The idea of this volume was born within a multidisciplinary research on regional dynamics in Southeast Asia which considered both micro and macro levels of analysis. As anthropologists in the team, we chose to study social objects defined by the interplay of capital, the environment and work. Monika Arnez focused on the development of a luxury neighbourhood entirely built on reclaimed land in Melaka, and Silvia Vignato singled out a declining extractive location in North Aceh. The two sites were part of developmental plans that very explicitly targeted world standards and Asian ideals and reflected local policies, national economic trends and massive transnational investments; they were also the scene of long-term social conflict. Through the people who were involved in the sites as workers, residents or planners, we intended to study how different and often competing regional visions become not only relevant, but also consciously relevant in people’s life.
The dialogue with theorists of “worlding” processes was an essential and enlightening step in our analysis, and led to the current special issue. In a seminal book, Aihwa Ong (2011) reacted to the suggestions of post-colonialism theorist Gayatri Spivak (1999) that “the world”, the globe which is considered as both the arena and the subject of globalisation, was coextensive with “the Western, dominant world” and that globalisation is a reframing of colonial oppression. Ong was also inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2001) description of the process of “worlding from below” happening in African cities, where a non-Western, non-rich globe took shape and became a reference. With these premises, Ong argued that in Asian cities, globality as an embodied and emplaced set of ideas and symbols of the world, as well as of economic forces, features original elements that are certainly born within both Western-originated and dominant Asian modernities but also challenges them in unprecedented ways. She then came to theorise a “non-ideological formulation of worlding” focused on situated and
ambitious practices that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations—that is, “worlds”—than what already exists in a given context. Wording in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the claims that global situations are always in formation. Worlding projects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities, but they seem to form a critical mass in urban centers, making cities both critical sites in which to inquire into worlding projects, as well as the ongoing result and target of specific worldings.
Ong 2011, 12
In Ong’s thinking, as we see it, worlding is the appreciation of something new. In this regard, while her identification of the process as constitutive of cities is certainly ground breaking, our research indicated that in Asia, an important part of new sociality interconnected with larger national and regional dynamics today happens outside cities or rather cannot be fully apprehended without dropping the polarity of urban versus rural (Vasantkumar 2017). Specific sites which are neither cities nor countryside, but might include both, are dense with “projects and practices that instantiate some vision of the world in formation” (Ong 2011, 11), and can be regarded as “worlding sites”. Such sites, in our experience, have both material and immaterial consistence. Responding to a call for papers on the topic that we presented at the EuroSEAS international conference in 2019, the authors of the articles in the present volume all deal with material and immaterial aspects of worlding sites through an ethnographic approach.
Monika Arnez analysed the aesthetics of environmental protest through two initiatives in Malaysia and the global Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, as part of a decolonial worlding that expresses creative resistance to colonialism, capitalism, and resource exploitation. Silvia Vignato enquired upon the planning and the failure of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), which are somehow classic objects in social studies of global phenomena (see Ong’s own pioneer work on a Malaysian Free Trade Zone, 1987; see also Cross 2010 and Neveling 2014, Neveling and Steur 2018). The prism of “worlding” appealed to other authors and helped them set different social objects in focus.
It suited Giacomo Tabacco’s research on intangible and tangible infrastructures for Javanese factory returnees in Java; for Giuseppe Bolotta, it threw specific light on the analysis of a settlement of illegal workers in the fish transformation industry in Thailand; through worlding, Friederike Trotier could better identify the Jakabaring Sport District in Palembang; and Thomas Stodulka gained an original look on policies of health security in Kupang at the beginning of the pandemic. Of all the authors, only Jérome Tadié turned to cities and their symbols in his analysis of verticality in Jakarta, thus linking with Ong’s (1987) work.
In this short introduction, we would like to underline a few recurring characteristics in the articles that we present, characteristics that were identified through common discussion in our fieldwork: the relevance of regimes of visibility and the invisible, the fundamental role of emplaced emotions, the extent to which a specific site works as a symbolic organisation and the symbolic value of material infrastructures.
1 Contested Orders of Vision
The contemporary world is, at least in its dominant ideologies, “optically powered” (Bubandt, Rytter and Suhr 2019, 2), and studying processes of worlding almost inevitably implies analysing visions and the power of images. Some of the authors of this issue have approached the realm of vision through a more or less explicit elaboration on the Foucauldian idea that orders of vision are a major way for states and other powers (transnational investment projects, world health organisations, regional sport federations …) to govern and shape individuals; and that, for the same reason, powerful images can be differently appropriated by weaker subjects seeking reconnaissance (Foucault 1995; Jay and Ramaswamy 2014). Most articles describe how, in worlding sites, multiple actors contend their inscription in a regime of vision on different scales, including by staying invisible. If worlding is about the enactment of new perspectives, authors detail who holds control over the new vision, who suffers it, who sabotages it and who, from a different standpoint, sees something else altogether. It is argued that the fight over vision requires a conscious and intentional self-representation, and that acquiring control on standpoints means acquiring control of the future.
The fight for images can be understood on a very literal plane. In his examination of poor housing, city planning and evictions in Jakarta, Jérome Tadié deals with geometrical forms and visual trends in the urban landscape. He describes two competing spatialised visions: the verticality of high-rise building and malls versus the horizontality of non-elevated, traditional—although in the tradition of urban modernity—urban kampung residences. He shows how the city planners’ vertical projects evolve in a forced interaction with the counterproposals made by an anti-eviction NGO of local dwellers and by new generations of developers. He describes how, through international networking, the NGO has become a renowned pole of social research and a subject of reflexive knowledge which inevitably calls for the city planners’ attention. The author also points to how developers enter the competition for powerful images.
Monika Arnez’s contribution shifts the struggle over images into the realm of aesthetics. It posits that environmental protest movements should be understood as part of a decolonial worlding that manifests itself in performative acts. These can take various forms, including infographics, photographs, video clips, short documentaries, and text-image posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. They draw on familiar aesthetic repertoires, including images of disasters or threatened species, with the aim of creating an alternative political and social system through creative resistance to colonialism, extractivism, and capitalism. Despite the differences between the environmental initiatives studied, the protests of the Portuguese kristang community in Melaka, Klima Action Malaysia (KAMY), and Fridays for Future (FFF), these movements share a vision that reorders the world in a particular way, a vision that entails a more equitable distribution of resources. This article shows how the creation of visions is related to aesthetic choices, such as performative acts related to boundary-crossing between humans and plants, which serves to give the latter a political voice.
In Friederike Trotier’s article on the Jakabaring sports complex in Palembang, utopia is addressed as a compelling vision of the future where sport, considered both as international competition and as a healthy way of life, defines a desirable modernity. The construction of high-level infrastructures for the Asian Games is shown to substantiate a middle-class ideal of leisure and health as well as an Asian-based nationalism and developmentalism. Trotier underlines that although at ground level, the sporting complex is perceived as an imposing alien drawing finances away from citizens’ needs, the global moral representation of the healthy, fit body empowers politicians’ discourses and national planning.
Like in Friederike Trotier’s article, body-centred utopic visions are also at the heart of Thomas Stodulka’s article on health and prevention campaigns at the beginning of pandemics observed through signposts installed within the urban provincial landscape of Kupang, Indonesia. During a forced stay in partial lockdown, the author got acquainted with the public representation of diseases as part of the developmental vision of a future city. He observes that in the signposts that he encountered as he wandered around the desert city there is a reflexive elaboration where awareness is called upon for the sake of a “clean” and a “safe” future, virus-free. Dengue is a very well-known problem in Kupang; “Korona” and its fears are depicted as manageable through such existing knowledge. What is made visible through the signposts, so argues Stodulka, is not only a desirable moral order, but also the existing culture of handling a virus through morality.
Health campaigns address an invisible agent by making it visible. In other contexts, managing invisibility is an important part in the fight within orders of vision, that we can then call regimes of visibility (Perez 2018). This becomes the main focus in Giuseppe Bolotta’s account of hidden migrant work in Thailand. The article highlights how, in a society where an explicit hierarchy of images defines political aspects in all the spheres of existence (Jackson 2004), an illegal school for undocumented children is openly established and run by an NGO in the migrant settlement of Samut Sakhon.
Visibility in the neighbourhood, so observes Bolotta, is fundamental to enable fund-raising and implement the system of charity to the point that a campaigning local politician is invited on the school’s premises: the NGO head maintained that seeing such a good school should alert him both on the moral value of the illegal settlement and on the accountability of the NGO in charge. At the same time, Bolotta describes how, on a higher, official level, the school is invisible and has to remain so, or else it would prove to the whole Thai society and to the world that masses of badly exploited non-Thai migrants exist and that their work is vital for the country. Hidden exploitation and the world-encompassing manipulation of its levels of visibility is what the author calls “invisible worlding”.
2 Felt but Unseen: How Spirits and Emotions “World” a Place
“Invisibility is not merely that which is excluded from the hegemony of vision. Rather, the unseen haunts, affects and co-produces the visible world in multiple ways” write Bubandt, Rytter and Suhr (2019, 3). Regimes of visibility and the exclusion from them, invisibility, must not be mistaken for the totality of the real. Some articles of this volume focus on the role of the invisible by definition, that which is not obscured or erased but intrinsically not perceptible by the eye, in the process of worlding.
In the form of spiritual potencies, the immanent unseen concerns moral feelings and values. Friederike Trotier describes how, through building sports facilities, dangerous demons are replaced by orderly material structures that are supposed to grant more security for the population. The act of transforming an area previously considered haunted into a modern one is seen as having a cathartic effect, as if a “healing” of the space happened through modernisation. Trotier reminds us that the debates on the relationship between land and malignant powers are always thriving in Indonesia and animate attitudes of moral landscaping. On the one hand the acknowledgement of supernatural forces is regarded by modernisers of religion as superstition or syirik (idolatry) (Wessing 2017). On the other hand, the practice to annex unexploited areas to a perceived civilised society by integrating them into development plans falls in line with considering the anthropisation of abandoned or “wild” land as a sort of liberation from the unruly, mischievous and often ill-intentioned invisible beings. Developmental activities are then attributed a spiritual and moral quality which is coextensive with a world-inspired standardised religion.
The worlding efficacy of the unseen is at the centre of the production of a visual document in Silvia Vignato’s article on time and emotions in a failed Special Economic Zone in Indonesia. The “scene of gas”, as the author calls the context, is described as a static and controlled juxtaposition of images that acquire depth and movement only when ghosts, that is, the actualised immaterial presence of the dead, break in. Ghosts, or souls, can’t be seen but are felt both by the characters and by the authors of the film. In a methodological paradox where a visual approach is possible thanks to the invisible, in the documentary film Aceh After the post-industrial landscape becomes alive with memories of abuses and repression from the simultaneous time of fruitful yet exploitative gas extraction and civil conflict. In the article, a historicised fear is shown to link international and regional economic policies and national laws to the perception of North Aceh as the subject of entitlement: worlding as a plan for the future is carried out through emotions built in the past. The realm of the invisible allows time to be transcended.
In Monika Arnez’s article, it is a mix of emotions of anger, concern, and fear that have fuelled the protesters’ creative activities. Their anger is directed at colonial worlding, which often happens beyond public visibility, the perpetuation and maintenance of asymmetrical power structures and the overexploitation of natural resources, to the detriment of the affected population and flora and fauna. Through their protests they want to make these structures visible in order to change them in a second step. For example, KAMY activists, prompted by concern about further intensification of climate change damage in Malaysia, exposed the not directly visible connections between the creation of artificial islands and CO2 emissions, with the aim of educating vulnerable communities. Climate literacy, for them, is a means to speak on behalf of those who are less visible in the climate discourse, indigenous people, for example. In a similar way, Fridays for Future intends to give a political voice to endangered species by positioning them on an equal level with humans. The sense of fear of being “invisible”, being insignificant as a small ethnic and religious minority with little political influence, has led members of the kristang community to create a visible statement of their identity, the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
Emotions as powerful invisible drives are also at the core of Thomas Stodulka’s article. Feelings and handling them are fundamental in the public discourse of anti-contagion policies in Kupang, but, so argues the author, both admitted and proscribed emotions, like fear, linger on site in what he calls “sticky” situations and result in the ambiguous construction of a menacing Other. This goes beyond Kupang or the two states co-existing in Timor. Because of pandemics and communication about them, the colonial standard is upturned as it is the white man, the author himself, who is discriminated against as carrier of disease from the West. The building of a pandemic-informed world through emplaced emotional communication thus leads the people from Kupang to consciously reposition themselves in transnational, post-colonial logics.
3 Tangible and Intangible Infrastructures: Hard and Soft Worlding
The contribution by Silvia Vignato approaches the tangible, hard infrastructures that form gas-related SEZ in Aceh. Her article describes the effects of specific material structures on people’s life and ideas of the future, in what can be labelled as “hard” worlding, where things incorporate plans—in their case, failed plans. Such polysemy of materiality recurs in all the contributions and allows us to access a further angle of worlding alongside regimes of visibility and the spiritual or emotional immaterial.
In Vignato’s article, it is shown that although in North Aceh the narrative of a prosperity-generating SEZ was very often invoked, the only tangible new or renovated industries at the time of the research were a power generator and a long-standing state-owned company. As no new plants, roads or building sites were there to substantiate the planners’ well-wishing words, people sensed the inconsistence of the promised future and turned to other goals. Thus the inclusion of Aceh in a new, non-centralised state, cannot, argues the author, be uniquely political but must be materialised as, for example, in Timor, where the oil pipes and processing plants redefine the power of the new state (Bovensiepen and Nygaard-Christensen 2018). Vignato highlights how the new Indonesian nationwide developmental plan considers the national territory as an infrastructural network of extraction in which localities remain at their own will and for their own benefit, in a quasi-pure liberal attitude. The material failure of the SEZ signifies the troubled political history of the region, including the fact that to this day, many Acehnese feel unjustly exploited by their state.
Hard and soft infrastructures are viewed in Monika Arnez’s contribution through the lens of colonial worlding, both through material infrastructures and the creation of more exploitative labour structures. The three examples of climate change, plantation economy and the construction of artificial islands are indicative of how, in Spivak’s words (Spivak 1999, 253), colonialists are “worlding their own world”. It is both the physical infrastructure itself—such as the planned deep sea port in Melaka Gateway—and the symbols that stand for the serious consequences of such colonial worlding—flooding caused by climate change worldwide or haze in Malaysia due to the burning of rainforest—that the activists of the three environmental movements oppose. They aspire to a reordering of society based on a more equitable redistribution of resources, more gender-equity and securing the future for the young generation. Their decolonial worlding manifests itself in their environmental protest aesthetics, in performative acts with which they creatively resist colonialism, capitalism and resource exploitation. These performative acts refer both to physical infrastructures, such as the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Melaka, and to creative protest through digital means.
Giacomo Tabacco approaches the discrepancy between hard and soft worlding quite directly when he describes migratory infrastructures as intrinsically symbolic and intangible but nevertheless, experienced through materiality. Respondents, so he underlines, narrate their migration through a language of “things”: they use technological and personal objects as well as dwelling, workplaces and transportation to describe and transmit their experience. Building on the work of Harvey, Jensen and Morita (2017) and Larkin (2013), the author argues that the “things” that the workers met and used during their time in Batam were unfinished, unsafe, and unsecure: yet, returning migrants acknowledge them as technologically advanced, modern and desirable. Factory plants can be “good” or “bad” for migrants depending on a mix of experience, expectation and self-narration. The same migrants, however, describe their “coming home” as a choice to live in a supportive family environment, where affects and respect are valued and whatever capital is brought back gives some fruits. Migration appears as an ambiguous, affective and spatialised imaginary structure, which includes and reorders space and time, as a returnee child’s drawing beautifully shows in Tabacco’s article.
Giuseppe Bolotta focuses on embodied material worlding in his argument that migrant labour in Samut Sakhon is the backbone of intangible worlding infrastructures. Recalling Sopranzetti (2017), he suggests that illegal migrants are structural to the invisible worlding economy of Thai capital. In this case, like for Simone (2004), people themselves can be understood as an infrastructure shaped by provisionary and often precarious processes. Bodies are the “hard” worlding. Because Samut Sakhon residents fully live and work, they maintain or expand industrial fringes, ethnic enclaves, and slums while their everyday practices remain hidden from view. The author highlights that making migrant work and life invisible is part of a model of production based on profit maximisation through the exploitation of weak subjects, particularly migrants from Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos.
Thomas Stodulka, turned into a flâneur in Kupang by the outbreak of pandemics (Nas 2012), is poetically involved in both urban imagery and materiality when he wonders how the emotional and practical behaviour of people changes in their encounter with new infrastructures. As we mentioned, Stodulka analyses signposts, posters, banners, and media reports on the corona pandemic. Promoting the idea that changing orders of feelings raise the infrastructure to a personal and emotional level, he looks at various “disruptive situations” in which people reacted emotionally facing a newly introduced corona-related infrastructure. This included official measures such as the use of thermo-guns in a mall but also the absence of any corona infrastructure in residential neighbourhoods, where inhabitants continued to offer caring services to fellow residents, a haircut at the side of the road or a neck message, and no signposts or checkpoints had been set up.
4 Learning in Space: Connectivity
At the beginning of this introduction, we noted that non-urban/non-rural places, or specific places of cities, are an important horizon to capture processes of worlding. Vasantkumar (2017) has pinpointed the need to pay greater ethnographic attention to the lines of connectivity in a place, whether that “world-site” is a city, a village or just a path. We share the assumption that it is an important task of anthropological studies to analyse what the interplay between place and connectivity looks like (Vasantkumar 2017, 377). All the authors of this special issue have conducted fieldwork in places of heralded modernity with inwardly and outwardly defined boundaries that are meaningful to those who live there and are the object and the subject of an increased communication. We would like to return only to those mentioned in the various contributions to emphasise how these meanings are constructed through the experience of a specific space and the construction of emplaced symbolic meaning, and thus connect to wider spaces. This process is at the heart of Friederike Trotier’s contribution. The Jakabaring Sport City complex, she argues, provides visions for the future of the city which are driven by the stakeholders’ desire to make Palembang a modern, competitive and developed city. An emblematic worlding site was created in the place of what used to be a backward-looking area. The construction of the sports complex implied the expulsion of demonic forces that were said to have formerly wreaked havoc in the area: where wilderness conveyed ambiguity and insecurity, the new, healthy, built space was envisaged as morally sound and religiously safe. Concrete and permanent structures with gardens materialised such symbolic transformation and proposed it as an example. Trotier’s article illustrates the symbolic order achieved in the Jakabaring Sports City as exemplary also of other areas, as it was able to disseminate skills and administrative experience in a process that Bunnell, Padawangi and Thompson (2018) call “translocal learning”. However, in contrast to their explanation of the knowledge transfer from Solo to Jakarta as mainly happening through the personal mobility of Joko Widodo, Trotier foregrounds how different cities are autonomously trying to emulate Palembang’s model as a way to increase their competitiveness in the national, regional, and—in theory—world scene.
To this aim, in Palembang as in many cities in Southeast Asia, the vision of urban development is labelled “green and smart”, a highly desirable couple of qualities, although, according to the author, it is basically a strategy to distract the citizens from the environmental degradation associated with the construction projects. In Jérome Tadié’s article, the sites considered as carrier of modelling and symbolic communication are kampung, that is, in his case, poor settlements along rivers, as well as high-rise social housing complexes in the mega-city of Jakarta. Symbols of poverty and degradation are here at play. In urban Indonesia, communities living close to river banks—the Ciliwung has been referred to as one of the world’s dirtiest rivers (Lebreton et al 2017)—are frequently evicted on moral and social grounds: they are unsafe and unhealthy, and thus it is a duty to provide inhabitants with better housing. Tadié argues, though, that as the Ciliwung banks are often flooded in the rainy season, their inhabitants are evicted because their shacks and makeshift houses get in the way of the city administration’s flood control strategies and disrupt the desired city image of order. Eviction becomes part of a spatial re-ordering process of verticality in which informal settlements have to make way for social housing projects in high-risers. The sites are symbolically charged, as decision-makers connote the former kampung with wildness, lack of order and risk, while they promote the high-rise blocks of flats as modern and decent for the population to live in.
5 The Ambiguity of Worlding: Fragile Sites
We would like to conclude this introduction with a brief note on ambiguity as a fundamental character of emplaced worlding. As we have seen, the four aspects of the worlding process that we have underlined in the sites here examined—visibility, emotions, the symbolic value of materiality and connectivity as a space of learning—point to how the sites keep together the past and the future, the local, and the elsewhere. We can push further the list of doing “this but also that”. Worlding sites imply subjectivation while enforcing or maintaining passive exploitation. Though bound to a specific place, they span across different times. And while they thus transcend temporal limits and dissolve spatial boundaries, still, they are made of things. All the authors in the volume emphasise such emplaced polysemic ambiguity.
It’s an ambiguity of time, as researchers describe how contested visions of the future affect who controls, supports or resists the imagined future. In fieldwork, often competing categories of technicians of the future inspired by regional and global standards—politicians, planners, economist, developers—confront categories of non-professional diverse actors—activists, survivors, migrants, workers, poor dwellers, sports people—who are also referring to future ideals. And yet, while all actors ambitiously invoke their idea of a transformation for the better, the worlding sites that we observed materialise the very aspects of the past that many actors want to depart from, like the rotting plants in Aceh and Batam, the unfinished luxury housing, the Jakarta uneven skyline or the Samut Sakhon slums which signify past exploitation, an old civil conflict, the 2008 crisis, unsuccessful national plans, former competing investors and overall, poverty. The past is incrusted in things.
Ambiguity then concerns place, particularly because we consider worlding sites as non-urban or not exclusively urban. Whatever the emplaced, original and socially rooted attitudes which govern the enactment and the construction of the sites, dominating models and images are taken from outside, if only from a similar site or different political levels: we see the developmental conceptions underpinning regional SEZ, the Asian ideals of housing, the world criteria of risk management in health, and the international and national ideals of good and bad work create localities that are dispossessed, if only temporarily, of local symbols and horizons. Like Spivak (1999) originally suggested, being connected with wider networks is often akin to being colonised by dominating images: the phantasised luxury, the stigma of poverty, the resentment against the state, competition for sports events, hygiene and so on can be seen as impositions from outside. As in its first formulation, “worlding” in this acceptation is a passive mode, as if a site has been dragged into “the world” and submitted to its often negative systems of exploitation. Living in a worlding site is then an ambiguous feeling of living nowhere.
“Worlding”, though, as we have seen, can be an active mode, as when a site elaborates images, ideas and actions that others, through connections, will perceive as a new “world”. The proposals by the kristang community, the concrete and imaginary strength of migration and return between Batam and Java, across Thai borders or from Aceh, the educational projects in slums, the appropriation and inventive modification of urban sustainable development in Jakarta and the appropriation and creation of health strategies in Kupang all make the sites that we studied places of a world that could not be foreseen from outside them. Living and participating in a worlding site denotes a condition of fragility, of difficult decisions and unclear visions of one’s future while also making way for individual and collective initiatives.
Acknowledgments
The project of this volume has been developed within the European project CRISEA (2017–2020), Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia, grant n. 770562.
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