Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

xxiiiABOUT THE WORKSHOPThe 6 th API Workshop was held in Davao, onMindanao Island in the Philippines, from 25-29November 2007. The general flow of the Workshop,comprised mainly of eight parallel sessions of paperpresentations, followed a chautauqua, a set of talks orlectures. While the imagery should in no way be fullyassociated with the great body of factual informationrelating to chautauquas, it was offered as a heuristicdevice for grasping the power of the workshop. Justas lectures are the mainstay of the chautauqua, thepaper presentations were chautauquas in themselves.Twenty-seven API Fellows punctuated narratives ofAsian transformations with numerous philosophical,artistic, and social scientific analyses and insights.Many readers would have encountered the concept ofchautauqua through Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Artof Motorcycle Maintenance.” Pirsig’s novel, writtenin 1974, describes a motorbike journey across theUnited States by the narrator and his son.Pirsig, or rather the motor biker, gives lectures inhis head. Sometimes, the lecture appears in the formof conversation with the son and/or the couple theybefriended. In all instances, the reader is the thirdperson on the motorbike. In the API Workshop, theparticipants went on a motorbike trip—with manythird persons on the motorbike.Who were these third persons on the motorbike?Indeed, who was the audience of the API chautauqua?Since the API is about Fellows studying a societyother than one’s own, the workshop’s immediateaudience was: individuals who come from the societybeing studied by another; and individuals who comefrom the same society of the Fellow studying a societyother than one’s own.The other person on the motorbike, the otherimportant audience, was composed of the students ofthe Ateneo de Davao University. In the “API Hour,”selected Fellows visited five classes of the Ateneo deDavao University where they shared insights fromtheir explorations of Asian transformations.Aside from being characterized by lectures, chautauquashave one other characteristic. They are itinerant. Intheir original form, chautauquas brought educationand culture to remote places. In Pirsig’s book, themotorbikers travel across the United States. In theAPI chautauqua, the presentations allowed workshopparticipants to travel to and across Indonesia, Japan,Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.The API chautauqua also allowed travel acrossMindanao through “Mindanao Talk” with Fr. AlbertAlejo, S.J., Executive Director of the MindanawonInitiatives for Cultural Dialogue of the Ateneo deDavao University. Actual travelling was also donewith a visit to local settings, namely the PhilippineEagle Center and Eden Nature Park, where issuesrelated to environmental conservation and indigenouscommunities manifest themselves.NOTES1This comparative optics is further enriched by that factthat most Fellows in this cohort (19 out of 28, or 68%)pursued multi-sited research.2The presentation of papers in this book of proceedingsvaries slightly from the thematic assignment of papersand sessions in the Workshop. For the originalWorkshop program, please see Appendix I.Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu obtained her doctorate inSociology from Universität Bielefeld in Germany, herM.A. in Population Science from Peking Universityin the People’s Republic of China and her B.A. inSociology from the University of the Philippines.She is Associate Professor and concurrently Chair ofthe Department of Sociology and Anthropology andDirector of the Institute of Philippine Culture of theAteneo de Manila University. Named “OutstandingYoung Scientist” by the Philippine National Academyof Science and Technology in 2007, she is the authorof “Possible Worlds in Impossible Spaces: Globality,Knowledge, Gender and Information Technology inthe Philippines” (Ateneo de Manila University Press,2006) and co-author of “Casa Boholana: Meanings ofAncestral Houses” (Ateneo de Manila University Press,forthcoming).Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows