In the early months of 1930, a series of strikes broke out at various spots in French Indochina - at the Phu Rieng rubber plantation near Bien Hoa in Cochin China, at a match factory at Binh Thuy near Vinh in Central Vietnam, and at a textile plant at Nam Dinh in Tonkin. While not exceptionally important in themselves, these strikes can be seen in retrospect as the opening shots in a year of violence and rebellion. By midsummer the discontent had spread from outbreaks in the big industrial centers to the rural areas in Central and South Vietnam, where a series of major peasant revolts broke out against French colonial authority. As governmental authority in the Central provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh disintegrated, it was rapidly replaced by village peasant Soviets under communist party leadership. The French responded vigorously to these “Nghe-Tinh Soviets” but it was only several months later, in mid-1931, that order was restored over a battered, exhausted, and resentful peasantry.

Burma is a minor producer of rubber, yet its association with the cultivation of rubber dates back to the earliest days of the industry in the East. The overall process of development of the industry in Burma is little understood, especially regarding the early period. This article reviews the industry in its historical and contemporary perspectives and examines its problems and future prospects.

In August 1953, Dr Ali Sastroamidjojo formed his first Cabinet in Indonesia. In doing so, he heralded the beginning of some major changes in Indonesian policies, both domestic and foreign. It is the purpose of this paper to examine certain aspects of the latter policy, particularly with respect to the United Nations.

The establishment of diplomatic ties by the Soviet Union with all the countries of Southeast Asia except the Philippines and South Vietnam, and the growing influence sought by it in the area, indicates that the publication of more work on Russian relations with Southeast Asia would be of interest, and it is the purpose of this article to survey the course of these relations to date, to see what general picture emerges and what possibilities of further research exist. This survey is, of necessity, extremely superficial.

Studies on leadership in Southeast Asia's early modern era have tended to centre necessarily on men, and in particular, on O.W. Wolters' concept of ‘men of prowess’. The concept of female leadership is still little researched. This case study of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh (1641–75) provides some insights into female leadership in the Malay-Muslim island world of Southeast Asia. Contrary to the received view that successful leadership tended to be male (men of prowess), this article demonstrates that female leadership and the justification for the position of the ruler relied less on notions of sacral and charismatic power based on male prowess, but instead shifted to Muslim notions of piety and the just ruler.

Abdul Rahim Kajai (1894–1943), his life and his work, are discussed against the background of socio-cultural developments on the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s. A journalist, writer and author, Kajai played an important role in the emergence of notions of ‘Malayness’ which made Malays feel different from and hostile to the growing numbers of ‘others’ in the colony. In particular, his stories, splendid exercises in fragmentariness, suggest a strong nostalgia for the pastoral way of life, at variance with Kajai's own life in urban areas.

Japanese forces attacked Malaya late in 1941 and, by 15 February 1942, had occupied the entire peninsula as well as Singapore. Among other changes, the Japanese regime introduced a new currency. Pre-war British currency remained legal tender but rapidly vanished from the open market, and by 1943 the economy operated on Japanese currency, commonly referred to as “banana” money because the ten-dollar note featured a banana plant. By the end of the occupation, the buying power of this currency had deteriorated dramatically, and the country experienced massive inflation as large quantities of money were printed and put into circulation.

This paper is ethnographically concerned with two different orang asli communities: the Meniq living in Southern Thailand and the Orang Sakai in Riau, Indonesia. The focus is on the different discursive rhetorics of development in the two nation-states. These rhetorics have been absorbed by the two indigenous groups to form part of their own modern cultural discourses within their respective countries. These rhetorics of development define the indigenous groups as somewhat lacking in culture and provide them with new understandings of themselves that devalue their customary way of life. The post-development indigenous identity work (such as the development of an ethno-cultural identity) will therefore usually be constructed through these negated developmental foundations.

This article details the development of Indonesian national art theatre in Makassar, South Sulawesi from the 1950s to the present. It argues that through a commitment to modernity and modern aesthetics strong bonds to the idea of the nation were formed by Makassar theatre workers. Furthermore, in charting the relationship between local Makassar theatre and national trends often pioneered in Jakarta, I argue that beginning in the New Order and continuing to the present, through several formal and stylistic changes, the deployment of local cultural elements in modern Indonesian national theatre has deepened. Yet this development represents both a renewed pride in local identity and a continuing commitment to the national community.

The Orang Sakai of Mainland Riau, on the east coast of Sumatra, have an elaborate performing art genre through which they physicalise the unseen spirit-dimension in a shamanic ritual called dikei. Their shamanic ritual utilises songs, dance as well as comedy. This article elaborates on how songs and dance visualise the unseen beings and provides detailed examples of Sakai performances during which shamans ‘dance with’ or ‘move with’ the spirits. A second theme of the article is the question of the relationship between the meaning of ‘performance’ and fakery, and suggests that there are three types of performed fakery, two of which are accepted as valid and necessary performances which technically contribute to the performance of medicine and the physicalisation of spirit presence.

Among the more noteworthy features of the Indonesian government's current efforts to recover and accentuate what is believed to be the nation's “cultural identity” is the encouragement being given to the shift in emphasis in the writing of Indonesian history so as to bring out more fully the uniqueness and greatness of the Indonesian cultural achievement. This new “Indonesia-centric” approach is said to provide a much needed correction of the earlier, colonially oriented and “Western centric” type of historical writing about Indonesia, in which the Indonesian “identity” allegedly was obscured because of Western and Dutch ethnocentric prejudices, arid in which historical events in Indonesia were treated as mere appendages to Dutch or European history generally. As early as December, 1957, a seminar of historians in Djokjakarta, Central Java, was convened “in order to eliminate the colonial historian's presentation and restore the proper emphasis on the indigenous culture, tradition and history” in “the history books of the country”. More than five years later the problem still appeared not to have been resolved as yet, for at another historical seminar held in Medan, North Sumatra, in March, 1963, Indonesia's Deputy First Minister for Information, Ruslan Abdulgani, was reportedly still calling “on Indonesian writers to begin to ‘rewrite’ Indonesian history to cleanse it of what he called ‘West-centrism’”. Indonesian historians, Abdulgani urged, “must dare to rewrite our history so that it will no longer be West-centric but Indonesiacentric”.

This article explores how Old Javanese texts, ‘literary temples’, can be used to help reconstruct the ‘textual community’ (rather than a hegemonic polity) that existed prior to Java's sixteenth-century Islamic conversions. Instead of the physical and economic might of an emerging elite, it focuses on a society's empowering acceptance and understanding of a common culture that is centered in a ritualized court. This ritualized court culture is not, however, just religiously inspired, but also develops out of Java's new generalized prosperity and the court's control over its public's access to material objects, which became the markers of social distinction.

The romantic Filipino revolutionary and “irreconcilable” Artemio Ricarte y Vibora was born in 1866 at Batac, Ilocos Norte. A teacher of Spanish in Cavite by profession but a soldier by inclination, Ricarte secretly joined the independence-minded “blood brother-hood,” the Katipunan. Subsequently, he became an officer in the anti-Spanish Philippine uprising of 1896–1897. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Ricarte was one of those recruited by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo to cooperate with the Americans in destroying Spain's authority in the Philippines. As the commander of a military district in Luzon, Ricarte was rewarded by the revolutionary government with the title of General. As early as December of 1898, Ricarte doubted that the Americans would willingly withdraw from the Islands, and he submitted to Aguinaldo a plan for an immediate uprising against the American troops in Manila. Though this plot was frustrated, the outbreak of fighting on February 4, 1899, which resulted in the bloody Philippine-American War, occurred in an area immediately adjacent to that controlled by Ricarte, and some observers believe that Ricarte's personal belligerence contributed significantly to the edginess of the Filipino soldiers.

The political life in Sarawak has been characterised by confusion, disunity, and repeated crisis. As a primitive hinterland permeated by relatively sophisticated forms of political conflicts, it offers a rare phenomenon to political analysts. Several insightful articles have recently appeared concerning various aspects of its party system. I hope to concentrate on some aspects that I have not seen previously discussed.

In vol. IV (1962), No. 2, pp. 134–165 of the Journal of Southeast Asian History Dr. D. K. Bassett has made a detailed study of my book Asian Trade and Enropean Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between about 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague, 1962). Since some time always elapses before the latest editions of the Journal of Southeast Asian History become available in Dutch libraries, my attention was only drawn to this article some months after its publication.

The main characteristic of the Thai economy in the early Rattanakosin period, especially the extent of the development of overseas trade and its effect on the domestic economy and the peasantry in particular, has become one of the points of interest among scholars of Thai history in the past decade. This paper attempts to reconsider this question by examining the existing documents on suai (head tax in kind) sent from northeast Siam to Bangkok between the 1830s and the 1860s. The region canvassed here includes areas on both sides of the Mekong valley, i.e. the Eastern Lao provinces (huamuang lao fai tawan-k) and the Forest Khmer provinces (huamuiang khamen padong).

The decade of the 1950s constituted a turning-point in the history of Malayan rubber. This was marked by a changed world rubber market, along with incipient changes in Malayan economic aspirations and policies. Internationally, the creation of a large synthetic rubber industry in the main consuming country, the United States, posed a challenge to the competitive position and long-run prospects of Malayan plantation rubber. While coping with this challenge, the rubber industry, as the mainstay of the Malayan economy, had to simultaneously satisfy emergent claims for domestic development. Indeed, Malayan rubber was itself confronted with two coterminous developmental issues: its own internal development towards more efficient forms of production; and the provision of a resource base for the development of other economic and social sectors. By way of response to these cumulative challenges, a transformation occurred with respect to the government's role in Malaya's rubber economy, with rubber emerging as the lynchpin of an evolving development strategy. In the process, the Malayan rubber plantation industry was to undergo a fundamental and wide-ranging structural transfiguration.

In a recent article I looked at the Gunongan (Plate 1) in Banda Aceh, Indonesia in the context of both the stories surrounding this structure and its symbolism. Space did not permit an analysis of a second structure, the kandang (enclosure) that stands slightly to the north of the Gunongan. In this paper therefore I will take a closer look at the kandang and some of the stories surrounding it.