New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

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,

Denise Cruz‘s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) traces representations of Filipinas in literature and popular culture during periods of transitional power in the Philippines, from the transition from Spanish to American colonial power, then to Japanese Imperialism, then to independence and the Cold War, and then to contemporary global capital. Professor Cruz questions how these disruptions in power destabilized the elite classes, and provided moments of possibility for writers to shift ideas of femininity in the Philippines and for Filipinas abroad. Rather than focus solely on gender within the Philippines, Cruz considers how Filipina femininity was made through imperial networks from Spain, Japan, America and across the globe. In doing so, she exposes how the making of the Filipina was neither natural nor national, but was actually a strategic response to shifting colonial powers as well as to the demands of the global capital market.  Learn more about

What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and tria

Singapore has a well-deserved reputation as a state that stifles dissent and polices activism. But as Lynette Chua shows in Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (National University of Singapore Press, 2014), repressive government nowhere goes unchallenged, even if the forms that resistance takes are not manifest. Turning away from social movement theory that tends to valorize public protest and other forms of highly visible contentious politics, Chua tells another story: a story of contingent, incremental gains through strategic adaptation; a story of “pragmatic resistance” to authoritarianism. Mobilizing Gay Singapore is a highly readable and finely researched account of how a contemporary political movement has emerged and grown in a small Asian state, yet it is a book with a bigger story to tell about the beginnings and progress of social movements in difficult circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a foreword to Tyrell Haberkorn‘s first book, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (Wisconsin University Press, 2011), Thongchai Winichakul observes, “Haberkorn writes to prevent the fading of life to oblivion, recounting stories that bring the forgotten back to life.” She does this and more. By recalling the forgotten story of farmers who risked and paid with their lives to struggle against repressive forces in the mid-1970s during a period of intense political turmoil in Thailand she writes to refract light from the past onto events in the present. She also raises compelling questions about the meaning of law and its relationship to the violence and impunity that pervade Southeast Asia today. Revolution Interrupted is a study of rare nuance, sincerity and reflection, with much to offer not only to area studies scholars but also to researchers of political violence everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based on ultrasound imaging technologies. In the course of making life-and-death decisions, the subjects of Gammeltoft’s book confronted ethically demanding circumstances through which they forged moral selves. Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Haunting Images considers their reproductive choices as acts of collective belonging, producing the subjectivities of both mother and fetus. The book considers these choices in light of the extended repercussions of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the local specificity of biopower, national concepts of “population quality,” and the precarity of individual attachments to social collectives. The second half of the book fol

Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). After more than eighteen months of fieldwork in the contemporary nation with the highest Muslim population, Indonesia, she found that global discourses on Islam and feminism were constantly in dialogue in this local context. Mobilizing Piety is an ethnography of women activists in Jakarta during a time of democratization, popular religious resurgence, and post-9/11 anxieties and suspicions. Rinaldo examined a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and a Muslim political party to see how piety and politics intersected. In our conversation we discussed public aspects of piety, field theory, agency, polygamy, pornography, bodily politics, religion as cultural schema, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis

Reading Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter‘s book Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia Press, 2013) is the most fun I have had doing this podcast. Maguire makes a point during the interview that police officers preferred to arrest marijuana smugglers because they were so laid back and safe to handle. You get the same feeling reading his account of the members of the roaming hippy/surfer community who fund their lifestyle through ‘scams’, that is, smuggling marijuana into Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. Maguire is a former pro-surfer and he communicates the culture of the surfer and their dedication to their past-time. Drug smuggling has a very utilitarian role. While the surfers smoke drugs and have the connections to buy them; a good smuggling run can fund many years on the international surfing trail. Thus they are not drug smugglers who surf but surfers who take advantage of the profit margin of smuggling. Reading the book made me think that they were

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as a global capitalist strategy wherein the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces this trend in Filipina/o overseas workers, which has become one of the largest labor export systems in the world. Ultimately, she questions how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism,

Genocide studies has been a growth field for a couple of decades. Books and articles have appeared steadily, universities have created programs and centers and the broader public has become increasingly interested in the subject. Nevertheless, there remain some aspects of the field and some geographic regions that remain dramatically understudied. Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman’s new edited collection Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (Routledge, 2013) is an excellent step toward filling one of these gaps. The book adds greatly to our understanding of mass violence in East and Southeast Asia. As the title suggests, Mayersen and Pohlman focus not the violence itself, but on its long-term impact on Indonesia, East Timor and other regions in Asia. Deborah and Annie are, besides being solid scholars, delightful conversationalists. The result, I hope, is an interview well worth listening to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Indonesia is often highlighted as having the right kind of Islam, ‘moderate’ and ‘peaceful.’ Whether that remains true (if it ever was a reality) will be tested in the future but what about the past? How did we end up with this picture of Islam in Indonesia? Michael Laffan, Professor of History at Princeton University, explores this question in his new book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton University Press, 2011). From a plethora of sources Laffan has reconstructed the history of interactions and the formation of discourses about Islam in Southeast Asia. The narrative includes the exchanges between Dutch (and British) authorities, missionaries, and Muslims, in both local and global perspectives. Much of the debates was about the process of Islamization and how it was remembered. Muslim accounts regularly stressed the role of Sufi brotherhoods in situating Islam in the local context but other evidence puts this into question. Islamic texts played a major