Some names, like “rose”, acknowledge what exists. Others, like “unicorn”, create what otherwise would not exist. In between lie names that simultaneously describe and invent reality. “Southeast Asia” is one of these.

Some who study the region treat it as if it were Shakespeare's rose: a reality existing independently of its name. Others would agree with Waddell that an observer of “Southeast Asia” who uses the name incautiously risks hallucinating unicorns: projecting homogeneity, unity, and boundedness onto a part of the world that is in fact heterogeneous, disunited, and hard to delimit.

The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when understood in the context of the operating schema of the individuals experiencing such phenomena.

this article challenges the dominant paradigm of ‘inclusive syncretism’ in the study of thai religion. by taking the worship of multi-original deities in the popular spirit-medium cults in contemporary thailand as a case study, it argues that practitioners and specialists working on thai religious studies need to refresh and update their analytical paradigm to incorporate the concept of ‘hybridization’.

This article is a critique of ethnicity theories based on essentialism – the idea that ethnic traits are innate (essences) both in the individual and the ‘ethnie’ as a social group – which have been adopted, wittingly or unwittingly, by historians in mainstream Malaysian historiography in their effort to explain the formation of ‘Malay-Malayness’ as a social identity. It proposes instead that Malay ethnicity is not innate but rather learned or constructed, and Malay-Malayness has been created as a result of intersecting historical, cultural and social factors at a particular moment in a culture's life and history. Indeed, Malay-Malayness has been constructed by a colonial historiography and subsequently adopted uncritically by most historians in postcolonial Malaysia, both Malays and non-Malays.

this article explores changing attitudes towards courtship and marriage among educated muslim javanese youth, as seen against the backdrop of islamic resurgence, growing educational achievement and socioeconomic change. through a comparison of earlier forms of courtship and marriage with emerging trends, it sheds light on some of the tensions and ambivalences surrounding the new social freedoms and autonomy modern javanese women have come to enjoy.

The mainstream discourse on the political economy of drugs has emphasised the negative correlation between drug production and state capacity, with the presence of a thriving drugs trade seen as both a sign and a cause of weak states. Through an analysis of the drugs trade in Burma this study argues that such an approach is deeply flawed. Focusing on the period since the 1988 protests it argues that the illicit nature of the drugs trade has provided the state with an array of incentives (legal impunity, protection, money laundering) and threats (of prosecution) with which to co-opt and coerce insurgent groups over which it has otherwise commanded little authority. Although the state's involvement in the drugs trade was initially driven by an expedient desire to co-opt insurgent groups following the 1988 protests, this study also argues that over time it has provided an arena in which more immanent and largely unanticipated processes of state formation, namely the centralisation of the means of violence and extraction, have gradually been built. Rather than being a sign of corruption-induced state incapacity, the state's involvement in the drugs trade has thus become a central arena through which state power has been constructed and reproduced.

This article attempts to bring together recent literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which ‘Malay’ or ‘Melayu’ have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of ‘Melayu’ were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently. Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made ‘Melayu’ a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term ‘Indonesia’ might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country.

This article compares Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto period. It explores the question of why the party system of the 1950s collapsed quickly, while that of the contemporary polity appears stable. Challenging established assumptions that party systems fail if their individual parties are weakly institutionalised, I submit that the fundamental difference between the party politics of the 1950s and today's democratic system is related to the character of inter-party competition in both periods. While inter-party contestation in the 1950s took place at the far ends of the politico-ideological spectrum, the competition between parties in the contemporary democracy exhibits centripetal tendencies, stabilising the political system as a whole.

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.

This paper examines the major trends since the 1950s in social science writing on forest management in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is simultaneously rich in and dependent on natural resources, both for local and national use or sale. Among renewable resources, forest products have played critical roles in the region's national, provincial, and local economies before, during, and after colonialism — for as long as two millennia. Their importance in international trade illustrates that Southeast Asia's forests linked the region to other parts of the world for quite some time, dispelling myths that parts of the region such as Borneo were “remote”, “primitive”, or “pristine”.

In the Philippines, female migration for contract domestic work transforms the local landscape. The changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of new local futures, envisioned on a new global scale.

Thirty years ago, a theory of Philippine politics emerged that until now remains the most influential among academics and is widely adopted by journalists, diplomats and other observers of the Philippines. Its argument, in brief, is that Philippine politics revolves around interpersonal relationships — especially familial and patron-client ones — and factions composed of personal alliances. I refer to this as the patron-client, factional framework pcf, for short). It deserves to be influential; after all, patron-client and other personal relations are indeed significant in Philippine political life. These are also important features in many other countries; hence, the pcf framework developed for Philippine studies has contributed as well to comparative political studies.

Few works on modern imperialism (1880–1914) include Dutch political and military behaviour in the Indonesian archipelago. Theories concerning colonial expansion in this period have been based almost exclusively on the activities of the big powers, scrambling for new territories in Africa. The small country of the Netherlands, expanding its colonial frontiers within its nominal sphere of interest, did not arouse much interest, the less so as its history and sources are not easily accessible due to an internationally little known language.

This article examines differences and overlaps in imagined spatial ideas of rural Sarawak which underpin official and community mapping. It looks at the ways in which ‘counter-mapping’ is used by indigenous communities to support their claims to traditional land rights when these are contested by other parties.

The purpose of this essay is to suggest some major and pertinent questions regarding the nature, structure and problems of Southeast Asian history, rather than to provide ready-made answers to them. I am well aware that the very positing of such questions may appear premature in view of the youthfullness — not to say the woefully underdeveloped nature — of Southeast Asian historiography, particularly in the United States. Yet in a sense this innocence of youth may be an appropriate excuse for asking whither we are bound in our search; another, more pragmatic rationalization can be found in the undeniable fact that the teaching of ‘Southeast Asian history’, in which we are willy-nilly engaged, demands that such questions be asked, if not authoritatively answered.

From about the second century onwards, principalities (“empires” is probably the wrong word in all the earlier cases) began to appear in Southeast Asia, first along the isthmus of the Malay Peninsula, round the coast of the Gulf of Siam and of the southern part of Vietnam, later in the archipelago and eventually spreading throughout the area now known as Southeast Asia except for the north of Vietnam and parts of the archipelago in the east. These principalities are assigned to the historical record by inscriptions using Indian languages and scripts, stone remains attesting Hindu and Buddhist cults, and foreign accounts, mostly Chinese, indicating various features of Indian culture. Two of the questions which underlie historical studies of this evidence are: how did Indian influence spread through Southeast Asia? and, how far did Indian influence dominate Southeast Asia? In principle, these questions may be answered independently of each other, the first being chiefly concerned with the “Indianization I” discussed in an earlier article, the second with “Indianization II”. Attention will be directed here chiefly to the first, and to the second primarily only to the extent that is entailed by examination of the first. Various conflicting views have been advanced by historians; the purpose here is to suggest that, in the absence of convincing evidence for any one of them, an eclectic interpretation is not only legitimate but cogent.

Based on linguistic, archaeological, and historical evidence, this essay describes the environment that produced the culture associated with the ‘Melayu’, or the Malays. It also argues that Melayu ethnicity was never predetermined but was contested on both sides of the Straits of Melaka.

Throughout history and throughout most major regions of the world, the expansion of agricultural land has served as a tool of population redistribution and has also played a key role in the formation and consolidation of States. This appears particularly true in twentieth-century Southeast Asia, as can be observed from case studies of the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand developed in this article, and may contribute to the originality and dynamism of State formation in the region.

This article examines the recent expansion of large-scale rubber plantations in border areas of Laos and argues that this phenomenon as well as the attendant land concession controversy must be understood from the perspective of resource frontiers. While transnational Vietnamese investment in rubber plantations represents one form of land capitalisation, their establishment in southern Laos has been part of the turbulent political economic transition in Laos. Collaboration between frontier states which often bypasses central governance, chaotic boundaries between what is recognised as ‘used or productive’ and ‘unused or underproductive resources’, and regulatory disorientation of resource control allow what I call ‘frontier capitalism’ to proliferate.

Bureaucratic corruption is one of the most serious and embarrassing obstacles to national development in the developing countries, which include among others the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) viz., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. According to an official of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific:

Donor countries and the United Nations bodies working in developing countries are well aware that one of the most serious problems hampering development is corruption; so are the recipient countries. But no one seems prepared to discuss it publicly.