Maison Asie Pacifique

Actualités

International Conference - Globalization and localization in Asia and the Pacific : resistance, adaptation and synthesis

CASSIS - France, 2-4 Octobre 2008

Programme

After the first conference, held in Marseilles in June 2005, which analyzed the interactions between Southeast Asia and the Pacific, we became aware that it was important to compare the ways in which these two culture areas resisted the confrontation with Western expansion.
If cultural encounters often are sources of conflict, they also fuel people’s imagination and trigger invention, even re-invention. At first sight, the danger seems to be that of cultural standardization, but more in-depth investigation reveals many infra-national or transnational processes of adaptation, interpretation, and resistance, at work in defense of social, cultural, ethnic, or political identities.
After Gruzinski, it appears necessary to clearly distinguish between mondialization and globalization. Mondialization refers to the world-scale diffusion of persons, ideas, and beliefs, which blend with others originating from other continents. Globalization, rather, refers to a specific mode of diffusion that involves enforcing a frame of thought and a type of language while carefully preventing any contamination from the non-Western world. We wish to study the dialectical relationship of these two dynamic processes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Contemporary mondialization cannot be studied without reference to two earlier processes of expansion, closely linked to the two phases of Western colonization: the mercantile phase of the 16th to 18th centuries, and the imperialist phase of the 19th century. In the wake of colonial empires, not only Western sciences and techniques, but also philosophy, political science, and finally the emerging social sciences diffused through the whole planet.
The colonial empires of the age of capitalism and imperalism then progressively weakened, until their collapse with the Second World War. From then on, mondialization was no longer driven by the colonial enterprise, but rather by economic and technical development in relation to the communication revolution.
Christian missionary expansion was closely associated, though with no reflexive distance, to the two phases of colonial expansion. Following the discovery of new regions, America and Asia, the Portuguese and the Spaniards were granted by the Pope an evangelization monopoly in the lands that they had conquered and a transfer authority to their benefit over those lands. In the 18th century and, even more, in the 19th century, the evangelization venture experienced a renewed impetus. Catholic and protestant missionaries, men and women, hailing from Europe and North America, spread to the whole world and translated the scriptures of the Christian God into local languages.
While evangelization and colonization shared a common ideal of imposing to the world their vision of a civilizing and universalist project, their goals differed. Missionaries intended to build a Christian society. Although they had at first endorsed the colonial project, Christian churches, from the 1960s onward, tended to more or less clearly dissociate themselves from the West and to favor the emergence of autochthonous churches.
In Southeast Asia, missionary influence was particularly powerful in the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as among certain groups like the Karen, while colonization, somehow a relatively brief episode (about one century in many cases), had less devastating effects there than on other continents. Where political structures were strong, they were by and large maintained (Malay states, Laos, Cambodia, etc.).
By privileging a longue durée approach, we should be able to elude the “precolonial-colonial-postcolonial” trilogy, based on a Western historical view in which other cultures are marginal and dominated. Indeed, the colonial times and its present, postcolonial phase do not constitute the unique point of entry for dominated societies into modernity, but rather one episode in the course of a longer global history in which Western and non-Western space-time frameworks and historicities overlap. Western colonization did not develop in an indigenous void.
The choice to focus on the vast Asia-Pacific culture area is utterly relevant. This region, as a whole, increasingly features in the writings of economics and geopolitics experts and, although it could have been called a “empty immensity”, it is increasingly viewed as one of the world’s crucial hubs. It covers 17 percent of the planet’s surface, gathers 55 percent of its population, along with two thirds of the world’s poor, and includes the two most populous nations (China and India). Moreover, some of its states are among the most dynamic economically and among the most industrialized. It also benefits from supra-national institutions (APEC, ASEAN, etc.). Finally, the region has a long history of migrations, from the Austronesian diffusion to the Chinese and Indian diasporas, which has contributed to the unity of its human population.