The Militancy of Kinship, Intimacy, and Religion

What are the specific features of political dissent in Southeast Asia? And how may scholarly insights from the region contribute to the study of social movements in other world areas? In this article, we scrutinize the florescence of social activism in contemporary Southeast Asia by bringing together examples of popular protest in countries as diverse as Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as in transnational arenas of mobilization that connect local struggles to globally relevant issues and forms of dissent. We discuss applications of social movements literature to specific Southeast Asian historical, political and socio-cultural modernities, arguing that anthropological scholarship, postcolonial and feminist theory, as well as the social scientific study of power ontologies in non-western societies, are necessary references to expand our understanding of social movements in the region. We simultaneously advance that Southeast Asian expressions of dissent often double as “alter-politics”, or alternative re-imaginings of the common good. Their study benefits from careful examination of situational arrangements of power in specific locales, with particular attention to domains of feeling, thought and practice that are commonly deemed as apolitical in modern political philosophy: intimacy, religion, and kinship. With this essay, we finally aim to treat Southeast Asia as a site for the production rather than the mere reception of theories of resistance.