Thailand is a non-Western country where a firm state ideology based on national political traditions has been developed to counter the influx of Western liberalism. The official state ideology is clearly set forth in Article 45 of the present constitution, which states that “No person shall exercise his constitutional rights and liberties in a manner adversely affecting the Nation, Religion, King and Constitution.” That is to say, every Thai must be loyal to these four institutions. Moreover, the government maintains a steady output of pamphlets and other publications to imbue this ideology into the minds of the Thai people. “Nation” in this ideology is closely associated with “Religion” and “King”, both of which are fundamental elements in the traditional Thai Buddhist theory of kingship. According to this theory, the king, regarded as elected by a gathering of all the people, should reign justly as a protector on whom the people can rely, and should be guided by the restraints of the moral law of Buddhism. Accordingly, the concept of “nation” in this ideology is different from that in Western liberal nationalism.

The five cases of Protestant Christian practice in Indonesia and Thailand presented in this symposium are used to develop a sociology of Protestantism in Southeast Asia. A review is first undertaken of the history of Protestant missionary activity in Southeast Asia. Protestantism, it is observed, insists on the ultimate authority of the Bible. This authority has not been accepted by Southeast Asians until they have access to the Christian message in their own languages and they are motivated to adopt Christian practices as a means to confront deep crises in their lives. The establishment of Protestant Christianity has entailed the interpreting of the Christian message with reference to the non-Christian contexts in which Protestants in Southeast Asia live.

A comparison of European tobacco plantations and native shifting cultivation in North Borneo between 1881 and 1928 illustrates the discursive and political strategies through which colonial administrators justified intervention into native land matters and articulated their vision of ‘appropriate’ land management. The discourse of rational law, scientific agriculture and commercialisation provided the tools of colonial power that pushed native people and their customary laws into an increasingly peripheral position in relationship to the centralising state.

The idea that Malay peasants have a close attachment to their land is a common place in both historical and contemporary writings about Malaya, and since the 1890s land legislation has been oriented toward bringing into being and preserving a landowning peasantry. The files of the colonial administration, however, contain numerous complaints about peasants disposing of their holdings. Officials and later commentators have tended to view such behaviour as contrary to the natural inclinations of peasants and symptomatic of underlying social or political problems, but when a pattern has been reported consistently for over one hundred years the question must be asked whether it really is, as conventional wisdom would have it, anomalous.

One of the most interesting features of the growth of Britain's overseas commerce over the past two centuries has been the merchant firm, often the product of very small-scale beginnings but gradually developing into a worldwide network centring on London. The scope for such enterprises grew as effective naval control increased the security of the maritime trade routes and the importance of the great chartered companies declined. Much of the early growth came from the “country trade” between India and China in which private merchants were permitted to engage. In the late eighteenth century, commercial firms in the City of London began to open branches in India to deal in local products such as indigo, cotton and, later, opium. By the early nineteenth century, around two dozen of these “agency houses” were in existence though the majority were very small and short-lived. 1 In the same period, the more substantial firms were establishing further offshoots in Canton to participate in the tea and silk trade in Europe.

Conventional historiography presumes a linear development from urbanisation, the rise of indigenous middle classes and the spread of modernity towards nationalism as the logical outcome of this process. This article aims to disconnect modernity from nationalism by focusing on the role of cultural citizens in the late colonial period for whom modernity was a desirable lifestyle. The extent to which their desires and the interests of the colonial regime coincided is illustrated by a variety of advertisements and school posters, which invited members of the indigenous urban middle class to become cultural citizens of the colony.

Research on the social effects of tourism and beachfront property development in Southeast Asia finds that foreigners and local elites reap the main benefits, rather than fishing families and coastal communities, who also become vulnerable to displacement. This article, discussing cleavages and co-operation among parties brought together in court cases over land on a Philippine island, demonstrates that poor coastal dwellers just north of Dumaguete City on Negros Island differ in their ability to use social relations within and beyond kin groups to resist development-induced displacement from the increasingly lucrative foreshore. Members of families who are considered to be descendants of the ‘original people of the place’ have been far less vulnerable to displacement pressure than settlers with more of a ‘migrant’ status.

Quezon City was founded in 1939 as a planned city and envisioned as the future capital of the Philippines, which was anticipating its independence in a few years. Led by President Manuel Quezon, Philippine politicians conferred upon the city narratives of nationhood and social justice to make it the best spatial representation of a nation-in-waiting. However, underneath these state-centric ideologies was the authoritarianism of the Quezon regime, which used urban politics to centralise power. But far from being a symbol of the President's undisputed dominance, Quezon City's inherent contradictions became weak points in the city's official narrative.

What are the practical and cultural consequences of embracing the ‘Indigenous’ label? Despite universalising aspirations, the concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Philippines, where the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act has created a bureaucracy that purportedly responds to the special needs of Indigenous Peoples, including the preservation of cultural traditions and securing title to ancestral lands. While laudatory on the surface, in practice the current legal and bureaucratic framework allows the state to impose its own definition of indigeneity, often compelling indigenous minorities to conform to stereotypes in order to acquire the fundamental rights and benefits that, by law, are supposed to be guaranteed. The Philippine states’ requirements for being recognised as ‘Indigenous’ are transforming how Indigenous Peoples maintain and perform their ancestral traditions, often leading to highly divisive internal debates about proper cultural and political representation. This article examines the case of Higaunon Lumads in northern Mindanao, who have been responding locally to over thirty years of national trends in participatory development that require increased engagement with government bureaucracy. I explore how ‘indigeneity’ has been defined and employed by Higaunons in the service of ‘preserving tradition’, the political and other consequences that have emerged in this context, and the perils of representing and commodifying indigeneity in modern Southeast Asia.

This article investigates the history of women's relationship to political Islam in Indonesia over the last century. It addresses three questions: how Islamic women have been politically active in Indonesia, how Indonesian women have been affected by political Islam, and how they have influenced political Islam. Independence marked a turning point. In the colonial period, women were more active within radical Islamic organisations than in moderate ones. Since independence, however, the situation has changed. Instead, the role of women has strengthened in moderate organisations while radical Islam has kept women in the background.

A narrative sponsored by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen posits the prime minister as the reincarnation of sixteenth-century king Sdech Kân, a commoner who toppled the king at the time and ascended the throne. Whilst reincarnation narratives have wider Southeast Asian resonances, the reinvention of Sdech Kân is central to the redrawing of boundaries of power between a politically weakened monarchy and the Cambodian People's Party-led government. This article traces the meanings of reincarnating Sdech Kân in the contemporary Cambodian context, and what consequences this has for contemporary bids for political legitimacy.

Historical studies of the Chinese overseas, especially those focused on Southeast Asia, need to take into greater account the influence that Chinese born and permanently settled outside China exerted over the wider diasporic community. Moving away from a sojourner-dominated perspective, this article examines Nanyang commercial and cultural networks that were centred on Singapore and largely orchestrated by ‘Straits Chinese’. It argues that these networks played a significant role in altering the self-perceptions of more recently arrived migrants in the region and even, for some, helped re-define Chinese identities.

I began this paper with a critique of current analyses of development problems, which I suggested were not “sociological” enough. I proposed to illustrate this by analyzing the recent development history of the Riam Kanan valley in South Kalimantan. Following a brief description of the valley, its inhabitants, and the hydroelectric project that has become the dominant factor in its development planning, the two major agroecosystems of the Riam Kanan valley were discussed in some detail: forest-based swidden agriculture, and grassland-based permanent field farming. Each system was found to be the object of both negative perceptions and prescriptive policies on the part of local government. I concluded, however, that there is little or no empirical basis for these perceptions and policies and that this explains the disruption and conflict to which development planning in the valley has led. The underlying problem is that government planners have automatically tended to equate their values with those of development, and the values of development with those of the environment—whereas in fact the values and interest of each of these are quite different. This should be recognized as a major problem in contemporary development, and as one with which the common paradigm of “top-down/bottom-up” cannot and does not deal. When a more sociological approach enables us to distinguish between disguised conflicts of interest and genuine development problems, the latter are found to be far less intractable than imagined. The conflicts of interest may still prove to be intractable, but better that they be seen as such, as inherent constraints on government policy, than as inherent problems of peasant ecology and economy.

Recent developments have made the Thai Government increasingly uneasy about the continuing disturbances in various parts of the country. The vexing problem of Communist subversion and Vietnamese minorities in the Northeast appears to be matched by growing anxiety over the increase in banditry, assassinations, and the activities of several illegal organized groups in the extreme South. Concern is mounting particularly over reports of alarming agitation by resentful elements in the southern Thailand-Peninsular Malaysia border region. Perhaps the most unpleasant strand in the pattern of unrest, and the most serious threat to national integrity, is the tendency to irredentism among the Muslim Malays in the provinces of Pattani, Yala, Setul and Narathiwat in southern Thailand.

In selecting the “village community” as focus for an analysis of the social organization of relations between agents of the state and its subjects I bridge two distinct and sometimes contradictory themes. The first is the manner in which social connections within the countryside and with the state are handled in practice. The second is the way the concepts of “community” and, more specifically, “village community” are used to represent and sometimes misrepresent both how these relations are formally structured and what actually happens. Evaluation of these concepts is thus an important and necessary part of any interpretation of rural society and culture. Perceptions of community underlie and affect not only academic analyses but the actions and attitudes of officialdom and those experts who are involved with the administration and development of the countryside. They are intrinsically connected with matters of policy and administration, and the village — as we now observe it — is a consequent outcome.

This article discusses a different side of two controversial fatwas — one against Muslims participating in Christmas celebrations and the other against pluralism, liberalism and secularism — issued by the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Council of Indonesian Ulama). Most studies on MUI have emphasised the role that the Council's fatwas have played in inciting sectarian violence in Indonesia. Without denying the connections between violence and the MUI fatwas, this article argues that these controversial fatwas have also opened up room for more fruitful and constructive discussions among different religious groups in Indonesia. This article asks: What were the roots of the controversy over these intolerant fatwas? How did the state respond to them? And what does the controversy over these fatwas tell us about the nature of public debate on Islam in Indonesia? By answering these questions this article will shed light on aspects of contemporary Indonesian public debates about Islam that have been overlooked in current scholarship.

There is no significant historical lesson to be learnt from the narrative which follows, except the lesson of human endurance. The Twentieth Century, even more than any age before, is the age of the refugee. In almost every instance, the refugee instinct is spontaneous — unpremeditated — disorganised; it is individual, or familial. Nobody directs the refugee to depart; no regular organisation assists him on his way; and when he arrives eventually at his destination, nobody really wants him to stay. The refugee who is assisted to settle in a new environment, or the refugee who is expedited back to his former home, are the exceptions to the normal rule that once people become refugees they never entirely lose that status. The refugee is the world's most unwanted man. But somehow he survives. The present narrative is a story of survival.

The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the “world” — or, more properly, Western — rice market is well known. Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous “as every schoolboy knows” rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the “New Imperialism”, more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 or 1870 and 1900 or 1910. From small-scale beginnings in the 1850s and 1860s, Southeast Asia's extra-Asian rice trade is said to have grown dramatically in the years after 1870, quickly transforming a situation of market equilibrium into one of disequilibrium.

This study of the Agricultural Bank of the Philippine Government, which was established in 1908 to provide agricultural loans to local fanners, describes the background of bank, focusing on the active role of the local elite. Then, it discusses to what extent the bank served the needs of landlords, and why it stopped operations in 1916, facing a shortage of capital.

Among the array of pressing development requirements facing East Timor is the need to create a new strategic national management approach for forest resources. This article explores the historical and environmental factors that have contributed to the contemporary pattern of forest lands and discusses policy options to support the development of a sustainable forestry future.