FY2002
After the collapse of the centralized Suharto regime (“New Order”),
we witnessed the stark emergence of a tug-of-war between the gravitational attraction
of regions or ethnic groups and state integration. This research committee will,
based on specific materials concerning regional societies, discuss how contiguous
with the progress in national consolidation we have had the formation of ethnic
and regional identities. Concerning the dynamics between the nation state and
ethnic cultures, we aim to make theoretical contributions from an anthropological
standpoint. We hope our search for the conditions that have developed in local
society amidst the major policy shift from centralized direction to regional devolvement
will yield new knowledge concerning the problem of the creation of culture as
a national process, which has come to be recognized by anthropology in recent
years. We can now see widespread examples of ethnic/religious confrontation, splittist
independence movements and other instances in which there are standoffs between
the framework of the nation state and regional societies or ethnic groups. We
believe that the discussions of our research group will lay the foundation for
more general research, for example, for comparative research on the various nations
of Oceania.