To celebrate the fourth year of the Indonesian Studies Program at UCLA, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies hosted a celebratory dinner on January 19, 2012 at the Bar Hayama restaurant in Los Angeles.  The special honorees were filmmaker and philanthropist Dr. Robert Lemelson, the generous funder of the program, and the Honorable Hadi Martono, Consul General of the Republic of Indonesia in Los Angeles. 

During the dinner, Prof. Michael L. Ross, Director of the Center, thanked Dr. Lemelson for his remarkable commitment to funding Indonesian Studies over an extended period.  He pointed out that the four years of the project coincided both with the exciting expansion of relations between the United States and Indonesia and with the unfortunate decrease in funding for Indonesian Studies available from the State of California and the U.S. Department of Education.  Because of the Program's existence, UCLA has been able to participate actively in the field by sponsoring cutting-edge conferences that bring people together with a common interest in Indonesia.  Additionally, the Lemelson Fellowships funded by the Program have enabled UCLA to prepare the next generation of exciting young American scholars with Indonesian Studies expertise by assisting them with the cost of their research in Indonesia.

Prof. Ross also thanked Consul General Martono and the Consulate staff for their unstinting support of UCLA and their collaboration on various joint projects on Indonesian culture in Southern California.  He expressed the hope that this collaboration would continue long into the future.

Consul General Martono responded by expressing his thanks to UCLA for its commitment to the teaching of Indonesian language, and to Dr. Lemelson for his long support of Indonesian Studies.  He said, "It is indeed a great effort and a real proof of the closeness that Indonesia has in Pak Lemelson’s heart."  He continued, "I do hope that Bapak Lemelson has the same feeling as President Obama who said, 'Indonesia adalah bagian dari diri saya' or 'Indonesia is part of my life.'”  Addressing Prof. Ross, and Dr. Juliana Wijaya, UCLA's Indonesian language instructor, the Consul General said, "The Consulate General is willing to do its best to support the Indonesian language class in the future."  He closed by wishing all the best to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Also present at the dinner was Prof. Geoffrey Robinson of the UCLA Department of History.  Prof. Robinson organized the 2011 Indonesian Studies conference on the topic, "Legacies of Violence in Indonesia and East Timor."  The 2012 conference is being organized by two UCLA graduate students, Gustav Brown of the Department of Sociology and Kimberly Clair of Women's studies.  The conference is scheduled for April 27-28, 2012 on the topic "Indonesia in Global and Transnational Perspective."  Brown and Clair gave a short update on the progress on the conference to the assembled guests.

Other attendees at the dinner were some of the 2011 Lemelson Fellowship recipients, who briefly reported on their research in Indonesia:  Jennifer Goldstein, Department of Geography; Dahlia Gratia Setiyawan, Department of History; and James White, Department of Linguistics.

UCLA Today

An internationally known UCLA researcher is applying his expertise and passion for global mentoring to help bolster scientific capacity and technological infrastructure in a nation that boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia.

Professor Omar Yaghi, who was ranked one of the world's top two chemists of the past decade by the Thomson Reuters Center in 2010, is making a difference in Vietnam by helping the country launch a new advanced research center in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

Based at Vietnam National University (VNU), the new center, MANAR-Vietnam, will focus on the creation and development of molecular and nano-architecture, a field that Yaghi has helped expand. The research center, whose director is Anh Phan, a UCLA graduate who completed her Ph.D. studies under Yaghi’s guidance, opened last week.

MANAR will be the first collaborative research center at VNU which will focus on basic science and offer a high-quality postgraduate programs in Vietnam, says Phan, adding that she has long wished for a facility of this kind to benefit scientific research opportunities for Vietnamese researchers and students.

The scientists and administrators at the university, who proposed the international partnership to Yaghi, are particularly interested in a class of crystalline materials called metal-organic frameworks, sponge-like structures that can efficiently store gasses like methane and hydrogen for possible use in alternative-fuel vehicles.

“They’re an interesting class of materials because you can combine organic molecules and inorganic molecules to make new frameworks that are useful for clean-energy applications,” said Yaghi, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of molecular and medical pharmacology. “It is now a technology that is practiced all over the world.”

Molecular and nano-architecture is a field that Yaghi, director of the Center for Reticular Chemistry at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, knows particularly well. He invented reticular chemistry, which focuses on the linking of molecular building blocks into extended crystalline structures. His research has resulted in the creation and production of several new classes of materials that have powerful implications in the advancement of clean energy. The center, which will start with more than two dozen researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, will also enable the university to build its research and technology infrastructure, Yaghi explained. Fueling its growth will be industry partnerships, international collaborations and scholarship exchange. The new center will encourage young scientists to think big and work alongside world-renowned researchers.

“We don’t do research just to make more money and build the economy,” said Yaghi, who was granted a distinguished professorship at VNU. “We do it to inspire young people. Young students have dreams, and we want to help them achieve their dreams. That’s really our focus.”

The relationships between students and professors will be rooted in the concept of global mentorship, a concept that Yaghi is passionate about and has been working to bolster for the past 15 years. He is currently involved in global mentoring programs in Japan and Korea.

“Collaborations have always been around, but global mentoring provides a framework from which to start talking about partnerships and, for researchers, to develop a sustainable path,” he said. “Professors have more ideas than they can execute for various reasons. We have a lot of ideas, and the MOF field is full of new ideas. It has opened up a whole new space that requires development.”

By inspiring students to expand their perspectives and explore their potential, a research program like the one in Vietnam can lead to the creation of an unlimited number of molecular compounds. Yaghi’s lab has already produced more than 500 of them.

The only limit is one’s imagination, he said, adding that he hopes the center will also draw investment support from government and industry leaders.

“The number of variations that could be made is immense, and so you need talent from the world to be involved in this chemistry because no single group from one single country can develop it,” Yaghi said. More importantly, young people can actually be engaged intellectually in this endeavor at a very early stage. “Almost every student can come up with a structure they want to build based on the geometric building block.”

The global implications of such discoveries could be enormous, he said.

“These material s are important for clean-energy, water, the environment and sustainability,” Yaghi said. “These are challenges that transcend borders, and the world needs to join together to solve these problems.”

To make global mentoring a success requires open communication and detailed consultation to learn the needs of the host country and the expectations of both partnering nations in order to ensure transparency and viability.

“You need to help them lead their own effort,” Yaghi explained, and “grow it organically from the bottom up. We have students who come to UCLA from around the world who go back to their home country. So why not extend the mentoring bond that we’ve started with them in our lab overseas to help them build centers of excellence in their own countries?”

Special guests at the opening ceremonies at VNU included An T. Le, U.S. consulate general to Vietnam; Phan Thanh Binh, president of VNU; Tong Duy Hien, vice director of the Laboratory for Nanotechnology at VNU; Phillip Szuromi, supervisory senior editor of Science magazine; and Eric M. Frater, environment, science and technology officer at the Embassy of the U.S. in Hanoi.

By Nicole Mirea for the Daily Bruin

 Ima Matul left Indonesia in 1997 hoping to start a new life as a nanny in the United States.

As soon as she landed in Los Angeles, her employer took her passport and forced her to work 15 to 20 hours a day with no pay. She was just 17 years old.

Matul, a labor traffic survivor, now works for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking.

On Thursday, she shared her story at “Trends In Exploitation: Labor Trafficking and Organ Trafficking,” an event organized by the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center.

Designed to educate the public about the causes and effects of these human rights violations, the event also proposed solutions to organ and labor trafficking.

Both of these issues occur in Los Angeles, said Vanessa Lanza, director of partnerships at CAST.

During her talk, Lanza showed photographs of the El Monte sweatshop in Los Angeles County, where 72 Thai workers toiled for eight years to make clothing. On the outside, it looked like any other suburban home.

The interior shots, however, revealed scenes of squalor: 14 lice-infested mattresses crammed into a tiny room, windows nailed shut and wall-to-wall sewing machines.

“Los Angeles (county) is a local reflection of a global problem,” Lanza said during the presentation.

Victims of labor trafficking are sometimes controlled through physical violence, but psychological, emotional and sexual abuse can be just as damaging, said Susie Baldwin, chief of the health assessment unit at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology.

UCLA helped fund her research on the topic.

These can lead to sleep disturbances, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder among survivors.

Because of language barriers and fear, labor exploitation is often underreported, Baldwin said.

Gabriel Danovitch, medical director for the kidney and pancreas transplant program at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, said organ trafficking is no less pervasive. Many of his transplant recipients spend six to nine years on a waiting list­.

While kidney patients can stay on dialysis machines, liver and heart transplant patients cannot wait that long. Many look to black market organ transplants as a last resort, he said.

These transplants ultimately harm the recipients because of high rates of infection, he said.

Middlemen often do not care about the donor’s health and will sell unhealthy organs, Danovitch said.

Apart from educating about trafficking issues, the event also encouraged the implementation of more labor and organ trafficking policies.

Lanza said CAST takes a three-pronged approach to the issue through advocacy, outreach to survivors, and client services such as shelter and preparation, so survivors can enter the workforce.

CAST is working on renewing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which must be reauthorized every three years, Lanza said. The act expired last month and has yet to be renewed.

To facilitate its goals, CAST is starting an internship at the beginning of next year, which will focus on advocacy and organization. The coalition is also interested in further partnering with UCLA, Lanza said.

Danovitch said the long-term solution for organ trafficking is research to determine why people are getting kidney disease.

In the meantime, he encourages students to sign up to be organ donors through channels that do not provide compensation for donation.

He said UCLA’s OneLegacy organ donation agency is an example to other donation centers around the world because of its professionalism.

Janet Pregler, director of the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center, said UCLA provides a venue for student groups that work with CAST.

One such group is the Anti-Trafficking and Human Rights Coalition at UCLA.

The group sends its members to teach workshops on health and other subjects at the CAST shelter in Los Angeles to keep survivors of labor trafficking from falling back into exploitative situations, said Annie Fehrenbacher, the club’s founder and president and a second-year doctoral student in the School of Public Health.

As for Matul, she has been a part of the CAST Survivor Caucus, an outlet for survivors who advocate for trafficking issues, since 2005.

She said her goal is to demonstrate that survivors can impact policy and make a difference in other people’s lives.

Photo: Dr. Barbara Gaerlan, Assistant Director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and Ms. Maura Resnick, Director of Development for the UCLA International Institute, accept a check to the UCLA Foundation from the Royal Thai Government designated to support Thai Studies at UCLA.  Presenting the check are Deputy Consul General Mungkorn Pratoomkaew and Consul Komkrich Chongbunwatana of the Consulate of Thailand, Los Angeles.  Photo credit: Kat Kamonkan

By Barbara Gaerlan

UCLA is the happy recipient of a generous gift of $50,000 in 2011-12 from the Royal Thai Government to support Thai Studies in the United States.  This is the largest such gift that UCLA has received for this project, and it comes after two years of previous funding from the Royal Thai Government, representing remarkable commitment.

Prof. Michael L. Ross, Director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, expressed his profound thanks to the three offices which were instrumental in making the gift possible: The Foreign Ministry of Thailand, the Embassy of Thailand to the United States, and the Consulate General of Thailand, Los Angeles.  He expressed particular thanks to the individuals involved:  Dr. Kantathi Suphamongkon, Senior Scholar at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and former University of California Regents Professor; Mr. Chirachai Punkrasin, Director-General of the Department of American & South Pacific Affairs at the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs; His Excellency Kittiphong na Ranong, Ambassador of Thailand to the United States; and the Honorable Damrong Kraikruan, Consul General at the Consulate of Thailand, Los Angeles.

Ross explained: “This gift will be instrumental in ensuring that UCLA will continue to be able to offer three levels of Thai language teaching (elementary, intermediate, and advanced) in our Department of Asian Languages and Cultures for another year.  It will also enable us to provide scholarships for students to study in Thailand, and to do public programing related to Thailand and Thai Studies at UCLA.”

In the 2011-12 academic year, UCLA is the only university in California teaching Thai at all.  Ross said, “This generous gift ensures that we can continue not only to offer Thai at the beginning level, for which there is great demand, but also at higher levels, where serious researchers can benefit.”  In Fall 2011 there are 32 students studying Introductory Thai (a record number), 9 students in Intermediate, and 5 students in Advanced.  UCLA’s Thai language instructor is Dr. Supa Angkurawaranon, a skilled instructor from Chiang Mai, Thailand, who received her Ph.D. degree in the U.S. from Northern Illinois University.

Student scholarships will benefit UCLA students participating in the excellent study abroad opportunities offered at Thammasat University in Bangkok by the University of California Education Abroad Program (which is open to students from all 11 U.C. campuses).  These include Fall, Spring, Summer, and Full Academic Year programs. 

Five UCLA students participated in the Summer 2011 program and three are currently overseas for the Fall 2011 semester.  Of these, the Center was able to provide scholarships to three of the students with funding from the Royal Thai Government’s earlier gift.  It anticipates being able to provide even greater support in the coming year.  Announcements will be made on the Center’s website, with the application available by November, and a probable application deadline of February 2012 for funding from April 2012 through the 2012-13 academic year.

By Barbara Gaerlan

The American Institute for Indonesian Studies is a new nonprofit educational organization formed as a consortium of U.S. universities and colleges with an interest in furthering the development of Indonesian studies. The main goals of AIFIS are to foster scholarly exchange between Indonesian and American scholars, to promote educational and research efforts by U.S. scholars in Indonesia, and to facilitate visits by Indonesian scholars to the U.S.

AIFIS has a new office in Jakarta and is planning an inaugural event January 9, 2012. AIFIS administration in the U.S. is based at Cornell University.  The United States Executive Director of AIFIS is Audrey R. Kahin, Ph.D. (Cornell University).  The Jakarta Resident Executive Director is Timothy McKinnon, Ph.D. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). The AIFIS Board of Directors includes among others three faculty from the University of California: Muhamad Ali, Ph.D. (University of California, Riverside), Paul Barber, Ph.D. (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeffrey Hadler, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley).

The AIFIS website is http://aifis.org/.

Originally published in Summer 2011 (Volume 16) issue of UCLA College Report

Robert Lemelson’s multifaceted career as a psychological anthropologist, educator, and documentary filmmaker is a tribute to both the importance of interdisciplinary research and the value of mentor relationships in scholarly endeavors. Lemelson received his undergraduate degree in biology and anthropology from Hampshire College, where he learned firsthand the importance of being mentored by senior faculty.

At UCLA, Lemelson’s doctoral dissertation spanned the fields of medical and psychological anthropology, psychiatry, and Southeast Asian studies; he received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1999. Currently adjunct professor of anthropology at UCLA and research anthropologist at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Lemelson fueled his passion for synthesizing different scholarly fields by creating and funding several educational programs at UCLA.

Lemelson’s latest initiative, beginning in the winter quarter 2012, is the Lemelson Anthropological Scholars Program at UCLA, which will bring together individual faculty, graduate students, and small groups of UCLA undergraduates to form collaborative mentor relationships. Through the new Scholars Program, undergraduates will develop opportunities to conduct original field research. Lemelson has high hopes for the Scholars Program, noting that “it will allow committed scholars to go much deeper into their research and give them opportunities to really explore their vocation as anthropologists.”

Said dean of social sciences Alessandro Duranti, “I consider the Scholars Program to be a model of the high quality collaborative training we can provide in fieldwork-based research.” And according to Carole Browner, chair and professor of anthropology, “This is a novel concept that develops vital research skills among both undergraduate and graduate students by fostering close mentor relationships. A portion of the gift funds four graduate fellowships, which will greatly strengthen our ability to attract and retain top graduate students.”

The Scholars Program grew from Lemelson’s belief that creative, problem-oriented research skills and close mentor relationships are of crucial importance in training active and engaged anthropologists.

Lemelson’s belief in the value of interdisciplinary scholarship has resulted in the creation of innovative programs that have shaped the direction of academic inquiry, as well as the training and experience of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. In 1999 Lemelson created the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR), which supports research and training in neuroscience and the social sciences.

Since 2002, FPR has funded the FPR-UCLA Culture, Brain and Development Program (CBD). This graduate training and research program brings together the disparate disciplines of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, education, psychiatry, and applied linguistics to explore the complex relationships between the brain, individual behavior, and culture.

The work of CBD students and faculty has spanned a wide range of research—from laboratory-based experiments involving neural imaging to anthropological field research in areas as diverse as Greenland, Burma, and Mexico. Graduate students, through their mentor relationships with senior faculty, integrate and gain competence in these different areas, helping to forge new scientific ground. The emerging disciplines of cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology were, for example, innovated first by the FPR-UCLA Program, the first of its kind in the nation.

Lemelson believes that scholarship should also be socially and politically engaged. Through his generosity, since 2008 the Indonesian Studies Program (under the auspices of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies) has been able to award graduate fellowships to support research on issues such as gender, environmental resource management, and political change. The program’s recent conference, “Legacies of Violence,” addressed issues of human rights abuse and mass violence in Indonesia and East Timor, and included a screening of Lemelson’s film about the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, entitled “Forty Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy.”

Lemelson has contributed much time in the last decade to teaching in the anthropology and psychology departments at UCLA. He is a popular professor, consistently landing in the top ten on Bruinwalk, a UCLA student-managed “rate-the-professors” website. He is also a committed mentor, inviting some of his best students to work as interns for his film production company; two of his closely mentored student interns are now pursuing doctorates in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Lemelson has been conducting research in Indonesia since 1993, and has shot more than 1500 hours of film footage there, resulting in the completion of eight ethnographic films. His recent film series “Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia” was nominated for the Best Limited Series award by the International Documentary Association in 2010. His written work, published in numerous journals and books, includes the 2007 volume Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives, co-edited with McGill University psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer and neuroscientist Mark Barad of the Semel Institute. This is the first scholarly volume to be edited jointly by a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, and a cultural anthropologist.

In addition to teaching at UCLA, Lemelson is president of the FPR and serves as a director of the Lemelson Foundation (a family foundation dedicated to improving lives through invention) and an ethnographic film director at Elemental Productions.

For more about the Lemelson Anthropological Scholars Program, visit www.anthro.ucla.edu/lemelson_scholars.

View PDF of article here

By Stephen Stewart for The Daily Bruin

Van Huynh’s parents had kept their plans secret for three years after the fall of Saigon to North Vietnam in 1975.

The night they began their attempt to escape, they immediately faced a possibly disastrous obstacle – their boat had no gas.

Frantically, the couple searched for fuel and encountered a lady they knew, who gave them fuel. While on the boat, they ran out of food until a naval ship gave them food.

After a harrowing week, the couple landed in Hong Kong. The couple would later immigrate to the United States and marry.

Twenty years later, they returned to Vietnam and found the woman who made their escape possible, thanking her.

“My parents were boat people, but they never talked about it that way,” said Huynh, a fourth-year Asian American studies student. “If (Black April never happened), Vietnam would be very different. Our family would have never come to America.”

Huynh is the president of the Vietnamese Student Union, which is hosting the 2011 Black April Commemoration this week. Black April remembers the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, which ended the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975.

“For people who have never heard these stories, I hope it will begin the process of their curiosity and willingness to learn about it,” Huynh said.

Dieu Huynh, a third-year political science student who is not a relation to Van Huynh, is one of the artists who gave a spoken word performance Tuesday at VSU’s Expression Night, an event that also showcased an art gallery.

Dieu Huynh said his piece is more about the effects of war on family and how the Vietnam War continues to affect his life today.

“I want to bring a slightly different voice,” Dieu Huynh said. “Most art about Black April has been about mourning South Vietnam. I want to also bring in the voice of more contemporary Vietnamese Americans and the voices of others lost in the war.”

Dieu Huynh’s family moved to the United States from Vietnam in 2002. However, his parents’ move to the United States came after two failed attempts to escape from Vietnam.

After the second attempt, Dieu Huynh’s father went to jail and his mother was stripped of her position as a nurse.

His family then worked odd jobs until they were sponsored to immigrate to the United States, Dieu Huynh said.

Dieu Huynh first spoke with his parents about their experiences for a school project in eighth grade.

“It’s not something we would normally talk about,” he said. “I ask questions, they give a watered down version and sugarcoat it. … In order to survive, they have to have optimism.”

The trouble speaking to the younger generation about Black April is something with which Associate Professor Thu-huong Nguyen-Vo is very familiar.

Nguyen-Vo was 12 years old when Black April took place. She declined to comment about her experience, saying that she has a hard time reliving it.

Like the difficulty Van Huynh and Dieu Huynh experienced speaking with their parents about Black April, Nguyen-Vo feels the same difficulty with her own children and students.

Nguyen-Vo will deliver a speech today at VSU’s Black April Commemoration Event at the Fowler Museum about the difficulty of remembering the past, and will discuss her mother’s experience in Vietnam.

“It’s traumatic. How do we address the past and stay open without reliving it?” she asked. “I am hoping for an opening into this history without provoking further trauma.”

By Denise Mai for The Daily Bruin

While pho rather than film may come to mind when referring to Vietnamese culture, free campus film screenings on Thursday will shed new light on the country’s culture.

The Vietnamese International Film Festival’s UCLA Day will feature free screenings at UCLA in addition to the main festival showings at UC Irvine and in Santa Ana.

The film festival was first organized in 2003 by the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association and the UCLA-based club Vietnamese Language & Culture.

The short films and feature film to be shown during UCLA Day were specifically chosen by a screening committee consisting of festival organizers and one representative from Vietnamese Language & Culture, said third-year nursing student Jessica Do.

“I picked shorts which would appeal more to college kids, like YouTube videos,” Do said about the featured wordplay short “Ninja, Say What?” from Viet Nguyen, which has garnered close to 1.5 million views on YouTube.

Do said that the more somber topics of other films, such as refugee experiences following the Vietnam War, would be harder for students to relate to because of the generational gap. One selected short, which fulfilled her criteria of relatability, is “Dandiggity: Corner Shop Poet,” from Viet Nam Nguyen, the titular Dandiggity and a UCLA alumnus who explores the prospects of life after graduation in the short film.

“The filmmakers for the shorts are mainly second-generation Vietnamese and bring in lighter, happier themes,” said festival co-director Eileen Truong.

Truong said the way these second-generation filmmakers define themselves as Vietnamese in these shorts is especially relevant to the Vietnamese student community.

With an array of forms and themes, including an animated short based on traditional folktales, a short loosely based on a short story by a contemporary writer and a music video, the aim of the selections chosen for UCLA Day is to display the variety and versatility of modern Vietnamese filmmaking, especially to Vietnamese-American students.

“I think for the students it’s beneficial to attend the festival because they can see a wide range of films made by Vietnamese filmmakers to learn more about the culture and be inspired to follow the filmmaking path if they’re interested,” said the film festival’s associate director Helena Tran. “Especially with Vietnamese culture, art is not very supported in our tradition and culture, so we want to bridge that with these films and the festival to inspire them to follow their dreams.”

Following the screenings will be a question and answer session with the director of “Clash,” the action-packed Hollywood blockbuster look-alike that will be the sole feature film of the day. Through this discussion, Tran said students can learn more about the film and why it was made to gain a better idea of how to enter the Vietnamese film industry.

The theme of this year’s festival is “Reel Momentum,” in reference to the Vietnamese film industry as a whole and its gains in development, quality and visibility, Truong said.

“We want students to know there is a film community expanding, a legitimate Vietnamese industry that’s not just copying – brilliant filmmakers and directors whose voices are heard,” Truong said. “If they want to pursue this, we want them to know there is a way.”

Published in Fall 2008, Graduate Quarterly

In the United States, even friends might hesitate to ask the delicate question: "How old are you?" But in Vietnam, that’s the first thing people ask when meeting a stranger, before "What’s your name?" or "What do you do?" You can’t even say hello properly—and saying it properly is essential—until you know the other person’s age, says Merav Shohet, who recently returned from a Fulbright-sponsored field research trip in and around Danang.

Someone slightly older would be called "older brother or sister," she says, but more than 20 years age difference would call for "younger aunt or uncle." Age isn’t the only issue, however. A younger cousin might still be called "older brother" if his father is older than your father. "It can get pretty confusing how you navigate these things," she says.

Acknowledging hierarchy is obviously an important element of this. "Even before babies know how to speak," Merav says, "they’re already being taught to bow or to fold their hands in a respectful gesture when they greet or take leave of someone."

Merav was called "auntie" by the younger people she met during her time in Danang. She lived with a woman who worked for one of her sponsors in Vietnam, the College of Foreign Languages in Danang, and her grown family. Through her and previous connections, Merav was introduced to other families, and she also researched families in developing suburbs and rural areas. Although she conducted a broad-based ethnography, her primary focus was the concept of sacrifice: What did that mean to people of different ages, and how did it become part of the morality of their everyday lives, despite political or class divisions?

One of the primary expressions of sacrifice is the tribute paid to ancestors, and family obligations among the living. Merav was astonished, at first, by "the amount of time and resources Vietnamese devote to the dead." No matter what their religion, an altar honoring deceased members of the family has a prominent place in every home, but more strikingly, perhaps, are the annual tributes. Every single year, everything stops on the anniversary of a death, Merav says. "You take time off from work, and you cook for a minimum of 30, and often 90 people." Besides holding feasts to honor their own deceased parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, people are expected to attend anniversary feasts for members of their extended family. In many cases, families pool resources to make this happen. "It’s a big deal," Merav says, "a way of affirming your social relationships and duties."

At first, these occasions "almost seemed banal," Merav says, "because most of the people being honored had been dead a long time. It seemed like they were going through the motions, a mock spectacle of grief." Then, an unexpected death took place in her host family, changing her relationship to them and her attitudes about the anniversary practice. The family mourned for the first few days, but "once the body was buried, they were not supposed to cry anymore," she says. "Their grief was supposed to go underground."

All of these experiences are recorded in hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of pictures Merav brought back from Danang. She also accumulated 85 hours of videotape and 30 hours of audiotape, the numbers reflecting that the Vietnamese seemed "to like me having the camera but not the tape recorder." This year, she has a data analysis fellowship from the Department of Anthropology to support her work.

During her undergraduate years as an interdisciplinary social studies major at Harvard University, Merav did an ethnographic study of eating disorders for her honors thesis. When she decided on graduate school a few years later, she recalled that "as one of the most meaningful things I ever did." She chose anthropology because of her interest in ethnographic research, social theory, languages, and different cultures.

During her Vietnam fieldwork, city residents often told her "if you want to study culture, you have to go to the countryside." Yet, even in the cities, with their shops and scooters, she says, "they still maintain quite a few traditions, particularly the worshipping of ancestors, and this allowed me to explore the relation between political and personal histories and memories."

By Lauren Roberts for The Daily Bruin

For weavers like Sisilia Sii, the art of textile-making is far more than a simple pastime – it's an art form tightly woven in tradition. Weaving has been an intricate part of Sii's life in Flores, Indonesia, ever since her mother began teaching her the technique when she was a child.

Sii is among the weavers and batik makers featured in the UCLA Fowler Museum's current exhibition "Weavers' Stories From Island Southeast Asia," which focuses on traditional cloth and the women behind the looms. The show runs concurrently with "Nini Towok's Spinning Wheel: Cloth and the Cycle of Life in Kerek, Java," which features work from the community of Kerek, the last region of Java, Indonesia, where batik is made using traditional handwoven cotton cloth.

Both exhibitions will be displayed through Dec. 5.

"In the communities where the textiles are produced, the women who make them are very well-known. It's in fact the main measure of a woman's status in the community – her skill at textile-making," said Roy Hamilton, senior curator of the Fowler Museum's Asian and Pacific Collections.

According to Hamilton, even though these artists are renowned in their communities, their names are commonly omitted from museum textile exhibitions. With their names forgotten by collectors, their work is attributed to their culture at large, rather than the individual artists.

"'Weavers' Stories' is really wonderful because Roy (Hamilton) makes an attempt to attach the person who made the object to the textile itself," said Lily Doan, a conservation of archeological and ethnographic materials graduate student through a partnership with the Getty Institute who also assisted in both textile exhibitions' displays.

Unlike typical museum displays, "Weavers' Stories" offers an intimate opportunity to engage with the artists behind the work. Viewers are shown the weavers' homes through a series of eight short films, each showcasing different communities in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and East Timor.

"This whole project was designed so that weavers could have a voice and could speak directly to the museum-goers. That's why it's primarily a video installation," Hamilton said. "(It's) a chance for the weavers to talk directly about their concerns and their lives – what motivates them, how they continue doing what they do in the face of extreme social and economic change."

One of the weavers is Luisa de Jesus from Tutuala, Timor Leste. In her video, de Jesus recalls tragic memories of war [...] and also of a cloth pattern her ancestors designed after snakeskin believed to also harbor the snake's spirit. According to de Jesus, the cloth is worn only for special ceremonies and is highly dangerous or "hot" to those who cause trouble. After one of her snake-inspired cloths was stolen from her sister's home amid military fighting, de Jesus believes the snake spirit was the cause for the subsequent destruction of the coconut trees.

Meanwhile, weaver Dapong anak Sempurai of Sarawak, Malaysia, reflects on the changing social structure and reduction of weavers in the community as many work in nearby cities.

"It's very interesting that in most of the videos ... it's the women telling their own stories in their native languages," said Agnes Stauber, Fowler Museum digital media analyst. "We didn't 'dub' what they're saying, and you really hear their voices and how they feel about these stories."

Stauber edited the extensive collection of footage with Hamilton's translation assistance for about six months before the interviews were completed.

"Even though I don't understand what they're saying, the native languages, it's nice to hear their voices and hear how they talk about their life stories," Stauber said. "In our culture, I have a feeling that a lot of objects we're surrounded by today don't have these kinds of meanings to us. It's such a great revelation to hear these women talk about the meanings of the textiles."