The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University is a research institute established officially in 1965 after several years of unofficial existence and now has an establishment of twenty-three permanent research staff members and four visiting foreign scholars. It plays a central role in promoting area research on Southeast Asia at Kyoto University. There are also more than one hundred scholars at other faculties and research institutes of Kyoto University who have been engaged in Southeast Asian Studies. As affiliated members of the Center, they can participate in the Center's various research projects. The research results are made available both in Japanese and English in South East Asian Studies (a quarterly journal), Japanese and English monographs, reprint series and discussion papers. Information on these publications is provided in SEAS: The Second Report 1969–1972 (with supplement), a copy of which is available free of charge from the Kyoto Center.

Although there are many problems in development research that can be adequately analysed along the lines of traditional single disciplinary research, these studies frequently reach the boundaries of each discipline and require some way of combining with the knowledge of neighbouring sciences to further the analysis. This combination of knowledge may be encyclopaedic only in the sense that the various inquiries into the same or related problems by various disciplines are simultaneously attempted and their conclusions are arranged in parallel or cumulative fashion so as to facilitate a synthetical understanding of the different aspects of the development process. Such a type of research may be called multidisciplinary.

The Royal Autograph Edition of the Phrarātcha-phongsāwadān or Royal Chronicles gives one of the oldest known accounts of a rebellion led by a magic-man, generically called phú mi bun or a “man of merit.” In 1699, a Lao named Bun Kwāng who styled himself a phū mī bun terrorized the governor of Korat with his reputed magical powers, according to the chronicle, and managed to establish himself as the ruler of a city which had been made a Siamese outpost by King Phra Narai (1656–88). Despite the superior military strength at his command, the intimidated governor was unable to order the immediate arrest of the phū mī bun and furthermore, humiliated himself by acceding to the insolent demand of the latter for armed men, elephants and horses.

In 1950 Embree characterized Thai society as loosely structured in contrast with a Japanese-like, closely woven social system. Since then his article has served as a general guide-post for Thai studies. As data has accumulated, however, there have been reconsiderations of the application of his concept “loose structure” as applied to Thailand. For example, his analysis has been described as impressionistic: while it is phrased in structural terms, the evidences he adduces are stated in terms of individual behaviour rather than of social structure. This failure to distinguish the dimensions of culture, society, and personality makes the notion of structure, to say the least, fuzzy.

Unstable marriage among Malays is well known through the studies of Firth (1966), Downs (1967), Djamour (1959), Gordon (N.D.), Swift (1958) etc. The data in these studies are mainly descriptive, containing only rough statistics. In this paper the author presents a case of stable society with high divorce rate utilizing both statistical and descriptive data collected in a Malay village of Kelantan in 1970/71. By this year a decrease of divorce has become a prevalent trend in Malaysia, and Malay villagers have begun to treat divorce with increasing sentiment of shame. It is, therefore, only in the villages remote from towns that divorce is still referred as a routine matter of life. The village of Galok, nine miles away from a small town of Pasir Mas, is such a village. The village (kampong) consists of 146 Malay households. Villagers are engaged in paddy farming, rubber tapping and tobacco cultivation.

The objective of this paper is to clarify the welfare implications of the two-gap analysis of foreign aid concentrating on the model developed by Chenery and Strout (1966) and to provide related numerical examples for four Southeast Asian countries (Republic of Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines) where the real series in national income statistics are available.

The two gaps are of course the investment-saving gap (IS gap) and the importexport gap (ME gap), both of which are in the ex ante sense and must be consistent with the target growth rate of output.

In July 1922 a small private school called Nationale Onderwijs Instituut Taman Siswa was born quietly at a traditional town Yogyakarta in Central Java. Taman Siswa means literally “Garden for Pupils”. Nobody expected then that this pupils' garden would become a tough ground of resistance to the Dutch colonial Government later in the 1930's. The political climate in Indonesia around 1922 was showing a remarkable uprising of nationalism centering around the labor union movement guided by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party) and Sarekat Islam (Islam Union).

The aim of this paper is to examine and compare in two societies with different religious backgrounds the aftereffects of ritual in terms of the deference-entitlements which are enhanced through ritual.

Deference is “a way of expressing an assessment of the self and of others with respect to ‘macro-social’ properties” (Shils 1968 :105). The deferential person expects he will get something he lacks or wants or needs from the person to whom he defers.

Central Thailand comprises three ecologically distinctive areas, i.e. the mountain area, the floodplain and the delta, as shown in Fig. 1.

These three areas relied on irrigation agriculture making full use of the distributary system of intermountain basins. The mountain area was the main stage for the traditional “Muang” during the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries.