This article discusses the significance of religious diversity for a minority ethnic group (the Karen) in the midst of integration into the Thai nation state, addressing both the historical and cultural momentum of initial acceptance, and the subsequent diversifying reformulation and redefinition of identity and community through the adopted religions.

The philosophical basis of the Indonesian state, first framed in 1945, is the Panca Sila or Five Principles. Since 1985 all political and social organizations including religious ones have had to subscribe to the Panca Sila as their sole philosophical principle (Azas Tunggal). The first of the Five Principles is belief in Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, normally, though not entirely satisfactorily, translated as the One Supreme God. The founders of the state had accepted this principle rather than a more specific statement of belief in the God of Islam, the religion of the majority of the people. Its formulation was clearly a compromise, aimed at stressing the importance of religion in the state, but avoiding declaring Islam as the state religion. As it stood, the principle was generally acceptable to followers of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, and all religions which did acknowledge the existence of God, in one form or another.

The Great Depression (1929–35) seriously affected the world economy but it was also a catalyst of the development of political awareness among the Malays. In conjunction with the growth of political awareness there was the rise of consumerism, which also was accelerated by the Great Depression. People were taught to appreciate a new way of life centring around luxury goods that became cheaper and reportedly within the reach of everyone, if one only tried. The machines of this heightened consumerism were commercials that were disseminated through the rapidly expanding mass media, mainly financed by these advertisements. The huge boom in entertainment businesses and publishing houses defied the logic that the downturn would have a negative impact on the entertainment and popular culture industries. Rather the contrary occurred. The number of magazines, journals and newspapers published in this period increased dramatically, and theatre and dance companies met with great success in their performances in the towns and on tours throughout the region.

This paper examines Japanese attitudes toward the independence movement in Vietnam, the Japanese idea of “independence”, and Japanese relationships with the Vietnamese nationalists during the period between 1940 and 1945.

The Japanese used French Indochina, one constituent of which was “Vietnam”, as a supply base and a stepping stone for their troops on their way to other battle grounds such as Burma, Singapore, Indonesia, or the Philippines. The defeated units were returned to Vietnam, rested, and reorganized into new military units. Coal and rice and other foodstuffs used by the Japanese in these battlefields often came from Vietnam. For these objectives, the Japanese kept the political and administrative structure of French Indochina intact under the French. But on 9 March 1945, the 30, 000-man Japanese military attacked the 50, 000-man French Indochinese Army in a surprise attack under the command of Lieutenant General Tsuchihashi, commanding general of the 38th Army. (This operation is identified in Japanese military terms as “Meigo Sakusen” [Bright Moon Action].)

In the late 1960s, archaeological theory underwent a period of rapid and significant change. A group of scholars became known as progenitors of an approach termed New Archaeology. Some of these changes have been critized as lacking in substance, but it cannot be denied that much archaeological research and analysis performed during the 1970s and 1980s followed a new and more constructive agenda.

The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes of the Spanish Philippines. In line with Philip Abrams' vision of history as the nexus of structure and action, the 1855 ports policy is reinterpreted as issuing from the articulation of macro and micro spheres, a perspective which allows for contingency in so far as the possibilities of human actors confronting structured totalities are multiple yet theoretically bounded. By eschewing the overdetermined view of socioeconomic change and by accounting for human agency in history, this article serves as a case study to overcome the notion of inexorability that, as David Booth rightly points out, has been frequently imputed to the epoch of global capitalist change.

Ancient Cambodia turned definitively to state Buddhism under King Jayavarman VII at the end of the twelfth century, after four centuries of state Śaivism. This paper explores the motivation behind this momentous change and tries to establish the means by which it was achieved. It uncovers signs of a very large, politically motivated campaign of tantric Buddhist initiations that required a significant overhaul of the king's temples and the creation of a new series of sacred icons.

This article traces the changing relationships between the living and the dead in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Fuelled with fear, confusion, and massive displacement, these relationships initially consisted of distrustful interactions. Over time, however, reciprocal relations of support were established, enabling a transformation of the dead from frightened and frightening beings, to benevolent allies in the reconstruction of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. These relationships allowed both the living and the dead to be brought in from the ‘forest’, thus showing how managing the dead was an integral aspect of post-conflict security. By comparing such relationships at Choeung Ek Genocidal Center (a national memorial site) and Koh Sap (an island in the Bassac River) this article shows how the dead replicate the locally situated politics of the living in these encounters.

Successive wars and the establishment of a border between the kingdom of Burma and British India in the nineteenth century challenged Burmese conceptions of sovereignty and political space. This essay investigates how European, and more specifically Anglo-American, notions of race, nation, and consular protection to nationals, progressively informed the Burmese concepts of ‘categories of people’ (lumyo) and ‘subject’ (kyun). First, I present the semantic evolution of these concepts in the 1820s–1830s, following the annexation of the western Burmese province of Arakan by British India in 1824. Then, I argue that the Burmese concept of lumyo was progressively associated with the European concept of ‘nations’ in the 1850s–1860s, following the annexation of Lower Burma in 1852. Finally, I uncover developments in the 1870s, when British consular protection extended to several freshly categorised ‘nations’, such as Shan, Karenni, and Kachin.

Most studies on diversity in Southeast Asia focus on the nation-state, with much less attention given to everyday encounters and the negotiation of diversity in local contexts. This article investigates the discourses and practices of various actors in the historically tolerant, generally peaceful, and diverse city and special region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This study examines this ethnic, religious and cultural diversity and illustrates the negotiations among various interest groups and actors that strive to maintain this balance, or sometimes to strategically disrupt it. As such, the findings offer a different way to understand and interrogate the challenges confronting present-day diversity both on a local level in Yogyakarta, and also for Indonesia and Southeast Asia at large.

This article traces the evolutionary record of urbanism at two sites in Myanmar: their transition from late prehistory in c. second to first century BCE to proto-urban and fully urban development at Sri Ksetra and Beikthano by the mid-first millennium CE. The Pyu cities are remarkable because of their spatial continuity, for their early achievements in water control, iron production, ritual and domestic ceramics, brick monumental architecture, rich funerary culture, literacy and adoption of Buddhism on both elite and popular levels. Though the radiocarbon dates for Pyu urbanism are at present earlier, they share many features with other urbanising societies in mainland Southeast Asia, where new chronologies are emerging for social and economic complexity at Dvaravati, Pre-Angkorian and Co Loa sites. The article provides new and specific evidence on the dates and types of contacts between the Pyu, India, and other areas of Southeast Asia to interrogate the meaning of Indianisation in Southeast Asia.

Thailand's ‘southern border provinces’ of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat – along with four districts of neighbouring Songkhla – are the site of fiery political violence characterised by daily killings. The area was historically a Malay sultanate, and was only loosely under Thai suzerainty until the early twentieth century. During the twentieth century there was periodic resistance to Bangkok's attempts to suppress local identity and to incorporate this largely Malay-speaking, Muslim-majority area into a predominantly Buddhist nation-state. This resistance proved most intense during the 1960s and 1970s, when various armed groups (notably PULO [Patani United Liberation Organization] and BRN [Barisan Revolusi Nasional]) waged war on the Thai state, primarily targeting government officials and the security forces. In the early 1980s, the Prem Tinsulanond government brokered a deal with these armed groups and proceeded to co-opt the Malay-Muslim elite. By crafting mutually beneficial governance, security and financial arrangements, the Thai state was able largely to placate local political demands.

Through much of the last four decades of Dutch rule in Indonesia (1900-1941) the question of “native welfare” increasingly concerned colonial administrators and scholars. In her speech in 1901, Queen Wilhemina drew attention to the declining state of native welfare in Java, thus ushering in the so-called period of ethical policies. One aspect of the problem of declining welfare among the indigenous population both in Java and elsewhere which became the subject of government investigation was the burden of taxation. Writing in 1901, P. Brooshooft drew attention to the fact that “the present [colonial] budgets are always closed with a deficit…and the most pressing needs cannotbe filled; the capacity of the people to pay is exhausted more and more through heavier taxation”. Twenty years later, W. Huender, in surveying the economic conditions of the indigenous people of Java and Madura, felt

it is disquieting that taxation is not increasing more…it is impossible to maintain that the indigenous population is not taxed heavily enough. Taking account of the low capacity of people to pay the contrary is rather the case; and present plans to have the people pay even more (for example, by increasingthe head tax and the landrent) can only make one shudder. In fact the most difficult and pressing problem in Java and Madoera is that, while the people have been taxed to the utmost limit and are “minimum sufferers”, apparently the various government measures taken to improve the situation have not been effective.

A biography of Prince Phetsarath highlights how a specific idea about Laos and its culture was formed under French colonial rule and nurtured under the Japanese occupation and its aftermath. During these periods, Phetsarath's understanding of Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism. While ultimately a study of failure, Phetsarath's activities show that anticolonial nationalism did not always have to be linked to Communist movements to be ‘revolutionary’, and suggests the importance of taking into account non-revolutionary and non-Communist actors – even members of royal blood – in order to better understand the complexity that went into the making of modern postcolonial states.

This paper aims to discuss the issue of problem-solving at the national level by focusing on the concept of social discipline. The development of a new nation-state, i.e. contemporary Singapore, will provide the empirical basis for the analysis.

The paper is divided into three sections. The first section deals briefly with relevant conceptual approaches to the solution of social problems, and the definition of social discipline. The second section presents an illustration of social discipline in action. The final section attempts a critical assessment of the approach used in Singapore for the solution of social problems.

The title of this paper is influenced by that of Lee Soo Ann's book, Singapore Goes Transnational. However, the subject matter of this paper though related, is quite different. By Singapore “going transnational”, Lee was referring to how Singapore's economy became dominated by foreign transnational corporations (TNCs). During that process and period, local Singaporean companies declined in importance. This paper deals with the resurgence of Singaporean companies to the extent that some have spread their operations to other countries and have attained the status of TNCs.

To historians of Southeast Asia, the Bandung conference of 1955 presents itself as one of the most striking international initiatives undertaken by newly-independent Indonesia. For historians of Indonesia, it marks the emphasis on foreign as against domestic policy that was associated with Sukarno's growing dominance. To biographers of Sukarno it appears to be both a strategic device in domestic politics and a farsighted perception of a shift in international relations. Internationally it was both to demonstrate the influence of India and to show its limits. Even more it was to mark some kind of success for the People's Republic of China and for Chou En-lai in developing the foreign policy line associated already with Geneva and the five principles of co-existence.

In the past many of us have been accustomed to visualizing developmental analysis as taking an inventory of physical resources, distributing them (or merely imagining them) in different fields of production, and then, according to preconceived ideas of technical coefficients, calculating future output. This might be termed the “skeleton” of economic theory. But the real meat of development lies in the efficiency of implementation of decisions, whether planned or laissez-faire. The efficiency of implementation depends on the quality of entrepreneurship; again, whether in publicly or privately owned establishments. This quality of entrepreneurship is determined by the attitude of management and labour leaders to supervision, morale and workers, breakdowns in machinery, commercial risks, and all uncertainties which cannot be effectively programmed. We believe it is taking an inadequate and misleading view of economic development to regard technical coefficients as reliable indicators of the fruitfulness of investments. For instance, a $10 million investment in steel in China might have quite a different impact on a range of economic indicators than the same investment in India.

For contemporary Malay/Indonesian speakers, dukun signifies an indigenous healer. Etymologically, however, the word dukun is not native to Malay/Indonesian. Some say dukun is Arabic, but this article claims it is more Persian than Arabic. When fifteenth-century Persian settlers brought the proto-form of the word dukun to the Malay Archipelago, they also brought cosmopolitan notions of Sufism, faith and healing. Eventually orthodox Arab immigrants and Europeans denigrated Sufi healers as ‘indigenous’. Dukun became a rhetorical foil demonstrating how superb Western physicians or orthodox Arabs were by comparison. Gradually, the dukun's reputation became intertwined with negative attitudes about ‘indigenous’ practices.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Chinese gunpowder technology spread to the whole of Southeast Asia via both the overland and maritime routes, long before the arrival of European firearms. The impact of Chinese firearms on northern mainland Southeast Asia in terms of warfare and territorial expansion was profound.