The notion of dhammamātā is one of the last items of the legacy of the late Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu. In order to accord women practitioners better social status and provide them with opportunities for spiritual training, Buddhadāsa avoided committing himself to the reintroduction of bhikkunī ordination. Instead, he proposed the notion of dhammamātā, which literally means ‘dhamma mother’. This article postulates thatby using the metaphor of the mother, Buddhadāsa invited less conflict, appealing to the high respect which Thai people generally held for women. Moreover, the article argues that with dhammamātā Buddhadāsa challenged the common notion of motherhood which usually regards women as nurturers of the Sanġha. Dhammamātā nurture people's spirituality through their teaching and virtues. Whilst the social impact of dhammamātā cannot be compared to that of bhikkunī, whose yellow robes visually suggest a status equivalent to that of male bhikkhu, the concept of dhammamātā was a new creation revolving around the image of the female religious teacher, a role that Buddhist women had wanted.

The island of Borneo has maintained until fairly recently a number of tropical rainforest hunting-gathering groups, generally referred to as Punan or Penan (though other local ethnonyms are found). Today, a large proportion of them have switched to a partly settled way of life and some form of agriculture, but even these groups still rely heavily on the forest, collecting jungle products for trade and, often, processing the wild sago palms for their subsistence while collecting. The Bukat, one of these partly settled groups, are found (see Map 1) in Indonesia's West Kalimantan (three hamlets, totalling 300 persons) and East Kalimantan (one hamlet of 150), and in Malaysia's Sarawak (one hamlet of 150).

Western historiography assumes a chronological linear unfolding of progress, and early Western commentators on Asian societies tended to see them as stagnant variants of earlier phases in European history, as feudal despotisms and passive, unchanging village communities. In assessing levels of “development” or “progress” such observers looked for recognizable specialist institutions in politics and the economy; finding few such institutions, they saw only “backwardness”. To most Europeans, trying to make sense of unknown societies and cultures, the alien could only be made comprehensible by identifying it with the familiar. It was then all too easy to proceed as if the unknown was simply a mutant or primitive version of the known. Ideas, social relationships and values which were literally beyond their ken, were often simply not seen at all. In their observations of both political and economic systems, they saw decline, corruption and confusion because they failed to recognize the patterns which structured society. So it seemed natural that the West should dominate such societies and guide them on the correct path.

The article studies migrants from Uttar Pradesh in Singapore who have historically identified themselves as ‘Hindustani’ – a group that has largely been ignored in historical literature of the Indian diaspora in Singapore. Through an examination of British expansion in India in the early nineteenth century, parallel developments in Southeast Asia, community publications and oral testimonies, the article attempts to ‘(re)discover’ the history of Hindustani migration in Singapore.

The Strait of Melaka and connected waterways have been critical to, and directly affected, the formation of littoral states, societies and economies in eastern Sumatra, the Riau Islands, the Malay Peninsula, and Singapore. The history and nature of statehood in the region is interrelated to the way in which naval capabilities evolved, but, as argued in this article, perhaps not in the straightforward fashion often assumed. Naval capabilities and strategies evolved in tandem with state policy to adapt to changes in the wider Asian maritime political economy which was dominated at various times by China and India. This article examines the factors that affected maritime policy in the Melaka Straits c. 500 to 1500 CE, and the extent to which these furthered the viability of the mainly Malay port-polities, and in particular the regional hegemonic state of Srivijaya in eastern Sumatra. The study utilises textual records, epigraphic materials, and literature to reconstruct a more nuanced picture of maritime states and naval power in premodern Southeast Asia.

During the turbulent years between the 1930s and the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, Chinese businessmen in Yogyakarta confronted three major issues: competition against the emerging Indonesian entrepreneurs and Japanese business expatriates; patriotism towards their ancestral land China in fighting against Japanese aggression; and collaboration with the new regime run by their former enemy, the Japanese. During this period newly arrived ‘totok’ Chinese achieved pre-eminence over the well-established ‘peranakan’ community.

Protestant Akha highlanders of Northern Thailand held a Silver Jubilee in 1987 celebrating the initial conversions to Christianity twenty-five years earlier. The Akha-language translation of the passage from the Gospel of Matthew selected as the Jubilee's theme evokes the image of a laden basket from a pre-Christian folktale accounting for the differentiation of Akha from other ethnic groups, and the Protestant Akha used this traditional image to separate themselves from non-Christian Akha. This paper explores the transformation of a symbolic vehicle for interethnic differentiation into a vehicle for intraethnic differentiation. Use of this laden basket image is viewed as part of intraethnic dialogues of identity, which are themselves embedded in dialogues of identity between Christian as well as traditionalist members of the Akha tribal minority and Buddhist Thai, who are Thailand's dominant majority both politically and culturally.

Since the 1990s, the Temple of the Lady of the Treasury of Bắc Ninh province has become a religious destination for local people as well as thousands of pilgrims from around the country. The resurgence of this cult is one of the most visible manifestations of the Đổi Mới (Renovation) revival of religious practices after decades of discouragement and suppression. It also illustrates some of the profound socio-economic changes that have taken place since the advent of Đổi Mới in 1986.

This article investigates the role of prophet in the Batak millenarian movement of Parmalim against the colonial order. The Parmalim movement was organized in 1890 by Guru Somalaing who claimed to be able to gain access to the source of European power while retaining the essence of Toba-Batak values.

The 1940 Franco-Thai border conflict coincided with the beginning of a four-year campaign to weaken the Catholic Church's position in Thailand. The government closed down schools, confiscated property and imprisoned clergy. Angry mobs looted and burned churches, while the local populace boycotted businesses owned by Catholic Thais. The state-led persecution was part of a broad effort to deal with the legacy of western imperialism in Thailand. Catholicism's strong association with French colonialism, combined with France's decline, made the Church the ideal target for anti-imperialist forces. This overlooked incident provides strong evidence that Phibun Songkhram's strategy was not simply to survive the war, as historians have often claimed. The anti-Catholic campaign, which complicated the country's post-war status, was part of an attempt to re-position the country vis-à-vis the West and provide complete independence for Thailand.

Referencing insights from Cultural Studies and taking a jazz-age perspective, this essay aims to historicise and ‘locate the popular’ in colonial Indonesia and the Philippines. A new cultural era dawned in the 1920s urban hubs of Southeast Asia, associated with the creation of novel forms of vernacular literature, theatre, music and their consumption via the print press, gramophone, radio broadcasting and cinema. By investigating the complex relationship between the elusive phenomena of modernity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism as articulated by two pioneering artists active in commercial music and theatre, the social significance of popular culture is scrutinised.

This paper uses the example of songket to explore translocal Malay cultural processes in Sambas, West Kalimantan. I argue these intra-Malay cultural exchanges reframe selected Sambas Malay cultural forms as Malay ‘cultural heritage’, making it difficult to view cultural practices in purely localised terms. Consequently, many cultural forms lose their localised normative values and become aspects of a wider cultural heritage to be preserved, performed and consumed. The paper begins with a discussion of the historical, political and social grounds that forge a sense of translocalism amongst many Sambas Malays. Building on this, the more specific interest in participating in intra-regional Malay cultural exchanges is explained with reference to commodification, internationalisation and institutionalisation.

According to the existing studies on Myanmar's economic history, agricultural land in the Lower Myanmar delta was transferred from ‘agriculturists’ to ‘non-agriculturists’ under British colonial rule. However, a clear distinction could not be drawn between the agriculturists and non-agriculturists as was generally thought with respect to their economic activity. More importantly, the categories could be applied interchangeably. The purpose of this study is to reconsider the very concept of ‘agriculturist’ as a colonial category in British Burma by exploring the hitherto unused register of holdings (Register IA, U pain hmatpoun sayin).

It is evident from the brief historical survey presented in this paper that the French found in Cambodia well-established Chinese communities with a long tradition of indirect rule. My argument may be summarised in four propositions:

1. Contact between Cambodia and China has continued more or less uninterrupted since the first century of this era — and perhaps longer. Unlike early Indian contact, which produced distinctly Indian forms in the indigenous cultures of Southeast Asia, contact with China appears to have left them relatively unmarked. Khmer culture is definitely not sinic in language, social structure, religion, or the arts.

2. The long history of Chinese contact was not associated with extensive Chinese settlement in Cambodia until the fifteenth century, when there occurred a marked change in the nature of the Cambodian economy. Throughout the Chen-la and the Angkorean periods, the relative homogeneity of the country did not encourage internal trade, and the small amount of foreign trade evident in the capital was limited almost entirely to luxury goods for the court. After 1400, the Cambodian economy came to depend more and more upon trade, a phenomenon that was associated with the establishment of a growing Chinese population in Cambodia, primarily in Phnom-Penh.

3. The evidence of trade relations and large migrations suggests that by the middle of the nineteenth century the Chinese population of Phnom-Penh was mainly Cantonese, possibly with a smaller number of Hokkien. In Kampot, on the other hand, along the coast of the Gulf of Siam, a large number of Hainanese settled following the establishment, in the eighteenth century, of a trading centre at Hatien. We do not know the size of this population, but we do know that by 1860 it was primarily engaged in growing pepper. It is clear that by the time of the French Protectorate was established in 1864, the Chinese community in Phnom-Penh, whatever its make-up, numbered in the thousands and controlled practically all the trade of the country, foreign and domestic.

4. The concept of indirect rule over the Chinese in Cambodia dates from at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. This system was not very formal, however, and the legally denned system of congregations in neighbouring Annam, dating from 1814, became the model for the French colonial administrators when they eventually came to consider the “Chinese problem” in Cambodia.

After the riots and bloody clashes between the Malays and the Thai Police in 1948, there were no movements of a similar scale. Nevertheless, Muslim irredentist sentiments persisted in certain quarters. An event which contributed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Thai Muslims was the mysterious disappearance of Haji Sulong in 1954. After his disappearance, Sulong's relatives and followers did not remain inactive. Tension continued and separatist movements have spread quietly up to the present time. Complaints about governmental discrimination against Thai Muslims have been heard from time to time.

The promulgation of the Constitutional Amendment Act in the Malaysian Parliament in 1971 would seem to suggest an end to intercommunal squabbles over certain major issues which had threatened to bring about an irrevocable split in the tenuously held together multi-communal structure of the country. The Act proclaimed that “in the interest of security and public order” matters pertaining to citizenship (Pt. III of the Constitution), the National Language (Article 152), the special position of the Malays (Article 153), and the Sovereignty of the Rulers (Article 181.) were not to be questioned in public, in state legislatures, and in Parliament. Proscription on these issues had come about as a direct result of the cataclysmic events of 13 May 1969. The promulgation of the Act was the first item of business in the reconvened Malaysian Parliament following the dissolution of the National Operations Council (NOC) which had temporarily ruled the country.

This article examines colonial secularism in Burma through a history of the built environment of Rangoon. The creation of the colonial city in the 1850s as an ordered grid of ethnic neighbourhoods and established religions served as a pedagogy of the secular, teaching its population to internalise religious difference. And yet, against this secular vision in brick and pavement there were exceptional spaces that enacted alternative visions. The Thayettaw monastic complex began as home for the diverse displaced ethnic monasteries of the pre-colonial town, but it soon defied the boundaries of colonial rule. Its practice of Buddhism became a mechanism for mobility, interaction, and interconnection.

The homesteading system instituted in the Philippines in 1903 was intended to stimulate economic development through increased agricultural output from previously unoccupied lands and also to relieve agrarian problems in densely settled parts of the country. A case study shows that while early homesteaders did significantly improve their conditions, the intense demand for land rapidly led to the development of squatting and tenancy. Average farm sizes are declining but there are simultaneously indications of a trend towards concentration of land ownership, which accords with experience in other peasant economies.

During the intense concern for economic development over the past 25 or so years, many governments have expressed their faith in the development of new agricultural land as at least a partial answer to a wide range of economic and social problems. These problems include regionally dense populations with inadequate farm sizes, inequitable systems of holding and renting land, inefficient methods of production and marketing, lack of capital and difficulties of capital formation, and low yields from land that is losing fertility through constant cropping. Frequently, ignorance, poverty or the agrarian structure inhibits the adoption of measures for improvement.

Those countries with significant areas of little used land resources have tended to rely on developing these resources as an answer to agrarian problems rather than attempting to tackle defects in the whole structure. Since the structure is not changed, it is not surprising that in due course the firmly institutionalised problems of the older areas gradually established themselves in areas of new settlement too. This is essentially what Boeke referred to as “static expansion”. More recently, Mellor has pointed out, “Expanding the land area at constant productivity and incomes is not economic development in the usual sense — it is only a holding action in the face of a growing population”. Even with rising productivity such as associated with the Green Revolution, there is considerable evidence to suggest the continuation, if not exacerbation, of agrarian problems.

By examining in detail a case study of colonisation in the Philippines, this paper will show that even if productivity and incomes in a new area are initially high, the operation of customary economic and social processes is likely to ensure the recreation of traditional problems. Such a conclusion is nothing new. It has been repeated depressingly often not only in recent decades but also of course throughout history.