New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

In the last of our five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Cambodia, which looked anti-microbial resistance (AMR). This field school was offered to students from medical sciences, pharmacy, arts, international relations, media and communications, science, public health, vet science, and social work. Leaders Justin Beardsley and Leanne Howie are joined by two University of Sydney students – Sam and Alannah. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including: the value of transdisciplinary research, challenges, learnings, cultural differences and navigating these with sensitivity, and gaining insights into their own educational experience by moving outside their usual environment. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the pr

Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist United States which sought to contain communism. And this confrontation was fought out by their proxies in the Third World. But in recent years, a new generation of scholars, many of them from Asian countries that were “hot” battlegrounds for the Cold War, have rethought this paradigm. They give much more agency to local political actors, pursuing local political agendas.  In her provocative new book, Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2023), Sinae Hyun argues that in the case of Thailand, local political elites skillfully used the Cold War to achieve their own political ends. The book is a case study of Thailand’s Border Patrol Police, a unit which was initially set up with the assistance of the CIA, and which later developed a close relationship with the Thai monarchy. Besides promoting anti-communi

In the fourth of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Timor Leste, which looked at disability and work. This field school was offered to students from health sciences, psychology, and social work. Leader Natali Pearson is joined by co-leader, Kim Bulkeley, and two University of Sydney students – Rosie and Alana. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including: what it’s like to meet a head of state, the value of learning transdisciplinary research methods, managing cultural differences, and gaining insights into their own educational experience and culture by moving outside their usual environment. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat and other charitable funds, for purposes of poverty alleviation. Specifically, the book explores the social foundations of contemporary Islamic practices that strive to encompass the economic within an expanded domain of divine worship and elucidates the effects such encompassment has on time, its fissure and synthesis.  In order to elaborate on the question of time, the book looks beyond anthropology and Islamic studies, engaging attentively, critically and productively with the post-structuralist work of G. Deleuze, M. Fo

The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller: First partition cut Assam off from the rest of India, with just a tiny “chicken neck” of land connecting the state with India proper. Then decades of tension between the Assamese and minority groups led to new states being created from within its borders: Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, to name a few. Arupjyoti Saikia takes on the task of explaining six decades of Assam history in his latest book, The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000 (India Allen Lane, 2023) In this interview, Arupjyoti and I talk about Assam’s history from the Second World War and the decades since independence, including some of the wild schemes the British tried to apply to the Indian northeast, and why it’s important to understand Indian history through its federal states. Arupjyo

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their testimonials to the Christian faith helped them to make sense of and find purpose in their trauma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodian communities in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, and Phnom Penh, Wong examines questions of religious identity and the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism. While the community has grown in recent decades, Christians nevertheless make up a small minority of the predominantly Buddhist diaspora. Wong explores what it is about Christianity that makes these converts willing to risk their social standing, familial

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, nickel, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. Resource Nationalism in Indonesia explains these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. Warburton shows how the centrality of patronage to Indonesia's democratic political economy, and the growing importance of mining and palm oil as a drivers of export

In the third of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to the Philippines, which looked at disaster risk and resilience. This field school was offered to students from arts, architecture, nursing, engineering, commerce and science. Leader Aaron Opdyke is joined by co-leader, Emily Nabong, and two University of Sydney students – Oli and Sophia. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including flexibility in research goals, managing change, the value of transdisciplinary research, cultural differences and navigating these with sensitivity, and gaining insights into their own educational experience by moving outside their usual environment. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation o

In the second of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Indonesia, which looked at social justice. This field school was offered to students from law, political economy, geography, gender and cultural studies, Indonesian studies, and Asian studies. Leader Sonja van Wichelen is joined by co-leader, Dadung Mukitono, and two University of Sydney students – Bella and Sam. The students reflect on their learning, how to interact with the task at hand and research using methods from different disciplines, understanding the value of considering and applying the approach of students from faculties they don’t usually interact with, all while seeking to meet the needs of the local culture and situation. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by journalists picking up garbage. Why? What was she doing there? The obvious answer to that question is: launching a nationwide trash clearance campaign. The less obvious but more interesting one is: outsourcing the polity.  That’s the title of a new book by Gerard McCarthy, Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2023), which is the subject of this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. In it McCarthy explains how the NLD government’s failure to break with the political economy of military dictatorship was not due to structural constraints alone, but was ideologically motivated. Drawing on years of ethnographic and survey research in Myanmar, he shows how welfare capitalism can slip between regime types, and insidious

In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveling with just a backpack and a miniscule budget in what he calls the “golden age of travel.” In his many adventures around the region, two particular stories stand out enough for Chris to turn into a book, Bugis Nights (Earnshaw, 2023). The first is his encounter with an older German woman in the Himalayan mountains, with a penchant for flirtation and teasing. The second is a maritime journey from a remote Indonesian island to Singapore, on a wooden sloop and a rowdy and raucous French crew. In this interview, Chris and I talk about his journey—both in Southeast Asia and the Himalayas—and the golden age of travel. Chris Stowers is a photographer and reporter, who has traveled to over seventy countries around the world. His work has appeared in publications like Newsweek, Forbes and the New York Times. His journey on the sloop led to his first story and photos bei

COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer critical reflections on how the pandemic was experienced in the region. It interrogates dominants narratives of Covid-19’s legacies and invites readers to reflect of what it means to return to ‘normal’ in contexts marked by inequalities, selective policy interventions, and invisibilised experiences of marginalised communities. The book is structured around three themes: (1) urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) collective action, communities, and mutual action. Each chapter offers a distinctive point of view that contribute to a wider project of decolonising knowledge production. Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Murray Mckenzie is a postdoctoral re

The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people living in countries like Australia where childhood is typically a non-productive stage of life more readily associated with schooling and dependence on adults. What is the meaning of “childhood” in contexts of adversity where if you don’t work as a child, you and your family won’t survive? What does it mean where to attend school is to place your family in a precarious financial situation? To discuss these questions is Dr Maria Amigó, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. Maria is a social anthropologist and has studied children and childhood in contexts of adversity for over 20 years. Amigó is the author of Children Chasing Money: Children's Work in Rural Lombok, Indonesia (VDM, 2010). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention. These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minorities: the Karen, the Kachin, and others. Alexandra Kaloyonides covers these missions in Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press: 2023), her latest book. Alexandra Kaloyonides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where her teaching focuses on Buddhism. Dr. Kaloyanides serves as Associate Editor of Material Religion, served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and served as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel.

The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers an empirically-grounded approach to understanding the mobilisation of rights in the region. Instead of deriving definitions of rights from abstract philosophical text, court verdicts or statutes, the book advances a socio-legal approach which considers rights as social practices that take meaning from the various ways in which people enact, mobilise, and practice these rights. In doing so, the book offers a point of view that goes beyond the liberal versus critical rights perspective debate. The book is structured in three sections, with each section focusing on (1) the structural conditions that influence the emergence of rights mobilisation in the region; (2) the various ways in which people mobilise these rights; and (3) the consequences of these mobilisations. It concludes with a call to give rights a chance while embracing its incoherence. Lynette J. Chua is Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Like this inte

Kathrin Eitel's book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh (Routledge, 2022) examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through 'infracycles', maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way. In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, was

In the southern Philippines, the Bohol community speaks a language they say one man, Pinay, created long ago, leaving it for a modern Filipino named Mariano Datahan to rediscover and reenliven. The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Piers Kelly tells the story of the Eskayan language through linguistic, ethnographic, and historical analysis. Kelly investigates the origins of the Eskayan language as well as its role in political and conceptual controversies around language diversity and colonial contact. Carefully avoiding—and problematizing—dichotomies such as “real or fake,” “invented or natural,” the book explores not only the nature of Eskayan, its writing system, lexicon, and syntax, but also its relationship to other languages employed in the Philippines and to strategies of colonial resistance across Southeast Asia. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosop

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one.  Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics. Joshua

Is migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods interconnected in Asian cities? What are the likely main migration trends in Asia the coming decade? And what can you learn from studying the same village for decades? To discuss these diverse questions, we are joined by two leading experts on development and migration in Asia, Jonathan Rigg and Marta Bivand Erdal. Drawing on extensive experience working in South and Southeast Asia, they discuss complex questions of leaving and staying in contemporary Asia, how to study migration processes and how context matters for understanding the impact of migration. Professor Jonathan Rigg is Chair in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. He has decades of experience working on development and migration in South and Southeast Asia, focusing on issues such as rural-urban relations, livelihoods, coping and resilience, hazards and disasters and, more broadly, rural devel

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cambodia: Music is the soul of a nation. Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more than Ros Serey Sothea, a young woman who would forever change the landscape of Cambodian music as the Queen with the Golden Voice. From a humble rice farmer to nationally recognized singer, Sothea’s success captured the hearts of the Khmer people. Throughout her career, she recorded over 500 songs, her signature angelic voice soaring over genres from traditional ballads to psychedelic rock and beyond. As the Cambodian civil war raged, Sothea's singing career continued to flourish, even when she served in the army as one of the country's fi