David P. Chandler - Böcker

Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese, the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but sasana, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese Buddhists interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920 as signs that the Buddha’s sasana was deteriorating. This fear of decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of rarely used sources - newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation lists, and colonial reports—to trace three discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of sasana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing definition of religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and redefining the boundaries of religion operated as a key technique of colonial power—shaping subjects through European categories and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality—she explores how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and inflecting religion to shape their colonial situation and forward their own local projects.Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in scholarly conversations about religion and colonialism, but in theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of “religion” and “secular.” It contributes to ongoing studies of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of sasana as a discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for granted.

The political history of Cambodia between 1945 and 1979, which culminated in the devastating revolutionary excesses of the Pol Pot regime, is one of unrest and misery. This book by David P. Chandler is the first to give a full account of this tumultuous period.  Drawing on his experience as a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh, on interviews, and on archival material. Chandler considers why the revolution happened and how it was related to Cambodia’s earlier history and to other events in Southeast Asia. He describes Cambodia’s brief spell of independence from Japan after the end of World War II; the long and complicated rule of Norodom Sihanouk, during which the Vietnam War gradually spilled over Cambodia’s borders; the bloodless coup of 1970 that deposed Sihanouk and put in power the feeble, pro-American government of Lon Nol; and the revolution in 1975 that ushered in the radical changes and horrors of Pol Pot’s Communist regime. Chandler discusses how Pol Pot and his colleagues evacuated Cambodia’s cities and towns, transformed its seven million people into an unpaid labor force, tortured and killed party members when agricultural quotas were unmet, and were finally overthrown in the course of a Vietnamese military invasion in 1979. His book is a penetrating and poignant analysis of this fierce revolutionary period and the events of the previous quarter-century that made it possible.

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia?a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge?no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) since 1962 and as prime minister of

This is a history of the Khmers, the people who for thousands of years inhabited the wooded interior of Cambodia. One hundred and fifty years ago the representatives of imperial France were astonished to find half-buried within the jungle the still magnificent ruins of vast temples. Justly described as one of the wonders of the world, these were the remnants of the once great Angkor empire. Since then archaeologists and historians have attempted to piece together its history. This book presents the result of these endeavours in the first account of the history of Khmer civilization to be published for many years.

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia,a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge,no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) since 1962 and as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), he has been widely blamed for trying to destroy Cambodian society. By implementing policies whose effects were genocidal, he oversaw the deaths of more than one million of his nation's people.The political career of Saloth Sar, better known by his nom de guerre Pol Pot, forms a critical but largely inaccessible portion of twentieth-century Cambodian history. What we know about his life is sketchy: a comfortable childhood, three years of study in France, and a short career as a schoolteacher preceded several years,spent mostly in hiding,as a guerrilla and the commander of the victorious army in Cambodia's civil war. His career reached a climax when he and his associates, coming to power, attempted to transform their country along lines more radical than any attempted by a modern regime. Driven into hiding in 1979 by invading Vietnamese forces, Pol Pot maintained his leadership of a Khmer Rouge guerrilla army in exile, remaining a power and a threat.In this political biography, David P. Chandler throws light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot. Basing his study on interviews and on a wide range of sources in English, Cambodian, and French, the author illuminates the ideas and behaviour of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history. In this revised edition, Chandler provides new information on the state of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge following the death of Pol Pot in 1997.

The modern states of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, and East Timor were once a tapestry of kingdoms, colonies, and smaller polities linked by sporadic trade and occasional war. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the United States and several European powers had come to control almost the entire region - only to depart dramatically in the decades following World War II. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia offers a new and up-to-date perspective on this complex region. Although it does not neglect nation-building (the central theme of its popular and long-lived predecessor, In Search of Southeast Asia), the present work focuses on economic and social history, gender, and ecology. It describes the long-term impact of global forces on the region and traces the spread and interplay of capitalism, nationalism, and socialism. It acknowledges that modernization has produced substantial gains in such areas as life expectancy and education but has also spread dislocation and misery. Organizationally, the book shifts between thematic chapters that describe social, economic, and cultural change, and ""country"" chapters emphasizing developments within specific areas. Enhanced by scores of illustrations, The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia will establish a new standard for the history of this dynamic and radically transformed region of the world.

For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organisations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labour, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? This provocative new book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organisations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce.Author Sverre Molland provides an insider’s view of recruitment and sex commerce gleaned from countless conversations and interviews in bars and brothels—a view that complicates popular stereotypes of women forced or duped into prostitution by organised crime. Molland’s fine-grained ethnography shows a much more varied picture of friends recruiting friends, and families helping relatives. A recruiter rationalises her act as a benefit or favour to a village friend; relationships between prostitutes and bar owners are cloaked in kin terms and familial metaphors. Sex work in the Mekong region follows patron-client cultural scripts about mutual help and obligation, which makes distinguishing the victims from the traffickers difficult. Molland’s research illuminates the methods and motivations of recruiters as well as the economic incentives and predicaments of victims. The Perfect Business? is the first book to go beyond the usual focus on migrants and sex commerce to explore the institutional context of anti-trafficking. Its author, himself a former advisor for a United Nations anti-trafficking project, raises crucial questions about how an increasingly globalised development aid sector responds to what might more accurately be described as an extraterritorial development challenge of human mobility. His book will offer insights to students and scholars in anthropology, gender studies, and human geography, as well as anyone interested in one of the most controversial issues of development policy.

In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998. Anthropologist Eve Zucker’s ethnographic fieldwork (2001–2003, 2010) uncovers the experiences of the people of O’Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. She examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O’Thmaa with villages in a neighbouring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. Zucker argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers’ responses to changes in recent years. More positively, Zucker persuasively illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation. This point is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Forest of Struggle offers a compelling case study that is relevant to anyone interested in post-conflict recovery, social memory, the anthropology of morality and violence, and Cambodia studies.

The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways “lively,” re-traveling routes between houses and villages and highlighting the advantages of mobility. Through everyday and ritual activities that emphasise “liveliness,” the land gains a further potency: the power to evoke memories of birth, death, and marriage, to influence human health and fertility.Potent Landscapes is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behavior, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates Manggarai place-making and mobility within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism.Written in a clear and accessible style, Potent Landscapes will appeal to students and specialists of Southeast Asia as well as to those interested in the comparative anthropological study of place and environment. The analysis moves out from rooms and houses in a series of concentric circles, outlining at each successive point the broader implications of Manggarai place- and path-making. This gradual expansion of scale allows the work to build a subtle, cumulative picture of the potent landscapes within which Manggarai people raise families, forge alliances, plant crops, build houses, and engage with local state actors. Landscapes are significant, the author argues, not only as sacred or mythic realms, or as contexts for the imposition of colonial space; they are also significant as vernacular contexts shaped by daily practices. The book analyses the power of a collective landscape shaped both by the Indonesian state’s development policies and by responses to religious change.

In Indonesia, light skin colour has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin colour, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyse a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions--Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialisation. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

In Indonesia, light skin colour has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin colour, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyse a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions--Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialisation. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways “lively,” re-traveling routes between houses and villages and highlighting the advantages of mobility. Through everyday and ritual activities that emphasise “liveliness,” the land gains a further potency: the power to evoke memories of birth, death, and marriage, to influence human health and fertility.Potent Landscapes is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behaviour, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates Manggarai place-making and mobility within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism.Written in a clear and accessible style, Potent Landscapes will appeal to students and specialists of Southeast Asia as well as to those interested in the comparative anthropological study of place and environment. The analysis moves out from rooms and houses in a series of concentric circles, outlining at each successive point the broader implications of Manggarai place- and path-making. This gradual expansion of scale allows the work to build a subtle, cumulative picture of the potent landscapes within which Manggarai people raise families, forge alliances, plant crops, build houses, and engage with local state actors. Landscapes are significant, the author argues, not only as sacred or mythic realms, or as contexts for the imposition of colonial space; they are also significant as vernacular contexts shaped by daily practices. The book analyses the power of a collective landscape shaped both by the Indonesian state’s development policies and by responses to religious change.

In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998. Anthropologist Eve Zucker’s ethnographic fieldwork (2001–2003, 2010) uncovers the experiences of the people of O’Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. She examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O’Thmaa with villages in a neighbouring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. Zucker argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers’ responses to changes in recent years. More positively, Zucker persuasively illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation. This point is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Forest of Struggle offers a compelling case study that is relevant to anyone interested in post-conflict recovery, social memory, the anthropology of morality and violence, and Cambodia studies.

It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media fi gures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly Thailand’s relationship with the West is ambivalent.The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates Thailand’s long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms “National Humiliation discourse,” its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded Thailand’s development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative,it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression.Through his insightful analysis of state and media sources, Strate demonstrates how Thai politicians have deployed National Humiliation imagery in support of ethnic chauvinism and military expansion. He shows how the discourse became the ideological foundation of Thailand’s irredentist strategy, the state’s anti-Catholic campaign, and its acceptance of pan-Asianism during World War II; and how the “state as victim” narrative has been used by politicians to redefine Thai identity and elevate the military into the role of national savior. The Lost Territories will be of particular interest to historians and political scientists for the light it sheds on many episodes of Thai foreign policy, including the contemporary dispute over Preah Vihear. The book’s analysis of the manipulation of historical memory will interest academics exploring similar phenomena worldwide.

Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbour the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer.Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centres where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization.Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia.

Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbour the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer.Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centres where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization.Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia.

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bȇn Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise.Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In B?n Thành market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous.Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ng?c have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, post-war economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this ground-breaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of post-war southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Bȇn Thành market.

Forging Islamic Power and Place/ charts the nineteenth-century rise of a vast network of Islamic scholars stretching across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia. Following the political and military collapse of the tiny Sultanate of Patani in what is now southern Thailand and northern Malaysia, a displaced community of scholars led by Shaykh D?'?d bin 'Abd All?h al-Fa?n? regrouped in Mecca. In the years that followed, al-Fa?n? composed more than forty works that came to form the basis for a new, text-based type of Islamic practice. Via a network of scholars, students, and scribes, al-Fa?n? 's writings made their way back to Southeast Asia, becoming the core texts of emerging pondok (Islamic schools) throughout the region. Islamic scholars thus came to be the primary power brokers in the construction of a new moral community, setting forth an intellectual wave that spurred cultural identity, literacy, and a religious practice that grew ever more central to daily life. In Forging Islamic Power and Place Francis Bradley analyzes the important role of this vibrant Patani knowledge network in the formation of Islamic institutions of learning in Southeast Asia. He makes use of an impressive range of sources, including official colonial documents, traveler accounts, missionary writings, and above all a trove of handwritten manuscripts in Malay and Arabic, what remains of one of the most fertile zones of knowledge production anywhere in the Islamic world at the time. Writing against prevailing notions of Southeast Asia as the passive recipient of the Islamic traditions of the Middle East, Bradley shows how a politically marginalized community engineered its own cultural renaissance via the moral virility of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the power of the written word. He highlights how, in an age of rising colonial power, these knowledge producers moved largely unnoticed and unhindered between Southeast Asia and the Middle East carrying out sweeping cultural and religious change. His focus on Thailand's so-called ""deep south,"" which has been marginalized in scholarly studies until recent times, helps lay the groundwork for a new generation of scholarship on the region and furthers our understanding of the present-day crisis in southern Thailand. The study of Islam in Southeast Asia has been most often relegated to the realm of religious studies, and historians have considered the development of the nation as the single-most important historiographical problem in the region. By focusing on the role of human agency and the logistics of knowledge transmission, this book transforms our understanding of the long and complex history of the flow of religious knowledge between the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Visual evidence is the sine qua non of the modern criminal process—from photographs and video to fingerprints and maps. Siam's New Detectives offers an analytical history of these visual tools as employed by the Thai police when investigating crime. Covering the period between the late nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War, the book provides both an extended overview of the development and evolution of modern police practices in Thailand, and a window into the role of the Thai police within a larger cultural system of knowledge production about crime, violence, and history.Based on a diverse set of primary sources—police reports, detective training manuals, trial records, newspaper stories, memoirs, archival documents, and hard-to-find crime fiction—the book makes two related arguments. First, the factuality of the visual evidence used in the criminal justice system stems as much from formal conventions—proper lighting in a crime scene photo, standardized markings on maps—as from the reality of what is being represented. Second, some images, once created, function as tools, helping the police produce truths about the criminal past. This generative power makes images such as crime scene maps useful as investigative aids but also means that scholars cannot analyze them simply in terms of mimetic accuracy or interpret them in isolation for deeper meaning. Understanding how modern legal systems operate requires an examination of the visual culture of the law, particularly the aesthetic rules that govern the generation and use of documentary evidence.By examining modern policing in terms of visual culture, Siam's New Detectives makes important methodological contributions. The book shows how a historical analysis of form can supplement the way many scholars have traditionally approached visual sources, as symbols requiring a close reading. By acknowledging the productive nature of images in addition to their symbolic functions, the book makes clear that policing is fundamentally an interactive, creative endeavor as much as a disciplinary one.

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale.Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. His book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French film-maker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive.Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. His interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed in his book, which includes photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, he shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

How are meta-narratives of development entangled in people’s identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit people’s histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for the future? The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinized as a “Western” metaphor ordering global difference and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. But how is development assimilated into the worldviews of development’s subjects? How does it reshape identities and in what ways is it reshaped in the process?Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, In Pursuit of Progress explores myths, meanings, and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It does so not only by considering development as planned, community-wide interventions aimed at society-wide improvements in living standards, but by recognizing that, as a cognitive tool for organizing relationships between people, development is personal. For Siquijodnon, development, or kalamboan, is also a process of self-transformation concerning changes in knowledge, body, roles, and cultural orientation. Emblems as diverse as skin color, Christianity, infant formula, and infrastructure make statements about development on Siquijor. Kalamboan, is bound up with social mobility, consumption, and status, but so too is it imbued with ideals of the “simple life,” a life of austerity and attention to social relationships, and with other assumptions about how people should live.Author Hannah Bulloch analyzes development not only as a prescription for material aspiration but also for moral endeavor. In Pursuit of Progress, offers rich, ethnographic insights into contemporary Visayan culture, engaging with questions of enduring significance in Philippines studies, including livelihood change, “colonial mentality,” everyday politics, and moral economy. It will contribute to debates in anthropology, sociology, and development studies regarding the ways in which discourses of development act upon local and global power relations.

How are meta-narratives of development entangled in people’s identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit people’s histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for the future? The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinized as a “Western” metaphor ordering global difference and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. But how is development assimilated into the worldviews of development’s subjects? How does it reshape identities and in what ways is it reshaped in the process?Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, In Pursuit of Progress explores myths, meanings, and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It does so not only by considering development as planned, community-wide interventions aimed at society-wide improvements in living standards, but by recognizing that, as a cognitive tool for organizing relationships between people, development is personal. For Siquijodnon, development, or kalamboan, is also a process of self-transformation concerning changes in knowledge, body, roles, and cultural orientation. Emblems as diverse as skin color, Christianity, infant formula, and infrastructure make statements about development on Siquijor. Kalamboan is bound up with social mobility, consumption, and status, but so too is it imbued with ideals of the “simple life,” a life of austerity and attention to social relationships, and with other assumptions about how people should live.Author Hannah Bulloch analyzes development not only as a prescription for material aspiration but also for moral endeavor. In Pursuit of Progress, offers rich, ethnographic insights into contemporary Visayan culture, engaging with questions of enduring significance in Philippines studies, including livelihood change, “colonial mentality,” everyday politics, and moral economy. It will contribute to debates in anthropology, sociology, and development studies regarding the ways in which discourses of development act upon local and global power relations.

For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted métis children—those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers—from their homes. In many cases, and for a wide range of reasons—death, divorce, the end of a romance, a return to France, or because the birth was the result of rape—the father had left the child in the mother's care. Although the program succeeded in rescuing homeless children from life on the streets, for those in their mothers' care it was disastrous. Citing an 1889 French law and claiming that raising children in the Southeast Asian cultural milieu was tantamount to abandonment, colonial officials sought permanent, ""protective"" custody of the children, placing them in state-run orphanages or educational institutions to be transformed into ""little Frenchmen.""The Uprooted offers an in-depth investigation of the colony's child-removal program: the motivations behind it, reception of it, and resistance to it. Métis children, Eurasians in particular, were seen as a threat on multiple fronts—colonial security, white French dominance, and the colonial gender order. Officials feared that abandoned métis might become paupers or prostitutes, thereby undermining white prestige. Métis were considered particularly vulnerable to the lure of anticolonialist movements—their ambiguous racial identity and outsider status, it was thought, might lead them to rebellion. Métischildren who could pass for white also played a key role in French plans to augment their own declining numbers and reproduce the French race, nation, and, after World War II, empire.French child welfare organizations continued to work in Vietnam well beyond independence, until 1975. The story of the métis children they sought to help highlights the importance—and vulnerability—of indigenous mothers and children to the colonial project. Part of a larger historical trend, the Indochina case shows striking parallels to that of Australia’s “Stolen Generation” and the Indian and First Nations boarding schools in the United States and Canada. This poignant and little known story will be of interest to scholars of French and Southeast Asian studies, colonialism, gender studies, and the historiography of the family.

Caged in on the Outside is an intimate ethnographic exploration of the ways in which Minangkabau people understand human value. Minangkabau, an Islamic society in Indonesia that is also the largest matrilineal society in the world, has long fascinated anthropologists. Gregory Simon’s book, based on extended ethnographic research in the small city of Bukittinggi, shines new light on Minangkabau social life by delving into people’s interior lives, calling into question many assumptions about Southeast Asian values and the nature of Islamic practice. It offers a deeply human portrait that will engage readers interested in Indonesia, Islam, and psychological anthropology and those concerned with how human beings fashion and reflect on the moral meanings of their lives.Simon focuses on the tension between the values of social integration and individual autonomy—both of which are celebrated in this Islamic trading society. The book explores a series of ethnographic themes, each one illustrating a facet of this tension and its management in contemporary Minangkabau society: the moral structure of the city and its economic life, the nature of Minangkabau ethnic identity, the etiquette of everyday interactions, conceptions of self and its boundaries, hidden spaces of personal identity, and engagements with Islamic traditions. Simon draws on interviews with Minangkabau men and women, demonstrating how individuals engage with cultural forms and refashion them in the process: forms of etiquette are transformed into a series of symbols tattooed on and then erased from a man’s skin; a woman shares a poem expressing an identity rooted in what cannot be directly revealed; a man puzzles over his neglect of Islamic prayers that have the power to bring him happiness.Applying the lessons of the Minangkabau case more broadly to debates on moral life and subjectivity, Simon makes the case that a deep understanding of moral conceptions and practices, including those of Islam, can never be reached simply by delineating their abstract logics or the public messages they send. Instead, we must examine the subtle meanings these conceptions and practices have for the people who live them and how they interact with the enduring tensions of multidimensional human selves. Borrowing a Minangkabau saying, he maintains that whether emerging in moments of suffering or flourishing, moral subjectivity is always complex, organized by ambitions as elusive as being “caged in on the outside.”

Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property.Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced laws and morality codes limiting women's participation in social life. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political turmoil led the three competing states - the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen - to increase their military service demands, producing labor shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers, and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders. In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective offering. By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times, survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power relations, was central to the relationship between state and local communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the comparative study of gender.

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the "traces" of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale.Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers-photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets-embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. His book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French film-maker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988-part of the "post-memory" generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive.Boreth Ly's poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. His interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed in his book, which includes photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, he shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media figures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly Thailand's relationship with the West is ambivalent.The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates Thailand's long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms "National Humiliation discourse," its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded Thailand's development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative, it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression.Through his insightful analysis of state and media sources, Strate demonstrates how Thai politicians have deployed National Humiliation imagery in support of ethnic chauvinism and military expansion. He shows how the discourse became the ideological foundation of Thailand's irredentist strategy, the state's anti-Catholic campaign, and its acceptance of pan-Asianism during World War II; and how the "state as victim" narrative has been used by politicians to redefine Thai identity and elevate the military into the role of national savior. The Lost Territories will be of particular interest to historians and political scientists for the light it sheds on many episodes of Thai foreign policy, including the contemporary dispute over Preah Vihear. The book's analysis of the manipulation of historical memory will interest academics exploring similar phenomena worldwide.