The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering tones, breathless pace, and compelling musical language, has long captivated musicians, composers, artists, and travelers. Here, Michael Tenzer offers a comprehensive and durable study of this sophisticated musical tradition, focusing on the preeminent twentieth-century genre, gamelan gong kebyar.

Combining the tools of the anthropologist, composer, music theorist, and performer, Tenzer moves fluidly between ethnography and technical discussions of musical composition and structure. In an approach as intricate as one might expect in studies of Western classical music, Tenzer's rigorous application of music theory and analysis to a non-Western orchestral genre is wholly original. Illustrated throughout, the book also includes nearly 100 pages of musical transcription (in Western notation) that correlate with 55 separate tracks compiled on two accompanying compact discs.

The most ambitious work on gamelan since Colin McPhee's classic Music in Bali, this book will interest musicians of all kinds and anyone interested in the art and culture of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Bali.

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Kuo contrasts the economic evolutions of Taiwan and the Philippines as the product of government and industry relations.  The two nations shared many economic similarities-yet Taiwan moved from clientelism to state corporatism, while in the Philippines clientelism remains deeply entrenched.

Kuo's case studies in the textile, plywood, and electronics industries support these general arguments. He finds that clientelism invariably leads to economic problems, while a laissez-faire approach is unpredictable. The best formula for industrial success in a developing nation is close cooperation between business and government.
 

The development of medicine in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries has not been a simple imposition of European scientific medicine, but a complex and negotiated process that drew on Southeast Asian health experts, local medical traditions, and changing national and popular expectations. The contributors to this volume show how the practices of health in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries were mediated by local medical traditions, colonial interests, governments and policies, international interventions, and by a wide range of health agents and intermediaries. Their findings call into question many of the claims based on medicalization and biopolitics that treat change as a process of rupture. While governments, both colonial and national, instituted policies that affected large numbers of people, much health care remained rooted in a more interactive and locally-mediated experience, in which tradition, adaptation and hybridization is as important as innovation and conflict. "Semi-subaltern" Western-trained doctors and varied traditional healers, many of them women, were among the cultural brokers involved in the building of healthcare systems, and helped circulate mixed practices and ideas about medicine and health even as they found their place in new professional and social hierarchies in an era of globalization.

Guns of February shows the Fall of Singapore and Japan's 1941 military campaign in Malaya through the eyes of Japanese soldiers who took part, based on interviews, memoirs, war diaries, and other Japanese-language sources. Although an enormous number of books have been published on Japan's wartime advance into Southeast Asia, few books in English make much use of Japanese sources, and they reveal little of what happened on the Japanese side. In the words of the author, the Japanese"'advance by brigade groups', 'outflank the defence', 'sustain many casualties', and remain altogether a largely faceless mass bicycling their way down to Singapore." In Guns of February some of the voices of these soldiers are finally heard, and they tell a fascinating story. A few of them were professional soldiers who served their country with commitment and dedication, but many were conscripts hoping to stay alive, curious and apprehensive about the countries they entered, and moved by the plight of the people whose cities and towns they sometimes destroyed. Many were young men, interested in girls and in the sights and sounds of Southeast Asia, but also missing their families and the familiar world of Japan. It is a picture far removed from the staple view of the remorseless and fanatic Japanese soldier totally devoted to his Emperor and determined to die for his country. In writing this account of the Japanese advance on Singapore, the author attempted to show the universal humanity of the actors concerned.