The demarcation of boundaries is an important feature of the Sundanese social and geographical landscape. Markers indicating the limits of territories, ceremonial areas and the like abound. Linguistic markers indicate interpersonal social boundaries. Boundaries are generally regarded as places of danger and various supernatural entities are said to guard those between any two spheres in general. On Java generally, regularly recurring anniversaries, such as Idul Fitri and 1 Sura, the Javanese new year are marked with significant ceremonies such as bersih desa or petik laut or, in the past, rampok macan protecting the village or realm from evil.

Less immediately obvious are boundaries in time, marking the transition between zaman, or eras. A change in era is of a different kind from the cyclical changes since by its very nature it is a non-repeating event. The topic of this paper is one such change in West Java, the change from Hindu rule to Islamic hegemony, and the mythology which consequently arose, providing a supernatural explanation for this quite powerful event.

Finds of imported ceramics, especially early Chinese stonewares, are relatively rare in the mountainous interior of Sumatra. In 1977, however, Indonesian archaeologists discovered a series of five megalithic sites in Kecamatan Sumberjaya, Kabupaten Lampung Utara, about 85 kilometres northwest of Kotabumi the district administrative centre and some distance south of the road to Liwa and Krui. These sites were completely unknown in the Dutch colonial period and only came to light when Javanese immigrants moved in to the area in the nineteen fifties. Consequently, the present names by which these locations are known tend to reflect recent Javanese usage rather than indigenous nomenclature. Excavations at the complex known as Telagamukmin in Desa Purwawiwitan, Kecamatan Sumberjaya in 1980 revealed considerable quantities of locally made earthenware sherds and fragments of imported south Chinese stonewares dating from the ninth to tenth centuries, the Five Dynasties and northern Song periods in China. A bronze bracelet, two bronze blades and other metal fragments were also recovered. Quantities of ceramic sherds have also been recovered as surface finds at other locations including Batuberak and Batutameng Desa Purajaya, Ciptaarga, Bungin and Cabangdua.

The island of Borneo has maintained until fairly recently a number of tropical rainforest hunting-gathering groups, generally referred to as Punan or Penan (though other local ethnonyms are found). Today, a large proportion of them have switched to a partly settled way of life and some form of agriculture, but even these groups still rely heavily on the forest, collecting jungle products for trade and, often, processing the wild sago palms for their subsistence while collecting. The Bukat, one of these partly settled groups, are found (see Map 1) in Indonesia's West Kalimantan (three hamlets, totalling 300 persons) and East Kalimantan (one hamlet of 150), and in Malaysia's Sarawak (one hamlet of 150).

One of the constant problems for historians of Southeast Asia is to assimilate its system of adding extra days and extra years to the lunar calendar to make it keep pace with the solar calendar. It is well known that the addition of an extra month should take place 7 times in every 19 years (adhikames), and that the addition of an extra day should occur 11 times in every 57 years (adhikawan). It is also known that the extra month is called second Ashadha and that in Thailand and Cambodia the extra day is given to the previous month, Jyestha.

The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the “world” — or, more properly, Western — rice market is well known. Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous “as every schoolboy knows” rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the “New Imperialism”, more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 or 1870 and 1900 or 1910. From small-scale beginnings in the 1850s and 1860s, Southeast Asia's extra-Asian rice trade is said to have grown dramatically in the years after 1870, quickly transforming a situation of market equilibrium into one of disequilibrium.

I. The Philippine Scripts

In 1593, there was printed in Manila a most remarkable xylographic (wood-block) book, comprising Juan de Plascenia's Doctrina Christiana in Spanish, romanized Tagalog and Tagalog script (see Fig. 1). While there is still some debate as to whether this was the first book to be published in the Philippines, there appears little doubt that it constitutes the earliest extant printed example of any Philippine script.

In September 1990 the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam (CASA) organized an International Workshop on “Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia”. Most of the presented papers dealt with plantations where the workforce had to be imported from distant regions, sometimes even from abroad. The type of human community originating from such recruitment policies often resulted in a typical frontier society, characterized by extreme harshness on the part of the white planters, and by a sense of utter alienation and isolation among the Asian labourers.

By any measure, Trương Định (1820–64) was one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism. As such, he has received a good deal of scholarly attention in Vietnam, France, the United States, and elsewhere. This article analyses the anti-colonial movement led by Trương Định in southern Vietnam during the years 1859–64, focusing on the questions of Trương Định's relationship to the Vietnamese imperial government at Huế and his motivation for continuing the anti-French struggle after Huế had made peace with France in 1862. Its organization is as follows: first, the historical context is summarized; second, Trương Định's resistance movement and its relationship to the Huế court are analyzed; third, various explanations of Trươg Định's motivation are considered and my own hypothesis is offered.

The writing of Lao history presents peculiar problems, not because of the quantity and quality of sources available (though these leave much to be desired for certain periods), but because of the difficulty in deciding what is meant by “Lao history”. There is a problem in identifying the object of study. Is Lao history the history of those territories inhabited by ethnic Lao, or of the state of Laos as it has existed at various times under various names? The Lao have spread far beyond the geographical boundaries of present-day Laos: many more ethnic Lao live in Thailand than in Laos. Moreover the Lao state ceased to exist as a unitary entity in the early eighteenth century. What was reconstructed by the French nearly two centuries later and exists today is but a fragment composed of territories belonging to former principalities inhabited by diverse peoples, many of whom are not ethnic Lao. They are divided into three broad groups: the Lao Loum, or Lao of the valleys, comprise not only ethnic Lao but also upland Tai and account for about 65 per cent of the population; the Lao Theung, or Lao of the mountain slopes, speaking Mon-Khmer languages, account for around 25 per cent; while the Lao Soung, or Lao of the mountain tops, speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, number perhaps 10 per cent. The terms Lao Loum, Lao Theung and Lao Soung will be used to refer to these groups in this paper.

The growth of the pre-World War II rubber industry in British Malaya is, in contrast to the staple industries of many less-developed countries, exceptionally well-researched. P.T. Bauer and J.H. Drabble have written seminally on the rubber industry, while a number of others, including C. Barlow, have made important contributions. Yet an outstanding feature of the British Malayan industry remains relatively overlooked: the development of the Singapore rubber market.

The shadowplay of Southeast Asia has often been understood as a reflection of local cultural patterns, and it has therefore been the object of much scholarly interest. That interest has been directed especially at the Javanese play, although much has also been written about Balinese and Malaysian shadowplay performances. The shadowplay performance is not usually associated with Thailand, and the shadowplay there has not been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nevertheless, such a tradition is thriving among Tai-speaking Buddhist peoples in peninsular (Southern) Thailand, particularly in the provinces of Songkhla, Thammarat, and Phatthalung on the long-settled rice plain stretching from Songkhla near the Malay border to Nakhon Si Thammarat, where most puppeteers are found.

While the organization of the Philippine sugar industry evolved to promote and balance the short-term interests of planters, millers and traders, it now undermines the industry and threatens the economic fortunes of those who depend upon it. By perpetuating inefficiency and fostering a frenzy of trading that affords inordinate profits for the least productive sector, this structure has become the major obstacle to restoring the Philippines to its former status as one of the world's most efficient and technologically advanced producers of cane sugar. As efficiency falls further behind that of other sugar producing countries, and as industrial consumers become more disgruntled with paying high prices for sugar, the nation risks the collapse of an industry that has already proven vulnerable to intermittent crises. The last time a crisis occurred — in the mid-1980s — planters faced foreclosure, mills stood idle, and workers and their families suffered malnutrition and dislocation, leading commentators to refer to Negros, the nation's premier sugar-growing island, as “Asia's Ethiopia” and a “social volcano”. While conditions have improved since the EDSA Revolution, the structure that has emerged does little to encourage productivity, efficiency and fairness. Since the industry continues to employ 500,000 workers, with as many as three million dependents, a collapse would lead to mass displacement, hunger, and political upheaval.

This paper will outline the history of the Philippine sugar industry, examine its current structure, and describe the political and economic forces that sustain it. My first contention is that the institutional organization, rather than government policy, cultural attitudes, or neo-colonial dependency, is fundamentally responsible for the poor performance of the industry in recent decades and, unless major changes are forthcoming, will be mainly responsible for its ultimate demise.

Thai religion is changing. So is Thai society. To most scholars the connection is obvious: social and especially material changes drive religious ones. So a new middle class causes religious ferment while a crisis in legitimacy explains a militant Buddhist movement as well as the fervour for amulets and forest monks. Such explanations are typical in using extra-religious current events to explain religious change. We need not dispute their specific interpretations to make a larger historical point: today's religious changes are, if only in part, the unintended consequences of a century and a half of Sangha reform that has undermined the local Buddhism of the temple or wat. In effect centralizing reforms took the wat away from locals and, by driving folk practices out of the temple, fostered today's religious “free market”. This long-term institutional shift, changing the wat's place in Thai society, can be the context for understanding today's religious changes.