8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

— Unequal development: Land Dynamics in South East Asia Mountains Regions
Nguyen Tran Lam (Oxfam Vietnam)
For the last 2 decades, indigenous people (IPs) from the selectedregion in South East Asia Mountain Regions (SEAMR) 
have been targetedby various development programs. Yet, paralleling the extraordinarygrowth, unequal development 
has generated a number of socialinequalities. In fact indigenous people are being drawn into theglobalization pro-
cess and are experiencing new forms of contact andexchange, but at the same time they are ill-equipped to control 
thisinteraction and hence are at risk of becoming forcibly assimilated orplaced in a position of marginalization and 
exclusion.IPs in SEAMR have to face not only environment risks but also variousproblems relating to land including: 
i) governments’ swiddenagriculture eradication policies have affected hundreds of thousandsof indigenous families; 
ii) land allocation implementation in manyplaces is flawed and does not follow the agreed policies. In fact, theactual 
land allocation implementation has become a major cause ofpoverty, causing severe hardships for highlanders; iii) the 
alienationof land and forest from indigenous communities.
Panel: Precarity and Resilience in East Indonesia
convener: Thijs Schut (University of Western Australia)
panel abstract
In this panel, we discuss current issues of precarity in East Indonesia, and explore how people navigate and negoti-
ate precarious conditions. For example, these conditions include poverty, un- and underemployment, and a lack of 
access to justice and health care. Precarity – understood as an individually perceived notion of insufficient participa-
tion in the global culture of consumption – increasingly is part of people’s daily experiences. As growing numbers of 
people become enmeshed in global flows of ideas, products, and capital, many also fail to live-up to desired images of 
progress. Despite a decade of steady economic growth in Indonesia, many socio-economic problems remain. Due to 
West Indonesia’s political, economic and demographic dominance in Indonesia, East Indonesia is lagging behind the 
rest of the country in development, a disparity that, in fact, is increasing in recent years. Rebalancing development 
in Indonesia, in favour of the East, is crucial to the country’s social, political and economic stability. Such rebalanc-
ing can only be effective when local circumstances and approaches to precarity are taken into account. Therefore this 
panel brings together scholars who work in different parts of East Indonesia, but who have in common that they not 
only focus on the effects of macro issues in micro, and often marginal, contexts, but also explore the strategies people 
develop to deal with their precarity. In particular, we are interested to give ‘face’ to actual experiences of precarity and 
to discuss, by means of people’s resilience, the ways people in East Indonesia navigate their marginal circumstances.

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— Rotinese Fishermen and the Temptations to Become Involved in People-Smuggling 
Antje Missbach (Monash University)
Due to a variety of problems, ranging from overfishing, climate change, pollution, underdeveloped local fishing indus-
tries and mismanagement of distribution chains, fishermen in Rote face massive problems making a living for their 
families. Many fishermen are indebted and they have few chances to repay their debts in the short to mid-term. High-
risk voyages to transport asylum seekers to the Australian Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island have for years offered 
‘fast bucks’. However, these risky voyages entail very high social costs for the fishermen, such as arrest and imprison-
ment. Although not every transporter is arrested and prosecuted, many Rotinese transporters have spent several years 
in Australian prisons, away from their families and isolated from community support. With the criminalisation of 
people smuggling in Indonesia, more and more Rotinese transporters are imprisoned in Indonesia, which has even 
more severe consequences for the fishermen and their role as main income-providers for their families.
This paper is based on two fieldtrips to Rote in 2012 and 2014, in which a number of fishermen, convicted for people 
smuggling, have been interviewed both while serving their sentences in jail and after release. In addition, the paper 
draws from more than 20 court decisions that involved Rotinese fishermen in people-smuggling trials. With the help 
of fishermen narratives and the court documents I hope to reconstruct decision-making and risk-taking strategies of 
fishermen who have been involved in the transport of asylum seekers to Australia.
Understanding the local conditions for fishermen in Rote thus helps to draw firmer conclusions on how transnational 
people-smuggling networks operate and how they exploit local conditions of precarity.
— Bodies Impacted by Precarity 
Brooke Nolan (University of Western Australia)
This presentation explores the affects of precarity on the physical bodies of people in small rice farming communities 
on the island of Wawonii, Southeast Sulawesi. Further, it explores how marginalisation affects social harmony, gender 
relations and systems of power within the village.
I begin by looking at the more development-oriented issues of difficulties in accessing healthcare facilities due to 
geographic and economic marginality. Unsurprisingly, isolation and poverty mean that Wawonii people often receive 
little or no medical attention when sick, and the medical treatment they do receive is often woefully inadequate.
I then move on to a more anthropologically-focused discussion which asks to what degree the cultural practices de-
ployed by these people when faced with illness, pregnancy and death are a result of marginality. Many of these prac-
tices are also found in varying forms throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia. A variety of techniques and traditions, 
which derive from different epistemological systems, religious convictions and ancestral beliefs, are used by local 
people in communities on Wawonii to care for their bodies and the bodies of others. These practices have implications 
not only for peoples’ physical health but also social harmony, gender relations and systems of power within the village.
This presentation is based on 12 months of fieldwork research in villages on the north coast of Wawonii island, South-
east Sulawesi, between mid 2012 and mid 2013.
— Foreign Investment in Mining - An End to Precarity? 
Kathryn Robinson (Australian National University)
Foreign investment in mining has been regarded as a pathway to economic certainty for some local populations in 
Indonesia, an assumption challenged by a nationalist mining law passed in 2009. This paper reflects on the history of 
the nickel mine on Sorowako, South Sulawesi and its impact on community well-being. How has the resilience of the 
indigenous population been tested and what have they been able to achieve from this development?
— Troubled Education-to-Work Transitions of Young People in Central Flores, East Indonesia 
Thijs Schut (University of Western Australia)
In this paper I discuss educated young people in Flores (NTT) and how they navigate their troubled transition from 
education to work. Educational achievement is often highlighted as a key factor in narratives of national development. 
For rural areas, these narratives promote schooling as a gateway to work and as a way out of agrarian ‘backwardness’. 
However, due to a lack in labour absorbing capacity of developing industries, increasing numbers of educated rural 

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young people in Indonesia experience difficult transitions from education to work, and become un- or underem-
ployed. I have examined experiences of un(der)employed young educated people in Ngada district. In particular, I 
have focused on these young people and their position within the villages they live. Through long term fieldwork and 
participant observation, it has become clear that despite popular beliefs, these young people are far from being unin-
spired and lethargic. Although often opportunistic, they deploy positive strategies to gain experience, create new net-
works, and simultaneously try to ‘make a contribution to society’. However, generational differences do exist, which 
will have profound consequences for future developments of rural Flores in specific, and poor rural places in general.
Panel: Fragmented Realities Parallel Societies: The Kaleidoscope of Tanah Papua 
conveners: Christopher Chaplin (University of Cambridge), Henri Myrttinen (Mauerpark Institut)
discussant: Antje Missbach (Monash University)
panel abstract
‘Tanah Papua’, i.e. the western half of the island of New Guinea, which is comprised of the Indonesian provinces 
Papua and West Papua, has had a troubled relationship with the Indonesian state ever since it was incorporated into 
the country in 1969. While the continuing, low-intensity armed struggle for independence and a more vocal, peace-
ful and unarmed campaign for sovereignty tend to dominate coverage of the two provinces, the multiple societies of 
Tanah Papua, both indigenous and migrant, face a host of other challenges while also displaying a wealth of strategies 
of survival and coping.
The panel is based on a collaborative book project involving Papuan, Indonesian, Australian, North American and 
European contributors who examine issues of human rights, gender, religion, culture, health and politics in the two 
provinces. The stated aim of the book project is to diversify and deepen the understanding of Tanah Papua by focus-
ing on issues beyond questions of national sovereignty, highlighting the views of those living in Papua and examining 
the way they engage with everyday political, historical and structural challenges (such as HIV/AIDS, Human Rights 
abuses, social and environmental change, economic exploitation and religious faith) through which concepts of Pap-
uan belonging and agency are constructed and lived.
In this light, the three presenters, who are the co-editors of the book, will briefly outline and present key chapters 
of the book examining the notions and challenges relating to health, social empowerment and political imaginaries 
which will then be deliberated upon by the outside discussant.
— Political Realities and Reclaiming Identity – Papua’s Political Framework 
Christopher Chaplin (University of Cambridge)
‘Much of the policy and political debate on Papua has focused on the political status of the territory and the political 
dialogue processes which are moving forward at a glacial speed, with occasional bursts of hope, such as with the elec-
tion of Jokowi soon overtaken by a continuation of deadlock. The focus on these slow-moving macro-level debates 
however leaves many of the other, more micro-level processes under-researched. It is here where Papuan politics is 
extremely dynamic, with new local elites emerging and jockeying for power, mobilising new identities and re-creating 
older ones. The book chapters presented will examine these dynamics in detail, thus giving a frame for the chapters 
presented in the following sections.
— Religion, Politics and Re-Righting/Writing History in Papua 
Henri Myrttinen (Mauerpark Institut)
Both Catholic and Protestant Christianity has played a significant role in shaping Papuan identities, be it as a spiritual 
base, through the educational and social services provided or, importantly, also the human rights work of church-
affiliated NGOs. The chapters presented in this section will highlight the local dynamics of missionary work as well as 
the history of the different engagements of the churches with issues of human rights abuses. Special attention will be 
given to the concept of ‘memoria passionis’ and persistent Papuan demands of “righting” history and acknowledging 
past abuses.
 

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IX. Urban, Rural and Border Dynamics
Panel: Urban Infrastructure and Ecologies of Possibility in Vietnam 
convener: Christina Schwenkel (University of California, Riverside)
panel abstract
This panel explores the dialectical relationship between ecology and infrastructure in the context of contemporary 
urban landscapes in Vietnam. Recent years in the social sciences have seen a surge of interest in urban infrastructures 
in relation to shifts in political and social ecologies, from the technical material networks that transform “nature” into 
the “city” to the economic, religious, and social infrastructures that are at the center of urban disputes and negotia-
tions. While the governance and regulation of infrastructure has long been a technology of rule extending back to 
colonial urban expansion, the radical reorganization of urban space in Vietnam today raises complex issues about 
contemporary geographies of power and subjection. With deprivation, dispossession, and poverty on the rise, an 
examination of the specific agents and forces involved in urban transformation, and the possibilities for critical alter-
natives, becomes all the more urgent. The panel takes the city as a complex and dynamic assemblage in the process of 
continuous making and remaking. This approach works to transcend entrenched binaries in contemporary studies 
of cities (rural/urban, periphery/center, global/non-global) and to examine urban ecologies and their attendant in-
frastructures as unbounded, multidirectional, and co-constitutive across a range of agential possibilities. Employing 
historiographical and ethnographic methods, panelists conceive “the urban” in Vietnam not as a social given, but as a 
historical process and product of specific human and nonhuman activity. In highlighting the socio-technical, moral, 
and political economic dimensions to the reorganization of urban space (religious, economic, cultural, etc.), the panel 
seeks to determine how social and political power operates through ecologies of infrastructure and, subsequently, how 
ordinary practices of city making produce new socialities, materialities and aesthetics of the city as residents strive to 
build more sustainable and equitable urban environments.
— Coal Infrastructure and the Social Life of a Cooking Fuel in Ha Long City 
Annuska Derks (University of Zurich)
Ha Long City is known as main gateway to Ha Long Bay. Right next to this seascape of limestone islets, and out of 
sight of most visitors, are some of the oldest and biggest coal mines of Vietnam. This paper traces the source of a com-
monly-used cooking fuel, the beehive coal briquette, in these coal mines of Ha Long City. It focuses in particular on 
what coal infrastructure - the coal mines, roads, railways and waterways, processing and storage sites - tells us about 
the interlinkages between people, things and the environment in the coal briquette chain.
— “Civilized Urbanism” and Market Redevelopment in Lao Cai City, Vietnam 
Kirsten W Endres (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Over the past years, the city of Lao Cai has pursued ambitious urban development plans as part of Vietnam’s national 
campaign to “build rich, beautiful and civilized cities”. The special location of Lao Cai on the Vietnam-China border 
and its envisaged role as a hub of trade and tourism on the Kunming-Haiphong economic corridor not only required 
major investments into infrastructure improvements, but also efforts to enhance the city’s visual appearance vis-à-vis 
its powerful and prosperous neighbor, China. As part of the city’s face lift, Lao Cai’s largest public market has been de-
molished in October 2014, to be replaced by a modern four-storied market building at the same location over the next 
two years. Although the current stall-holders generally welcome the prospect of a cleaner and more beautiful market 
environment with spacious vending conditions and additional storage facilities, they do not approve of the municipal 
government’s decision to finance the construction through forced contributions from the traders. This paper analyses 
the contestations surrounding the market redevelopment project and the various strategies of resisting its implemen-
tation in light of Vietnam’s contemporary urban geographies of power, resistance, and subjection.
— Concrete Ecology: Covering and Discovering the Southern Ecosystem in and around Saigon 
Erik Harms (Cornell University)
This paper will discuss the ways in which master-planned building projects in and around Saigon make claims to have 

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discovered the essence of southern Vietnam’s unique ecosystem. The obvious twist, of course, is that these discoveries 
are made as part of massive development projects that propose to cover several hundred hectares of that very ecosys-
tem in concrete. By focusing on two master-planned periurban development projects already and about to be built 
in purported “swamps”, I show how the projects claim to attend to the flow of water and the rise and fall of the tides, 
how they aim to control the winds, the sun and shadows, and how they actually produce a concept of southern ecol-
ogy at the very moment that they frame it in concrete. In this way, the fetish-like discovery of a unique urban ecology 
is entangled with the very process that transforms it. A dialectic of covering and discovering both produces and is 
produced by a southern ecology that is itself transformed by the process of urban development. Through all this, the 
object that has been discovered—Saigon’s unique riverine ecology—can in all likelihood never be recovered.
— Electrification and Enlightenment in Vinh City 
Christina Schwenkel (University of California, Riverside)
In the study of urban infrastructure, the promise of progress and prosperity has long been linked to dream worlds of 
modern technology and an everyday politics of hope and possibility. In this paper, I examine postcolonial projects 
of electrification and the impulses – electric, affective and otherwise – embodied in and transmitted by the indus-
trial smokestack, as one of the most enduring technological objects of energy infrastructure on the urban landscape 
in Vinh City, a city destroyed in the US air war and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. Around the world, 
smokestacks stand as abject relics of industry that evoke the dystopia of environmental risk and calamity. And yet 
smokestacks continue to hold persuasive, if not nostalgic, power over populations. In postcolonial and postwar Vinh, 
the possibility of generating universal electricity for the masses underpinned the collective dream worlds that formed 
across time and space, even in the face of recurring disruption. In this paper, I trace the imaginative possibilities of ur-
ban infrastructure associated with electrification and the symbol of the smokestack as embedded in the sacred land of 
the nation. With its potential to “enlighten” the masses and produce new socialist subjects, electrification became key 
to the state management of bodies and social conduct in urban space. And yet, the smokestack was not a passive and 
inert icon that stood silent on the landscape; at various moments in history it mobilized new solidarities and created 
new sensibilities, particularly among energy plant workers in GDR-built housing. Drawing on archival and ethno-
graphic materials, including poems about the bombing of the Soviet-built power plant, I show how emotional invest-
ments in the smokestack, as an icon of resilient infrastructure, have been constitutive of enduring social collectivities 
held together by a state of chronic disrepair during and after the war, and that now make new demands on the city.
Panel: Urbanism and Communication in Southeast Asia 
conveners: Tim Kaiser (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen), Sandra Kurfürst (University of Cologne)
discussant: Helen Grant Ross (independent scholar)
panel abstract
We invite presentations in the panel dealing with topics such as urban symbolism, urban governance, urban media 
including print and online media, urban communication networks, communicative repertoires of urban dwellers, dif-
ferent representations of cities, etc.
We would like to encourage debates on the interrelationship between urbanism and communication and to provide a 
forum for the start of a network of scholars interested in these topics.
— The Communication of Resistance through Urban Space Utilization among Teenage Girls in Chiang Mai, 
Northern Thailand
Kangwan Fongkaew (Burapha University)
Chiang Mai, the capital of the northern region, is one of the largest cities in Thailand. Various spaces in this modern 
city such as shopping malls and nightlife spots have become favorite public spaces where urban residents come to 
spend their times. These venues have become an important part of the city’s social life and are indispensible in the 
work, leisure and day-to-day life of urban residents. These places also provide an important stage and resource for the 
formation of contemporary urban identities and for a range of social interactions, especially for young people. Apply-

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ing Michel de Certeau’s idea of ‘Strategies and Tactics’ (1984), this multi-sited ethnographic research among a group 
of thirteen schoolgirls aged 18-21 years in Chiang Mai city aims to explore the ways they creatively and proactively 
‘make do’ urban spaces and consumerism society to negotiate and express their sexual identity. The researcher ap-
proached the schoolgirls since their last year in high school. He continued following them during the period of 2010 
to 2014 after they enrolled in universities. This study describes the various tactics that schoolgirls employed various 
urban spaces to evade or resist the mechanisms of dominant state control that aimed to regulate their sexual and cul-
tural practices. Taking the girls’ point of view, this ethnographic research argues that, as active cultural agents, young 
Thai girls are actively engaged in the work of negotiating and contesting various dominating powers which imposed 
on them by the utilization of urban spaces and global consumerism over the formation their sexual subjectivities – to 
communicate that they are not conformists to mainstream standards. In contrary, their practices sought to send the 
messages that they were the creators of their own sexual selves.
— Contested Colonial Space: 19th-Century Manila as Arena of Resistance and Collaboration
Maureen Justiniano (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
This paper presents late nineteenth-century Manila as a contested space for those involved in the nationalist move-
ments as well as the counter-revolutionary movement against the growing threat of urban-based native uprisings. The 
spread of native discontent in Manila coincided with the socio-economic and political transformation of this cosmo-
politan colonial city during the period of high colonialism marked by rapid urbanization and direct Spanish colonial 
engagement in the Philippines. After almost three centuries of indirect rule through Nueva España, Spain’s shift from 
indirect to direct colonial rule had disrupted the social order and status quo existing not only in Manila, but also, in 
other places across the Philippines. As the late nineteenth-century colonial Manila underwent drastic transforma-
tion through the process of urbanization, its demographic and geographic landscape was also altered through socio-
economic and political changes across the Philippines.
By interrogating the connection between colonial Manila’s urban expansion with the issue of mobilization and col-
laboration leading up to the revolution of 1896, we shift the focus from nationalist narratives to a more socio-political 
analysis of complex interaction and entanglement within the colonial urban space. Whether for the purpose of chal-
lenging colonial rule through armed rebellion, or organizing a counter-response to the looming threat of revolution, 
it is important to consider these two opposing sides as consequences of rapid urbanization and direct colonial engage-
ment in the Philippines after centuries of indirect rule.