The aim of this paper is to examine and compare in two societies with different religious backgrounds the aftereffects of ritual in terms of the deference-entitlements which are enhanced through ritual.

Deference is “a way of expressing an assessment of the self and of others with respect to ‘macro-social’ properties” (Shils 1968 :105). The deferential person expects he will get something he lacks or wants or needs from the person to whom he defers.

These memorable words were spoken by Tan Cheng Lock, a man who did not speak any Chinese himself, when addressing a meeting of representatives of Chinese School Committees and Chinese School Teachers' Associations on 9 November 1952. Speaking as president of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA), Tan went on in his speech to promise that

At this critical juncture in the history of the growth and development of Chinese education and culture in Malaya … its cause has the full support of the Malayan Chinese Association.

Tan's speech, and the presence of three other MCA leaders at the meeting, were the first clear indications that the MCA was prepared to take a consolidated stand with other Chinese organizations, in particular the United Chinese School Teachers' Association (UCSTA), and the United Chinese Schools' Committees' Association (UCSCA), on the issue of Chinese education. The MCA's decision was greeted by a chorus of approval from the Chinese press which described the 9 November meeting as an unprecedented manifestation of Chinese unity and from leading shetuan, or Chinese social organizations, which expressed their full support for the meeting's stand on Chinese education.

Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia can be an easy academic exercise. Structure the courses after those of a department in an established university in Europe or America, use the textbooks produced by the major publishing companies, list the references carefully worked out by their counterparts in some western universities, organize the facts and points in the texts, present them in class, give one or two examinations to find out how much the students know, mark them strictly or leniently, hand in the grades to the Registrar's office and the academic year is over. With few exceptions, everything seems to be ready-made for the teacher and the student.

The focus of the article is on the policy perspectives of the colonial state in Malaya vis-à-vis business, Western and Chinese. It touches on the policy outlook of the periods preceding the inter-war years before exploring various related topics (the question of industrial development, tariff policy, private sector initiatives) with a view to ascertaining the relationship between state and business.

Comprehending the origins, dynamics and solutions to the ongoing violence in southern Thailand's Muslim majority border provinces has proved to be a challenge, not only to successive Thai governments and security forces but also to scholars and other investigators. Insurgent-instigated attacks, now paralleled by and intertwined with more opportunistic forms of violence, have afflicted the border region for nearly seven years (as of late 2010), with no sign of ultimate abatement, despite a considerable investment of resources by the Thai state. Arguably under-reported by the world media, this conflict has nonetheless attracted its fair share of parachute journalism and superficial reportage by instant-experts, single-issue rights advocates, wide-eyed postgraduate researchers and assorted cranks. Many of them have been ensnared by local ‘fixers’ with their own agendas. Despite some notable exceptions, much academic research effort in the region itself has been hit-and-run. As Duncan McCargo emphasises: ‘this is a messy, awkward, in-your-face conflict’ (p. 188) — as such it demands a comparable ‘in-your-face’ and sustained field-based research effort, which, as he rightly notes, has been sadly lacking.

Between 1975 and 1979 the genocidal regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in Cambodia targeted minorities including the Cham Muslim population. To hold the regime to account for its crimes against the Cambodian people, the Cambodian government in 2001 formed the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Using transcripts of testimonies and judgements from the ECCC, this article examines Gender-Based Violence (GBV) among the Cham Muslim population. The study shows that Alexander Hinton's arguments to explain GBV using cultural frameworks are insufficient in this case. Indeed, Nicole Rafter has proven it is important to take into account the broader genocidal context to the violence. This article argues that ECCC documentation proves that GBV cannot be explained by cultural contexts alone and instead needs to be understood as a means to destroy the Cham and Cham culture.

While Sri Lanka is geographically closer to India, there are greater similarities in economic structure with many Southeast Asian countries. Sri Lanka is a small open economy. Foreign trade has always played a pivotal role in the functioning of the economy. Politically the country has exhibited a preference for democratic parliamentary forms of government, which are compatible with an underlying cultural individualism. There are important differences, however, in both the tempo and direction of economic growth over the past two decades, and these differences, along with the underlying policy strategies that produced them, are potentially instructive in any consideration of economic performance in the region.

That view of the history of maritime South East Asia which fixed a rigid dividing line in 1511 or 1600, and regarded the assertion of European dominance in the area as marking the frontier between traditional and modern history, has long ago been discredited and discarded. It led to the treatment of the earlier history of Malaya and Indonesia as a mere prelude to the coming of the Europeans, or at least as an era without relevance to later events, to which special criteria must be applied. The later history was treated predominantly as the story of European activities and rivalries, and purely western criteria were applied even to indigenous themes. All this is now regarded as unscientific, and labelled ‘Europe-centric’. Few, if any, contemporary historians would challenge this judgment so far as the internal history of Malaya and Indonesia and their component parts are concerned, and, though there is still ample room for discussion as to its application in practice, this paper does not seek to re-open the debate. It is concerned not so much with the development of maritime South East Asian society, or with the history of individual states within what are now Malaysia and Indonesia, as with the relations of these states with each other.

For almost a century before 1629, the sultanate of Acheh in north Sumatra was the most formidable indigenous state on either side of Malacca Strait. A stalemate had developed between Acheh and the Portuguese in Malacca, with the Portuguese unable to maintain sufficient forces locally to invade Acheh, and the Achinese unable to press their numerous sieges of Malacca to a successful conclusion before the Portuguese relief fleet arrived from India. Under additional Dutch pressure early in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese seem to have been unable to render the assistance against Acheh which they had given the Malay states on occasion in the sixteenth century. In 1613–20 Johore, Pahang, Kedah and Perak were conquered by Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607–36) of Acheh. In most cases, the defeated sultan was carried off to Acheh and a relative installed as a vassal of Acheh. Sultan Ala'ud-din Ri'ayat Shah II of Johore escaped when the Achinese overran Batu Sawar in June 1613, but died a few years later. His half-brother, Raja Bongsu or Raja Seberang, was taken to Acheh, married to Iskander Muda's sister, and sent back to Batu Sawar as Sultan Abdu'llah Ma'ayat Shah (1613–23). When Abdu'llah rejected Iskander Muda's sister and married a daughter of the Sultan of Jambi about 1617, he also rejected the Achinese tradition of hostility to the Portuguese. For this, the Achinese pursued him from his new capital at Lingga to Tambilan, where he died of “hartseer” (despair) in 1623. Carpentier, the Dutch governor-general at Batavia, assumed that the once mighty Johore empire had come to an end.

This paper examines the trade in ceramics from northern Vietnam into island Southeast Asia in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. It focuses on two issues: the question of typology of Vietnamese ceramics and the feasibility of these wares entering the southern Philippines during the years 1663–82. The compilation of an accurate typology has been inhibited by exceedingly brief descriptions in trade records, and the difficulty has been further compounded by the fact that although the Dutch East India Company (VOC) records show Vietnamese ceramics were imported into Batavia and dispersed to regional godowns, no material has yet been reported from either archaeological excavations or accidental finds in island Southeast Asia that can with certainty be ascribed to this era. Furthermore, items proposed in the ceramic literature as wares exported to Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century are, in the face of new evidence, no longer convincing. The typology put forward in this paper is based on VOC trade records and the contemporary literature. It broadly matches material from archaeological sites in Vietnam and in Japan that are from co-eval contexts. Previously untapped archaeological findings from Vietnam contribute a new dimension to this issue.