The Hoàng Lê nhât thông chí is an indispensable text for the study of late eighteenth-century Vietnamese history and especially the Tây So'n uprising. Its influence on subsequent historiography, however, has often been overlooked. This article examines the text, its content and genre, and demonstrates its historiographical impact on both nineteenth-and twentieth-century histories of the Tây So'n period.

the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typically been a result of economic growth, and that the general sparsity of the population in early historical times reflected the low ‘carrying capacity’ of the environments in question under the prevailing economic conditions.

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.

this article analyses the socioeconomic relations of manila cigar-makers, who had strong bargaining power vis-à-vis management during the american colonial period. focusing on a structural economic depression which took place in the mid-1920s, the study considers the evolution of these workers' lives in terms of skills, autonomy, stratification and cohesiveness at their work sites.

This article examines the emergence of twentieth-century technological development policies in the Netherlands East Indies from broader welfare policies formulated in the nineteenth century. Identity became particularly important in policymaking as officials disputed whether differences between Javanese and European culture could explain why the Javanese did not flourish under colonial rule, and whether encouraging Javanese to become more like Europeans would solve ‘Native’ welfare problems. Technical experts, whose development projects would increasingly define what a ‘developed’ Native would be, became crucially important players in debates about ‘Europeanizing’ the indigenous people.

Historical studies of the Chinese overseas, especially those focused on Southeast Asia, need to take into greater account the influence that Chinese born and permanently settled outside China exerted over the wider diasporic community. Moving away from a sojourner-dominated perspective, this article examines Nanyang commercial and cultural networks that were centred on Singapore and largely orchestrated by ‘Straits Chinese’. It argues that these networks played a significant role in altering the self-perceptions of more recently arrived migrants in the region and even, for some, helped re-define Chinese identities.

britain and indonesia approached the brink of war at the height of the sunda straits crisis in september 1964. using newly released declassified archival records, this study reviews the supposed british deterrence success. the factors behind successful indonesian deterrence during the crisis contradict the prevalent view that statesmen should refrain from brinkmanship since they are unlikely to achieve their political goals at minimum costs to themselves.

Since German missionaries arrived in the Batak Lands in the early 1860s, the Toba Batak Protestant Church has struggled with its relationship to the indigenous cosmology and belief system known as adat. Using the performance of ceremonial music and dance as a case study, this article explores the impact of continuing local respect for adat on the development of Church policy over 140 years.

The expansion of public education is often seen as an effective tool for the promotion of national identity and the mitigation of ethno-religious tensions in diverse post-colonial states. This essay questions such assumptions via an examination of successive Philippine governments' efforts to deploy educational policy as a response to chronic tensions between the nation's Christianised mainstream and a restive Muslim minority on the southern island of Mindanao. It suggests that the expansion of education to foster a cohesive national identity without careful reconsideration of the religious, cultural and political biases inherent in its content is likely to fail in achieving peaceful, cohesive relations between different ethno-religious communities in religiously diverse multicultural states.

In Malaysia, the influence of the hegemonic or ‘authority-defined’ discourse on nation appears so pervasive that it obscures the fact that ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ identities are in fact highly contested concepts or categories. There is a need, therefore, to examine alternative constructions of ethnic and national identity where dominant notions are challenged, reconstituted and problematized. In keeping with recent developments in critical and literary theory, this article examines selected works of a leading Malaysian novelist, K. S. Maniam, to argue that it is his commitment to the cultural politics of diaspora that problematizes state constructions of a coherent or homogeneous Malaysian identity.

Despite popular representations of Tunku Abdul Rahman as an avuncular political personality, he was also an astute policy practitioner. This was evident in how he, in pursuit of Malayan interests, calibrated Malaya's foreign policy posture towards Jakarta in a manner that not only displayed little appreciation of Indonesian sensitivities, but also undermined its political interest and status as the major power in Southeast Asia, thus contributing to bilateral tension.

this article examines the recent debate on the position of syari'ah in indonesian constitutional amendments (1999–2002). the article operates at two levels: a historical review of the debate on islam and state in indonesia and a theoretical effort to situate the indonesian debate in the broader context of debates over islam and constitutions. it argues that the rejection of the proposed amendment to article 29, dealing with islam, has shown that indonesian islam follows the substantive approach of syari'ah, not the formal one.

This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.

Since 1989 ‘rites of cursing’, derived from Northern Thai folk-religious practices, have become common in public protests and demonstrations in Thailand. This essay argues that the employment of these practices and associated beliefs as aspects of civil society and contemporary nation-state making in the Thai context can only be understood in terms of the internal logic of sorcery and embedded conceptions of morality.

this article explores changing attitudes towards courtship and marriage among educated muslim javanese youth, as seen against the backdrop of islamic resurgence, growing educational achievement and socioeconomic change. through a comparison of earlier forms of courtship and marriage with emerging trends, it sheds light on some of the tensions and ambivalences surrounding the new social freedoms and autonomy modern javanese women have come to enjoy.

Since the fall of Suharto's New Order government the number and variety of media available have grown at a remarkable rate in Indonesia. In the process these new media, particularly radio, have created new forums for expressing local identity. This article examines how various radio stations, and specific programmes, in Pekanbaru, Riau have provided a new conduit for marginalised ethnic, linguistic and social groups – particularly Riau Malays – to address issues of their identity in an increasingly globalised, and decentralised, Indonesia.

this article challenges the dominant paradigm of ‘inclusive syncretism’ in the study of thai religion. by taking the worship of multi-original deities in the popular spirit-medium cults in contemporary thailand as a case study, it argues that practitioners and specialists working on thai religious studies need to refresh and update their analytical paradigm to incorporate the concept of ‘hybridization’.

This article examines the cinematic representation of identity through an analysis of the well-known Philippine film, Badjao. Produced in the late 1950s, Badjao successfully commercialized the idea and expression of conflict between the Tausug and Badjao ethnic groups. The study focuses on how the enactment and enunciation of identity through difference presented itself in cinema and how such representations, imbued with stereotypical cultural and religious codes, were re-formulations within nationalist discourses in the Philippines.