The study of the political in Myanmar over the past 200 years has been conducted in circumstances and with methods that have resulted in only partial and often unsatisfactory outcomes. Difficulties of accessing data and problems in its analysis have forced analysts to seek to understand Myanmar's politics often through informed hunches from a comparative perspective. As the field has grown, it has also become somewhat more politicised and there is a necessity to be analytically self-critical in order to avoid making ‘facts’ fit theories.

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.

Soon after Raffles founded Singapore in 1819, the Chinese began to arrive in slowly increasing numbers and to form an important section of its population. Most of the immigrants came from the two southernmost maritime provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. In the Straits there were five major groups: the Macaos, natives of Canton and neighbouring towns and villages; the Khehs from the interior of the province of Kwangtung; the Teychews, from Swatow and its vicinity; the Hailams, natives from the Island of Hainan; and the Hokiens, from Amoy and the other places in the province of Fukien.

This study of Timor and the surrounding islands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries provides evidence that, after the demise of the Portuguese Estado da India, an ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ empire persisted but in uniquely localised ways. It describes the emergence of the ‘black Portuguese’ community known in Timor and the Solor archipelago as the Topasses. Their singular identity was based on the melding of indigenous and Portuguese blood and cultural forms. Their ability to access the sources of spiritual authority in both the Catholic and the Timorese domains assured their survival and that of the Portuguese in Timor until well into the twentieth century.

The exploration of differing historical interpretations has become an area of growing interest to anthropologists and historians alike, who have come to recognize that diverse interpretations of the same events can create as powerful a force for future actions as the events themselves. Following this approach, history becomes not so much a narrative progression of events, as shifts in meaning structures over time. The impact of such a perspective on scholars of Southeast Asian societies has led to both an increasingly critical use of colonial sources as well as to renewed interest in native or indigenous documents. We have also come to expect major divisions not only between colonialist and indigenous views, but among indigenous views themselves. This is particularly true in societies divided by class and ethnicity such as Malaysia where competing political and cultural interests can be expected to produce markedly different versions of past events. Similarly, we can predict that ongoing shifts in political and cultural relations will create continued transformations in interpretations over time.

I joined the Maritime Silk Route Expedition organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a member of the International Team of Scholars. We sailed on the Fulk-al-Salamah, the expedition ship, from Oman to China, stopping in the following countries: Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. International seminars were held in each one of these countries during the expedition.

The recent rebuilding of the house of the clan from which a “king” of Manggarai was chosen during direct Dutch rule on the island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago has brought to light several different histories of that clan's rise to power and the meaning of the house in those histories. This paper explores the contestation over both time and place in Todo, Manggarai, relating them to people's present-day concerns.

This article discusses the ongoing hybrid war crimes tribunal taking place in Cambodia — in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — in relation to the simultaneous eviction of the Boeung Kak Lake community in the capital, Phnom Penh. Presenting these two phenomena alongside one another highlights the contradiction inherent in the liberal peace model's humanitarian rhetoric of societal reconstruction and its economic imperatives, which serve the interests of the elites. The material discussed here suggests that so-called transitional justice interventions may accompany a period of stabilisation, which is good for the global market, but do little to enhance fairness and peace for ordinary people.

This article describes the communal associations of the “Dayak” communities in Sarawak, and their functions of relating to the state and articulating local interests of the indigenous minorities. The significance of communal associations to the ethnogenesis of indigenous peoples is considered as well. Overall, communal associations are useful for projecting the presence of indigenous peoples in a communally stratified nation-state.

Holy men were respected leaders in early Thai and Lao society. As Thai society became more complex, traditional holy men disappeared, to be replaced by modern charismatic monks. But, in Southern Laos and the Khorat Plateau, holy men found a new role as leaders of protest movements.

For contemporary Malay/Indonesian speakers, dukun signifies an indigenous healer. Etymologically, however, the word dukun is not native to Malay/Indonesian. Some say dukun is Arabic, but this article claims it is more Persian than Arabic. When fifteenth-century Persian settlers brought the proto-form of the word dukun to the Malay Archipelago, they also brought cosmopolitan notions of Sufism, faith and healing. Eventually orthodox Arab immigrants and Europeans denigrated Sufi healers as ‘indigenous’. Dukun became a rhetorical foil demonstrating how superb Western physicians or orthodox Arabs were by comparison. Gradually, the dukun's reputation became intertwined with negative attitudes about ‘indigenous’ practices.

The Oecusse-Ambeno enclave of Timor has persisted as a geographically distinct zone under Portuguese governance for over three centuries, enduring repeated efforts to undo its enclave status. This article analyses the confluence of economic, religious, and political elements that brought and kept Oecusse within Portuguese rule on Timor. Strong local authorities controlled trade linkages, maintained political and military ties with colonial rule, and wove Catholicism into existing customary practices and hierarchies, forging a strong regional identity that fostered sustained alliance with the Portuguese. Finally, the article discusses the impacts of Oecusse's enclave status over the past century.

The narrative of the origins of the Lao people in contemporary Lao-language history books and textbooks is divided among divergent interpretations. The most popular reading is the ‘Ai-Lao’ version, an implicit response to Thai nationalist historiography. Marxist-Leninist-orientated historiography, by contrast, resembles the Vietnamese Communist narrative. As far as likely future trends are concerned, a journey back to the ‘roots’ seems ultimately to reveal the biography of a pre-modern spatial identity.

The rise and fall of Pertamina is a remarkable event in the recent economic history of Indonesia which has had wide-ranging economic and political ramifications. Formed in 1968, the state enterprise grew rapidly into one of the most important companies in Asia and Indonesia's most vigorous business organization. By 1974, this burgeoning oil conglomerate led by a dynamic President Director, Dr Ibnu Sutowo, known for his “can-do” philosophy and record of delivering the goods, had expanded its activities to a wide range of diverse business ventures both within and outside of Indonesia. But in late 1974, just as it seemed that the oil boom would surely strengthen Pertamina's already-dominant role in political and economic life in Indonesia, severe financial difficulties overtook the enterprise. In March 1975 the Indonesian Government was forced to step in to shore up Pertamina, and the subsequent investigations which continued on into 1976 revealed a series of remarkable business miscalculations which had led the company to accumulate debts officially put at over US$10 billion, much of it in foreign currency. Corruption in Indonesia has attracted much attention in recent years, so it is perhaps not surprising that it is this side of the remarkable Pertamina affair — and especially the role of Dr Ibnu Sutowo — that has received most comment. But the controversy surrounding the rise and fall of Ibnu Sutowo should not be allowed to obscure other significant issues. There are numerous semi-independent “states within a state” in Indonesia, and the role of particular individuals (whether honest or corrupt) within them should be kept in perspective. After discussing the background to the Pertamina crisis below, several issues will be taken up. It will be argued that while the economic consequences are bound to be farreaching, their impact on the economy should not be exaggerated. It will also be suggested that it is conflict between the need for autonomy and the desirability of public accountability which is at the heart of the debates about Pertamina's role, that many other official institutions (especially state enterprises) are faced with a similar conflict, and that we must look to the long-term development of institutional checks and balances to permanently improve the situation.

When the French assumed effective political control of Vietnam in the late nineteenth century they were confronted with the dual problem of raising revenues and securing administrative control of the countryside. In seeking a solution they were forced to consider Vietnamese land tenures and the distribution of agricultural output prevailing at that time. Their early moves reflected a sharp bias in favour of French law and almost total ignorance of the wide divergence between their system of property and taxation and Vietnamese custom and procedure. On a broad scale what was involved was an attempt to reinterpret indigenous practices to achieve compatibility with the French conception of private and public property categories and the legitimate rights and claims inherent in each. Le Code Annamite was translated by P.L.F. Philastre and gradually Vietnamese property laws were drawn towards conformity with French practices.

There is perhaps no more startling example in the history of the British Empire of a casual, almost imperceptible shift of attitude in the Colonial Office having such dramatic repercussions as in Malaya in 1874. Authorised to “enquire and report” into conditions in the western Malay states, the new Governor, Sir Andrew Clarke, found himself carried away by forces on the spot, which had been building up for twenty years while the British government maintained a strict policy of non-involvement. Within weeks of arriving in Malaya, Clarke made agreements with three Malay rulers for British Residents to be attached to their states, and laid the foundations for the relentless spread of British protection over the whole peninsula. These repercussions mystified Colonial Office officials at the time and left future generations of historians to unravel the mystery of what had happened and why.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nguyen kingdom was known as Dang Trong to Vietnamese, and Cochinchina by the Westerners. In just 200 years it won control over three-fifths of the territory in modern Vietnam. The experiences of this expanding southern frontier area seem to suggest an image of Vietnam that is very different from the north, opening a door to an alternative world in which diversity was tolerated, and indeed exploited, for Vietnam's own development.

Ever since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

This article documents the shifting identity over time of a single Malaysian ethnic minority, the Portuguese Eurasian community of Malacca. Through a close examination of three pivotal historical moments (1952, 1969, and 1995), it shows how cultural phenomena (in this case, music and dance) play key roles in the projection of new public images.

Ironically, the focus which Schrieke and Van Leur first brought to bear on socioeconomic changes in the Archipelago inspired scholars after them, Benda, Wertheim and Meilink-Roelofsz, among others, to plead for more dynamic structural changes than the pioneers of “Southeast Asia-centric historiography” presumed fit. The more cautious approach of Schrieke and Van Leur would appear to arise from their anxiety to establish cultural continuity as a viable basis for the study of socio-economic change. Since then change has come to be understood, particularly with reference to the maritime societies of Southeast Asia, as an indispensable element which guaranteed continuity within the basic traditions of the regions.