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The Crown and the Capitalists

The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation

By Wasana Wongsurawat

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent...

The New Way

Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam

By Tâm T. T. Ngô

In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had been created in the Hmong language by the Far...

Mapping Chinese Rangoon

Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

By Jayde Lin Roberts

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Living Sharia

Law and Practice in Malaysia

By Timothy P. Daniels

Drawing on ethnographic research, Living Sharia examines the role of sharia in the sociopolitical processes of contemporary Malaysia. The book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide...

Imperial Bandits

Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands

By Bradley Camp Davis

The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium,...

No Concessions

The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer

By Daniel S. Lev. Introduction by Benedict Anderson

The compelling personal story of human rights lawyer Yap Thiam Hien (1913-1989) brings decades of modern Indonesian history to life. No Concessions is a penetrating analysis of the trajectory of the Chinese minority in Indonesia...

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism

Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory

By Christoph Giebel

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communisim illuminates the real and imagined lives of Ton Duc Thang (1888–1980), a celebrated revolutionary activist and Vietnamese communist icon, but it is much more than a conventional biography. This multifaceted...

Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

By Allison J. Truitt

The expanding use of money in contemporary Vietnam has been propelled by the rise of new markets, digital telecommunications, and an ideological emphasis on money's autonomy from the state. People in Vietnam use the metaphor...

The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah

Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories Along the Malaysian-Thai border

By Irving Chan Johnson

The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah examines the many ways in which people living along an international border negotiate their ethnic, cultural, and political identities. This ethnography of a small community of Thai Buddhists in the...

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words

Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand

By Justin Thomas McDaniel

Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation...

The Ironies of Freedom

Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam

By Thu-huong Nguyen-vo

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of...

Beginning to Remember

The Past in the Indonesian Present

By Mary S. Zurbuchen

Beginning to Remember charts Indonesia's turbulent decades of cultural repression and renewal amid the rise and fall of Suharto's New Order regime. These cross-disciplinary pieces illuminate Indonesia’s current efforts to reexamine and understand its past...

Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects

By Laurie J. Sears

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field...

Seditious Histories

Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts

By Craig J. Reynolds

This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam’s...

Submitting to God

Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia

By Sylva Frisk

In recent decades, Malaysia has been profoundly changed both by forces of globalization, modernization, and industrialization and by a strong Islamization process. Some would argue that the situation of Malay women has worsened, but such...

Making Fields of Merit

Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand

By Monica Lindberg Falk

Religion plays a central role in Thai society with Buddhism intertwined in the daily lives of the people. Religion also plays an important role in establishing gender boundaries. The growth in recent decades of self-governing...

Love, Passion and Patriotism

Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892

By Raquel A. G. Reyes

Love, Passion and Patriotism is an intimate account of the lives and experiences of a renowned group of young Filipino patriots, the men whose propaganda campaign was a catalyst for the country's revolt against Spain.

José...