2018 Asian Studies Sampler

The Teahouse under Socialism

The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950–2000

Di Wang

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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This book has been published with the assistance of a research grant from the University of Macau.

Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wang, Di, 1956– author.

Title: The teahouse under socialism : the decline and renewal of public life in Chengdu, 1950–2000 / Di Wang.

Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017040065 (print) | LCCN 2017040970 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501715549 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501715556 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501715488 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501715495 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Chengdu (China)—Social life and customs—20th century. | Tearooms—China—Chengdu—History—20th century. | Socialism and culture—China—Chengdu—History—20th century. | Chengdu (China)—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC DS797.77.C48 (ebook) | LCC DS797.77.C48 W355 2018 (print) | DDC 951/.38—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040065 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Urban Political Transitions under Socialism

1

Part I. The Decline of Public Life, 1950–1976

31

1. The Demise of the Chengdu Teahouse Guild and the Fall of Small Business

33

2. State Control and the Rise of Socialist Entertainment

60

3. The Decline of Public Life under Mao’s Rule

91

Part II. The Return of Public Life, 1977–2000

119

4. The Resurgence of Teahouses in the Reform Era

121

5. Urban Residents and Migrant Workers in Public Life

150

6. The Power of Mahjong

181

Conclusion: The State, the Teahouse, and the Public Sphere

206

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v iii

Conte nts

Character List

225

Notes

235

Works Cited

263

Index

295

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Introduction Urban Political Transitions under Socialism

The last day of 1949 in Chengdu was cold and overcast, and in their usual way residents sought warmth and camaraderie in hundreds of neighborhood teahouses. But December 31 also marked a turning point. News about the war just beyond the city was trickling in, and newspaper headlines announced the destruction of Nationalist troops and a coming political transition for Chengdu.1 Just a few days earlier, the air was filled with the not-so-distant rumble of cannon and intense gunfire, but on December 27, without firing a shot, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had marched into Chengdu, preventing the street battles that residents dreaded. During all this, life carried on, and teahouses not only remained open but were packed with customers. Daily life was affected very little.2 Few patrons would have noticed that on this last day of the year the new government established a Committee for the Takeover of Culture and Education (Wenjiao jieguan weiyuanhui) under the PLA’s Military Control Commission in Chengdu (Chengdu shi junshi guanzhi weiyuanhui), an act that would forever change not just teahouses but public life in general (see figure I.1).3

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Figure I.1 Stove to warm patrons in a teahouse in a Chengdu suburb, September 2015. Author photo.

People eager to hear the latest about the war went to their neighborhood’s information hub. On December 31 the teahouse waiters would have been attending to their usual duties—seating, clearing, and refreshing tea bowls—but today they were too busy to sweep peanut shells and

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tobacco ash from the floor. Customers did not seem to mind; their sole focus was the PLA’s presence in the city and the optimistic speculation that the new Communist government would bring social and economic stability. Large numbers in Chengdu were hopeful that a regime change would end an era filled with civil war, rising prices, and the Nationalist dictatorship. The ordinary people cared little about complex political ideologies but longed for stability and prosperity. In the eyes of many, a regime change might not have been a bad thing.

As night fell, even more people squeezed into the teahouses, as the day’s news was put aside in favor of scheduled storytelling. The storytellers quickly lured listeners into strange and fantastical worlds—Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), and The Legend of Yue Fei (Shuo Yue).4 These roiling tales led listeners into well-known historical and political narratives as well as into ghost worlds, and it all overlapped with human society past and present, providing temporary relief from recent difficulties. Many in the audience went home once the storytelling ended at about 10 or 11 p.m., but hardcore teahouse-goers would have stayed much longer, bolstered by naps taken earlier in the bamboo chairs.5 Also, late nights were when chefs, apprentices, and workers from nearby shops and restaurants gathered in the teahouses to relax with friends and unwind after their long shifts, and to use the hot water to clean their faces and even their feet. The regulars might not have noted the passing of another year before heading home.

After all, previous years had blended, one into another, and there was no reason to believe the year ahead would be any different. The common folk of Chengdu followed the generations that went before them, secure in the knowledge that regardless of the world’s chaos, they could hold fast to their meager livelihoods and their teahouses (see figure I.2).

But if some of the customers or workers paused to think about teahouses, they might have recalled that like all of Chengdu, the teahouses had already gone through some changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, even the city’s physical landscape had transformed during this time.6 While the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century and the occupation of Beijing by troops of the Eight Powers Alliance had had little effect on Chengdu, which was shielded by high elevation and mountainous borders, this protection was pierced with the regime change brought by the 1911 Revolution. At that time, mutinous soldiers

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Figure I.2 Storyteller. From Fu Chongju 1910, 117.

burned and looted Chengdu’s commercial center, followed by the horrific street battles of 1917 and 1932. Chengdu survived relatively unscathed a few years later, when Japanese invading troops flooded eastern China.

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Subsequently, from 1937 to 1949, Chengdu residents could easily frequent teahouses, and they went about their everyday lives without interruption.

Long after midnight on the last day of 1949, waiters finally twisted the knobs to turn off oil lamps or switched off electric lights, leaving their teahouses dark and quiet, a brief respite in the daily cycle of operation.7 Teahouse workers went home to sleep under thermal quilts after another exhausting day, and quite a few actually lived in the teahouses. This free time was precious, a quick opportunity to rest or stretch sore muscles.

After just a few hours, they would make their way back to the commotion of the teahouse, thankful for wages that kept them from starvation and perhaps hoping to someday open their own place. As long as there were teahouses, they would have their livelihoods.

While we cannot construct with any certainty the dreams and aspirations of average teahouse customers and workers, we can be sure that most did not foresee the upheaval soon to come, when teahouses would disappear along with the occupations that they provided. When workers awakened the following morning, January 1, 1950, they would have opened the teahouse doors for business as usual, unaware that Chengdu as well as all other Chinese cities had entered a profoundly different era, one that made the functioning of teahouses and public life more subject to state control.

The City, Modernity, and the Vitality of Teahouses Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan Province and one of the major cultural, economic, and political centers in West China. It has a long history. During the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE), it was the capital of the state of Shu. During the Tang dynasty, Chengdu was one of most prosperous cities in China. Much later, a transition occurred from late Ming governance to that of the early Qing (roughly the 1620s to 1680s), during which Sichuan experienced more than a half century of war that devastated the economy in the region and damaged the cities. Yet in the early Qing, the economy and culture were gradually restored. The Opium Wars (1840–1842 and 1856–1860) had little economic impact on Chengdu, although missionaries increased their activities there, and the city suffered little damage during the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864). Chengdu had one of the largest populations among the country’s inland cities in the

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late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1900s to the 1920s its population was from 340,000 to 350,000. By 1949, it had grown to 650,000. By 2000, its population reached six million.8 Like all other provincial capitals, Chengdu experienced almost all the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations from the lateQing reforms to the Communist victory. During 1900 and 1910, Chengdu, under the influence of the New Policies and self-government movement, became a center and model of industrial, commercial, educational, and social reforms in the upper Yangzi region. Local elites, supported by state power, enthusiastically participated in reforms that expanded their influence over ordinary people and built their social reputation. In 1911 many residents joined the Railroad Protection Movement, but in the post-Republican revolution Chengdu fell into chaos. By 1935, the central government barely controlled Chengdu; instead the city was in the hands of five warlords who shared power under the system of defense districts (fangqu zhi). The Nationalist government finally extended its power into Sichuan during 1935 and 1937.9 The War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) brought Sichuan and Chengdu onto the central stage of national politics. The Nationalist government’s move to Chongqing (only 180 miles from Chengdu) had a profound impact on Chengdu and also changed the relationship between Sichuan and the central government. Many offices of the central government and other provincial governments, social and cultural organizations, schools, and factories from East China arrived in Chengdu. A huge number of refugees flooded into the city, bringing new cultural elements with them. Postwar Chengdu became a stage of political struggle between the Guomindang and the Communists. On December 27, 1949, nearly three months after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the People’s Liberation Army captured Chengdu.

During the early socialist period, Chengdu was gradually developed into an industrial city, and its facilities and infrastructure were also gradually improved: streets were widened; there was new residential construction; sewage systems and bridges were built or improved. From 1964, the central government launched a plan called Three Lines of Construction (Sanxian jianshe) in preparation for future wars. This provided a new wave of industrial development. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the city fell into unrest and even a constant sort of violence in the early

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stage of the movement, when many factories and schools were shut down, and many young people and government employees were sent to the countryside. The Imperial City, a historic site dating to the Han dynasty, was dismantled entirely.

The post-Mao reforms brought Chengdu rapid expansion and construction. From 1993 to 1998 the dredging of the Funan River that circles the city and the construction of parks with plantings along its banks greatly improved the landscape, environment, and living conditions of the city. In order to balance development between coast and hinterland, the central government launched an ambitious plan called the Great Development of China’s West (Xibu dakaifa), which opened even more opportunities for Chengdu to play a broader role in the national economy. Sichuan was usually one of the most populous of China’s provinces, but in 1997 its eastern part was separated and became administered by Chongqing at the provincial level; as a result, Chengdu’s administrative region shrank.

Despite this setback, Chengdu, based on its central position in Sichuan Province, subsequently built up its own momentum by knitting together the economy of western Sichuan, thus providing a great opportunity for its economic development.

With the advent of this kind of modernization, the pace of everyday life has accelerated. As Ágnes Heller pointed out, “Any change in the rhythm of life is bound to affect everyday life, but not everyone’s everyday life in equal measure; and not every area of everyday life is affected to the same degree.”10 Chengdu succumbed much less than other major Chinese cities to the fast-paced lifestyle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, like many Chinese cities, Chengdu has experienced development processes and pressures that are now commonplace in China and around the world. As a result of China’s political, economic, and cultural transformation and the impact of globalization, teahouses, teahouse culture, and the public sphere have seen a shift in both the substance and style of the activities and opportunities offered.11 By 2000, the city had changed dramatically. It teemed with places of public leisure—coffeehouses, bars, Internet bars, karaoke clubs, ballroom dance halls, cinemas, and other modern entertainment centers—as well as luxury hotels and related facilities. Furthermore, almost every family had one or more color television sets and low-priced VCD and DVD players that brought a huge variety of channels and entertainment genres

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(especially Hollywood). Entire families, in their own cars, were taking drives out of town to scenic areas or to resorts and the like. Chengdu residents had options for their leisure time, but, almost unbelievably, this tsunami of options failed to drown the teahouse business; instead, in Chengdu today, teahouses enjoy unprecedented popularity and success and are found almost everywhere in the city. No one anticipated such a strong resurgence, given the obstacles teahouses faced during almost every political stage in the twentieth century. During the War of Resistance, reformist elites and the government all framed their constant attacks on teahouse culture in the larger context of the war. They often compared the plight of soldiers fighting on the bloody battlefields with people whiling away the hours at teahouses, turning leisure pursuits into shameful activities. Lao Xiang, a local writer, defended the habits of Chengdu residents, pointing out, “We do not cry out ‘Long live teahouses,’ but we also disagree that teahouses should be forbidden. When a better alternative emerges, teahouses may fade away. In the meantime, however, we have to go to teahouses to drink, rest, chat, do business, and meet friends.”12 Lao believed that new types of public facilities might eventually replace the teahouse, which was a token of an “old society” that would be abandoned as society became more “progressive.” He of course could not anticipate that more than half a century later, when society came to be considered vastly more “progressive,” teahouses would flourish.13 Today, old, small, and rustic teahouses prosper along with elegant and magnificent ones, and they are shared by elderly retirees who smoke old-fashioned pipes and fashionable youngsters with dyed hair and smart phones.

Chengdu in the past had more teahouses than other cities because of the culture fostered by its geography and economy. Unlike in most regions in China, the rural people of Sichuan, especially on the Chengdu Plain, lived in relative isolation on their farmlands; this prevented the cultivation of village or community life. They relied on rural markets more than did their counterparts elsewhere, who had access to long-distance trade networks.

The rural workers of the Chengdu Plain marketed locally and then would stop by a teahouse to socialize or take in entertainment. Some even bought and sold in the teahouses.14 In addition, the narrow footpaths made the use of transport animals rare; men using equipment such as carrying poles, wheelbarrows, and sedan chairs were much more prevalent. Coolies depended on teahouses as rest places. Poor water quality and limited fuel

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Figure I.3 A teahouse in the open air. This photograph was taken by Joseph Needham between 1943 and 1946. Photo reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge University.

made Chengdu further dependent on teahouses. Water carriers brought river water from outside town to sell for drinking. Such transport would have been difficult for many families, so it was common to purchase boiled water directly from teahouses. Firewood, the major fuel in Chengdu, was expensive; many ordinary families lit fires only to cook. They patronized restaurants and teahouses in order to conserve firewood, and bought their hot water for washing from neighborhood teahouses (see figure I.3).

By the end of the twentieth century, drinking water, fuel, and transportation were plentiful and affordable, and people could drink tea conveniently at home. So what has made teahouses endure? There are many factors, but the most important is that teahouses always adapted to changes in society, and adjusted their business model in parallel with cultural, political, and economic transformations. In particular, they have been able to absorb new technology and new demands for pleasure. In the first ten or fifteen years of the twentieth century, for example, even during the Qing dynasty at its endpoint, teahouses introduced movie shows and record players to the public.15 In the 1980s, with the rise of videos,

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many teahouses added video screening equipment. To keep up with economic development and rising living standards, teahouses installed airconditioning and private box seats. Similarly, teahouses provided space for mahjong. Even the older sort of personal services either survived intact or came back in different forms. For instance, while the hot towel service was gone, foot-soaking has been added. And fortune-telling, earwax picking, and shoe polishing continue today. Sometime, people in the teahouse feel that they have traveled to a previous era or are on a bridge linking the past to the present.

Coffeehouses and bars have not replaced teahouses or stolen away teahouse customers. Tea drinking is still the best fit for people with limited economic resources, especially the elderly. The main customer base in the teahouse is the middle-aged and older. Young people who are attracted to international trends go to modern Western-style coffeehouses or bars, while others patronize the less-expensive and old-style ones.16 Coffeehouses and bars in contemporary Chinese cities are entirely Western, with no reflection of Chinese custom, but teahouses are rooted in China’s past.

In a coffeehouse or a bar, patrons have no access to peddlers, fortunetellers, earwax pickers, or shoe polishers. The teahouse has always included more of these aspects of the local society and economy than do the modern coffeehouse and bar. Its patrons can linger for hours or even all day, for very little money, adding boiling water to their tea leaves rather than having to buy another cup. In lower-level and street-corner teahouses, people often strike up conversation, adding thus another dimension of vitality to the teahouse environment.

Nearly all of Chengdu has been demolished and rebuilt during the decades spanning the turn of the century. The old streets and neighborhoods in which teahouses were embedded are almost all gone, and the city has been born anew, amid rapid population growth, booming urban development, and the attendant traffic problems. Chengdu’s fate is similar to that of almost all other ancient cities in China. Whereas each Chinese city in ancient times had its own charming, distinctive appearance and folk culture, today this uniqueness is all but lost; cities are becoming alike in look and sensation. Therefore, the recovery and restoration of the historical legacies of China’s cities form a significant mission for social, cultural, and urban historians. Whether the teahouse will continue to adapt to the challenges of radical social transformation, incorporate

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today’s ubiquitous technological gadgets, manage globalization, and play an important role in modern, urban lifestyles are questions that only time will answer.

Public Life, Public Spaces, and Urban Society under the Socialist State Why are we looking at teahouses in socialist, that is, post-1949, Chengdu?

The teahouse may be considered a “small urban space,” following the words of sociologist William H. Whyte in his discussion of such public places as coffeehouses.17 It is natural, then, that the theory and history of urbanism will be taken up here, since we are dealing with Chengdu as an urban area with many smaller spaces, à la Whyte. I propose that we think beyond simply “small urban spaces” and link the latter to concepts of the public, society, and the state. How does the public (or publics) manifest itself (or themselves) in those small urban spaces? Teahouse life was and is part, but not all, of public life in Chengdu, and was thus susceptible to transformations, along with the rest of the country. We shall see its importance in everyday life and how an ancient cultural institution could remain vital and even thrive despite unprecedented threats during a period of rapid modernization. Post-Mao reforms provided a significant opportunity for the revival of public life, which enhanced the development of the public sphere.

In this book, “the public” means people as they move about outside their private spaces, engaging in livelihoods, commerce, information sharing, and entertainment—all of these giving substance to another aspect of urban society, namely urban culture. The individuals who act in public, in their public spaces, and the resultant life and culture that make up a society, must all deal in numerous ways with the state. In this book I begin to explore examples of the way in which certain policies of Early Socialism created historically game-changing impacts on society. The main evidence of this was the large extent to which urban Chengdu and its culture of public life became pressured and bent by the ruling Communist state entity, which was quite concerned with the public. By looking back at Chengdu and capturing the push and pull of various forces, we can narrate changes in the situation of the urban teahouse (the small spaces)

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The Venture Capital State

The Silicon Valley Model in East Asia

Robyn Klingler-Vidra

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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[Publication of this book has been made possible by a generous grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.]

Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klingler-Vidra, Robyn, author.

Title: The venture capital state : the Silicon Valley model in East Asia / Robyn Klingler-Vidra.

Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Cornell studies in political economy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017052058 | ISBN 9781501723377 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501723391 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501723384 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Venture capital—Government policy—East Asia—Case studies. | Capital market—Government policy—East Asia—Case studies. | Technological innovations—Finance— Government policy—East Asia—Case studies. | Diffusion of innovations—East Asia—Case studies. | East Asia—Economic policy—Case studies.

Classification: LCC HG4751. K573 2018 | DDC 332/.04154095—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052058 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii 1. The Venture Capital State

1

2. Contextual Rationality

17

3. Venture Capital and VC policy

48

4. Hong Kong: Night-Watchman State

63

5. Taiwan: Private Sector Promoter

78

6. Singapore: Financier and Director

93

7. Analyzing Sources of Adaptation

109

8. The Future of Venture Capital States: Distinct Interventions to Build Markets

132

Notes 153 List of Interviews 163 References 165 Index 187

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1

The Venture Capital State

The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.

—Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

Rumors abounded as twelve North Korean government officials spent two weeks in Silicon Valley during the spring of 2011. What we know of their northern California trip is that the delegates—surrounded by security officers in a visit enshrouded in secrecy—spent a hundred minutes at the Googleplex in Mountain View and joined a lunch seminar at Stanford University. Their itinerary was reportedly motivated by a desire to build up North Korea’s “own internet expertise.” The North Korean policymakers wanted to learn what the Silicon Valley cluster was all about, and what aided its ephemeral success.

We could presume that they came to study Silicon Valley with an eye toward developing Pyongyang as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The North Korean delegates are perhaps the least likely in a long list of policymakers, acting on behalf of cities, provinces, and countries around the globe, to study the drivers of Silicon Valley’s success. Policymakers visit the valley to learn how to create their own system of innovation (Nelson and Winter 1982; Lundvall 1992) and to build a bridge to Silicon Valley (Rapo and Seulamo-Vargas 2010; Saxenian 2008). As an expression of their aspirations, policymakers go on to craft Silicon monikers for their locale. The British government’s promotion of the Silicon Roundabout in London, Taiwan’s use of the Silicon Island, and Skolkovo being created as Russia’s Silicon Valley are just a few examples.1

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2 Chapter 1

Many of these policymakers study one particular component of the Silicon Valley cluster: its venture capital (VC) industry. They learn about the cluster’s VC element for two reasons. First, VC epitomizes the neoliberal essence of Silicon Valley: private investors allocating money to high-growth, but high-risk, start-ups—in exchange for an ownership stake—that strive to disrupt existing markets (Lerner 2002).2 If a local Silicon Valley is to be created, then a VC market—akin to the one that financed and nurtured the meteoric rise of start-ups in Silicon Valley—is a necessary component of the free market fabric.

Second, venture capital is widely recognized as an engine of innovation and entrepreneurship (Gompers and Lerner 1999; OECD 1996; National Venture Capital Association 2012). In the post–global financial crisis world, as policymakers in advanced economies work to resuscitate economic activity, they hope that venture capital’s “smart money” for start-ups fosters innovation and high-quality job creation. Policymakers in emerging markets see venture capital as a tool for advancing the knowledge-based economy capabilities essential to competing in the services and technology-centric segments of the global economy. Policymakers in emerging market countries hope that an escape from the “middle income trap” can be attained through competition in high value-added sectors, such as those that venture capitalists invest in (Paus 2014). Venture capital promotion is conceptualized as one of the tools capable of driving advanced and developing states’ ability to compete on the innovation frontier. Such innovation capacity brings greater productivity—and, according to mainstream economic theory—sustainable growth and competitiveness (OECD 2007).

In light of its positive associations with innovation and entrepreneurship, venture capital holds a unique position in the minds of the public and policymakers. Unlike other investment classes, such as hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, which are criticized for their dubious impact on firms and markets, venture capital is conceptualized as part of the financial sector that society cannot afford to live without. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to dub venture capital “Humanity’s Last Great Hope” for its purported ability to identify and nurture transformative technologies (Mims 2014). National Venture Capital Association research corroborates this sentiment: 40 percent of all the companies that have gone public in the United States between 1974 and 2015 received VC funding in their ascent. Those 556 companies account for 85 percent of all research and development (R&D) spending, 63 percent of the public equities market capitalization, and employ more than 3 million people.

Concurrent to the rising exuberance for venture capital is the increased restraint on public R&D coffers. Downward pressure on spending since 2008 stems from the promulgation of austerity measures, leaving governments increasingly unable to fund basic research. Yet R&D spending is often viewed as central to national industrial strategy, particularly in the technology sector

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The Venture Capital State 3

(Spencer and Brander 1983). European Union member states have struggled to achieve the 3 percent R&D spending targets set in 2002, as they spend, on average, 2 percent (Eurostat 2015). This shortfall fuels claims that there is not enough investment in innovation. Venture capitalists are put forward as the answer, as they are private investors flush with money, networks, and expertise. It is in this context that policymakers’ interest in deploying purposive action to build VC clusters along the lines of Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry—now conceptualized to be singularly capable of advancing entrepreneurship and innovation, which is believed to be central to spurring economic growth—has never been greater.

Puzzle At least forty-five countries have utilized public policies aimed at creating local Silicon Valley–like venture capital markets. These “venture capital states” span a remarkable range, from Russia and Canada, Finland and the United Kingdom, and China and Chile. The diffusion of VC policy transcends ideological lines, as neoliberal and socialist states, liberal market economies and coordinated market economies, and left- and right-wing governments alike pursue policy actions.3 Efforts are not only attempted by advanced economies; policymakers in numerous emerging economies (including all of the BRICS) have also acted. Figure 1.1 below illustrates the breadth of venture capital policy diffusion, specifying the cumulative number of states initiating policies since the United States first catalyzed VC activity by providing loans to venture capital managers via the SBIC program in 1958.

North Korean policymakers’ interest in Silicon Valley, along with the VC policy diffusion trend depicted in figure 1.1, paints a picture of states converging in their efforts to replicate the Silicon Valley model. More specifically, the diffusion of the VC policy model appears to be driving economically, spatially, and culturally different states to reach “universal convergence” on yet another component of the American capitalist model (Kuczynski and Williamson 2003, 325).

Diffusion scholars expect this type of result as the temporal clustering of economic policies and government regime types comes from states having increasingly less scope for distinctive policy choices due to globalization’s advance (Elkins and Simmons 2005; Braun and Gilardi 2006; Busch and Jörgens 2005; Holzinger and Knill 2005; Haggard and Maxfield, 1996; Goodman and Pauly 1993). In 1979, Kenneth Waltz contended that policymakers are socialized into following similar paths through emulation, praise, and ridicule mechanisms. Organizational sociologists such as Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell (1983) assert that the preponderance of a “world culture” explains the “non-rational” adoption of similar policies across states.

Policymakers pursue similar, highly acclaimed policies like that of trying to

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45 40 35 30

Slovenia Brazil, Portugal, Turkey Netherlands, Poland, Germany

5

Russia Hungary, Norway, New Zealand

Belgium, Greece Austria, India, Switzerland, United Kingdom Spain, Japan Australia, Hong Kong, Korea, Iceland Sweden

20

10

Estonia South Africa

Luxembourg, Czech Repubilc

25

15

Saudi Arabia

Canada, European Union

Finland Israel, Ireland, Argentina, Chile, Mexico

Denmark Singapore China France, Indonesia Taiwan

United States 0 1957 1961 1965 1969 1973 1977 1981 1985 1989 1993 1997 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 Year in which VC policy launched

Figure 1.1 State launches of VC policy efforts (cumulative number) 1957–2017 Sources: European Venture Capital Association, Latin American Venture Capital Association, European Union, OECD, World Bank, and individual country sources. Methodology: Chart indicates each country’s initial VC policy launch date, and the curve represents the cumulative number of VC policy launches.

Sample is all OECD, G-20, BRICS, and Asian Tiger countries. All forty-five states launched VC policies by 2014. The forty-five states included in the sample are Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States. The sample also includes the European Union as an entity. Saudi Arabia launched a national VC fund in 2014, and Iceland created a public-private VC fund.

create a Silicon Valley as “social proof” that they “belong” (Axelrod 1986).

Particularly relevant to this study of the diffusion of a highly revered model, Florini (1996) argues that diffusion is likely when the model emanates from a “prominent” state that is viewed as successful. Canonizing the conceptualization of mechanisms that drive diffusion processes, Simmons et al. (2006) distill the mechanisms by which convergence occurs: coercive forces, competitive pressures, learning, or imitation processes. The overarching orientation of this scholarship is the assumption that, at some critical “tipping point,” international influences “become more important than domestic politics” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 902), trumping the potential for domestic context in repudiating—or reshaping—the internationally disseminated object.4 In light of the widespread expectations for convergence, this study reveals a puzzling result: systematic diversity underlies the veneer of the convergent VC policy trend. Policies do not converge on replicating the Silicon Valley VC policy model. Policymakers do not replicate the American tax and regulatory

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policies to enable the private supply of investment capital into local venture capital funds. Even states of similar population and economic sizes, that are geographically proximate and at comparable levels of industrialization, do not pursue VC policies similar to one another. In fact, no two of the countries studied in this book pursued identical VC policy paths. This book explains why policymakers, who meticulously study the Silicon Valley model in an effort to build their own VC market, come to pursue distinctive—and interventionist—VC policy formula. It reveals why they use different “means” to reach the same “end”—a Silicon Valley–like venture capital cluster.

Argument This book argues that this result—of varied, interventionist strategies—is not puzzling at all. Diffusion frameworks expect convergence because they are designed to explain similarity, not variety. They emphasize the strength of the model, not the importance of local context, in explaining why policies diffuse. In so doing, this scholarship depicts policy information diffusing into contextless realms. This results in diffusion’s analytical tools only being able to explain part of an interesting phenomenon: the occurrence of interdependent, but diverse, policies (Klingler-Vidra and Schleifer 2014). Diffusion theorization is ill equipped for investigating the occurrence of variety within patterns of diffusion. It, instead, excels in explaining top-line convergence.

Diffusion research’s quantitative bias contributes to this insufficient ability to articulate how, in actuality, the diffusion process leads to only limited degrees of convergence (Dobbin et al. 2007, 463). Research designs and methodologies consist of Large-N studies that impute explanations for the occurrence of broad but shallow patterns of convergence (Levi-Faur 2005a; Levi-Faur et al. 2011). They reveal correlation—that states adopt policies at the same time—without tracking the causal process by which the policy information diffused and, then, the local policymaking process that shaped its implementation. Diffusion studies only rarely employ qualitative case study examinations to trace causal processes (Poulsen 2014).5 For example, in her research on the diffusion of liberal market reforms, Meseguer (2009, 1) acknowledges that there were “differences in the timing of reforms, in their speed and intensity, and in their results,” but states that the aim of her study was “not to explain those differences.” Research on norm internationalization has also not been oriented toward explaining “variation in state behavior”; it has instead been “puzzled by the degree of similarity or ‘isomorphism’ among states and societies” (Finnermore and Sikkink 1998, 904–5). Focused on surface trends, diffusion scholarship does not delve into the causal chain by which elements of the diffusion process contribute to the pursuit of varying policies (Weyland 2006, 14). Simply said, they don’t pay “attention to diffusion itself” (Solingen 2012, 631). In fact, to date only a few

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scholars have systematically examined the role of domestic factors in driving variation in international diffusion processes (Yeo and Painter 2011; Acharya 2009; Lenschow et al. 2005).

State-of-the-art diffusion scholarship has formulated expectations about the degree of convergence based on properties of the model (the level of specificity of the model and the number of models) and the mechanisms (see Klingler-Vidra and Schleifer 2014 for a review of the literature). The existence of multiple policy models and vague policy ideas are expected to drive diverse outcomes (Falkner and Gupta 2009; Weyland 2006). In contrast, the diffusion of models that are precise blueprints are expected to result in policymakers closely mimicking the source model, and therefore the universe of adopters converging on a similar policy strategy. Competition, coercion, and emulation mechanisms are expected to propel high degrees of convergence (Simmons et al. 2008). Conventionally rational learners converge on replicating the most consistently successful policy; they undergo full Bayesian updating processes, meaning that their prior beliefs (about the consequences of a policy) are overridden such that all policymakers come to hold the same posterior beliefs (Meseguer 2009), and therefore choose the same policy. Boundedly rational learners converge on replicating the “anchor” policy models of the countries they deem to be leaders and peers (Weyland 2006).

These analytical approaches constitute progress in the theoretical tools available to sources of variance in the diffusion process. However, they still leave much to be desired in terms of systematically accounting for whether, how much, and in what way policies vary. They do not offer analytical tools sufficient for investigating how the diffusion process results in adaptation and simply not enough analytical muscle for exploring the local context’s role in the process.

Contextual, Not Conventional or Bounded, Rationality in Learning Processes This book addresses this lacuna by developing a “contextual rationality” approach for exploring diversity amid convergence, which elucidates how local normative contexts shape rational learning in international diffusion processes. This approach—which conceptualizes rationality as contextually based—posits that learning is rooted in policymakers’ constitutive and regulative norms rather than in some acontextual environment. How policymakers see themselves (constitutive norms inform their identity) and the appropriate policies available to them (regulative norms) shapes their preferences.

Norm-rooted preferences, rather than exogenously derived preferences, inform how they value policies in the diffusion process, and then, how they design policies for local use.

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The premise is that political economy scholars need to focus on the local normative contexts in which diffusion occurs in order to understand patterns of policy diffusion. The contextual rationality approach builds on the work of scholars who argue that domestic contexts are not “black boxes” into which models diffuse (Yeo and Painter 2011). It takes seriously the contention that “state identity fundamentally shapes state behavior, and that state identity is, in turn, shaped by the cultural-institutional context within which states act” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 902). The approach taken here presumes that cultural similarities and differences across local contexts affect the “rate and form” of diffusion (Hall 1993; Strang and Soule 1998; Lenschow et al. 2005, 799), rather than result in a binary acceptance or rejection of the diffusion model. It holds that local environments transform the object being diffused in a similar way to what Acharya (2004, 240–41; 2009) refers to as the “localization” process in which adopters reinterpret an external model in order to increase its “fitness” with prevailing local norms. It extends our understanding of how the relationships between foreign information and local contexts affect the result of diffusion (building on work by Radaelli 2005).

The contextual rationality framework does not posit that norm-based explanations are at odds with conventional accounts of rationality; instead, it contends that rational learning processes should be understood as rooted in normative contexts. It does not suggest that politics do not matter, or that formal institutional constraints do not shape the form that policies take. The contextual rationality framework instead heeds the call of Finnemore and Sikkink (1998, 911) by modeling “social context as a background for rational choice.” To address this gap, the approach draws on the rich analytical tools in rationality and contextualism scholarship. It posits that policymakers are guided by “logics of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1998; Axelrod 1986). Their logics of appropriateness are normatively dependent; rationality does not mean operating as a “technical, rational” and “culture-neutral” actor (Finnermore 1996, 328).

A key ontological difference underpins contextual rationality as compared to bounded or conventional forms of rationality. Contextually rational actors are not conceptualized as learners with limited computational skills dependent on cognitive biases (as in bounded rationality, see Kahneman and Tversky 1983) or with preferences based in material interests, susceptible to full Bayesian updating as in conventional rationality.6 Even institutional economics—that does consider the constraining role of norms in individual choice—treats “actor identities and interests themselves as preexisting and fixed” (Kowert and Legro 1996, 458). The approach developed here presumes that locale-specific norms about actor’s identity (constitutive norms about “selfhood” as mutually constituted and evolving) and socially accepted policy practices (regulative norms) shape rational policy learning processes (Fearon and Wendt 2002).7

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This book employs the following conceptualization of “norm”: the “collective expectations about proper behavior for a given identity” (Jepperson et al. 1996, 54). There are three types of norms—regulative, constitutive, and evaluative—two of which, constitutive and regulative, I focus on in this book.

The differences in the norm types are further discussed in chapter 2; for now, I note that constitutive norms inform the identity of an actor while regulative norms—sometimes referred to as social laws, habits, and customs—regulate actor behavior. Together, they “prescribe and regulate the practice of agents in international politics” (Kowert and Legro 1996, 453). Contextual rationality guided empirical investigations, such as this one, investigate how policymakers’ constitutive and regulative norms shape the valuation and adaptation of existing models in learning processes. Policymakers do not “choose the policies that are expected to yield the best result” in a distanced, objective way as asserted by Meseguer (2009, 3). Instead of some acontextual efficacy, norms lead policymakers to value policy options that fit their “logic of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1998) even as they rigorously study proven policy models.

The book’s point of departure from the bounded rationality framework is fundamental to its argument: it critiques the theoretical grounding for how little policy models are expected to be adapted. Bounded rationality is “identified with an imperfect ability to perform calculations, to remember or envision states of affairs,” or said another way, a limited form of rationality (Fearon and Wendt 2002, 55). According to bounded rationality scholarship, convergence occurs precisely because actors’ cognitive heuristics leave them beholden to replicate the “anchor” that they study (LeBoeuf and Shafir 2006; Jacowitz and Kahneman 1995). Revered models of leaders and peers become anchors from which policymakers cannot deviate (Weyland 2006).

Rather, this book’s contextual rationality approach expects policymakers to undergo fully informed and distinctive learning experiences that reach different conclusions about policy values. Contextually rational policymakers are not “limited” or “bounded” in their rationality; they are rational learners whose local normative context forms the basis of their rationality. Contextual rationality, in light of this central analytical role of local norms, has a fundamentally different expectation than the bounded and conventional rationality scholarships: diversity, not convergence. It expects policymakers to adjust even core elements of much studied and highly regarded policy models, such as the Silicon Valley VC policy model, to optimally suit their local context.

In a critique of bounded conceptualizations of the learning process, Meseguer supports the book’s expectation. She argues that although the bounded learning framework is: “used to explain policy convergence, what one would actually expect is the opposite—that is, policymakers arriving at very different conclusions about the consequences of policies, and hence choosing divergent policies” (Meseguer 2009, 19, italics added). Following from this logic, normative environments should lead to policymakers coming to different

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conclusions rather than replicating anchors. With this view, the occurrence of diversity in VC policy diffusion is not a puzzle but the expected outcome.

Distinct constitutive and regulative norms fuel local policymakers’ studying experiences that result in the pursuit of locally appropriate policies. Across a set of policy adopters, this leads to variety rather than convergence.

States Can, and Should, Support Market Development in Different Ways This book asserts an important policy implication: failure to copy the American model does not mean that local VC policy efforts fail. This study reveals that several states with exceptionally different policy contexts—to that within which the Silicon Valley venture capital market emerged and from one another—fostered vibrant local venture capital markets. Taiwan’s tax credits catalyzed both the most successful government-engineered venture capital market as well as “the most Silicon Valley–like” VC industry in Asia (Gulinello 2005, 845). Israel’s funding of an initial cohort of venture capitalists propelled the growth of the world’s largest venture capital market in per capita terms (Baygan 2003). Such state-led approaches can—and do—facilitate local venture capital clusters if the policies are appropriately calibrated for local contexts (Klingler-Vidra et al. 2016).8 Unlike the effective Weberian bureaucrats who are “technical, rational and therefore culture-neutral,” it is precisely the policymakers that deploy contextually rational policies that prove effective (Finnemore 1996, 328; Weber 1968). Policy effectiveness, therefore, is the product of the extent of “localization” (Acharya 2009), “embeddedness” (Evans 1995), and “institutional fit” (Radaelli 2005) of the policies with local context, not policymakers’ ability to meticulously reproduce Silicon Valley’s model.

This argument echoes the conclusions that “Silicon Valley can’t be copied” (Wadhwa 2013), claiming instead that customized paths need to be followed. It offers a contemporary validation of Polanyi’s assertion that “whatever principle of behavior predominated” was compatible with the market pattern (2001, 71). Policymaking that attempts to suppress the local context in favor of a Weberian contextless way, by copying an international “best practice,” does not outperform. There is not, therefore, a universal best practice that all actors should hold as “most efficient and effective” (Finnemore 1996, 329) for supporting market development. A variety of public policies can engineer local VC activities—so long as they fit the local environment (and so long as there is a baseline level of demand for venture capital (Avnimelech and Teubal 2006). As an example, the 1980s Taiwanese tax credit proved effective because of its fit with regulative norms. Taiwanese policymakers’ adaptation of the Silicon Valley model into a tax credit and an inverse of the LP structure—though making it very different from the acclaimed model—was a precise fit with their logics of appropriateness for supporting local firms.

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Building on this premise, this book argues that states can “pick winners” to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. This runs counter to prevailing wisdom about the role of the state purported by neoliberal thinkers. Milton Friedman famously criticized the state’s ability to promote productive activity, saying, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” In a 1986 speech, Ronald Reagan asserted that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Criticism of the state’s involvement in markets and entrepreneurship is not only relegated to the zenith of free marketeers or to devoted neoliberals or policy wonks. A 2014 study by the Small Enterprise Association of Australia and New Zealand concludes that states “should avoid trying to ‘pick winners’ ” and should instead support entrepreneurship “through the reform of legal, bureaucratic and regulatory frameworks” (Mazzarol 2014, 3).

This book’s finding about the essential, purposive role of the state in venture capital is consistent with that of recent, influential scholarship that portrays an effective, necessary role for the state. This includes influential works such as the “entrepreneurial state” (Mazzucato 2013), “innovation and the state” (Breznitz 2007), and “the politics of innovation” (Taylor 2016). This scholarship contends that states’ constitution of private market activity is not relegated to traditional sectors. The state can, and often does, have an essential (if not widely publicized) role in forging the competitiveness of innovative sectors.9 Weiss (2014) offers contemporary “high-technology” proof of Polanyi’s argumentation. She argues that the state has been an integral force to the emergence and continued success of the American technology sector.

This shatters the “stateless” depiction of the environment within which U.S. technology companies achieved success, and by extension, the neoliberal rise of Silicon Valley.

Venture capital markets need the support of the state. As Polanyi (2001) argued, the idea of a liberal market utopia is a fallacy as even laissez faire is planned. The reality is that, behind the veneer of the supposedly neoliberal Silicon Valley VC market, the U.S. government intervened to support the onset and growth of a VC market. The myth is that VC financing synonymous with Silicon Valley is merely “an invention of the U.S. market” (Weiss 2014, 51). The U.S. government was a key proponent of Silicon Valley’s brand of early-stage financing. Public money was given in the form of loans to VC managers from 1958, via the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program. Then, beginning in the 1970s, the national government made venture capital more profitable and accessible for institutional investors. The NASDAQ stock market was launched in 1971, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) reinterpretation of the Prudent Man Rule in 1979 allowed institutional investors (especially pension funds) to invest in the VC asset class, the capital gains tax rate (to which VC profits are subject)

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was lowered in 1979, and the lighter touch regulations were introduced via the Small Business Investment Incentive Act in 1980 (Lazonick 2009).

The Silicon Valley VC policy model is not, in fact, neoliberal. The U.S. government has acted as a “hidden developmental state” (Block 2008) and has epitomized the “neoliberal paradox” (Wade 2016) through its provision of definite support for select sectors while maintaining that it is dedicated to the neoliberal approach. The hands of the American government were visible in allowing and enabling (profitable) VC investment activity as a means of supporting Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (see Weiss 2014 for an analysis of U.S. VC support as a component in the American “national security state”).

Internationally, VC markets have not spontaneously appeared. In Israel, the chief scientist invested in ten would-be venture capital firms as a means to create a domestic class of venture capitalists in the early 1990s (Avnimelech and Teubal 2008). In Europe, particularly in the Nordic and Baltic states, public funding bodies such as national governments, the European Investment Fund, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, invested in venture capital managers before start-ups in the region had achieved success (Sabaliauskas 2015).

There is a multitude of approaches to supporting venture capital market building—and different models have worked. Taylor (2016, 5) similarly argues that “there is no single ‘best’ institution or policy design” to effectively promote innovation. If VC policy diffusion is seen as a binary of whether or not states deploy policies, as typical quantitative approaches do, it would miss the variety of ways VC can be supported. Studies would assume that it is the Silicon Valley VC policy approach that is diffusing and that convergence on the Silicon Valley model is driving success. But the successful policies invest in, tax, and regulate venture capitalists in ways distinct from the U.S. government approach.10 Contextually rational policy approaches, not conformation to the Silicon Valley template, underscores instances of effective VC support.

Evidence This study’s evidence is presented in two parts: a dataset of forty-five countries’ VC policies and deep investigations of diffusion to three East Asian cases. The dataset informs the book’s narrative: numerous policymakers deployed purposive action in an effort to build their own Silicon Valley–like venture capital cluster, but did so in different ways from each other and from the model they aimed to replicate. Variation depicts the VC policies utilized within each and every geographic and cultural cluster; no cluster of states adapted the Silicon Valley model in the same way. Early adopters began employing tax, regulations, and funding efforts in the 1980s while some others

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only attempted their first initiative in the post–global financial crisis era. Because the large dataset revealed pervasive diversity, the lion’s share of the book is dedicated to investigating the precise causal drivers of policy adaptations through analytical narratives.

The large dataset identifies the VC policies deployed in forty-five countries that compete in the global information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The dataset specifies the funding, tax, and regulatory components of each state’s VC policies from the first launch of a VC policy effort.

For the funding category, the dataset details government funds’ launch dates, names, assets under management, repayment (and other) terms, and international versus domestic venture capital manager requirements. In addition, it indicates whether each country directly managed venture capital funds or operated a fund of VC funds structure. The section on tax policy specifies the tax rate that venture capital managers are subject to, as well as any tax credits or exemptions for VC managers or investors in each country. The regulatory section identifies the legal structures (e.g., limited partnership and private company vehicles) used to structure VC funds as well as any variations on the Anglo-American limited partnership model. The regulatory component also identifies restrictions on private investors’ ability to invest in the venture capital asset class (e.g., if pension funds and insurance companies are able to able to allocate to VC funds) as well as nonpecuniary incentives, such as residency in exchange for VC investment.

This book challenges existing diffusion expectations by exploring diffusion to a cluster of states that are similar in terms of population size, ethnicity, and development. This case selection is motivated by diffusion scholarship’s typical research design, which examines how policies diffuse to and within geographically or culturally proximate clusters (see Simmons and Elkins 2004; Weyland 2006). Spatially organized diffusion analyses contend that policies diffuse in a similar manner to clusters of states precisely because of their colocation (Solingen 2012). In effect, diffusion scholarship assumes that mechanisms such as competition and coercion explain similar policy choices. However, like Ruggie’s (1982, 382) critique of realist international relations scholarship’s emphasis on power rather than “social purpose,” this book contends that diffusion mechanisms are blunt instruments that may predict the form (e.g., the adoption of VC policy) but not its content (e.g., the regulatory, tax, or funding instruments used). Given that this book aims to extend diffusion theory to account for variety, the case studies are chosen in a similar manner: as a culturally, economically, and geographically proximate cluster of states.11 Rather than proximity somehow contributing to convergence, this study’s research design aims to show how even among a cluster of peers, policymakers’ norms underpin context-rooted learning processes, which propel variation among clusters of otherwise similar states.

The East Asian cluster “analytical narrative” (Bates et al. 1998) research design enables the study to include many factors that are typically used

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to explain convergence. By controlling for other variables, it explicitly investigates the differences in norms as the driver of variety (following case study methodology as depicted by King et al. 1994; Ragin and Becker 1992).

Moreover, differences in constitutive and regulative norms are not simply expected to lead to variance across the cluster; policymakers’ norms are expected to drive adaptation in line with their national normative environment. Although there are expectations informing the analysis of the case studies, this study shies away from invoking predictive typologies. This investigation of “contextually rational human behavior” allows for a view of human behavior as “something intermediate between perfect clouds and perfect clocks” (Almond and Genco 1977, 491) and between “order and disorder” (Steiner 1983). To borrow Almond and Genco’s words again, this book seeks to understand probabilistic logics about how a nonphysical thing (in this case, norms) can bring about a physical change in the physical world (the deployment of specific forms of venture capital policy). In so doing, it strives to develop a theory of human behavior that tries to account for actual behavior (typically the work of “descriptive” theories) aimed at achieving optimal choices (rather than “prescriptive theory” that prescribes optimal behavior; see March 1978, 588, for further distinction of the two theoretical frames).

The analytical narratives constitute a regional cluster that is economically and (in many ways) culturally similar, but whose policymakers possess different constitutive and regulative norms: the East Asian states of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Each of these states have largely ethnically Chinese populations of less than 25 million people (between 6 and 23 million) and relatively small, but highly successful, economies with gross domestic product within a range of US$250 billion to US$475 billion. The three island states are “late industrializers” that developed in the same era by plugging into various sectors of the global economy, especially ICT and manufacturing (Fuller 2010; Breznitz 2007).

The impact of norms on VC policymaking is investigated through primary interviews and extensive reviews of government communiqués. Background expectations were formulated based on deep research into economic policymaking in each state (for example, Gold 1986; Huff 1994; King 2006; Greene 2008; Whitley 1999; Walter and Zhang 2012; Witt and Redding 2013). Though political economy literature often groups the East Asian states together as “developmental states” (Woo-Cuming 1989) that “govern the market” (Wade 2004), the region offers normative variety in terms of how state envisage their role in the economy; after all, it includes the most free economy in the world—Hong Kong.12 The cases’ interventionist orientations range from laissez-faire Hong Kong, to Taiwan’s reliance on tax supports for local SMEs, to Singapore’s focus on financing to attract international firms.

The study examines the role of constitutive and regulative norms in shaping how each state’s policymakers learned about and subsequently designed VC

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policy. The longitudinal study begins with Taiwan’s VC policy learning in the early 1980s and concludes with VC policies implemented in 2017.

Historically, East Asian states’ financial systems have been broadly characterized as bankcentric; debt—not equity—instruments have been crucial to corporate financing (Pempel 2015, 23–24; Walter and Zhang 2012, 11).

The development of venture capital markets in East Asia is part of capital market development throughout the region, particularly since the East Asian financial crisis. Public equity markets have grown, in absolute terms as well as a percentage of financial transactions, as East Asia’s financial centers are among the world’s largest (The Money Project 2016). The growth of equity markets has been driven by market forces and by policies aimed at supporting capital market development, including private equity, public equity exchanges, bond markets, and money markets (Rethel 2010, 493–94). In this respect, the role of the state in venture capital is consistent with this broader equity story: East Asian policymakers have demonstrated their commitment to ensuring the availability of long-term capital to help private companies grow, by being shielded from the vagaries of volatile public equities markets (Pempel and Tsunekawa 2015). State support of venture capital markets is also consistent with East Asian developmental states exhibiting a contemporary form of “financial activism” in their bid to support industrial activity (Thurbon 2016).

Despite the rise of equity financing in East Asia, there is sparse research into the policies that have supported venture capital markets (Da Rin et al.

2013). Kenney et al. (2002) and Dietrich (2003) described the VC policies deployed across Asia Pacific countries. Their studies were conducted fifteen years ago, so they necessarily miss recent policy developments. Furthermore, their studies detail the policy differences but do not analytically explore the reasons why the East Asian VC policies constitute “scattering geese.”

The states’ innovation policies have been examined by numerous scholars, including Alice Amsden in her (2001) “rise of the rest”; Douglas Fuller’s (2010) edited volume that explores the limits of Hong Kong’s laissez-faire approach; Dan Breznitz’s 2007 book on Innovation and the State; and J. Megan Greene’s The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan (2008). Even these accounts of innovation policy development do not investigate the learning behind East Asia’s pursuit of a variety of VC policies.

Exploring how an American policy model diffuses to East Asia is equally fruitful for political economy scholarship reasons. There are only a modest number of studies on the diffusion of Western models to the region (e.g., Yeo and Painter 2011; Klingler-Vidra 2014a). Diffusion research tends to investigate global diffusion trends (e.g., Simmons et al. 2008; Solingen and Borzel 2014) or focus on diffusion to, and within, the Americas (e.g., Weyland 2012; 2006; Meseguer 2009; Swank 2008) and Europe (Radaelli 2005; Checkel 1999).

Finally, the rise of East Asia’s VC markets motivates this study. Hong Kong has the second largest VC market in Asia (HKTDC 2016), and Singapore

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is increasingly lauded for its attractiveness as a Silicon Valley–like VC hub (Wood 2014). Taiwan became the world’s third most active VC market (behind only the United States and Israel) by 2000 and is said to be the Asian venture capital market that is “most Silicon Valley–like” (Gulinello 2005, 845). Through varied policies, Hong Kong and Singapore advanced their positions as preferred domiciles for international venture capital funds while Taiwan succeeded in constituting a locally focused, early-stage VC market.

This study contributes novel insights into the drivers of success in these VC clusters.

Approach of This Book This book reveals how policymakers’ contextual rationality repudiates pressures to converge on a singular form of VC policies. It exposes how policy diffusion does not occur in a normative vacuum, and instead, how policy learning and the resultant policy choices are “subject to a complex array of constraints and opportunities” (Almond and Genco 1977, 492). In an aim to build local Silicon Valley–like venture capital markets, even proximate states pursue varied policies. Free market economists would expect the state’s intervening to hinder the performance of market-enabling policies (as Friedman thought the federal government’s management of the Sahara would lead to the depletion of sand). Industrial policies in which the state directs market activities, according to neoliberal orthodoxy, should torpedo the emergence of vibrant capitalist markets. Institutionalist scholars within the “varieties of capitalism” approach, argue that science and technology policy efficacy is “determined by the degree to which free markets are allowed to structure the incentives” of actors (Taylor 2016, 11). This book’s finding embodies the opposite of this expectation; policymakers do not need to sit back and allow market forces to work in order to develop their local venture capital markets.

Even the Silicon Valley VC cluster is the result of government policy, not merely the outcome of unfettered capitalism at work.

In venture capital, a supposedly quintessential neoliberal construct, the state is a needed actor—with room to move in terms of policy choices—in the constitution of markets central to financing innovation and entrepreneurship. This is an important takeaway for today’s policymakers who are eager to promote innovation, economic growth, and job creation. The lesson is clear: do not follow the same path that others took. Even if it means diverging from highly regarded models, policymakers should ascertain their “aim”—e.g., a locally focused VC industry—and design policies in line with their normative context in order to get there.

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 develops the book’s contextual rationality framework that places norms at the center of diffusion analysis. In so doing, it presents the understanding that rational policy learning is

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16 Chapter 1

rooted in constitutive norms that construct the self-identity of policymakers, and that those identities are accompanied by regulative norms that inform logics of appropriateness about policy actions. This normcentric approach contends that policymakers do not complete Bayesian updating of prior beliefs, nor do they simply rely on cognitive shortcuts. In order to understand policy diffusion, it is essential that we understand the normative context within which policymakers are situated. The chapter also synthesizes state-ofthe-art diffusion scholarship’s expectations about sources of diversity in the diffusion process. This is done so that existing diffusion expectations can be explored alongside the contextual rationality approach in the case study narratives. Given the lack of coverage of venture capital in political economy scholarship, chapter 3 provides an introduction to the asset class and VC policy.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are analytically guided accounts of VC policy diffusion in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The contextual rationality analyses canvas the full policy diffusion process. In these chapters I begin by studying how policymakers came to believe that they should aim to build a local Silicon Valley VC market. Policymakers’ orientation toward interventionist or neoliberal strategies emanates from their constitutive norms; whether they identify themselves as necessary providers of “positive non-intervention,” promotion, or financing and direction. Regulative norms—fitting with these conceptions of self-identity—then inform which policy tools are deemed appropriate. The contextual rationality approach’s focus on constitutive and regulative norms allows the investigation to move further back in the causal argument than rationalist frameworks allow; it explores how the self—from which interests flow—is rooted in normative context, rather than only material surroundings.

Chapter 7 offers a comparative analysis of the case study findings. The final chapter concludes the book by applying the findings to larger political economy debates and outlining areas for further research. Chapter 8 also presents the contextual rationality approach in a bid to reinvigorate research agendas that combine rational approaches with contextualism. Empirically, the concluding chapter makes the case for the continuance of the “planning of laissez-faire.” Even in areas characterized as bastions of innovative activity, there is not a “retreat of the state” (Strange 1996) or imposition of a “golden straitjacket” (Friedman 1999, 86). The book closes with a critical discussion of the virtues of venture capital market support and shares expectations for the future of venture capital states in East Asia and beyond.

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The Geopolitics of Spectacle

Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia

Natalie Koch

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright Š 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

1

1. Approaching Spectacle Geographically

25

2. From Almaty to Astana: Capitalizing the Territory in Kazakhstan

47

3. From Astana to Aral: Making Inequality Enchant in Kazakhstanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hinterlands

75

4. From Astana to Asia: Spectacular Cities and the New Capitals of Asia Compared

107

Conclusion: Synecdoche and the Geopolitics of Spectacular Urbanism in Asia

147

Notes

161

Index

187

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Introduction Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

It is easy to conjure images of Asia’s spectacular high-rise cities: bustling with life and brimming with gleaming skyscrapers and ultramodern infrastructure. For foreign visitors and ordinary citizens alike, the cities of Asia have become iconic of the region’s state-led modernization agendas and increasing integration with the world economy. Asia’s impressive urbanization can largely be explained by pro-market globalization processes under way since the end of World War II, but also in the wake of collapsing communist regimes across the region since the early 1990s.1 There is, however, a subset of cities whose stunning growth stands apart from this general trend: the new or recently transformed capital cities of the region’s resource-rich states. Political and economic logics well beyond (but not exclusive of) tighter integration with global market capitalism are at work in these cities, seven of which are the subject of this book. The central case is Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. Other examples in post-Soviet Central Asia include Baku, Azerbaijan, and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. In the Arabian Peninsula, spectacular capitals can be found in Abu Dhabi in the

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United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Doha, Qatar, and, in East Asia, Naypyidaw, Myanmar, and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.

Seeking to explain the apparent convergence around spectacular urbanism in Asia’s new capitals, I ask: What makes a city spectacular and for whom? How do spectacular city projects factor into local and regional politics, and what sets them apart from other cities in the region? And more generally, what can they teach us about place, power, and political geography? Most of these cities’ recent building booms have involved transforming the existing urban fabric, while others have entailed developing an entirely new capital (namely, Astana and Naypyidaw). Their differences are important, as we will see. But each is, in one form or another, spectacular. In particular, they have several key commonalities: (1) they are located in nondemocratic and resource-rich states; (2) they have been developed on the basis of strong state planning, quickly, and on an unprecedented scale for their region; (3) they boast lavish built landscapes and celebrations that represent a stark contrast with their surrounding context; and (4) they are designed to display the government’s prosperity and ostensible benevolence in a manner that contrasts significantly with other forms of state austerity and violence found elsewhere. While these capitals are not uniformly successful, these elements all suggest that the image and shape of spectacular cities involves a degree of state intervention and guidance that is atypical of urban development in most cities of the world today.

Spectacular Cities and Their Others Spectacular urban development is not new. Urban landscapes, and those of capital cities in particular, have long been privileged places for political leaders to express the state’s power and their nation’s unity, promise, and modernity. State planners have put their visions of modernity on display through monumental capital city projects in places as diverse as Ankara, Beijing, Brasília, Islamabad, Paris, Rabat, Riyadh, and St. Petersburg.2 When they were first developed, each of these cities was, in one way or another, spectacular—an effect largely achieved through autocratic master planning that was unprecedented for their context. Yet that context was always historically and geographically specific; many people would

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be hard-pressed to characterize any of these cities as spectacular today.

Formerly stunning architectural icons and modernist urban order now look outmoded and fail to visually impress. Not only are visual displays of urban modernity historically and geographically contextual, but also fleeting. As such, to understand how spectacular urbanism works in and across time and space, a decidedly geographic approach is needed. Developing such an approach is the goal of this book.

Anyone interested in global politics will readily note that leaders in some countries take statist spectacle far more seriously than in others. For reasons discussed in chapter 1, today it is primarily, though not exclusively, used in highly centralized (“nondemocratic,” “authoritarian,” or “illiberal”) states. Orchestrating spectacle requires substantial resources, which may be financial or political, obtained through coercion or persuasion as well as corrupt or legal means. Indeed, we shall see these variations at work in the case countries considered here, all of which have substantial natural resource wealth and governments that depend heavily on revenues from these extractive industries. In addition to requiring a certain amount of resources, statist spectacle is always the product of mixed agendas. The producers and participants of any given spectacle will invariably interpret and appropriate it in contrasting ways, but state-based elites publicly aim to unify the message that a spectacle is meant to send. This message often centers on broader identity narratives about the nation, the state, or the government itself. In Kazakhstan, for example, the government’s decision in the 1990s to develop a new capital city, Astana, has been at the center of its political leaders’ effort to institutionalize their power and materially inscribe their vision of modernity in the post-Soviet period.

Spectacular cities, like Astana, are an example of statist spectacle par excellence. But a central argument of this book is that looking at spectacular cities themselves is insufficient to understand the broader geopolitics of spectacle. As a political tactic, spectacle depends on, and indeed reproduces, deeply political understandings of geography. For something to be deemed spectacular, it must stand apart in space, time, magnitude, perceived experience, or some combination thereof. This also implies that it is only ever spectacular over a defined space, for certain individuals, and in contrast to specific images and experiences of the unspectacular. This relationship between the spectacular and the unspectacular is never fixed; it is always contingent on the perspective of any given observer. While

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these perspectives are also never fixed, geographers seek to discern general patterns in how people make sense of the world and map concepts like spectacular/unspectacular onto certain spaces, places, and experiences.

These ways of thinking about space and time are called spatial imaginaries, and they are reproduced in both language and practice, rhetorically and materially.3 Accordingly, to understand the effects of spectacular urbanism as a geopolitical tactic, I examine the spatial imaginaries of individuals who are engaged as spectators, participants, and producers of spectacle.

This approach requires discerning who these people are as political actors, but also raises specifically geographic questions about where they are located and how they interact with one another in and through the material spaces that spectacular urban development conjures—and neglects. While my analysis considers the geopolitical relations and conditions that have given rise to Asia’s diverse spectacular capital cities, I am especially concerned with identifying and locating the unspectacular “Others” that make these cities intelligible as a form of spectacle. These are the spaces and social experiences that spectacular urban development neglects, and they take an infinitely varied number of forms and unfold at many different scales and temporalities. To understand the geopolitics of spectacle, we must take seriously the diverse and diffuse Others that give it meaning. Of course, I cannot do this comprehensively for each city discussed in this book. Rather, in illustrating what such an approach would look like, I mean to highlight the value of jointly analyzing spectacle and its Others.

In Central Asia, where I have been conducting research since 2005, I argue that the spectacular capital city schemes are largely developed on the basis of marking a radical break with the Soviet past. The three cities considered here, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, Baku in Azerbaijan, and Astana, are all capitals of Caspian littoral states with access to significant oil and gas reserves in and around the sea. Because of this access to resource wealth, they have been able to set themselves apart from other regional neighbors and to do so through the opulent urban development schemes in their capitals. In these cases, the Soviet past, as well as their poor and politically weak regional neighbors, constitute unspectacular Others. The spectacle of the capital cities in Central Asia is also made possible by the significant social inequalities between ordinary citizens and

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the elites. This is most vividly illustrated in the case of Kazakhstan, where I unite the view from Astana with the view of Astana from the vantage point of rural residents in the environmentally devastated Aral Sea region.

In the Arabian Peninsula, I focus on recent urban development in Doha, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, where I have been conducting research since 2012. Rapid urban development in this region has likewise been made possible by the wealth from local oil and gas extraction for global export. But the UAE and Qatar are quite different from the Central Asian states in that they all have extremely small territories, and an unusually small percentage of their total population has formal citizenship (under 15 percent each).

Here I show that a state-centered approach can be a hindrance to locating the social and political Others that make spectacle possible in these two monarchies. Doing so requires a wider understanding of the Arab Gulf capitals’ hinterlands as extending well beyond the state boundaries to touch many countries across Asia and Africa where large numbers of migrant workers in the Arabian Peninsula originate. From this perspective, the center-periphery relations that are conjured through the spectacular city schemes in the Arabian Peninsula, including similarly dramatic social inequalities, begin to look more like those considered in Central Asia.

Last, in East Asia, I consider the capitals of Naypyidaw in Myanmar and Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei, where I conducted fieldwork in 2015.

These two cities represent the biggest contrast to the other cases insofar as planners have not oriented recent developments around crafting an iconic image of the capital. That is, while Naypyidaw and Bandar Seri Begawan are spectacular capitals, they have not been designed around projecting a coherent image of the city to circulate internationally, or even domestically (as we find with the intense city-branding exercises in places like Astana or Doha). The more decentralized planning of Bandar Seri Begawan, for example, pushes against iconicity, while Naypyidaw has actually been closed to the media and foreigners until very recently. In both cases, however, the cities draw much of their spectacular nature from the visual order of modernist urban planning that works to “other” the past and older urban forms (such as the prevailing water village settlements in Brunei). In Brunei and Myanmar, we also find that the spectacular cities are made possible by the state’s monopolization of wealth from the country’s rich natural resource reserves—resulting in a grossly unequal distribution

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of wealth justified through paternalist assertions of benevolent rule and a passively accepting population.

Approaching Spectacle Geographically Spectacle has long been a subject of academic concern, but scholars have not yet sought to theorize it geographically. A geographic approach is important because spectacle has both spatial and temporal dimensions.

Typically defined as a large-scale show or display, it is spatially pointbased. This means that, while it unfolds at any scale, it is staged at one particular location, such as a city as a whole or a public square within a city. Spectacle is also temporally exceptional: it happens sporadically, occasionally, or only once. Since time and space are relative, so too is spectacle: what is spectacular in one context may be entirely unspectacular in another. Most academic analyses gloss over the relative nature of spectacle, as they tend to focus inward—that is, considering a spectacle itself rather than its place in a broader context. The failure of scholars to adopt a wider lens, however, may be less a theoretical oversight than an indication of a major analytical challenge in studying spectacles: they do not have an easily measurable set of political outcomes. They are spatially diffuse, are experienced contingently, and extend across uneven temporalities. Focusing on the contextual nature of spectacle thus raises important theoretical questions about how to define its Others—those spaces, activities, temporalities, routines, and affects that inform how people draw borders between the spectacular and the ordinary. The relational approach to spectacle I develop spotlights these questions and works to account for a spectacle’s diffuse Others beyond the singular site or event.

As a study in political geography, this book emphasizes the power relations that shape and are shaped by spectacle. While spectacle is certainly not confined to state-led events or projects, my analysis is limited to state-sponsored (or “statist”) spectacle.4 This is because, when employed by government leaders, it takes on special geopolitical significance.

At the most general level, statist spectacle has two variations: celebratory and punitive.5 Whereas punitive spectacle may include public torture or executions, celebratory spectacles include parades, festivals, capital city

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development schemes, engineering mega-projects, or iconic buildings such as ultra-tall towers or palaces.6 Both celebratory and punitive variants tend to be at work in any given political system, albeit to varying extents.

A handful of studies, in political contexts ranging from the Dominican Republic under Trujillo to the Soviet Union under Stalin, have considered the role of state violence as a sort of spectacle, but few do little more than note the apparent contradictions of regimes that simultaneously engage in spectacular forms of state violence and ostentatious celebration culture.7 Yet even under the most brutal regimes, leaders will seek to minimize public discussion of the state’s most punitive tactics. In such cases, where state violence is truly pervasive and the general population is well aware of it (as with Stalinist and Nazi persecution), open conversation about it is nearly always off limits. Public discussion about state benevolence, by contrast, is usually vigorously promoted. Using the full range of public relations and ideological tools, repressive regimes tend to amplify the significance of celebratory spectacles and their nonpunitive policies. In their efforts to control and guide popular discourse, authoritarian elites are logically concerned with the spatial manifestation of state benevolence vis-àvis state violence. This is not merely about grabbing their subjects’ attention and putting celebratory spectacle in their direct line of vision; by making expressions or metaphors of beneficence more visible, a regime can make accusations of violence and austerity appear less credible—sometimes casting them as fictitious or exaggerated claims of its opponents. In both the Dominican and Soviet cases, for example, the state’s repressive tactics were seen most intensely in the peripheral reaches of their territory, far from the symbolic centers in their capital cities. And even today, some citizens will question the historical record of those repressive governments’ crimes. This is to simplify the matter greatly, but it does point to key questions about the geography of spectacle and pushes scholars to ask not only who uses it and with what effect but also where.

Given its etymology, spectacle raises the question of spectatorship and how to account for its necessarily multiple and ever-changing audiences. I consider the primary case of Astana from several different vantage points, asking how the iconic development project has been projected across Kazakhstan. Set next to hardship and poverty found elsewhere in the country, spectacular urbanism in Astana is exemplary of how authoritarian governments work to make “inequality enchant” through the use

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of spectacle of the center.8 It also illustrates how highly centralized governments are founded on unspectacular spaces, temporalities, embodied experiences, and forms of slow or structural violence—the impacts of which are felt most in the territorial peripheries and among marginalized populations. The local context in Kazakhstan, detailed in chapters 2 and 3, is essential to understanding the political geographic implications of the spectacular city project in Astana.

Spectacle is fundamentally geopolitical. This is in no small part because it is consistently entangled with normative readings of political regime types and modes of government in the international community. In the Western press, for example, state-promoted spectacle is often caricatured as the staple of megalomaniac autocrats. Its significance is dismissed because of its very theatricality—exemplified in the bemused but disdainful tone of reports on North Korea’s Mass Games or Turkmenistan’s Novruz celebrations. Such reporting typically implies that participants and audiences do not actually believe in the message on display, but are forced to participate against their will. They are painted as mere pawns following the orders of a megalomaniac autocrat. These simplistic accounts of state-led spectacle stem from, at best, a misunderstanding and, at worst, a deliberate stigmatization of authoritarian states. Ultimately, though, they are rooted in the false assumption that authoritarian states are largely devoid of competitive politics. While autocratic leaders do not stake their legitimacy in competitive elections, their polities have just as many spaces for political contest as in liberal democracies—albeit differently configured.

Through the case of spectacular capital city schemes in Asia, I show that the city is one such site of contestation. Taking these cities seriously means taking authoritarian states seriously.9 It also requires accounting for the agency of ordinary people in authoritarian contexts. In the West, prevailing stereotypes about nondemocratic states frame these countries as consisting of victimizers and victims, conjuring the image of a thoroughly repressive state apparatus quashing passive citizens. As scholars of authoritarianism have long argued, however, and as I show in this book, a clear-cut division between victimizers and victims is more myth than reality.10 Furthermore, in writing on spectacle in classical Bali, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has stressed, “Whatever intelligence it may have to offer us about the nature of politics, it can hardly be that big fish

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eat little fish, or that the rags of virtue mask the engines of privilege.”11 Although he was writing almost forty years ago, his point about common interpretations of spectacle remains apt: discussions still rapidly descend into mere assertions that the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and misguided. The result is that observers end up floundering over questions about whether citizens either are dissimulating or are “true believers.” Finding an either-or approach untenable, social scientists informed by poststructuralist theory examine the role of spectacle in shaping certain subjectivities and regimes of governmentality rather than lingering on the question of belief.

In addition to dismissing statist spectacle as a form of fictional theater, Western accounts frequently discount it as something of the past.

These observers frame it as outdated and irrelevant for “our” modern, reason-based times, or, in other cases, as an overwrought effort to claim modernity while masking a certain backwardness. This is particularly evident in mainstream press accounts of Asia’s spectacular cities. In writing about Astana, for example, Western journalists have given the city a wide range of labels that point to its allegedly false claims to modernity, such as “the Jetsons’ hometown,” “Disneyland of the steppe,” “Nowheresville,” and “Tomorrowland.”12 Or in the words of one writer: “To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It’s a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer’s creation.”13 Mike Davis’s description of Dubai is similarly Orientalizing: “The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly.”14 This Orientalist rhetoric is of course problematic in itself, but it also grossly oversimplifies the complexity of spectacular urbanism. In addition, these accounts normatively demarcate illiberal states as bizarre and essentially foreign. They position statist spectacle as an index of backwardness— something characterizing only fundamentally unmodern people and places. Dubious as they may be, caricatures of spectacle in authoritarian

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states are not just clichéd journalism in poor taste. They run deep in political and academic imaginations about global political geographies. For example, the French theorist Michel Foucault even suggests that spectacle is a thing of the past (“Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle”), which he contrasts with more recent techniques of discipline and biopolitics. These, he claims, extinguish the relevance of spectacle in modern polities: “The pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.”15 The irony of this quotation cannot be lost on anyone familiar with the state flag of Kazakhstan, which depicts a steppe eagle soaring underneath a large golden sun (see figure I.1). Indeed, through a focus on Kazakhstan, this book shows that the eagle and the sun are not at all useless, but that the “pomp of sovereignty” still matters today. Contra Foucault, whose work otherwise deeply informs my approach in this book, I argue that as new governmentalities have arisen, spectacle has certainly not faded in relevance. Spectacle continues to sit squarely at the center of normative mappings of “proper” political configurations that define geopolitical imaginaries and foreign policies the world over. Critical scholars would be mistaken to confine it to the past or to approach it as a mere aberration

Figure I.1 The flag of Kazakhstan.

Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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characteristic of allegedly backward governments. Understanding contemporary uses of spectacle is essential to understanding power, politics, and space—not only in authoritarian settings but also in ostensibly liberal or democratic settings. It is especially important to examine the overlaps between liberal and illiberal forms of government if we are to resist simplistic accounts of authoritarianism as something bizarre and foreign, and to open up larger questions about how geopolitical maps of liberalism and illiberalism are written and contested, by whom, and with what effects.

Illiberal Government and Practice-Centered Analysis Spectacle appears to be perennially salient in the full range of polities— from empires, monarchies, fascist dictatorships, and sheikhdoms to authoritarian regimes and democracies.16 Yet certain governments have historically exhibited a particular penchant for spectacle. Writing on post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Laura Adams has termed such cases spectacular states—that is, states where, “more than in most countries, politics is conducted on a symbolic level,” and where “spectacle is a technique of mobilization.”17 Geertz describes a similar dynamic in his classic work on Bali.

The early Balinese state, he argues, was not organized around a rationalist form of government but pointed instead “toward spectacle, toward ceremony, toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride.”18 In Geertz’s reading of precolonial Bali, lavish and costly ceremonies were not a means toward political ends, but “ends themselves, they were what the state was for.

Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power.”19 The “spectacular state” and “theater-state” concepts offer a useful entry point to examine the specific political dynamics in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and nineteenth-century Bali. But it is hard to generalize from these cases, as the French historian Paul Veyne argues, “unless we allow specifications, historical accidents, and ideological influences to proliferate, at the price of endless verbiage.”20 That is, by putting the state at the center of the analysis, such taxonomies invariably fail in the face of

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HAMKA AND ISLAM COSMOPOLITAN REFORM IN THE MALAY WORLD

KHAIRUDIN ALJUNIED

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Southeast Asia Program Publications Editorial Board Mahinder Kingra (ex officio) Chiara Formichi Tamara Loos Andrew Mertha Kaja McGowan Copyright Š 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Glossary Introduction: Hamkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cosmopolitan Reform 1. Of Reason and Revelation 2. In Praise of Moderation 3. Muslims and Social Justice 4. Women in the Malay World 5. Restoring Sufism in the Modern Age 6. History as a Tool of Reform Conclusion: Thinking with Hamka Bibliography Index

Introduction Hamka’s Cosmopolitan Reform <inset text> Paradigms may change, the frameworks of global governance may change too. And Muslims are an inescapable part of these shifting configurations. But the light that shines in the hearts of those infused with the spirit of Islam, with the soul of Islam, will not change. It may be suppressed for sometime, but it lingers. It lingers like a fire trapped beneath a husk. When the time comes, it emerges. Notice the husk would soon be scorched by the burning flames.

With certainty in the continued existence of this spirit [of Islam], the global Muslim community in general, and in Indonesia in particular, confront the future!

Hamka, Social Justice in Islam (1966)i <end inset text> Although written many decades ago, the epigraph above anticipates the train of events unfolding in the Islamic world today. Now more than ever before, Muslims in almost all corners of the globe are calling out for reform. Questions are being asked as to whether Muslim elites and thinkers have been effective in diagnosing and addressing the ongoing upheavals and crises in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Anguished by the traditional Islamic scholars’ inability to respond to the manifold challenges of modernity and disillusioned with successive authoritarian regimes that have torn Muslim societies asunder, an emerging crop of Muslim activists and thinkers are crying out for change. They desire a total transformation of Islamic thought and practice. These reformers advocate a re-examination of age-old methods of teaching and transmitting Islam. In the words of an influential figure in this renewed wave of thinking about Islam, Tariq Ramadan, Muslims are in need of “radical reform.” This is a brand of reform that builds upon innovation in the reading of sacred texts in Islam alongside a “full and equal integration of all available human knowledge.”ii Echoes of similar calls for reform and change can be heard in the Malay World; a region that houses the largest Muslim population on the planet, and yet is all but neglected by most analysts of Islam.iii The more than three-hundred million strong Muslim inhabitants in the Malay world—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Thailand—share common elements of the same language and culture, with Islam as the dominant religion.iv One figure that has

cast a long shadow on the history of Islamic reform in the Malay world is Haji Abdullah Malik Abdul Karim Amrullah (1908–81), commonly referred to as “Hamka.” Described as the most prominent twentieth-century Muslim intellectual hailing from that region, Hamka’s lectures beguiled thousands of avid listeners in his time. v He wrote more than a hundred popular and scholarly Islamic books, as well as several successful novels. His literary career spanned a wide range of topics, including history, theology, philosophy, Islamic jurisprudence, and spirituality. The attractiveness of Hamka’s writings and speeches can also be attributed to his ability to reconcile opposing ideas about culture, modernity, and Islam. The late Nurcholish Madjid (1939–2005), who was one of Indonesia’s intellectual giants, observed that: “His [Hamka’s] ideas are accepted by a wide spectrum of Muslims, principally the Muslim community in Indonesia who identify themselves as ‘the modernist group’ or the ‘reformist group.’”vi `Hamka’s writing is omnipresent in the Malay world. His books, such as his commentaries on the Qur’an, are used widely in Muslim schools and tertiary institutions. vii Some popular titles, such as Ayahku, Falsafah Hidup, and Tasauf Moderen (Modern Sufism), are now in their ninth editions. These books are found in all major libraries in the Malay world, with a select few of these libraries featuring special collections in Hamka’s name. viii To cap it all, Hamka’s acknowledged contributions to popularizing Islam have recently been memorialized in a museum located in his hometown, Tasek Maninjau, Sumatra. ix In Semarang, Java, a road has been named after him: “Jalan Prof. Dr Hamka.”

His large body of work has outgrown him and taken on a life of its own, and become part of the shared scholarly heritage of Muslims in the region.

Indeed, Hamka is that rare modern Islamic thinker who is the subject of hundreds of scholarly monographs, articles, and editorial commentaries touching on various aspects of his ideas, activism, and vision. A towering figure in the eyes of many Muslims in the Malay world, he also attracted a fair share of criticism.

Notable volumes by Junus Amir Hamzah, Nasir Tamara, M. Yunan Yusuf, Md. Sidin, Sidek Baba, Abdul Rahman Abdul Aziz, Shamsul Nizar, Abdul Rauf, and M. Alfan provide us with a wide range of approaches that scholars have used to engage with, and provide critiques of, Hamka’s ideas.x Hamka has been censured as a scholar without any formal training or real expertise in any fields of Islamic knowledge. Although he wrote on a range of Islamic topics, his critics maintained that Hamka was never recognized by the ulama in the Malay world as a specialist in one of these topics. As a novelist, his stories were said to be direct adaptations of Arabic and European fictional

classics. He had merely tailored the characters and contexts of his stories to reflect the places that he was most familiar with.xi Hamka’s lack of attention to facts and accuracy, his poor referencing style, and the absence of proper acknowledgements of the sources that shaped his ideas and conclusions have also made him the target of many scholars. Both his admirers and detractors viewed him as a man in a hurry. A polymath who did not take the trouble to polish his writings, who moved hastily from one subject to another, publishing them quickly, perhaps too quickly, than he could follow. The end result is a host of errors that lingers in most of his books.xii Despite this broad and diverse range of responses to his work from local and contemporary scholars, Westernlanguage scholarship has captured only isolated aspects of his reformist thought.xiii There is only one book-length study by an American historian, James R. Rush, that looks primarily at Hamka’s Islamic background, his acumen as a master writer and storyteller, and reveals how he contributed to the making of Islam in Indonesia through his oeuvre.xiv This book seeks to expand the scope of existing studies on Hamka by bringing to light his conceptualization and theorization of social problems in Muslim societies as well as the solutions Hamka offered for dealing with these challenges.

While Rush portrayed Hamka as an Indonesian scholar who was absorbed with issues affecting his home country, this book situates Hamka as a shaper of Islam in the Malay world in general, whose works have deep ramifications on the study of Islamic reformism outside the region. As his son Rusydi adroitly put it, Hamka was a man of letters from and for Muslims in the Malay world. He was a child of the Minangkabau society in Sumatra, but his writings and speeches were directed toward a wide audience with the aim of bringing about religious reform on a regional scale. xv Deliar Noer drives home this point by stating that “Hamka was a Muslim first and an Indonesian second. Indeed, for many Indonesian Muslims in the second and third decades of this [twentieth] century, attachment to the Muslim community [ummat Muhammad] was felt more intensely than to Indonesia as a nation.”xvi Hamka himself ensured that his name traveled far beyond Indonesia’s borders.

Many of his books were published in both Malaysia and Singapore just as they were read, sold, and debated in Brunei and South Thailand. From the 1950s onwards, he accepted many speaking tours in neighboring countries and wrote books strictly for Malaysian and Singaporean audiences. One such book was entitled Kenangan kenangan-ku di-Malaya (My Memories in Malaya). In it, Hamka expressed his hopes for the would-be independent Malaysia, and shared his encounters with, as well as critiques of, Malayan Muslim thinkers and politicians.

Hamka openly admitted that, as a budding writer in the 1930s, his books were mostly written in the Malay dialect that was commonly used in Malaya. Because of this, his books were more warmly received there than in Java. xvii Another Singapore-published pamphlet was a polemic against the mufti (expounder of Islamic laws) of Johor, whom Hamka believed was spreading falsehoods about the reformist movement in Malaya.xviii Hamka’s conscious efforts to gain recognition overseas paid off, both in monetary and symbolic terms. He gained much income from royalties of various editions of his books and was often paid handsomely during speaking tours across the Malay world. In 1974, Hamka was conferred an Honorary Doctorate by the National University of Malaysia.xix The popular Malaysian magazine AlIslam covered the event, detailing Hamka’s scholarly career. The magazine’s editor underscored the significance of the honorary degree by querying, “When will Indonesian universities confer the same award to its own son [Hamka]? Why are countries such as Egypt and Malaysia foremost in conferring such recognition to him? They are more familiar with Hamka than Indonesians themselves.”xx The editor’s observation was correct. Hamka ought to be positioned as a ummat (global Muslim community)-oriented Muslim scholar with strong ties throughout the Malay world, rather than as an Indonesian thinker per se. This is not to say that Indonesia was something secondary to Hamka. Hamka saw Indonesia as a strategic launchpad to reach out to Muslims in the Malay world. A comprehensive survey of Hamka’s long list of publications shows that there is a fair balance between the works he wrote that were largely Indonesian in nature and those that addressed issues affecting the ummat and the Malay world.

Hamka’s most influential book, the thirty volume Tafsir Al-Azhar (The Al-Azhar Exegesis), is not centered on Indonesian themes; instead, it is much wider in its reach and focus.

Hamka’s reformist thought, showcased in works such as Tafsir Al-Azhar, thus escaped the attention of most Western-language scholars. As Mun’im Sirry sharply observed: “Like other reformers, Hamka was concerned primarily with how to reform peoples’ religious life.”xxi Still, Hamka’s venture to reform Muslim minds and his attempts at transcending the ideological limitations of his time remains under-studied and insufficiently understood. I employ the term “cosmopolitan reform” to describe Hamka’s reconstruction of various understandings of Islam in the Malay World and his adoption of ideas and influences from intellectuals and scholars globally. First, it refers to Hamka’s work, distilling and harmonizing what was best from the many streams of Islamic

thought—traditionalist, rationalist, modernist, reformist, Salafi, and Sufi—to provide fresh reinterpretations of Islam. More than an erudite writer, Hamka was a master synthesizer. He melded different Muslim intellectual traditions, placing radically different thought systems in tension and in a dialogue with one another.

He held the firm belief that Muslims should not confine themselves to a single school of thought, proclivity, or ideology, for such parochial tendencies have caused unneccesary divisions while stifling the formulation of innovative and cutting-edge ideas.

This was clearly exhibited in his exegesis of the Qu’ran, which is reflective of his broad-minded attitude toward different streams of Islamic knowledge.xxii What Hamka called for was a cosmopolitan approach to the rich legacy of Islamic knowledge and sciences, urging Muslims to find inspiration from the differing outlook of a broad cross-section of Muslim thinkers. Whether from the various schools of jurisprudence, theological doctrines, approaches to Qur’anic exegesis, or strands of philosophy and mysticism, Hamka held that only with a wide exposure to and perceptive adoption of all bodies of knowledge within Islam can Muslim minds be broadened and divisions within the Muslim community be blurred toward unity in thought and action.xxiii Hamka’s vision of cosmopolitan reform also entailed a judicious selection and creative appropriation of relevant aspects of European and other non-Muslim epistemologies and ideas to afford in-depth diagnoses and to propose viable antidotes for the many problems confronting Muslims. Based on the Prophetic tradition that states: ‘Wisdom is the lost property of the believer, so wherever he finds it then he has the right to it.’ Hamka encouraged Muslims to be informed in many disciplines. Muslims ought to be well-versed in all branches of human knowledge in order for them to keep up with the demands of modern life. This spirit of openness toward wisdom from all civilizations and nations, regardless of faiths or creed, is not new to Islam. Hamka explained that the greatness of Muslims of the past hinged upon such inclusive attitude. Muslim decline during the dawn of modernity, he argued, was borne out of their unwillingness to learn from competing civilizations, which led, in turn, to intellectual stagnation throughout the Islamic world: <inset text> It would be unrewarding for the modern generation of Muslims to accept all of the opinions of Al-Ghazali in an age where there is a wide selection of philosophical ideas. We must consider the currents of philosophical thought since ancient Greece, till the advent of Islamic

philosophy, to the time of the scholastic philosophers, up until the coming of modern Western philosophical thought…. We should be aware that all of these thinkers were not without weaknesses, because they were human beings and the absolute truth lies only in God’s revelation. But our encounters with a flawed idea should not hinder us from reflecting upon it.xxiv <end inset text> Finally, I use the term cosmopolitan reform to underscore Hamka’s attempt to overcome extremist, communalist, bigoted and gendered tendencies that defined much of the societies in the Malay world. Hamka believed that modern Muslims should be just toward everyone in society, and to consider men and women to be of equal value to the task of improving Muslim civilization. Muslims should observe respectful dialogue and empathy toward humankind while recognizing their own limitations. Extremism and bigotry breed exclusionary attitudes and the inability to accept change. Communalism creates gulfs and widens the gaps between Muslims and non-Muslims. Gendered paradigms as well as jaundiced practices have resulted in the marginalization of both men and women in Muslim societies. To engage in cosmopolitan reform, in Hamka’s formulation, is to internalize the ideal of moderation and a sense of common humanity, and to be open to change as well as to respect people of different sexes, ethnicities, worldviews, classes, nations and cultures. Hamka explained cogently that Islam “is for the world, not for the Arabs as such. Inviting the world [to Islam] necessitates us to be open-minded, to be embracing, to view the whole world as part of a universal brotherhood. If our hearts are filled with hatred, fraternity among all of humankind cannot be sowed in this world.”xxv In sum, Hamka’s cosmopolitan reform was aimed at encouraging Muslims in the Malay world to think and act in a more inclusive, fairer and more pluralistic manner without having to compromise the basic precepts and universal aims of Islam. Defined in this way cosmopolitan reform is not unique to Hamka. Muslim intellectuals and thinkers in other parts of the world have exhibited such an approach to reform, even while they were immersed in different issues from Hamka.xxvi The term cosmopolitan reform therefore provides a useful heuristic tool to understand the thought processes and breakthrough ideas of other twentieth-century Muslim reformers. Some examples of Muslim reformers whom Hamka referenced in his works were Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), Rashid Rida (1865–1935), Mahmud Shaltut (1893–1963), Ali Shariati (1933–77), Malek Bennabi (1905–73) and Muhammad Natsir (1908–93), among others. These thinkers’ ideas of reform – or better described as cosmopolitan reform –

inspired Hamka to formulate his own take on the reconstruction of Islam in the Malay world. As one cosmopolitan reformer amongst many in the Islamic world of the twentieth century, Hamka was thus both a man of his time, and a man ahead of his time.

Studying a thinker as prolific as Hamka has methodological challenges. I have choosen to draw upon the history of ideas, as developed by Quentin Skinner and Dominic LaCapra. Skinner emphasized the “need to situate the texts we study within such intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse as enable us to recognise what their authors were doing in writing them. To speak more fashionably, I emphasise the performativity of texts and the need to treat them intertextually.”xxvii In what follows, I will bring to the fore the various contexts and currents of thought that shaped Hamka’s thought. I will show how Hamka engaged with the prevailing ideas of his day and age and his utilization of various Islamic and non-Islamic traditions and philosophies to reconstruct Islamic thought. The following pages will also highlight Hamka’s use of various discursive techniques to gain the attention of his readers and to destabilize his intellectual opponents’ perceptions of Islam.xxviii Dominic LaCapra, in turn, highlights the different ways by which a historian of ideas can read the work of extremely prolific scholars. The first is by showing ‘continuity among texts (linear development), second, by exposing discontinuity among texts (change or even “epistemological break” between stages or periods) and thirdly, by bringing to the fore dialectical synthesis (the later stage raises the earlier one to a higher level of insight).” xxix LaCapra problematizes these three ways of reading texts and sees them as seductive traps that writers can fall into while trying to make sense of genres of written work, yet I find that Hamka’s works do exhibit a “dialectical synthesis” of past ideas with new ones. He was remarkably consistent about his views regarding the reformation of Islamic thought and society, progressively adjusting his scholarly positions as he encountered new knowledge. Hamka’s corpus ought to be read dialogically and cumulatively “like a single text writ large.”xxx I have structured this book to consider Hamka’s exposition of six central issues through the prism of cosmopolitan reform. Chapter One explores Hamka argument for the harmonization of reason and rationality and the need to move beyond the pervasive acceptance of taqlid (blind obedience) along with the negative beliefs about taqdir (fate) on the road to reform Malay-Muslim thought.

Hamka introduced the concept of ‘guided reason,’ a type of reasoning that was guided by the sacred sources of Islam, by good character, and by changing

contexts, as well as by the new forms of knowledge for Muslims to adapt effectively to a modernizing world. Linked to the concept of guided reason is the notion of moderation. Chapter Two examines Hamka’s clarification of what moderation means, entails and what it its antithesis. He explained that the ruptures of modernity and the failure of Muslims to utilize their God-given intellectual gifts have brought about various forms of extremism that have bedeviled Muslims globally. However, he stressed that Muslims must also be cognizant that the media and some scholars have used extremism as a trope to obscure and paint a dark picture of Islam. To resolve extremist tendencies and correct negative images of Islam, Hamka enjoined his readers to appreciate and live up to the notion of kesederhanaan di dalam segala perkara (moderation in all things), a concept he drew from Plato but redefined through the lens of Prophet Muhammad’s teachings.

To Hamka, “if only human beings are moderate [in all things], their lives would not be ridden by anxieties” that lead to injustice toward themselves and society. xxxi Chapter Three developes this theme by focusing on Hamka’s thoughts about the importance of social justice in the Malay world. He urged Muslims to reclaim the Islamic conception of social justice and incorporate what was best of capitalist, socialist and communist conceptions of social justice. The Islamic conception of social justice is guided by the practical concepts of khalifatul fil ‘ard (vicegerents of God on earth), amanah (sacred trust), shura (mutual consultation) and maslahah (general welfare). It has and can still be fully realized should elites, activists, intellectuals and ordinary Muslim alike study how Muslims in past lived as ethical human beings. Chapter Four expands on the issue of social justice between different groups in the Malay world by focussing on Hamka’s project of ‘recasting gendered paradigms.’ This involves reinterpreting, reconceptualizing and reconfiguring various dominant understandings about the roles, functions and responsibilities of women in Islam as reflected not only in the Qur’an and the adat (traditional customs), but also in modern discourses about feminism.

Hamka questioned the inflexibility of classical and literalist Islam, the limitations of the modernist paradigm and the approaches of proponents of an emerging group of secular thinkers toward gender issues.

How can Muslims become ethical human beings? Hamka’s answer to this is through the agency of Sufism. Nonetheless, he believed Sufism in the Malay world was corrupted and weakened by superstition and wayward beliefs. In Chapter Five, I highlight Hamka’s efforts to restore Sufism through his clarification of the origins of Sufism, his delineation of the teachings of pure Sufism as well as the intellectual and spiritual contributions of Sufi scholars’ to

Islam. He enjoined Sufis in the Malay world to modernize themselves, admonishing them and their murshids (spiritual guides) to inject the positive aspects of spirituality into the lives of ordinary Muslims. The last chapter explicates the ‘reformist histories’ that Hamka wrote as an extension of his concern with Sufism. These historical works were driven by Hamka’s conviction that history can be utilized as a tool to reform the minds of ordinary Muslims.

Hamka utilized a historicist mode of explanation that was centred upon the ‘belief that the truth, meaning, and value of anything, i.e., the basis of any evaluation, is to be found in its history; and, more narrowly, the antipositivistic and antinaturalistic view that historical knowledge is a basic, or the only, requirement for understanding and evaluating man’s present political, social, and intellectual position or problems.’xxxii I critically examine a few threads of Hamka’s reformist histories. First, these histories link the Arab world of Islam with other centres of the faith in Africa, Asia, and Europe into one seamless and synergistic whole, as part of Hamka’s hope to create awareness among Muslims in the Malay world that they belonged to a millennium-old civilization and that Muslims interacted easily with nonMuslims throughout the history of Islam. The second thread of Hamka’s reformist histories underscores the agency of grassroots reformers in determining the course of Muslim history. Many lessons can be learned from their attempts to overcome the obstacles that were stacked up against them. The third distinctive strand of Hamka’s reformist histories lies in his emphasis on narrating the tangled yet courageous journeys of Muslims in upholding social justice in the past as a means to motivate Muslims in the Malay world take their place in the vanguard of positive transformations today. <A>The Making of a Cosmopolitan Reformer A brief biography of Hamka is in order here for us to appreciate the genesis of his project of cosmopolitan reform and the various circumstances that shaped his thoughts. There are three factors that structured Hamka’s approach to Islamic reform. The first resulted from his personal life struggles; the second was related to the impact of the societal conditions of his time; and the third had to do with shifts in the thinking about Islam and Muslim societies – coming in the form of reformist and modernist pulses – at both the local and global levels. These circumstances drove him to carve out his own unique interpretations of Islamic reformism in the Malay world.

Hamka was born into the matrilineal world of Minangkabau, Sumatra, on 17 February 1908. A scion of an illustrious line of Muslim religious scholars, Hamka

was first taught by his father, Abdul Karim Amrullah (1879–1945), a strict disciplinarian who demanded full compliance from his first son. His daily lessons included learning the rudiments of the Arabic language and memorization of the Qur’an. At the age of eight years old, he was sent to a village Dinniyyah (Religious) school. This lasted for a few years, following which, Hamka was enrolled in the Thawalib (Senior Students) school where he learnt and memorized classical Islamic texts. He dropped out soon after due to boredom and daily frustrations with the dismal state of this traditional Islamic school.xxxiii From then on, Hamka was practically self-taught, building his reputation as an autodidact who spent his time reading books at private libraries owned by his father’s students, including Zanuddin Labay el-Yunusi. Disenchanted with his home region of Minangkabau, and always wanting to escape the influence of his overbearing father, Hamka travelled to Java in 1924 to observe at close range the rapid growth of Muslim social movements such as Sarekat Islam and Muhammadiyah. Three years later, Hamka was already on a ship to Mecca to further his studies and carve out an independent life of his own, only to return to Minangkabau just six months later to establish himself as a popular writer of novels and religious books. Hamka had initially planned to stay in the Mecca and dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a religious scholar. He was however advised by an Indonesian consul in Mecca, Agus Salim (1884–1954), to shelve the idea. Agus quipped in local Minangkabau dialect: “You should go back home. There are more important tasks in the field of activism, studies and other struggles that you will encounter in Indonesia. This country is a place of worship. It is not a place to study. You are better off developing yourself in your own country.”xxxiv Similar to his contemporary, South Asia scholar-activist Abul A’la Maududi (1903–79) from whom he drew much inspiration, xxxv Hamka continued to be a self-taught student throughout his life, harnessing his superb memory and writing skills to write on any religious topic that piqued his interest. He was part of what Michael Laffan has vividly described as the “alternative religious-print network” in Southeast Asia that “was bound to a religious centre, Cairo, where politics had firmly entered the realm of the popular Muslim imagination.”xxxvi Hamka’s house was filled with books written by reformist and modernist thinkers from Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Although fluent only in the Malay-Indonesian and Arabic languages, Hamka’s wide collections of books included translated works of European authors, especially books concerned with philosophy, theology and gender issues. xxxvii In Hamka’s family, there were many different visions of Islam represented. This diversity of thought inspired him to try to bridge the contending paradigms of

Islam. His great-grandfather and grandfather were both proponents of Sufi practices and subscribed to the Naqshbandiyyah Sufi order, which had a strong following on the island Sumatra as well as in other parts of the Malay world . By comparison, Hamka’s father, Abdul Karim Amrullah, was an ardent opponent of Sufistic tendencies and one of the leading proponents of Islamic modernism in modern Indonesia. Together with Mohammad Djamil Djambek, Sheikh Abdullah Ahmad, and Sheikh Thaib Umar, all of whom were studying and teaching in Mecca for over a decade under the tutelage of Sheikh Ahmad Khatib, Abdul Karim Amrullah formed a formidable anti-Sufi faction that invited strong reactions from Sumatra’s traditionalist Muslim leaders.xxxviii Very early in his life, Hamka realized that, if left to fester, the differences between Sufis and anti-Sufis could tear the Muslim community in the Malay world apart, leaving it susceptible to other powers and influences that would threaten the faith of Muslims.xxxix Such intellectual skirmishes in his own family, the ebb and flow of Sufism in the region and Hamka’s encounters with many syncretic mystical movements that began to take hold in the hearts of Muslims in the Malay world, driving him to reinterpret and write about Sufism from a modernist and reformist point of view. Published in 1939 with the title Tasauf Moderen (still in print today), this book established Hamka as “one of the most important figures in the popularisation of Sufism amongst Indonesia’s modernizing elites,” according to Julia Howell.xl Despite their ideological differences, Hamka’s progenitors nevertheless shared a common practice which troubled Hamka throughout his life: they were polygamists and frequently divorced. Hamka was born into a polygamous family and grew up as a neglected child in a divorced household. Although Hamka’s father, Abdul Karim Amrullah, was reputed as a scholar and reformer whose condemnations of local customs and folk Islam had led traditional Muslims to label him sesat (wayward), xli Abdul Karim, subscribed to the local culture of marrying close to a dozen wives. He maintained four at one time, in keeping with Islamic laws, and divorced them when domestic conflicts arose. Religious elites in Minangkabau in the early twentieth century regarded this as an accepted practice. Hamka’s paternal grandfather had eight wives who bore him forty-six children.xlii The 1930 national census conducted by the Dutch colonial authorities confirms the prevalence of polygamy. According to this census, 8.7 percent of the marriages in Minangkabau were polygamous. This was more than four times the percentage in Java and Madura, where 1.9 percent of marriages were reportedly polygamous.xliii

Widespread polygamy went hand-in-hand with high rates of divorce in the Malay world. In his study of marriage dissolution in the twentieth century, Gavin Jones found that divorce among Malays usually occurred within the first five years of marriage. Many interlocking factors can explain the high rates of divorce in Indonesia and Malaysia, including early marriage, the economic independence of women, spousal incompatibility, social safety nets made available to divorcees by their kith and kin, the ease of remarriage, and the problems that arose from polygamy.xliv Writing about the frequency of divorce in Aceh in the 1930s, Edwin Loeb wrote in a rather hyperbolic way that it was normal for an Acehnese woman to marry ten to fifteen times. xlv Broken marriages, along with the imposition of colonial and feudal rule, brought about stark injustices in local societies. Predictably, Hamka’s writings were colored with issues of justice and injustice pervaded as evinced most strikingly in his book, Keadilan Sosial dalam Islam (Social Justice in Islam). Hamka was probably one of the few male Muslim scholars in the history of the Malay world to write extensively on the subject of Muslim women. While other Malay-Muslim thinkers, such as Sayyid Shaikh AlHadi and Agus Salim, wrote about the conditions and circumstances of Muslim women in the region, xlvi none of the writers prior to Hamka wrote so much about the subject or made it their lifelong intellectual pursuit. Hamka’s book entitled Kedudukan Wanita Di Dalam Islam (The Position of Women in Islam) which was first published in 1929, and is now regarded as a classic, served to correct opposing ideas about gender, culture, freedom and modernity from within the Islamic tradition.xlvii By the time he was twenty, Hamka was already a strong proponent of what would become the largest modernist Muslim organization in Indonesia, the Muhammadiyah. In point of fact, his father, siblings and other relatives too played important roles in the spread of Muhammadiyah branches across West Sumatra, “an Amrullah family affair,” as Jeffrey Hadler handsomely describes it. xlviii At the same time, Hamka was earning his living as a writer of essays published in the popular Islamic weekly—Pedoman Masyarakat (Society’s Compass). He later collected these weekly essays and published them in a few acclaimed self-help Islamic books. Lembaga Budi (Foundation of Character) Falsafah Hidup (Philosophy of Life) and Lembaga Hidup (Foundation of Life) were bestsellers throughout Indonesia in the 1930s and 1940s.

It was also during this period that Hamka established himself as an admired novelist, or more accurately, a pengarang roman (romance author).xlix Si Sabariyah, Dibawah Lindungan Ka’abah (Under the Protection of Ka’bah), Kerana Fitnah (Because of Defamation [later re-published as Terusir (Cast Aside)]), Tenggelamnya

Kapal van der Wijck (The Sinking of van der Wijck) and Merantau Ke Deli (Sojourning to Deli), all of which were realist fictions of the travails of Muslims in a modernizing era, were written in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War.l He became more involved in political activism at this time. With the encouragement of his brother-in-law, Sutan Mansur, he joined Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia (PSII), which was agitating for the independence of Indonesia.

Predictably, this brought him to the attention of Dutch colonial officials.li The Japanese Occupation (1942â&#x20AC;&#x201C;45) was a major turning point in Hamkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life.

He openly collaborated with the Japanese, advising them on the management of Muslim affairs. This work bought him and his family a comfortable life in the city of Medan, but the gains of collaborating turned out to be shortlived. He was marginalized by many Muslim leaders, who accused him of selling out his religion to reap quick benefits from the Japanese occupiers. Fearing reprisal at the end of the war, and cast aside by his close associates in Muhammadiyah, Hamka returned to West Sumatra in 1945. The outbreak of the Indonesian Revolution, which lasted from 1945 to 1949, was a golden opportunity to redeem himself in the hearts and minds of the Muslim public. He was an energetic propagandist and mobilizer for the revolution, escaping near death situations on a few occasions while finding the time to publish several books that touched on revolutionary themes.lii During these four years and thereafter, Hamka defined himself as one of the foremost public Muslim intellectuals based in the capital city of the new Republic of Indonesia, Jakarta. <Insert Figure 0.1 near here> Due to his established reputation as an author, a religious scholar and activist during the Indonesian revolution, Hamka was appointed as a high-ranking official by the Ministry of Religious Affairs under the Sukarno administration from 1951 till 1960. This position enabled him to travel globally, including a four-month visit to the United States which he documented in a two-volume travelogue. He was certainly impressed by some of what he saw in the United States, even though he was dismissive of the moral laxity among men and women and troubled by the treatment of African-Americans. The aspects of the United States that especially enthralled him were the respect for democracy, the staggering number of institutions of higher education, and scientific and technological innovations such as nuclear energy. Hamka thought that this was indicative of an advanced state of cultural development. He felt that Muslims in Indonesia, and the Malay world in general, had a lot of work to do to catch up.

They could do so if they adopted a proud and confident predisposition.liii

Hamka rolled out dozens of books in the decades that followed, on a variety of subjects, including general history and politics (the 900-page, Sejarah Umat Islam [History of the Muslim Peoples] was written during this era), the history of Sufism, and a biography of his father and his autobiography. But the bulk of his works from the 1950s onwards dealt with matters of faith and reason, among which was Filsafat Ketuhanan (Philosophy of Divinity). He published several other volumes that addressed religious questions posed by the Muslim public. Hamka began to cut back on the writing of fictional works in order to devote more time to writing an exegesis of the entire Qur’an, an ambitious project that had long been delayed due to his hectic schedule. In between writing, he met community leaders, religious scholars, social activists, and politicians daily at his home. He responded to countless of interviews by newspapers and periodicals, speaking to radio and television channels, and served as the Grand Imam of the newly established Masjid Agung Kebayoran Baru in South Jakarta. In 1960, the name of the mosque was changed to “Masjid Agung Al-Azhar”. The man behind this naming was none other than the prominent Egyptian scholar, Sheikh Mahmud Shaltut (1893–1963), who convinced the Al-Azhar University to confer Hamka an Honorary Doctorate in 1958.liv Hamka was soon elected to the Constitutional Assembly, or the Konstituante, as a representative of the Parti Islam Masyumi, where he served from 1955 to 1959.

In his work to bring Muslims closer to the Islamic faith, Hamka entered into an ideological battle against communists in Indonesia who were increasingly belligerent in their attacks upon Muslim movements and upon Islam as a faith.

At the same time, he made a deep impact on the minds of Muslims in the Malay World through public lectures and sponsored visits all around the region. Hamka was asked to mediate scuffles between Muslim modernists and traditionalists in Singapore and Malaya. In Brunei, he was an oft-invited speaker and was known as a celebrity preacher by locals.lv Hamka and President Sukarno were close friends during the nascent days of the Indonesian revolution, but the relationship between them soured as both men developed diametrically opposite views of communism. Hamka maintained that communism and Islam can never be reconciled, while Sukarno promoted the fusion of nationalism, religion and communism, in what he termed Nasakom (Nasionalisme, Agama dan Komunisme). Things came to a head when Hamka began to openly criticize Soekarno’s authoritarianism. Sukarno reacted by banning Hamka’s mouthpiece, Society Compass. Hamka was arrested in 1964 for his alleged involvement in anti-government movements. The years in captivity turned out to

be the much-needed time Hamka yearned for to complete his magnum opus— the thirty-volume Tafsir Al-Azhar.lvi After two years in detention, Hamka was released by General Suharto, the leader of the military coup that toppled the Sukarno regime. The days Hamka spent behind bars were not as catatrophic as he had initially believed. His years as a prisoner became badge of honour and a testimony to many Muslims that Hamka was among the many ulama (scholars) in the history of Islam who had experienced the painful ordeal of incarceration by unjust regimes. But just as his life was stabilizing under the new government while he was becoming accustomed to his new role as the preeminent living Muslim scholar in Malay world, his wife passed away in 1971. To get over his bereavement, Hamka had to continously motivate himself to remain committed in the struggle to reform the minds of his fellow Muslims. His productivity in writing and publication was substantial in spite of these difficulties, and he continued to receive man acknowledgements for his contributions to Islam and Muslims.lvii Mention has been made earlier of the doctorate Hamka received from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in 1974. A year later, he was elected as the first chairman of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI; the Indonesian Ulama Council), a position which he described as a balancing act between the rage of the people and the pressure from the state.lviii Hamka wanted the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulama Council) to advise the government on matters pertaining to Muslim affairs and serve as a mouthpiece for the government on policies relating to Islam. The MUI would also served as a facilitator for intellectual discussions between the ulama and state bodies in addition to performing the task of becoming a conduit for the ulama to deliberate and issue fatwas (religious edicts) for the benefit of ordinary Muslims.

Although sponsored by Suharto’s New Order regime, dissenters against the state’s brand of Islam within the MUI itself were not spared from the state’s heavy hand. Hamka was the state’s first victim.

Concerned about what he saw as the rising tide of Christianity in Indonesia and the unethical means that many missionaries used to convert Muslims, Hamka wrote passionately about the need to put the evangelicals in check. For Hamka, the last straw came when the government pressured the MUI to issue an edict allowing a joint celebration of Christmas and Eidul Fitri (signifying the end of the fasting month), since both festive days were in the same month. Hamka resisted the government’s pressure and held that celebrating any other non-Muslim religious events would endanger the faith of ordinary Muslims at a time when

Christian missionary activity was at its zenith. He had however promoted good relations and cooperation with Christians in other spheres of life. A long and controversial debate ensued between him and the Ministry of Religion that culminated in his abrupt resignation in 1981.lix Already suffering from diabetes and other health problems, Hamka’s life was cut short by heart failure on 24 July that same year. He left a legacy of writings that fashioned a new generation of Muslims who were inspired by his reformulation of how Islam should be understood and what Muslims should do to be guiding lights for their societies and the world at large. As Hendrik Maier beautifully puts it: <inset text> At his death in 1981, Hamka left an amazing number of books— histories, treatises, surveys, commentaries, exegeses, speeches, sermons, and lectures—all of them written in the service of Islam and God’s glory and splendour. His eloquence, his writing skills, his enigmatic personality had made him a well-respected man, inside and outside Muslim circles … An authoritative religious leader. A respected writer.

A gifted speaker.lx <end inset text> It will be evident to the readers of this book that Hamka’s commitment to Islamic reformism was a product of his personal experiences and social interactions just as he was shaped by profound political transformations, economic vicissitudes, social revolutions and acute ideological shifts in the Islamic World in the twentieth century. Indeed, few Muslim thinkers and intellectuals in the Malay World of Hamka’s generation transcended dualistic categories such as “traditionalist vs modernist”, “literalist vs progressive”, “fundamentalist vs liberal” and “Salafi vs Sufi” that ground many studies of Islam and Muslims globally. This book maintains that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness toward a whole range of ideologies and philosophies to develop his own imaginary and vocabulary of Islamic reform. I call it cosmopolitan reform.

Hamka, Keadilan Sosial Dalam Islam (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1906), 176.

Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33. i

ii

For discussions on the neglect of Islam in the Malay world in the study of Islamic studies, see: Greg Fealy, “Islam in Southeast Asia,” in Contemporary Southeast Asia, ed. Mark Beeson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 158-173. iv Leonard Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) and Anthony Milner, The Malays (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). v Michael Feener, “A Re-examination of the Place of al-Hallaj in Southeast Asian Islam,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 154, no. 4 (1998): 585 and Jeffrey Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession: Three Generations of Amrullahs in Twentieth-Century Indonesia,” Indonesia, 65 (1988), 125. vi Nurcholish Madjid, Tradisi Islam: Peran dan Fungsinya dalam Pembangunan di Indonesia (Jakarata: Paramadina, 1997), 123-124. vii Sartono Kartodirdjo, Indonesian Historiography (Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 2001), 25-26. The list of works on Hamka in Malay and Indonesian languages deserves a bibliography of its own and would take up to much space to be listed in full here. Among the universities that are current using Hamka’s books as course texts are International Islamic University of Malaysia, Institut Wasatiyyah Malaysia and Universitas Muhammadiyah Prof. Dr Hamka. viii See: “Profil Perpustakaan Hamka”, Perpustakaan Prof. Dr. Hamka, accessed June 5, 2017, https://hamkalibrarymugu.wordpress.com/about/. ix Fauziah Muslimah, “Berkujung Museum Rumah Kelahiran Buya Hamka Di Tepian Danau Meninjau”, accessed on June 10, 2017, http://www.gomuslim.co.id/read/destinasi/2016/11/27/2344/berkunjung-ke-museumrumah-kelahiran-buya-hamka-di-tepian-danau-maninjau.html. x Junus Amir Hamzah, Hamka sebagai Pengarang Roman (Djakarta: Megabookstore, 1964); Nasir Tamara, Buntara Sanusi dan Vincent Djauhari (eds.) Hamka Di Mata Hati Umat (Jakarta: Pustaka Panjimas, 1984); M. Yunan Yusuf, Corak Pemikiran Kalam Tafsir Al-Azhar (Jakarta: Panjimas, 1990); Md. Sidin Ahmad Ishak (ed.), Pemikiran dan Perjuangan Hamka (Kuala Lumpur: Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia, 2001); Abdul Rahman Abdul Aziz, Pemikiran Etika Hamka (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications, 2002); Shamsul Nizar, Membincangkan Dinamika Intelektual dan Pemikiran Hamka tentang Pendidikan: Seabad Buya Hamka (Jakarta: Kenchana, 2008); Sidek Baba (ed.), Pemikiran Hamka (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2008); Abdul Rauf, Tafsir Al-Azhar: Dimensi Tasawwuf (Selangor: Piagam Intan, 2013); M. Alfan Alfian, Hamka dan Bahagia: Reaktualisasi Tasauf Di Zaman Kita (Bekasi: Penjuru Ilmu Sejati, 2014). Recent journalistic commentaries on Hamka are found here: Rahmat Nur Hakim, “Lewat Islam, Hamka dan Pramoedya Ananta Toer pun Berdamai”, June 29, 2016, accessed on June 6, 2017, http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2016/06/29/05050041/Lewat.Islam.Hamka.dan.Pramoed ya.Ananta.Toer.pun.Berdamai and Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, “Pesan Hamka: panggil saya Muslim”, June 8, 2014, accessed on June 6, 2017, https://m.malaysiakini.com/columns/265033. xi Adries Teuuw, Modern Indonesian Literature (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 71. xii James R. Rush, Hamka’s Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 15. iii

The majority of Western-language scholarship on Hamka analyzes his fictional and biographical works. Among prominent ones that touched primarily on Hamka are: Deliar Noer, “Yamin and Hamka: Two Routes to an Indonesian Identity”, in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, eds. Anthony Reid and David Marr (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), 249-262; Karel Steenbrink, “Hamka (1908-1981) and the Integration of the Islamic Ummah of Indonesia,” Studia Islamika 1, no. 3 (1994): 119-147; Jeffrey Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession: Three Generations of Amrullahs in Twentieth-Century Indonesia,” Indonesia 65 (1998): 122-154; Conrad William Watson, Of Self and Nation: Autobiography and the Representation of Modern Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 106-129; Wan Sabri Wan Yusof, “Religious Harmony and Inter-faith Dialogue in the Writings of Hamka” Intellectual Discourse, 13, no. 2 (2005): 113-134 and Rosnani Hashim, “Hamka: Intellectual and Social Transformation of the Malay World”, in Reclaiming the Conversation: Islamic Intellectual Tradition in the Malay Archipelago, ed. Rosnani Hashim (Selangor: The Other Press, 2010), 87-205. One of the critics of Hamka was Andries Teeuw who wrote that “Hamka cannot be considered a great author by any standards.” See: Andries Teeuw, Modern Indonesian Literature (Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications, 1986), 2. xiv Rush, Hamka’s Great Story. xv Rusydi Hamka, Hamka: Pujangga Islam Kebanggaan Rumpun Melayu (Selangor: Pustaka Dini, 2002). xvi Deliar Noer, “Yamin and Hamka: Two Routes to an Indonesian Identity”, 253. xvii Hamka, Kenangan kenangan-ku di-Malaya (Singapore: Setia Darma, 1957), 7. xviii Hamka, Teguran Suci dan Jujur Terhadap Mufti Johor (Selangor: Pustaka Dini, 2009). xix Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Majlis Konvokesyen Kedua (Bangi: UKM, 1975), 3. xx Editorial, “Sambutan rakyat Indonesia terhadap Dr Hamka”, Al-Islam, 9 (1974): 12. xxi Mun’im Sirry, Scriptural Polemics: The Qur’an and Other Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 87. xxii See: Wan Sabri Wan Yusof, “Hamka’s “Tafsir al-Azhar”: Qur’anic Exegesis as a Mirror of Social Change” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1997). xxiii Hamka, Renungan Tasauf (Jakarta: Pustaka Panjimas, 2002), 62-64. xxiv Hamka, Membahas Kemusykilan Agama (Selangor: Pustaka Dini, 2009), 28. xxv Hamka, Prinsip dan Kebijaksaan Da’wah Islam (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Melayu Baru, 1981), 47. xxvi For an excellent survey of modern Islamic reformers and reformist thought, see: Shireen T. Hunter (ed.), Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2009) and Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). xxvii Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vii. xxviii Henk Maier, for example, describes Hamka’s writing style as “of a breathtaking grace, mellifluous and silvery, perfectly suitable for recitation.” See: We Are Playing Relatives: A Survey of Malay Writing (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 335. xiii

Dominic LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 55. xxx LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 55. xxxi Hamka, Falsafah Hidup (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1977), 216. xxxii Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, ‘The Meaning of “Historicism”’, The American Historical Review, 59, no. 3 (1954): 577. xxxiii Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Kuala Lumpur, 1973), 44-45. xxxiv Hamka, Kenang-kenangan Hidup (Shah Alam: Pustaka Dini, 2009, first edition was published in Jakarta by Gapura in 1951), 101. xxxv Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Maududi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19. xxxvi Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10. xxxvii Hamka, Kenang-kenangan Hidup, 175-183. xxxviii Hamka, Zaim Rais, Against Islamic Modernism: The Minangkabau Traditionalists’ Responses to the Modernist Movement (Jakarta: Logos Wacana Ilmu, 2001), 32. xxxix Hamka, Said Djamaluddin Al-Afghany: Pelopor Kebangkitan Muslimin (Djakarta: Penerbit Bulan Bintang, 1970), 174. xl Julia D. Howell, “Indonesia’s Salafist Sufis,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 5 (2010): 1031. See also: Martin van Bruinessen,“The Origins and Development of Sufi Orders (Tarekat) in Southeast Asia,” Studia Islamika 1, no. 1 (1994): 13. xli “Sesat” in that context meant those ideas and practices that did not conform to the prevalent understandings of Islam that were shaped by a mixture of Shafi’i law, Asharite theology and local manifestations of Islamic piety. See: Roy. F. Allen, “Social Theory, Ethnography and the Understanding of Practical Islam in South-East Asia,” in Islam in South-East Asia, ed. M.B. Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 50-91. xlii Azra Aryumardi, Historiografi Islam Kontemporer: Wacana, Aktualitas dan Actor Sejarah (Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2002), 262. xliii Saskia Wieringa, “Matrilinearity and Women’s Interests: The Minangkabau of Western Sumatra,” in Subversive Women: Women’s Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Carribean, ed. Saskia Wieringa (London: Zed Books, 1995), 252. xliv Gavin Jones, Marriage and Divorce in Islamic South-east Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 218-234. xlv Edwin M. Loeb, Sumatra: Its History and People (Vienna: Institut fur Volkerkunde der Universitat Wien, 1935), 238-239. xlvi See: Ibrahim Abu Bakar, Islamic Modernism in Malaya: The Life and Thought of Sayid Syakh AlHadi, 1867-1934 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malay Press, 1994) and Solichin Salam, Hadji Agus Salim: Hidup dan Perdjuangannja (Djakarta: Djajamurni, 1961). xlvii Hamka, Kedudukan Wanita dalam Islam (Selangor: Pustaka Dini, 2009). xlviii Jeffrey Hadler, Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 164. xxix

Yunus Amir Hamzah, Hamka sebagai Pengarang Roman (Jakarta: Puspasari Indah, 1993).

Hamka, Di Bawah Lindungan Ka’bah (Djakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1936); Hamka, Kerana Fitnah (Djakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1938) and Merantau ke Deli (Djakarta: Djajamurni, 1962). li Alfian, Muhammadiyah: The Political Behavior of a Muslim Modernist Organization Under Dutch Colonialism (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1989), 280-281. lii Hamka, Kenang-Kenangan Hidup (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Dini, 2009), 364. liii Hamka, Empat Bulan di Amerika, Djilid 2 (Djakarta: Tintamas, 1954), 66. liv The speech that Hamka delivered during the conferment of his Honorary Doctorate was published as follows: Hamka, Pengaruh Muhammad Abduh di Indonesia; Pidato Diutjapkan Sewaktu Akan Menerima Gelar Doctor Honoris Causa Dari Universitas al-Azhar di Mesir Pada Tgl. 21 Djanuari 1958 (Jakarta: Tintamas, 1961). lv Hamka, Kenangan kenangan-ku di-Malaya (Singapore: Setia Darma, 1957); Hamka, Teguran Suci & Jujur Terhadap Mufti Johor (Selangor:Pustaka Dini, 2009 [first published in 1958]) and Iik Arifin Mansurnoor, ‘Islam in Brunei Darussalam: An Analysis of their Interaction’, in Johan Meuleman (ed.), Islam in the Era of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2002), 65. lvi Hamka, Tafsir Al-Azhar Vol. 1 (Singapura: Pustaka Nasional, 1983), 1. lvii Irfan Hamka, Ayah: Kisah Buya Hamka (Jakarta: Republika, 2013), 213. lviii Taufik Abdullah, ‘Hamka dalam Stuktur dan Dinamik Keulamaan’, in Hamka di Mata Hati Umat, eds. Nasir Tamara, Buntara Sanusi and Vincent Djauhari (Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1983), 419. See also: Moch. Nur Ichwan, “Ulama, State and Politics: Majelis Ulama Indonesia After Suharto,” Islamic Law and Society 12, no. 1 (2005): 48. lix Melissa Crouch, Law and Religion in Indonesia: Conflict and the Courts in West Java (London: Routledge, 2014), 88 and Nadirsyah Hosen, “Behind the scenes: Fatwas of Majelis Ulama Indonesia (1975-1998),” Islamic Studies 15, no. 2 (2004): 147-179. lx Maier, We Are Playing Relatives, pp. 380-381. xlix l

ART AND ENGAGEMENT IN EARLY POSTWAR JAPAN

JUSTIN JESTY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges grants from the University of Washington which aided in the publication of this book. Also, publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Copyright Š 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Chapter 1: Arts of Engagement and the Democratic Culture of the Early Postwar Chapter 2: Avant-Garde Documentary: Reportage Art of the 1950s Chapter 3: Opening Open Doors: SĹ?bi and Hani Susumu Chapter 4: Kyushu-Ha Tartare: Anti-Art between Raw and Haute EPILOGUE: Diachronic Speculations Notes BIBLIOGRAPHY Index

Introduction <A> An Opening Example The Atomic Bomb Panels (Genbaku no zu) are enormous, 1.8 meters high and 7.2 meters long. There are fifteen in all. A wife and husband, Maruki Toshi and Iri, painted the panels together over a period of thirty-two years.1 Millions of people have seen the panels over the decades since the first one appeared in 1950, as they have toured the world in the context of numerous peace movements and campaigns against nuclear arms.2 [Plates 1-2] One of the most striking things about them is that what fills the space on these enormous canvasses is people. There are some animals, a ship, and some floating candles, but in the early panels all that comes into and holds this space is peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;over two hundred in Water alone. There is no landscape, no reliable perspective, no consistency of scale. The figures do not walk on a stable territory, and the aerial view, which itself made the bombing possible, cannot encompass their testimony. The compositions are too rambling to be called a snapshot, and they are not collage: built up from single details, the images are the cumbersome work of individually realized human forms, not an exercise in nimble juxtaposition.

Though a narrative is apparent to contemporary audiences, the panelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; first audiences had incomplete access to that: four years separate the initial devastation of Ghosts (1950) from the beginning of Rescue (1954). Even with the hindsight made possible by the whole sequence, it would be difficult to claim that Rescue managed to undo the excesses of Ghosts to make them more consistent or familiar.

Though the Panels forego the elegance gained from regularity in time and space, they do not forsake drama. The figures themselves are predominantly women and children. There were few adult men left in Hiroshima by the time of the bombing, but more to the point, the mother and child partake of long-standing popular metonyms for violence and shattered bonds. There are mountains of the dead, pieces of people strewn around the feet of those who stand, tendrils of skin hanging from outstretched arms. But there are also figures not fully dehumanized by starvation or even injury. Many commentators have noticed how well-formed they are, more nude than naked body. This is daring, even transgressive. Do we dare cross that river, to make a fiction of beauty amid tragedy? Though undoubtedly a risk, it may be this tension, this field of melodrama between the human and the dead, of uncertainty between success and failure, which is the source of fascination that keeps people looking at these images.3 Would a more brutal realism or flourish of painterly mastery stay with us for long, would it speak to or beckon us? Would it not run its own risk of hygiene?

The issues of speech, beckoning, and sharing, are central to the production and reception of the paintings. Iri was a native of Hiroshima but was in Tokyo when the bomb was dropped. When he read of the terrible new weapon in a newspaper, he hurried home, arriving three days after the blast. Toshi followed

a few days later. They did not see the scenes they painted in the first three panels with their own eyes. The sources for the scenes were stories told by survivors and eye witnesses, many of them Iri’s relatives. Therefore, the scenes the Marukis painted were based on verbal accounts, many of which were gathered in 1949 and 1950. There are other sources too. As Kozawa Setsuko’s research has shown, the mother and child at the center of Water, and the dead child at the bottom of Fire were modelled on photographs that had evaded Occupation censorship and were being circulated through Communist Party networks. These panels, then, do not bear witness to the visual reality of the event (whatever that might have been), but to a narration that was already part of a community: they are an amalgam of stories and carefully stewarded fugitive photographs.

The paintings are collaborative in a more immediate sense also, in that Iri and Toshi worked on them together, even though Toshi worked in oil painting (yōga) and Iri in the modern style of Japanese ink painting (nihonga). Oil and water, paint and ink, are not easily mixed. Neither are the traditions and styles of yōga and nihonga. During the first few panels especially, the two artists were experimenting with how these divergent traditions could be brought together. In understanding the actual roles of the two artists, Kozawa proposes a parable: Toshi, an expert in painting nudes from studio models, created corporeal figures of definite volume based on the verbal testimony of eyewitnesses, while Iri, who arrived much closer to the actual blast washed the veil of memory over this in the watery grey of ink.4 The wobbly, irregular human forms emerge too close to each other, and then too far apart. That the tension between death and survival, between anger and humanism, between mourning and melodrama should come in such unbalanced compositions, and such a hodge podge of styles and images, is testament to the human scale of this memorial. No one approach dominates, no experience rises above others. No single line establishes a rule of consistency or finality over what in the community of memory is such a multifarious and unruly event.

Beyond the community that supported the imagery that appears in the paintings, there is the extended community that enabled their visibility as paintings.

Images have long suffered suspicion and persecution, in the argument that vision is an unavoidably alienating sense that both represents and enables the inhumanity and violence of modernity.5 Images do undoubtedly have their own power, one which is often experienced as being direct or immediate. But they are also exceedingly unwieldy and fragile. They require tremendous effort and resources to produce, display, and preserve. Therefore, as a corrective to the claimed power of the image, we must remember how much capital, infrastructure, and work is necessary to make and keep a given image visible. What were the communities of support that were called into being to bear the Atomic Bomb Panels around the world, so that they might in turn bear their own form of witness?

The first five panels were made under US occupation. Any public mention of the atomic bomb was forbidden under Occupation policy, so if the first exhibitions had been caught by the police or military police, the panels could well have been confiscated. A picture book about the bombing that the Marukis produced in 1950, titled Pikadon (Flash-boom), was banned by the Occupation censorship authority (CIC), and pirate copies were regularly confiscated from shops by the police. Until the landmark August 6, 1952 edition of Asahi gurafu, which, with the end of Occupation, was finally able to “break” the seven-year-old news, many Japanese people had little idea of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and certainly had never seen any pictures.

The Atomic Bomb Panels could intervene, but it was not a matter of images spreading of their own accord. Through 1950 and 1951, the Marukis themselves carried the panels from place to place on a countrywide exhibition tour. With nothing but the national railroad and their own feet to move the huge canvasses, the Marukis held exhibitions in fifty-one locations. Of course they had help, most notably from the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and the Japan Peace Committee (Nihon Heiwa Iinkai). These organizations helped the Marukis make contact with people in the places they visited who could help them set up the exhibit. The exhibits were held in department stores, country inns, schools, universities, and temples. Local groups such as students, teachers’ union members, and people in the peace movement helped to organize publicity and integrate the program with the local community of the concerned. Each exhibit would stay in one place for three or four days, and each day one of the Marukis, usually Toshi, would make a presentation: not lectures, but dramatic performances. She told stories based on the panels, sometimes half-sung in an improvised vocal style reminiscent of traditional, popular oral narratives, shifting frequently from one character’s voice to another’s. She often spoke laments from the perspective of the dead. These performances enabled a space for extreme emotional involvement and participation. 649,000 people reportedly saw these exhibitions.6 Near the end of 1951, two young activists agreed to take over the exhibition tour. Through 1952 and 1953, Nonoshita Tōru and Yoshida Yoshie brought the paintings to 794,200 people in ninety-six locations. Although they could not mimic Toshi’s verbal performances, they held four or five teach-ins per day when the panels were on display. They discovered that survivors of the bombings lived all over Japan, and when one was in the audience he or she would sometimes take over the explanation. Visitors were given the chance to express their reactions, and Yoshida later described how some crushed their pencil tips into the paper as they tried to write out their emotions. In at least one case these reactions were collected and hand printed as a booklet.7 The Atomic Bomb Panels, therefore, are not simply images, and certainly not images claiming to capture or legislate reality. Rather they are one part of an

expanding network, part of a community and a communication that was only possible insofar as people sustained it, kept contributing to it, and kept the images visible. Just as the panels themselves were born of the unevenness of human community, memory, and capacity, their exhibition was a forum for multiple ways of identifying and reacting to the paintings. Performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson has argued that art’s institutionality—something I might broaden to its social existence—is best thought of as a durational, performative process rather than a static structure: “less a sculpture than a drama.”8 We can bring this to bear here: what we see, and what we look to as art, always rests on the activities of people and collectivities. The work of the artists in this study brings this to light.

Their work was realized in pen, paint, film, performance, and this is what survives as art. But their work was also a gesture within a movement, a gesture which they themselves had to carry through to the audience they hoped it would reach. Their work includes not only their visual artistry but also their work creating the conditions which would make their work visible and relevant. Only when we take these together can we understand the testimony embodied in their work. <A> Goals This book is a cultural history of the relationship between art and politics in a particular time and place, Japan, 1945-1960. The investigation has two main goals. One is to reframe the history of that moment and its relevance to the present day, something which has specific relationship to Japan but also addresses understandings of the Cold War more broadly by revisiting possibilities obscured by subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. The other is to demonstrate a method of examining the relationship between art and politics which approaches art as a mode of intervention, but insists artistic intervention move beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance, to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value.

In both of these efforts, my project is aided by—indeed, relies upon— the formation of art and culture in the early postwar. It was a time of tremendous transformation globally. For Japan, the end of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945) left people momentarily destitute and dislocated, stranded as refugees around Asia and inside Japan. But by the end of the subsequent fifteen years, Japan was fast allies with its former enemy and occupier, dreams of mass prosperity were coming within reach, and hardly a shadow of empire remained in public memory. That transformation was anything but neat and even, and its results were far from foregone. Its elements were contested, the sites of prolonged political struggles across the 1950s. Within those struggles, particularly at the popular level, culture played a central role. Practices of self-expression and self-representation flourished. Hundreds of small-scale associations formed around practices of

production and reception—writing, performance, singing, visual art, music and film appreciation—and became stages organizing that creative and expressive work into a mode of semi-public subjectivity that fed into and formed out of social movements both large and small. Preserved today mostly in the pages of handprinted (gariban) pamphlets and journals, eked from busy workdays and material adversity, this cultural engagement was undertaken with evident seriousness of intent: not something done with an excess of time or money but as an apparently necessary work to its present. There is thus ample evidence within the field of culture of broad and deep popular engagement with the urgent questions that faced Japan, along with an idea that culture itself would be a tool of its refashioning.

The crisis and engagement of the early postwar have tended to be squeezed by histories that take the social stability, political quiescence, and economic expansion of the period 1960-1990 as definitive of Japan’s postwar.

Modernization theorists hailed Japan’s “miraculous” postwar transformation into a prosperous, capitalist, democratic nation as evidence that it had redeemed itself from the error of fascism. A later generation of critical “transwar” historians worked to undermine that view by arguing the roots of postwar order were to be traced to wartime mobilization and rationalization, not postwar liberalization.

Though opposed on many points, neither narrative has much use for the hybridity and outright conflict of the early postwar and neither gives weight to the reality of roads not taken. This book revisits the early postwar for its difference from what came immediately after it, but also for its apparent kinship to the present, when once again visions of the future are openly contested and the foundations of stability less evident.

The study also endeavors to rethink the relationship between art and politics. Theorization of the politics of modernist and avant-garde art has for some time been dominated by ideas such as intervention, disruption, and critique, which tend to ascribe the political significance of artwork to the incisiveness of its indictment of mainstream systems of value and meaning and its disruption of those systems through provocation or displays of antagonism or parody. The art forms that appear in this study occasionally partake of this logic, but it alone is not able to account for their politics. Put simply, along with disruption (and its more ambitious cousins, destruction and revolution), the artists herein were in a situation whose instability demanded some degree of creation. While their work is not short on critiques of fascism, capitalism, and the Cold War, these were paired with efforts to build something different in the present. Hence our theories of art and its politics must be able to account for constructive and creative work which is carried through at the level of practical action as well as theory and artistic practice.

Writers such as Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson, and Doris Sommer have recently begun to call for aesthetic and political value to be recognized in duration and commitment, interdependence and solidarity, and sustained dialogue between

artist and non-artist. This study will show how art, and culture more broadly, became both a field and a tool for imagining and enacting delineable social change, not simply marking the need for it.

The above two goals are closely interlinked. The task of pursuing them follows a similar logic. The history of Japan 1960-90 has understandably focused on the dominant trends of economic development, depoliticization of public life, and the astonishing standardization of everyday culture. Similar trends are to be found in France, the UK, and the US. Keenly sensitive to these trends, political artists were among the first to address them in their work, as early as the late 1950s.

The political aesthetic of estrangement, disruption, critique, and parody emerges from that work, as artists and theorists faced increasingly hidden and pervasive forces of social organization with no organized radical alternatives. In film studies, this aesthetic has been codified as political modernism. In art history, Guy Debord may be the best-known theorist in the Euro-American context, while William Marotti demonstrates Akasegawa Genpei’s importance to the Japanese context.9 Beyond these examples, most scholarship on the politics of the avant-gardes of the long 1960s relies on some version of an aesthetics of disruption and critique, which assumes a well-defined and clearly dominant mainstream culture, against which a small, critical minority of artists position their works to political effect.

The aesthetics is highly invested in the artwork and artist as privileged bearers of political significance, yet in many cases it envisions little actual change.

While it is true that I find this political aesthetic fundamentally limiting, as discussed in Chapter One, my project is primarily historical. I seek to historicize post-1960s interventionism by setting out an alternative. While risking great oversimplification, we can characterize the contrast with reference to Yuriko Furuhata’s recent study of the image politics of Japan’s avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s. She shows how “cinema—itself an apparatus of the spectacle—became a testing ground for the reflexive critique of media spectacle” precisely as new media formations (particularly television) were coming to dominate the intersection of culture and politics.10 The political aesthetics traced here, however, developed in a different context. The reach of visual media was not nearly so broad, while the question of what the mainstream was to be was itself in dispute, as multiple hegemonic articulations of meaning and value clashed. In the cultural field, production was less capitalized, less centralized, and highly permeable, making divisions between producer and consumer, high and low, avant-garde and vernacular, less easy to draw and maintain. Most importantly, however, the instability in the cultural field was invested with value. The idea of a “testing ground,” something legitimated by separation from other milieu of culture, was rejected (in practice as well as rhetoric), while—to coin a term for the sake of comparison—the aesthetics at play are characterized more by flexivity than

reflexivity: the idea that both art and action could affect the flux of a transforming reality.

The aesthetic and political convictions of the movements investigated in this book vary considerably, but one common thread connecting them is the importance each accorded to what I call democratic culture. In the ideas and activities to be chronicled, we will repeatedly see creative expression taken to be a fundamental aspect of participation. Further, ideas and creative practices were paired with concrete efforts at extending the franchise of creativity and expression by building the space and capacity for anyone to articulate an idea and position.

Thus, in addition to the ideal of creativity, we see an investment in practices and organizations by which the fruits of anyone’s authorship might find some degree of publicity. Democratic culture is not a term that was used at the time in the way I am proposing and the mode of its appearance is uneven. But its advantage is that it allows us to see what I propose are constitutive commonalities among a variety of cultural movements of the early postwar, in which self-expression, selfrepresentation, and the structured sharing of those expressions, became key modes of political subjectivity and action. As a working definition, I use the term to denote an organization of values and competencies that aims to make possible the participation of the widest number of people as public authors of their own ideas, and aims to build the material and institutional forms by which those ideas could be heard and weighed most widely. This is a study of how cultural producers conceived of and worked in and around that ideal in the early postwar.

It is also a study of how these efforts were informed by the experience and assessment of war and fascism. Questions of responsibility emerged out of concrete and deeply personal experiences of war, defeat, loss, and survival. Peace and democracy, while they energized so much postwar debate and political organization, were implicitly and explicitly set against their darker shadows: war and fascism. For the groups in this study, who tend toward the liberal and radical left, the figures of war and fascism were doubled: the Cold War was reanimating the monstrosities of the war just finished. The push by successive conservative governments of the 1950s to “correct the excesses” of the early, liberal Occupation reforms was indistinguishable from a resurrection of fascism. The Korean War, the remilitarization of Japan by US forces, and the beginnings of Japan’s own rearmament, revived the socio-economic structures of the war as well as people’s memories of it. Early postwar adversity was thus riddled with urgency. And yet— though the word optimism can be misleading in this context—animated by a belief that the future could be shaped by intervention in the present.

Although the patterns of the early postwar’s democratic culture faded with the consolidation and homogenization of culture in the 1960s, certain aspects of it can provide resources for understanding the present-day pluralization of political aesthetics, seen in renewed interest in community arts, amateur

production, and experiments in finding a place for art in fostering civic engagement. Both the early postwar and the present are characterized by having witnessed a massive decentralization of cultural authority and deprofessionalization of production. Both are characterized by an awareness of empowerment and progressive change existing as possibilities, but as possibilities imperiled by the consolidation of new patterns of military expansion and conflict, as well as political repression. Both seem to be characterized by an opening of conceptions of what art is and who should be doing it, while understandings of the politics involved concentrates as much on creating contexts for changing the terms of culture as protesting its immobility. Both seem to demand new models of understanding the relationship between art and politics. <A> Cases and Method The three movements in this study each center on the visual arts, but they share an essential characteristic common to many varieties of cultural group in the early postwar. In each case here and in many instances beyond, we find people devoted both to their artwork and to the task of finding new terms for art and culture’s social existence. Artists experimented with ad-hoc, non-hierarchichal, and non-coercive ways of relating to one another and explored a range of media and exhibition formats to find new ways of relating to a public. This kind of experiment is familiar territory for avant-garde movements throughout the 20th century but, in the early postwar, artists were not the only ones exploring new ways to participate in building a new culture. They were joined by large numbers of people not normally associated with the avant-garde—amateur producers—who gathered in workplaces and neighborhoods, or through a common interest or experience, to share in a creative and expressive activity. Poetry writing, theater, dance, singing, painting, film and music appreciation, were some of the more common activities of these “circles,” as they were often called. Circles were forums for people to meet, away from their usual social roles. Many held performances or exhibitions, or produced their own hand-printed publications. Though each circle was diminutive—little more than a handful of people who got together a few times a week to exchange their work and talk—these were where the franchise of authorship was expanding. People in them used their own hands and voices to take hold of the cultural means of production and alter, if only incrementally, the terms of the culture they were to share. We therefore have artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals on the one hand, and workers, teachers, housewives, and a whole range of people on the other, each involved in commensurable experiments in finding new terms of organization and new modes of creative and expressive agency. It is at the junctures between these two trajectories, between the widespread impulse towards creative externalization on the one hand, and the

more familiar realm of creative expression, i.e. art, on the other, that I situate the movements I now introduce.

The subject of Chapter 2 is the reportage artists. These artists formed a loose movement whose work is part of what made the 1950s a golden age of documentary. The movement was born around 1950, when the conservative shift in US occupation policy was reaching a crisis point. The late 1940s had already seen policy moving away from the early commitment to democratization and demilitarization toward rebuilding a strong, capitalist Japan as a bulwark against communism in the East. But in 1949-50, with the beginning of a purge of suspected communists and the Korean War, the backsliding became a rout, and the reportage artists saw society returning to the military-industrial authoritarianism so familiar from just a few years before. Although the word “democracy” now fell easily from the lips of those who had recently been urging wholesale sacrifice for Japan’s wartime empire, the reportage artists did not see a break with the fascist past. They saw not democracy, but a sinister repetition of the structures of war and oppression, and their work was undertaken to reveal that.

The practice of reportage involved travelling to places like US military bases and factory districts, where the violence of militarism, and military-driven capitalism condensed. But for the reportage painters, the problem Japan faced was also one whose source lay on the inside. As artist Katsuragawa Hiroshi saw it, their mission was to, “dredge up that cause that in so many forms has raised us over the past twenty years, has driven us towards a hateful war, has so decisively eaten away our youth, we have to get inside this and express it …”11 That source was something that lay deeply buried, not only in social structures, but also within the individual psyche, and the reportage artists used surrealist techniques of deformation and montage to get at the depths of that interpenetration. Their works tend to be crowded, heavy with contorted and overripe bodies, crowds, shanty towns, constructions sites, and bases. Though heavy, the embodiment remains unstable, pulled apart and squeezed together in grotesque reconfigurations. Allover, montage compositions likewise refuse to settle down, teetering, jangling towards an uncertain future that the artist only seems able to capture a distended instant of. While many people sought to disavow responsibility for fascism—to cut off any personal role in it beyond that of victim—the reportage artists insisted on digging uncomfortable histories up and finding them doubled in the present.

Peeling back the skin of Japan’s supposedly postwar society, all still teemed with rot underneath—setting the terms for the political failures of their present. Reportage works insisted on sewing the subject back into history and opening out its vulnerability in the process, challenging people to face the deeper causes of war and corruption, both inside and out, which would not otherwise be exorcized.

Their devastating artistic critique of postwar society was paired with concrete—and surprisingly optimistic—efforts to realize something that would

operate on different terms. This played out at a number of levels. At one level, the artists undertook institutional experiments to alter the place and role of their artwork. Along with all of the groups in this study, they were concerned with the issue of how and under what terms their work could become visible. They organized their own exhibitions and published small, hand-printed works of criticism, in order not to be beholden to the hierarchy of the more prestigious exhibition societies that had existed since before the war. At another level, the artists were attempting to realize new terms of social relationship in their relations with others. They supported each other in their exhibition and self-publishing through a fluctuating network of short-lived groups of fellow travelers. These groups self-consciously avoided hierarchy and specialization of roles, which would disenfranchise people from certain kinds of production. Though we might be tempted to accord these little weight, it was through such ad-hoc groups that the artists received much of their considerable cultural education, and it is thanks to them that their work has survived at all. While attempting to avoid inherited hierarchies in their own groups, they also crossed boundaries to work with amateur artists and poets who had formed their own circles. This type of contact was a constituent part of reportage practice, as research itself could only be done through a network of relations that described an (admittedly fleeting) alternative to a more stratified and concentrated organization of cultural production. In these ways reportage consisted of both artistic and social practice though, as will be seen, in a highly conflicted and unstable combination.

The second chapter examines a looser grouping: the Society for Creative Aesthetic Education, the work of the documentary filmmaker Hani Susumu and, tangentially, artists of the Asocio de Artistos Demokrato and Fluxus. If the reportage artists were concerned with documentary and realism, what draws the actors of the second chapter together is a shared modernist belief in the possibility of personal and social liberation through the unfettered exercise of creativity. The Society for Creative Aesthetic Education (Sōzō Biiku Kyōkai), Sōbi for short, was one of a number of non-governmental education movements (minkan kyōiku undō) that flourished in the decentralized educational environment of the early postwar.

Sōbi advocated a radically child-centered education, one that afforded each child the time and space to explore the world for her or himself and work through challenges by exercising an innate creativity. Full actualization of individual human energies would loosen and eventually destroy the bonds of repression, which Sōbi saw surviving from the prewar into the postwar. The cycle of modern authoritarianism, by which the adult world stamped “good” behavior into children to satisfy the parochial demands of rationality, was enabled by the devaluation and exclusion of human beings’ innate aesthetic sense. The child, if allowed to discover their own process of growth through creative exploration, could achieve an aesthetic accord with the world around them, one ultimately governed by fleeting

intuitions of fit and balance. Schools, and society more broadly, needed to encourage this process of growth, in all its messiness and unpredictability.

Teachers paid close attention to each artwork a student produced, but of even more concern was what they would produce next. The necessity of that work-tocome would appear in retrospect, while in the moment of anticipation it was an as-yet-unformed possibility. How could the teacher orient themselves and their students to welcome that change, how could society come to welcome it, how could it be represented?

While Sōbi advocated a non-repressive approach in the classroom and school, the teachers in the organization also attempted to realize a certain art in their working lives. The movement was constituted at its base by school teachers interested in the pedagogy who formed local study groups to learn about it. As learners they undertook their own process of exploration in a self-conscious pursuit of knowledge and tried, through openness and good will, to create an atmosphere where personal expression and creativity would be encouraged and shared. The aesthetic became a model for a non-coerced, spontaneously emerging order. It was to be the model for all education.

Hani Susumu and his family were peripherally involved with Sōbi, but the primary connection to be traced is in the way his early work explores the problems that the unpredictability and excessiveness of human creativity present specifically for filmic representation. While film, particularly documentary film, might be taken to lock reality into an image that is frozen at the moment of shooting, Hani hoped to achieve the opposite: to create films that brought reality’s inherent liveliness to life by helping the audience appreciate the tension and unpredictability of each moment unfolding into its own future. If the Sōbi teacher attempted to adopt a certain humility before the complexity of each child’s development, Hani saw film as a medium that let the viewer assume a similar relation to the world. And much like the Sōbi teacher who stepped down from the front of the class to stand (in A.S. Neill’s famous words) “on the side of the child,” Hani’s film practice brought the camera down to a position among the children he was filming, in a move that would have lasting impact on the practice of social documentary in the 1960s and 1970s.

The third chapter takes up a regional group of avant-garde artists, Kyushu-ha. If the first two chapters find their protagonists among the relative elite, the chapter on Kyushu-ha takes the opposite position. Kyushu-ha was a group of talented artists, but none had formal education in the arts, and all had full time jobs. They worked on their art in the time they could find outside their work as train conductors, teachers, copy editors, store clerks, and printers. While there is an unavoidable impression that the reportage artists were going down to work with workers’ circles, Kyushu-ha is a case where the energy was bubbling up. And far from nature sketches and still-lives one might expect from aspirants on the

outskirts of the cultural hierarchy, Kyushu-ha’s work was an eruption of hardedged social comment, realized in viscerally suggestive materials such as tar, rope, wood, and metal scraps. There are continuities between Kyushu-ha’s exploration of embodiment and that of the reportage artists. Though Kyushu-ha’s exploration carries through in material associations more than figuration, there is a similar belief that the work of art can reveal primal interpenetrations among people and things. Both at the time and since, Kyushu-ha was taken as one of the flag-bearers of Anti-Art, which began around 1958, and developed parallel to proto-Pop assemblage in the US, and Nouveau Réalisme in France. But as is the case with some contemporaneous assemblage artists in California, it is difficult to judge whether Kyushu-ha was acceptably iconoclastic or whether they were closer to outsider savants, whose poor taste, erratic energy, and atavistic anti-modernism make even the label “Anti-Art” too bounded and coy.

Kyushu-ha comes towards the end of the 1950s, and its experience embodies the tension between the ideals and practices of democratic culture so characteristic of the early postwar, and the increasingly professionalized and centralized field of contemporary art. At the beginning, Kyushu-ha had all the features of a circle: it was open to all comers, avoided organizational infrastructure and hierarchy among members, and was committed to altering the conditions of culture’s visibility. Outside Tokyo, the regional art world was dominated by large exhibition societies with exclusive memberships, who acted as the cultural gatekeepers in areas where there were no dedicated art museums or galleries.

Kyushu-ha undermined this cartel by building an alternative: organizing their own exhibitions in which any artist could exhibit. They also organized semiannual trips to Tokyo. Their works, and some of the antics surrounding them, attracted the attention of Tokyo-based critics, and for a time Kyushu-ha enjoyed a degree of recognition as a vanguard group. The pull of Tokyo, however, created unresolvable pressures. The Tokyo art scene was tied increasingly to contemporary developments in New York and Europe. Critics did not suffer laggards gladly.

While there were a few artists in Kyushu-ha who had the ambition and talent to succeed in that fast moving world, its “open door” policy hampered its fortunes, as did the project of remaking the regional art scene. The contradictory demands split Kyushu-ha bitterly, and the group dissipated in the first half of the 1960s (though it resurfaced in altered form in the turbulent politics of the late 1960s). If the commitment to democratic culture meant increasing access to authorship, Kyushu-ha was remarkably successful in doing that for the dozen or so members who passed through it. But this commitment was in tension with the emerging system of contemporary art, which was based on individual careerism and on a demanding distinction between authorized and unauthorized producers.

Each of these movements made their art political. Art was understood to be political in many registers, to be sure, but a basic understanding shared by all

was that art emerged from and answered to reality in a special way. Reality itself was radically fluid—emergent in growth and creation for the progressive educators of Sōbi, metamorphosis and revolution (kakumei; henkaku) for the reportage artists—conceived as encompassing subject and object in inherently unstable fields. Art, in its modernist and avant-garde modes, was uniquely able to attend to such change and make it a social artifact, its value lying in its profound and multiform sensitivity to the tumultuous transformations so in evidence at the time.

In this way, change implied radical freedom and unbounded possibility. But liberation was not figured as rarefication or purification and was not to be achieved by attaining distance. It was only to be had through engagement with the churn of reality, and we will see how the human body, the collective body, and a proliferating multitude of everyday objects figure prominently, even heavily, as the most important sites of art’s work. Art provoked and marked involvements that moved across divisions between inside and outside, interweaving individual and world, yet insisting that that had no given form. In this most abstract way, then, art was a way of making do and playing through, in a reality intensified by the realization that it was undetermined, but of all the greater gravity because of it.

We might also say that the groups made their politics artful, though in doing so we must take care not to exoticize the creative work of people with few resources. Whatever picture we get of the artfulness of their political work is retrospective, something people at the time would have been unlikely to recognize.

But there is room to be sensitive to—even admire—the creativity and resourcefulness of their interventions. Most were not blessed with comfort, and the transformations they lived through showed little mercy. In spite of and because of this, they realized new possibilities in myriad responsive and crafty ways that defy reasonable prediction. To give a few examples, all more or less minor. When the Marukis brought the Atomic Bomb Panels to Hakodate in December 1951, Inoue Yoritoyo, one of Japan’s most prominent cellists, happened to be in the city at the same time and gave a free, impromptu recital at the exhibition for about three hundred people. He observed that performing music for the sake of peace was the truest form of performance.12 Also in 1951, author Abe Kōbō, having just received Japan’s most prestigious literary prize (the Akutagawa Prize), moved into a small apartment in working-class South Tokyo as a Communist Party activist. There he taught a group of worker-poets how to write poetry and assemble self-printed magazines, using the same techniques he and his circle of avant-garde colleagues had used to produce their own experimental publications. Some years later, a major publisher put out a book of amateur writings by inmates in a juvenile detention center as a mass circulation publication.13 The collection became the basis for a film starring a cast of young men, also with juvenile records, none with acting experience. Director Hani Susumu let them “write” many of the scenes through improvisation on set. The film, Bad Boys, was voted best film of 1961 by leading

film magazine, Kinema Junpo, outdoing films by cinema giants like Kurosawa Akira and Ōshima Nagisa. Members of Kyushu-ha lay in wait on the day that people would be bringing their works to submit to the prestigious Fukuoka Prefectural Exhibition, in order to poach as many as they could to ditch it in favor of their own low-budget, self-organized “Kyushu Independent” exhibition, held in the assembly hall of a local newspaper company.14 (The exhibition also gave them the chance to exhibit their collaboratively assembled pile of junk that had the dubious distinction of being rejected by the open-submission Yomiuri Independent Exhibition when they had tried to submit it a few months before.) Time and again we find people collectively refusing to recognize stability in place or identity.

Artists thrive in coal mines, workers are artists and authors, teachers become learners and vice versa. Here also, liberation is not a free-floating or unaccountable state, but the discovery of possibility in response-ability, which enables a creative taking in and setting out with whatever is at hand, towards audiences and other producers not fully conceived at the start but that come into being and proliferate in the process of the works’ becoming-public.

Yet even as we may find interest in the unusual trajectories that pop up here and there over the course of this narrative, we should not lose sight of the effort and work, almost always collaborative and repetitive, that was required to make them actual and sharable. In one of his early considerations of culture, which also dates from the late 1950s, Raymond Williams insisted on two aspects to the term. “We use the word culture in … two senses: to mean a whole way of life— the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning—the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction.”15 In their practice, the movements in this study also insisted on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The work of conjoining the two modes of culture in the early postwar—the one the proleptic attempt to realize the not-yet-real, the other to build vessels adequate to sharing values and meanings—was not smooth, but part of an ongoing and always partial work.

In attempting to follow this process, I avoid reducing one to the other, claiming either that the avant-garde led the social through sheer force of vision, or that the artworks were embedded in the circulation of meaning like any other aspect of culture. Doing so both raises and lowers the bar for intervention: it demands concrete accounts of relations between thought, vision, speech, and action, but in that it quickly forces us to confront the persistent gap between visions and actual, enduring achievements. We cannot help but notice that the reportage artists’ attack on subjectivity and their simultaneous organizational and educational efforts undermine each other, or that Sōbi’s attempt to open open doors and Hani’s attempt to represent indeterminateness are fundamentally contradictory, or that Kyushu-ha was in a state of inconsistent denial about its

contradictory need for Tokyo as both scorned foil and necessary ally. Attempts to represent or achieve ideals always entail such contradictions. The potentialities suggested by word and art are never purely instantiated in reality. If we do not accept the separation, we are forced to devalue the one or the other: to long for utopias which promise resolution to the dilemma through perfect realization, or be driven to a cynicism which takes the continuing gap between word and reality as evidence that words mean nothing.16 Taking this insight from Jacques Rancière, let us accept that words are words, that art is not fully actual, but not take that as a sign that words and art are thereby unreal or inconsequential. Their models can be verified, but only by people acting with them in mind either wholly or in part.

The conjunction will be far from consistent, we might say far from pretty. But it is in the attempt at conjunction and its unpredictable results that my greatest interest lies.

Understanding art’s relationship to social change in this way requires traversing different idioms and modes of culture. No single artwork in and of itself is sufficient to social change. Rather, when read as gestures that unfold in the context of wider movements, we can see each work as part of an arc, or a heterogeneous forest of arcs which, taken together, establish political presence as the possibility of collective change. When Katsuragawa Hiroshi accompanied Abe Kōbō to teach woodcut to workers in South Tokyo, for instance, both his action and art at that time and place can be understood not only in the context of his other attempts to work across class lines, but also as one instance of a broader interest in woodcut as a teaching and learning tool in the early postwar.

Katsuragawa’s work is just one, irreducibly important fleck in that larger movement.17 The collection of juvenile delinquents’ writings that was the source for Bad boys (Furyō shōnen), is one of dozens of such books, where the work of marginalized people created in a local circle was subsequently published for a mass audience. Writers, editors, activists, and consumers moved cultural products all over the cultural field: not always as burdensome as the Atomic Bomb Panels, but movements that neither capital nor state had much interest in supporting. The Kyushu Independent exhibitions of 1958 and 1959 were comparatively small, but in the context of the art scene in Fukuoka, which had no venues for exhibition outside of those provided by the prefectural exhibition and the large art societies, even such a small venue represents an important opening. Further, the Kyushu Independents occurred in the context of at least a dozen similar independent exhibitions that sprung up around Japan in the early postwar. The open exhibition is a simple format, but one that is radically pluralistic: not just emblematic of, but actually instantiating equality of access to a public, albeit in a short-lived, episodic form. This kind of consideration is the core of my account of the political: each artwork, and each act is a small moment in and of itself, but can be understood within the wider context of the many movements of the early postwar. When

written as history such reading is contextual, with the caveat that the context is not pre-constituted background but was itself being made and remade in each of the actions recounted and among many more beyond the bounds of what can be included here. It is in the accumulation and extension of such accounts that we can begin to appreciate political significance, as something that does not explode in sudden clashes but emerges in resonances among many single steps.

1

The title of this series of works is usually translated as Hiroshima

Panels. “Atomic bomb” is much closer to the Japanese title. All of the panels are displayed on the Maruki Museum website: http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/index.htm 2

See Kozawa Setsuko, Genbaku no zu: egakareta “kioku,”

katarareta “kaiga” (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002); and Okumura Yukinori, Genbaku no zu zenkoku junkai (Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobō, 2015).

3

Both Kozawa Setsuko and John Dower point this out. Kozawa,

119-128; John Dower, “War, Peace and Beauty: the Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki,” in The Hiroshima Murals: the Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, eds. John Dower and John Junkerman (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 9-26.

4

Kozawa, 138.

5

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in

Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

6

Kozawa, 148-49.

7

Yoshida Yoshie, Kaitaigeki no makuorite (Tokyo: Zōkeisha,

1982), 50.

8

Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting

Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 125.

9

William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and

Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham: Duke UP, 2013).

10

Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde

Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham: Duke UP, 2013), 3.

11

Katsuragawa Hiroshi, “‘Shūdan toshite no bijutsuka’ wa nani o

subekika?,” Konnichi no bijutsu 1 (April 1953). Reprinted in Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Haikyo no zen’ei: kaisō no sengo bijutsu (Tokyo: Ichiyōsha, 2004), 154-57.

12

Shirato Hitoyasu, “GHQ senryoka no Genbaku no zu Hokkaido

junkai ten,” in Masaki Motoi, ed., Bunka shigen toshite no tankō

ten: yoru no bijutsukan daigaku kōzaroku (Tokyo: Meguro Art Museum, 2012), 276.

13

Jinushi Aiko ed., Tobenai tsubasa: Kurihama Shōnenin shukishū

(Tokyo: Rironsha, 1958).

14

Kikuhata Mokuma, Hangeijutsu kidan (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha,

1986), 28.

15

Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” (1958); reprinted in

The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins, 10-24 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 11.

16

Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron

(New York: Verso, 2007), 45-47.

17

See Takeyama Hiroko and Kokatsu Reiko, eds., No ni sakebu

hitobito: Kita Kantō no sengo hanga undō / Print Art Movement in Northern Kanto Region: 1946-1966, exh. cat. (Utsunomiya: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2000); Tomotsune Tamotsu, “Minshū hanga undo no 50-nendai,” in Suzuki Katsuo, Masuda Tomohiro, Ōtani Shōgo, eds., Jikkenba 1950s, exh. cat. (Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 86-99; Justin Jesty,

“Hanga to hanga undō,” Gendai shisō, vol. 35 no. 17 (December 2007): 152-161.

Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built Jessica Marie Falcone Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright Š 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents Note on Conventions Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Part One: The Transnational Buddhist Statue-Makers Chapter 1. Community/SANGHA: FPMTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Transnational Buddhists Chapter 2. Religious Practice/DHARMA: Global Buddhism, Translation and Heritage Chapter 3. The Statue/MURTI: Planning a Colossal Maitreya Chapter 4. The Relics/SARIRA: Worship, Transmission, and Fundraising With The Relic Tour Chapter 5. Aspiration/ASHA: Hope, the Future Tense, and Making (Up) Progress on the Maitreya Project Part Two: The Kushinagari Resistance Chapter 6. Holy Place/TIRTHA: Social Life in the Place of the Buddha's Death Chapter 7. Steadfastness/ADITTHANA: Indian Farmers Resist the Buddha of Love Chapter 8. Loving-Kindness/MAITRI: Ethics, Values and Progress in the Shadow of Maitreya Chapter 9. Compassionate Practice/KARUNA: Advocacy Anthropology and Engagement Conclusion. Faith/SHRADDHA: Guru Devotion, Agency and Belief Epilogue: Rebirth/SAMSARA: the Future of the Maitreya Project Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Introduction Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the current spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), has dozens of ambitious Buddhist construction projects underway at any given time, but a colossal Maitreya Project statue slated to be “the biggest statue in the world” is known to be Rinpoche's most cherished dream. The statue plan to build a 500-foot Maitreya Buddha (inclusive of pedestal), would have made it not only the tallest Buddha in the world, but indeed the tallest statue in the world at the time. 1 Just for comparison, 500 feet is approximately three times the size of the Statue of Liberty (sans pedestal). The idea to repay India for sheltering Tibetan refugees from the Chinese-occupation of their homeland with the "gift" of a grand Maitreya statue was the wish of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s deceased guru, Lama Yeshe.

When I first heard about the “giant Buddha statue project” being planned in India by the transnational Tibetan Buddhist religious community, I found the idea immediately appealing. I had already spent a little time in India, and I had already found myself personally drawn to Buddhism. At the time, in the late 1990s, I was living in Florida, home of giant Disney structures; in lieu of another corporate amusement park, the notion of a colossal Buddha actually seemed like a reasonable course correction for modern society. The statue was slated to be the biggest in the world, and at that point it was supposed to be built in Bodh Gaya, in the state of Bihar. I was intrigued straightaway.

Almost a decade later, in 2006, I had just settled into my spare room at the run-down Tibetan monastery in Kushinagar, India, where the plan for the statue had fairly recently been relocated, when I welcomed my first visitor in the field.

My friend, another anthropologist with an interest in global Tibetan Buddhism, wanted to see the site where the Maitreya Project International (MPI) would build their monumental statue (also known as “the Maitreya Project”), so we piled into the back seat of his rented car, and his driver spirited us away from the pilgrimage spots of Kushinagar and deeper out into the countryside. I was excited and anxious. My nascent research project – my whole reason for moving to the sleepy village in rural Uttar Pradesh – hinged on studying the plan to build a 500-foot statue of the Maitreya Buddha right here. I had returned to Kushinagar a week before; I had not left town and ventured into the countryside, since my short preliminary trip to the area two years prior. And now, we were headed straight for the heart of the contested land. Eventually, I directed my friend’s driver to stop on a small cement bridge overlooking a flushed green river valley. The river bed bisected farmland, and I could see houses, sheds and irrigated farmland on either side.

“This is it,” I told my friend, “this is the land.”

I had been shown this land by Nathu, a local informant, two years before, during my first brief visit to Kushinagar. Nathu was an Indian staffer at a nearby Buddhist temple, and he had swelled with enthusiasm as he discussed the plans he had heard about in the newspaper and through the grapevine. During that visit, Nathu had waxed poetic about the Maitreya Project as a dream come true.

But Nathu and other pro-MPI locals were precisely the people who gave me my first indication of the controversy surrounding the plan. Nathu had told me that disgruntled farmers were “making problems” and impeding the process. He acknowledged that the farmers had reason to fear for their livelihoods, but he wished aloud that they would put their personal considerations behind the economic well-being of the region in general.

On the Maitreya Project’s website at the time, in 2006, there was only one single photo of Kushinagar, and it was taken at around this spot; it was a picture of a vast green expanse – utterly empty of farms and people, not a bullock cart or fence in sight.

“Right there,” I pointed.2 But MPI’s photo had strategically omitted, or cropped out, the farms on the edge of that parcel of the larger expanse of coveted land, and thus they had certainly not given their devotees an accurate sense of the how many people lived in the affected area. Maitreya Project photo seemed carefully framed to fabricate an air of local calm: as if the region was an uninhabited blank slate, as if the river itself were waiting for Maitreya.

As we surveyed the spot with our eyes, I wondered which way the giant statue would eventually face. I took a photo.

Foreigners were uncommon this far from the pilgrimage sites, so we were an anomaly. A crowd of passersby began to gather. My friend and I, both curious anthropologists, proceeded to pepper the crowd with questions.

“The giant Buddha statue is coming here, right?” We pointed to the land. The response was as unambiguous as it was hostile.

“No, it won't come here. It is bad...”

“Are you a farmer?”

The man was emotional and his voice was raised.

“Yes I'm a farmer. Where will we go? Where will our chapati-roti come from?

The government is giving a very low price. It is a very bad thing. I will fight them. I will not sell no matter what the price."

Another farmer told us that they would not permit the statue to come. “We will not let this thing happen here.”

The crowd pressed forward. They wanted to know what were we doing there, and who we were. The farmers seemed to be trying to discern whether my friend and I were in favor of the Maitreya Project, or worse, whether we were agents of MPI itself.

During that early exchange on the bridge, a businessman from nearby Kasia noted that the farmers were not taking into consideration the economic development that would come with the project. Four farmers angrily replied in turn that the rate of compensation was pitifully low. One said, “If they come to take the land, we will fight. I will kill anyone who comes." A teacher from a nearby intermediate college also countered the businessman’s desire for “development” (Hindi: vikas) by confirming that the compensation rate was far too low, and that the farmers had every reason to mistrust government promises on compensation anyway. My friend and I asked question after question about the statue plan and its potential effects here in Kushinagar.

I was not prepared for the angry, dark looks, nor the frustrated, raised voices of some of the men on the bridge that day. One man in particular scowled at me angrily, and then threatened violence against any minions of the Maitreya Project; he was the first to imply that I was allied to the Maitreya Project, but he was nowhere near the last.

But I was not an enemy, and I said so. I reiterated the fact that I was an anthropologist, which I rendered in Hindi as “a student of culture.” I told them that I wanted to understand their side, their story, and their cultural views.

The intermediate college instructor said that if we were really interested in learning more about the anti-Maitreya Project movement, then we should return that afternoon for a protest in the community commons in the nearby village of Siswa Mahant. He explained that the riverbed I had just photographed was only a small parcel of the land being acquired for the project. Further afoot, prime arable land under cultivation, as well as many houses and village neighborhoods, would have to make way for Maitreya.

By now it was apparent that local tensions about this issue ran very deep, and the men on the bridge were still trying to decide if we were friends or foes. Do they believe us?, I wondered. Perhaps the Kushinagaris on the bridge that day were wondering the very same thing.

The crowd continued to grow, so my friend’s driver anxiously packed us back into his car. The bridge receded behind us as we drove off towards a chai stall in town where my friend and I sat and scribbled down our notes about the encounter. Later, I wondered what our interlocutors would have thought if I had told them that I had come to Buddhism through FPMT and “taken refuge” as a Buddhist at one of their events with one of their lamas.3 Or if I had confessed to them that I had donated money to the Maitreya Project at one of their Relic Tour stops in upstate New York just a few months before. I did not lie to my Kushinagari interlocutors that day, but I did not tell them everything. Those personal tidbits were shared with some of my village informants much later, but the extent to which I straddled worlds was probably not crystal clear to most of my informants on either side of the rift.

That day in Kushinagar in 2006, I tucked my personal fondness for FPMT away, and reminded myself to set aside my preconceptions. I was here to listen and learn. Just a few hours after the emotional flurry on the bridge, I attended my very first anti-Maitreya Project protest. The first of many to come. <A> The Maitreya Project: a Cultural Biography of a Dream FPMT was founded in the 1960s by a Tibetan refugee, Lama Yeshe, and his Nepali-born disciple, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, when they began teaching Westerners in Nepal about Tibetan Buddhism.4 At the time of great uncertainty about the future of Tibet, the two lamas began teaching non-Tibetan devotees from America, Europe and elsewhere to ostensibly "preserve" Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist religious conventions.5 Today, the devotees, monastics and administrators worshipping at FPMT's global network of over 150 centers are as likely to hail from Canada or Switzerland as Malaysia or Taiwan. Thus, it is worth noting that while FPMT teaches a form of Tibetan Buddhism, the large majority of practitioners in FPMT are not ethnically Tibetan; most FPMTers have embraced Buddhism in adulthood, and are thus what I call “non-heritage” Buddhists.

Why a Maitreya statue? Proponents from Maitreya Project International (MPI), the FPMT affiliate responsible for seeing the statue project through to fruition, claim that the statue will establish a direct karmic connection between Maitreya himself, the long-awaited Buddha of Loving-Kindness, and the donors (and worshippers) of the statue. The Tibetan Buddhist ritual and practice surrounding Maitreya emphasizes the significance of making karmic connections to Maitreya in this life, by building and worshiping a Maitreya statue for example, in order to be in a good karmic position to be reborn during his lifetime. Aside from the religious goal of constructing a statue in order to establish a link to the Maitreya Buddha, MPI boasted a secondary motivation for their plans in Kushinagar: humanitarianism. MPI literature of all kinds noted that the statue will be flanked by a host of charitable, "engaged Buddhist" projects, such as a school and a hospital, so as to provide immediate socioeconomic benefits to complement long-term karmic advantages.

MPI’s statue project was once slated to be built in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, but for a myriad of reasons, they moved the plan to Kushinagar in 2003. This book is primarily focused upon the second major imagining of the Maitreya Project (MP 2.0), and the period during which the agricultural fields of Kushinagar were MPI's contested, embattled hinterland. As I will discuss in the next section, some Kushinagaris rejected MPI’s plan and fought vigorously against it, even establishing groups dedicated to defeating the giant statue project. Yet, during the MP 2.0 era, MPI had no office, Buddhist center or staffer in Kushinagar. Statue planners and supporters had no presence on the land – it was coveted from a

distance.

Throughout the MP 2.0 period, Kushinagar remained a completely unknown space to the Buddhist devotees and staffers of FPMT and MPI – as if it were a new frontier. In anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano's discussions of the notion of “hinterland,” he perceives it as a frontier that cannot be transgressed literally or figuratively: "Frontiers mark a change in the ontological register" (2004). Thus, the hinterland is an ambiguous beyond that forms as plans, dreams, images, desires, but even as it is approached, it recedes ever further into the distance.

There's another horizon beyond every horizon, ad infinitum. The "imaginative horizon," in Crapanzano's view, can never be reached, even though it pulls us forward. He writes, "It is a land, of pure possibility, of desire, and fear" (2004).

For MPI’s distant fundraisers and public relations experts, Kushinagar was perceived as empty wilderness, the frontier, and the hinterland upon which their dream could be made manifest. Like Joseph Masco's “fantasy playground,” the Nevada desert “wasteland” (2005), and Anna Tsing's notion of the constructed Indonesian resource "frontier" (2005), the vision of the empty, barren lands of Kushinagar are a myth— a dream woven by those who have something to gain.

The distance, the frontier, the one FPMTers had imagined, ultimately, was not transgressed, but I read this as a failure of the imagination and not a confirmation that the wilderness was really and truly too wild. As Tsing knowingly writes, “Frontiers are not just discovered at the edges; they are projects in making geographic and temporal experience” (2005, 28).

Kushinagar was viewed by MPI agents as so much a hinterland that it could only be visited incognito. An MPI staffer told me that in the fall of 2008, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and some statue supporters traveled to the disputed Kushinagar land without alerting the local people to their identities or purpose. In secret, they conducted a puja to rid the land of evil spirits, and overcome the myriad “obstacles” to the project. <A> The Kushinagari Resistance From a Kushinagari perspective, the most formidable obstacles in MPI’s way were desperate Indian farmers, not wrathful spirits. Kushinagar, a Buddhist pilgrimage town in rural India where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is thought to have breathed his last, is surrounded by arable farmland and several villages of local Indians who have farmed and worked that land for generations.

When the MPI plan to acquire nearly 750 acres of land on the outskirts of the pilgrimage areas for their statue project was announced in the early aughts,6 the plan quickly ran afoul of the local farming families (many of whom farmed very small subsistence plots) who worried that their futures were being placed at risk.

There was a swift and strong local Kushinagari backlash against the project, especially by the thousands of locals who stood to lose their farmland, homes

and/or livelihoods. Incensed farmers established an anti-Maitreya Project group, called the Bhoomi Bachao Sangharsh Samiti (BBSS), which can be translated as the "Council for the Struggle to Save the Land," or more simply, the "Save the Land Association." In the years that followed, the anti-MPI resistance spent countless precious hours and resources fighting against the statue project. Since the MPI did not have a local office in Kushinagar, nor did FPMT have a Buddhist center there, most local Kushinagari activists never met a single FPMT devotee in person in the decade they spent fighting FPMT’s heart project.

Global Buddhism today is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of globalization, in all of its cultural, economic and media forms, as it has been discussed by social scientists such as Appadurai (1996; 2001), Harvey (1989), and others. Buddhism has always been transnational, but the Global Buddhism of the technological, jet-set age of neoliberal globalization has created new challenges and opportunities for Buddhist practitioners. The Maitreya Project and the controversy it has garnered are manifestations, or symptoms, of the frictions extant in Global Buddhism. Appadurai warned that globalization entails the “disjunctive flows” that are wont to “produce problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local” (2001, 6).

Moreover, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes that in the context of globalization, the motion of various ideas, communities and institutions often produce unforeseen “friction”: “…the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2005, 4). The story of the Maitreya Project, one in which a transnational Buddhist group blithely undermines the socioeconomic stability of the poorest inhabitants of a poor Indian locale, tragically and perfectly illustrates the disjunctive flows and frictions of neoliberal globalization. <A> Fieldwork: Circumambulating the Maitreya Project "I call ethnography a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. We come to it as the start of a different kind of journey." (Tyler 1986, 140) I did kora (Tibetan: circumambulated, ritually circled) around countless stupas and holy objects in India during my research tenure, but to write this book I essentially did kora around a statue that did not exist. I came to see my research trajectory as a sustained circumambulation of the Maitreya Project. 7 I circled the project in small tight rings, and wandered further out on longer, lengthier cycles around the heart of the matter. My object of study was technically a statue on the drawing board, but I found that its future presence permeated my fieldsites with various manifestations of hope and anxiety.

When I moved to India in late 2005, I asked MPI if I could volunteer with the Maitreya Projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s remote officer in Gorakhpur (a little over an hour away from Kushinagar), but institutional authorities quickly rejected that request (probably to our mutual benefit given what later transpired). I was barred from the inner sanctum, so I was denied the primary data that I had hoped to collect: meeting minutes and memos, MPI maps, interviews with staff about working through logistical and moral dilemmas, etc.8 So, I decided to instead focus on the Kushinagar locale, as well as the fundraising and support-generation activities conducted for the Maitreya Project in FPMT centers.9 Circling the project from the outside meant spending my two years of full-time research shuttling between very disparate fieldsites: 1) in Indian FPMT centers in Dharamsala, Bodh Gaya and Delhi, as well as in American FPMT centers in California and elsewhere; 2) with Maitreya Project side projects, i.e., the Relic Tour in various American towns, and the Maitreya Project school in India; 3) in Kushinagar with both the potential winners and losers of the land acquisition plan; 4) in Lucknow acquiring the Maitreya Project paperwork, legislation, and plans from Uttar Pradesh state government partners.10 My research trajectory reflects a transnational pull that led me in small concentric circles in both India and the United States (and in far wider circles between the two nations). If I had spent two years shuttling the 55 kilometers between Gorakhpur and Kushinagar as initially planned, this book would have been more of a story of local Indian politics and their effects on a transnational organization, rather than a "history of the future" (Rosenburg and Harding 2005) of the nascent Maitreya Project itself. Multi-sited ethnography is increasingly ubiquitous (Finn 1998; Marcus 1995), and it is especially useful as means for understanding how globalization haunts localities and vice versa. During nearly two years of concentrated fieldwork, I traveled often, usually never staying in one place for more than three months at one stretch. Like many of the MPI administrators, staff and FPMT devotees that I met along the way, I was in constant motion, but I returned to many of the same places again and again.

Sometimes you can get somewhere by going in circles.

I used standard participant observation techniques; I was a hunter and gatherer of interviews, written information, experiences, interactions, and diverse perspectives and viewpoints. I collected everything possible that was directly, or even peripherally, related to the Maitreya Project, transnational Buddhism, Uttar Pradeshi politics, the Land Acquisition Act, and dispossession in rural India: newspaper articles, pamphlets, blog postings, maps, plans, advertisements and more. I collected many government documents about the Maitreya Project, including official maps, the Memorandum of Understanding (a draft and the final version), and the Kushinagar Master Plan 2021. Some documents were in Hindi and some were in English; I translated some of the Hindi materials I collected

myself, but I also hired translators to help with some of the documents and articles. I gathered books, pamphlets, puja booklets, schedules, listserv emails, and other documents from the FPMT centers where I did research. I solicited interviews from all levels of FPMT: staff, students, monastics, and volunteers. I attended several dozen FPMT courses, lectures, meditation sessions and discussions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; some required payment and others requested donations.

In Kushinagar, I interviewed businesspeople, monastics, students, teachers, factory workers, day laborers, and farmers.11 I spent my days collecting interviews, both formal and informal with nearly everyone who crossed my path.

I was as interested in the perspectives of the local sweeper at the Tibetan monastery as I was in the Thai abbot's viewpoints. I visited and took notes at Buddhist pilgrimage sites on a regular basis. I also spent a good deal of time in the MPI plan-affected villages, especially Siswa Mahant, Anirudhwa, and Dumari.

I conducted a survey of afffected areasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;going compound-to-compound, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, village-to-villageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;interviewing people about their families, their socioeconomic situation, their views on the Maitreya Project, the potential effects of the proposed land acquisition, and their hopes and anxieties about the future. I also organized several dozen family interviews at people's homes and many group interviews in public village spaces. I became particularly attached to a specific elementary school in the village of Siswa Mahant, and visited regularly, both to support their educational work, and to do interviews with the staff and parents connected to the school. Finally, I attended dozens of anti-Maitreya Project protests. Later, towards the end of my research, I often acceded to requests to occasionally give short speeches during protests and sit-ins. <insert fig.1 about here> I was not a passive researcher. After some time, when I recognized that the forcible land acquisition could be disastrous for the local farming villages, I began approaching FPMT insiders with connections to the project: I talked to an FPMT center leader whose group had recently hosted the Relic Tour; I arranged to meet a Maitreya Project board member; I talked to an FPMT nun who was not a statue advocate, and asked her to help me reach someone in the organization who might have some pull. I sent emails and letters to MPI representatives. Midway through my work I began giving interviews to FPMTers and MPI associates, instead of just taking their perspectives one-directionally. In the end, for better or worse, I engaged in a form of advocacy anthropology work that made my research itself a factor in the Maitreya Project story. I will discuss this personal aspect of the story, since it would be disingenuous to disregard it, however, this is a book about the beliefs and practices of my informants, both those in FPMT/MPI and those in Kushinagar, and how those two communities persistently frustrated one another in their attempts to model the future of

Kushinagar in their own terms. <A> The Bridge: revisited The debate on the bridge that I narrated at the beginning of this chapter was the moment that my fieldwork in India began in earnest. The episode was a raucous confirmation of the dark, tender underbelly of the Maitreya Project International’s ambitious endeavor. It was also a loud and volatile refutation of a popular notion floating around FPMT at the time, the idea that “nothing” was happening in Kushinagar, and that the Maitreya Project was simply a harmless plan on paper making no ripples (nor karma) in the world. The voices I heard on the bridge evoked themes of anxiety and desire regarding the uncertain future, and the echoes of that conversation reverbate through this work.

This book will explore both of the two sides straddling the Kushinagar controversy: the would-be statue-makers versus the statue-antagonists. The statue, which could have served as a bridge between transnational Buddhists and Kushinagar-area villagers if all had gone differently, is instead better represented as the gap itself. The book’s very structure mimics the chasm between communities; in this way, I replicate the disconnect between these competing groups as they tried and failed to make sense of one another across a gaping geographical, linguistic and cultural divide. Since the statue-cheerleaders at FPMT and the statue-naysayers of Kushinagar railed against each other from a distance, and across troubled waters, the bridge between them – the connecting point, that is, this study itself (and to some extent, my role as an advocacy anthropologist12) – has also become a part of the story.

Part One, inclusive of chapters one through five, is largely concerned with understanding the statue-makers – who they are, why they wanted to build a statue and how they went about it. This portion handles the Maitreya Project’s statue itself – a potential bridge between two communities that instead ended up as a divisive wedge that made the gap between the two sides deeper and wider, perhaps even un-traversable.

In chapter one, I first tell the story of how FPMT emerged in the 1960s as a conduit for Western Buddhism, and discuss how one might understand FPMT’s new brand of Tibetan Buddhism in the the context of the phenomenon of Global Buddhism today. Chapter 1 focuses on the people of FPMT and how we might understand disparate backgrounds and levels of faith.

In chapter two, I explore the institution of FPMT in more depth by discussing what it teaches, how it is structured, and what kinds of activities it sponsors around the world. I look at FPMT conventions and religious practices in general terms, and offer a ritual case study to offer ethnographic depth.

In the first two chapters, I also introduce the notion of the heritage spectrum.

One of the challenges facing scholars of Global Buddhism is that with the increasing flow of ideas and people across national borders, it is hard, yet critical to acknowledge differences between and within communities of practice. FPMT as an institution itself promotes a type of Tibetan Buddhism that has diverged somewhat from its antecedents, and thus I label it a relatively “non-heritage” Buddhist group that is mostly peopled with non-heritage practitioners. This book defines distinct heritage spectrums for both practitioners (chapter 1) and institutions (chapter 2), and makes a case that anthropologically these differences matter. At the same time, while my typology can assist scholars in the task of representing disparate Buddhisms and Buddhists, I uphold the conventional anthropological perspective that no one type of practice or practitioner is more “authentic” or “real” than any other. I argue that attention to the heritage of practices and practitioners is the most useful way for scholars to delineate the significant distinctions between Global Buddhisms and the Buddhists therein.

The third chapter focuses on MPI, FPMT’s giant statue-makers, by examining how the dream took shape over time. I look at how aesthetics and politics meet in the artist’s renderings, and in the industrial planning for building the colossus.

I introduce the people, finances and institutional structures of MPI. I trace the early history of MPI’s work in India, and what led them to shift their plans from Bodh Gaya to Kushinagar.

In chapter four, I discuss one of the main public aspects of MPI’s work during my research period, the traveling Relic Tour that served to spread the message about the statue project and raise money for it. The Relic Tour carried and displayed various Buddhist relics across many continents for the Maitreya Project for many years, functioning as a kind of global ambassador for MP 2.0.13 In chapter five, I take a closer look at the medium of futurity that runs through MPI’s project—a future statue of the future Buddha. I examine the myths surrounding the coming of the Maitreya Buddha, and the actual details of planning and prophesying the MPI statue; here I also do a detailed analysis of the prospective momentum established through the use of publicly circulated progress reports and the way that the yawning gap between possible outcomes can manifest in the anxious discourse of the future tense.

Part Two—chapters six through nine—is focused on local Kushinagari perspectives and social realities. In this section, I illustrate the ways that the plan both compelled and repelled various communities in Greater Kushinagar. I tell the story of the grassroots resistance movement that formed in Kushinagar to combat the colossal statue plan. I detail how the BBSS, the “Save the Land” activists, worked to organize farmers and landowners into a cohesive anti-statue effort, and what kind of futures these activists were advocating for instead.

Chapter six provides an exposition of the Kushinagari social world, in order to provide context for the resistance movement against MP 2.0. I describe the

Greater Kushinagar region in detail to show how the Buddhist pilgrimage place is co-constitued by pilgrims, temporary residents, transplants and locals. In this sense, Kushinagar, like many other pilgrimage sites, is itself a “realm of competing discourses” (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 5).

In chapter seven, I lay out the activist work undertaken by the BBSS, which claims to represent and be inclusive of all the farmers of the affected villages. For example, BBSS has organized countless hunger strikes, fasting relays, protests, highway blockades, and strikes. I discuss my interviews with affected farmers, and why they were so vehemently opposed to the Maitreya Project plan. To contextualize the farmers’ views, I also look at how politicians weighed in on MP 2.0, as well as how some local people cheered the possibility of a tourism boon.

In chapter eight, I continue discussing the grassroots movement against the MP 2.0 by asking what values are really being espoused by MPI. Is the project to build a monument to maitri actually practicing maitri as it moves forward? I handle the issue of contested values by putting two sets of values at the heart of controversy side by side: spiritual values and economic values. I look at how Global Buddhist ethical practice has taken the form of “engaged Buddhism,” and how intractable it is to determine ethical practice, generosity and how to help others in a neoliberal global moment that presumes that economic development is the way forward. I discuss the type of top-down development being embraced

by MPI, and the ambivalence of Kushinagaris about the form that FPMT’s vaunted charity has taken thus far. Develop-mentality, the passion for socioeconomic progress in capitalist terms, has played a key role in the planning and reception of MP 2.0 in Kushinagar.

In the ninth chapter, I discuss the rough terrain of ethnographic fieldwork, especially in when it involves such a contested object of analysis. Specifically, I address the particular ethical challenges of this research project, including my advocacy and media interventions on behalf of MPI-affected Kushinagaris. Was I able to do ethnographic research with karuna (Sanskrit: compassion), as I sought to do? Finally, as it follows from my advocacy work, I narrate the final piece of the MP 2.0 controversy here; I look at the media blow-up, and how MPI sought to manage it.

In the conclusion, I answer the question: what led to this improbable imbroglio? How could a transnational Buddhist organization blithely create so much suffering for impoverished rural Indians? What were the cultural logics at work that built such an unbridgeable gulf between advocates and opponents of the statue. I argue that the key is faith: both faith in neo-liberal development, as I’d already discussed at length, but also with the particular type of faith taught in FPMT subculture, one that stresses unquestioning guru devotion. In this final chapter, I show how guru devotion and faith provided the foundation for the desire to build the colossal statue in India in the first place, and how in the end, it

also created many of the conditions that led directly to the intractable problems faced by the Maitreya Project in India. <A> A History of the Future of a Statue In sum, this book is essentially an ethnography of the Maitreya Project’s future past. Like so many other “histories of the future” (Rosenberg and Harding 2005), though the actual object of my research, the statue itself, was “not-yet” extant, I could productively study the futurity-saturation of the past (through archival work) and the present (through participant observation). As an anthropologist studying futurity, I observed the acts of mediation in the present through which my informants work towards and create their futures.

Not unlike Walter Benjamin's angel of history who rushes forward facing backwards into the past (1968), the angel of futurity rushes forward into ever new present moments, but never gets where s/he sought to go. The angel of futurity is, and has always been stuck in the here and now. When I envision the angel of futurity, I think about the Sri Lankan men charged with painting on the eyes of the Buddha statue without looking straight at it,14 as the angel also faces the opposite direction of its object and can only intuit where it is going through dull reflections and images of images. Just as no human eye can look directly in the face of the creation of Buddha/god without mediation, reflection, and artifice, none of us, not even the angel of futurity, can look straight into the face of the future. By looking at the ways that FPMTers, MPI staff and the statues Kushinagari interlocutors have framed their futures, I traced the Maitreya Project's origins, its progress and setbacks, and its forward momentum past and present.

Celebrated work written over the past thirty years in material culture studies, the anthropology of materiality, and the anthropology of art (Appadurai 1986; Geary 1986; Gell 1998; Kopytoff 1986; Miller 2005; Myers 2001), teach us that social scientists must be attentive to the cultural life trajectory or “cultural biography” (Kopytoff 1986) of an object. As Appadurai notes, "…commodities, like persons, have social lives" (1986, 3). Kopytoff, The real and imputed effects of holy objects give them a special place in the discussion of the agency of objects. Alfred Gell has written of the "secondary" agency of objects in which the objects that humans create have the ability to significantly shape human lives (1998).15 Acknowledging the Maussian roots of the notion that an object can extend and retain the personhood of those who meaningfully handle it, Gell forwards a theory of agency for objects: while the "primary" agency lies with a person, he asserts that the "secondary" agency of objects is significant in and of itself.

Holy objects, like Maitreya Buddha statues, can be understood as representations, simulations, signs, or “simulacra” (Baudrillard 1994), and so too

can the rituals of creating them, worshiping them, and making offerings to them.

It is tempting to read the Maitreya Statue as a third order simulacra, as wholly “hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1994), because literally and figuratively the map is all we ever had, and the territory was always forthcoming. There is something hauntingly, achingly “hyperreal” about the model of Maitreya Project statue sitting in a place of honor at the center of the Relic Tour's set of reputedlyancient artifacts.

This book is a study of a statue, an object, a thing, which did not come to fruition as anticipated, not wholly unlike Bruno Latour's exploration of the rise and fall of the idea of Aramis (1996). Aramis, a technological innovation in public transportation that was supposed to be built in Paris, France, was cancelled in 1987. Latour's “scientifiction” whodunnit asks: who killed Aramis?

To answer that question, the scholar lays out the cultural biography of the object as it weaves its way from idea(s), to prototype, to models, and then back to idea/text. Latour argues that the line between human and machine (object) is more blurry than immediately obvious, since objects such as Aramis have their own "life" and "death," just like their creators. Although Aramis is no more, for some twenty years Aramis was in the process of becoming, so much so that Latour rather eccentrically gives the machine a voice; with that voice, Aramis expresses a will to live, frustration at the reticence of his ersatz makers, and despair at having been loved too little. By arguing that objects must be seen as co-constituting agents of sociality, Latour asserts the agency of the object, even one that never manifested. Daniel Miller, a materiality studies scholars, puts the agency of the object into sharp relief, writing, "In short, we need to show how the things that people make, make people" (2005, 38).

Like Aramis, the giant MP 2.0 statue was a "fiction seeking to come true" (Latour 1996, 18). Also, like Aramis, the Maitreya statue hit stumbling block after obstacle after rough patch, and it is incumbent upon us to understand the context and complexity behind both the project in and of itself, and the social environments that have resisted and welcomed it (sometimes doing both simultaneously). This Maitreya statue has been envisioned in many iterations, but ultimately this book serves as a “history of future” for the statue project during a significant era, the MP 2.0 period, during which it touched many lives around the world, for better and for worse.

The task of building the “biggest” statue was not uncontested at that point, however, as there were other projects in the works trying to outdo MPI’s statue plan. For example, Chinese Buddhists fundraised for a Vairocana Buddha statue that would be slightly taller than MPI’s statue (“China enters biggest Buddhist statue race” 2001); they delivered on that promise in 2008, as the finished Spring Temple Buddha reached a stunning 502 feet tall (inclusive of 1

throne and building/pedestal). The global Buddhist moment has created the conditions for several other colossal Buddhist statues in the past twenty-five years, for example: 1) the giant Amitabha Buddha in Japan, the Ushiku Daibutsu that is 390 feet (inclusive of pedestal) finished in 1993; 2) the Kuanyin of Sanya, China enshrined in 2005 that is 345 feet tall (Feng 2005); 3) a giant 380-foot Buddha statue in Myanmar completed in 2008 (Baker 2016).

Gigantic Buddha statues seem to be symptom of neoliberal globalization, a point that Kajri Jain effectively makes in her work on the emergence of colossal statues in post-liberalization India (Jain 2016). In reference to colossal statues in India, Jain writes: “Tracing how this form of spectacle and its exhibition value are enmeshed in the imaginaries, spatial politics, material processes and heterogeneous temporalities of uneven development, I highlight its territorial aspects and its capacities as an assemblage that brings together religion, aesthetics, politics and business.” Although Jain focuses on local/regional Indian creations as opposed to internationally-funded statues, her work speaks to how MP 2.0 can be read as a spectacle of neoliberal globalization.

2 I assumed, as had some of my local informants, wrongly as it turned out, that the MP 2.0 statue was to be built, “right there,” since that was the spot shown in the MPI web photos. I learned later that the land in the picture was supposed to be acquired for the grand statue park, but the land actually slated for the main statue site was even more heavily populated.

3 I first took refuge at an FPMT function led by Lama Zopa Rinpoche in Florida in the late nineties. “Taking refuge” is manner of ritually self-identifying as a Buddhist.

4 While I utilize the conventional delineation of "Western" and "Eastern" with respect to the terminology used by so many of my informants, I must note here that the binary is, of course, exceedingly over-simplistic, erasing some of the historical contingencies of these imaginaries.

5 There are four primary Tibetan Buddhist sects recognized today: Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, and Gelukpa. Jonang practitioners sometimes argue that it should be considered the fifth important Tibetan Buddhist sect. From internal perspectives there are sectarian differences in lineage, Tantric rituals practices, and other aspects, however arguably all the schools follow Nagarjuna's Mahayana Buddhism and emphasize the significance of Vajrayana (Tantric) ritual and practice (Powers 1995).

6 The MP 2.0 initial land acquisition figure of 750 acres was soon reduced to 661 acres. Since media reports often touted the number as 700 acres, please note that the MP 2.0 land acquisition acreage varies from 660 to 750 at various times in various sources.

7 Circumambulations of holy objects hold the connotation of both giving respect to the object, and taking merit from one's proximity. Proper circumambulations are done clockwise, and are called nang khor in Tibetan. Anti-clockwise circumambulations, also called chi khor in Tibetan, are considered improper in normative Tibetan Buddhist practice. My friends and I sometimes joked that contrary to plan, I sometimes seemed to be circumambulating the Maitreya Project counter-clockwise. There are culturally appropriate times and places for chi khor however, in certain Tantric practices (Snellgrove 1987). Chi khor is also often associated with Bonpos, the indigenous religious practitioners in Tibet, although there are times and places that Bonpos circulate clockwise, and other times and places when Buddhists circumambulate counterclockwise (Huber 1999). Huber also notes that on certain popular mountain cult circumambulations, women are forbidden from making the full clockwise circumambulations, and must proceed counter-clockwise on specific paths (121). Huber wonders along with a colleague if the left-circling of women is a relic of the left-handed practices associated with the

feminine path of the highest yoga Tantra (253). Like the women excluded from the full men's path around Pure Crystal Mountain in Tibet who had to proceed by going nang khor halfway and then chi khor halfway, perhaps one could say that I did both. From my point of view, an anthropologist and a Buddhist, with due attention to my professional ethics, I very diligently endeavored to research maitri (Sanskrit: loving-kindness) with maitri.

8 I was not permitted to do research in MPI’s “Gorakhpur office,” as they had every right to decide. However, I was taken aback at some of the ways the MPI tried to deter my research in Kushinagar. One MPI official aggressively tried to talk me into another project. Almost comedic in retrospect, he pulled out an encyclopedia and looked up ‘anthropology,” and then proceeded to try to think of other cultural questions I could research for my dissertation.

Later, another MPI staffer called my doctoral advisor at Cornell University and tried to get him to curb my research. While MPI could bar me from researching within MPI, they could not ban me from the Uttar Pradeshi villages or from FPMT centers that permitted me to do research therein. Hugh Gusterson did fieldwork on the Livermore National Laboratory without ever getting full clearance to work inside of it (1996); he learned instead by encircling it, working at its periphery, and doing interviews with willing individuals who worked in the lab (and in the neighborhood). I take Gusterson's work as a successful model for sociologically seeing a large institution, despite the fact that it endeavored not to be seen.

9 The relevant Center directors gave me permission to conduct my research in those specific FPMT Centers. Throughout my research period I secured permissions from regional institutional heads and directors, as well, of course, as getting consent from the individuals with whom I conducted interviews.

10 To be more specific about the timing of particular inquiries: I was based in India from December 2005 to April 2007. I primarily divided my time in India between: 1) the statue's prospective home in Kushinagar; 2) the statue's current bureaucratic home on the drawing boards in Lucknow and elsewhere; 3) and, the statue's spiritual home in the thoughts and prayers of devotees from the three FPMT centers in Bodh Gaya, Dharamsala, and Delhi.

During the fall of 2005 and the summer of 2007, bookending my fourteen plus months of fieldwork in India, I followed the Relic Tour to several different sites, and also conducted short-term research at three FPMT institutions in California. In India, I completed two lengthy stints in Dharamsala, two in Bodh Gaya, several in Kushinagar, one in Lucknow, and several in Delhi.

11 I conducted solo interviews in Kushinagar in Hindi and English. Since many villagers spoke the local Hindi vernacular, Bhojpuri (the Northern Bhojpuri dialect, also known as “Gorakhpuri”), I supplemented my Hindi proficiency with Bhojpuri language training while in the field. Still, my nascent Bhojpuri was not sufficient for one-on-one interviewing, so in the Kushinagari area villages, I relied heavily on a handful of short-term translators and research assistants.

12 The bridge as a structure also reverberated with me on a personal level as a person stuck between two unyielding groups that never really met. Stretched between FPMT statueadvocates and Kushinagari anti-statue activists, I sometimes felt their weight lay heavy across my shoulders; I often wrestled with the burden, the responsibility, of advocacy anthropology. I did not always know what to do, how much to advocate and how much to explain (and to whom, and for whom). In this manuscript, I have worked to background myself, but it would be disingenuous to try to write myself out of the drama altogether, as I was an active

participant observer, and my advocacy work did affect the unfolding of the narrative to some small degree. I took no pleasure in this fact, and thus I have tried to consolidate the bulk of my self-reflexivity and activism into chapter nine, so readers can take it or leave it as they like.

13 The Relic Tour ceased operations in 2015, after 15 years of regular traveling (sometimes with multiple relic caches traveling on separate routes).

14 For more on the Natra Mangala, or eye ceremony, see Coomaraswamy 1956. In his novel, Ondaatje beautifully writes about ceremony: "The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder, and paints the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him â&#x20AC;&#x201C; so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha's during the process of creation. Around him the mantras continue..." (2000, 99). Donald Swearer's work on the ritual of consecration, or "opening the eyes," of a new Buddha statue in Thailand stresses that Buddha images of the past, present and future become a corporeal presence as the object is thus anthropomorphized (2004).

15 For example, Gell explains: "The little girl's doll is not a self-sufficient agent like an (idealized) human being, even the girl herself does not think so. But the doll is an emanation or manifestation of agency (actually, primarily the child's own), a mirror, vehicle, or channel of agency, and hence, a source of such potent experiences of the co-presence of an agent as to make no difference" (1998, 20).