PANEL 84: ALONE BUT NOT MARGINAL: FIGURES OF UNRELATEDNESS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Convenors: Silvia Vignato; Matteo Alcano (University of Milano- Bicocca)

This panel addresses solitude as a minor, though meaningful, feature within contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Researches in both urban and rural modern context (growing cities as well as transforming agricultural environments) point to the existence of individuals who do not refer to traditional webs of relations such as kinship or a common residential origin in the first place. Some of these people are structurally alone and sometimes feel emotionally lonely but are not necessarily marginal or excluded from either productive or family life. They can belong to categories – like for example migrants, umarried women, students, criminals – or to places – like survivors to catastrophes, street children and others.
We invite the participants to bear in mind Janet Carsten’s fundamental book, Cultures of relatedness but also Leo Coleman’s challenging article (Being Alone Together: From Solidarity to Solitude in Urban Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 3, , 2009, pp. 755–778), in order to question what encrusts an individual into a specific social bond and what, in the process, is culture-specific. Contributions should be deeply rooted in fieldwork or documentary researches of modern Southeast Asia.