front cover of Early Photography in Vietnam
Early Photography in Vietnam
Terry Bennett
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Early Photography in Vietnam is a fascinating and outstanding pictorial record of photography in Vietnam during the century of French rule. In more than 500 photographs, many published here for the first time, the volume records Vietnam’s capture and occupation by the French, the wide-ranging ethnicities and cultures of Vietnam, the country’s fierce resistance to foreign rule, leading to the reassertion of its own identity and subsequent independence. This benchmark volume also includes a chronology of photography (1845–1954), an index of more than 240 photographers and studios in the same period, appendixes focusing on postcards, royal photographic portraits, Cartes de Visite and Cabinet Cards, as well as a select bibliography and list of illustrations.
[more]

front cover of East Asian Development
East Asian Development
Foundations and Strategies
Dwight H. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the early 1960s, fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China’s per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in South Korea’s rural areas were on par with some of the world’s poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkins grapples with both the contemporary and historical causes and consequences of the turnaround, drawing on firsthand experience in the region to explain how Asian countries sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century.

East Asian Development offers a comprehensive view of the region, from Japan and the “Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) to Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and China—a behemoth larger than all the other economies combined. While the overall picture of Asian growth is positive, no single economic policy has been effective regionwide. Interventionist policies that worked well in some countries failed elsewhere. Perkins analyzes income distribution, to uncover why initially egalitarian societies have ended up in very different places, with Japan, for example, maintaining a modest gap between rich and poor while China has become one of Asia’s most unequal economies.

Today, the once-dynamic Japanese and Korean economies are sluggish, and even China shows signs of losing steam. Perkins investigates whether this is a regional phenomenon or typical of all economies at this stage of development. His inquiry reminds us that the uncharted waters of China’s vast economy make predictions of its future performance speculative at best.

[more]

front cover of Eating Her Curries and Kway
Eating Her Curries and Kway
A Cultural History of Food in Singapore
Nicole Tarulevicz
University of Illinois Press, 2013

Discovering Singaporean identity through cooking and cuisine

While eating is a universal experience, for Singaporeans it carries strong national connotations. The popular Singaporean-English phrase "Die die must try" is not so much hyperbole as it is a reflection of the lengths that Singaporeans will go to find great dishes.

In Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, Nicole Tarulevicz argues that in a society that has undergone substantial change in a relatively short amount of time, food serves Singaporeans as a poignant connection to the past. Eating has provided a unifying practice for a diverse society, a metaphor for multiracialism and recognizable national symbols for a fledgling state. Covering the period from British settlement in 1819 to the present and focusing on the post–1965 postcolonial era, Tarulevicz tells the story of Singapore through the production and consumption of food.

Analyzing a variety of sources that range from cookbooks to architectural and city plans, Tarulevicz offer a thematic history of this unusual country, which was colonized by the British and operated as a port within Malaya. Connecting food culture to the larger history of Singapore, she discusses various topics including domesticity and home economics, housing and architecture, advertising, and the regulation of food-related manners and public behavior such as hawking, littering, and chewing gum. Moving away from the predominantly political and economic focus of other histories of Singapore, Eating Her Curries and Kway provides an important alternative reading of Singaporean society.

[more]

front cover of Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia
Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia
Perspectives from Prehistory, History, and Ethnography
Karl L. Hutterer, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1978
Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization on the other hand. Indeed, social scientists are often particularly interested in the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. Economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations that themselves may transcend the economic realm and that otherwise are often difficult to trace.
Yet in social science research in Southeast Asia, the area of economic studies has lagged behind, despite the great study potential represented by the tremendous diversity of its physical and human environment. Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia attempts to take advantage of that opportunity. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, many if not most of the systems organized on very different levels of integration interact with each other. Taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the incredible diversity of economic and social systems that may be investigated in Southeast Asia.
 
[more]

front cover of Electrifying Indonesia
Electrifying Indonesia
Technology and Social Justice in National Development
Anto Mohsin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Electrifying Indonesia tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia’s rapid post–World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies—nation-building and equity—shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens.

In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with science and technology studies to understand a crucial period in modern Indonesian history. He shows that attempts to illuminate the country were inseparable from the effort to maintain the new nation-state, chart its path to independence, and legitimize ruling regimes. In exchange for an often dramatically improved standard of living, people gave their votes, and their acquiescence, to the ruling government.
[more]

front cover of Eliciting Care
Eliciting Care
Health and Power in Northern Thailand
Bo Kyeong Seo
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing almost its entire population with health protection coverage. However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not without its weaknesses. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a district hospital in northern Thailand, Bo Kyeong Seo examines how people in marginal and dependent social positions negotiate the process of obtaining care.
Using the broader concept of elicitation, Seo analyzes the social encounters and forces that shape caregivers. These dynamics challenge dichotomies of subjugation and resistance, consent and coercion, and dependence and autonomy. The intimate and moving stories at the core of Eliciting Care from patients and providers draw attention to a broader, critically important phenomenon at the hospital level. Seo's poignant ethnography engages with feminist theory on the ethics of care, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution to emerging work in the field of health policy and politics.
[more]

front cover of The End of Silence
The End of Silence
Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia
Soe Tjen Marching
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In the late 1960s, between one and two million people were killed by Indonesian president Suharto's army in the name of suppressing communism-and more than fifty years later, the issue of stigmatisation is still relevant for many victims of the violence and their families. The End of Silence presents the stories of these individuals, revealing how many survivors from the period have been so strongly affected by the strategy used by Suharto and his Western allies that these survivors, still afraid to speak out, essentially serve to maintain the very ideology that led to their persecution.
[more]

front cover of Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment
Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment
Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia
Angie Ngoc Tran
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad. Angie Ngọc Trần concentrates on ethnicity, class, and gender to examine how migrant workers belonging to the Kinh, Hoa, Hrê, Khmer, and Chãm ethnic groups challenge a transnational process that coerces and exploits them. Focusing on migrant laborers working in Malaysia, Trần looks at how they carve out a third space that allows them a socially accepted means of resistance to survive and even thrive at times. She also shows how the Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, especially from ethnic minorities; how it manipulates its rural poor into accepting work in Malaysia; and the ways in which both countries benefit from the arrangement.

A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether.

[more]

front cover of Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia
Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia
A. Terry Rambo, Kathleen Gillogly, and Karl L. Hutterrer, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1988
The authors consider the ways in which the high degree of ethnic diversity within the region is related to the nature of tropical Asian environments, on the one hand, and the nature of Southeast Asian political systems and the ways in which they manipulate natural resources, on the other. Rather than focus on defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, this book examines the different social evolutionary contexts in which the phenomenon is manifested.
Companion volume to Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia (Michigan Papers no. 27).
[more]

front cover of Ethnography #9
Ethnography #9
Alan Klima
Duke University Press, 2019
As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the “real” and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less “real,” such as spirit consultations, ghost stories, and haunted gambling. His unconventional, distinctive, and literary form of storytelling uses multiple voices, from ethnographic modes to a first-person narrative in which he channels Northern Thai ghostly tales and the story of a young Thai spirit. This genre alchemy creates strange yet compelling new relations between being and not being, presence and absence, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality. In embracing the speculative as a writing form, Klima summons unorthodox possibilities for truth in contemporary anthropology.
[more]

front cover of Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar
Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar
Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows, eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the short term, these coping strategies may hinder the emergence of the democratic values needed to sustain the country's transition to a more open political environment.

Thawnghmung conducted in-depth interviews and surveys of 372 individuals from all walks of life and across geographical locations in Myanmar between 2008 and 2015. To frame her analysis, she provides context from countries with comparable political and economic situations. Her findings will be welcomed by political scientists and policy analysts, as well by journalists and humanitarian activists looking for substantive, reliable information about everyday life in a country that remains largely in the shadows.
[more]

front cover of Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History
Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History
The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft
Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1976
While following the probes of foreign individuals into various obscure parts of Southeast Asia over the centuries is a diverting and entertaining pastime, the purpose of this volume is to investigate this past with the mind, to question and postulate upon the historical patterns that have developed from earlier study of the area, and to bring concepts from other areas and disciplines to bear on the existing information. The product of this effort, as it is encompassed in this volume, is not an attempt at the definitive study of any of the topics. It is rather a series of speculations on the directions feasible for the further study of the Southeast Asian past. As such, the answers proposed in these essays are really questions. Are the ideas presented here true within the specific historical contexts for which they have been developed? If so, can we use these ideas, or variations of them, to interpret the history of other parts of Southeast Asia? If not, what other ideas may be brought to bear on these situations in order to understand them? The ultimate aim of this volume is thus a challenge to the profession at large not only to criticize what we have done, but also to go beyond our postulations and create new ones. [xi]
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter