The Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Chinese Nationalism Reinforced
(2009). The Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Chinese Nationalism Reinforced. Diaspora Studies: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 119-142.
The Indian Ocean as Diasporic Space: A conceptual introduction
Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in Indian Ocean networks within diaspora studies, and within migration studies more generally. In this introduction we develop the idea of the Indian Ocean as a space within which diasporas come into being, endure, and sustain relationships. Taking this Indian Ocean perspective, we suggest that the concept of the diaspora as currently employed in scholarship could be strengthened and we outline some suggestions for a reframing of the concept. Through an emphasis on its enduring character, as a community, and through a decentring of the homeland, we propose to understand a diaspora as a community that is diffuse but coherent, both spatially and temporally, and that has agency, facilitating the activities of its members. This provides a framework for the variety of approaches to the concept in the articles in the collection that follows. The networks linking the shores of the Indian Ocean have long facilitated a constant if sometimes irregular movement of peoples, leading to the establishment of communities both along the ocean’s littoral and further inland. Some of these communities have great temporal depth: the Hadramis, for example, who have been present in eastern Africa for centuries, if not millennia; the Gujaratis, who claim to have been responsible for the Islamisation of parts of Southeast Asia; or different groups of Chinese, who in centuries past appear to have settled not only in Southeast Asia but in places as far afield as the Persian Gulf and eastern Africa. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the consolidation of the European colonial empires around the Indian 77 | The Indian Ocean as a Diasporic Space Ocean, there were renewed movements. Some were forced, or as good as, others were prompted by greater economic opportunities facilitated by easier (if sometimes more expensive) travel. Some of the people moving drew upon pre-existing relationships – again, Hadramis or Gujaratis – while others established new communities – Tamils or Chinese in the Mascarenes, for example. Many of these communities continued, and continue, to maintain relationships across the ocean, both with each other and with the homeland, and these relationships are often instrumental in framing contemporary social and cultural practices, constituting individual and group identities, and shaping social, economic and political strategies, thereby providing cohesion within and between these different communities and influencing relationships with others in the host society. They are, of course, diasporas. For many, the notion of the diaspora invokes classic examples such as Jews, Armenians or Africans, groups of people with their places of origin in the Middle East, the Caucasus and western Africa and dispersed – often with great violence – to locations mainly in Europe and the Americas. The Indian Ocean, by contrast, has historically (and perhaps ironically) received less recognition as a space characterised by diasporic communities and networks – only the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean, often borrowing conceptually, and not always convincingly, from the Atlantic model, attracted much attention. However, over the past two decades or so, scholarship on African diasporic communities in the Indian Ocean has become more nuanced, and there has been work on other groups, Hadramis in particular, but South Asians, including Gujaratis and 1 For example: Edward A. Alpers, “The African diaspora in the northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an old problem, new directions for research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 17, 2 (1997), 62-81; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1989). 2 See, for example: Hubert Gerbeau, “L’océan Indien n’est pas l’Atlantique. La traite illégale à Bourbon au XIXe siècle,” Outre-mers, 89, 336-337 (2002), 79-108; Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (eds.), The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003); Kai Kresse and Edward Simpson, “Between Africa and India: Thinking comparatively across the western Indian Ocean,” Berlin: ZMO, ZMO Working Papers 5 (2011); Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and creolization in an Indian Ocean diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Behnaz Mirzai, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Ineke Van Kessel, “Belanda Hitam: The Indo-African communities of Java,” African and Asian Studies, 6, 3 (2007), 243-79; Thomas Vernet, “East African travelers and traders in the Indian Ocean: Swahili ships, Swahili mobilities ca. 1500–1800,” in Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Michael Pearson, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 167-202. 3 Ulrike Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut: Reforming the homeland (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Anne K. Bang, Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c. 1880-1940): Ripples of Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Sumit K. Mandal, Becoming Arab: Creole histories and modern identity in the Malay world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Christian Lekon, Time, Space and Globalization: Hadhramaut and the Iain Walker and Martin Slama | 78 Tamils, and Chinese, too. From our perspective, this growing interest in Indian Ocean diasporas is welcome: the Indian Ocean is very much a diasporic space, and it has long been so. People have moved through the region for a multitude of reasons, maintaining (unlike the Atlantic African diaspora, for example) networks across the ocean and beyond, through which people moved for economic, religious, educational, political and family reasons. These networks have long been the focus of scholarship, and it is hard to imagine histories of the ocean that do not have these sorts of connections and movements at their core, even if they haven’t explicitly invoked the notion of diaspora. From works by Hourani, Toussaint and Chaudhuri, to those by McPherson, Pearson and Das Gupta, by way of the novels of Amitav Ghosh, the Indian Ocean has long been a space defined by its networks. Indeed, one of the oldest books known to us – the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea – is about Indian Ocean networks. The notion of diaspora is in such widespread use in contemporary scholarship that, by way of a conceptual recalibration, it is useful to briefly revisit the history of the term before reconsidering the concept in the context of the Indian Ocean. The word diaspora is derived from the Greek verb διασπείρειν, to scatter, and was used in the classical period Indian Ocean rim 1863-1967 (Gleichen: Muster-Schmidt, 2014); Leif Manger, The Hadrami Diaspora: Community‐ building on the Indian Ocean rim (New York: Berghahn, 2010). 4 Edward A. Alpers and Chhaya Goswami (eds.), Transregional Trade and Traders: Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from early times to 1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019); Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2015); Fred Clothey, Ritualizing on the Boundaries: Continuity and innovation in the Tamil diaspora (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Pascale Herzig, South Asians in Kenya: Gender, generation and changing identities in diaspora (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006); Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Lotika Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat and the Sea (Vadodara: Darshak Itihas Nidhi, 2011). 5 Abanti Bhattacharya, “The Chinese diaspora in southeast Asia: Chinese nationalism reinforced,” Diaspora Studies, 2, 2 (2009), 119-42; Shelly Chan, “The Case for diaspora: A temporal approach to the Chinese experience,” Journal of Asian Studies, 74, 1 (2015), 107-28; Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in modern times (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Anshan Li, A History of Overseas Chinese in Africa to 1911 (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2012); Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese diasporas, 1842 to 1949,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 2 (1999), 306-37; Ian Rae and Morgen Witzel (eds.), The Overseas Chinese of South East Asia: History, culture, business (Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 6 George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in ancient and early medieval times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A history of people and the sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Naylor Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003); Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant: 1500-1800: Collected essays of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Ghosh’s novels include: Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Granta, 1998). 7 Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Text with introduction, translation, and commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 8 For a comprehensive history of the word, see: Stéphane Dufoix, The Dispersion: A history of the word diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 79 | The Indian Ocean as a Diasporic Space to refer to a dispersal of human beings. Only later was the noun diaspora invoked to describe the state of dispersion. It appeared for the first time in the G
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION AND SOCIAL ACCEPTABILITY IN THE PHILIPPINE EIA PROCESS
Since 1992, the Philippines has employed an innovative requirement to demonstrate social acceptability in project planning as a means through which public participation can be established. This paper discusses the participatory mechanisms used and evaluates the effectiveness of public participation in three case studies from key development sectors. In doing so, the existing conceptual frameworks for evaluating public participation are further developed through insights to community empowerment and sustainability in particular. Whilst increased public participation has resulted in improvements in the EIA process and environmental decision making in the Philippines, the evaluation of the case studies also reveals substantial issues of conflict within the communities and of the representation of diverse local interests at core stages in the planning process.