BiblioVault - Books about Southeast Asia

Seaways and Gatekeepers

Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c.1600–c.1906

Heather Sutherland

National University of Singapore Press, 2020

The eastern archipelagos of Southeast Asia stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of the inhabitants of this area are often described as “people without history,” in part because colonial borders long ago cut across shared underlying patterns of relations. Yet many of these societies were linked to transoceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some of the world’s most prized commodities once came from territories which were either “stateless” or under the tenuous control of loosely structured polities in this region.

In this book, trade provides the integrating framework for local and regional histories that cover more than three hundred years, from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, when new technologies and changing markets helped lead to Western dominance. This book presents theories from the social sciences and economics that can help liberate scholars from dependence on states as narrative frameworks. It will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, state formation, the evolution of markets, and anthropology.

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Shadow and Sound

The Historical Thought of a Sumatran People

James Siegel

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Atjeh was a kingdom in northern Sumatra which had a long history of rebellion and unrest. As a Mulim Sultanate from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Atjeh engaged in internal political struggle. Since the nineteenth century, Atjeh has been under Dutch, Japanese, or Indonesian control - domination to which the Atjeh never passively yielded. In Shadow and Sound James Siegel arges that the Atjehnese view of history, as expressed in the language of their epic poetry, is based not on the fixing of historical fact, but on a flow of words that is actually immune to the past.

Siegel traces the Atjehnese treatment of history through two epics and a folktale. In his interpretation he goes beyond the idea tht texts such as these are semi-accurate historical documents to show tht tempo, rhythm, rhyme, and melody replace the significance of the content. Furthermore, he uncovers which Atjehnese frameworks - native genres ranging from dream interpretation to conventions of braggadocio
- illuminate their own sense of history.

Siegel first translates one of the important remaining epics on a historical topic, the Hikajat Potjoet Moehamat, and provides an analysis based on the narratve, prosodic structure and his observation of the recitation of epics. He then translates and analyzes two other pieces: a tale entitled Si Meuseukin's Wedding and another epic, the last popular one, Hikajat Prang Sabil. Finally he indicates how a similar treatment of history continues in present-day Atjeh. The analyses demonstrate that in the context of centuries of violence and disruption the Atjehnese have maintained an ability to speak of the past in such ways that it is turned into triumph, not by dwelling on heroic victories but by controlling language.

Siegel's way of looking at the relationship between history and literature will be valuable not only in anthropology but in literary history and comparative studies in literature and politics as well.

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Sidewalk City

Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City

Annette Miae Kim

University of Chicago Press, 2015

For most, the term “public space” conjures up images of large, open areas: community centers for meetings and social events; the ancient Greek agora for political debates; green parks for festivals and recreation. In many of the world’s major cities, however, public spaces like these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. With increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world.

With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced.

In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.

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Siege of the Spirits

Community and Polity in Bangkok

Michael Herzfeld

University of Chicago Press, 2016

What happens when three hundred alleged squatters go head-to-head with an enormous city government looking to develop the place where they live? As anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows in this book, the answer can be surprising. He tells the story of Pom Mahakan, a tiny enclave in the heart of old Bangkok whose residents have resisted authorities’ demands to vacate their homes for a quarter of a century. It’s a story of community versus government, of old versus new, and of political will versus the law.

Herzfeld argues that even though the residents of Pom Mahakan have lost every legal battle the city government has dragged them into, they have won every public relations contest, highlighting their struggle as one against bureaucrats who do not respect the age-old values of Thai/Siamese social and cultural order. Such values include compassion for the poor and an understanding of urban space as deeply embedded in social and ritual relations. In a gripping account of their standoff, Herzfeld—who simultaneously argues for the importance of activism in scholarship—traces the agile political tactics and styles of the community’s leadership, using their struggle to illuminate the larger difficulties, tensions, and unresolved debates that continue to roil Thai society to this day.

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Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour

Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities

Edited by Dwi Noverini Djenar and Jack Sidnell

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages.

Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, defines, and creates a field for working out social relations. Because this field of study in sociolinguistics historically has focused on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on references to the addressee—for example, the choice between tu and vous when addressing someone in French. This book uses the study of Southeast Asian languages to theorize interlocutor reference more broadly, significantly deepening our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. As the authors explain, Southeast Asian systems exceed in complexity and nuance the well-described cases of Europe in two basic ways. First, in many languages of Southeast Asia, a speaker must select an appropriate reference form not only for other/addressee but also for self/speaker. Second, in these languages, in addition to pronouns, speakers draw upon a range of common and proper nouns including names, kin terms, and titles, in referring to themselves and the addressee. Acts of interlocutor reference, therefore, inevitably do more than simply identify the speaker and addressee; they also convey information about the proposed relation between interlocutors. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanized communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this is an important contribution to the regional linguistic and anthropological literature.

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Silenced Voices

Uncovering a Family’s Colonial History in Indonesia

Inez Hollander

Ohio University Press, 2008

Like a number of Netherlanders in the post–World War II era, Inez Hollander only gradually became aware of her family’s connections with its Dutch colonial past, including a Creole great-grandmother. For the most part, such personal stories have been, if not entirely silenced, at least only whispered about in Holland, where society has remained uncomfortable with many aspects of the country’s relationship with its colonial empire.

Unlike the majority of memoirs that are soaked in nostalgia for tempo dulu, Hollander’s story sets out to come to grips with her family’s past by weaving together personal records with historical and literary accounts of the period. She seeks not merely to locate and preserve family memories, but also to test them against a more disinterested historical record. Hers is a complicated and sometimes painful personal journey of realization, unusually mindful of the ways in which past memories and present considerations can be intermingled when we seek to understand a difficult past. Silenced Voices is an important contribution to the literature on how Dutch society has dealt with its recent colonial history.

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Singaporean Creatures

Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City

Edited by Timothy Barnard

National University of Singapore Press, 2024

An analysis of the human-animal relationship in post-colonial Singapore.

Modern Singapore is the Garden City, a biophilic urban space that includes a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans, even polar bears. Singaporean Creatures brings together historians to contemplate this human-animal relationship and how it has shaped society—socially, economically, politically, and environmentally. It is a work of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives, and events involving animals provide insight into how the larger society has been formed and developed over the last half-century. The interaction of all Singaporean creatures thus provides a lens through which we can understand the creation of a modern and urban nation-state, shaped by the forces of the Anthropocene.

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Singapore's Grand Strategy

Cheng Guan Ang

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

New insight into the defense history of Singapore.

Even small states can have grand strategies. Singapore, despite its poor natural resource endowment, small population, and size, has often been described as punching above its weight in international affairs. Part of this stems from the way Singapore strategically integrates the different diplomatic, political, and defense-oriented tools at its disposal. To explore this, Singapore’s Grand Strategy offers a fresh and useful diplomatic, defense, and security history of Singapore, from its independence in 1965 through today’s period of strategic realignment.

Most previous studies of grand strategy have focused on super- or at least middle powers, but this book presents an important contribution to international relations and strategic studies by showing how the concept can help explain the strategic posture and achievements of small states as well. Moreover, he brings a historian's perspective to a subject usually tackled by political scientists. The result will be useful and important for scholars in these fields.

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Siting Postcoloniality

Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere

Pheng Cheah and Caroline Hau, editors

Duke University Press, 2023

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center-periphery, colonizer-colonized, and developed-developing. Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony; the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule; Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism; and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the Sinosphere. Challenging fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies, this volume forcefully suggests that postcolonial theory needs to be rethought.

Contributors. Pheng Cheah, Dai Jinhua, Caroline S. Hau, Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Wendy Larson, Liao Ping-hui, Lin Pei-yin, Lo Kwai-Cheung, Lui Tai-lok, Pang Laikwan, Lisa Rofel, David Der-wei Wang, Erebus Wong, Robert J. C. Young

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Social Forces in Southeast Asia

Cora DuBois

University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Social Forces in Southeast Asia was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Forces are at work in Southeast Asia which deserve the most judicious attention of diplomats, the best analysis by social scientists, and a highly serious interest on the part of all responsible people in the Western World."

The application of cultural anthropology to problems of world politics and economics presented here has been made by a ranking authority in the field. Dr. Du Bois is the author of The People of Alor and before World War Two she was anthropologist at Sarah Lawrence College. During the war she was associated with the Office of Strategic Services in charge of Indonesian and South Asian research, with headquarters at Kandy, Ceylon. Since October 1945 she has been chief of the Southern Areas Branch, Office of Intelligence Research, Department of State.

Siam, Burma, French Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesian Archipelago, and the Philippines offer a geographic unit rich in material for the social scientist, including, as it does, more diverse cultural strains than any other area of the world. The author considers the impact of European colonization on the region, analyzes the tensions created by value difference between East and West, and offers predictions on the course Southeast Asia will take in the future.

Dr. Du Bois has risen above statistical science and narrow specialization to wide interpretation and application. The book is full of exciting theses and suggestive ideas which should open new areas for both factual investigation and creative speculation.

Dr. Du Bois sees a growing consciousness of nationality in these states of Southeast Asia—and eagerness to work out their common problems and a desire to participate in the United Nations, but she does not minimize the grave economic difficulties of the area or the chance that it will become another powder keg if the states become pawns of the big powers.

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Social Forces in Southeast Asia

Cora Du Bois

Harvard University Press

Songs for the Spirits

Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam

Barley Norton

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.

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Southeast Asia After the Cold War

A Contemporary History

Ang Cheng Guan

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

International relations in Southeast Asia after 1990 can be understood in terms of a United States dominated security order, and the regional structure created by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But as the Cold War recedes further into the past, that order is increasingly under siege, with a new global strategic rebalancing underway. The region is forced to contemplate new risks and the emergence of new rivalries and conflicts.
With Southeast Asia After the Cold War, Ang Cheng Guan offers a complete, analytically informed contemporary history that covers the whole region, tracing developments since 1990 and highlighting change, continuity, and the larger context in which decisions have been made. Crucial as a tool for making sense of the dynamics of the region, this account of Southeast Asia’s international relations will also be of immediate relevance to those in the United States and elsewhere who engage with the region, with its young, dynamic population, and its strategic position at between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

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Southeast Asia on Screen

From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)

Gaik Cheng Khoo

Amsterdam University Press, 2020

After the end of World War II when many Southeast Asian nations gained national independence, and up until the Asian Financial Crisis, film industries here had distinctive and colourful histories shaped by unique national and domestic conditions. Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998) addresses the similar themes, histories, trends, technologies and sociopolitical events that have moulded the art and industry of film in this region, identifying the unique characteristics that continue to shape cinema, spectatorship and Southeast Asian filmmaking in the present and the future. Bringing together scholars across the region, chapters explore the conditions that have given rise to today’s burgeoning Southeast Asian cinemas as well as the gaps that manifest as temporal belatedness and historical disjunctures in the more established regional industries.

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Southeast Asian Anthropologies

National Traditions and Transnational Practices

Edited by Eric C. Thompson and Vineeta Sinha

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

Anthropology is a flourishing discipline in Southeast Asia. Anthropologists in the region spent the second half of the twentieth century establishing the field, and now, as we move further into the twenty-first century, a new generation is working to shift the discipline from European and American narratives to a Southeast Asian locus. There has been a vigorous debate and a wide range of suggestions on what might be done to break from the Euro-, andro-, hetero-, and other centrisms of the discipline and move to an emerging world anthropologies perspective. But actually transforming anthropology requires going beyond mere critique.

Southeast Asian Anthropologies outlines the practices and paradigms of anthropologists working from and within Southeast Asia. It addresses three overlapping issues: the historical development of unique traditions of research, scholarship, and social engagement across diverse anthropological communities of the region; the opportunities and challenges faced by Southeast Asian anthropologists as they practice their craft in different institutional and political contexts; and the emergence of locally grounded, intraregional, transnational linkages and practices undertaken by Southeast Asian-based anthropologists. It is a much-needed assessment of the state of the discipline that will be an invaluable tool for anthropologists navigating a new era of development and challenges.

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Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture

Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power

Edited by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology, and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artifact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.

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The Sovereign Trickster

Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte

Vicente L. Rafael

Duke University Press, 2022

In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism. He is less concerned with defining Duterte as a fascist, populist, warlord, and traditional politician than he is with examining what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. Locating Duterte's rise within the context of counterinsurgency, neoliberalism, and the history of electoral violence, while drawing on Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics, Rafael outlines how Duterte weaponizes death to control life. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex account of Duterte’s regime and the social conditions that allow him to enjoy continued support.

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Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom

The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699

Sher Banu Khan

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

The Islamic kingdom of Aceh was ruled by queens for half of the 17th century. Was female rule an aberration? Unnatural? A violation of nature, comparable to hens instead of roosters crowing at dawn? Indigenous texts and European sources offer different evaluations. Drawing on both sets of sources, this book shows that female rule was legitimised both by Islam and adat (indigenous customary laws), and provides original insights on the Sultanah’s leadership, their relations with male elites, and their encounters with European envoys who visited their court. The book challenges received views on kingship in the Malay world and the response of indigenous polities to east-west encounters in Southeast Asia’s Age of Commerce.

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Sovereignty and the Sea

How Indonesia Became an Archipelagic State

John G. Butcher and R. E. Elson

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

Until the mid-1950s nearly all of the sea between the far-flung islands of the Indonesian archipelago was open to ships of all nations, but in 1957, the Indonesian government declared that it had absolute sovereignty over all the waters lying within straight baselines drawn between the outermost islands of Indonesia. In this single step, Indonesia made its lands and seas a unified entity for the first time, a claim formally recognized in 1982 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Sovereignty and the Sea explores how Indonesia succeeded in its extraordinary claim despite its low international profile. John G. Butcher and R. E. Elson reveal that at the heart of Indonesia’s archipelagic campaign was a small group of Indonesian diplomats whose dogged persistence, negotiating skills, and willingness to make difficult compromises resulted in Indonesia becoming the greatest archipelagic state in the world.

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Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization

Channeling the Flow of Life

Deborah E. Tooker

Amsterdam University Press, 2012

Based on the author's extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically reexamines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices have played in maintaining cultural autonomy. The book expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems.

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Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia

Worlds Ever More Enchanted

Edited by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

In dramatic contrast to the reported growing influence of doctrinal and fundamentalist forms of religion in some parts of Southeast Asia, the predominantly Buddhist societies of the region are witnessing an upsurge of spirit possession cults and diverse forms of magical ritual. This is found in many social strata, including the urban poor, rising middle classes and elite groups, and across the different political systems of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. This volume reveals both the central historical place of spirit possession rituals in the Buddhist cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and their important contemporary roles to enhance prosperity and protection. It examines the increasing prominence of spirit mediumship and divination across the region by exploring the interplay of neoliberal capitalism, visual media, the network cultures of the Internet, and the politics of cultural heritage and identity.

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Staging Asia

The Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Theatre

Manjusha Kuruppath

Leiden University Press, 2016

In the early modern Dutch Republic, three playwrights wrote dramas based on political revolutions that were occurring at that same time in Asia. Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the transmission of the stories surrounding the seventeenth-century Asian events and their ultimate appearance in Europe as Dutch dramas. Manjusha Kuruppath explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these works and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels, including some connected to the Dutch East India Company, that the dramatists relied on to gather information for their plays.

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Stone Masters

Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia

Edited by Holly High

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

A new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism.

Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. Not just a collection of exemplary ethnographies, Stone Masters is also a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels, and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery, and the social theory of animism globally.

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The Story of Southeast Asia

Edited by Eric Thompson

National University of Singapore Press, 2024

A complete narrative history of Southeast Asia.

The oldest figurative cave paintings in the world are found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Hand stencils and animals painted some 45,000 years ago attest to a long history of human creativity. The Story of Southeast Asia tells how the peoples of the region have crafted their diverse societies and cultures over thousands of years. Southeast Asia has been a remarkable crossroads of global connections for millennia. Whereas other regions have been defined by centralizing forces, Southeast Asia’s story is one of complex networks of trade, ideas, and social relationships. Southeast Asians have created, localized, and remade their own cultural values by drawing on influences from around the world.

Marshalling the latest literature from anthropology, archaeology, history, and other disciplines, Eric C. Thompson highlights broad themes that cut across history: including the making—and evasion—of states, adoption of diverse religious practices, tolerance and flexibility regarding gender, processes of forging modern identities, struggles over sovereignty, and the making of modern nations in a postcolonial world. This readable, single-volume history reckons with the narrative pull of familiar colonial and national perspectives but maintains a regional and deep-historical focus. It will be a stimulating read for scholars as well as students and newcomers to Southeast Asian history.

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Strong Soldiers, Failed Revolution

The State and Military in Burma, 1962-88

Yoshihiro Nakanishi

National University of Singapore Press, 2013

General Ne Win’s state reformation in the name of the “Burmese Way to Socialism” contributed to the expansion of the political role of the Myanmar Armed Forces, the tatmadaw, but the underlying dynamics of this change remain poorly understood. Drawing on propaganda publications, profiles of the country’s political elites, and original documents in Burma’s military archives, Yoshihiro Nakanishi offers a fresh look at the involvement of the tatmadaw in Burma’s ideological discourse and civil-military relations.

The tatmadaw’s anti-communist propaganda during the 1950s was a key element in state ideology under the Ne Win regime, and the direct participation of tatmadaw officers in the Burma Socialist Programme Party and government ministries at the national and local level transformed the political party system and civilian bureaucracy. Personal relationships — between Ne Win and the tatmadaw officer corps, and within the military — were central to the growing influence of the military, and to the outcome of the political crisis and subsequent military coup d’état in 1988.

Nakanishi’s discussion of these processes reveals many heretofore-unknown facts about this “dark age” in the country’s political history, and highlights its institutional legacy for the post-1988 military regime and the reformist government that succeeded it. His thought-provoking conclusions are significant for Southeast Asia specialists and for students of politics generally, and his insights will be useful for anyone seeking to engage with Myanmar as it comes to terms with an outside world it once kept at arm’s length.

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Studies in Malaysian Oral and Musical Traditions

William P. Malm and Amin Sweeney

University of Michigan Press, 1974

The first of two studies included is “Music in Kelantan, Malaysia and Some of Its Cultural Implications,” by William P. Malm. Kelantan is the northernmost province on the east coast of Malaysia. It is considered to be the most orthodox area in a nation whose state religion is Islam. At the same time it must be noted that it borders to the north with the Buddhist country of Thailand and to the west is the Malaysian province of Perak whose jungles and mountains contain many “pagan” tribal traditions. Beyond Perak is Kedah with its larger Indian and Chinese populations and to the south is Trengganu where some Indonesian traits are still to be found. It is in this context that Malm’s study of music is made.

The second study is “Professional Malay Story-Telling: Some Questions of Style and Presentation” by Amin Sweeney. In view of the hitherto almost exclusive concern with the content of such tales as those of Sang Kanchil or Pak Pandir, Sweeney throws some light on the form, style, and presentation of oral Malay literature, with special reference to that class of story-telling popularly known as penglipur lara, or what Winstedt termed “folk romances.”

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Subversions of the American Century

Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States

Adam Lifshey

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States argues that the moment the United States became an overseas colonial power in 1898, American national identity was redefined across a global matrix. The Philippines, which the United States seized at that point from Spain and local revolutionaries, is therefore the birthplace of a new kind of America, one with a planetary reach that was, most profoundly, accompanied by resistance to that reach by local peoples.

Post-1898 Filipino literature in Spanish testifies crucially to this foregrounding fact of American global power, for it is the language of that tradition that speaks directly to the reality of one empire having wrested land from another. Yet this literature is invisible in American Studies programs, Asian Studies programs, Spanish and English departments, and everywhere else. Subversions of the American Century will change that. After Subversions, students and scholars in various American Studies disciplines as well as Asian, Spanish, and Comparative Literature fields will find it necessary to revisit and revamp the basic parameters by which they approach their subjects.

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The Sulu Zone

The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 1768-1898 (Second Edition)

James F. Warren

National University of Singapore Press, 2007

First published in 1981, The Sulu Zone deals with a fascinating geographical, cultural and historical "border zone" centered on the Sulu and Celebes Seas between 1768 an 1898, and its complex interactions with China and the West. The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system.

His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid "forward movement" of colonialism and modernity. It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers and traders. Often neglected by historians, the responses of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia.

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Sundanese Print Culture and Modernity in 19th Century West Java

Mikihiro Moriyama

National University of Singapore Press, 2005

Sundanese Print Culture and Modernity in 19th Century West Java traces the development of modern printed books written in Sundanese, the dominant language in West Java, Indonesia, and the mother tongue of about 30 million people.

Starting with the 'discovery' of Sundanese by Europeans in the early 19th century, Mikihiro Moriyama follows the developments in the ensuing century when a small group of Dutch scholars and colonial officials reshaped the language and its literature over the next one hundred years. Schools taught Sundanese, and printed materials based on western concepts began to influence indigenous writing and oral tradition. The imposition of European standards of literary aesthetics shaped a modernity that rejected traditional knowledge in favour of rational and empirical paradigms. Interest in traditional poetry and its mythologies declined, and new forms of prose, including novels, captured the attention of the reading public. These materials promoted useful knowledge and morality, and encouraged deference and loyalty towards colonial authority.

Early in the 20th century, the establishment of the Commissie voor de Inlandsche School- en Volkslectuur (Committee for Indigenous Schoolbooks and Popular Reading Books), a government-subsidised institution, provided the growing number of literate people in the Indies with 'good' and 'appropriate' reading materials. Its development marked the end of an era when Sundanese writing competed with Western-style schools and publications, and signalled the triumph of the new colonial modernity.

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Surabaya, City of Work

A Socioeconomic History, 1900–2000

Howard Dick

Ohio University Press, 2002

Surabaya is Indonesia’s second largest city but is not well known to the outside world. Yet in 1900, Surabaya was a bigger city than Jakarta and one of the main commercial centers of Asia. Collapse of sugar exports during the 1930s depression, followed by the Japanese occupation, revolution, and independence, brought on a long period of stagnation and retreat from the international economy. Not until the export boom of the 1990s did Surabaya regain prominence as Southeast Asia’s leading non–capital–city industrial area. Previous thinking on Indonesia is being reassessed in light of recent political and economic upheaval. Surabaya, City of Work offers an alternative to the Jakarta-centric focus of most writing on the country. It is a multifaceted view of a fascinating and complex city in the dimensions of time and space, economy and society, and the current transition toward decentralization makes it highly topical. Exploration of this eventful economic history gives new insight into Indonesia’s modern economic development. Industrialization is recognized as being associated with rapid urbanization, but this is the first study of Indonesia from an explicitly urban perspective. Surabaya, City of Work takes a broad approach that links industrialization to socioeconomic trends, the increasing role of government, changing land use, and trade patterns. This well–illustrated local history encompassing national events and trends will be a central work on Indonesia for years to come.

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Surviving against the Odds

Village Industry in Indonesia

S. Ann Dunham

Duke University Press, 2009

President Barack Obama’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Dunham’s dissertation adviser Alice G. Dewey and her fellow graduate student Nancy I. Cooper undertook the revisions at the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The result is Surviving against the Odds, a book based on Dunham’s research over a period of fourteen years among the rural metalworkers of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia’s population. Surviving against the Odds reflects Dunham’s commitment to helping small-scale village industries survive; her pragmatic, non-ideological approach to research and problem solving; and her impressive command of history, economic data, and development policy. Along with photographs of Dunham, the book includes many pictures taken by her in Indonesia.

After Dunham married Lolo Soetoro in 1967, she and her six-year-old son, Barack Obama, moved from Hawai‘i to Soetoro’s home in Jakarta, where Maya Soetoro was born three years later. Barack returned to Hawai‘i to attend school in 1971. Dedicated to Dunham’s mother Madelyn, her adviser Alice, and “Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field,” Surviving against the Odds centers on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar. Focusing attention on the small rural industries overlooked by many scholars, Dunham argued that wet-rice cultivation was not the only viable economic activity in rural Southeast Asia.

Surviving against the Odds includes a preface by the editors, Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, and a foreword by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, each of which discusses Dunham and her career. In his afterword, the anthropologist and Indonesianist Robert W. Hefner explores the content of Surviving against the Odds, its relation to anthropology when it was researched and written, and its continuing relevance today.

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Systemic Silencing

Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia

Katharine E. McGregor

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system’s history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself.

Here, Katharine E. McGregor not only untangles the history of the system during the war, but also unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other.

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