Culture, religion and the Southeast Asian state

For much of the Cold War, religion and culture did not feature prominently in the study of politics. In the industrialized societies of the West, sacred beliefs and religious sensibilities were thought to have been successfully relegated to the private sphere through the process of secularization that was the inexorable attribute of the modern nation-state. Confrontation with the Soviet bloc notwithstanding, the very movement of history itself pointed towards a global convergence towards the secular, capitalist, liberal democratic model. Any difficulties in applying this model to the newly independent states of Asia and Africa or even Latin America were explained as stemming from the persistence of premodern culture in these societies. Social commentators were virtually at one in arguing that the rise of the modern state in the Third World, coupled with material progress, would eventually give rise to more recognizably ‘modern’ forms of politics there as well. Scientific rationalism and advances in technology would help transform even such stubbornly religious backwaters as the Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe, or the ‘Muslim world’.1 Although not peculiar to the formal study of societies, the singular conception of modernity led to widespread assumptions that economic progress would help replicate the socio-cultural formations and political conditions it had produced in most of the world’s industrialized societies. As had happened in the West, religious beliefs and practices would inevitably fade under the pressures of urbanization, bureaucratization and the market. Culture and religion might be the concern of anthropologists and historians, but not of political scientists or international relations scholars, at least not during the greater part of the Cold War period. Operating within the dominant paradigm of modernization theory, political science departments were focused on the design and function of parliaments, electoral mechanisms or legal frameworks - not on threadbare relics of the feudal age fated to be swept away sooner rather than later. Even Iran’s Islamic Revolution or the pivotal role played by the Catholic Church in the dissolution of the Soviet empire were routinely explained away as vestiges of the old order in societies that had not fully completed the processes of modernization, or they were presented as responses to be expected in particularly repressive regimes, where religion oftentimes provided the only possible vocabulary of dissent. Obvious exceptions to this conscious marginalization of religion and culture were the still influential works of Robert Bellah, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jose Casanova. But for the most part, Cold War era scholarship refused to countenance a serious place for religion in studies of politics and the functioning of modern industrialized societies. It has become a cliché to say that many things changed on 11 September 2001, but what transpired that autumn day served to accelerate a reassessment of the role of religion and culture that was already under way. Even when religion and culture were, albeit reluctantly, considered relevant to domestic and international politics, they were seldom viewed as distinct fields of analysis. More or often than not they were said to reflect or obscure the somehow more real material or ideological divides within or between states and societies. The persistent hesitation to recognize religion and culture, which overlap but are not coterminous, as a valid and legitimate field of political analysis has been strikingly evident in the coverage of what is often referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’. While conservative commentators warned of an ominous Islamist tide usurping the democratic upheavals of the Arab world, many progressive voices hailed the young revolutionaries as ‘secularists’. The possibility that the critiques to the old discredited order could be simultaneously democratic and religious was seldom entertained. Even where religion and culture are acknowledged as politically significant factors, the often unspoken assumption across the intellectual and political spectrum was that they were at best transitory phenomena in the public sphere. The expectation remained that, along with the rise of an indigenous middle-class, education (and in particular that of women), foreign aid and assistance in institution-building would eventually help bring about change. This assumption is troublesome in that it ignores the extent to which religion continues to play an overt political role in many ‘modern’ Western states. It overlooks the fact that the secular, liberal modern state has absorbed a number of the functions and, indeed, some of the less tolerant traits of the confessional state and of religion itself. The position developed in this volume is that religion and culture matter in politics everywhere; in Europe, North America and Oceania as much as in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Although religion and culture are clearly not the only forces shaping history, our understanding of society is all the poorer when we ignore some of the dynamic factors influencing processes of nation-building, economic development, the evolution of regional and global institutions, as well as the growth of international law. While religion has often served as a powerful transmission belt for the intensification of political conflicts and, indeed, often sits astride tangible economic and political inequalities, religiously articulated political standpoints cannot be dismissed as manifestations of ‘irrational politics’ or false consciousness. The same applies more generally to the religious beliefs and practices, upheld in public and in private, that sustain congregations in churches, mosques and temples everywhere. This is not to overlook the instrumentalization of religion and the frequent cloaking of secular objectives in sacred language. Rather it is to take seriously the agency of religiously affiliated or religiously inspired actors in conflict and violence on the one hand and the construction of civility and the growth of dialogical discourse and practice on the other. We have seen this dual trend unfold in various domains, including national polities, regional formations and on the wider international stage. International relations theorists are coming to the realization that religion must itself be made the subject of theorization (Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Thomas 2005; Hanson 2007; Heng and Liew 2010). Their calls, particularly in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, London and most recently Utøya, appear to have found greater resonance than the pleas of Bellah, Eisenstadt and Casanova did in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, the analysis often remains paper-thin. It is one thing to identify the factors that have led to the apparently unprecedented politicization of ethnicity, religion and culture over the past several decades, and quite another to articulate the complex interconnection of state, society and religion. Three important clarifications may be in order here. The first concerns the use of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘religion’, two concepts that are quite distinct though inextricably entwined, hence the source of much confusion. Both religion and culture are all-encompassing concepts that cannot be easily or usefully categorized by making one the subset of the other, or by attempting to reduce one to the realm of the sacred and assigning the other to the realm of the profane. Nor is it satisfactory to characterize religion in terms of doctrinal or metaphysical claims on the one hand, and culture purely in relation to ethnicity or ‘primordial’ attachments on the other. Both culture and religion delineate in complex and interacting ways the boundaries that separate the insider from the outsider, the internal from the external, right from wrong or at least acceptable from reprehensible conduct. There is nevertheless a distinctive quality to religion, which has to do with an enduring yearning for some form of transcendence, whether expressed by belief in God or more amorphous but no less potent cosmic notions that take the human being beyond the reality of the physical universe. Religion is inseparable from culture in that all religions, in different ways and to different degrees, entail stories, myths, rituals and ethical precepts, which are themselves important building blocks of culture. Yet the culture of any society is necessarily multilayered, and seldom the pure reflection of the beliefs and practices of any one religion or even combination of religions. Culture, which includes language, technology, institutions and much else, is best understood as a complex mosaic to which different epochs and population movements contribute different ways of knowing, perceiving, feeling and living in the world as societies seek to adapt to the challenges of a ceaselessly changing environment. The second has to do with the understanding of religion itself. It hardly need be said that the world’s major religions, including the three Abrahamic faiths, are heterogeneous entities composed of a bewildering array of sects, schools, denominations, orthodoxies and heresies. If this sometimes makes it difficult to conceive of faith traditions in the singular, this is even more so in the case of abstract references to religion. There exists, as Talal Asad (2003) has argued, no universal definition of this term. Yet, religion as understood in dominant academic discourse derives largely from the distinct history of Western Europe. The narrow delineation of ‘religion’ as a separate sphere sits uncomfortably with the Muslim conception of din, or the metaphysical beliefs and spiritual practices of South and East Asia. Even though the Muslim world, at least from the Abbasids onwards, has known a de facto separation of powers, the idea that politics and religion constitute two discrete domains, or that the ‘sacred’ is separate from and independent of the ‘profane’, is a distinctly modern, European conception. The third regards the understanding of culture that has also been elaborated many times before, but bears repeating here. We are not dealing with immutable, primordial essences but with malleable, highly dynamic and constantly transforming norms, values, customs and practices. Nowhere is this more so than in Southeast Asia, a region straddling one of the most ancient trading routes; open to the exchange of goods, ideas and speculations about the metaphysical. Not only have Southeast Asia’s indigenous peoples themselves long participated in these networks of trade, scholarship and pilgrimage, but they have also long hosted a diverse range of diasporic communities. It is these intersecting currents of trade, conquest, migration and intellectual exchange that underlie the constant transformations of culture. To recognize the dynamism and evolutionary character of culture, however, is not to deny its centrality in formulations of the good, the right and the beautiful - even when these perceptions evolve over time or when citizens that share the same culture arrive at sharply different conclusions. And although each tradition, it is true, possesses distinctive ‘perspectives on ethical conduct and personal and social relationships’, the differences within groups are often no less significant than those between them (Camilleri 2011: 10).