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19-22 November 1997
Leiden, the Netherlands
The Changing Pace of Life in Southeast Asia. By Vincent HoubenIn November 1997, a small group of European, American, Asian, and Australian scholars met under stormy Leiden skies to discuss the multivalent nature of time and time-perceptions in Southeast Asia. The conference was financed by the IIAS and the NIAS (Denmark).
In total ten papers were discussed. Although the participants broached very different sorts of issues, most of them aimed to disclose the ways in which temporal aspects of modernization have been accommodated within the identities of people within a particular region. At the end of the conference the participants felt it was more useful to talk of 'time regimes' instead of 'time' as such. The term 'time regime' leaves no doubt that in important ways time is a construct, its functional characteristics being determined by whom (an individual or a group) or what (a nation, for instance) it has been produced.
One category of papers tended to focus on the production of time rather than its reception. Thongchai Winichakul (University of Wisconsin-Madison) tackled the problem of how the Thai measured the degree to which they had advanced in the term 'siliwai' (a trope containing a culture specific modification of 'civilized') both inside Siam, for instance in relation to the forest people of the mountainous border regions, and in relation to the West. Siwilai was essentially a temporal scheme by which the Thai elite tried to negotiate its identity towards an envisioned future. Vincent Houben (Passau University) tried to show how different time orientations were set up during successive periods of modern history in Java. Until the middle of the nineteenth century time was above all 'inscribed', so that history was perceived of as a deliberate prefiguration of a particular present or future. Around 1850 the manifestations of Western technological advance provoked both awe and negation, but from the start of the twentieth century the notion of progress had been internalized by the Indonesians to such an degree that it became a powerful vehicle against colonialism. During the Revolution and under the Old Order the rapid passage of time was promoted, whereas the New Order has frenetically tried to freeze time and return to inscription.
Robert Cribb (NIAS Copenhagen) discussed the ways in which time was measured in Indonesia. The history of telling the time of day, in particular, was not only determined by technological development (from the sundial to the European clock) but also by socio-political entities. For instance, the colonial state preserved local times for a very long time until the introduction of a limited number of standard time zones only. What started as uniformization of time reckoning ultimately resulted in the integration of the Archipelago into the modern world.
Andrew Turton (SOAS London) produced an ethnography of embassy, in which the time dimensions to which British diplomats visiting Tai states from the 16th until the 19th century were submitted were outlined. Unlike the Dutch imposing Western time on Indonesia, the delays or re-routing the British diplomats had to endure functioned as a kind of time warp imposed by the Thai, although over time the rate and volume of transcultural contact taking place as a whole accelerated. Stein Tønnesson (NIAS Copenhagen) looked at the pace of political life in Indochina as this was represented by the French political police between January 1946 and May 1947. The thinking of the Sûreté was based on the false premise that extremists could only temporarily disrupt normalcy and that the majority of the Vietnamese population longed for the restoration of a normal pace of life. Helen Creese (University of Queensland) tried to analyse how the past of Bali is being recreated in modern media. She illustrated that contestation exists between national identity on the one hand and the assertion of Balinese regional identity on the other hand. A substantial production of textual and audio-visual media, often linked to ritual performance practice, testify that a dynamic, continuous reinterpretation of the Balinese past is going on.
The other participants in the conference were engaged more with certain qualities of the reception of time or, to put more precisely, the way in which time can simultaneously be shaped and experienced by groups of people. Chan Kwok Bun (National University of Singapore) looked into factors that determine work stress among professional workers in present-day Singapore. Established professionals such as physicians and lawyers tend to possess monopolized expert knowledge and high social-economic returns, whereas emerging professionals (engineers, nurses, teachers and life insurance agents) lack these benefits. Although many dissimilarities characterize the various professional groups, stress proved to be generated not only by work-related performance pressure but also by an increasing amount of clashes between work time and time spent with the family. Professionals with more autonomy over their time schedule were less stress affected than professionals working in hierarchical organizations.
Jörgen Hellman (University of Gothenburg) studied time perceptions of a middle-class student theatre group in Bandung trying to revitalize traditional Longser theatre. While submitting to the metanarrative of 'development', they in fact see their endeavours as 'transitional' i.e. somewhere between traditional and modern, while during their performances 'no time' is being constructed. Two time concepts thus evolve, progress and punctuality, whereas flux could be linked to the social situation of the lower middle class. Juliette Koning (University of Wageningen) looked at generational differences in the appreciation of rapid social change over the past few New Order decades as experienced in a village on the north coast of Java. Dissimilar frames of references and separate identities of various generations produce tensions on issues such as the use of money, marriage, outward appearances, and work. Personal, social, and mechanical dimensions of time tend to diffract as the pace of transformation has stepped up enormously.
Gwynyth Øverland (University of Oslo) drew upon her experiences with Khmer war refugees in their effort to integrate into Norwegian society. Having lived through the bitter Pol Pot years and a subsequent period in refugee camps, their once public past has turned into a privatized present, living in virtual segregation. A very important vehicle by which to rediscover a personal identity after traumatic experiences proved to be the performance of traditional rituals. Also, the creation of a private sphere of social life within the own subgroup proved to be a powerful instrument to rebuild their own identity.
Although covering a wide range of periods and localities, the direct and informal nature of the discussions between this small group of scholars coming from various disciplines proved to be very refreshing. The topic of time construction and time perception appeared to be in need of further exploration. It was agreed that the papers should not yet be published but that further activities in this direction, such as the results of the workshop on Time and Society to be held at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies from 18 -l 20 June 1998, should be incorporated.
:Professor Vincent Houben is attached to the University of Passau, Germany
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