Journal of Southeast Asian Studies articles from March 1993

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies archives from March 1993

A change in the forest: myth and history in West Java.
March 1, 1993... Introduction The demarcation of boundaries is an important feature of the Sundanese social and geographical landscape. Markers indicating the limits of territories, ceremonial areas and the like abound.(1) Linguistic markers indicate...

Myth, history and modern cultural identity among hunter-gatherers: a Borneo case.
March 1, 1993... 1. INTRODUCTION The island of Borneo has maintained until fairly recently a number of tropical rainforest hunting-gathering groups, generally referred to as Punan or Penan (though other local ethnonyms are found). Today, a large proportion of...

On the possible Cham origin of the Philippine scripts.
March 1, 1993... I. The Philippine Scripts In 1593, there was printed in Manila a most remarkable xylographic (wood-block) book, comprising Juan de Plascenia's Doctrina Christiana in Spanish, romanized Tagalog and Tagalog script.(1) While there is still some...

Tru'o'ng Dinh and Vietnamese anti-colonialism, 1859-64: a reappraisal.
March 1, 1993... By any measure, Tru'o'ng Dinh (1820-64) was one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism. As such, he has received a good deal of scholarly attention in Vietnam, France, the United States, and...

On the writing of Lao history: continuities and discontinuities.
March 1, 1993... The writing of Lao history presents peculiar problems, not because of the quantity and quality of sources available (though these leave much to be desired for certain periods), but because of the difficulty in deciding what is meant by "Lao...

"Syrup in the wheels of progress": the inefficient organization of the Philippine sugar industry.
March 1, 1993... Entrepreneurs who hoard their wealth or seek government protection from rivals or revel in vain consumption or retreat to selfish isolation betray the very essence of their role and responsibility in the world. To that degree, they are no longer...

Pengantar Seni Rupa Islam di Indonesia.
March 1, 1993... The author of this introduction to Islamic influences in the plastic arts of Indonesia is a lecturer at the renowned Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). The work is divided into five sections, treating the cultural background, architecture, crafts...

The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India - Society, Culture and the Colonial Encounter.
March 1, 1993... The anthropological fraternity surely will find no discordance, but lest anybody wonder why a review of a book on India's Naga people should appear in a journal devoted to Southeast, rather than South Asian, studies, let the Naga's Southeast...

Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400-1750.
March 1, 1993... This volume presents the results of a symposium held in September 1989, at which three principal topics were discussed: the function of Asian emporia; specific commodities involved in Asian maritime trade; and the stories of individual...

South-East Asia Languages and Literatures: A Select Guide.
March 1, 1993... This unique book straddles several genres: annotated bibliography, regional history, study of the development of journalism and the printing press in various parts of Southeast Asia. If one had to choose one word to characterize this book, it...

Reshaping Local Worlds: Formal Education and Cultural Change in Rural Southeast Asia.
March 1, 1993... Massive educational expansion into rural areas has been experienced by each nation-state in Southeast Asia, and each "local world" is reeling in its own way from the impact of a centralized education system which extends to the heart of the...

Why Gender Matters in Southeast Asian Politics.
March 1, 1993... The provocative question posed in the title of this edited volume, "why gender matters in Southeast Asian politics?" tantalisingly raises a level of anticipation which is not quite fulfilled in the slim text of barely 100 pages. In lieu of...

The Political Economy of Foreign Policy in Southeast Asia.
March 1, 1993... It is the bad luck of the editors and contributors of this volume that the conference papers from which most of the chapters originated took place in mid-1987 and were published in book form in 1990. Even by the time of publication, the...

Burman in the Back Row: Autobiography of a Burmese Rebel.
March 1, 1993... The political autobiography of U Aye Saung, a Burmese revolutionary who is currently the spokesman for the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB), was written in 1985, three years prior to the mass pro-democracy upheaval in Burma. Compiling the book...

Not Out of Hate: A Novel of Burma.
March 1, 1993... The first English translation of a Burmese novel is welcomed: in the world few know "Myanmar" (the new name of Burma), and fewer care for its literature or for the Burmese feelings. Here we have a good work, in the most popular form, the novel --...

Burma.
March 1, 1993... This bibliography is a delight to read and will serve as a useful guide to anyone interested in publications about Burma available in the English language. There are more than 1,500 references and 850 annotated entries which have been divided...

Scots in Burma: Golden Times in a Golden Land.
March 1, 1993... The book under review is a recent addition to the literature on the history of British commercial enterprise in Burma. The book consists of two parts. Part One, based on an enlarged version of the paper which Alister McCrae wrote in 1986 for the...

Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists: The Ambonese islands from Colonialism to Revolt, 1880-1950.
March 1, 1993... A recurring debate in Indonesian politics is the merit or otherwise of the appointment of putera daerah (local people) as governors of Indonesia's non-Javanese provinces. The most recent controversy was sparked by the imminent retirement of the...

The Indonesian Killings 1965-1966: Studies from Java and Bali.
March 1, 1993... The book under review is a first serious attempt to break a conspiracy of silence. In his short Preface the editor of the volume, the historian Robert Cribb, writes: In accepting the task of editing the collection, I was aware, of course, that...

Landscapes of Emotion: Mapping Three Cultures of Emotion in Indonesia.
March 1, 1993... In recent years the study of human emotion has become an important arena of interdisciplinary inquiry. Lively and fast-changing, the field has been polarized between universalists who believe in the pan-human uniformity of emotional experience...

East Kalimantan: The Decline of a Commercial Aristocracy.
March 1, 1993... This brief monograph is above all interesting for its account of the fate of the economic and political elites in East Kalimantan, a region which has so far not been extensively covered in the literature on modern Indonesia. It is to a large...

The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity, and Growth: Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
March 1, 1993... International comparative studies are difficult to undertake and often more difficult to present, especially when they involve teamwork. This World Bank sponsored study is part of its series on "The political economy of poverty, equity, and...

Botanical Monkeys.
March 1, 1993... Professor Corner has had a remarkable, distinguished and at times controversial career in the field of tropical botany, specialising in the flora of South-East Asia. Before the last war he commenced his career as Assistant Director of the...

Malay Society: Transformation and Democratisation.
March 1, 1993... This is a collection of eight essays which Professor Khoo Kay Kim originally wrote and published as separate papers in various journals between 1967 and 1989. They have been skillfully arranged in sequence to provide "a view of Malay society at...

Taming the Winds of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance.
March 1, 1993... "Taming the Winds of Desire" centres around the Malay concept of angin (translated as "Inner Winds") and its multiple meanings, many of which are connected to the notion of "temperament", extended in a more concrete sense to "basic personality"....

Reflections of Change: Sociopolitical Commentary and Criticism in Malaysian Popular Music Since 1950.
March 1, 1993... "Reflections of Change" traces the development of Malay and English popular music of social commentary and links this development to sociopolitical change in Malaysia and Singapore. The author starts off by giving an overview of Malaysian...

Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine.
March 1, 1993... Post-war ethnographic work on the Malayan aborigines was pioneered by Geoffrey Benjamin and R.K. Dentan, soon followed by M.K. Endicott, but it was during the last decade or so that we began to see monographs on different Orang Asli groups in...

Le Moment "Sino-Malais de la litterature Indonesienne."
March 1, 1993... The proceedings of a workshop on Sino-Malay literature, held in Paris on 14 and 15 May 1990 and subsequently published by Association Archipel in 1992 constitute a very interesting document on a literature which has been far too long considered...

An Introduction to the Development of Modern Malay Language and Literature.
March 1, 1993... Like New Guinea Pidgin, a tongue with which it shares the condition strictu sensu of creole (though the comparison ends there), or come to that like English itself, Malay is one of history's most spectacularly successful contact vernaculars....

Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital and Environmental degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon.
March 1, 1993... This is a study by a geographer of agricultural, economic, cultural and ecological change in Buguias, a sub-district of Benguet district in the Cordillera mountains in the Philippines. This is a remarkable book in several ways. Most importantly...

Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin.
March 1, 1993... The present reviewer, at his wits' end, confesses, with a dismay he feels convinced will not be his alone, to being able to make neither head nor tail of this book. It's not that he hasn't tried: one takes for granted that a reviewer's first duty...

Diminished Responsibility (With Special Reference to Singapore).
March 1, 1993... The idea that an individual's state of mind bears on his or her culpability for a crime has been part of Western legal thought at least since Plato's time. But how can we distinguish the mad from the bad? Which states of mind exonerate a...

The British as Rulers Governing Multiracial Singapore, 1867-1914.
March 1, 1993... This is a study of the policies and methods of the colonial regime in Singapore, between 1867 and 1914, in coping with a variety of problems presented by the main ethnic communities. It is a revised and enlarged version of the author's PhD...

Victims of Sexual Violence: A Handbook for Helpers.
March 1, 1993... Rape and other forms of sexual assault are unique among criminal offenses. Is there any other crime in which victims so commonly feel ashamed of their victimhood? In which victim-blaming (Was she asking for it?) and guilt (Did I lead him on? Did...

National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989.
March 1, 1993... The theme underlying most of the contributions to this collection is that "the concept of Thai identity, with its disarming ring of transcendence and permanence, has a specific history and conditions of existence" (Reynolds, p. 14). In Thailand...

Coming to Terms: Indochina, The United States, and the War.
March 1, 1993... Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States, and the War is comprised of eleven articles by thirteen authors, most of whom are or were affiliated with the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. As the introduction by editors Ngo Vinh Long and...

Confucianisme et societes asiatiques.
March 1, 1993... Confucianisme et societes asiatiques is a collection of French-language articles (some translated from their original Asian language into French by Professor Tsuboi Yoshiharu) by the doyens of French and Asian (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and...

The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War.
March 1, 1993... This very interesting book offers a discussion which marginalizes its apparent subject: the Vietnamese revolution of 1945. To do this it first locates the revolution in a "short sequence of events" -- one that takes place between the 13 August...