On 10 October, 1945, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies announced in the House of Commons an outline of a new policy to be adopted in Malaya.

“His Majesty's Government have given careful consideration to the future of Malaya and the need to promote a sense of unity and common citizenship which will develop the country's strength and capacity in due course for self-government within the British Commonwealth. Our policy will call for a constitutional union of Malaya and for the institution of Malayan citizenship which will give equal citizenship rights to those who claim Malaya to be their homeland.”

The Malayan Union was to be made up of the nine Malay States and the two Straits Settlements of Malacca and Penang including the Province Wellesley; Singapore was exclude.

Karen believe they are like orphans without a king and leader; royalty often appear in their myths, legends and prophecies. Buddhist Karen await the next Buddha, Ariya Metteya — preceded by a righteous Karen leader — who shall cleanse the world. This paper explores the Karen imaginary and notions of royalty as preconditions for a new era governed by Buddhist ethics that will bring peace and prosperity. This imaginary combines religion and politics in a millenarian model of the world as seen from the margins of traditional kingdoms and modern nation-states — what James Scott has termed ‘non-state spaces’. The Karen oscillate between defensive and offensive strategies, as shown in several examples. Is this imaginary a premodern phenomenon typical of marginalised minorities or perhaps also part of a modern, global imaginary of a better future? The concept of morally enchanted leadership is discussed in relation to states, nations and globalisation.

This essay focuses on the political dimensions of the Festival Huế, which is claimed to be significant as a celebration of the nation. Although socialist state rituals have lost their relevance in the Đổi Mới era, the revival and re-invention of ritualised tradition create fertile ground for new ritualised events that legitimate and lend significance to the current regime. I argue that despite the unfamiliarity of many spectators with the symbolic contents of these new forms, they are effective because of their aesthetic resemblance to, and association with, familiar rituals.

The number of scholarly books and articles on the Chinese in Southeast Asia has increased so rapidly during this century that it would be useful to examine some of the trends in writing and put the results into some historical perspective. For example, there have been the early writings by Chinese in China and by various colonial officials of the region; then came writings by Southeast Asian Chinese themselves, whether in Chinese or in some local or colonial language; and more recently, the work of specialist scholars trained in social science disciplines, including the work of local scholars whether of Chinese descent or not. There is scope for a full-scale study of the whole range of historical works and it is hoped that the study will be attempted soon. This essay is a preliminary outline and focuses on writings in Chinese, especially those which help to mark some important turning-points both in the history of the Chinese communities and in the writing of history itself.

By embodying the paradoxes found in three webs of signification – panaad (devotional promise), sacred camp and carnivalesque during the Ati-atihan festival – Augusto Diangson, an individual of the ‘third sex’, was able to claim membership in the Roman Catholic community of Kalibo, Aklan in the Central Philippines while also negotiating the Church's institution of heterosexuality. The narratives of mischief and the gender ambiguity of the Santo Niño or the Holy Child Jesus, the centre of Ati-atihan's religious veneration, further enabled Diangson to interact with Kalibo's Roman Catholicism. Through an analysis of Diangson and his participation in the festival, this article exposes how ordinary individuals in extraordinary events localise their faith through cross-dressing and dance performance. Seen throughout the Philippines, these processes of mimicry and gender transformation transport individuals into zones of ambivalence and contradictions in which they are able to navigate through the homogenising discourse of their culture and the Church's homogenising myth of Roman Catholicism.

The United States gained authority over the Philippine Islands as a result of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Treaty of Paris (1899), which recognized American wartime territorial gains. Prior to that time the Spanish had general authority over the northern region of the Islands down to the Visayas, which they had ruled from their capital at Manila on Luzon for nearly three hundred years. The population in that Spanish zone was Christianized as a product of deliberate Spanish policy during that time frame. The area to the south, encompassing much of the island of Mindanao and all of the Sulu Archipelago, was under Spanish military control at the time of the Spanish American War (1898), having been taken over in the previous fifteen years by a protracted military campaign. This southern territory was held by the presence of Spanish military units in a series of strong forts located throughout the settled areas, but clear control over the society was quite weak and, in fact, collapsed after the American naval victory at Manila Bay. The United States did not establish its own presence in much of the southern region until 1902. It based its claim over the region on the treaty with the Spanish, and other colonial powers recognized that claim as legitimate.

On hillside slash and burn fields, Lisu of Northern Thailand produce rice, opium poppies, and corn. In this paper I shall develop models to show the relationships among various factors that determine how much rice each household produces, and the relative importance of opium and rice.

Under the direct rule of the British Colonial Government in nineteenth-century Singapore, the Chinese leaders held little political power. They were essentially community leaders, charitable and enterprising. They worked for peace and harmony in a multiracial society and were closely attached to the British Colonial administration. Though the Chinese leadership played various roles in economic, political, diplomatic and social fields, it was in the social arena that it contributed most. These nineteenth-century leaders were essentially social workers who had established no radical traditions nor shaped any unique patterns of leadership.

All observers and stakeholders agree that the Cambodian state's capacity for development has been rather limited, although there are signs of expansion. The management of its important fisheries is no exception. Drawing upon existing literature, primary documents, and field interviews in two provinces and in Phnom Penh with various state and non-state actors, this study provides a background to the reasons for Cambodia's failure to manage its fisheries, enforce compliance within fishing lots, and curtail corruption in the fishing industry. It shows how fishing concessionaires' power has grown vis-à-vis that of the state and other actors. This study concludes that the considerable power held by concessionaires to make and enforce their own rules, together with their ability to accommodate or co-opt relevant state agents, has impeded Cambodia's capacity to fully benefit from, conserve, and manage its fisheries.

This paper argues that Lao bureaucrats who migrate to the uplands offer possibilities for re-thinking the immutability of upland–lowland distinctions and the power of the modern state. The specific focus is on low-ranking government officials on the Nakai Plateau in central Laos who are positioned at the nexus of state authority, development schemes and the rural poor. Nakai is a site of nationally significant resource utilisation and practices that has provided a model for development across the country. Officials' experiences in Nakai suggest that the upland–lowland contrast can provide valuable understandings of power when combined with an awareness of social processes that reproduce and shift the meanings ascribed to these nominally distinct domains. Significantly, the experiences of mobile marginal officials highlight an idea of state power as the potential to grant prosperity.

Does Thailand still have peasants? Does it still have a peasant society? How dynamic are Thailand's chaona? To answer these questions we begin with an interview of a septuagenarian farmer who discusses rural change over his lifetime and provocatively claims he is ‘the last peasant’ of his village. We use this rural anecdote as a catalyst to highlight agrarian change in Thailand and to expose the hazards of employing static concepts to describe contemporary rural political economy. By analysing the use and meanings of the term ‘peasant’ and its Thai equivalents, we demonstrate how static concepts obscure Thailand's rural evolution and contribute to misleading assumptions, harmful agrarian myths, and extant political cleavage.

The paradox can be expressed simply: the population of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia apparently grew much more rapidly than precedent or demographic theory would have led us to expect. In the two areas for which we have the most and best data — Dutch Java and the Spanish Philippines — almost all the statistical evidence points to rates of natural increase reaching 1 per cent a year by the early nineteenth century and rising well above that level for most of the rest of the century. Though the evidence is much less clear for other countries in the region, it is generally compatible with a hypothesis of comparably rapid growth. In Siam, for example, the trend line passing through most nineteenth-century estimates reaches 1.3 per cent by the 1860s, 3 per cent by the 1890s.

Religious conversion juxtaposes new beliefs and practices with previous ones, the relationship between the old and new often put in terms of substitution, superimposition, renaming, or rejection. Conversion in Anakalang, a district of West Sumba in the Indonesian Province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, differs from many of the situations of recent religious change in Southeast Asia in that it is not motivated primarily by the demands of creating a distinctive ethnic identity, differentiating status groups within a single society, or compelling personal visions. This paper focuses on some of the ramifications that religious change has for Anakalangese understandings of history and tradition. In contrast to many students of ethnicity and religion elsewhere in Southeast Asia, I would argue that in Sumba, at the present historical moment, identity formation and boundary maintenance do not serve as major motives and are not sufficient explanations for local historical responses to religious change. The need for an explicit “identity” may not be given requiring no further explanation, for it arises under specific historical and political circumstances.

In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis of Buddhist–Muslim coexistence in the Songkhla Lake area in southern Thailand as it unfolds on the margins of a violent conflict in the Deep South (Patani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces). I argue that in the Songkhla Lake area, social, religious, economic and political alliances are reflected in multi-religious ritual traditions that have the potential to transcend cultural difference or manage difference constructively. The article then analyses the transformation of multi-religious coexistence and concludes that the revitalisation of Theravada Buddhism and Islam results in the uneasy coexistence of old and new practices and in a dialectic of sharing and competition.

Over a half century after the great ‘classical’ kingdom of Pagan that produced the ‘golden age’ of Myanmar had declined in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu appeared. Thereafter, for the next century and a half, both dominated the land. While Ava was an ‘upstream’ agrarian kingdom ruling mostly Upper Myanmar, Pegu was a ‘downstream’ commercial polity with hegemony over Lower Myanmar. However, and contrary to convention that the history of fifteenth-century Myanmar was an ethnic struggle between two irreconcilable Burmese and Mon populations, their relationship should be characterised more as a dualism of different geo-political and economic factors instead. Indeed, the history of that ‘upstream–downstream’ relationship between Ava and Pegu established lasting patterns that became, thereafter, part of the fabric of Myanmar's history until today.

The Franco-British rivalry over Siam in the last decades of the nineteenth century was one of the most serious of the world wide colonial conflicts between the two Powers after 1875 resolved by the Entente Cordiale agreements of 1904. Like the other colonial conflicts along the Niger and the Nile, in Morocco and Madagascar, and over the Newfoundland fisheries, the rivalry in Siam complicated and strained Franco-British relations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and made diplomatic cooperation in European affairs very difficult, if not at times impossible.

Most studies on diversity in Southeast Asia focus on the nation-state, with much less attention given to everyday encounters and the negotiation of diversity in local contexts. This article investigates the discourses and practices of various actors in the historically tolerant, generally peaceful, and diverse city and special region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This study examines this ethnic, religious and cultural diversity and illustrates the negotiations among various interest groups and actors that strive to maintain this balance, or sometimes to strategically disrupt it. As such, the findings offer a different way to understand and interrogate the challenges confronting present-day diversity both on a local level in Yogyakarta, and also for Indonesia and Southeast Asia at large.

A pattern of trade completely new to the traditional structure of Southeast Asian trade emerged in the eastern extremity of Southeast Asia following the permanent settlement of the Spaniards at Manila in 1571. The new addition was based upon the Manila-Acapulco trade with its two supply lines originating from the ports of Fukien province in China, and the Coromandel and Malabari Coasts in India. Two hundred years later, this trade with Manila as the entrepot, had become a well-defined system, and very much a part of the traditional pattern of Southeast Asian trade. The mercantilist regulations obtaining in Manila, the seasonal rhythm of shipping movements, the goods carried along the routes and the dependent trades outside the Spanish systems had moulded the character of the Manila trade.

This article provides a detailed account of the process of invention of a nationalist tradition for Brunei, the most tradition-conscious nation in Southeast Asia. It shows how Brunei's nationalist tradition emerged at the interface of colonial records, indigenous oral and written sources, ethnographic fieldwork, and anthropological theories. For this purpose the article traces the history of anthropological research in northern Borneo from its colonial beginnings to its postcolonial role in nation-building and shows how anthropology and anthropologists have — sometimes unknowingly, sometimes deliberately — played an active role in the shaping of Negara Brunei Darussalam.

Since NEP, the ethno-political measure of Malay progress has emphasised Malay capital ownership, leading social scientists who study the Malay middle class to focus almost exclusively on what this article calls the ‘two poles of consumption and dependency’. This ethnography suggests that certain middle-class Malays use a different calculus to mark out their place in contemporary Malay life. It argues that these Malays portray themselves not only in terms of material and entrepreneurial success, but through their frequent experiences of failure. To them, failure becomes, paradoxically, a virtue that can establish their moral and Islamic distance from the Malays they characterise as the ‘indolent’ poor and the ‘politicking’ rich.