Conference Description
A conference to be held at College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, MA
November 4-6, 2005 During the 1980s and ‘90s, various countries in Asia were heralded as thriving economic miracles. Their conspicuously prosperous urban middle classes, sometimes referred to as Asia’s “New Rich,” led many media pundits, political leaders, and academics in the region and throughout the world to ascribe Asian economic successes to supposed “Asian Values” that emphasize hard work, respect for authority, close family structures, and frugality. Following the economic crises of the late 1990s, the triumphalism of Asian Values political discourses waned, but economic anxieties seem to have sparked their own kinds of assertions of cultural particularity. Asian Values rhetoric continues to possess a remarkable flexibility that seems only to have added to its appeal. Depending on the context, Asian Values can incorporate a variety of ethnic and national identities, as well as diverse religious and moral traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism). Variations on this discourse have resonated with emergent middle classes, for Asian Values can explain their status in moral and ethical terms and counter anxieties that the New Rich have abandoned their cultural roots. Appeals to Asian Values have also been used to justify social and political hierarchies or to rationalize the marginality of less prosperous groups as due, not to structural inequalities related to class, gender, ethnicity, or place of residence, but to their own cultural, ethnic, or moral shortcomings. Being Asian thus becomes appealing across class segments, and as a result, often conceals class differences. In short, Asian Values discourses can explain economic outcomes as due to cultural particularity.
“Class-ifying ‘Asian Values’: Culture, Morality, and the Politics of Being Middle-Class in Asia” invites anthropological, sociological, and historical tracing of the genealogy of these discourses, reconsideration of their relationship to forms and experiences of Asian-ness and of class, and theorizing of the connections between cultural politics and political economy. Rather than explain economic success by referring to Asian cultural particularities, we seek scholarship that explores why assertions of Asian Values have gained such widespread currency, what their outlines are in specific contexts and at particular moments, and what consequences such claims have on personal life, social relations, political regimes, and processes of cultural reproduction.
By bringing together innovative and critical scholars working in this area, we hope to “class-ify” Asian values through consideration of two key questions:
- How do discourses of Asian Values naturalize socioeconomic hierarchies based on class, ethnicity, gender, and location?
- How are the supposed structural realities of the middle class experienced and contested through moral and political discourses, cultural practices, and political economy?
The conference will be organized into thematic panels based on presenters’ abstracts. Panel topics could include:
(1) Reading Class: How might articulations of culture, religion, gender, ethnicity, and locale constitute middle-classness through notions of propriety, respectability, morality, and religiosity? How might these forms reproduce or rework specific structural differences and collective identities?
(2) Class-ifying Asian-ness: How have concepts of Asian-ness been constructed in colonial and postcolonial contexts? How have appeals to Asian-ness migrated across the region and been localized in specific nations and areas? How might such constructions combat Orientalist images of an Asian other, yet also risk the potentially essentializing effects of self-Orientalization? Could Asian Values be a response to accusations that middle classes are engaged in inauthentic mimicry of either colonial bourgeoisies or imagined contemporary Western culture?
(3) Middle-class Subjectivities: How is middle-classness experienced and interpreted on the ground? What kinds of anxieties or privileges mark middle-class experience? What sorts of broad social labor are middle classes ask to perform? What claims to history, authenticity, or modernity are such actors making? In what ways does being middle-class involve playing up or down distinctions against other classes?
(4) Political Discourses and Class: How do political discourses, both socialist and neoliberal, shape class subjectivity? Why might aspects of an idealized Asian-ness be especially associated with and attractive to middle classes? Who and what institutions benefit by construing particular population segments as “middle-class”? What are the connections between the middle class and discussions of civil society?
(5) Asian Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism: How do Asian Values shape and get shaped by economic activities and forms of organization? How do various kinds of actors use appeals to Asian Values to justify their economic endeavors? How do Asian Values naturalize particular regimes of accumulation, buttress claims to cultural superiority, resist and/or enact neo-imperialism, or combat fears of Westernization? How might local notions of flexibility or entrepreneurship intersect with neoliberal economic orientations?
(6) Gender, Sexuality, and Asian Values: How do notions of class and Asian-ness interact with concepts of masculinity and femininity? How are women seen as a danger to and/or the embodiment of Asian-ness or tradition? How might particular forms of middle-class flexibility, mobility, or entrepreneurship be gendered masculine? What kind of family forms are deemed appropriately middle-class, and by whom? How are desires gendered and classed? How do childrearing and education reflect anxieties about the reproduction of culture and class status? Are Asian Values or middle-classness always heteronormative, or do appeals to neoliberal flexibility provide room for alternative sexual identities?
(7) Ethnicity and Asian Values: How might citizenship be cultural, with certain groups coming to fulfill and embody values of Asian-ness? How are particular formations of Asian Values used to marginalize and critique ethnic Others? Are dynamics of internal Orientalism involved? What are the connections between ethnicity and class? How might ethnic minorities appropriate Asian Values discourses to challenge the terms of their exclusion?
(8) Media-ting and Consuming Asian Values: How do mass media participate in the construction of Asian Values? What industries and institutions are invested in categorizing populations as middle-class or appropriately Asian? Are consumer desires made respectable or suspect when associated with a middle class?
Conference presentations will take place on November 4 and 5, with panels open to the public. The morning of November 6 will be dedicated to private discussion among presenters.
We
very much hope that you will be able to join us. For more
information, please contact Ann Marie Leshkowich (Holy Cross)
and Carla Jones (University of Colorado, Boulder) at: asianvalues@holycross.edu.
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