Michael G. Peletz

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2009! This book examines three big ideas: difference, legitimacy, and pluralism. Of chief concern is how people construe and deal with variation among fellow human beings. Why under certain circumstances do people embrace even sanctify differences, or at least begrudgingly tolerate them, and why in other contexts are people less receptive to difference, sometimes overtly hostile to it and bent on its eradication? What are the cultural and political conditions conducive to the positive valorization and acceptance of difference? And, conversely, what conditions undermine or erode such positive views and acceptance? This book examines pluralism in gendered fields and domains in Southeast Asia since the early modern era, which historians and anthropologists of the region commonly define as the period extending roughly from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times

Gender Pluralism

Aihwa Ong

This impressive array of essays considers the contingent and shifting meanings of gender and the body in contemporary Southeast Asia. By analyzing femininity and masculinity as fluid processes rather than social or biological givens, the authors provide new ways of understanding how gender intersects with local, national, and transnational forms of knowledge and power. Contributors cut across disciplinary boundaries and draw on fresh fieldwork and textual analysis, including newspaper accounts, radio reports, and feminist writing. Their subjects range widely: the writings of feminist Filipinas; Thai stories of widow ghosts; eye-witness accounts of a beheading; narratives of bewitching genitals, recalcitrant husbands, and market women as femmes fatales. Geographically, the essays cover Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The essays bring to this region the theoretical insights of gender theory, political economy, and cultural studies. Gender and other forms of inequality and difference emerge as changing systems of symbols and meanings. Bodies are explored as sites of political, economic, and cultural transformation. The issues raised in these pages make important connections between behavior, bodies, domination, and resistance in this dynamic and vibrant region.

Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia

Bewitching Women, Pious Men

"This book mixes aspects of 'old' and 'new' ethnography to powerful and persuasive effect: It is ethnographically rich, modestly (and appropriately) reflexive, and framed within a broad range of contemporary theoretical issues concerning gender and beyond. It is a pleasure to read, and will be enormously valuable (and important) for teaching as well."--Sherry Ortner, University of California, Berkeley "This is the single best study of gender and culture that I know, whether in Southeast Asia or elsewhere."--Robert Hefner, editor of Conversion to Christianity

Michael G. Peletz

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