The SOAS GLOCAL CALA 2022/2023 theme Symbol and Society describes the need for symbolic representation in a rapidly changing Asia. As has been the case globally, Asian societies have sought increasingly rapid change, seeking none less than online spaces to contextualize and to legitimize the effects of this rapid change. Here, recent events have mediated this shift to online interaction, a shift which has intensified the development, and the invention, of new symbolisms and symbolic clusters.

Throughout the past decade, and more particularly over the past two years, global changes have exposed these new symbolisms of communication to processes of contestation and (re)interpretation that now present themselves as highly pertinent to anthropological enquiry. Asian language symbolisms have always appeared as representational of their communities, while effectively positioning these communities in global society, yet never have they shown more significance than in the current era, as their intensified usage online, and their qualities for legitimizing Asian identities, seek renewed investigation.

Asian symbolisms pervade the whole spectrum of that which is performatively Asian, and which is at times distinct from, and at times overlaps with, the Non-Asian, yet these symbolisms can interlink the colonized with the decolonized. This is now more the case as the boundaries of Asian symbolisms have been blurred through the use of online textual modes, Linguistically, Anthropologically, and beyond.

The SOAS GLOCAL CALA 2022/2023 thus calls for renewed awareness and interpretations of Asian symbolisms in this new era, and asks that we seek new perspectives of these Asian complex symbolisms, in their global contexts. These interpretations increase in significance as the use of online virtual world texts and textual modes have now assumed an authoritative place over the real world, possibly creating new realities and real worlds that subvert our ideologies of the old. This shift to symbolisms with which to reconceptualize new and old worlds in this current era will surely motivate dialogue.