“Malaysia needs this kind of spirit.” With these words, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, responded to a student demonstration supporting the nation against the 1968 territorial claims to Sabah put forth by the Philippines. Although he toned down his enthusiasm somewhat when later he learned that the same students had forced their way into the Philippine Embassy compound and had torn down its flag prior to their demonstration in front of his residence, there is no denying that this was another example of political change in Malaysia which is causing its leaders to come to grips with a comparatively new phenomena, students as participants in the political process.

This article reviews the memoirs of Phạm Duy, a famous Vietnamese composer, who in the late 1930s and 1940s composed some of the first modern Vietnamese songs. His memoirs describe his time with the anti-French Resistance, his break with it in 1950, and his years in Saigon and the United States. My review focuses on curious aspects of these memoirs: Phạm Duy's careful listing of his many love affairs; his insistence that he needed lovers to compose songs; and his failure to acknowledge that he profited from a culture that glorifies the self-sacrifice of women. After considering whether Phạm Duy's behaviour as depicted in his memoirs conforms to cultural norms for Vietnamese male artists, I argue that it is best seen as, in Judith Butler's expression, a ‘hyperbolic exhibition’ of the natural. I conclude by speculating about how Phạm Duy and his memoirs may be viewed in future years.

Archaeological research at the Yarang complex of moated sites in Pattani demonstrates that this was an early historic Buddhist ceremonial centre and a later Islamic fortification, but probably not the early trade centre called Langkasuka. At Kerisik archaeological evidence supports the identification of this complex as the location of the fifteenth-eighteenth century trading port city of Patani.

The impact of the conquering Japanese upon the Indian communities of Southeast Asia and upon the Indian soldiers captured there led, within a few months, to the formation of an Indian National Army intended to fight for the Independence of India alongside the Japanese, and to the establishment of an Indian Independence League embracing the civilian population of the whole area. The Japanese impact was harsh; the requirement from the conquered populations was total quiescence; military operations must not be hampered, Japanese needs for supplies and labour must be met without hesitation. Where this could be secured through an existing colonial administration as in Indochina, by enforcing the collaboration of a national government as in Thailand, or by playing on latent nationalism as in Burma, so much the better. Otherwise the method was terror: massacre, random execution, torture. It is the method of invading armies; it was the German method, the Russian method, the method of Genghiz Khan. That it wasemployed by the Japanese in the countries of Southeast Asia is basic to the history of the period.

Singapore became a distinct crown colony in 1946. Two years later the British Government began to introduce constitutional reforms in the island in accordance with its pledge in 1943 to foster the growth of “(Malaya's) capacity for self-government within the British Empire”. This colonial tutelage assumed two forms. Firstly, the government started to prepare for a fully elected legislature through which to transfer power to the people in the future. Secondly, the people were trained to work a system of democratic elections based on universal suffrage for all British and (after 1948) British Protected Subjects. The process, however, was fairly slow with the result that the governmental system of a normal crown colony remained basically intact in Singapore until 1955. Assisted by an advisory executive council and a legislative council, the governor continued to rule the colony with almost unlimited powers, subject only to the control of the Secretary of State for the Colonies at Whitehall. The legislature did not even have an elected majority until the Rendel Constitution was introduced in April 1955. Under this new constitution, the Labour Front-Alliance coalition government became the first elected government to assume office with a considerable degree of power in its hands.

During the Japanese invasion of Java, local nationalists came to the fore and set up Merdeka Committees to welcome their “liberators”. The high hopes they entertained that the Japanese would give them a say in the local administration and economy, or even grant them independence, turned out to be an illusion.

This article uses the lens of alcohol as a means of exploring the experiences and anxieties of Vietnamese ‘colonial modernity’ and the way it was mutually constituted with ‘colonial tradition’. The production, consumption, and meaning of alcohol in Vietnam were all profoundly altered as the state's contested attempts to control the market for rice liquor interacted with the growing availability of imports like wine, champagne, and cognac. While these new products would become ideal symbols of modernity and markers of distinction, at the same time reinvented traditions surrounding what the French called ‘native’ and the Vietnamese called ‘our’ alcohol would become linked to evolving notions of community and nation.

Many writers have shown that Peninsular Malaysia is undergoing rapid urbanization. The proportion of the total population living in urban areas, for instance, increased from 15·9 per cent in 1947 to 28·7 per cent in 1970. This growth is more readily appreciated if it is noted that the per annum urban population increase after independence (that is, between 1957 and 1970) is nearly twice the per annum increase in the previous inter-censal period (1947–1957). This rapid urbanization ushers in many political, social and economic problems among which is the unbalanced ethnic constituents of the urban population.

An insuperable difficulty presents itself in tracing with any degree of correctness the origins of a barbarous race of people who possess no written character, and whose history is clothed in the obscurity of legendary traditions handed down to successive generations by oral Agency alone, in which much of the fabulous becomes mixed with certain transactions of a nature to state indefinitely the ‘era’ of their occurrence, but affording no positive source from whence to derive anything approaching a correct ‘data’. It is then thus with the race of the ‘Kaya’, so called by themselves in their own language, that of ‘Karen Nee’ or ‘Red Karens’ being given to them by the Burmese and surrounding people, from the predominating color of their costume — the short drawers and turban being generally of that color, which distinguishes them from other tribes of ‘Karens’ whose attire consists of a white tunic and are on that account termed ‘Karen Pyee’ or ‘White Karens’.

About the middle of the thirteenth century the great Arab scholar, Ibn Sa'id, compiled his Bast al-Ard or Geography, in which he collected many ancient texts; amongst them is the following, which may offer a clue to the early history of Brunei:

[The Khmers] lived with the Chinese in the eastern regions of the earth. Discord having broken out amongst them, the Chinese chased them towards the islands, and they remained there a certain time. The name of the King was Kamrun. Following this, discord broke out amongst them when they were in the islands, of which we shall speak later. Then those who did not form part of the Royal Family went away to the great island [Madagascar], and their Sultan dwelt in the city of Komorriya.

In his two pioneer studies on the Nanyang Chinese national salvation movement between 1908 and 1941, Professor Yoji Akashi stresses developments in China, and the extension of KMT and CCP structures in the Nanyang as basic “to any investigation of Nanyang Chinese political motive and orientation”. These developments, if viewed from a rather Sino-centric standpoint, are indeed important in explaining why the Singapore hua-ch'iao (overseas Chinese) responded as they did to the Double-Seventh Incident of 1937. However, contemporary local sources reveal that forces and conditions in Singapore played a decisive part in shaping the stand and modus operandi adopted by Singapore Chinese at the outbreak of the 1937 Sino-Japanese War.

Considering that, except for the initial period of the Emergency, Malaysia as a country attracted far less attention internationally than most of the other countries in Southeast Asia, it is somewhat surprising to find that many foreign historians did not hesitate to make Malaysian history the subject of their scholarly works. L.A. Mills wrote in 1924, 1942, and again in 1958; Rupert Emerson in 1937. In 1935, a Ph.D. thesis was completed by M.I. Knowles in the University of Wisconsin. In 1943, Virginia Thomson wrote Postmortem on Malaya. The post-1950 situation was even more exciting. Numerous theses on Malaysia were written in various universities in the world — among them SOAS, ANU, Hong Kong, California, Columbia, and Duke. Of course, by far the greatest volume of work was done in the University of Malaya (Singapore) itself where, between 1951 and 1961, more than a hundred theses were completed at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Understandably, in the mid-sixties, there was a growing feeling that the field was being exhausted.

Jamit Singh's legacy as a charismatic trade unionist and political activist on Singapore's waterfront coincided with its changing political developments. He was instrumental in bringing about this change by transforming the dock workers into an effective political force. His subsequent banishment by the People's Action Party government brought an end to a colourful episode in the history of Singapore's harbour.

In 1690, the previously sympathetic Nguyễn ruler of Cochinchina (located in south-central modern Vietnam) prohibited Christian religious practice in his state. Uniquely in the history of Catholicism in early modern Vietnam, however, the ban did not lead to a persecution of believers. The following article, based extensively on archival materials from the Missions-Étrangères of Paris, historicises this event and the steps leading up to it in 1688–89. It argues that to understand what was happening on the ground in Cochinchina, and why, we need to analyse the way global and regional factors intersected with local, and even personal, ones to cause a prohibition of Christian practice in early 1690, an event for which internal Catholic dissention was almost entirely responsible.

The transition from Late Iron Age to early state societies in the riverine lowlands of the Mun Valley and northern Cambodia took place rapidly in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Defining the former involves archaeological excavation, whereas the latter is best known from surviving temple structures and inscriptions in addition to the results of archaeological fieldwork. Several common threads link the two phases of cultural development. From the late fifth century BCE, Iron Age communities participated in the growing maritime exchange network linking Southeast Asia with China and India, bringing exotic ideas and goods into the hinterland. Iron itself had a major impact on agriculture and warfare. Salt, a vital commodity that is abundantly available in the Mun Valley, was exploited on an industrial scale. By the fifth century CE, an agricultural revolution involving permanent, probably irrigated, rice fields and ploughing underwrote a rapid rise of social elites. These leaders in society, named in the early historic inscriptions, maintained and elaborated prehistoric innovations.

The Sěrat candraning wanita (Book of descriptions of women) is a voluminous Javanese manuscript written in Yogyakarta in the 1930s. This handbook for would-be husbands is basically an instruction manual, informing its (male) readers how to choose a good wife/sexual partner (based on physiognomy) and how sex works (based on ‘the etiquette of sexual intercourse’). It can be regarded as the swansong of pre-modern Javano-Muslim erotology.

Although nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in Siam tried to debunk local spirit beliefs and witchcraft accounts, they and their actions were perceived in terms of local supernaturalist frameworks. Late twentieth-century Thai Christians, supernaturalists themselves, have reclassified local spirit activity through their own Christian frameworks, using local vocabularies of spirit phenomena but retaining master categories of interpretation and practice drawn from North American evangelicalism. This practice puts Thai Protestant churches in a direct dialogue with their cultural contexts and leaves them positioned to benefit from Thailand's increasing religious pluralism.

“If you want to write a real Burmese story”, U Nu once told an audience of Burmese writers, you “must know the real Burmese background”. It is advice that applies to foreign as well as indigenous writers and, in most cases, non-Burmese writers have followed it. The recommendation is important because fiction provides a popular entryway for the “average” reader to reach beyond his normal range of knowledge and imagination; it is more likely that he will have read a novel or short story rather than a history or a scholarly work and it is from this source that he will have formed his ideas and adopted his stereotypes. Thus, it is necessary that the available literature is good, that it is accurate in its descriptions of the locale and the behaviour of the people, that it catches the nuance of local speech and expression, that it reflects the psychology of the subjects when it discusses them rather than imputing alien speech, values, and attitudes.

Since the end of the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste in 1999, a significant revival of local cultures and identities in public life has been occurring. In this article I discuss aspects of identity and culture among Fataluku-speaking people in relation to the recent establishment of the Nino Conis Santana National Park over much of their homeland. Today Fataluku cultural and historical stories provide a basis for their status as an autonomous and sovereign cultural group, as well as a legacy of intercultural negotiation and alliance that arguably reflects regional patterns of migration and social change over thousands of years. With the park's 15,000 residents continuing to rely on its forests and reefs for subsistence, recent restrictions on hunting have highlighted the need for increased local community support if the park is to achieve its conservation aims. I argue that long-standing traditions surrounding the negotiation of social and political change within Fataluku society provide a potential basis for cooperation with the new nation–state and for developing community-oriented park management policies.