Keywords

Southeast Asia, popular culture, identity

Objectives

Southeast Asia is home to a great variety of popular culture. The research objectives of this project are to examine forms of cultural expression and corporeal symbolism in globalizing modern societies, and thus clarify the processes by which differences in gender, ethnicity, language, religions, and class give rise to identity. In Southeast Asia, our target region, most nation-states are multicultural entities that freed themselves from colonialism in the latter half of the twentieth century and are still in search of national identities. These postcolonial nations all contain differences in ethnicity and religion, region, social class, and gender. Under the impact of globalization, many expressions of culture have been decentered, deregionalized, commercialized, and fragmented. They have been repeatedly reinterpreted in ways that transcend existing cultural boundaries. This research focuses on the media and popular culture industries in contemporary Southeast Asia, examining them as sites of both production and consumption of cultural expression, and paying special attention to music, performance, literature, film, art and fashion, to better understand the formation of identity and self-perception.

Research Results

Through discussions in the research project, we gained the following knowledge as the background for observations about popular culture in Southeast Asia. A large number of studies on Southeast Asian culture from the 1980s to 1990s set the construction of a nation state and modernization as the main theme, where the main object was culture that was produced, distributed and consumed as a representative list of national culture and emphasis was placed on the relations between collective identity, such as a nation or ethnic groups, i.e., a constituent element of a nation, and culture. Meanwhile, on the back of globalization of information, the rise of neoliberal economy, the era of media development, witnessed are fluctuations in, or conflicts of, diverse values in discussions on culture in Southeast Asia. With these changes as the background, we discussed the importance of studying from cases in each region as to the formation of growing self-awareness and conflicts of diverse values. Based on these discussions, we positioned our case studies in the following three areas: 1) People’s multiple /fluid identity in cultural expressions; 2) Cultural activities that aspire to national integration and regulations and censorship of cultural expressions by the state; and 3) The mode of culture that is distributed and dispersed by going beyond the regional framework on the back of globalization of information and development of media.
In addition, as the viewpoint when considering the aforementioned current state, we thought about paying attention to the following three points: 1) Changes in cultural expressions thanks to the development of media; 2) Consumption activities by the middle class in urban areas; and 3) The role performed by new-generation artists who were born in the 1970s and later.
As regards popular culture as the objective of research, we deepened discussions on its importance in terms of how it is produced, distributed and consumed without taking it as a genre. In addition to cultural expressions that are distributed through diverse media, we also paid attention to bodily representations, such as artistic performance activities, cosplay (dressing up as a character) and tattoo, and observed the process of how these expressions were created and became widespread as well.