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Local responses to global challenges

Asia looms large in the new globalised world and in current Euro-American economic imaginations (of miracle, or of apocalypse). But how exactly is the booming ‘Asian economy’ understood and negotiated by the different social actors participating in it, and how can the local economic cultures, identified across Asia be characterized? By focusing on the intimate relations between cultural ideas and economic practices on the one hand, and on different local responses to accelerating social changes on the other hand, it will be possible to shed new light on the little-understood socio-cultural specificities of the Asian economic miracle. How do local populations and organizations respond to the global challenges and how does it affect the everyday life in urban and rural communities of Asia. As such, the idea is to establish methodological, theoretical and analytical bridges between the predominantly macro-level and quantitative research and the micro-level more qualitative oriented research.

Investigating the different local cultural economies in Asia will involve four interrelated themes: 1) Production is always embedded in local socio-cultural forms (e.g. households) and in work ethics propagandized by cultural and religious traditions (e.g. Confucianism and Buddhism). How does this affect local economies in Asia, and what are the effects of globalisation on the moralities of production across this region? 2) Socio-cultural practices of exchange are hardly ever simply economic. Recognising this entails paying close attention to how social networks control the flow of money, goods and gifts within and between different regions and countries. How are economic exchanges moulded by cultural ideas and social relationships? And how does the introduction of market exchanges in formerly socialist economies affect social relations and categories? 3) In a similar vein, to understand how the peoples of Asia are becoming global consumers entails exploring how new consumption patterns are embedded in cultural values, and how new forms of consumption transform different identities and subjectivities. Finally, the question of power will need to be attended to in detail. What is the relation between (liberal or authoritarian) political cultures and economy? As the Asian economic boom has led to a growing social and cultural stratification, a focal point is also the growing social tensions arising from wealth differences between centres and peripheries.

The focus on local economic and social transformations is aimed at shedding light on how "Asian Dynamics" affect concrete social structures and relations (e.g. class, caste, ethnicity, community, family, generation, gender) and contribute to new processes and patterns of differentiation (e.g. rich/poor; rural/urban; adults/youths; majority groups/minority groups; citizens/non-citizens; migrants/non-migrants; believers/non-believers); and not least how these processes of social change are experienced and acted upon by local collective and individual actors (through e.g. coping and response strategies; political and economic resistance in the form of for instance new social movements; religious and political fundamentalism; and new forms of production, exchange and consumption).