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This book is about a fundamental aspect of the feminist project in the Philippines: rethinking the Filipino woman. It focuses on how contemporary women's organizations have represented and refashioned the Filipina in their campaigns to improve women's status by locating her in history, society and politics; imagining her past, present and future; representing her in advocacy; and identifying strategies to transform her. The drive to alter the situation of women included a political aspect (lobbying and changing legislation) and a cultural one (modifying social attitudes and women's own assessments of themselves). In this work Mina Roces examines the cultural side of the feminist agenda: how activists have critiqued Filipino womanhood and engaged in fashioning an alternative woman.How did activists theorize the Filipina and how did they use this analysis to lobby for pro-women's legislation or alter social attitudes? What sort of Filipina role models did women's organizations propose, and how were these new ideas disseminated to the general public? What cultural strategies did activists deploy in order to gain a mass following? Analyzing data from over seventy five interviews with feminist activists, radio and television shows, romance novels, periodicals and books published by women's organizations and feminist nuns, comics, newsletters, and personal papers, Roces shows how representations of the Filipino woman have been central to debates about women's empowerment. She explores the transnational character of women's activism and offers a seminal study on the important contributions of feminist Catholic nuns.Women's Movements and the Filipina provides an original and passionate account of the contemporary feminist movement in the Philippines, bringing to light how women's organizations have initiated change in cultural attitudes and had a significant impact on contemporary Philippine society.

Here was Once the Sea features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction guest edited by Rina Garcia Chua, Esther Vincent Xueming, and Ann Ang. While many of these works are comprised mostly of anglophone texts, which reflects the aspirations of regional writers to speak across borders and to the globe at large, several native languages appear on these pages. Here, Southeast Asia refers to the constituent nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as their associated diasporas. The writers and the peoples of the region live and remember more profoundly than we know. Their work explores the ecological across a multiscalar spectrum, featuring both geological landscapes and visceral botanical or animal entanglements, inheriting histories and spiritualities that defy and disrupt modern epistemologies. Together they represent a chorus of offerings, first and foremost to the land and the sea; and secondly to you, our readers, as an invitation to attend to the urgencies and travails of our homes. These are the stories we share and the stories we carry in our pasiking (basket) as we follow movements towards our destinies. These are the stories that sing of hope—for ourselves and for our world; ones that we whisper silently to ourselves as we touch our lips to the familiar earth and wait for the incoming monsoon rain to fall gently on our backs, our fields, our rivers.

In a tour-de-force study of sixty years of cinematic entertainment, Silver Screens and Golden Dreams traces the veins of Burmese popular movies across three periods in history: the colonial era, the parliamentary democracy period, and the Ne Win Socialist years. Author Jane M. Ferguson engages cinema as an interrogator of mainstream cultural values, providing political and cultural context to situate the films as artistic endeavors and capitalist products. Exploring how filmmakers eschewed colonial control and later selectively toed the ideological lines of the Burmese Way to Socialism, Silver Screens and Golden Dreams offers a serious yet enjoyable investigation of leisure during difficult times of transition and political upheaval. By skillfully blending historical and anthropological approaches, Ferguson shows how Burmese cinema presents a lively, unique take on the country's social history.The world tends to see Myanmar (Burma) as an ancient, idyllic land of emerald-green rice paddies dotted with golden pagodas, yet sadly tarnished by a contemporary reality of grinding poverty, a decades-long civil war, and the most enduring military dictatorship in modern history. Burmese society is frequently stereotyped as isolated, hidebound to Buddhist cultural foundations, or embroiled in military rule and civil strife. Its thriving, cosmopolitan film industry not only questions such orientalist archetypes but also provides an incisive lens to explore social history through everyday popular practices. Emerging from a vibrant literary and performing arts scene, Burmese talent and ingenuity spurred a century of near-continuous motion picture production. Dozens of local film companies have churned out thousands of films, bringing to life popular folk tales, tear-jerking dramas, and epic adventures for millions of adoring fans. Even during the purportedly isolated Burmese Way to Socialism years, local movie production continued, and ticket sales even increased. Glamorous stars adopted international fashions, yet inspired Burmese cultural pride in the face of foreign economic and political domination. From silent films depicting moral perils, to Hollywood remakes, to socialist realism and ethnic unity films, locally made motion pictures have captured the imaginations of Burmese people for over a century.

Confronting Christianity explores the history of religious encounters between Christian missionaries and Thai Buddhists during the nineteenth century, a period of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia that fundamentally transformed Siamese society and religious institutions. From about 1830 onward, discussions on religion became a central arena of conflict between rival regimes of knowledge in Thailand, confronting traditional Buddhist views on nature and man's existence with the ideals and practices of science and rationalism coming from the West. Protestant missionaries, mostly from the United States, became important brokers of knowledge, as one of their strengths was the ability to offer religion in tandem with modern science and technology. Historian Sven Trakulhun explains why the intrusion of evangelical Christianity strengthened the position of Theravāda Buddhism rather than undermining people's belief in traditional forms of worship. Based on a wide range of Thai and Western primary sources, the volume describes how Christian missionaries unwittingly contributed to the making of what scholars of Buddhism have later rendered as “Buddhist modernism.” In response to Christian assaults on the traditional cosmology, Buddhist reformers fashioned an orthodox version of Buddhism that acknowledged the findings of modern science and at the same time deemed even more rational than Christianity. This new orthodoxy became a major source of moral authority for Thai kings and an important ideology for pushing their claims for religious leadership in the Theravāda Buddhist world. Trakulhun offers a thorough study of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism and places the history of Siamese Theravāda Buddhism within the broad context of global intellectual history.

The Trade-Offs of Legal Status explores the costs, risks, and unfreedoms produced alongside migrant regularization in Southeast Asia. In 2017, Thailand's military government enacted a new migration law cracking down on unauthorized employment, coupled with an extensive regularization campaign seeking to grant legal status to migrants already working in the country. Between 2017 and 2018, more than a million migrants gained legal status. Based on multisited ethnography of that time, and informed by a decade of experience researching migrant communities in Cambodia, Maryann Bylander describes the experiences of Cambodians confronting Thailand's intensifying migration infrastructure. In this evolving landscape, migrations are increasingly shaped by formalized documents, complex systems of brokerage, collateralized debts, and state control.Traversing across the Cambodia-Thai borderlands, the book covers a wide range: from deportation centers; to pop-up documentation sites; to safe migration trainings; to international policy meetings; and to migrant communities. Through vivid, accessible storytelling, the author describes the experiences of Cambodians as they navigate Thailand's increasingly strict and costly documentation regime. While Cambodians want legal status for the protections they believe it will offer, Bylander shows that documentation has ambiguous and often unwanted effects—documents are easily invalidated, can create harsh constraints, and routinely lead to new debts. At the same time, documents do not always offer meaningful protection, or improve working conditions. Together, these stories challenge the discourses and programming of “safe migration” campaigns, which are a growing area of engagement for nongovernmental and international organizations. While safe-migration efforts assume that regular, orderly migrations will produce safer, more beneficial migrations, the experiences of Cambodians in Thailand suggest otherwise.The Trade-Offs of Legal Status is the first book to explore the lives of Cambodian migrants in Thailand, offering insight to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, development studies, geography, migration studies, and Southeast Asian studies. Through its grounded exploration of a case of migration, the book offers a rare ethnographic portrait of migration and development in Southeast Asia.

Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean draws attention to the varied, historically contingent, and sometimes competing, arguments for and about sovereignty that operated in the Pali arena during the first half of the second millennium AD. It was a time of expanding interaction within the Indian Ocean just prior to Portuguese colonial presence in Southern Asia. Developing a linked series of case studies and examining territories now subsumed within the nation-states of Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, and Thailand, Blackburn examines sovereign arguments expressed textually, as well as in the built environment, by persons with an interest in the teachings and institutions associated with Gotama Buddha. These cases show that no single model of Buddhist-inflected sovereignty dominated the Pali arena during this time, and that there was no stable vision of “Buddhist kingship.” Rather, over time, there was an accrual of possible models and pathways for argumentation about how sovereigns could and should relate to buddha-sāsana. Taking inspiration from diverse sources transmitted through multiple forms and media, arguments for and about sovereignty in the Pali arena were contested and rapidly changing. As the Indian Ocean increasingly shaped the flow of people, objects, and ideas, more peoples and territories participated in the Pali arena, attracted by its intellectual and aesthetic resources.Drawing on extensive scholarship and a wide range of multilingual source materials from premodern Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, Anne M. Blackburn develops innovative conclusions about the relationships between textuality, sovereignty, maritime connectivity, and material culture in each of these areas. The book contributes simultaneously to several fields of study: the intellectual history of Southern Asia, literary and historical scholarship on Buddhism, and historical studies of the Indian Ocean. By offering accessible yet in-depth analysis, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean connects research fields and introduces new interpretive possibilities for the study of sovereignty, politics, premodern textual cultures, and Buddhism.

Around the first century BCE, Buddhist monks formed monasteries and established relationships with kings and lay people. The rules monks live by, the Vinaya, are a pivotal source of meaning for them and their dealings with society and form the basis of multiple monasticisms across geographical regions and throughout history. The ways in which the Vinaya is understood and practiced, therefore, must take into account the kind of monasticism that emerges from it. In Living with the Vinaya, Ryosuke Kuramoto examines the process of creating monasticism in contemporary Myanmar by focusing on how monks acquire, possess, and consume material goods.To live as a monk means to obtain resources from society and to own and use these according to monastic rules. Over the centuries, as monks interacted more with the world beyond the monastery, the question of what a monk “should be” became a concern for not only monks, but also government authorities and lay people. How monks interpreted and observed the Vinaya became a question of legitimacy and power. Kuramoto's ethnographic analysis reveals the constant (re)creation of monasticism in Myanmar resulting from the interactions between monks and these groups in response to this question. He identifies some of the key mechanisms by which monasticism and broader Buddhist institutions are created and transformed and concludes that monastic governance is inseparable from the Buddhist state and the society that surrounds it.

The encounter of indigenous history-making tradition with Western historical practice has been long neglected in Southeast Asian scholarship. Theara Thun offers one of the first critical and systematic studies of the interface between these two distinctive modes of historical presentation and their impacts on society. By examining historical discourses on Cambodia through the precolonial, colonial, and post-independence years, he presents a compelling account of indigenous scholars, with varying perspectives, who advocated competing versions of history. Thun argues that new discourses about national history emerged by drawing on, reconfiguring, combining, or, in many cases, rejecting older discourses of precolonial historical scholarship.Epistemology of the Past examines how certain types and forms of historical knowledge are created, understood, and used within a given context and how that knowledge has evolved over time. The book brings together and critically explores a large collection of original manuscripts and printed texts—notably, Khmer chronicle manuscripts and colonial-era works of French scholar-officials. Thun's analysis discloses multilayers of intellectual traditions and diverse views of Cambodian and, more broadly, Southeast Asian scholars engaging with European colonial scholarship. In addition to contributing to the multidisciplinary field of Cambodian and Southeast Asian studies, Epistemology of the Past will be essential reading for those interested in intellectual history, transculturation, historiography, intertextual studies, narrative studies, literature, colonialism, and nationalism.

Emplacing East Timor explores the relationship between the cycle of regime change and that of knowledge production, offering an alternative framework to periodize the history from the 1850s to the 2010s. Kisho Tsuchiya shows that the prevailing perceptions of East Timor have been shaped by large-scale wars, postwar consolidation, and the dominance of foreign observers. The transitions that construct what we know about East Timor have followed the rhythm of devastating violence and regime transformations. Playing a role as well are personal, institutional, and geopolitical interests and the creativity of Timorese and foreign observers. Acknowledging this cycle, Tsuchiya interweaves narrative of crucial events and political movements with an analysis of Timor's connections to global circulations and historical transitions. He traces key persons and communities that shaped the contour of East Timor—from Portuguese colonial officers to anthropologists, Japanese occupiers to Australian activists, and Timorese poets to revolutionaries. Their experiences and imaginations of (East) Timor have been expressed through scholarly works, secret documents, policy statements, ceremonies, revolutionary songs, and museums.Using multi-archival historical research, the author introduces sources in several languages and provides missing links, including secret documents in Portuguese archives and the National Archives of Timor-Leste, Japanese wartime sources, and Timorese sources in the Archives of Timorese Resistance. Emplacing East Timor skillfully synthesizes nationalism studies and borderland studies, creating a comprehensive approach to modern East Timorese national imaginings, the historical role of territorial borders, and its postcolonial problems.

In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic?Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.

The Nature of Kingship is an innovative exploration of dynastic power and the environment in nineteenth-century Vietnam. It offers important insights into Vietnamese kingship by delving into the intricate workings of the Nguyễn court and its interactions with the natural world. Weaving together a rich array of sources including official histories, royal poetry, astrological manuals, geography texts, and provincial gazetteers, Kathryn Dyt vividly demonstrates how Nguyễn governance and court hierarchies were intertwined with a powerful, agentive, and emotional “weather-world”—a world inhabited by ecological actors such as rain, wind, land, and skies.While previous narratives have often faulted Nguyễn rulers for being aloof and detached from their surroundings, this new study considers how Nguyễn dynastic rule was in fact highly responsive to its setting and sensitive to the environment. It shows that Nguyễn kings were not static, inert individuals, cut off from the world, but rather were intensely engaged with their environment and its cosmological and spiritual dimensions. Placing kings in the thick of lived experience, in a land perceived to be alive and responsive to human incantations, prayers, and pleas, this account demonstrates how Nguyễn rulers consolidated their authority through displays of superior weather knowledge and modes of affective rule rooted in reciprocal emotional resonance with the weather-world. The king's exemplary affective responsiveness to the weather was central to his preeminence and it was a means by which the court validated its power within Vietnam's extensive social field. Exploring kingship from phenomenological perspectives, this wide-reaching study addresses diverse forms of court engagement with the environment, including the observation of astronomical and meteorological phenomena, divination practices, rainmaking rituals, travel through the kingdom, the writing of environmental histories, and imperial poetry.

In this first anthropological study of Muslim and Hindu lives in urban Myanmar today, Judith Beyer develops the concept of “we-formation” to demonstrate that individuals are always more than members of wider groups. “We-formation” complements her rich political, legal, and historical analysis of “community,” a term used by Beyer's interlocutors themselves, even as it reinforces ethno-religious stereotypes and their own minority status. The book also offers an interpretation of the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021.

The city of Manado and province of North Sulawesi have built a public identity based on religious harmony, claiming to successfully model tolerance and inter-religious relations for the rest of Indonesia. Yet, in discourses and practices relevant to everyday interactions in schools and political debates in the public sphere, two primary contested frames for belonging emerge in tension with one another. On the one hand, “aspirational coexistence” recognizes a common goal of working toward religious harmony and inclusive belonging. On the other hand, “majoritarian coexistence,” in which the legitimacy of religious minorities is understood as guaranteed exclusively by the goodwill of the Protestant majority, also emerges in discourses and practices of coexistence. These two agonistic frames of coexistence stem from both a real pride at having staved off ethno-religious violence that plagued surrounding regions at the turn of the twenty-first century, as well as a concern about whether the area will maintain a Christian majority in the future. Based on ethnographic research in Manado, North Sulawesi, a Protestant-majority region of Indonesia, Ethics of Belonging investigates the dynamics of ethical deliberation about religious coexistence. In this analysis, schools are understood as central sites for exchange about the ethics and politics of belonging in the nation. The author draws on in-depth fieldwork at three secondary schools (a public high school, private Catholic boarding school, and public madrasah), an inter-religious “exchange” program among university students, and societal debates about religion and belonging. Each of the schools promotes a distinct method to addressing diversity and a particular understanding of the relationship between religious and civic values. Larson's research demonstrates how ethical frameworks for approaching religious difference are channeled and negotiated through educational institutions, linking up with their broader political context and debates in the community. This resource argues for a consideration of ethical reflection as a fundamentally pedagogical process, with important ramifications beyond the immediate environment. The focus on educational institutions provides a critical connection between interpersonal and public ethical deliberation, elucidating the entanglements of ethics and politics and their manifestation across different societal scales.

The Border Patrol Police (BPP) of Thailand was formed as a United States CIA's paramilitary intelligence force in the early 1950s. In the early 1960s, changes in Thailand's political leadership and the U.S. government's strategies for fighting the spread of communism in Southeast Asia led to a transformation of the BPP. The organization became a civic action agency supported by the United States Agency for International Development and the Thai monarchy. Its civic actions, pinned on advancing anticommunist modernization, civilian counterinsurgency, and royalist nationalism, soon extended from the margins to the center of Thailand, and contributed to building the border of “Thainess” (khwam pen thai). The growing tension between the royalist network, consisting of military and rightwing groups, and the democratization movements culminated in a massacre. On October 6, 1976, the Village Scout, a rural vigilante group that the BPP created through its civic actions, and the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU), a subunit of the BPP, attacked peaceful protesters at Thammasat University. The success of a military coup on the same day solidified the victory of the royalist network, and it would continue to dominate Thai politics and society into the post–Cold War era.Through a study of the Border Patrol Police's transformations, Indigenizing the Cold War shows how the Thai ruling elite unfailingly pursued their nation-building. With an introduction of the “indigenization” concept and an in-depth analysis of postcolonial nation-building, this work challenges conventional Cold War studies. The Cold War in Thailand was not always and only about an ideological conflict between the communist and anticommunist. It was a war between the local ruling elite and the people, each pushing forward their visions for constructing a new nation-state. The “indigenization” framework reveals the nature of the collaboration between the global superpowers and the Asian local ruling elite, who took advantage of the American Cold War for legitimizing and continuing their authoritarian regimes.

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar was thrown into a state of crisis by a military coup, abruptly ending a decade of civilian rule. The junta imprisoned the political opposition and deployed lethal force to quell dissent, thinking that most people would meekly acquiesce. However, they underestimated the tenacity of the nascent democracy that had taken root in the last decade. Instead, a civil disobedience movement quickly emerged, with people going on strike across the country to prevent the junta from exerting control, which was soon followed by armed struggle among urban youth. Forging the Nation: Land Struggles in Myanmar's Transition Period examines how democratic institutions were fought over and built from 2011 to 2020 through the lens of land politics. This book explains how the differences in outcomes in the contest over land are situated in the specific historic and political contexts of Myanmar's states and regions, despite them being subject to the same national dynamics.As Myanmar is an agriculture-based economy involving two-thirds of the population, land remains a coveted asset in the era of the “global land rush,” referring to the intensification of capital's pursuit of land since the food price surges in 2008–2009. Thus, land is also the ideal lens through which to understand the dynamics of a country that underwent a three-part transition: toward democracy, toward peace with a national ceasefire, and toward open markets after the lifting of sanctions by the West. Against a fraught democratization process that unfolded from 2011 to 2020, Forging the Nation looks at how state and societal actors in Myanmar's multiethnic society, recovering from over seven decades of civil war, negotiated land politics to shape democratic land institutions. By exploring the interaction of the democratic transition, ethnic politics, and global capital pressures on land across national, regional, and local scales, Siusue Mark provides an overarching frame pulling together these three facets that are usually treated separately in the literature. Emphasizing the co-constituent relationship between democratization and land politics, Forging the Nation makes a unique contribution to understanding the role of land in political-economic transitions.The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of any affiliated institution.

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung's lives and afterlives, this book shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.

English-language scholarship all too often dismisses South Vietnam as an American creation, a product of US imperialism. Republican Vietnam, 1963–1975 boldly upends this depiction, exposing a diverse and dynamic portrait of the Second Republic. In twelve essays, each based on original archival research, the volume brings to life the Second Republic in all its complexities, displaying how politicians, students, educators, publishers, journalists, musicians, religious leaders, businessmen, and ordinary citizens built a highly intricate society—with dazzling entrepreneurial zeal, an outspoken press, globally engaged religions, a vibrant intellectual and associational culture, and a level of artistic production that remains unmatched since the Vietnam War. That inspired and frenzied age, though short lived, held a resilient spirit that Vietnamese refugees have kept alive. The trove of vernacular music and print media, not to mention the many associations the Vietnamese diaspora founded, exemplify the republican values that once energized South Vietnamese culture. But this nuanced society has appeared in popular media and American scholarship as a hopelessly dependent nation, led by corrupt dictators beholden to US interests. In contrast to such negative stereotypes, this account situates South Vietnamese front and center as agents of their own histories. Republican Vietnam is the first collection of scholarly essays on the Second Republic since the end of the Vietnam War. It is also among the first to use republicanism as a lens to re-examine twentieth-century Vietnamese history, the Vietnam War, and the diaspora. The twelve essays together show how war, in tandem with external intervention, shaped South Vietnam's economy, culture, and the life of every individual and family. By featuring works from Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic studies, this text takes the important step of bridging the two fields, laying the foundation for cross-disciplinary projects in the future.

The ethnic Chinese have had a long and problematic history in Indonesia, commonly stereotyped as a market-dominant minority with dubious political loyalty toward Indonesia. For over three decades under Suharto's New Order regime, a cultural assimilation policy banned Chinese languages, cultural expression, schools, media, and organizations. This policy was only abolished in 1998 following the riots and anti-Chinese attacks that preceded the fall of the New Order. In the post-Suharto era, Chinese Indonesians were finally free to assert their Chineseness again. But how does an ethnic group recover from the trauma of assimilation and regain a lost cultural identity?Memories of Unbelonging is an ethnographic study of how collective memories of state-sponsored ethnic discrimination have shaped Chinese identity politics in Indonesia. Combining case studies, in-depth primary data, and incisive analysis of Indonesia's contemporary political landscape, anthropologist Charlotte Setijadi argues that trauma narratives are at the core of modern Chinese identity politics. Examining spaces and domains such as residential enclaves, educational institutions, the creative arts, and politics, this book paints a vivid picture of how different generations of Chinese Indonesians make sense of their historical trauma, ethnic identity, and belonging in a post-assimilation environment. Far from being passive victims of history, the ethnic Chinese are actively challenging old stereotypes and boundaries of acceptable Chineseness in the country.This emphasis on group and individual agency marks a strong departure from structural analyses of Chinese Indonesians that mostly highlight their disempowerment as an oppressed minority. Furthermore, placing the analysis within the broader context of China's rise in the twenty-first century demonstrates how the combination of persisting local anti-Chinese sentiments and renewed pride over China's growing global dominance have prompted many Chinese Indonesians to re-evaluate their sense of ethnic and national belonging. By focusing on the nexus between collective memory, local identity politics, and the rise of China as an external factor, Memories of Unbelonging offers new perspectives of understanding about Chinese Indonesians, post-Suharto Indonesian society, and the relationship between China and ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Western observers have long considered communism to be synonymous with Vietnam's modern historical experience. Eager to make sense of the North Vietnamese victory in the Vietnam War, scholars and journalists have spilled much ink on the history of Vietnamese communists. But this preoccupation has obscured the diversity of ideas and experiences that defined Vietnam in the twentieth century, in which communism represented just one of many tendencies. Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963, posits that republicanism shaped modern Vietnam no less profoundly than communism. Republicans championed representative government, the universal rights of man, civil liberties, and the primacy of the nation. These ideas infused the thinking of Vietnamese reformers, dissidents, and revolutionaries from the 1900s onward, including many men and women who went on to lead the struggle for independence. Republicanism was also one of the chief inspirations for the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam (also known as South Vietnam) in 1955.This interdisciplinary volume brings together eleven essays by historians, political scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists, who make use of fresh sources to study the development of republicanism from the colonial period to the First Republic of Vietnam (1955–1963). The introduction by coeditors Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu critically analyzes the existing scholarship on the First Republic, explains how the concept of republicanism can illuminate developments in the Saigon-based state, and situates the regime in a comparative context with South Korea. Peter Zinoman's chapter reviews the historiography on republicanism and modern Vietnam and heralds the arrival of the “republican moment” in the field of Vietnam studies. Several chapters by Nguyễn Lương Hải Khôi, Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, and Yen Vu examine the transformation of republican ideas. Nu-Anh Tran and Duy Lap Nguyen explore competing concepts of democracy and the factional politics of the First Republic. The essays by Jason Picard, Cindy Nguyen, Hoàng Phong Tuấn, Nguyễn Thị Minh, and Y Thien Nguyen analyze nation- and state-building efforts in the 1950s and 1960s. Collectively, the essays give voice to Vietnamese republicans, from the ideas they espoused to the institutions they built and the legacies they left behind.

Human-fashioned boundaries transform spaces by introducing dualisms, bifurcations, creative symbioses, contradictions, and notions of inclusion and exclusion. The Buddhist boundaries considered in this book, sīmās—a term found in South and Southeast Asian languages and later translated into East Asian languages—come in various shapes and sizes and can be established on land or in bodies of water. Sometimes, the word sīmā refers not only to a ceremonial boundary, but the space enclosed by the boundary, or even the markers (when they are used) that denote the boundary.Sīmās were established early on as places where core legal acts (kamma), including ordination, of the monastic community (sangha) took place according to their disciplinary codes. Sīmās continue to be deployed in the creation of monastic lineages and to function in diverse ways for monastics and non-monastics alike. As foundations of Buddhist religion, sīmās are used to sustain, revitalize, or reform Buddhist practices, notions of identity, and conceptualizations of time and history. In the last few decades, scholarly awareness of and expertise on sīmās has developed to a point where a volume like this one, which examines sīmās across numerous cultural contexts and scholarly fields of inquiry, is both possible and needed. Sīmā traditions expressed in the Theravāda cultures of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute the dominant focus of the work; a chapter on East Asia raises questions of historical transmission beyond these areas. Throughout contributors engage texts; history; archaeology; politics; art; ecology; economics; epigraphy; legal categories; mythic narratives; understandings of the cosmos; and conceptualizations of compassion, authority, and violence.Examining sīmās through multiple perspectives allows us to look at them in their contextual specificity, in a way that allows for discernment of variation as well as consistency. Sīmā spaces can be both simple and extremely intricate, and this book helps show why and how that is the case.

Since the 1950s, the domestic politics of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) has puzzled outside observers. To these external analysts, the American-backed regime seemed to be plagued by instability and factionalism for no apparent reason. Their bewilderment, however, has obscured a deep and complex history. In Disunion, Nu-Anh Tran shows how factional struggles in the Saigon-based republic reflected serious disagreements about political ideas at a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the Vietnam War.The book traces the emergence of Vietnam's anticommunist nationalists back to the struggle for independence and explores how their alliances were tested and then broken during the rule of the RVN's first president, Ngô Đình Diệm. The anticommunists rejected the authoritarianism and ideology of the Vietnamese communists and dreamed of building an independent, democratic government that would unite the Vietnamese nation. The RVN was supposed to be the fulfillment of this long-cherished vision. But discord soon erupted among the anticommunists. Politicians fiercely debated to what extent the government should be democratic and which groups had a legitimate place in political life. The unresolved disagreements provoked intense and continuous infighting that troubled the RVN throughout the regime's existence. Ultimately, the animosity undermined any possibility of realizing the anticommunists'shared vision for the country.Based on previously neglected primary sources and extensive research in Vietnamese and American archives, Disunion paints a rich and sensitive portrayal of leaders and activists in the RVN. Anticommunist nationalists were deeply devoted to their homeland and inspired by forward-looking visions, but they were also hobbled by their failure to live up to their lofty ideals. By examining these historical figures on their own terms, the book offers a fresh perspective on the political history of South Vietnam that has remained misunderstood to this day.

At the tail end of the twentieth century, a monk transformed a small village temple on the outskirts of Hanoi into a monastery and meditation center called Thiền Viện Sùng Phúc—a place where monastics and lay Buddhists could learn and practice Zen meditation. In time the original temple was replaced by numerous large buildings to accommodate meditation sessions, youth events, weddings, classes, and a variety of other activities designed to keep practitioners engaged. Thiền Viện Sùng Phúc's approach to Buddhism as a life commitment for all ages and genders has been very successful, attracting more than a thousand Buddhists to its weekly services. It joined Thiền phái Trúc Lâm, a much larger organization started by Thích Thanh Từ in southern Vietnam that has expanded to northern Vietnam and internationally. In Zen Conquests, Alexander Soucy presents not only the first ethnography of Thiền Viện Sùng Phúc and its followers, but also a compelling look at how the discourses of Buddhist Modernism were incorporated at a local level into this new space on the outskirts of Hanoi and how and why new constituencies of followers are drawn to Zen Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam.Thiền Viện Sùng Phúc's Zen tradition purports to be a continuation of the only Zen Buddhist sect founded in Vietnam: the fourteenth-century Trúc Lâm Zen School. However, the movement can also be seen as the product of Buddhism's globalization, born from the D. T. Suzuki-inspired interest in Zen in South Vietnam during the American War. Despite its claims to be authentically Vietnamese Zen, it more closely resembles Modernist versions of Buddhism practiced by Western converts in North America than anything Vietnamese. Soucy maintains that it is only by looking at the processes of globalization that Vietnamese Buddhism (both in the context of Vietnam but also in the Vietnamese diaspora) can be properly understood. He argues convincingly for acknowledging the continued influence of transnational, pan-Asian, and global flows of migration and communication on the development of multiple forms of Buddhism worldwide.

In Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture.Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province's first certified “Culture Village,” the nation's very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state's resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one's life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.

That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merdeka and a cherished sign of hope for the imminent arrival of peace and justice to West Papua. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua is an ethnographically framed account of the long, bitter fight for freedom that challenges the dominant international narrative that West Papuans'quest for political independence is fractured and futile. Camellia Webb-Gannon's extensive interviews with the decolonization movement's original architects and its more recent champions shed light on complex diasporic and intergenerational politics as well as social and cultural resurgence. In foregrounding West Papuans'perspectives, the author shows that it is the body politic's unflagging determination and hope, rather than military might or influential allies, that form the movement's most unifying and powerful force for independence.This book examines the many intertwining strands of decolonization in Melanesia. Differences in cultural performance and political diversity throughout the region are generating new, fruitful trajectories. Simultaneously, Black and Indigenous solidarity and a shared Melanesian identity have forged a transnational grassroots power-base from which the movement is gaining momentum. Relevant beyond its West Papua focus, this book is essential reading for those interested in Pacific studies, Native and Indigenous studies, development studies, activism, and decolonization.

“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok's transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state.Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007, Citizen Designs describes how residents of Khon Kaen's railway squatter communities used Thailand's experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. It also shows how the Thai state used participatory planning and design to manage both situated political claims and emerging politics. Through ethnographic analysis of contentious collaborations between residents, urban activists, state planners, participatory architects, and city officials, Eli Elinoff's analysis reveals how the Khon Kaen's railway settlements became sites of contestation over political inclusion and the meaning and value of democracy as a political form in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elinoff examines how residents embraced politics as a means of enacting their equality. This embrace inspired new debates about the meaning of good citizenship and how democracy might look and feel. The disagreements over citizenship, like those Elinoff describes in Khon Kaen, reflect the kinds of aspirations for political equality that have been fundamental to Thailand's political transformation over the last two decades, which has seen new political actors asserting themselves at the ballot box and in the streets alongside the retrenchment of military authoritarianism. Citizen Designs offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the lived effects of Thailand's political volatility and into the current moment of democratic ambivalence, mass urbanization, and authoritarian resurgence.

On Our Own Strength examines the political activities of the most influential intellectual movement in interwar French-occupied Vietnam. The far-reaching work of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn) included applied design, urban reform, fashion, literature, journalism, and cartoons; its work was deeply political in both form and intent. The Group drew upon a wide range of global intellectual currents and practices to build an enlightened public that would one day serve as the basis of a modern Vietnamese nation. Its nationalist vision sought a nonviolent middle path between colonialism and anticolonial struggle, advocating a process of gradual decolonization that ultimately ended in Vietnamese autonomy. This form of cosmopolitan nationalism proved tremendously popular among ordinary Vietnamese and necessarily shaped local politics, influencing the political agenda of even rival groups such as the newly revived Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). On Our Own Strength shows how the Group's vision framed the ways ICP positioned itself and sought popular support in the years leading up to the August Revolution and beyond. In later years, the party attempted to erase the Group's early influence on national politics, banning their writings and casting them as little more than bourgeois literary figures. In recovering the Group's unique response to the world around them, this book bridges the areas of political, cultural, and intellectual history, drawing them together into a rich narrative of Vietnamese nation-building from the bottom-up within a larger global context​. On Our Own Strength offers a dynamic model for the field of Vietnamese studies as it continues to move beyond Cold War political narratives of its most tumultuous period. This book engages broadly with global history, European history, and imperial studies to explore colonialism's hybrid cultural and political forms. Martina Thucnhi Nguyen examines how the Self-Reliant Literary Group weighed in on everything from women's fashion and public housing to the major political ideologies of their era, in a unique style that mixed French-inflected ideas with Vietnamese norms and forms. As a deep case study of important figures on the Vietnamese moderate left, On Our Own Strength provides an injection of color and nuance into a history that is often too monochromatic.​​

Immediately after its founding by Hồ Chí Minh in September 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) faced challenges from rival Vietnamese political organizations and from a France determined to rebuild her empire after the humiliations of WWII. Hồ, with strategic genius, courageous maneuver, and good fortune, was able to delay full-scale war with France for sixteen months in the northern half of the country. This was enough time for his Communist Party, under the cover of its Vietminh front organization, to neutralize domestic rivals and install the rough framework of an independent state. That fledgling state became a weapon of war when the DRV and France finally came to blows in Hanoi during December of 1946, marking the official beginning of the First Indochina War. With few economic resources at their disposal, Hồ and his comrades needed to mobilize an enormous and free contribution in manpower and rice from DRV-controlled regions. Extracting that contribution during the war's early days was primarily a matter of patriotic exhortation. By the early 1950s, however, the infusion of weapons from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China had turned the Indochina conflict into a “total war.” Hunger, exhaustion, and violence, along with the conflict's growing political complexity, challenged the DRV leaders'mobilization efforts, forcing patriotic appeals to be supplemented with coercion and terror. This trend reached its revolutionary climax in late 1952 when Hồ, under strong pressure from Stalin and Mao, agreed to carry out radical land reform in DRV-controlled areas of northern Vietnam. The regime's 1954 victory over the French at Điện Biên Phủ, the return of peace, and the division of the country into North and South did not slow this process of socialist transformation. Over the next six years (1954–1960), the DRV's Communist leaders raced through land reform and agricultural collectivization with a relentless sense of urgency. Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960 explores the way the exigencies of war, the dreams of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the pressures of the Cold War environment combined with pride and patriotism to drive totalitarian state formation in northern Vietnam.

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea.The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social ‘backwardness'; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam's territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam's resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea.The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries – e.g. secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, etc. – and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and -women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts.Fishers, Monks and Cadres is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership.

The massacre on October 6, 1976, in Bangkok was brutal and violent, its savagery unprecedented in modern Thai history. Four decades later there has been no investigation into the atrocity; information remains limited, the truth unknown. There has been no collective coming to terms with what happened or who is responsible. Thai society still refuses to confront this dark page in its history. Moments of Silence focuses on the silence that surrounds the October 6 massacre. Silence, the book argues, is not forgetting. Rather it signals an inability to forget or remember—or to articulate a socially meaningful memory. It is the “unforgetting,” the liminal domain between remembering and forgetting. Historian Thongchai Winichakul, a participant in the events of that day, gives the silence both a voice and a history by highlighting the factors that contributed to the unforgetting amidst changing memories of the massacre over the decades that followed. They include shifting political conditions and context, the influence of Buddhism, the royal-nationalist narrative of history, the role played by the monarchy as moral authority and arbiter of justice, and a widespread perception that the truth might have devastating ramifications for Thai society. The unforgetting impacted both victims and perpetrators in different ways. It produced a collective false memory of an incident that never took place, but it also produced silence that is filled with hope and counter-history. Moments of Silence tells the story of a tragedy in Thailand—its victims and survivors—and how Thai people coped when closure was unavailable in the wake of atrocity. But it also illuminates the unforgetting as a phenomenon common to other times and places where authoritarian governments flourish, where atrocities go unexamined, and where censorship (imposed or self-directed) limits public discourse. The tensions inherent in the author's dual role offer a riveting story, as well as a rare and intriguing perspective. Most of all, this provocative book makes clear the need to provide a place for past wrongs in the public memory.

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale.Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive.Boreth Ly's poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari‘a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami explores Acehnese survivors'experiences of the deadly waves and the subsequent reconstruction process through the stories they tell about the disaster. Narratives, author Annemarie Samuels argues, are both a window onto the process of remaking everyday life and an essential component of it. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Samuels shows how the everyday work of recovery is indispensable for any large-scale reconstruction effort to succeed. Recovery is an ambiguous process in which grief remains as life goes on, where optimism and disappointment, remembering and forgetting, structural poverty and the rhetoric of success are often intertwined in individual and social worlds. Such paradoxes are key and form a thread through the five chapters of the book. Addressing post-disaster reconstruction from the survivors'perspectives opens up space for criticism of post-disaster governance without reducing the discussion of recovery to top-down interventions. Individual histories, emotions, creativity, and ways of being in the world, the author argues, inform the remaking of worlds as much as social, political, and cultural transformations do. After the Tsunami is a provocative and highly significant contribution to studies of humanitarian aid and disaster, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and scholarly studies of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Its elegant style, pointed theorizing, and moving ethnographic descriptions will draw readers into Acehnese lifeworlds and politics. Its narratives attest to Acehnese ways of living with loss, within and across a history of colonial and postcolonial violence and suffering and a present of political uncertainty and hope.

Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display offers intriguing new perspectives on historical and contemporary Sino-Indonesian performance. For the first time in a major study, this community's diverse performance practices are brought together as a family of genres. Combining fieldwork with evidence from Indonesian, Chinese, and Dutch primary and secondary sources, Josh Stenberg takes a close look at Chinese Indonesian self-representation, covering genres from the Dutch colonial period to the present day. From glove puppets of Chinese origin in East Java and Hakka religious processions in West Kalimantan, to wartime political theatre on Sumatra and contemporary Sino-Sundanese choirs and dance groups in Bandung, this book takes readers on a tour of hybrid and diverse expressions of identity, tracing the stories and strategies of minority self-representation over time. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Indonesian groups and individuals have represented themselves locally and nationally to the archipelago's majority population as well as to Indonesian state power. In the last twenty years, the long political suppression of manifestations of Chinese culture in Indonesia has lifted, and a wealth of evidence now coming to light shows how Sino-Indonesians have long been an integral part of Indonesian culture, including the performing arts. Valorizing that contribution challenges essentialist readings of ethnicity or minority, complicates the profile of a group that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms, and enriches the understanding of Indonesian culture, Southeast Asian Chinese identities, and transnational cultural exchanges. Minority Stages helps counter the dangerous either/or thinking that is a mainstay of ethnic essentialism in general and of Chinese and Indonesian nationalisms in particular, by showing the fluidity and adaptability of Sino-Indonesian identity as expressed in performance and public display.

Throughout his fifteen-year reign (1910-1925), King Vajiravudh, absolute monarch of Siam, attempted to foster a spirit of nationalism among the Thai, to unite the Thai people and make them proud of their land and their heritage. He hoped to save his country from expanding Western imperialism by infusing his people with the Western ideology of loyalty to the state.This book documents all the many forms the King's nationalistic efforts assumed, ranging from the establishment of a para-military patriotic organization called the Wild Tiger Corps to the encouragement of the team sports and the coining of a new cheer, Chaiyo! ('Victory!'). Vajiravudh was a prolific writer, and his hortatory articles, plays, poems, and speeches are analyzed in terms of the King's message to his people to be Thai, to act Thai, and to think Thai.Chaiyo! adds greatly to an understanding of the emergence of modern Thailand. It is also an important addition to studies of the impact of the West and the emergence of nationalism in Asia as a whole during the period of World War I. The findings will be of value not only to historians but also to political scientists and, indeed, to all those interested in the development of Asia or in the growth of nationalism anywhere in the world.

Pagan: The Origin of Modern Burma offers major contributions in three areas: the manner in which it integrates original, indigenous source material with social science theory; the significant association it makes between religion and the economy of redistribution; and the model it provides for the rise and decline of a major Buddhist kingdom in Southeast Asia.This is an important book for Southeast Asia scholars and Burma specialists. It will be standard reference work for historians, social scientists, and philologists with an interest in Southeast Asia. Readers interested in general issues of church and state, religion and society, as well as those more specifically concerned with historic and institutional Buddhism will find it a valuable work.

Thailand in Transition goes beyond the conventional approach to Thai politics present in most of the literature, which concentrates on the traditional institutions in Thailand—the monarchy, the military, and the bureaucracy. The objective here has been rather to examine the more contemporary emergent oppositional forces struggling to play a permanent and significant role in the broader context of Thai politics.Oppositional forces in Thailand are many and varied, ranging from the outlawed Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), which seeks to overthrow the Thai government, to the Thai Parliament, which is usually legitimized as part of the the government for brief periods between military coups. The book focuses on the CPT, workers, students, and Parliament by presenting in historical perspective the origins, nature, and influence of each as an oppositional force in Thai politics. Special attention is given to the transitional role of these oppositional forces during and after the dramatic shifts in Thai politics precipitated by the student revolution of 1973, the military coup of 1976, the increased hostilities between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam in 1979, and the abortive coup by the Thai'Young Turk'military faction in 1981.

International development programs strive not only to alleviate poverty but to transform people, aid workers and recipients alike. Becoming One grapples with this process by exploring the work of OISCA•, a prominent Japanese NGO in central Myanmar. OISCA's postwar origins at the intersection of Shinto, secularism, and rightwing politics, and its vision of inter-Asian solidarity and a sustainable future helped shape the organization's ideology and activities. By delving into the world of its aid workers—their everyday practices, discourses, and aspirations—author Chika Watanabe seeks to understand the NGO's political, social, and ethical effects.At OISCA training centers, Japanese and local staff teach sustainable agricultural skills and organic farming methods to rural youth. Much of the teaching involves laboring in the fields, harvesting produce, and caring for livestock: what they can't use themselves is sold at nearby markets. Watanabe's detailed and multi-sited ethnography shows how Japanese and Burmese actors mobilize around the idea of “becoming one” with Mother Earth and their human counterparts within a shared communal lifestyle. By exploring the tension between intentions and political effects—spanning environmentalism, cultural-nationalist ideologies of “Japaneseness,” and aspirations to make the world a better place—Watanabe highlights fascinating questions and both positive and negative outcomes. Becoming One weaves together vivid descriptions of the intensive, intimate, and “muddy labor” of “making persons” (hitozukuri) with the wider historical resonances of these efforts, decentering common understandings of development, NGOs, and their moral and political promises. This engaging and thought-provoking book combines insights from anthropology, development studies, and religious studies to add to our understanding of modern Japan.•Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement

In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book.In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg's attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand's development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand's development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood?Rigg's thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand's wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.

One of the great transformations presently sweeping the Muslim world involves not just political and economic change but the reshaping of young Muslims'styles of romance, courtship, and marriage. Nancy J. Smith-Hefner takes up the personal lives and sexual attitudes of educated Muslim Javanese youth in the city of Yogyakarta to explore the dramatic social and ethical changes taking place in Indonesian society. Drawing on more than 250 interviews over a fifteen-year period, her vivid, well-crafted ethnography is full of insights into the real-life struggles of young Muslims and framed by a deep understanding of Indonesia's wider debates on gender and youth culture.The changes among Muslim youth reflect an ongoing if at times unsteady attempt to balance varied ideals, ethical concerns, and aspirations. On the one hand, growing numbers of young people show a deep and pervasive desire for a more active role in their Islamic faith. On the other, even as they seek a more self-conscious and scripture-based profession of faith, many educated youth aspire to personal relationships similar to those seen among youth elsewhere—a greater measure of informality, openness, and intimacy than was typical for their parents'and grandparents'generations. Young women in particular seek freedom for self-expression, employment, and social fulfillment outside of the home. Smith-Hefner pays particular attention to their shifting roles and perspectives because it is young women who have been most dramatically affected by the upheavals transforming this Muslim-majority country. Although deeply personal, the changing aspirations of young Muslims have immense implications for social and public life throughout Indonesia.The fruit of a longitudinal study begun shortly after the fall of the authoritarian New Order government and the return to democracy in 1998–1999, the book reflects Smith-Hefner's nearly forty years of anthropological engagement with the island of Java and her continuing exploration into what it means to be both “modern” and Muslim. The culture of the new Muslim youth, the author shows, through all its nuances and variations, reflects the inexorable abandonment of traditions and practices deemed incompatible with authentic Islam and an ongoing and profound Islamization of intimacies.

Myanmar's Buddhist-Muslim Crisis is a probing search into the reasons and rationalizations behind the violence occurring in Myanmar, especially the oppressive military campaigns waged against Rohingya Muslims by the army in 2016 and 2017. Over more than three years John Holt traveled around Myanmar engaging in sustained conversations with prominent and articulate participants and observers. What emerges from his peregrinations is a series of compelling portraits revealing both deep insights and entrenched misunderstandings. To understand the conflict, Holt must first accurately capture the viewpoints of his different conversation partners, who include Buddhists and Muslims, men and women, monks and laypeople, activists and scholars. Conversations range widely over issues such as the rise of Buddhist nationalism; the sometimes enigmatic and unexpected positions taken by Aung San Suu Kyii; use of the controversial term “Rohingya”; the impact of state-sponsored propaganda on the Burmese public; resistance to narratives emanating from international media, the United Nations, and the international diplomatic community; the frustrations of local political leaders who have felt left out of the policy-making process in the Rakhine State; and the constructive hopes and efforts still being made by forward-looking activists in Yangon. Three main perspectives emerge from the voices he listens to, those of Arakanese Buddhists who are native to Rakhine (once called Arakan), where much of the conflict has taken place; Burmese Buddhists (or Bamars), who make up the vast majority of Myanmar's population; and the Rohingya Muslims, whose tragic story has been widely disseminated by the international media.What surfaces in conversation after conversation among all three groups is a narrative of siege: all see themselves as the aggrieved party, and all recount a history of being under siege. John Holt gives voice to these different perspectives as an engaged and concerned participant, offering both a critical and empathetic account of Myanmar's tragic predicament. Readers follow the hopes and dismay of this seasoned scholar of Theravada Buddhism as he seeks his own understanding of the variously impassioned forces in play in this still unfolding drama.

Every year during Holy Week in the Philippine province of Pampanga, hundreds of men and women undergo acts of excruciating, self-inflicted pain in ways that evoke the Way of the Cross: the torment and crucifixion that Christ endured in the last days of his earthly existence. Because these Passion rituals are officially disavowed by the Filipino Roman Catholic Church, most observers view them as irrational and extremist mimicry of Christ's painful ordeal. Even scholars conventionally depict them as theatrical “spectacle” or macabre examples of Filipino “folk religion.” But what conditions enable ritual actors to submit to such extreme pain? What justifications do they give for going against official prohibitions? What outcomes do they seek in channeling Christian piety in this way?This book addresses these questions through its in-depth analyses of three interconnected ritual acts: the pabasa, a days-long communal chanting of Christ's Passion story; the pagdarame, the public self-flagellation of hundreds of devotees; and the pamamaku king krus, in which steel nails are driven through the palms and feet of ritual practitioners as part of a street play performed in front of tens of thousands of spectators. Author Julius Bautista suggests that such ritual acts manifest the embodied physicality of a suffering selfhood that facilitates the expression of heartfelt sentiments of pity, empathy, trust, and bereavement. By emphasizing these outwardly focused human sensibilities as the wellsprings of ritual agency, he demonstrates that Passion rituals are reinterpretations of the very idea and experience of pain, hardship, and suffering and premised on an appeal for a certain kind of divine intimacy.The author draws on a decade of in-depth and often exclusive interviews with a host of local stakeholders—including ritual practitioners, clerics, scholars, and government officials—and his own participation in a Passion play. Ethnographic insight is considered alongside primary and secondary archival sources, including unpublished, locally produced oral historical accounts and a survey of relevant media coverage. The Way of the Cross makes a welcome contribution to the anthropology of religion by examining the unique ontological contexts in which ritual agents experience God's involvement in their lives.

Mahathir Mohamad's legacy as Malaysia's longest serving prime minister (1981–2003) is deeply controversial. His engagement with Islam, the religion of just over half Malaysia's population, has often been dismissed as partisan maneuvering. Yet his willingness to countenance a more prominent place for Islam in government and society is what distinguished him from other modernist politicians, and his instinct to set Malaysian politics against the backdrop of the wider Muslim world was politically astute.Author Sven Schottmann argues that Mahathir's transformative effect on Malaysia can only be fully appreciated if we also take him seriously as one of the postcolonial Muslim world's most significant political thought leaders. Schottmann sees Mahathir's representations of Islam as a relatively coherent discourse that can legitimately be described as “Mahathir's Islam.” This discourse contains Mahathir's assessment of the economic, political, and sociocultural problems facing the contemporary Muslim world and the range of solutions and corrective measures that he proposed Muslims should adopt. His ideas are fraught with flaws and contradictions. On the one hand, he emphasized the individualistic, egalitarian, pluralistic, democratic, and dynamic qualities of Islam. On the other, his government enacted legislation and acquiesced in the activities of religious bodies that curtailed religious freedoms of both Muslims and non-Muslims. His ideas contributed to Malaysia's worsening state of interethnic relations, yet his insistence that every Muslim had the right to speak for Islam may have, paradoxically, prepared the ground for a future democratization of Malaysian politics.Mahathir's Islam is based on rigorous analysis of Mahathir's speeches, interviews, and writings, which the author is able to link to parallel processes elsewhere in the Muslim world—Indonesia, the Middle East, Pakistan, Turkey, and diaspora communities in the West. Mahathir's Islamic discourse, Schottmann suggests, must be read against the wider late twentieth-century resurgence of religion in general, and the post-1970s Islamic revival in particular. Balanced in approach and engagingly written, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, religious studies, and others interested in Malaysia, Southeast Asia, or Mahathir himself.

The Treaty of Paris in 1898 initiated America's administration of the Philippines. By 1905, Manila had been replanned and the city of Baguio built as expressions of colonial sovereignty and as symbols of a society disassociating itself from its hitherto “uncivilized” existence. Against this historical backdrop, Ian Morley undertook a thorough investigation to elucidate the meaning of modern American city planning in the Philippines and examine its dissemination throughout the archipelago with respect to colonial governmental ideals, social advancement, and the shaping of national identity. By focusing on the forces of the early years of American colonial rule, Cities and Nationhood offers a historical paradigm that not only re-grounds our grasp of Philippine cities, but also illuminates complex national identity movements and city design practices that were evident elsewhere during the early 1900s.Cities and Nationhood places the design of Philippine cities within a framework of America's distinct religious and racial identity, colonial politics, and local cultural expansion. In doing so, it expands knowledge about city planning—its influence and role—within national development by providing valuable insights into the nature of Philippine society during an era when America felt morally compelled to enact progressive civilization by instruction and example. Producing a new understanding of the role of America's colonial mission, the City Beautiful modern of urban design and Philippine cities, and the inclusions and exclusions designed into their built forms, the author addresses two fundamental intellectual matters. First, the work recontextualizes the planning history of Philippine cities. Analysis of the ideals of nationalism and civility at a key period in Philippine history shifts scholarship on the plans of Philippine cities. Second, the book offers an example of how studies of city design can profitably embrace additional geographical, cultural, and chronological territories in order to rethink the abstract and tangible meaning of arranging urban places after major governmental changes and identity transitions have occurred.

The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia's Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry.When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union's role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia's leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979.This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.

Burma and neighboring areas of Southeast Asia comprise the only region of the world to have developed a written corpus of Buddhist law claiming jurisdiction over all members of society. Yet in contrast with the extensive scholarship on Islamic and Hindu law, this tradition of Buddhist law has been largely overlooked. In fact, it is commonplace to read that Buddhism gave rise to no law aside from the vinaya, or monastic law. In Buddhist Law in Burma, D. Christian Lammerts upends this misperception and provides an intellectual and literary history of the dynamic jurisprudence of the dhammasattha legal genre between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on a critical study of hundreds of little-known surviving dhammasattha and related manuscripts, Buddhist Law in Burma demonstrates the centrality of law as a crucial discipline of Buddhist knowledge in precolonial Southeast Asia. Composed by lay and monastic jurists in prose and verse, in Pali, Burmese, and other regional vernaculars, dhammasattha were intended for use by judges to guide the adjudication of legal disputes. Lammerts argues that there were multiple, sometimes contentious, modes of reckoning Buddhist jurisprudence and legal authority in the region and assesses these in the context of local cultural, textual, and ritual practices. Over time the foundational jurisprudence of the genre underwent considerable reformulation in light of arguments raised by its critics, bibliographers, and historians, resulting in a reorientation from a cosmological to a more positivist conception of Buddhist law and legislation that had far-reaching implications for innovative forms of dhammasattha-related discourse on the eve of British colonialism.Buddhist Law in Burma shows how, despite such textual and theoretical transformations, late precolonial Burmese jurists continued to promote and justify the dhammasattha genre, and the role of law generally in Buddhism, as a vital aspect of the ongoing effort to protect and preserve the sāsana of Gotama Buddha. The book will be of value to students and scholars interested in the rich legal, intellectual, and cultural histories of Buddhism in Burma and Southeast Asia, or in the historical intersections of law and Buddhism.

Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property.Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced laws and morality codes limiting women's participation in social life. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political turmoil led the three competing states—the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen—to increase their military service demands, producing labor shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers, and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders. In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective offering. By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times, survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power relations, was central to the relationship between state and local communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the comparative study of gender.

Ranging across the longue durée of Thailand's history, Monastery, Monument, Museum is an eminently readable and original contribution to the study of the kingdom's art and culture. Eschewing issues of dating, style, and iconography, historian Maurizio Peleggi addresses distinct types of artifacts and artworks as both the products and vehicles of cultural memory. From the temples of Chiangmai to the Emerald Buddha, from the National Museum of Bangkok to the prehistoric culture of Northeast Thailand, and from the civic monuments of the 1930s to the political artworks of the late twentieth century, even well-known artworks and monuments reveal new meanings when approached from this perspective.Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities, Museums, and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites'worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country's embattled political present.Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.

Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia's culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan's Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tiên Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao's multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement.Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Until its recent political thaw, Burma was closed to most foreign researchers, and fieldwork-based research was rare. In The Traffic in Hierarchy, one of the few such works to appear in recent years, author Ward Keeler combines close ethnographic attention to life in a Buddhist monastery with a broad analysis of Burman gender ideology. The result is a thought-provoking analysis of Burmese social relations both within and beyond a monastery's walls. Keeler shows that the roles individuals choose in Burman society entail inevitable trade-offs in privileges and prestige. A man who becomes a monk gives up some social opportunities but takes on others and gains great respect. Alternatively, a man can become a head of household. Or he can choose to take on a feminine gender identity—to the derision of many but not necessarily his social exclusion. A woman, by contrast, is expected to concern herself with her relations with family and kin. Any interest she might show in becoming a nun arouses ambivalent reactions: although it fulfills Buddhist teachings, it contravenes assumptions about a woman's proper role. In Burma, hierarchical understandings condition all relationships, but hierarchy implies relations of exchange, not simply inequality, and everyone takes on subordinate roles in their bonds with some, and superordinate ones with others. Knowing where power lies and how to relate to it appropriately is key. It may mean choosing at times to resist power, but more often it involves exercising care as to whom one wishes to subordinate oneself, in what ways, and on what terms.Melding reflections on the work of theorists such as Dumont, Anderson, Warner, and Kapferer with close attention to the details of Burman social interaction, Keeler balances theoretical insights and ethnographic observation to produce a rich and challenging read. The conundrum at the heart of this book—whether to opt for autonomy, the Buddhist seeking of detachment, or for attachment, the desire for close bonds with others—is one that all humans, not just Burmans, must confront, and it is one that admits of no final resolution.

Making liquor isn't rocket science: some raw materials, a stove, and a few jury-rigged pots are all that's really needed. So when the colonial regime in turn-of-the-century French Indochina banned homemade rice liquor, replacing it with heavily taxed, tasteless alcohol from French-owned factories, widespread clandestine distilling was the inevitable result. The state's deeply unpopular alcohol monopoly required extensive systems of surveillance and interdiction and the creation of an unwieldy bureaucracy that consumed much of the revenue it was supposed to collect. Yet despite its heavy economic and political costs, this unproductive policy endured for more than four decades, leaving a lasting mark on Indochinese society, economy, and politics.The alcohol monopoly in Indochina was part of larger economic and political processes unfolding across the globe. New research on fermentation and improved still design drove the capitalization and concentration of the distilling industry worldwide, while modernizing states with increasing capacities to define, tax, and police engaged in a never-ending search for revenue. Indochina's alcohol regime thus arose from the same convergence of industrial potential and state power that produced everything from Russian vodka to blended Scotch whisky. Yet with rice liquor part of everyday life for millions of Indochinese, young and old, men and women, villagers and city-folk alike, in Indochina these global developments would be indelibly shaped by the colony's particular geographies, histories, and people.Imperial Intoxication provides a unique window on Indochina between 1860 and 1939. It illuminates the contradictory mix of modern and archaic, power and impotence, civil bureaucracy and military occupation that characterized colonial rule. It highlights the role Indochinese played in shaping the monopoly, whether as reformers or factory workers, illegal distillers or the agents sent to arrest them. And it links these long-ago stories to global processes that continue to play out today.