Giorgio Borsa in 1989.
Copyright © 2018 - Viella s.r.l. & Associazione Asia Maior ISSN 2385-2526
ISBN 978-88-3313-044-6 (paper) ISBN 978-88-3313-045-3 (e-book) Annual journal - Vol. XXVIII, 2017
Published jointly by Associazione Asia Maior & CSPE - Centro Studi per i Popoli extra-europei “Cesare Bonacossa” - Università di Pavia
EDITOR (direttore responsabile): Michelguglielmo Torri (University of Tu-rin).
CO-EDITORS: Elisabetta Basile (University of Rome «La Sapienza»); Nicola Mocci (University of Sassari).
BOOK REVIEWS EDITORS: Oliviero Frattolillo (University Roma Tre); Francesca Congiu (University of Cagliari).
STEERING COMMITTEE
Axel Berkofsky (University of Pavia); Diego Maiorano (University of Notting-ham); Nicola Mocci (University of Sassari); Giulio Pugliese (King’s College London); Michelguglielmo Torri (University of Turin); Elena Valdameri (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich); Pierluigi Valsecchi (Uni-versity of Pavia).
The graphic design of this Asia Maior issue is by Nicola Mocci
Asia Maior. The Journal of the Italian think tank on Asia founded by Giorgio Bor-sa in 1989 is an open-access journal, whose issues and single articles can be freely downloaded from the think tank webpage: www.asiamaior.org. Paper version Italy € 50.00 Abroad € 65.00 Subscription [email protected] www.viella.it
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C STUDIPERIPOPOLIEXTRA-EUROPEI “CESAREBONACOSSA” - UNIVERSITÀDIPAVIA
ASIA MAIOR
The Journal of the Italian think tank on Asia founded by Giorgio Borsa in 1989 Vol. XXVIII / 2017
Asia in the Waning Shadow
of American Hegemony
Edited by
Michelguglielmo Torri, Elisabetta Basile, Nicola Mocci
SSOCIAZIONE ASIA MAIOR
Steering Committee: Marzia Casolari (President), Francesca Congiu, Diego Maiorano, Nicola Mocci (Vice President), Michelguglielmo Torri (Scientific Director). Scientific Board: Guido Abbattista (Università di Trieste), Domenico Ami-rante (Università «Federico II», Napoli), Elisabetta Basile (Università «La Sapienza», Roma), Luigi Bonanate (Università di Torino), Claudio Cecchi (Università «La Sapienza», Roma), Alessandro Colombo (Università di Mila-no), Anton Giulio Maria de Robertis (Università di Bari), Thierry Di Costan-zo (Université de Strasbourg), Max GuderCostan-zo (Università di Firenze), Franco Mazzei (Università «L’Orientale», Napoli), Giorgio Milanetti (Università «La Sapienza», Roma), Paolo Puddinu (Università di Sassari), Adriano Rossi (Università «L’Orientale», Napoli), Giuseppe Sacco (Università «Roma Tre», Roma), Guido Samarani (Università «Ca’ Foscari», Venezia), Filippo Sabetti (McGill University, Montréal), Gianni Vaggi (Università di Pavia), Alberto Ventura (Università della Calabria)
CSPE - Centro Studi per i Popoli extra-europei “Cesare Bonacossa” - Università di Pavia
Steering Committee: Axel Berkofsky, Arturo Colombo, Antonio Morone, Giulia Rossolillo, Gianni Vaggi, Pierluigi Valsecchi (President), Massimo Zaccaria.
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or unsolicited, after being first evaluated by the Journal’s editors, are then submitted to a double-blind peer review involving up to three anonymous referees. Coherently with the double-blind peer review process, Asia Maior does not make public the name of the reviewers. However, their names – and, if need be, the whole correspondence between the journal’s editors and the reviewer/s – can be disclosed to interested institutions, upon a formal request made directly to the Director of the journal.
5ONTENTS
7 MICHELGUGLIELMO TORRI, Asia Maior in 2017: The unravelling of the US foreign policy in Asia and its consequences
29 MARCO MILANI, Korean Peninsula 2017: Searching for new balances 59 FRANCESCA CONGIU & CHRISTIAN ROSSI, China 2017: Searching for
internal and international consent
93 SEBASTIAN MASLOW & GIULIO PUGLIESE, Japan 2017: Defending the domestic and international status quo
113 AURELIO INSISA, Taiwan 2017: Stalemate on the Strait
129 BONN JUEGO, The Philippines 2017: Duterte-led authoritarian populism and its liberal-democratic roots
165 ELENA VALDAMERI0Indonesia 2017: Towards illiberal democracy? 191 NICOLA MOCCI, Cambodia 2016-2017: The worsening of social and
political conflicts
211 PIETRO MASINA, Thailand 2017: Political stability and democratic crisis in the first year of King Vajiralongkorn
227 MATTEO FUMAGALLI, Myanmar 2017: The Rohingya crisis between radicalisation and ethnic cleansing
245 MARZIA CASOLARI, Bangladesh 2017: The Rohingya’s carnage
267 MICHELGUGLIELMO TORRI & DIEGO MAIORANO, India 2017: Narendra Modi’s continuing hegemony and his challenge to China
291 MICHELGUGLIELMO TORRI, India 2017: Still no achhe din (good days) for the economy
309 MATTEO MIELE0Nepal 2015-2017: A post-earthquake constitution and the political struggle
331 FABIO LEONE, Sri Lanka 2017: The uncertain road of the «yahapalayanaya» government
351 MARCO CORSI, Pakistan 2017: Vulnerabilities of the emerging market 369 DIEGO ABENANTE, Afghanistan 2017: Trump’s «New Strategy», the Af-Pak
conundrum, and the crisis of the National Unity Government 387 LUCIANO ZACCARA, Iran 2017: From Rouhani’s re-election to the
December protests
411 ADELE DEL SORDI, Kazakhstan 2017: Institutional stabilisation, nation-building, international engagement
REVIEW
453 ANOTHER VISIONOF PAKISTAN: ISLAMANDSOCIETYINA SOUTH ASIAN
ENVIRONMENT
Diego Abenante
University of Trieste
Michel Boivin, Le Pakistan et l’Islam. Anthropologie d’une République
Islam-ique, Paris : Téraèdre, 2015, 223 pp., (ISBN 9782360850648).
In comparison with India, Pakistan has received less extensive atten-tion from scholars. In addiatten-tion to this disadvantage, there has also been the misfortune that a large part of the research dedicated to the country after 9/11 has focused on violence and terrorism. Pakistan has variously been depicted as a «failed state», a place dominated by religious fanati-cism, and constantly on the verge of collapse. Without denying the com-plex issues relating to its political dimension, it is possible to speak of an over-representation of violence in the literature on Pakistan. Instead, very little is known of its rich culture and its society, apart from a small group of specialists. It is a curious paradox that, while the study of the «everyday» is increasingly gaining ground among historians and social scientists, in Pa-kistan the lives of the millions of inhabitants who lead a peaceful existence are largely neglected.
This said, nowadays a growing number of social scientists have begun to fill this vacuum. A new generation of scholars has started to engage with the lives of those human beings who call themselves Pakistanis, even re-reading the political history of the region «from below».8 The volume under
review by Michel Boivin, Le Pakistan et l’Islam. Anthropologie d’une République Islamique constitutes a relevant contribution to this endeavour. The main point of strength of the volume is that not only has the author contributed to a «decentring» of the discourse on Pakistan – as the author himself de-clares in the introduction (p. 14) – but that he has done so in a very acces-sible style and synthetic form. Michel Boivin is one of the main representa-tives of a lively school of French scholars at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et l’Asie du Sud in Paris, whose studies focus on various aspects of South Asian societies. This volume is based on long periods of research conducted by the
8. Some recent examples are: Elisabetta Iob, Refugees and the Politics of the
Every-day State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947-62, London & New York: Routledge, 2018; Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, The Politics of Common Sense. State, Society, and Culture in
Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Naveeda Khan, Muslim
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author in the field, mainly in the province of Sindh, especially on Sufism and popular culture.
Various important themes run through this volume. The most im-portant – and the one around which the whole narrative is built – is the rel-evance of «diversity» as an essential tool for our understanding of Pakistani society. This concept is intended by the author not only as a criticism of the «essentialist» interpretation of many western observers; he also affirms that diversity, and the difficulty of accepting it, constitutes the root of a series of ambiguities in Pakistani collective identity, which the author defines as the territory of the «unsaid». The first of these issues is the plural character of Islamic religion. Paradoxically enough, for a state that calls itself an «Islamic Republic», religion is the most problematic domain. Michel Boivin points in particular to the complex coexistence of various layers of religious identity, both inside and outside the fold of Islam: sunni/shi’i, deobandi/barelwi, ismaili/ zikri or ahmadi; and, of course, to the different religious communities, like Hindus, Christians, Parses, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’i, and Jain.
Obviously, the author’s anti-essentialist approach makes direct refer-ence to an interpretive vein that arose in the 1980s and 1990s, and that had in Mohammed Arkoun, among the francophone scholars, and in Aziz al-Azmeh, in the English-speaking world, two influential examples.9 However,
it is a vision that has been more often applied to Middle Eastern societies than to Pakistan.
The volume is divided into four chapters. The first chapter analyses the management of religious diversity. Here the author explains in detailed, yet easily accessible style, the complex layers of the Pakistani religious scene. Central in Boivin’s analysis of the local forms of Muslim belief is the concept of «vernacularisation» of the Islamic tradition; a concept that he borrows from the work of Sheldon Pollock, and that the author develops further in the concluding section. The second chapter focuses on the historical con-struction of the idea of Pakistan. Moving from the original elaboration of a distinct political identity among the Muslims of India, from Sayed Ahmad Khan to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the author proceeds to discuss how, after 1947, the Pakistani state has negotiated the place of Islam with the holders of religious authority, in the first place the ‘ulama. The third chapter extends the analysis to the social structures, in particular to those of the rural society. Here, Boivin’s contribution is to relate the concepts of biradari («brother-hood») and zat («caste») with the religious dimension. The author empha-sises the impossibility of analysing these forms of hierarchy without taking into consideration their sacralisation. Thus, social stratification and Islam are not conceived by the author as distinct, but related areas. It is important to note that, in the analysis of the Pakistani rural society, the author offers a
REVIEW
455 clear description of the system, without hiding the main aspects of inequal-ity. At the same time, the reader will find a thorough analysis of the origins and social functions performed by the various figures. It is a well-balanced approach, obviously consistent with the Weberian lesson of socio-political study. Something that, unfortunately, we do not always find in other analy-ses on Pakistan society.
The fourth chapter, which is perhaps the most interesting of the en-tire volume, brings the discussion made in the preceding chapters to the elaboration of the concept of Islam as a «vernacular culture». The chapter opens with a discussion of the meaning of ethnicity in the Pakistani context, and of its relations with Islam. The author distinguishes the reality of the ethno-linguistic composition of the population from the process of ideologi-cal transformation of these identities. In particular, the chapter describes the emergence of sub-national movements from 1947 onwards, focusing in par-ticular on the Pashtuns, and on the role of pakhtunwali or tribal code. In the latter part of the chapter, Boivin takes up and expands the concept of vernac-ularisation, defined as «the process by which agents, in particular the tradi-tional producers and transmitters of a tradition, have appropriated notions or concepts from other linguistic and cultural areas» (p. 163). The author applies this concept to the historical process of Islamisation in the Indian subcontinent, giving ample space to non-sunni and popular Islam. Likewise, the author discusses the process of popularisation and syncretism between Islam and Hindu culture under the Muslim power, from the Turkish-Afghan dynasties to the Moghul Empire. Equally interesting is the discussion that the author makes of the role played by local elites during the British Raj.
Here, Michel Boivin is able to refer to his own vast knowledge of Is-mailism and on Sufi cults in Sindh. The reader finds an depth, yet in-triguing, discussion of the religious rituals at the graves of the Muslim saints of Sindh, that attract large numbers of believers. Rituals such as the visit to the tomb (ziarat), the annual celebration of the death of the saint (urs or «marriage» to God), and the ecstatic dance (dhamal) are described with spe-cial attention to the cult of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sehwan Sharif, perhaps the most renown Sufi saint in the province, and one of the most celebrated in Pakistan. The author concludes the chapter with two very interesting par-agraphs dedicated to iconography and material culture, an area that covers a very important space in the Pakistani popular devotion.
The first part refers to the art of drawing sacred paintings on trucks and rickshaws, and to the art of religious posters – known as poster-e dini – which are normally sold in bazaars and Sufi sanctuaries especially in Sindh and in Punjab. The second paragraph is devoted to the discussion of reli-gious popular music, such as qawwali, a genre that has been popularised at international level by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the sufi poetry or kafi.
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