This article investigates the history of the ethnonyms Temoq, Semelai, Semaq Beri and Jakun, which label Orang Asli groups in the south-central lowlands of Peninsular Malaysia. It combines ethnographic and historical accounts and census analysis to argue that each of these ethnonyms, in the twentieth century, became attached to the groups that now carry them by R.J. Wilkinson and other colonial administrator/anthropologists who were primarily concerned with finding traces of supposed primitive ancestors of modern humans, but who determined that language had to be used as a proxy toward that end. Clarifying the basis of that classification makes the system of ethnonyms that became official somewhat clearer. The article delves deepest into the genesis of ‘Temoq’, through an analysis of the ethnography of H.D. Collings and through the linguistics of the word. It argues that the Semelai word tmoʔ derives from the Malay word tembok [təmboʔ], meaning ‘tattered and dissolute in appearance’, and has been used by the Semelai to achieve social distance from the Temoq, who the Semelai also call /smaʔ bri/ ‘forest people’. It further suggests that the people now known as Temoq may themselves have once been known as ‘Semelai’.

This article argues that ritual remains a potent instrument for the generation of national identity and citizenship in Southeast Asia. We focus our analysis on the ritualisation of public space in Bangkok, Thailand, under the military-led government of General Prayut Chan-o-cha. The authors provide an ethnographic analysis of Sanam Luang, arguing that between 2016 and 2017 funeral rites held in this public space would reanimate it as a catalyst of national unification. As in other cases of ritual in public space, however, the intensified securitisation and control over national mourning for King Bhumibol by the military government, gave way to a range of reactions, including increased protests and criticism of the ruling government and Thailand's lesé-majesté laws by a predominantly youth-led movement in 2020.

What explains the regionally varying electoral outcomes of Islamist parties in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy? By employing a three-stage approach inspired by Evan Lieberman's nested analysis, this article aims to gain a better understanding of how adaptability to local political contexts matters in determining the vote share of the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) at the sub-provincial level. It uncovers that PKS’ electoral mobilisation in non-Javanese regions depends more on whether the party leverages a strong predisposition towards personal votes underpinned by pre-existing clientelistic ties. In contrast, the PKS support base in Java tends to be embedded in specific milieus shaped by deep-seated sociocultural cleavages. The findings thus not only demonstrate the limitations of programmatic, institutionalised parties like PKS in the Indonesian context, but also resonate with a larger body of broader literature on politics in the Muslim world, indicating strategic considerations of local political conditions as an important factor in electoral support for political Islam.

While most studies of industrialisation and modernisation in Singapore have focused on the post-1960 period and the role of the new nation-state, multinational corporations, and government-linked companies, Lim Peng Siang's business career shows that these processes and engagements were already under way before the Second World War. This study seeks to foreground the dynamics of industrialisation and modernisation in the historiography of Chinese business in colonial Singapore, Malaya, and Southeast Asia through examining Lim's business career. It shows how the projects of industrialisation and modernisation that Lim and his contemporaries embodied extended beyond business and the economy, and were entangled in broader cultural, sociopolitical, and urban forces and developments in Singapore and other parts of colonial Southeast Asia, maritime Asia, and the world-at-large between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His experiences highlight the pitfalls of assuming a simple traditional–modern dichotomy, and any essentialistic and ethnic constructions of culture, and the discourses surrounding business strategy, behaviour, and thought.

In the late nineteenth century, British commercial interests in Asia and back home visualised a railway connecting British Burma with inland China, which they saw as a vast unexplored market. British engineers and adventurers were then employed by the commercial bodies to investigate the economy and geography of Yunnan and Upper Burma for the project. The railway was eventually rejected by the British as being unviable and unprofitable. The colonial knowledge created by these missions (in the form of travelogues, survey reports, interviews and studies) was later interpreted by Chinese nationalists as evidence of Britain's ambitions to colonise southwest China in 1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) and 1927 (the Northern Expedition) when the Chinese nation was in deep crisis. But the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War led the Chinese Nationalist government to reconsider the Yunnan–Burma railway as necessary infrastructure for obtaining foreign supplies to save the nation. The colonial knowledge produced by British explorers and merchants earlier was reinterpreted by the Nationalists to try to persuade the British authorities to construct the Burma section of the railway. By tracing the history of this failed project, this article argues that nationalist understandings of colonial infrastructure were far from fixed and consistent. It recounts the circulation of colonial knowledge on the Yunnan–Burma railway from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, showing how different nationalist agents in Asia interpreted and reinterpreted colonial infrastructure at various critical periods.

This is the first article-length study of Kuwentong Kutsero (A Coachman's Tales), an immensely popular radio comedy in mid-twentieth century Philippines. This sitcom had two iterations: the first aired a few years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in the country, while the second dominated the airwaves in the postwar years and enjoyed even greater success than its predecessor despite major changes in the script. The programme was so influential that the phrase kuwentong kutsero entered the Tagalog lexicon as an idiom to mean tall tales. Such a level of success was ironic considering that in the postwar decades the cochero as an actual occupation was on its way to obsolescence. This article argues that the reformatted programme was able to improve on the breakthroughs of the original because of the changes in the language used, the type of humour employed, and the topics tackled—factors that could only be understood if analysed alongside the historical experience of actual rig drivers.

Studies on opium consumption in Southeast Asia have thus far not addressed the issue from an economic welfare perspective. This article assembles data from colonial sources to derive estimates of aggregate opium consumption in Singapore during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows that an alternative measure of welfare that includes opium in the consumption basket led to a declining standard of living amongst unskilled labourers who depended on the drug for their work.

For decades, the Mekong River has been a site of ongoing tensions between China-backed infrastructure and communities relying on the mighty Mekong for their lives and livelihoods. In Thailand, tensions have escalated into actions against ecologically damaging hydropower dam development and the blasting of river rapids for Chinese navigation in a Thai border town. This article examines how Chinese transnational infrastructure has been reconfiguring power relationships among actors at multiple scales. Based on my fieldwork, I offer a narrative of the concerted efforts by one small community-based environmental group in northern Thailand, some of whose activism has prodded Chinese planners and project managers into responding to widespread criticism of ecological damage caused by its hydropower and riparian infrastructure and ignoring the needs of downstream local communities. The interactions between Chinese agencies and local NGOs will be discussed through the concept of a moral ecology of infrastructure, which contributes to transcending infrastructure and the environment, enabling a broadened understanding of human and nonhuman relations in more recent retrofitting of the dams and waterway projects. I argue that the reconfigured ‘Green’ Belt and Road Initiative is a contingent process in which multiple transnational actors claim decision-making power over the retrofitting and redevelopment of the Mekong's ecological infrastructure.

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.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a marked rise in the number of recorded murders in British-ruled Burma. The sentence for murder prescribed by the Indian Penal Code—in force in Burma as a province of British India—was death or transportation for life. However, while Burma's murder count was rising sharply, the number of executions taking place in the province's jails remained broadly stable, with perhaps a tendency to fall, and indeed it fell decisively at the end of the 1930s. By that point, a high standard of evidence was being increasingly demanded for conviction for murder and increasingly the death penalty was being imposed only when murder had clearly been premeditated. In other words, in the administration of justice in murder cases, the rule of law had been markedly tightened. The focus in the article will be on the local pressures, on the practices and perspectives of Burma's colonial administration and of the Burmese themselves that led in time to a decisive fall in the number of convicted murderers who were hanged for their crime.

This article explores the colonial land tenure system which evolved in the municipalities of the Dutch Indies in the early twentieth century, resulting in structural differences in urban property ownership. The development of a formal and informal property regime during this period created the logic of racialised capitalism that underpinned settler colonialism. By looking at the actions of the Indo-Europeesche Verbond (IEV), the main Indo-European political party, this article seeks to understand why settler colonialism failed in the Dutch Indies. It finds that the success of the settler colonialism project depended on its relationship with global capitalism and imperial support. This study also finds that structural differences in property ownership have continued in postcolonial Indonesia.

The fate of captives designated as ‘communist’ prisoners during the Vietnam War has largely been overshadowed by that of US POWs detained north of the Seventeenth Parallel. This article, based on newly released archival sources in multiple languages, considers their classification and treatment in captivity. In particular, civilian captives and members of the National Liberation Front were often categorised as ‘civil defendants’ by South Vietnam and thus deprived of their rights as POWs, as codified in the Geneva Conventions. Yet, as representatives of a state dealing with both an insurgency and an invasion at the same time, South Vietnamese officials realised the significance of enemy captives. By illustrating the complex policies and practices of prisoner taking and incarceration, this article interprets and explains the gap between civilian and military law and informal and oftentimes self-serving practices on the ground. Thus, the Second Indochina War foreshadowed a global trend of excluding captured irregular combatants from the laws of war.

Central to this article are the minutes of nine codification meetings held in 1865 at various locations in West Sumatra. During these meetings the draft regulations for a new colonial legal system were discussed and negotiated by West Sumatran elites and Dutch officials. This episode and its unique archives serve as a microhistory of lawmaking, legal translation, and erasure. The article argues that the process of making colonialism procedural, as well as the genealogical workings of colonial knowledge production, are crucial to understanding the making and unmaking of law in the context of legal pluralities. It shows that finding similarities in interests and worldview, moments of ‘erasure through translation’, the symbolic language of fluidity of adat and legal hybridity, as well as the archival power of the material and the spatial elements of both the meetings and the minutes, were vehicles through which codification in West Sumatra was attempted and contested.

This article reads Filipino director Lino Brocka's film Orapronobis (1989) as a commentary on the 1987 Philippine Constitution, a post-dictatorship document which the director helped draft as a member of the Philippine Constitutional Commission. Using a ‘law and film’ approach, the article argues that the film visualises law's limit concepts such as the state of exception, hostis generis humani, and constituent power. The film depicts the failure of words to control the political world that results in a dystopian constitutional order where human rights monsters and revolutionaries contend. Through an exploration of law's limit concepts, Brocka's Orapronobis represents the limits of Philippine constitutionalism.