Part 1

• Accepting inequality in livestock-related livelihoods: insights from Vietnam and Myanmar Ayako Ebata Institute of Development Studies Nguyen Thi Dien

  In this presentation, we will address social and economic inequality that persists in agri-food value chains in Vietnam and Myanmar. Drawing on insights along livestock value chains, we identify and discuss acceptance of inequality in livestock-related livelihoods based on identities linked to gender, economic status, and migration status. For instance, while women in Vietnam are engaged in raising small livestock such as chicken, their access, control and entitlement to key production resources such as land and credit are constrained by gender norms. Women also remain responsible for most housework, leading to unequal distribution of household labour at home. Likewise, poor families in Myanmar consider expanding their livestock production out of reach and small-scale farming is where they feel “comfortable”. Through theories of power – including Steven Lukes’ “third face of power” and James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance” –, we will unpack how individuals and communities accept precarious livelihoods as their appropriate place in a given society. We argue that power relationships that are hidden in the existing social norms, institutions (such as regulations and laws), and individuals’ interactions with the market economy influence how marginalised people accept the notion of inequality. However, we also argue that these people are not entirely powerless, and they exercise invisible form of power (as discussed by Scott) to influence social and economic outcomes for them and their families. We conclude with suggestions to tackle inequality in these complex contexts in Southeast Asia.

• Banal Inequality: The Glowing Role-Playing Body of the Rich and the Invisible Cluttered Entities of the Poor in Neoliberal Thailand Rubkwan Thammaboosadee Bangkok University

  This presentation is derived from my broader ongoing research, “Performing Inequality: The Study of Body, Noises, and Cultural Memory Transmission in Neoliberal Thailand (2023-2025),” aimed at creating innovative learning tools to foster awareness and engagement with socio-economic inequality in Thailand.
  Through the lens of performance studies, I seek to unveil the cultural processes that render socio-economic inequality in neoliberal Thailand as mundane via media representation. In this presentation, I discuss instances in which wealthy Thai celebrities share online content about their personal lives, performing an ‘easy and simple life.’ One such example includes a wealthy billionaire family presenting their children using dilapidated public buses in a romanticized manner. While the process of “role-playing,” which attempts to foster empathy towards others, is identified as a crucial tool in the dramaturgical process, enabling the role-player to temporarily experience emotions and shared experiences previously unknown to them, I argue that these acts of role-playing by the privileged class, assuming the roles of those in lower social statuses, serve as a temporary, fantasized spectacle and do not aim to address structural issues or critique inequality. At times, these celebrities also flaunt their ultra-luxurious lifestyles, including ownership of numerous supercars. I refer to this as ‘selective performance,’ where the affluent curate their media portrayals, which are then perpetuated and celebrated as commendable acts.
  Conversely, I explore the struggles of the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, where hundreds of impoverished individuals attempt to voice their concerns about labor rights and welfare since 2023 but are silenced, marginalized, and remain unpopular to be reported by the mainstream media. Tragically, during October 2023’s gathering, one protester died at the protest site when authorities obstructed ventilation with giant metal containers, and no one assumed responsibility for the incident. Another case explored involves a middle-aged man who died from a chronic illness, which his relatives claim was caused by overwork, although his employer denied any responsibility. In contrast to the affluent, these impoverished individuals are rendered as entities without agency, transformed from citizens to denizens. I argue that these everyday cultural performances of inequality, selectively showcased through the media and in tandem with neoliberal policies, play a crucial role in normalizing the country’s significant economic disparities, subtly promoting the acceptance of this unjust structure.

• “Phuying-kham-phet” and/or “Kathoey” which box should I tick? Transgender’s positional identities in contemporary Thailand Cheera Thongkrajai Khon Kaen University

  “Phuying-kham-phet” appeared to the Thai public for the first time in 2010 in a TV show. Nok Yollada explained that she was a phuying-kham-phet, a woman trapped in a male body. Her condition was to be considered as a pathology to be cured. After this public appearance, there were a lot of debates, negatively criticizing the category “phuying-kham-phet”. Most of these reactions disapproved of her female identity, even though she was fully beautified and had undergone gender affirmative surgery. For many, a “Kathoey” is always a kathoey, a “third sex” category, the “in-between” within sex/gender binarism that has been considered as such for a long time.
  Thai kathoeys may seem to be integrated into Thai society. However, it is apparently a “tolerant but not accepting” attitude (Jackson, 1999). Nowadays, Thai transgenders are still facing many sorts of discrimination and violations, starting from within families and schools and in workplaces (Suriyasarn B. 2014, UNDP and USAID 2014). For many decades, trans communities have been fighting for their gender recognition in the eye of the law. The identity politics of phuying-kham-phet is strategically employed to conquer a women’s identity and be free from being identified as kathoeys (Thongkrajai, 2023).
  This study aims to understand how individuals, activist groups or trans communities choose the terms to define and describe themselves, and how their choices can reveal their strategies of negotiation with different actors, such as the general public, politicians, media, and international NGOs in the struggle towards acceptance and recognition. Based on qualitative research with 16 transgender youths and 6 transgender activists, this paper will try to examine how people’s positionality in terms of social class, economic status, profession, level of gender embodiment, ethnicity, generation…etc., influences how they see and define themselves contextually. The emergence of modern trans identity has also had an effect on the younger generation’s self-exploration and gender identification process. This transformation has illustrated the changing in the way Thai people understand sex and gender from the social constructionist conception towards human rights- based discourse.

• Radical Acceptance? Where do Indonesia’s domestic workers go from here? Mary Austin (Independent Scholar - retired)

  Indonesia’s four million plus domestic workers embody inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity.

  After showing a three-minute video depicting the precarity and vulnerability of Indonesia’s Pekerja Rumah Tangga- or PRT as they are known- I will draw on interviews and observations collected during fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, on recently published writings of domestic workers, and on scholarly ethnographies dating from the 1970s onwards to explore the notions and practices of acceptance amongst workers on the one hand and employers and politicians on the other (Austin 2022; Austin 2024).

  Analysis of these sources suggests that a relatively small but growing group of organized workers have found ways to endure and transform their individual and collective experiences of intersecting inequalities. Joining a conversation about acceptance and resistance in precarious labour, such as recent research on workers in the Grab economy (Yasih 2022; Yasih and Hadiz 2023; Novianto 2023), I argue that established connections with transnational feminisms and the global domestic workers’ movement have offered PRT an alternative imaginary and opened a space of radical acceptance, enabling them to challenge the status quo.

  However, despite twenty years of activism, deeply rooted practices and the logics of neoliberalism have stymied campaigns for the legal, monetary, and social recognition of the value of the PRT labour force.

  Whether the long-awaited Law for the Protection of Domestic Workers will finally pass through Indonesia’s parliament following the 2024 elections remains to be seen.

Part 2

• Village Health Volunteers as compliant agents of the Thai State Anjalee Cohen University of Sydney

  Reformist doctors in Thailand have combined to create a primary health care system in rural areas in which village health volunteers play a major role. Inspired by Buddhist moral values and WHO advocacy of a whole-of-society approach, these doctors have envisaged a decentralised system that emphasizes volunteers as community oriented, self-reliant agents of change. My ethnographic research in Chiang Mai from 2020-2024, and research elsewhere in Thailand, reveals that these ideals of village health volunteer empowerment have not been realized. Rather village health volunteers have become entrapped in a centralised, hierarchical, and top-down system rigorously controlled by the Ministry of Public Health. This paper examines the roles of village health volunteers in a medium-sized town in Chiang Mai, most of whom are female and relatively poor, and their ‘acceptance’ of increased unpaid labour, stringent rules, and growing governmental oversight (especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic) in their efforts to improve the health of their community.

• Normalizing illegality: A case study of transnational labor migration in Central Vietnam Thi Anh Thu Dinh University of Milano-Bicocca

  Research in labor migration in the Southest Asia addresses the ongoing issues of systemic failure to protect labor migrants throughout their migratory process such as corruption, exclusion,
  discrimination, exploitation, coercion, etc. In this context of transnational labor migration, I focus on a rural commune in central Vietnam with a large population of citizens working abroad, unpacking how people perceive and accept migration related issues as ordinary hardships as well as the collective effort to maintain the migration out flow through illegal means.
  The paper highlights the practices of sending people to work abroad hinged on the naturalized reality of inequalities and risks. First, by contrasting legal and illegal methods of preparing for overseas labor migration, I demonstrate how illegal approaches have become such refined and established practices as much as they become ordinary within the community. Second, I explore the locals’ perception and attitude towards (in)equality in relation to labor, which subvert and reconstitute the legitimate notions of worthy laborers and labor oppoturnities. Therefore, such perception and attitude purport the activities, albeit illicit and risky, to onboard people working overseas. Thus, I point at the the social phenomenon of normalizing inequalities, where individuals find acceptance within a political and economic structure that systemically sustains vulnerabilities. The discussion leads to a critical view at the evolution of individual and collective agency that redefines freedom of movement and the view of mobility. It presents an uncertain outlook on how the capacity for migration may develop amidst
  increasingly stringent mobility regulations. I selected Cuong Gian commune as a particularly meaningful location. Cuong Gian is a coastal commune in Ha Tinh province in Vietnam. There are 3390 households with about 15000 people, of which nearly 3000 people are working abroad, and there is at least one family member working abroad in almost every household. The commune has gained incredible economic jump resulted from labor export since 1995. In 2018, Cuong Gian was re-classified as new rural construction, though it is more well-known with the name given by the media as làng ti? phu? (billionaire villages) due to its imposing and wealthy neighborhoods., the site has a significant population of left-behind children and elders. Most of the old generation are now retired after returning from working overseas; their children followed their footstep with more well-informed preparation, and their grandchildren will follow suit with even better starting point. I moved there in October 2023 and have carried out ethnographic enquiries through participant observation and through interviews with different households and individuals. I also carry out document analysis of local socio-economic reports which give a broader view into the political and social axis of the migration networks.

• To eat or to accumulate? The moral economy of informal logging in upland West Kalimantan, Indonesia Paul Thung Brunel University

  Informal, commercial timber extraction remains a significant part of the lives of many small-scale farmers in the uplands Indonesian Borneo. Nevertheless, research on illegal logging remains largely separate from research on agrarian issues. Building on recent moves to expand agrarian studies to include extractive activities, the paper aims to provide a more complete consideration of rural livelihoods, enrich theories of the agrarian transition, and move understandings of illegal logging beyond the limiting frame of illegality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I report on ethical debates about logging held in one village in Indonesian Borneo. This reveals how some residents engaged in logging as a subsistence activity, while for others it was a way to accumulate capital. Whereas the former were strongly oriented towards individual autonomy, the latter engaged in hierarchical relations structured by indebtedness and the imperative to make a profit. Finally, I also show how the community worked through these ethical and related economic differences through practices of conviviality: discussions and institutional responses at the local level which, seemingly successfully, aimed to dampen the social impacts of capitalist transformation.

• Linguistic Honorifics in Cambodia: Language of Respect or Language of Inequality Cheryl Yin Carleton College

  Social hierarchy and identity are important in Cambodia, and the Khmer (Cambodian) language reflects this through an elaborate system of honorifics and honorific registers. First, Khmer allows open class pronouns, so a teacher can say “Go get glue for teacher” instead of “Go get glue for me” when speaking to a student. Second, Khmer also has honorific registers, or speech styles, that change based on participants’ identities and formality. For example, the verb “to eat” is normally nyam in the cities and hob in the countryside, but Cambodians use si when describing animals eating, chan when monks are eating, and soay when royalty eat (even if they are not present). This paper asks: as a result of growing trend toward democratic, egalitarian ideals and in light of the Khmer language’s grammar, how are Cambodians using Khmer language today? Using data from ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, I argue that Cambodians today prefer to keep some forms of social hierarchy in their language, but linguistic forms that reflect extremely social inequality (like the inequality between master-slave, landlord-peasant, human-animal) are less acceptable. I also point to one historical moment when Cambodians were forced to speak in egalitarian ways. Under the Khmer Rouge communist regime (1975-1979), when over 1.5-2 million Cambodians died, Cambodians had to address everyone as mitt (comrade) and only one word for “eat” (hob) was allowed. This was supposed to create an egalitarian, agrarian society. With this in mind, I tease apart Cambodian perceptions of “social hierarchy,” “social inequality,” and “respect” to show that extreme egalitarianism is sometimes equated with lack of respect, which is why Cambodians continue to accept some social inequality and use linguistic forms that make social hierarchy and social difference salient.

Abstract