem to prefer a 1000 year old theory appropriate to Chinese imperial rule. Each to his own, I guess. (In fact, it’s quite appropriate that such a theory is to be debated on the 60th anniversary of HMK. Dictarships, whether they are communist or royalist, need all the friends they can find these days).
2 Jon Fernquest // May 14, 2007 at 11:13 pm
“invites scholars from various disciplines to contribute to our understanding of harmony as a **contested discourse**, constructed and negotiated in the Southeast Asian region…how can state harmony, a seemingly internal condition, be maintained in the face of neo-liberalism, regionalisation and globalization movements”.
a. “Contested discourse” implies in its very nature some “lack of harmony.”
b. In my studies of the pre-modern era c. 1350-1600 there was already a high degree of regionalisation five hundred years ago, regionalisation that included Yunnan and India as well.
c. There might be unity and harmony in some sense, but if you read the newspaper each today there are obviously daily news events that bespeak of disharmony and a lack of unity, and this is not some new phenomena.
d. This sounds like a discourse that nationalism has taught some scholars, that creates a self-referential intellectual habit difficult to kick, that is inherently uninteresting to outsiders, and more than anything reifies the existing power structure that they depend on for legitimacy.
e. This nationalistic discourse not unique to Thailand. I used to get this all the time in the essays of South Korean students whose nationalistic doctrination is more intense than any state in Southeast Asia, to be sure. Many histories of the US doused heavily in nostalgia suffer in a likewise fashion.
3 New Mandala » ‘Buddhism and Science’ conference at Mahidol // May 22, 2007 at 8:11 pm
[...] readers will know that Andrew and I remain keenly interested in the various Thailand-related scholarly and activist meetings that are going on around the world. Tomorrow, [...]
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