In the Melaka Straits, Chinese copper cash has been recovered archaeologically, in varying quantities, from land settlement sites dated to between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite their apparent importance, their role and function in a regional context is still largely unknown. This article seeks to reconstruct the usage of these coins in the Straits region through the integrative use of Chinese textual information and archaeological data.

After regaining independence from France in 1953, Cambodia was ruled by successive regimes according to specific ideologies which were presented as charters for constructing a modern state. For the past 20 years, however, Cambodian politics has been dominated by the seemingly non-ideological Prime Minister Hun Sen. In his public rhetoric and the stated goals of the current regime, it may be possible to identify if not ideology, then ideas about how the Cambodian people are to be governed in a post-ideological era.

This article surveys the reign of Cambodian King Reameathipadei I (1642–58) on the basis of Khmer and Dutch sources, with a particular focus on the monarch's conversion to Islam in the early 1640s. This episode provides an illustration of the pluralism of Southeast Asian societies during the Age of Commerce.

Modern spoken theatre emerged in Vietnam in the context of the intellectual and social upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s. Plays in this period focused on the status of women, the effects of Westernization and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism. In Nam Xu′o′ng's 1930 play Ông Tây An-nam, women became conduits through which men expressed their Westernized or nationalist identities.

This paper lies at the intersection of the considerable scholarly literatures on household livelihood strategies and on the role of women in Southeast Asia. Focused ethnographically on rural Philippine households engaged primarily in various combinations of fishing and farming activities, and analytically on how gender relations figure in the decisions that the co-heads of these households make regarding their economic plans for the future, it considers how the livelihood diversification that characteristically accompanies rural development affects – and is in turn affected by – the conjugal relationship.

A seventeenth-century painting, ‘Pieter Cnoll and His Family’ by J. J. Coeman, reveals a number of entry points from which Indonesian histories can be explored. Through a discussion of the painting and its subjects, a variety of issues ranging from VOC (United East India Company) policies and mestizo relationships to gender, labour and legal rights in VOC-controlled ports are discussed.

This collection of articles focuses on the interrelationship of tradition and change in the Cambodian context. In doing so, it seeks to achieve a number of objectives: first, to contribute to the debate over the role of ‘culture’ in political life in Cambodia; second, to challenge some of the preconceptions about the nature of ‘culture’ in general, and Cambodian culture in particular, upon which that debate has been based; and third, to achieve these first two aims by bringing together in productive dialogue recent speculations on Cambodia in the disciplines of political science and anthropology. As such, the symposium seeks to reflect on the relationship between culture and politics; the implications of different framings of this relationship for the politics of contemporary international engagement with Cambodia; and the implications of these for the disciplinary lenses commonly adopted by political scientists and anthropologists.

Late colonial sugar cane production in Java was characterised by the heavy use of (chemical) fertiliser in tandem with labour-intensive techniques and industrial work processes in the field. This article provides a useful corrective to an overemphasis on the extractive nature of the colonial economy of sugar and shows the truly industrial nature of plantation production. For students of colonial science and agriculture, the situation has additional ramifications, relating both to the role and ‘diffusion’ of scientific knowledge and to the historical dimensions of agricultural development in ‘the tropics’.

In the conventional historiography of Indonesia, the Second World War is equated with the Japanese occupation, and 1942 is a year of sudden change. This article argues that there was a prelude to these conditions. Changes in the global economic structure due to the Second World War, and countermeasures by the state authorities, began well before the Japanese invasion. The fundamental problem was the gradually deepening economic isolation that necessitated state intervention.

The Hmong are not passive actors who wait for help from development workers and other authorities. Instead, they actively engage themselves within a process of social negotiation between unequal socio-economic and political groups, a ‘dynamic knowledge system’. Three case studies from a Hmong Thantam community are used to better understand the process of social negotiation with multiple actors within complex power relations. More importantly, their dynamic local knowledge is used as a strategy to struggle against, and reconcile with, more powerful forces; the result of this process is the ‘complexity’ which happens as a response to power

It's possible to find knowledge from any place in the world when we humans learn from one another. Throughout the generations we Hmong have learned from many diverse sources. In order to fulfil our lives, we young Hmong still learn from the whole world. Laoyeng Saehang, A headman of Thantam village, Northern Thailand, 1998.

The Federal Constitution of Malaysia states that Islam is the religion of the Federation. This provision in Article 3(1), inserted in 1957 when the independence constitution was framed, has drawn considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Most of the studies, however, have not been able to consult the primary constitutional documents. Invariably, many have given varied and ambiguous interpretations of the provision. This article examines the primary constitutional documents and constitutional debates between 1956 and 1957 to trace the origin of Article 3(1) and to determine the intentions of the framers in inserting this provision in the constitution.

Often typecast as sedentary and static in Western writings, Cambodians have long been on the move. This article explores the misrepresentation of such mobility in colonial narratives, and contrasts the stereotype of the static Khmer with the mobilization of recruits in the First World War, the activities of protesters in Cambodia and political devices like the Royal Tour.

Several scholars portray Thai provincial strongmen as having character traits associated with nakleng – ‘tough guys’ – who are violent and ruthless toward enemies, but generous and compassionate toward supporters. Banharn Silpa-archa, the strongman of Suphanburi province, does not fit the description however. His personality is reflected in the way he meticulously – fussily – monitors all local development projects. This surveillance pushes otherwise lazy and inefficient local civil servants to be more diligent in their work. Banharn's domination rests on Suphanburians' appreciation of his non-nakleng-type leadership.

This article challenges the perceived image of ‘traditional’ Vietnam by viewing the polity's early history from the sea. A trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tonkin area, stretching to Hainan Island and northern Champa by sea, and overland to Yunnan and Laos. Commerce and interactions of peoples in this area played a crucial part in state formation for Vietnam.

On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’.

The minority tribal groups in the border zones of Southern Thailand (the ‘Sakai’) are often described as ‘disappearing’ demographically while the inability to ‘know’ them at first hand by successive interested parties (the colonial explorer, the naturalist, the government official) has been attributed to their ability to disappear into the jungle, seemingly without a trace. This paper discusses the way the ‘Sakai’ have faded in and out of ethnology and Thai public consciousness, due in part to their own survival imperatives, and in part to the character of Thai state and society.

This paper seeks to elucidate the symbolic and coercive dimensions of gift-giving in contemporary Cambodia. It is argued that gift-giving is enacted in such a way as to make self-conscious references to aspects of Cambodian ‘tradition’, but that these references are less important, in compelling assent, than the overt sense of threat that accompanies the donation of gifts. It is argued that the hitching of traditions of giving to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion is widely rejected as lacking in any kind of cultural legitimacy, but that there are few opportunities available for the poor to make such rejection explicit. In this circumstance, acceptance of practices of regimentation as ‘traditional’ represents a strategy of surrender, rather than a culturally induced response.

The surge in Song foreign trade affected Ða[under dot]i Viê[under dot]t greatly, helping to integrate the upper and lower valley of the Red River first economically in the twelfth century, then politically with the rise of the Trâ[grave accent above]n dynasty in the thirteenth, and finally culturally in the fourteenth. Coastal wealth, power and classical Chinese scholarship entered the inland capital of Thăng Long (Hanoi) and strongly influenced it, leading to major changes across the land.

Through the analysis of a Bentian Dayak ritual – the nalin taun – this article discusses how this ritual went through a change that reflected a transformation of the social organisation of the Bentian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus revealing the complex and important interaction between Malays and Dayaks in eastern Borneo. The conclusions overturn stereotypes of Dayak isolation and critique ahistorical analyses of cultural traditions in Southeast Asia.

This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.