This article situates historical struggles for supremacy in early modern Makassar within a framework of intrafamily rivalry in which cooperation and competition coexisted. Through a reading of two texts, it examines the connections between resistance and emulation in a society that viewed social and political relationships within the structuring context of kinship. These contradictory impulses produced tensions fostering cycles of alliance and rivalry characteristic of centre–periphery dynamics in South Sulawesi.

Existing accounts of the Madiun incident or revolt of September 1948 suggest that it was a mainly domestic incident, with little direct link to international communism, whether through instructions or the international communist line. This paper argues that there were in fact strong links to both. The revolt was closely linked to the return of veteran communist Muso, who arrived from Europe after discussions with communists there, and with a mandate to help the PKI to reform its policies.

This article examines the life and death of Phra Pho Pan, a charismatic hermit of northern Thailand whose Buddhist beliefs and utopian philosophy reflect the dissident holy man (ton bun) tradition of Lanna Buddhism and, in particular, that of the renowned forest monks Khruba Siwichai and Khruba Khao Pi. Phra Pho Pan's death in 2016 has led to a radical shift in the religious affiliation of his hermitage. I argue that a major agent of this transformation has been a female hermit and spirit medium whose own religious quest reflects the more independent and assertive role of women in the Thai religious domain, but one which is conservative and aligned with Thai nationalism. I also consider the dissension that has arisen between key supporters and opponents of this realignment and dramatically made visible in ceremonies commemorating Phra Pho Pan's death.

The rise of the three great rice-producing and -exporting deltas of mainland Southeast Asia numbers among the most familiar chapters in the modern history of the region. On a macro level, it exemplifies the integration of the region into the North Atlantic-centered world economy during the age of high imperialism and the consequent shock of the depression of the 1930s. On a micro level, that rise has offered historians an opportunity to examine the responses of Southeast Asian cultivators to market signals; the variation in the allocation of factors of production across the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya and Mekong deltas; and the implications of those responses and that allocation for reactions to the shock of the inter-war crisis. The principal features of the history of the mainland rice economies between 1850 and the 1930s have indeed grown so familiar as to make that history seem like yesterday's topic. Occasional attempts to propose significant revision to the story have had little impact. And the need for a major monograph on the economic history of the Mekong delta during the French colonial period remains unmet.

This article examines the Asian channels through which foreign military knowledge flowed into Vietnam during the first half of the twentieth century. Using the Vietnamese opposition to the creation of the French colonial state of Indochina between 1905 and 1954, it is argued that there is an Asian context that needs to be taken into consideration when studying twentieth-century military and technical transfers and adaptations in Vietnam.

Late in the seventeenth century the Phaulkon fiasco encouraged Thailand to rid herself of the possibility of European domination — an endeavour whose success no doubt owed much to unsettled conditions in Europe. It is not until the mid-nineteenth century, following the ascension of the enlightened King Mongkut, that the renewed activity of Western diplomats, traders and missionaries provide the memoirs from which may be reconstructed a relatively coherent description of the distributional pattern of the Thai centres.

The year 1338 was the occasion of a great event in the life of a certain John of Florence, for in December of that year he set out from Avignon on a journey that was to take him, in his capacity of Papal Legate, to the court of the Great Khan of Cathay in Peking. This Franciscan Friar of aristocratic Florentine lineage is best known to us under the name John Marignolli, sometimes Giovanni de' Marignola, and his importance for the history of South-East Asia lies in the fact that, like Marco Polo, he made his return voyage from China not by the Central Asian overland route again but by sea through the Indies and, what is more, though passing through many perils, survived to tell the tale.

This paper illustrates the Japanese cultural policy towards the Philippines through the example of the New Philippine Cultural Institute, an educational institution created by the Japanese military to inculcate the Filipino youth with patriotism and to nurture the future leaders of the “New Philippines”. This organization developed later into a volunteer army which showed determination to fight against the returning U.S. forces.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1970, when the first volume of the Journal of South-East Asian Studies made its appearance, I was living in a rather remote mountain village in Phrao district, northern Thailand, about to complete a four-year field project with the Lahu Nyi. I was one of close to a dozen social and cultural anthropologists, at various stages in their professional careers from Ph.D. candidates (such as myself) to seasoned professionals (like the late Bill Geddes), at work among Thailand's so-called “northern hill tribes”. The small expatriate community in the charming Chiang Mai of those days readily joked about “the anthropologist behind every bush in the northern hills”. In fact there were good reasons for this heavy concentration of anthropological research at that time. The 1960s were perhaps the halcyon days for social and cultural anthropology in the Western academy; naturally this happy situation was reflected in the numbers of doctoral candidates proceeding to the field. Moreover, within the mainland Southeast Asia of that time, only Thailand provided academic researchers with relatively easy and more-or-less safe access to its mountain peoples.