Over a half century after the great ‘classical’ kingdom of Pagan that produced the ‘golden age’ of Myanmar had declined in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu appeared. Thereafter, for the next century and a half, both dominated the land. While Ava was an ‘upstream’ agrarian kingdom ruling mostly Upper Myanmar, Pegu was a ‘downstream’ commercial polity with hegemony over Lower Myanmar. However, and contrary to convention that the history of fifteenth-century Myanmar was an ethnic struggle between two irreconcilable Burmese and Mon populations, their relationship should be characterised more as a dualism of different geo-political and economic factors instead. Indeed, the history of that ‘upstream–downstream’ relationship between Ava and Pegu established lasting patterns that became, thereafter, part of the fabric of Myanmar's history until today.

This article draws upon recently-gathered anthropological and other data from Cambodia to explore how some Cambodians move beyond the constraints of social differentiation and order to access higher realms of meaning. This enables communion, security and liberation from social patterns of misrecognition. Gender is one of the primary principles of social differentiation and in recent years the relationship between gender, security and development has attracted the interest particularly of feminist scholars. Attention is often focused upon the misogynistic aspects of gender differentiation. Proponents of this kind of discourse tend not to concern themselves with how women and men may actually transcend rather than challenge gender order or with how they may commune with one another in ways that generate security. Focusing instead on the notions that are meaningful to the members of a given society may reveal some of the shortcomings of current security, development and feminist discourse. The material presented here is analysed by adapting some of the ideas that Roy Rappaport developed in his study of the ‘cognized models’ and liturgical rituals of the Maring of New Guinea. Rappaport's model helps to reveal how, by navigating multiple and overlapping levels of meaning, Cambodians may negotiate and even invert social order in ways that can be transformative, emancipatory and healing.

The mainstream discourse on the political economy of drugs has emphasised the negative correlation between drug production and state capacity, with the presence of a thriving drugs trade seen as both a sign and a cause of weak states. Through an analysis of the drugs trade in Burma this study argues that such an approach is deeply flawed. Focusing on the period since the 1988 protests it argues that the illicit nature of the drugs trade has provided the state with an array of incentives (legal impunity, protection, money laundering) and threats (of prosecution) with which to co-opt and coerce insurgent groups over which it has otherwise commanded little authority. Although the state's involvement in the drugs trade was initially driven by an expedient desire to co-opt insurgent groups following the 1988 protests, this study also argues that over time it has provided an arena in which more immanent and largely unanticipated processes of state formation, namely the centralisation of the means of violence and extraction, have gradually been built. Rather than being a sign of corruption-induced state incapacity, the state's involvement in the drugs trade has thus become a central arena through which state power has been constructed and reproduced.

The Shan State Army-South (SSA-S) is today one of Burma's largest remaining ethnic opposition armies. This paper investigates ethnic politics of the SSA-S and their strategic use of media. It argues that Shan insurgency today has moved into a new phase characterised by its intense involvement with mass media. The paper examines, on the production side, the Shan insurgency's media products and its networking with the Thai press. On the reception side, it explores how the images of ethnic insurgency are consumed by Shan audiences living in exile, analysing how long-distance Shan nationalism is generated through the spectatorship of these ‘militarised’ images.

According to the existing studies on Myanmar's economic history, agricultural land in the Lower Myanmar delta was transferred from ‘agriculturists’ to ‘non-agriculturists’ under British colonial rule. However, a clear distinction could not be drawn between the agriculturists and non-agriculturists as was generally thought with respect to their economic activity. More importantly, the categories could be applied interchangeably. The purpose of this study is to reconsider the very concept of ‘agriculturist’ as a colonial category in British Burma by exploring the hitherto unused register of holdings (Register IA, U pain hmatpoun sayin).

This paper argues that Lao bureaucrats who migrate to the uplands offer possibilities for re-thinking the immutability of upland–lowland distinctions and the power of the modern state. The specific focus is on low-ranking government officials on the Nakai Plateau in central Laos who are positioned at the nexus of state authority, development schemes and the rural poor. Nakai is a site of nationally significant resource utilisation and practices that has provided a model for development across the country. Officials' experiences in Nakai suggest that the upland–lowland contrast can provide valuable understandings of power when combined with an awareness of social processes that reproduce and shift the meanings ascribed to these nominally distinct domains. Significantly, the experiences of mobile marginal officials highlight an idea of state power as the potential to grant prosperity.

By considering the historical significance of a southern Thai policeman, Khun Phantharakratchadet (1898–2006), I aim to shift historical writing away from the court, the aristocracy and the capital even though the social setting is not merely ‘local’ or ‘peripheral’ but an amalgam of elements found throughout the country. I also want to give credit to local historians often dismissed for being parochial, untheoretical and disposed to myth-making, and to show how tantric practices (saiyasat), the arts of self-defence, policing, banditry and masculinity intersect in the career of this policeman, a native of the unique environment in the Songkhla lakes district.

The 1940 Franco-Thai border conflict coincided with the beginning of a four-year campaign to weaken the Catholic Church's position in Thailand. The government closed down schools, confiscated property and imprisoned clergy. Angry mobs looted and burned churches, while the local populace boycotted businesses owned by Catholic Thais. The state-led persecution was part of a broad effort to deal with the legacy of western imperialism in Thailand. Catholicism's strong association with French colonialism, combined with France's decline, made the Church the ideal target for anti-imperialist forces. This overlooked incident provides strong evidence that Phibun Songkhram's strategy was not simply to survive the war, as historians have often claimed. The anti-Catholic campaign, which complicated the country's post-war status, was part of an attempt to re-position the country vis-à-vis the West and provide complete independence for Thailand.

The policies of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) related to heritage preservation and promotion have been spreading worldwide for the past few decades. This ethnographically focused paper examines two UNESCO devices, the Crafts Prize and the Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts, as they apply to the contemporary Laotian textiles scene. It questions in particular the uses and values locally assigned to these international certifications of excellence and their mobilisation in the commoditisation of fabrics. On a larger scale, it considers what those devices reveal and entail regarding a ‘traditional’ handicraft that is, from now on, entangled between trade and the ‘politics of culture’.

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.

S.M. Kartosuwiryo, famed leader of the long and bloody Darul Islam rebellion which began in West Java in 1948, was a strong supporter of the Indonesian independence struggle and a champion of the Indonesian Republic proclaimed in 1945. This article seeks to understand how it was that Kartosuwiryo came to oppose that very Republic with such violence in 1948–49. Many scholars have sought to explain the origins of the Darul Islam movement in terms of Kartosuwiryo's fanatic Islamist ambition. However, a detailed examination of the circumstances of the revolt's gestation and outbreak indicates that it was a consequence of a complex interplay of historically contingent circumstances rather than any ideological fixity.

Studies of the formation of national identity have highlighted the importance of national pilgrimages, akin to sacred religious pilgrimages. However, less attention has been paid to the effect of religious pilgrimages on national identities. In this article, I examine the ways that religious pilgrimages have shaped identities in the Jawi community, particularly early in the twentieth century, when nationalism spread through Southeast Asia. Given the deeply personal nature of pilgrimages, I do this primarily through an exploration of the religious pilgrimage and later life of one well-known leader from Pattani, Haji Sulong Abdulkadir al-Fatani. I find that this approach leads to a more nuanced consideration of the ways that plural identities, even conflicting plural identities, are often held by individuals.

On 31 December 1985, Singapore left the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), turning against the ‘New International Information Order’ demanded by UNESCO at that time. In October 2007, after 22 years of absence, Singapore rejoined UNESCO, looking for an intensification of cultural and scientific exchange. Taking this example of reviving co-operation between Singapore and UNESCO, this paper assesses the concept of ‘creative industries’ as a boundary concept that allows for increased co-operation between players with generally opposing knowledge concepts — as manifested in their respective knowledge and cultural politics. The paper starts with a conceptual discussion on the crossing of boundaries. This is followed by an assessment of first, UNESCO's and second, Singapore's gradual repositioning towards culture. While UNESCO turned from distinctly separating ‘culture’ and ‘market’ in the 1970s and 1980s to an increased openness for profit-oriented conceptualisations of culture today, Singapore identified the economic potential of culture, creativity and the arts, and therefore the need to foster these as part of its development into a knowledge-based economy. The underlying differences in interests and the orientation of content, expressed by the traditionally opposing conceptualisations of knowledge and culture, are still valid today, yet the concept of ‘creative industries’, adopted by both sides, seems to offer a common meeting ground. It acts clearly as a bridge, and hence a boundary concept, allowing for an intensification of mutual co-operation. This is discussed in the final part of the paper.

The Calatagan pot, with an inscription around its rim, is one of the very few existing archeological evidences of ancient writing in the Philippines. It was discovered in Calatagan, Batangas and bought by the Philippine National Museum in 1961. Having since eluded decipherment, the present paper proposes a strategy which combines traditional palaeographic techniques and cryptographic methods. By means of this procedure, a tentative decipherment of the inscription is proposed here. The preliminary results show that the inscription is some kind of ancient spell or charm written in a central Philippine language with a Javanese admixture.

In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis of Buddhist–Muslim coexistence in the Songkhla Lake area in southern Thailand as it unfolds on the margins of a violent conflict in the Deep South (Patani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces). I argue that in the Songkhla Lake area, social, religious, economic and political alliances are reflected in multi-religious ritual traditions that have the potential to transcend cultural difference or manage difference constructively. The article then analyses the transformation of multi-religious coexistence and concludes that the revitalisation of Theravada Buddhism and Islam results in the uneasy coexistence of old and new practices and in a dialectic of sharing and competition.

This paper provides a critical historical analysis of the Muhammadiyah movement in Singapore. I argue that four processes have been crucial in the emergence and sustenance of the Muhammadiyah within a predominantly non-Muslim society: the symbiotic relationship between the leaders and their followers, the formulation and subsequent reformulation of the ideology of the movement, political opportunities which were judiciously exploited and the availability of a wide array of infrastructures. The Muhammadiyah, as will be shown, provides an informative example of an Islamic movement in Southeast Asia that has transcended the challenges faced by the minority Muslim population by making effective use of the limited resources at its disposal.

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.

Only in a handful of cases in world history has female rule been seen by contemporary observers as desirable and been sustained for long periods of time. Drawing on European, Malay and Chinese sources, this article investigates the reasons for the institutionalisation of female rule in the Malay sultanate of Patani (presently in southern Thailand) for most of the period between c. 1584 and 1711. It is concluded that the results of previous research, in which the Patani queens are characterised as powerless front figures and/or promiscuous, have insufficient support in the contemporary sources. Furthermore, the problems of female rule for dynastic stability are discussed comparatively. Finally, the decline of female rule in Patani after the mid-seventeenth century is explained with reference to the larger political, economic and military changes in maritime Southeast Asia at the time.