In-Person Panel PS1.7

Sacred Spaces: Living Cultures, Rituals, and Religion across Asia

The Lasting Gospel: An Ethnographic Approach to Funeral Music in Toraja 

Danielle Dudung 

This study focuses on the Christian communities in Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. I explore the cultural negotiations through which indigenous people adjust their pre-Christian belief systems and practices while retaining a distinct form of Christianity manifested in their daily practices. Despite the shift of the majority of Toraja people from their indigenous faith, Aluk Todolo, to Christianity, some components of the old religion have also been maintained, and funeral music is a clear example. I mainly focus on the grand funeral of Toraja, which consists of up to a week of rituals and celebrations accompanied by singing and dancing. I approach funeral music to understand the degree of negotiation that Toraja Christians performed as Christians whose identity is intertwined with Aluk Todolo and its practices. I discuss how funeral music is incorporated into the beliefs and practices of Toraja people.

Living cultures and heritage processes: heritagisation, custodianship and batik

Tod Jones

Custodianship of heritage in heritage institutions operate at a number of scales and obligations to different groups often conflict. Ethical obligations are often addressed after decades when the broader effects of processes of heritagisation that create custodial relationships for objects are interrogated and acknowledged. This presentation interrogates the role of museums in the ongoing and boundary-crossing effects of the process of heritagisation and the gendered consequences for batik workers. The scales that museums have shaped and, in many cases, continue to defend have ongoing material effects on the skilled practitioners who hold heritage knowledge. Using the example of batik, I demonstrate how its heritagisation, beginning in the colonial museums of the nineteenth century, has shaped not just batik cloth but the conditions of batik workers over generations and the neighbourhoods where batik is produced. Importantly, I explain how heritage processes have contributed to concealing the skill of female batik artisans and their gendered exploitation over many decades. These relationships become visible when attention shifts to the relationship between heritage and its environment rather than understanding batik and batik neighbourhoods as a practice of cultural production.

Cold War Tours in Sinophone Asia (1950s-1970s) 

Cho Kiu (Joseph) Li 

Recent studies on the “Cultural Cold War” have shown that the Cold War was composed of numerous cultural and affective interactions that cannot be oversimplified as conflicts of grand ideological discourses. This paper focuses on Cold War Asia through the lens of tourism and its affective dynamics. Contrary to the conventional view that Mao’s China was “closed” before its “opening,” from the 1950s onwards, the Chinese government actively invited overseas Chinese to visit China for diplomatic and economic purposes. Numerous “homeland tours” were organized to compete with the KMT in attracting tourists from Sinophone regions like Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, and more. This study reconstructs this overlooked history through travel reports and travel literature in pro-communist and pro-KMT Sinophone newspapers in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The textualized tourist experiences and guest-host relations presented in print materials were attempts to construct—and at times negate—China as a symbol of hospitable socialism in the affective Cold War Asia landscape. In the context of cross-border tourism, the Cold War emerges as a period of contentious touristification.