UCLA Today

There are many people in history who have set out to evoke positive change in their communities and who devote their entire lives to accomplishing their goals, but none have intrigued Professor George Dutton, vice chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, as much as a certain 18th century Vietnamese priest.

Philiphe Binh is the man at the center of Dutton’s current research, and one day Dutton plans to share Binh’s story with the world.

In 1796, Binh left his home in Northern Vietnam determined to convince the king of Portugal to assign a bishop to serve his community. Binh travelled to Lisbon because he knew that the Portuguese ruler held papally-granted authority to appoint bishops to Asia. “He never succeeded,” says Dutton, adding that Binh spent the rest of his life in Portugal, where he finally died in 1833 at the age of 74.

“He’s probably the first Vietnamese person about whom one can write a full-fledged biography, one in which you get a sense of what made him tick as a person,” says Dutton. “There are obviously many significant historical figures in Vietnam before him, but very few of them left a sense of who they were as individuals.”

For the past several years, Dutton has been sifting through endless amounts of documents in search for words written by or about Binh.  Fortunately, the priest left a vast collection of writings, including 35 notebooks containing letters, journals and other materials, which are archived at the Vatican.  “We know whom he liked, whom he hated and what he liked to eat,” says Dutton. “He writes extensively about his life in Portugal, his observations about Portuguese life and his experiences with Portuguese bureaucracy as he went about his mission.”

Binh was in Portugal during the Napoleonic invasion, which forced the Portuguese king to flee to Brazil. Still driven by his dedication to his community in Vietnam, Binh attempted to follow the king by boat. He was forced to turn back, but remained undeterred; later buying a ticket to Brazil to continue his appeals, but unable to travel at the last minute.

“He nearly became the first Vietnamese to travel to the new world,” says Dutton.

Dutton first visited Southeast Asia in 1987 as a junior at Brown University, where he studied history and international relations, and participated in a study abroad program that landed him in Singapore. He says he made the most of his time there by traveling throughout the region, making stops in Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma and Thailand.

“That was my first chance to explore the area, and I fell in love with the place,” says Dutton, who later earned a master’s degree in international relations from Yale University and a PhD in history from the University of Washington. “At an emotional level, Southeast Asia is a fascinating place. There’s such enormous diversity of people, culture, religious practices, tradition. It’s really a place where you can study human society in so many forms.”

Upon graduation, Dutton was hired by a non-profit organization in Washington that was developing and running smoking cessation programs in Vietnam. As part of that internship, in early 1990 he helped lead an American tour group to Vietnam, a nation where tourism was still very much limited.

His passion for Southeast Asia led him to UCLA in 2001. At the time, the university’s Southeast Asian studies program was still very much in its infancy, and Dutton was keen to support its growth and development.

One of the program’s strongest features is its language programs, says Dutton, adding that there are consistently strong enrollment figures for Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Indonesian classes. “For most of those languages, we have the highest enrollment of any language programs in the United States.”

In addition to his research and teaching duties, Dutton, whose work has been published in Xua va Nay, South East Asia Research, the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, to name a few, served as director of the Southeast Asian Languages Program from 2006 to 2009 and chair of the Southeast Asian Studies Interdepartmental Program from 2004 to 2010.

In 2006, Dutton released his first book, The Tay Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam. His latest book is a co-edited volume, Sources of Vietnamese Tradition, translates primary texts that explore the multifaceted history, culture, politics and society of Vietnam. The book, which is scheduled for release in June, is the latest title in the highly respected “Introduction to Asian Civilizations” series published by Columbia University Press.

In addition to his role as vice chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, a position he accepted in 2009,  Dutton recently became chair of the Southeast Asia Council for the Association for Asian Studies. At UCLA he teaches courses on Vietnamese history and aspects of Southeast Asia. Among these is “Religion and Society in Southeast Asian,” which covers folk-religious practices, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, spirit worship, Islam and Hinduism, all of which, says Dutton, have unique manifestations in Southeast Asia.

Dutton is also involved with planning and organizing a number of the free public talks offered by the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, which promotes innovative, interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, and sponsors research, student scholarships and fellowships, language instruction, public lectures and conferences, and outreach to schools and communities.

This includes talks by Lan Chu, an associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College, who will discuss religious protest in Vietnam on May 9 and Muhamad Ali, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside, who will talk about diversity of religious pluralism in Indonesia on May 15. Both talks will be held in Bunche Hall, Room 10383, from 12-1:30 p.m.

By Jessica McQueen for the Daily Bruin

A beautiful half-bird, half-woman creature flies down to Earth to partake in a ritual that signifies her entrance into womanhood. A fame-seeking hunter, Chai, sets out to capture this mythical creature, only to find that he cannot after he falls in love with her.

On Saturday, these scenes will come to life as part of Thai Smakom’s 14th annual Thai Culture Night.

The event will include the drama performance “Fallen” that incorporates traditional dances, instruments and Muay Thai, a Thai form of kickboxing.

Olivia Mekdara, a fourth-year applied linguistics student and co-director of this year’s Thai Culture Night, co-wrote the script for the drama. She said this year’s show differs from those of recent years in that it will focus on traditional as opposed to modern-day Thailand.

“(Co-director Natsha Siri, a second-year ethnomusicology student, and I) wanted a show that would involve the imaginative and the visual. There will be more nature and rural life, creatures and animals. We wanted to create something that would take (the audience) into a different world,” Mekdara said.

According to Mekdara, the drama is loosely based on elements of Thai folklore and Hindu traditions of the “Ramayana,” an ancient Sanskrit epic.

References to these traditions include the half-bird, half-woman hybrid, or kinaree, and Hanuman, a monkey deity.

Mekdara said “Fallen” will include Muay Thai, which is incorporated into fight scenes, as well as a segment for modern hip-hop dances performed by Thai Smakom Modern. The drama will also include Looktoong, an upbeat form of Thai country song and dance, and traditional dances such as the Coconut Dance, or Serng Krapo, from the central and northeastern regions of Thailand.

According to Paricha Duangtaweesub, a third-year chemical engineering student, Serng Krapo originates from the agricultural area of Thailand in the northeastern region of Isaan and is influenced by the Lao culture.

“Even though I grew up in Thailand, I was never actually exposed to the traditional dances like the Coconut Dance. I’m a part of that this year, and every year I learn something new in terms of culture and performances through this culture night,” Duangtaweesub said.

In Serng Krapo, dancers hold two coconut shells and clap them against those of the other performers while kneeling or moving in a formation.

According to Mekdara, this number is one of the club’s most upbeat performances for the night and depicts young women who are reaching maturity.

The event will also incorporate instrumental music created with traditional Thai instruments including the khim, a trapezoidal stringed board that is struck with small hammers, the ching, a small set of finger cymbals, and the sor duang, a high-pitched, two-stringed fiddle.

Alex Wonnaparhown, a third-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, will play the role of a brother in the village in the drama and perform in Serng Krapo and Thai Smakom Modern. He said he views the culture night as an opportunity to pass on Thai culture and traditions from international students to other group members while also presenting it to those not of Thai origin.

“Having an insight into another culture other than your own opens your mind to the other types of people in the world. It adds to you as a person when you know about others,” Wonnaparhown said.

By Meg Sullivan for UCLA Newsroom

Oil-rich countries would seem to have won the mineral equivalent of the lottery, tapping into the kind of vast wealth that their counterparts with more diversified economies could only dream of.

Yet the sheer volume of these revenues can make it easier for authoritarian governments to silence dissent, including clamors for democracy. The wealth can also make these countries less stable than those without oil reserves by leading to violent insurrections when the people who live in a country's oil-rich regions seek a larger share of these immense revenues. And the volatility of oil prices can turn economies that rely too much on oil wealth into harrowing rollercoaster rides.

In a new book, UCLA political scientist Michael L. Ross, director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, ascribes these and other afflictions to what he calls "the oil curse." Ross came to this conclusion after methodically analyzing half a century of data on the political and economic lives of 170 nations around the globe, including the 25 nations that produce 90 percent of the world's oil.

While Ross found no evidence that the curse afflicts all nations with oil wealth, he isolated a troubling cluster of problems that plague countries that are poor or developing when the assets are discovered, especially if those assets are then nationalized.

"The irony of oil wealth is that those countries with the greatest social and economic deficits are also the most vulnerable to the oil curse," said Ross, a professor of political science at the UCLA International Institute's Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

In addition to being more prone to dictatorships, violent insurgencies and pronounced economic swings, countries with oil wealth tilt the labor market toward jobs for men and away from jobs for women, leaving women with less political influence and less influence in the home, Ross reports in "The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations," which will be published March 7 by Princeton University Press.

The dearth of economic opportunities for women in turn results in relatively fast population growth, which dilutes the per capita benefit of oil wealth, he found. Effectively sidelining half the workforce also results in less diversified and stable economies overall. Both effects, Ross said, play into a more subtle economic problem that afflicts these countries: While oil-producing nations have grown at about the same rate as other countries, most have not grown as quickly as would be expected given their wealth.

And where population explosions and workforce underutilization do not account for lackluster economic outcomes, government malfeasance does. Oil wealth tends to get squandered by bloated bureaucracies, corruption and waste, he said. The nationalization of such vast wealth, meanwhile, reduces transparency, preventing citizens from holding their governments accountable. Nationalization also minimizes a government's reliance on taxes and therefore its incentive to be responsive to pressures for accountability.

Ross, a pioneer in the use of modern political-science tools to analyze the problems of resource-rich countries, conducted research on timber in Southeast Asia before devoting five years to "The Oil Curse." He also is active in several groups of scholars, including the Political Instability Task Force and the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators, that use their expertise to warn about the possibilities of conflict around the globe and provide citizen groups with effective measures for political change.

Ross traces the beginnings of the oil curse to the 1970s, when oil-producing nations seized petroleum assets from the seven international oil corporations - the Seven Sisters - that controlled about 85 percent of the world's oil exports in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the leaders who rose to prominence through such nationalization efforts were Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

With the cost of oil having increased roughly tenfold since 1999, the incentive to explore oil reserves in poor and developing countries has grown. Today's global demand for oil is spreading the curse by pushing the petroleum frontier into ever-poorer countries, Ross warns.

"Most states in Africa, the Caspian Basin, Southeast Asia and other regions that have recently begun or are about to begin exporting oil and gas are unfortunately about to confront this vexing dilemma," he said. More than 20 countries are on that list, including Brazil, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Cuba.

The oil curse also threatens to stall Arab Spring impulses in petroleum-producing countries, he warns.

"No country with as much oil as Libya, Bahrain, Oman, Algeria or Iraq has ever made a successful transition from authoritarian to democratic rule," he said.

In fact, he insists that pro-democratic forces in Libya would never have succeeded in overthrowing Gadhafi without NATO support. He is concerned that oil wealth may doom the chances of pro-democracy movements in Russia, Iran, Bahrain and Venezuela.

In Syria, on the other hand, oil reserves were small to begin with, and their depletion over the last five years helps explain why President Bashar Assad has been losing his grip on power, Ross said.

Pernicious as the curse may be, countries can take steps to minimize or avoid the negative fallout of petroleum wealth, he emphasizes.

To neutralize the gender inequality and population growth that can accompany petroleum wealth, Ross urges countries on the petroleum frontier to invest in fields like health and education, which benefit large numbers of women, and to follow the lead of such countries as Morocco in establish meaningful gender quotas for elected office so that women can have enough political influence to encourage their participation in the labor force.

To smooth out the inevitable booms and busts of the oil industry, he urges leaders in these countries to forgo the short-term political benefits of immediate spending in favor of the long-term benefit of sustainable growth. In particular, he advocates that countries consider such counter-cyclical steps as paying down their debts, building up their stabilization funds and fostering growth in non-petroleum sectors.

In some cases, full or partial privatization can boost government accountability by making it harder for the state to hide its oil revenues. But the step works best, he said, if the companies are publicly listed on stock exchanges, as Brazil has done. Such exchanges force companies to disclose balance sheets and adhere to internationally recognized accounting standards, providing a kind of transparency missing with nationalized assets.

Consumers also can play a role. By taking a page from the international effort to curb the market for blood diamonds, concerned citizens in the West can help by insisting that gasoline suppliers disclose their product's country of origin. Boycotting oil from "cursed" countries could bring pressure to bear on autocratic petroleum producers in much the way the 2003 Kimberley Process Certification Scheme ensured diamond consumers that their purchases were not financing war and human rights abuses.

"Just as there was a beginning to the oil curse," Ross said, "there could be an end to it."

Ross will be discussing his new book and how oil wealth shapes - and warps - the politics of countries in the Middle East and Africa at a Zócalo Public Square event on Wednesday, March 14, at the Goethe-Institute Los Angeles. For reservations, visit http://bit.ly/xBoghy.

Related article:

Questions: Michael Ross on the curse of being oil-rich

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.

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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.”