nici /Boellstorff

Terms I has to look up:

• autochthonous: o-'täk-th&-n&s indigenous, formed or originating in the place where found
• imbricated: To overlap like roof tiles
• metapragmatics: the study of consciousness as to language, it's manifestation, and grammar. Or, language about the indexical or pragmatic relationship between linguistic signals and their contexts of use.
• diectic: showing or pointing out directly
• incommensurability: Generally, two quantities are commensurable if both can be measured in the same units. For example, a distance measured in miles and a quantity of water measured in gallons are incommensurable. A time measured in weeks and a time measured in minutes are commensurable because a week is a constant number of minutes (10080), so that one can convert between the two units by multiplying or dividing by 10080.
• tautologous: somewhat like redundant, rhetorical tautology is a needless repetition of and indea, word, or statement. The definitions of tautology seemed very tautologous.

That was some article! The central concepts were:

1. The _gay and _lesbi subject-positions commonly encountered by the author in his studies were neither strictly a western subjectivity adopted by the Indonesian men and women ( and other) that he spoke too, but neither did these roles have any basis in "traditional" Indonesian culture.
2. The Indonesian Government first insisted on and then forbid the dubbing of other nations tv and movies into Indonesian, the motives for insisting were to build nationalism through shared language and were turned over in favor of delinating a strong outer limit to what should be seen as Indonesian.
3. These two points can be united by a theory of cultural dubbing that reworks the way in which the outer/ foreign is recieved/interpreted by the inner / local. The concept that the outside has influence but is always mediated and modified by the insides interpretation of that pressure.

Some relativly key points from the text:

• Three important issues (to the author) to understanding queer Asia:

1. Liberal Western theories of agency, the viewing of sexualities as flexable don't allow for a nuianced undestanding of the situation. How much of these subject=positions personal choice and how much is designated by the structure through which they are defined? These existing modes of defining your role / place within society are both a recognized as pre-existing role that get assumed and a self-narrative that is fleshed out through behavoir.
2. the presentation of global capitalism as absolute, or as having absolute influence
3. the issue of authenticity, whether these queer Asians have subject-identities that pre-existed Western influence and are only being masked by these Western terms (which would be Authentically 'Idonesian" Queer) or are traitors to Indonesian tradition (which would be Authentically Global Gay).

• I keep putting quotes around Indonesian as the culture is a conglomeration of many cultures, over 600, and the sense of a national identity is something that is being very activly sought out by the government and aparently very readily understood and adopted by the people in question. I particularily liked the term commessurable which means that the units of measure are different, but not so different that one cannot speak of them in terms of each other. The example on the Wikipedia was inches and miles would be commessurable because they are in a constant relation and one can be converted to the other. Galons of water and miles of road would be incommesurable as there is no basis for comparison. In terms of national identity I believe this is central to the governments outlawing of dubbing certain media into Indonesian. They want to keep Western culture incommesurable while allowing a localized set of identities that are similar but have their distinctions.
• Traditional Indonesian culture does have a role waria, that coresponds fairly directly to the western transvestite. This role is a recognized by not valorized, accepted as having skills valuable to the public but denigrated and demeaned. The availability of this role sets off the lack of traditional roles for homosexual men and women.
• Current roles for these men and women are waria (homosexual men who "act like women") , gay (homosexual men who "act like men"), lesbi (homosexual women who "act like women") and tomboi (homosexual women who "act like men").
• Most of the people the author queried (queeried?) feel they first found their subject-identity in the sporadic way mass media dealt with the subject. Sexual subjectivity was usually aquired through a sense of recognition of self in the other presented by the mass medias depictions of gay or lesbian characters or real people, even though these depiction were often negative or derogatory. In the void of any queer roles from the local culture these men and women turned to the snippets of structure offered by the global media, and perhaps because the were such fractured transmission of culture , these snippets were glued together into a whole that does not mirror its image in the western culture but rather reedits it in terms of localized concerns.
• Back to the dubbing for a moment, dubbing is the practice of putting a new sound track over films or shows in order to translate it into a local language. This was ultimatly deemed undesireable as it extended the bound of who could seem to be indonesian to far. Considering that the use of one national language was one of the ways in which the government bound people together to create a national identity out of a plethora of people (yeah alliteration) extending the limits of who would be seen as speaking this language to include Western actors and TV persona would weaken its ability to be a binding tie amoungst those who spoke it locally. Never mind that with dubbing the lips never quite match up, you suspend your disbelief and attribute the voice to the image of the person, thus possibly bringing your cultural connection to Sharon Stone to an equvalent level as that of your neighbors. Movies and TV play a strong role in the production of culture, by indigenizing them through the use of language the government risked indigenizing the culture they construct and it was feared that this culture would conflict with the construction of the national culture.
• The concept of Dubbing culture, as posited by the author, then becomes one of reciving a transmission from another culture, in this case western, and reinterprting it just ever so slightly. There are stong forces being applied by the outside culture, but they are not completely dominant and the reciving culture has room to translate and interpret them.
• Dubbing culture is an escape from hierarchy and reinstates a new type of authenticity. The colonial view would put a translation as a layer over the more privledge "original" layer, instantiating a hierarchy of meaning. Dubbing puts the two material or methaphorical sources side by side and privledges neither. The outcome is a imperfect fusion of two recognizably distinct imputs with its own authenticity. I'm not sure Benjamin would completly agree with the claim that this new item will retain its aura past its creation but I believe he would agree that this is not a mere quotation. The authenticity come throught the process in which a unique dubbing is created, the sources are not original but the reconfiguration of them is.