New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

Mary M. Steedly‘s book, Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence, is “one of a kind and will continue to be so,” writes Benedict Anderson. This is high praise from one of the greats of Southeast Asian studies. A reading of Rifle Reports reveals why it is praise that is so well deserved. Steedly deftly weaves the stories of Indonesian independence told to her on “the outskirts of the nation” together with thought-provoking discussions of memory practice and the writing of history via ethnography. Concentrating on the accounts of Karo women about their struggle against Dutch colonizers and Japanese invaders, Steedly situates the fight for independence in the day-to-day activities of North Sumatra’s entire population. In so doing, she offers a much more richly textured account than conventional histories concentrated on male-dominated politics, military strategies and moments of combat provide, one that “moves toward difficulty rather than simplification, one that compels as well as enacts the strategie

Labour consciousness is not just class-based; it also emerges out of cultural identities, as Tran Ngoc Angie argues powerfully in Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2013). Vietnamese workers habitually form relationships based on native place, ethnicity, religion and gender. At critical class moments, as Tran calls them, these workers can also succeed in transcending or building on their cultural ties to form larger movements for labour rights. Through detailed study of 33 cases from French colonial Indochina to present day Vietnam, Tran tracks labour activism across a range of political and economic conditions, industries and sectors. Concentrating on the period since economic reform and liberalization from 1986 to the present, she compares worker agency in state-owned and equitized factories, factories with foreign-direct investment and domestic privately owned factories, to arrive at findings that speak to conditions not only in Vietna

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the effects of mass media on the perception and proliferation of these phenomena, de la Cruz charts the emergence of voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. She traces a shift from local to national to transnational contexts, and from the representational to the virtual – in short, Mother Figured explores what Mary tells us about becoming modern. Deirdre de la Cruz is assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies and history at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

In Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) Khairudin Aljunied tells a neglected story of anticolonial politics in Malaya from the late 1800s to the Emergency. Whereas other scholars working from imperial archives have downplayed the role of radicalism in nationalist resistance and the struggle for Malayan independence, Khairudin “seeks to rescue the Malay radicals from the shadows of nationalist scholarship” and resituate them in accounts of the country’s past, and its present. Concentrating on the period from 1937, with the establishment of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, Khairudin tells a complex story of resistance, collaboration, anxiety, ferment and experimentation under both British and Japanese occupiers. Through close readings of memoirs, poems, newspapers and polemical tracts, he offers a lively and engaging account of political consciousness and action in the era of late European colonialism, amid intense warfare and heavy repression. Khairudin Aljun

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Combining a powerful aesthetic sensibility with excellent scholarship, her book is of rare quality: beautifully written, visually compelling, and passionately argued. Annette Miae Kim joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss sidewalk symbols and vendors, the regulation of public space old and new, the right to the city, pushing the boundaries of the map, and the passing of time along the streets and alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City. To download and view a space-time map and a narrative map from Sidewalk City click here, hereand here. Thank you to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduc

In The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation(University of Hawaii Press, 2015), Shane Strate tracks the movements of two competing narratives of national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century Siam, subsequently Thailand. Against the dominant narrative of royal nationalism, he shows how in moments of crisis another narrative of national humiliation functions to bond citizens to the state through the solidarity of victimhood. Both narratives rely heavily on the trope of territory lost to French imperialism. In the royal nationalist narrative, the lost territories are cleverly conceded: a finger sacrificed to save the hand. In the national humiliation narrative, duplicitous colonizers betray and embarrass Siam for their own ends, emasculating its geobody through the seizure of vassals on its periphery. National prestige is restored when the military embarks on new expansionist projects to reclaim the nation’s former preeminence. And when plans to regain an imagined lost empire on th

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), is almost impossibly vast in scale and ambitious in scope, ranging across familiar territory while drawing out major new themes in the history of one of the world’s most diverse yet nevertheless coherent regions. Writing against the “seductive pressure” to view past political and cultural arrangements as analogues of our own, Reid draws on the resources of a life spent studying and writing Southeast Asian history to take the reader on a journey from the nagara polities and stateless majorities of a thousand years ago to the rise of high modernism in the places that today we know as Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. His strong engagement with major debates will appeal to specialists, yet the book is also highly accessible to students new to study

When a revolutionary party aims to take administrative control of the countryside, what kinds of devices, training and documents does it use? And what are their consequences? In The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Ken MacLean explains that confounded by its inability to get a clear reading of its own practices, let alone those of the rural population, the party/state in Vietnam has since the late 1920s layered varied and oftentimes conflicting approaches to the management of information one on top of the other. Although the approaches have differed, all have been premised on a lack of trust: of villagers, of cadres, and of the integrity of the processes of data collection and interpretation themselves. The government of mistrust both produces and is reproduced by the forms of documentation on which it relies. Ken MacLean joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the functions of “legibility devices” in state p

Researching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants “experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way”, yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond essentialist explanations, Duncan nevertheless insists that the challenge for scholars “is to explain the role of religion in the violence without essentializing it”. In Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2013) he takes up the challenge. Drawing on over a decade of research in North Maluku, and informed by time spent in the region prior to the conflict, Duncan speaks with impressive authority about the before, during and after of the bloodshed. Utilizing work by scholars of political violence and the management of memory like Stanley Tambiah and

“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015) is a powerful and multilayered book that upbraids overseas Chinese studies for their neglect of class. Bringing class struggle and identity firmly to the centre of his analysis, Donald Nonini argues that scholars of the overseas Chinese have not accounted for class and its role in state formation adequately. Instead, an abiding concern for articulating an imagined essential “Chinese culture” causes scholars to disregard the radical dialectics of state formation and antagonism that crisscross time and space in Southeast Asian postcolonies. Nevertheless, class relations have been fundamental to Malaysian society, and especially, to the making of meaning among its racially differentiated citizenry. Drawing on over three decades of fieldwork, from 1978 to the 2000s, “Getting By is full of detail yet highly readable. Sometimes provocative but always reflective, it is throughout concerned with rethinking premises and

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitted greenbacks cease to be the stuff of the currency trader or foreign state. Here, they take on new and distinctive roles. They mingle with their counterfeits, the one burned at cemeteries and shrines to satisfy ancestral debts, the other sent by relatives living abroad to acknowledge the debt-bond owed by those who have left the country to those who remain behind. They celebrate the transnational yet also beckon to the intimate. And, they challenge the communist party to reorder its narrative of modernity so as to maintain the primacy of its role in political and administrative affairs. As Truitt herself puts it,

Policymakers around the world design projects in which the demands of citizens for basic services are cast as a problem of poverty. Villagers are expected to prove their worthiness for charitable projects and participate with gratitude in schemes for their gradual improvement. When projects fail, the recipients get blamed for being corrupt, ignorant, or disinterested in their own welfare. In Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos (NUS Press, 2014), Holly High recounts how Laotian villagers participate in road projects they know will fail, attempt to restart irrigation schemes they had only recently thwarted, and engage with a state they distrust not because they lack awareness, but out of culturally embedded desire. Poverty alleviation campaigns aim to enlist people into cooperative projects with appeals to egalitarianism and democratic choice, yet the success of mutual assistance depends on hierarchical relations, the making of extravagant claims, and sometimes, the ritualized delivery of excessive ab

Think of student activism in Asia and what comes to mind? The democracy movement in China during 1989? Or Burma the year before? The tumultuous student politics of Thailand in the mid 70s? Perhaps the 2014 protests in Hong Kong. For most of us, student politics in Malaysia probably isn’t the first thing we’d think of. But not Meredith Weiss, author of Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP & NUS Press, 2011), who provides a definitive account of student politics and university life in this Southeast Asian country, from the colonial period to the present. The number of scholarly monographs on Malaysia is relatively small, and few are as meticulously researched and referenced as this book. For these reasons alone, Student Activism in Malaysia deserves close attention. Weiss writes to recover lost history, and she does so with keen insight and nuance. At the same time, she pushes the reader to rethink what the categories of “student” and “activist” mean–not only in Malaysia or So

In Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Alicia Turner tells the story of how Burmese Buddhists reimagined their lives, their religious practice and politics in the period of 1890 to 1920, following the fall of Mandalay to the British. Whereas many histories narrate the modern anti-colonial struggle in Burma from the 1920s onwards, Turner shows how in the preceding decades Buddhists were working to navigate, explain and respond to rapidly changing conditions through familiar tropes of Buddhist decline and revival, often for new and innovative purposes, and with unfamiliar consequences. By juxtaposing the dynamic Buddhist concept of sasana with the bureaucratic colonial category of “religion” she explains how projects to bring Buddhist practice into alignment with colonial government failed and how new types of conflict emerged, and with them, new identity politics and interest groups. “Turner’s book not only contributes to the study of religious t

Over the last decade, debates about political turmoil in Thailand have loomed large in talk shows, chat rooms and public lectures. From the military coup of 2006 that ousted the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, through the tumultuous years after the restoration of civilian government and the latest coup of 2014, events in Thailand have held our attention. Much of the time, these events are reduced to simplistic binaries: yellow shirts and red shirts, elites and commoners, urbanites and rural dwellers. In Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) Andrew Walker, co-founder of the influential New Mandala website–takes the reader beyond the binaries. Rural politics in contemporary Thailand, he advises, is not the old resistant politics of the rural poor; rather, it is a new middle-income politics, a politics through which rural people seek out productive connections with sources of power. In this fundamental shift in the thinking and practices of rura

Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultural theory to write Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), an unusual and fascinating story spanning four centuries of human-orangutan encounters in Southeast Asia and beyond. The book tracks these encounters from the jungles of Sumatra in the 17 century through to the cinematic performances of the 20 century, and into contemporary advocacy for animal rights. It shows how humans–particularly Europeans–have been troubled by the orangutan, because it challenges political, juridical and ethical ideas, perceptions and representations of humanness. Wild Man from Borneo is an illuminating and revealing study, which will appeal to general readers as well as specialists. Over 50 illustrations complement the authors’ elegant and detailed written account. In view of the orangutan’s precarious condition today, the book

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals. Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the e

In Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jothie Rajah tells a compelling story of the rule of law as discourse and praxis serving illiberal ends. Through a series of case studies on legislation criminalizing vandalism and regulating the print media, legal profession, and religion in Singapore, Rajah raises critical questions about the meaning and place of law in a postcolony that celebrates colonialism as a cause of its modernity, prosperity and plurality. Terrence Halliday describes Rajah’s work as “theoretically innovative, empirically compelling, and gracefully written”, adding that it “has far-reaching consequences for national leaders who seek ‘third ways’ in which economic development is partitioned from political liberalism”. As Halliday suggests, the contents of Authoritarian Rule of Law transcend the confines of the small city-state with which it is primarily concerned, and go to global debates about legislation, discourse a

For many Muslim communities particular religious identities were formulated or hardened within colonial realities. These types of cultural encounters were structural for the various Muslim tribes in the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao and Sulu during the turn of the twentieth century. In Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), Michael Hawkins, Assistant Professor of history at Creighton University, demonstrates the dramatic consequences of this short historical moment for Filipino Muslims. Between 1899-1913, professional ethnographers and military officers worked to represent Filipino Muslims as noble primitive warriors. Various communal identities were fused into a singular construction, the Moro. Moro identity was constructed in the American imagination to serve colonial civilizing agendas. Ultimately, this period served as a crucial moment for Filipino Muslim identity and is looked back upon with nost

Few books on Southeast Asia cover as much geographic, historical and theoretical ground as Dan Slater’s Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Working across seven case studies, the book argues that existing theories of institutionalization don’t account for regional variation in regime type. Tracing causal processes from the colonial period to the present day, it shows how internal conflicts occurring at critical moments of state building encouraged the formation of elite “protection pacts” with a high degree of durability. Along the way, it engages with an expansive and diverse array of literature on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Ordering Power is an ambitious and demanding study, but also a highly accessible one that appeals to a range of audiences. Above all, it is a book that demands the attention of anyone interested in Southeast Asian politics. As John Sidel puts it,