Asmus Randløv Rungby defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Anthropology

Asmus Randløv Rungby defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Anthropology

Candidate

Asmus Randløv Rungby, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

Title

Parliament of Cats
Democracy, Organizational Work and Mutual Felinity in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

Committee

• Associate Professor Atreyee Sen
  University of Copenhagen (chair)
• Professor Johan Lindquist
  Stockholm University, Sweden
• Professor Patricia Sloane-White
  University of Delaware, United States

Host

Head of Department, Bjarke Oxlund

Time and Place

11 March 2022, at 2:00 PM 
University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Social Sciences, 
Gothersgade 140, 1353 Copenhagen K
Auditorium no. 1

The defence is scheduled to last a maximum of 3 hours. After the defence, the department will hos an informal reception in building 34, Christian Hansen at the Campus area.

A copy of the dissertation is available for reading at the Department of Anthropology, by contacting Vicki Antosz (va@samf.ku.dk), office 16.1.34. The dissertation will be available via academic books as an e-publication after the defence. 

Summary

This thesis examines the work of RUMAH, a creative hub and youth advocacy organization in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Based on long-term fieldwork the thesis depicts their efforts and the way these efforts interface with political realities of the Malaysian democratic regime. Alternating between experimental ethnographic interludes and analytical chapters, the thesis builds an analysis across four themes. By delving into the Kuchingite figure of the cat as expressive of political conditions, human behavior and activist tactics it examines how this idiomatic mode of approaching and understanding politics might inform scholarly discourses on democracy.

The first chapter highlights microsocial interactions and civility as necessary components of work within RUMAH. Through emphasizing vernacular metaphors of cat-likeness, it demonstrates how dynamics of conversational lightness, mutual charm and gestures of inclusion coalesce into an inclusive civility. This peculiar form facilitates organizational collaboration but also complicates life by engendering mutual mistrust understood through feline metaphors of self-interest, predatory hunting and interpersonal opacity.

The second chapter, foregrounds Kuching’s urban space as both organizational site and venue for advocacy. The city too is understood in feline terms as both charming and predatory. By analyzing RUMAH’s efforts of both establishing their own organizational building and utilizing Kuching’s urbanity of cafés, restaurants and offices to connect with and thereby influence power holders and other activists, the thesis opens up a discussion of what relation urban space has to democracy. Marxist and liberal accounts of urban democratic space in each their own way privilege ostentatious demonstrations and displays as the quintessential democratic function of urban space. Contrary to the implications of both theoretical strands, the cat metaphors and feline behavior at RUMAH foreground interpersonal persuasions and networking as a means of pursuing one’s interests.

From there, the third chapter engages issues of leadership and organizational labor to highlight both the necessity of leadership and the contingent effects of particular leadership efforts. Through an ethnography of arranging events, the chapter demonstrates how feline dynamics impose themselves on the relationships and interactions between leaders and collaborating members. It further demonstrates how understanding these dynamics problematizes assumptions over the centrality of citizenship and depersonalized national loyalties in democracy theory.

Finally, the fourth chapter challenges the logics of electoralism in democracy theory by confronting the disruptions caused by Malaysia’s 2018 federal election (GE14). This analysis foregrounds RUMAH artists’ efforts to secure funding and support for their efforts as well as the ways their capacity to navigate powerholder networks was disrupted by the shift in government. The thesis counterposes these complications of my interlocutors’ attempts to improve their own conditions to an idealized logic positing that competitive elections will improve societal conditions. In contrast to these predominant views in democracy theory, my interlocutors’ experience was that election disruptions complicated their lives rather than improving political transparency.

In conclusion, I present the concept of mutual felinization as condensation of the complex of behavioral patterns and political apprehension contained by the Kuchingite figure of the cat. This proffers a different account of democracy from the point of view of my interlocutors whereby the microsocial navigations of political conditions and interpersonal exchanges is made to tell us more about democracy as a historical formation than accounts centering idealized operations of sovereignty. I propose through this argument that anthropology investigate democracy as a historical formation that conditions the political economy, forms of statecraft and lived conditions rather than as an idealized ethical model against which the relative merits of differing regimes might be judged.