I am interested in ways in which some Vietnamese in the fourteenth century were thinking about their fellow-countrymen. The writings of only a few of them are extant, but their understanding of a well-ordered society survived. For this reason, the fourteenth century may be a watershed in Vietnamese history. Thoughtful men during that century were concerned with more than reaffirming their country's independence, which was never in doubt and had been triumphantly vindicated during the three Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Their preoccupation was Vietnam's cultural well-being.

Based on fieldwork conducted among the Buddhist population living in Rakhine State, Myanmar, between 2005 and 2011, this article elucidates how people deal with health and illness and related uncertainties by relying on a multiplicity of conceptions and practices associated with Buddhism, astrology, spirit cults, as well as indigenous and Western medicine. This article unpacks this plurality to show how different components contribute to the healing process in complementary and yet hierarchical ways which hold to a nexus of political, social, medical, economic, cosmological, biological, and environmental factors. It also questions the boundaries between the religious and medical, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, worldly and otherworldly, and natural and supernatural.

During the past decade, Singapore has been characterized by a relatively open and competitive party system, thus setting this nation apart from a number of her Southeast Asian neighbors. However, the travails experienced by the system as it has evolved are no less in evidence today than they have been heretofore.

It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.

Few areas of recent Thai history have been the target of as much guesswork as have Thailand's foreign relations in the years immediately preceeding the Pacific War. The educated guess has been the only resort of the historian who would venture into this field, for vernacular documentation has gone unexploited. As a result, the usual treatments of the Thai role in the 1940 Franco-Thai border dispute have followed unreliable or hostile Western sources and the Thai policies of the time have been viewed in an unfavourable light. In a real sense, the French view of the affair has been adopted, for lack of other alternatives.

In late May 1904 a small band of people led by a certain Kasan Mukmin, a kyai or rural religious teacher, mounted an uprising in the village of Kebonpasar in Gedangan district of Sidoarjo regency, East Java. It was a single incident in a series of protests involving small groups of affluent peasants in Java between 1880 and 1920 which are difficult to explain in terms of the “moral economy” perspective. J.C. Scott has suggested that increasing intrusion of market economic forces into the indigenous economic life in the process of capitalist economic transformation eroded the subsistence margin of peasants instigating them to mount uprisings. This view may well explain some major peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia, but as Mukmin's uprising illustrates, numerous small rural protests in Java after 1880 occurred in relatively prosperous areas and involved affluent peasants. They were not caused by violation of peasants' perception of moral economy.

This article will examine the motivations for being spirit mediums, practitioners of the lên đồng rituals associated with the Mother Goddess (Đạo Mẫu) religion, which is unique to the ethnic Vietnamese. Drawing on the life stories of mediums interviewed in northern Vietnam, I will show that these people practise the rituals primarily because they themselves view this role as their destiny and because they expect it to bring them good health and auspiciousness.

Between 1949 and 1951, the Communities Liaison Committee (CLC), an unofficial body comprising leaders from the main Malayan ethnic communities, served as a prototype for elite intercommunal conflict resolution during a very challenging period amid an ongoing communist insurgency. Drawing upon previously inaccessible primary sources, this article reassesses the CLC's work towards resolving divisive issues such as Malay economic backwardness, federal citizenship, national identity, education and language in Malaya. This article argues that the CLC played a significantly bigger role than previously recognised and influenced government policy considerably. Equally importantly, it entrenched the concept of consociationalism, which was to shape the Malayan political landscape long thereafter.

This article focuses on the growth of spirit cults in Cambodia since the end of the Democratic Kampuchea regime through an examination of the most common type of tutelary spirit, neak ta, in Kompong Tralach in Kep Province. The role of neak ta is discussed in relation to Buddhism through their representation in local legends and myths, as reported by villagers and monks, and as the focus of rituals and ceremonies, including some conducted in a Buddhist temple, Wat Kompong Tralach. This provides ethnographic data showing that during and following the destruction of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge, and the resulting loss of monks and knowledgeable lay Buddhist specialists, Cambodians turned increasingly to older traditions such as the belief in the power and efficacy of neak ta to help fill a void. This examination of the enduring place and growing importance of beliefs such as the neak ta cult within Khmer cosmology and religious practice following decades of war and recovery deepens our understanding of the reconstruction of Buddhism in Cambodia.

From the mid-1920s, Indian music scenes developed in Singapore that were not just about the construction of regional and religious forms of Indian diasporic belonging. Drawing upon European, Chinese and Malay influences (musical and otherwise), and performing in contexts that were uncommon in India, Singaporean Indian musicians contributed to non-Indian musics, while incorporating non-Indian influences into Indian genres. Such musical–communal interactions functioned in colonial Singapore to locate the island as a hub for the constitution of a ‘Malayan Indian sonic geography’. By encouraging links between various Indian and other communities throughout the peninsula via radio, films, recordings, touring networks, and performances at hotels and amusement parks, music became a means for Indian communication and integration in colonial Malaya — a sonic geography that would be significantly transformed, though not eliminated, after Singapore and Malaysia parted ways in 1965.

This article examines colonial nature-making in twentieth century Philippines. It particularly looks into natural history investigations of the American-instituted Bureau of Science and the ways in which it created a discursive authority for understanding the Philippine natural environment. These biological investigations, the article argues, did not only structure the imperial construction of the colony's nature, but also provided a blueprint for imagining notions of national integration and identity. The article interrogates the link between colonial scientific projects and nation-building initiatives, emphasising the scripting of the archipelago's nature and the creation of a national science through biological spaces.

This article argues for a reassessment of the history of the Singhasari period based on disambiguating diverse historical sources that have often been combined to produce a seamless narrative, when in fact the textual record is marked by conflict, contradiction and ambiguity. The author proposes a basic division between the perspective of kakawin literature, which represents the interests of royal and priestly actors with a large stake in maintaining a fixed symbolic order, and literature in Middle Javanese, which reflects the more personal values that arose among young royals competing for favourable position in the core-line status hierarchy. The author further claims that symbolic initiatives of Krtanagara (1265–92 CE) that led to his identification as ‘the god Shiva-Buddha’ were not aimed at producing a syncretic religious system, but rather a politico-religious hegemony that had profound effects on the shape of statecraft during the Majapahit era.

From the turn of the century up until the 1930s, public education under Dutch rule in Indonesia developed both quantitatively and qualitatively, but this expansion was interrupted, and even reversed, by the onset of the Great Depression. Focusing on schoolteachers in particular, this essay examines the trajectory of education policies in colonial Indonesia in response to the crisis, from the initial measures, to partial recovery in the mid-1930s, up to the Japanese invasion of 1942. The crisis ushered in the policy of indigenisation, which saw large-scale education reorganisation, including the substitution of European teachers with much lower paid Indonesians. Indigenisation was also a political response to the spreading of nationalist ideals through the growing number of independent schools run by Taman Siswa and the Muhammadiyah. Hence, the intention was also to transform Indonesian teachers into cultural agents who would propagate a government-formulated concept of cultural identity among their own community. However, indigenisation contributed to the gradual delegitimisation of colonial authority through the exodus of well-educated Indonesians who had been intended as docile imperial subjects.

Rapid urban growth, in spite of some limited success in controlling population expansion, will likely continue over the next two decades in much of the developing world. Growing evidence suggests that this surge of urbanization poses significant problems for urban development and management as well as for national economic progress in general. Despite relatively strong economies and development programmes this trend is quite conspicuous in Southeast Asia where policy concerns about resource allocation, informal sector development, fiscal capacity and urban services delivery have emerged.

Around the turn of the century, railroads seemed to have a special attraction for the overseas Chinese. In that era, the iron horse was, indeed, the very symbol of the industrial age brought to Asia. Chinese modernizers had long advocated the construction of railroads as a crucial step toward self-strengthening. Many coolies had worked on the great American, Canadian and South African railways and shorter lines had been built in colonial Southeast Asia. Peasants in South China may still have feared the disruptive introduction of Western technology, but more worldly Chinese at home and abroad understood the significance of railroads not only as an improved means of transportation but as a symbol of Wealth and power.

Growing inter-regional trade has created closer ties between a remote.Thai market town near the Burma-Thailand border and the central region of Thailand. With more outside traders — armed with new kinds of goods — coming to trade, the central region, Bangkok in particular, is no longer a strange, faraway land, and Central Thai, which is used in trade, has become a familiar language in the town. Such new economic activities are thus a crucial factor in national integration, and help strengthen the ideology of the modern Thai nation.

Tengger Javanese are an ethnic Javanese people who live in the rugged uplands surrounding Mount Bromo in eastern Java. Tengger are unique among modern Javanese in that they alone trace their religious traditions back to a non-Islamic, Hindu-Javanese priesthood thought to date from the time of the last of Java's great Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Specialists of Java's ancient Hindu traditions, however, have generally concluded that liturgical manuscripts from the Tengger region can tell us little about Old Javanese religion. The eminent Dutch historian Th. G. Th. Pigeaud writes that the people who preserved the religious texts among the Tengger never belonged to the class of cultured ecclesiastics so prominent in Hindu-Javanese times. Many of the Tengger manuscripts in museum collections are written in a rustic and non-standard, budha script, and do not contain any learned Sanskrit slokas or other easily identifiable references to classical Hindu-Javanese traditions. These facts led Pigeaud to speculate that the Tengger population had always formed a separate community, only superficially influenced by Hindu tradition, and primarily involved in the worship of Mount Bromo, the volcano located at the centre of the region.

For decades after their introduction in 1854, state-defined categories of subjects and citizens in the East Indies remained largely uncontested. But a furore erupted when Indo-Europeans — legally Europeans and citizens of the Netherlands — demanded rights to own land, rights exclusively apportioned to the autochthonous population. This article recounts a contentious campaign in the 1930s by the Indo-European Association to gain rights to own land, and the vehement rejection by Indonesians expressed in various civic outlets. I argue that by challenging state categories of entitlement, race, and belonging, the debates on rights to own land defined more sharply notions of citizenship among the Indies population. Drawing on ‘acts of citizenship’, I situate the discourse of rights at the centre of the debate on colonial citizenship. In so doing, I offer an insight into the genealogy of exclusion that has haunted the idea of citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia.

This paper examines the main factors behind the rise and decline of the Japanese fisheries based in Singapore before the Pacific War, and shows that, as the fisheries contributed greatly to the Singapore economy, they did not constitute a foreign economic enclave in the British colony. It also describes how the Japanese and local fishermen conducted fisheries during the period from 1942 to 1945, and argues that the legacy of the Japanese fisheries outlived the Japanese occupation.

In the aftermath of World War Two, Malaya saw the emergence of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its attempt to mobilize labour support against the returning British colonial government. The Pan Malayan General Labour Union (PMGLU), later renamed the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Union (PMFTU), was established as a front organization to harness multiracial labour support and to work in close liaison with other left-wing political groups. Trade unions that mushroomed after the War were invariably dominated by the PMGLU and used as tools for the realization of communist political objectives in Malaya.