Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

I I A S N e w s l e t t e r | # 4 0 | S p r i n g 2 0 0 6 1 0 > The art of seduction Religion, more often than not, equates the arts of seduction -whether in traditional performances or popular music -with immoral behaviour. The status of music and dance in the Islamic world, especially the fear of its sensuous powers, has been heatedly discussed in religious treatises; with its clean-cut performers and moral messages, nasyid, the Islamic boy-band music of Southeast Asia, seems to epitomise the art of no-seduction. Reality, however, is more complex, as Muslim pop music struggles to combine two competing powers -the eroticism of pop music and the persuasive power of religion. And especially when the female voice comes into play....

Literature on the new media generally ignores new media's use for spiritualistic pursuits. Yet this aspect of novel technologies reveals much about embedded practices and their cultural construction in particular spatial and temporal contexts. In this chapter, we look at representations of the cell phone in Southeast Asian societies focusing especially on the ways new mobile technologies have been represented in the Philippines and Indonesia. These representations have drawn on a long tradition of communicative exchanges between people and the supernatural. New technologies often elicit unintended and unexpected practices from their users. In many parts of Asia, mobiles have become a new writing tool, their main use being to transmit SMS. That these messages sometimes involve the dead or other supernatural beings is not surprising since these multiple realities happily coexist in many Asian societies, including technologically advanced ones.

Not only has Nasyid music been successful in addressing questions about what it is to be a modern Muslim youth in Southeast Asia, reconciling piety with a "funky but shariah" consumerist lifestyle; it also has been expressive of political aspirations for a utopian-style communal society. This essay focuses on how, from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the Malaysian missionary movement Al-Arqam used nasyid music to articulate ideas of Muslim Malay modernity and on how nasyid music became one of the main interfaces to spread the Arqam message beyond its model villages. The focus is on Arqam's main ensembles, Nadamurni and the Zikr, and, with the 1994 ban on Arqam's activities, the celebrated pop group Raihan. Raihan's sonic explorations into Muslim Malay modernity have challenged orthodox Islamic ideas, but also the entertainment industry and the secular Malaysian state at large. Nasyid culture provides us with an understanding of the larger changes that have occurred within Southeast Asian Islam, away from a previous Islamic revival and toward a post-Islamist chic and new cultural performances that successfully blend entertainment and education.

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... It was accompanied by a return to more craftsman-like practices and an appreciation of local prod-ucts (Parkins and Craig 2006), and ... as its explanatory text, and in line with what is said above about stressing the visual, are the stunning photographs by Luca Invernizzi Tettoni. ...

This entry covers some of the early twenty-first century developments in Indonesian media practices. While providing the reader with a brief history from 1997 onwards, it scrutinizes the ways in which ever new media have resulted in novel practices and to what extent such practices are building on previous constellations in Indonesian culture. The second part of the entry deals with public representations of new, social and mobile media by focusing on two Indonesian stereotypes, the male hacker and the female call girl. Such stereotypes show not only how much of the so-called " digital revolution " has been gender sensitive but also how new media increasingly have become associated with the ills of modern society, specifically pornography. Towards the end, the entry dwells on how, in the largest Muslim nation on earth, new media have generated debates and how some Indonesians have urged a more spiritual (use of) technology. Subject Words: mobile phones moral anxiety pornography popular culture spiritual technology blogging digital revolution social media social networking

Thinking of the future is hardly possible without reference being made to the role of digital information technologies or the growing impact of knowledge industries. But how relevant are these concepts outside the Northern Hemisphere? Said to be on its way by 2020, Islamic Information Society posits an alternative to both Western ideas on the Global Village, as well as the hijacking of Islamic futures by radical conservatives.
Bart Barendregt examines how majority Muslim countries in Southeast Asia have increasingly become role models in Islam’s quest for a digital future.

This article introduces the special issue ‘Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia: In Between Religious Politics and Popular Pious Practices’ by discussing prominent approaches in the study of media and the public sphere in light of the specific history of digital media’s rise in Muslim Southeast Asia. It focuses on earlier and current expressions of mobile and Islamic modernity as well as on changing moralities and forms of Islamic authority. Referencing the other contributions to this special issue, it particularly emphasizes the (discursive and visual) contestations and social dramas that take place in the region’s media spaces providing for a variety of Islamic forms, practices, and socialities that can best be grasped, the authors argue, by considering politics, the pious, and the popular not as separate, but as mutually constitutive domains.

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Digital Activism’ by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and whether Asian activism requires its own theorizing. Most of all, it is a plea for a careful and ethnographically informed approach to digital activism. Although outwardly they look similar and use the same templates, manuals, or even similar media strategies, not all forms of online activism promote democratic values. Furthermore, we argue that much of what happens under the banner of digital activism is not necessarily politics with a capital P but, rather, consists of everyday forms of engagement, with sometimes seemingly vulgar contents and often familiar routines and natural forms, yet in their impact such ‘banal activism’ may have political implications.

Résumé/Abstract Les gens de Kanekes, connus également sous le nom de Baduy, à Banten (Java Ouest), de par leur association historique avec l'ancien royaume soundanais de Pajajaran, se considèrent comme les gardiens du sanctuaire de cet Etat, qui confère au ...

Over time Dutch and Indonesian composers, performers and music scholars have inspired each other and they continue to do so. The presence of the Dutch in the Netherlands East-Indies and Indonesia, but also the existence of large diasporic communities in the Netherlands have contributed to a mutual exchange in musical terms: from military brass bands, classical and liturgical music to jazz, Indo rock and more recently world music. Yet, such musical interactions have often been shaped by unequal power balances, and very divergent motifs to start with. Recollecting Resonances offers musicological, historical and anthropological explorations into those musical encounters that have been shaped in both the past and present. The resulting mutual heritage can still be listened to today. Contributors include: Bart Barendregt, Els Bogaerts, Liesbeth Ouwehand, Gerard A. Persoon, Sumarsam, Miriam Brenner, R. Franki S. Notosudirdjo, Henk Mak van Dijk, Madelon Djajadiningrat, Clara Brinkgreve, Wi...