Southeast Asia remains a rich region for students and scholars interested in understanding the place of culture within a variety of human activities. Three recent studies under review, Acts of integration, Bridges to the ancestors and Listening to an earlier Java, particularly demonstrate the ways in which culture plays a pertinent role in the health, performance and music of contemporary Southeast Asians. Although Acts of integration focuses on mental images, Bridges to the ancestors on a festival, and Listening to an earlier Java on musical sound, the studies shared the recognition of the interplay between two opposite yet interactive forces: sacred and secular; inner and outer; order and chaos; male and female. They argue that mental normality, aesthetics and music represent, shape and are shaped by culture characterised by such dichotomous categories. Amidst other studies which try to deconstruct culture as more fluid and hybrid, however, these works serve as a reminder of the place of culture as an underlying persistent force in shaping the views and lives of many Southeast Asian peoples.

This article examines changes within the Dutch civilising mission ideology after the decline of the Ethical Policy. Support of pure science, scientific knowledge that supposedly transcended ideology and politics, allowed the colonial administration to continue to project their rule as decent and moral, even as conflict and repression dominated colonial politics in the 1920s. The argument starts with the construction of pure science after 1910, under the care of J.C. Koningsberger, out of the research traditions at the Department of Agriculture. It next examines the creation of institutions and agendas of pure science. And finally it analyses the absorption of pure science into the civilising mission of the 1920s. It concludes with a discussion of what this means for historical evaluations of the Dutch colonial project.

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 explores the common bases of knowledge on race among Malay intellectuals and British scholar-officials in British Malaya. It focuses on genealogies of knowledge that not only lead back to Europe, but to contexts in the Malay Archipelago, encompassing both coloniser and colonised as agents of production of colonial knowledge on race. Race was a strategy adopted by Malay intellectuals in a colonial milieu, in line with histories and conditions before and during the period of British control over Malaya. The notion of complicities is explored in studying the interaction between British and Malay intellectuals which produced colonial knowledge on race.

An important but little-studied act in the history of postwar Singapore was played out at the margins of the city. Here, the state was involved in a major campaign to socialise the ‘squatters’ of urban kampong into citizens of a high modernist state. The fire hazard in these settlements also contributed significantly to the process, as the residents were mobilised into fire-fighting squads and politicians acted on behalf of the victims of infernos by rehousing them in emergency public housing. This article proposes a new approach to postwar Singapore historiography at the interface between politics and social developments. It underlines the social agents, spatial dimension and historical continuity uncovered in the venture.