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P A R T F I V E Communicating Ideas: Popular Culture, Arts, and Entertainment Southeast Asia is rightly celebrated for the rich diversity of its artistic, expressive , culinary, and entertainment traditions. Many American and European scholars were initially drawn to Southeast Asia via chance encounters with the region’s music, dance, material culture, or martial arts. One of this volume’s editors (Adams) still vividly recalls a European train ride she took as an undergraduate on which an Indonesian family introduced her to their homeland by pulling out from their suitcases an array of brightly colored batik textiles and postcards of their elaborately carved ancestral houses. When they learned that Adams was an anthropology major, the family declared Indonesia to be a dream nation for anthropologists interested in the arts, as the country is home to a multitude of cultural groups, each with its unique genre of textiles, music, and carvings, not to mention foods and leisure activities . This family’s assessment of the richness of Indonesian expressive forms is equally applicable to other regions of Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, as in other parts of the world, popular culture, the arts, sports, and even food preferences express a myriad of personal, communal, spiritual, and political concerns. Some performative and artistic traditions may have their roots outside the region, as is the case with the famed puppetry and dance performances based on the Indian epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata or stories recounting episodes of Buddha’s life. However , as with all cultural borrowings, these imported epic narratives rapidly became infused with local cultural themes. Today these imported traditions are part of the expressive landscapes of Java, Bali, Thailand, and other regions of mainland Southeast Asia. The Indian tales of the Mahab- 178 / Part Five harata or the Ramayana may be performed accompanied by gamelan percussion orchestras as shadow puppetry epics (wayang) at all-night village-based celebrations (such as weddings or purification ceremonies), as they were in the past on Java and Bali. Or the epics might be condensed, updated, and staged at prestigious performing arts venues in national capitals, adapted to make trenchant commentary on social issues, as the Indonesian artist Kumoratih Kushardjanto recently did in his adaptation of the Mahabharata (“Boma”), which spotlighted the profusion of homeless children on the streets of Jakarta. In her contribution to this section, Sandra Cate (chapter 16) examines the ways in which several contemporary Thai artists in Bangkok and Chaing Mai craft interactive art forms drawing on ancient Theravada Buddhist forms or other “traditional” Thai icons (including the elephant or the symbolic color of yellow, associated with a revered king of Thailand) to problematize official national narratives of Thai history. These official national narratives suppress evidence of state-sponsored violence against Thai citizens and celebrate mythologies of benevolent rulership. Participatory art in Southeast Asia may also offer less disturbing, more easily digestible lessons. Cate’s chapter also addresses the ways in which contemporary Thai artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pinardee Sanpitak draw on performance and participatory art to celebrate how the preparation of foods such as pad thai (the epicurean embodiment of Thai identity for many American frequenters of Thai restaurants) can be reconceptualized as part of the social, interactive “art of living.” A bottom-line point embodied in these performative pieces is that we need not limit our conception of “art” to objects and paintings. In a related vein, Nir Avieli (in chapter 17) spotlights food, approaching the Hoinese everyday meal as a kind of cultural artifact that conveys much about Vietnamese conceptions of the cosmos. That is, when viewed as a communicative cultural form, a simple meal of rice, fish, fish sauce, and other leafy or aromatic greens is far more than mere caloric nourishment. Rather, underlying such a meal are important ideas about cosmic principles (yin and yang, am and duong) and the ways in which diet can forge balance between these principles. In essence, as Avieli’s anthropological analysis suggests, Vietnamese food is interwoven with cultural and metaphysical ideas, even when not consciously articulated by those consuming it. Thus far we have spotlighted performative, immaterial expressive forms and how these expressive forms may “speak” to various spiritual, political , or historical themes. What of more concrete types of material culture? Various writers have addressed the ways in which ancient monumental architectural displays in Southeast Asia embody visions of the cosmos. For instance , the Hindu-Buddhist temple of Borobudur in central Java (Indonesia), whose construction began...

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