In Indonesia the industry producing the most popular commercial TV programmes, known as sinetron, is largely dominated by Indonesians of Indian (Sindhi) origin. This article examines social relations within the sinetron production houses and argues that between the 1990s and the early 2010s the distribution of symbolic and material capital depended on ethnicity, as it was imagined and constituted by two rather different cultural frameworks and historical experiences. One is based on the occupational distinction, rooted in the South Asian caste system, while the other can be traced back to ethnic classifications in colonial Indonesia.

The development of the Indonesian national language has been exemplary. Unlike the creation of a national language in other developing countries, as in Malaysia, the Philippines, and India, the choice has not become a political issue. In Indonesia, no sector of society has sought to promote other local or foreign languages as the national language. In 1962, Takdir Alisjahbana outlined the initial development of Indonesian from Malay, the trade language of the archipelago from the first century AD. and the language of the Sriwijaya Empire (A.D. 700–1200) through the period of rising nationalism to independence. A few of the important steps in this process were: the declaration of Indonesian as the national language by the National Youth Congress in 1928; the flourishing of a national and a Chinese press from the 1920s onward, both of which used the Malay language; the promotion of literary works by the monthly journal, Pudjangga Baru, from 1933 onward; and the standardizing effect of the Indonesian Language Commission established in 1942. These events successfully established the first stage or emergence of the national language.

Though the appellation “Châu-B'an” designates particularly the dynasty archives viewed or critized by emperors personnally with minium ink, the Châu-B'an of the Nguyên has traditionally included “T'âu-B'an” (report),: Tnu'o'ng-Du” (decree), “Chi'ên-Ch'i” (edict), as well as other documents connected with official matters.

Much has been written about the labor system introduced by the Spaniards in Latin America where institutions such as the repartimiento (forced labor) were used to obtain laborers for the public works and the private haciendas and mines. Many of these features existed in the early Philippine colonial period, but were modified to accomodate the local situation and the differing patterns of conquest and colonization. As in Latin America, the Spaniards distributed encomiendas and land grants (mercedes) to the conquistadores, and a system of corvee labor was imposed on the Filipinos for public works (the so-called polos and servicios personales), but for the private haciendas in the Philippines a different method was used than had been the rule in the New World.

This paper analyses the symbolic aspects of the tiger as perceived by the Madurese, both on Madura and in East Java. It focuses on people's relationship with the environment and the supernatural world as well as the way the tiger as symbol has adapted to both the progress of Islam and to the modern world in general.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.

The relationship between law and politics is both close and ambiguous. Ideally, the law provides impartial justice, but at the same time it expresses—both actually and symbolically—the will of the state. Consequently, a legal system usually embodies the establishment idea of proper social order, and should provide a legitimate means of enforcing compliance to that idea. It follows then that different societies have different kinds of law: underlying principles, procedure, and the institutional framework vary considerably from place to place.

One of the most obscure periods in modern Burmese history comprises the reigns of King Tharrawaddy (1837–1846) and his eldest son, Pagan Min (1846–1852). Historians have relied, to varying degrees, on Colonel Henry Yule's unsympathetic and inaccurate retelling of court gossip which portrays the two monarchs as bestial lunatics who murdered and plundered at will. This assessment is as exaggerated as it is simplified and ignores the very real structural problems the Burmese nation experienced between the first and second Anglo-Burmese Wars.

Like most developing countries, the Philippines before the imposition of martial law towards the end of 1972 was characterized by the fact that the majority of her population, living in the small towns and the countryside, were actually peripheral to the national polity. The political process was largely concerned with the intra-elite conflicts and manoeuvrings. As the government did not derive the bulk of its revenue from the income and resources of the mass of the citizenry, the political system functioned mainly as a giant system of patronage.

In 1950 Embree characterized Thai society as loosely structured in contrast with a Japanese-like, closely woven social system. Since then his article has served as a general guide-post for Thai studies. As data has accumulated, however, there have been reconsiderations of the application of his concept “loose structure” as applied to Thailand. For example, his analysis has been described as impressionistic: while it is phrased in structural terms, the evidences he adduces are stated in terms of individual behaviour rather than of social structure. This failure to distinguish the dimensions of culture, society, and personality makes the notion of structure, to say the least, fuzzy.

New Zealand was one of the first parts of the British Empire to offer Britain help in the building of the Singapore naval base and was the only Dominion to do so. It is true that considerable financial help was given by the Straits Settlements. Hong Kong, the Federated Malay States and the Sultan of Johore. Australia's naval programme was, also, based on the assumption that the base would be built. But the Reform Party Ministry in New Zealand was the only democratically elected government which supported the United Kingdom Government with a vote of funds.