The Aru Islands in southeastern Maluku have a long history of economic exchange and colonial relations with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and later the Dutch colonial state. Aru was fragmented in smaller autonomous settlements, of which those in the east produced valuable items for export, such as pearls and tripang (edible sea cucumber). The article focuses on a spate of anti-colonial revolts in the waning days of the VOC in the 1790s. It centred on the Batuley villages situated on a few small islands on the eastern side. The central incident leading to the resistance was the killing of a Dutch low-ranking officer, Scheerder, an event which has been preserved in local tradition till the present day. A search in the VOC archives confirms several details, but suggests a rationale for the resistance which is partly different from the traditional version, and linked in with larger movements of resistance in Aru and Maluku. The article discusses the significance of the oral traditions, and how a comparison with archival materials can enrich our understanding of Arunese–Dutch relations.

This article examines the life and death of Phra Pho Pan, a charismatic hermit of northern Thailand whose Buddhist beliefs and utopian philosophy reflect the dissident holy man (ton bun) tradition of Lanna Buddhism and, in particular, that of the renowned forest monks Khruba Siwichai and Khruba Khao Pi. Phra Pho Pan's death in 2016 has led to a radical shift in the religious affiliation of his hermitage. I argue that a major agent of this transformation has been a female hermit and spirit medium whose own religious quest reflects the more independent and assertive role of women in the Thai religious domain, but one which is conservative and aligned with Thai nationalism. I also consider the dissension that has arisen between key supporters and opponents of this realignment and dramatically made visible in ceremonies commemorating Phra Pho Pan's death.

Only a few decades ago, there was not a country in Asia that recognised the existence of specifically and legally defined ‘Indigenous Peoples’. In recent years, however, that has changed, albeit unevenly. The concept of indigeneity is being increasingly accepted, both by governments and the public, although it remains highly controversial, even in countries where it has made some ground legally. For example, in the region we now frequently refer to as ‘Southeast Asia’, the governments of the Philippines and Cambodia now define particular ethnic groups of people as Indigenous, and are providing these groups with particular rights. In other countries in the region, the concept of Indigenous Peoples is still not legally recognised, but there is increasing acceptance of the concept, or at least recognition of it amongst certain groups. Questions related to the proliferation and contested nature of the concept of Indigenous Peoples were addressed during a multidisciplinary workshop organised by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 2015. This special issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies is devoted to considering some of the conceptions of indigeneity in Southeast Asia that brought together a group of scholars and activists from various countries in Asia and the United States for the workshop, which was financially supported through a grant provided by Open Society Foundations.

Buddhist modernist movements transformed the religious practice and social engagement of one of the world's principal faiths in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These movements produced diverse effects on Asian societies which, despite generic similarities, are best understood in particular socio-historical contexts. This article examines the work of a group of young Thai monks and laymen who had an ambitious aim to morally improve and empower people; and the practical adaptation of this impulse in a society in transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional democracy in the 1930s. Like many modernist movements, their work was innovative. But it also was an inheritance of religious and political history, and the Thai modernist case thus shows a contradiction between novelty and custom that was resolved in a way that blunted the movement's reformist energy.

Studies on the international history of fourteenth-century Singapore have been hitherto limited to external trade conducted by local inhabitants, and material consumption patterns that this trade enabled them to develop. Broader regional cultural influences have been postulated though not clearly demonstrated, given scant textual records and limited material culture remains. This article seeks to examine the external influences, adaptation and assimilation in the production and consumption of fourteenth-century Singapore. In particular, it looks at three aspects of Singapore's pre-colonial existence — modes of economic production, patterns of consumption of international products, and the articulation of high culture vis-à-vis external entities. By examining available archaeological, epigraphic, art historical and cartographic data from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, this article postulates how distinct consumption patterns may have developed among different riverside populations living north of the Singapore River. This study also questions the common view that Singapore developed as a cosmopolitan port-city only after the advent of British colonialism, demonstrating that its diversity and openness was likely a feature centuries before.

Successive wars and the establishment of a border between the kingdom of Burma and British India in the nineteenth century challenged Burmese conceptions of sovereignty and political space. This essay investigates how European, and more specifically Anglo-American, notions of race, nation, and consular protection to nationals, progressively informed the Burmese concepts of ‘categories of people’ (lumyo) and ‘subject’ (kyun). First, I present the semantic evolution of these concepts in the 1820s–1830s, following the annexation of the western Burmese province of Arakan by British India in 1824. Then, I argue that the Burmese concept of lumyo was progressively associated with the European concept of ‘nations’ in the 1850s–1860s, following the annexation of Lower Burma in 1852. Finally, I uncover developments in the 1870s, when British consular protection extended to several freshly categorised ‘nations’, such as Shan, Karenni, and Kachin.

This article presents a chronology of the growth of the concept of Indigeneity in Thailand, analysing the particular ways in which the global Indigenous movement has taken root in the country. In Thailand, transnational support networks and the opening of political associational space played key roles in facilitating the growth of, first, a regional, and later a national Indigenous movement during the 1980s and early 2000s, respectively. Indigenous Peoples in Thailand are asserting their identity by drawing on a new concept of Indigeneity being promoted by the United Nations and other international advocacy organisations that identifies them not only as first peoples, but crucially as colonised or oppressed peoples. Indigenous Peoples in Thailand are further asserting both their cultural distinctiveness and their compatibility with the Thai nation. The Indigenous movement in Thailand differs from movements in Australia, Canada, and the United States where Indigenous Peoples must perform their cultural distinctiveness to maintain political recognition, and in turn are accused of being not different enough when exercising their rights. In Thailand, rather, Indigenous Peoples are accused of being not Thai enough in their efforts to push for any political recognition. While the Thai government denies the relevance of the concept of Indigeneity to Thailand, it is clear that the Indigenous movement in Thailand has grown since the early 2000s. In fact, state policies between the 1950s and early 2000s contributed toward the scaling-up of a pan-Hill tribe identity among the core groups associated with the movement.

This article provides an outline of the historical construction of Timorese (East Timorese and Indonesian West Timorese) geo-bodies and communal identities from the mid-nineteenth century to the present time, thereby reconstructing the origins of many national imaginings amongst the Timorese people. Since the controversial annexation of Portuguese Timor by Indonesia in 1976, (East) Timor has been constructed as a place of two territorial identities: Timor as a part of Indonesia and East Timor as a homogeneous nation distinct from Indonesia. However, representations of Timor had been much more fluid and inconsistent in preceding ages. This article studies various communities’ representations of Timor to reveal dialectic relations between diverse colonial and post-colonial representations of the Timorese spaces and their senses of belonging. Thereby, it problematises the political role of global and regional place-making in a contested Southeast Asian locale.

The academic journal has been a key element of the scholarly world for some time and as a key component of this world it deserves historical examination. But this has not often been forthcoming, especially for regions of the world outside the Anglo-American core. In this article I examine the content of the early years of Philippine Studies. Founded in 1953, it has survived and prospered up to the present day as a vehicle for scholarly studies of the Philippines. The content of the early years of Philippine Studies (1953–66) reflected a desire on the part of its editors and many of its authors and supporters to create a Philippine society based on the teachings of the Catholic Church, one that would be strong enough to create a middle path between communism and liberalism. Articles published during this period advocated social reform based on the teachings of the Catholic Church; these articles also aired warnings about the communist threat to the Philippines and the world. But alongside these materials were literary and historical studies that also, but in a more indirect fashion, supported the project of Catholic-inspired social reform.

This article investigates the processes of becoming Indigenous Peoples in Thailand by tracing the transnational relationships and influences of global Indigenous movements on the creation of the Network and the Council of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand (NIPT and CIPT). In addition, it examines the Indigenous Peoples’ movement toward both internal and external recognition. I argue that in Thailand the Indigenous Peoples movement stems from the global movement and exists in relation to international organisations. Within Thailand, the movement represents a deterritorialisation of the ethnoscape, with those now identified as Indigenous Peoples previously being identified as ‘tribal peoples’, ‘ethnic minorities’, or ‘Others’ who threatened national security. Indigenous Peoples are also self-identifying as native and marginalised peoples whose basic rights must be recognised and who advocate for equal treatment as citizens. Yet, the Indigenous Peoples’ movement in Thailand is developing through a process of ongoing negotiations with various internal and external sectors. As a Hmong anthropologist and long-time participant in the Indigenous movement in Thailand, in addition to secondary sources, I draw mainly on personal observations and interviews with key informants.

Ancient Singapore is often discussed exclusive of its cultural and historical context, a backward projection of the modern, independent city-state. Temasek is understood mainly in terms of being a maritime entrepôt with extensive trade connections. This research is interested in Temasek as a proto-historic Malay port-city, namely its social, political and economic organisation. It is an aspect of early Singapore, and of the Malay World, in general, we know very little about. However, more than three decades of archaeology have provided a wealth of data related to daily life in the settlement and the data has provided hints of a diverse sociocultural landscape. This study focuses on the relationship between metal production and social organisation, and employs a conceptual and interpretative framework that is both multidisciplinary and cross-cultural. Craft production is as much a social and political phenomenon as an economic and technological one, and studies of production systems can shed light on issues of power and control over resources and labour. The data suggest the presence of a social stratum that could generate and mobilise resources independent of the ruling elite. Metals were rare and valuable commodities during this period, however, the ruling class in Temasek did not appear to control nor restrict production of iron and copper-based goods as it did with glass. The results are by no means the final word on ancient Singapore or Malay society. Instead it provides a provisional model that can be tested with archaeological data, refined and expanded as more material becomes available.

In Myanmar, the idea of ‘indigeneity’ has been mobilised in two radically different ways. Ethnonationalist groups such as the Chin National Front and the Karen National Union have utilised the concept to lobby for increased autonomy in international forums such as the United Nations, while the Burmese state has used the idea of indigeneity (or native-ness, typically translated as taingyinthar in Burmese) to exclude certain minorities — most prominently the Rohingya — by explicitly striking them from the official list of Myanmar's ‘national races’. To clarify how this definitional tension has developed, this article will situate the competing Burmese appeals to indigeneity within the history of international indigeneity politics, and compare the Burmese ‘Indigenous situation’ to other Asian countries that have addressed the question of who counts and does not count as Indigenous.

In the 1970s, during and right after the end of the Vietnam War, more works by Filipino writers, especially historians, were translated into Japanese than works by any other Southeast Asians. In Southeast Asia, it was in the Philippines that the Japanese and the American forces had fought their fiercest battles during the Second World War. The Japanese translators who translated prominent Filipino nationalist historians such as Gregorio Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino, had personally experienced war, defeat, and postwar life under the US-led Allied occupation of Japan. This article compares the original texts of some of these key Filipino works and their Japanese translations, and examines the ‘noises’ produced in the process of translation. This noise includes strategies such as the deletion and addition of information, opinions, and deliberate misreadings. This article suggests that these strategies reveal the translators’ views on the past as well as their contemporary experience of postwar Japan against the background of the ongoing Vietnam War.

Munsyi Abdullah and his better-known writings, Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah (1838) and Hikayat Abdullah (1843), are much-discussed in the historiography of early British colonial Singapore. However, Amin Sweeney's efforts to historicise some aspects of Abdullah's life and writings have established that Abdullah was much more than a sharp social critic of Malays and their rulers. He is better understood as a subtle critic and even a manipulator of his European interlocutors who craftily used his occidental contacts and connections alongside his local knowledge to preserve his role as a cultural intermediary in a burgeoning port settlement. Sweeney's efforts bring into focus a multifaceted imperial experience where notions like ‘interactions’ and ‘connections’ become viable descriptive categories in making sense of the intersections of Abdullah and empire, thereby strongly resonating with networked conceptions of imperial space propounded by ‘new’ imperial history. Taken alongside the recent literary and theoretical efforts of Jan van der Putten and Sanjay Krishnan respectively on Abdullah, and the carefully circumscribed historical efforts of Ian Proudfoot, the recent historiography of Abdullah offers fresh interpretive possibilities of early colonial Singapore. Leveraging such developments to engage with Mary Turnbull's scripting of a gruesome episode in 1823 indicates that Turnbull's historiographical dominance of Singapore's early colonial history can be transcended to better represent British coloniality, warts and all.

This article examines gotong royong as social citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century in Indonesia. Gotong royong was traditionally understood as a collective spirit among neighbours to strengthen economic and social resilience. However, the institutionalisation of the system through massive development programmes since the 1940s has influenced the common people's perception and practice of it. This article argues that the co-option of gotong royong as part of the discourse of nation-state building transformed the popular view of labour and capital mobilisation from an openly critical stance to apparent submission. Gotong royong became a means of social engineering and an ingenious linguistic strategy by which state elites orchestrated control over the making of citizens. Still, Indonesians have remained vigilant of their participation in gotong royong, and about the potential for its misuse by corrupt officials.