I argue that women's literacy was more common than is usually supposed and that women engaged extensively with written literature, both as readers and writers. I also discuss the role of traditional Islamic education in transmitting literacy among girls. The article is based on the examination of a group of narrative poems written by women at the court of Penyengat.

This article traces the etymology of the term ‘revolution’ as it developed in Việt Nam between the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It argues that the term was slow to catch on, and that activists who used it did so in often contradictory ways. The term's historical development complicated efforts to fix its meaning, and it was not until the later part of the 1920s that it came to be consolidated, in part through Hồ Chí Minh's publication of a short book entitled Đường Kách Mệnh (The road to revolution).

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

In late May 1904 a small band of people led by a certain Kasan Mukmin, a kyai or rural religious teacher, mounted an uprising in the village of Kebonpasar in Gedangan district of Sidoarjo regency, East Java. It was a single incident in a series of protests involving small groups of affluent peasants in Java between 1880 and 1920 which are difficult to explain in terms of the “moral economy” perspective. J.C. Scott has suggested that increasing intrusion of market economic forces into the indigenous economic life in the process of capitalist economic transformation eroded the subsistence margin of peasants instigating them to mount uprisings. This view may well explain some major peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia, but as Mukmin's uprising illustrates, numerous small rural protests in Java after 1880 occurred in relatively prosperous areas and involved affluent peasants. They were not caused by violation of peasants' perception of moral economy.

During the past decade, Singapore has been characterized by a relatively open and competitive party system, thus setting this nation apart from a number of her Southeast Asian neighbors. However, the travails experienced by the system as it has evolved are no less in evidence today than they have been heretofore.

Ever since the Separation on 9th August 1965, the principal leaders of Malaysia and Singapore have expressed the view that their separated states would be compelled by the forces of historical, geographical, economic and social ties to reunite some day. When this would be accomplished has not been clearly defined nor has the manner of their reunification been suggested. Tengku Abdul Rahman, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, merely stated that Singapore would be welcomed back sometime in the future, while Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore Prime Minister, admitted that it could be a task for the next generation to seek reunification. However, both were hopeful that at some future date circumstances would be more conducive than they were prior to 1965, for another attempt at merger. It is generally agreed that the Separation was a political separation arising from the incompatibility of the political views of the Alliance-controlled central government and the state government of Singapore in the hands of the People's Action Party (PAP). It has also been implied that the fact of their interdependency in several basic fields even after Separation could well provide a strong basis for some form of reunification.

Although, as a result of a boom in tin prices, Kuala Lumpur grew very rapidly in the last two years of the 1870s, and the headquarters of the British administration of Selangor were moved there from Klang in 1880, it still remained a pioneer mining town. A number of contemporary descriptions exist of the town (admittedly seen through European eyes), as it was in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These all portray a small, but bustling, “raw and rumbustious” settlement, with a very large Chinese element in its population; indeed, one visitor in 1879 termed it a “great Chinese village”. This settlement consisted almost wholly of wooden, attap or mud houses, arranged in the haphazard manner which had resulted from its rapid and unplanned growth. One of the major hazards which the town faced at this time was fire, and it was mainly through the fear of extensive fires that the town began to be replanned and rebuilt during the 1880s.

I am interested in ways in which some Vietnamese in the fourteenth century were thinking about their fellow-countrymen. The writings of only a few of them are extant, but their understanding of a well-ordered society survived. For this reason, the fourteenth century may be a watershed in Vietnamese history. Thoughtful men during that century were concerned with more than reaffirming their country's independence, which was never in doubt and had been triumphantly vindicated during the three Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Their preoccupation was Vietnam's cultural well-being.

Between 1949 and 1951, the Communities Liaison Committee (CLC), an unofficial body comprising leaders from the main Malayan ethnic communities, served as a prototype for elite intercommunal conflict resolution during a very challenging period amid an ongoing communist insurgency. Drawing upon previously inaccessible primary sources, this article reassesses the CLC's work towards resolving divisive issues such as Malay economic backwardness, federal citizenship, national identity, education and language in Malaya. This article argues that the CLC played a significantly bigger role than previously recognised and influenced government policy considerably. Equally importantly, it entrenched the concept of consociationalism, which was to shape the Malayan political landscape long thereafter.

A new perspective has begun to challenge both the conventional portrayal of the Vietnamese revolution and the communist account of its success. This essay takes stock of new research that presents revolutionary Vietnam in a more complex and less triumphal way. It is argued that Vietnam's nationalist revolution (1945–46) should be conceptually distinguished from the subsequent socialist revolution (1948–88). The former had a distinctly urban and bourgeois character, was led by a coalition of the upper and middle classes, and lacked ideological intensity. The latter was imposed from above, based on socialist visions, and dependent on foreign assistance. The failure to disentangle the two revolutions in existing narratives assigns little agency to Vietnamese actors and leads to triumphs being exaggerated while tragedies are overlooked.

From the turn of the century up until the 1930s, public education under Dutch rule in Indonesia developed both quantitatively and qualitatively, but this expansion was interrupted, and even reversed, by the onset of the Great Depression. Focusing on schoolteachers in particular, this essay examines the trajectory of education policies in colonial Indonesia in response to the crisis, from the initial measures, to partial recovery in the mid-1930s, up to the Japanese invasion of 1942. The crisis ushered in the policy of indigenisation, which saw large-scale education reorganisation, including the substitution of European teachers with much lower paid Indonesians. Indigenisation was also a political response to the spreading of nationalist ideals through the growing number of independent schools run by Taman Siswa and the Muhammadiyah. Hence, the intention was also to transform Indonesian teachers into cultural agents who would propagate a government-formulated concept of cultural identity among their own community. However, indigenisation contributed to the gradual delegitimisation of colonial authority through the exodus of well-educated Indonesians who had been intended as docile imperial subjects.

In a rapidly modernising Cambodia, dance parties that accompany large temple celebrations and weddings have become violent arenas where young men fight with fists and knives beyond police control. In 2010, this led to a ban on dance parties during the Pchuṃ Biṇḍ celebration. This paper concerns an ad hoc bribe to lift the ban that was collected in the manner of a meritorious temple offering. I suggest that the flexible parameters of Buddhist merit-making in this ritualised context both reconfigured the bribe and palpably brought expectations of moral conduct into the energetically charged dancing arena — but only momentarily.

Despite popular representations of Tunku Abdul Rahman as an avuncular political personality, he was also an astute policy practitioner. This was evident in how he, in pursuit of Malayan interests, calibrated Malaya's foreign policy posture towards Jakarta in a manner that not only displayed little appreciation of Indonesian sensitivities, but also undermined its political interest and status as the major power in Southeast Asia, thus contributing to bilateral tension.

The minority tribal groups in the border zones of Southern Thailand (the ‘Sakai’) are often described as ‘disappearing’ demographically while the inability to ‘know’ them at first hand by successive interested parties (the colonial explorer, the naturalist, the government official) has been attributed to their ability to disappear into the jungle, seemingly without a trace. This paper discusses the way the ‘Sakai’ have faded in and out of ethnology and Thai public consciousness, due in part to their own survival imperatives, and in part to the character of Thai state and society.

This article argues for a reassessment of the history of the Singhasari period based on disambiguating diverse historical sources that have often been combined to produce a seamless narrative, when in fact the textual record is marked by conflict, contradiction and ambiguity. The author proposes a basic division between the perspective of kakawin literature, which represents the interests of royal and priestly actors with a large stake in maintaining a fixed symbolic order, and literature in Middle Javanese, which reflects the more personal values that arose among young royals competing for favourable position in the core-line status hierarchy. The author further claims that symbolic initiatives of Krtanagara (1265–92 CE) that led to his identification as ‘the god Shiva-Buddha’ were not aimed at producing a syncretic religious system, but rather a politico-religious hegemony that had profound effects on the shape of statecraft during the Majapahit era.

From the mid-1920s, Indian music scenes developed in Singapore that were not just about the construction of regional and religious forms of Indian diasporic belonging. Drawing upon European, Chinese and Malay influences (musical and otherwise), and performing in contexts that were uncommon in India, Singaporean Indian musicians contributed to non-Indian musics, while incorporating non-Indian influences into Indian genres. Such musical–communal interactions functioned in colonial Singapore to locate the island as a hub for the constitution of a ‘Malayan Indian sonic geography’. By encouraging links between various Indian and other communities throughout the peninsula via radio, films, recordings, touring networks, and performances at hotels and amusement parks, music became a means for Indian communication and integration in colonial Malaya — a sonic geography that would be significantly transformed, though not eliminated, after Singapore and Malaysia parted ways in 1965.

Few areas of recent Thai history have been the target of as much guesswork as have Thailand's foreign relations in the years immediately preceeding the Pacific War. The educated guess has been the only resort of the historian who would venture into this field, for vernacular documentation has gone unexploited. As a result, the usual treatments of the Thai role in the 1940 Franco-Thai border dispute have followed unreliable or hostile Western sources and the Thai policies of the time have been viewed in an unfavourable light. In a real sense, the French view of the affair has been adopted, for lack of other alternatives.

This article focuses on the growth of spirit cults in Cambodia since the end of the Democratic Kampuchea regime through an examination of the most common type of tutelary spirit, neak ta, in Kompong Tralach in Kep Province. The role of neak ta is discussed in relation to Buddhism through their representation in local legends and myths, as reported by villagers and monks, and as the focus of rituals and ceremonies, including some conducted in a Buddhist temple, Wat Kompong Tralach. This provides ethnographic data showing that during and following the destruction of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge, and the resulting loss of monks and knowledgeable lay Buddhist specialists, Cambodians turned increasingly to older traditions such as the belief in the power and efficacy of neak ta to help fill a void. This examination of the enduring place and growing importance of beliefs such as the neak ta cult within Khmer cosmology and religious practice following decades of war and recovery deepens our understanding of the reconstruction of Buddhism in Cambodia.

This article will examine the motivations for being spirit mediums, practitioners of the lên đồng rituals associated with the Mother Goddess (Đạo Mẫu) religion, which is unique to the ethnic Vietnamese. Drawing on the life stories of mediums interviewed in northern Vietnam, I will show that these people practise the rituals primarily because they themselves view this role as their destiny and because they expect it to bring them good health and auspiciousness.

Based on fieldwork conducted among the Buddhist population living in Rakhine State, Myanmar, between 2005 and 2011, this article elucidates how people deal with health and illness and related uncertainties by relying on a multiplicity of conceptions and practices associated with Buddhism, astrology, spirit cults, as well as indigenous and Western medicine. This article unpacks this plurality to show how different components contribute to the healing process in complementary and yet hierarchical ways which hold to a nexus of political, social, medical, economic, cosmological, biological, and environmental factors. It also questions the boundaries between the religious and medical, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, worldly and otherworldly, and natural and supernatural.