Brill's Southeast Asian Library – serie

Faith and the State offers a comprehensive historical development of Islamic philanthropy--zakat (almsgiving), sedekah (donation) and waqf (religious endowment)-- from the time of the Islamic monarchs, through the period of Dutch colonialism and up to contemporary Indonesia. It shows a rivalry between faith and the state: between efforts to involve the state in managing philanthropic activities and efforts to keep them under control of Muslim civil society.Philanthropy is an indication of the strength of civil society. When the state was weak, philanthropy developed powerfully and was used to challenge the state. When the state was strong, Muslim civil society tended to weaken but still found ways to use philanthropic practices in the public sphere to promote social change.

In Workers, Unions and Politics. Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, John Ingleson revises received understandings of the decade and a half between the failed communist uprisings of 1926/1927 and the Japanese occupation in 1942. They were important years for the labour movement. It had to recover from the crackdown by the colonial state and then cope with the impact of the 1930s depression. Labour unions were voices for greater social justice, for stronger legal protection and for improved opportunities for workers. They created a discourse of social rights and wage justice. They were major contributors to the growth of a stronger civil society. The experiences and remembered histories of these years helped shape the agendas of post-independence labour unions.

Between Harmony and Discrimination explores the varying expressions of religious practices and the intertwined, shifting interreligious relationships of the peoples of Bali and Lombok. As religion has become a progressively more important identity marker in the 21st century, the shared histories and practices of peoples of both similar and differing faiths are renegotiated, reconfirmed or reconfigured. This renegotiation, inspired by Hindu or Islamic reform movements that encourage greater global identifications, has created situations that are perceived locally to oscillate between harmony and discrimination depending on the relationships and the contexts in which they are acting. Religious belonging is increasingly important among the Hindus and Muslims of Bali and Lombok; minorities (Christians, Chinese) on both islands have also sought global partners.Contributors include Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, David D. Harnish,I Wayan Ardika, Ni Luh Sitjiati Beratha, Erni Budiwanti, I Nyoman Darma Putra, I Nyoman Dhana, Leo Howe, Mary Ida Bagus, Lene Pedersen, Martin Slama, Meike Rieger, Sophie Strauss, Kari Telle and Dustin Wiebe.

In this biography Nico J.G. Kaptein studies the life and times of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822-1914), the most prominent Muslim scholar of his era in the Netherlands East Indies. During his long career, he provided guidance to the Muslim community and from 1889 onwards simultaneously served the colonial government as advisor for Muslim affairs after the famous C. Snouck Hurgronje had engaged him. Based on an analysis of his writings, Kaptein focuses on the question of how Sayyid ʿUthman viewed the place of Islam in the colonial state and the many reactions this provoked, both nationally and internationally, e.g. from the Cairo-based reformist Rashid Rida.For an online exhibition on "Sayyid ʿUthman of Batavia (1822-1914): A Life in the Service of Islam and Colonial Rule", see: http://www.library.leiden.edu/special-collections/special/sayyid-uthman-exhibition-now-online.html

Fighting arts have their own beauty, internal philosophy, and are connected to cultural worlds in meaningful and important ways. Combining approaches from ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, performance theory and anthropology, the distinguishing feature of this book is that it highlights the centrality of the pluripotent art form of pencak silat among Southeast Asian arts and its importance to a network of traditional and modern performing arts in Southeast Asia and beyond.By doing so, important layers of local concepts on performing arts, ethics, society, spirituality, and personal life conduct are de-mystified. With a distinct change in the way we view Southeast Asia, this book provides a wealth of information about a complex of performing arts related to the so-called 'world of silat'. An ancillary media companion website (www.bits4culture.org/pencaksilatandmusic/) is part of this work. Login authorisation information is included in the book.Contributors include: Bussakorn Binson, Jean-Marc de Grave, Gisa Jähnichen, Margaret Kartomi, Zahara Kamal, Indija Mahjoeddin, Ako Mashino, Paul H. Mason, Uwe U. Paetzold, Kirstin Pauka, Henry Spiller and Sean Williams.

The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script.The approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives. Scholars have long recognized a gap between the practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. The question is what impact this gap should have on our conception of ‘the text’. Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese script has been put in the context of ceremonial rites? What ideas of materiality, power and agency are at work in the production and preservation of palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed amulets and other script-bearing instruments?Contributors include: Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, Richard Fox, H.I.R. Hinzler, Annette Hornbacher, Thomas M. Hunter and Margaret Wiener.

In this monograph Philipp Bruckmayr examines the development of Cambodia’s Muslim minority from the mid-19th to the 21st century. During this period Cambodia’s Cham and Chvea Muslims established strong relationships with Malay centers of Islamic learning in Patani, Kelantan and Mecca. During the 1970s to the early 1990s these longstanding relationships came to a sudden halt due to civil war and the systematic Khmer Rouge repression. Since the 1990s ties to the Malay world have been revived and new Islamic currents, including Salafism and Tablighism, have left their mark on contemporary Cambodian Islam. Bruckmayr traces how these dynamics resulted inter alia in a history of local Islamic factionalism, culminating in the eventual state recognition of two separate Islamic congregations in the late 1990s.

In Alcohol in Early Java: Its Social and Cultural Significance, Jiří Jákl offers an account of the production, trade, and consumption of alcohol in Java before 1500 CE, and discusses a whole array of meanings the Javanese have ascribed to its use. Though alcohol is extremely controversial in contemporary Islamic Java, it had multiple, often surprising, uses in the pre-Islamic society.

This publication brings together current scholarship that focuses on the significance of performing arts heritage of royal courts in Southeast Asia. Royal courts have long been sites for the creation, exchange, maintenance, and development of myriad forms of performing arts and other distinctive cultural expressions. The first volume, Pusaka as Documented Heritage, consists of historical case studies, contexts and developments of royal court traditions, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Established in 1979 in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S-21 in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM) has had a turbulent history, mirroring Cambodia's social and political transformations. The book brings together academics and practitioners from multiple fields who offer novel perspectives and sources on the site and reflect on the challenges the institution has faced in the past and will face in the twenty-first century as an archive, heritage, and education site, especially with the coming of the post-justice era in the country.

Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern Southeast Asia as have other fabled imagined communities.