Journal of Southeast Asian Studies articles from September 1997

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies archives from September 1997

Cultural chameleons: Portuguese Eurasian strategies for survival in post-colonial Malaysia.
September 1, 1997... According to recent statistics, about 57 per cent of Malaysia's 18 million inhabitants are ethnically "Malay". Of the remainder, 32 per cent are categorized as "Chinese", 9 per cent as "Indian", and 2 per cent as "Other". The fact that such...

Indigenous people, the state and ethnogenesis: a study of the communal associations of the 'Dayak' communities in Sarawak, Malaysia.
September 1, 1997... Introduction A voluntary association is an organized group of persons formed for the pursuit of common interests.(1) Communal associations may be defined as voluntary associations which represent ethnic communities and pursue a wide range of...

Masonic myths and revolutionary feats in Negros Occidental.
September 1, 1997... In the sugar-producing province of Negros Occidental in the central Philippines, a monument stands in the town centre of Bago extolling the local hero of a one-day revolution that brought down Spanish rule in this province in 1898, a sugar...

The Agricultural Bank of the Philippine government, 1908-1916.
September 1, 1997... Introduction Among Filipinists, "compadre colonialism" or "colonial democracy" are common terms for defining the nature and characteristics of political relations between American colonialists and the Filipino elite in the first half of the...

The Japanese fisheries based in Singapore, 1892-1945.
September 1, 1997... Introduction In the pre-war and the occupation periods, Japanese fishermen occupied a very important position in the fishing industry in Singapore, where fish constituted a major source of protein for the Chinese, Malays, and Indians.(1) As...

The holy man in the history of Thailand and Laos.
September 1, 1997... There have been many ways of approaching the study of the "holy men" rebellions that occurred in Thailand and Laos from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. They have been examined as a study of millenarian or messianic...

'International orphans' - the Chinese in Thailand during World War II.
September 1, 1997... Historians of Southeast Asia are quite familiar with the flexible "bamboo" diplomacy which permitted Thai politicians to avert national disaster during World War II, but have paid less attention to the equally pragmatic wartime survival strategy...

Response to Dr. Michael Vickery's review of 'The Khmers.' (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1996, 389-404)
September 1, 1997... Michael Vickery's review of our The Khmers (hereafter M.V.) consists of thirteen pages of dense discussion, thoroughly documented. Such attention from an acknowledged authority on the Khmer sources for Cambodian history is, in itself, gratifying....

Vietnam: The Second Revolution.
September 1, 1997... In making the transition from a centrally planned state to a market oriented trading economy, Vietnam has become one of the world's most interesting countries. However, the complexity of this change, combined with the speed at which it is...

Urban Harvest: Recycling as a Peasant Industry in Northern Vietnam.
September 1, 1997... In making the transition from a centrally planned state to a market oriented trading economy, Vietnam has become one of the world's most interesting countries. However, the complexity of this change, combined with the speed at which it is...

Dilemmas of Development: Vietnam Update 1994.
September 1, 1997... In making the transition from a centrally planned state to a market oriented trading economy, Vietnam has become one of the world's most interesting countries. However, the complexity of this change, combined with the speed at which it is...

Thai Tourism: Hilltribes, Islands and Open-ended Prostitution.
September 1, 1997... The works under review here represent a rarity in the literature of the social science disciplines and sub-fields staking an interest in interpreting and explaining the sex trade in Thailand. Despite the extensive writings on female prostitution...

Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World.
September 1, 1997... The works under review here represent a rarity in the literature of the social science disciplines and sub-fields staking an interest in interpreting and explaining the sex trade in Thailand. Despite the extensive writings on female prostitution...

Hsing-ch'a Sheng-lan: The Overall Survey of the Star Raft by Fei Hsin.
September 1, 1997... The dearth of reviews which followed the publication in 1970 of Dr. Mills' Ying-yai Sheng-lan: The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores [1433] (Cambridge University Press/Hakluyt Society), a translated and annotated edition of Ma Huan's work, was...

Recits de voyages asiatiques: Genres, mentalites, conception de l'espace.
September 1, 1997... Few books are capable of weaving together a scientific outlook with pleasure and fantasy. This compilation of twenty-one papers on Asian travellers takes the reader into the world of imagination through the theme of travel and exploring the...

Maritime Trade, Society and European Influence in Southern Asia: 1600-1800.
September 1, 1997... The present volume represents a collection of sixteen essays published between 1966 and 1986. The focus of the essays is chiefly on the patterns of trade in the eastern Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Readers of this...

A Presenca Oculta: 500 Anos de Cultura Portuguesa na India e no Sri Lanka. (A Hidden Presence: 500 Years of Portuguese Culture in India and Sri Lanka)
September 1, 1997... Based on the premises spelt out in the introductory chapter, this bi-lingual Portuguese-English language work sets out to examine the effects of Portuguese culture on the physical and social landscape of former Portuguese settlements in South...

Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography.
September 1, 1997... The volume under review (OAA) is one of several which have appeared or are scheduled to appear under the aegis of the Comparative Austronesian Project, at the Research School of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University. It is thus...

'A Strong Showing': Britain's Struggle for Power and Influence in South-East Asia 1942-1950.
September 1, 1997... Rolf Tanner did not need to defend his decision to add yet another book to two heavily travelled paths: the immediate post-war political experience of Southeast Asia, and the foreign policy of the post-war Attlee government in the U.K. This...

Cultural Organisation in Southeast Asia: A guide for Artists, Performers and Cultural Workers.
September 1, 1997... This is an extremely useful handbook for scholars in any field related even remotely to the "arts" in Southeast Asia who wish to know how to initiate a research project, organize a cultural event, determine which governmental bodies in the region...

Essays on Modern Brunei History.
September 1, 1997... The phrases "the history of Brunei" and "little is known of' sometimes seem inseparable. The contributors to this enterprising volume prefer to call the historical study of Brunei "underdeveloped". The foreword points out how recently such...

The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesia Consciousness (1855-1913).
September 1, 1997... Studies of the history of the press in Indonesia, especially the relevance of the vernacular press to the rise of Indonesian nationalism, are remarkably few and limited. Therefore this book by Ahmat bin Adam, which is based on his Ph.D. thesis at...

The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period.
September 1, 1997... Maluku (vulgarly known as the Moluccas), a group of isolated islands with few people and no resources vital to human survival, nevertheless held the key to the economic balance of power in much of the world during the transition from medieval to...

Islam and Identity in Eastern Indonesia.
September 1, 1997... Although it is not clear from the title, this book is about Bima, located on the eastern peninsula of the island of Sumbawa. In the introduction, Bima is characterized as "a Muslim outpost in a largely non-Muslim Indonesian region", and for this...

Tantri Reliefs on Javanese Candi.
September 1, 1997... This work fulfills the long-standing need for a comprehensive study of the animal tale reliefs found on a significant number of Javanese candi. As someone who has in the past struggled with identifying these reliefs and understanding their...

The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar.
September 1, 1997... Chairil Anwar (1922-49) is widely regarded as Indonesia's greatest twentieth-century poet. His reputation rests on two slim collections of poems, Deru Campur Debu (Howls Mixed with Dust) and Kerikil Tajam dan Yang Terampas dan Yang Putus (Sharp...

Apanage dan Bekel: Perubahan Sosial di Pedesaan Surakarta, 1830-1920.
September 1, 1997... This study of Prof. Suhartono, attached to the History Department of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, constitutes a valuable contribution to what local history from an Asiacentric perspective can achieve. This sequel to his doctoral...

Music of Indonesia.
September 1, 1997... As was the case with the first four discs in this series (reviewed in Journal of Southeast Asia Studies 28 (1) (1997): 209-210), the eight items reviewed here seek to explore and exhibit Indonesian musical genres beyond the well-known forms of...

Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women.
September 1, 1997... Nobody, surely, could ever have wished upon tens of thousands of mostly preliterate, Southeast Asian slash-and-bum farming folk a forced migration from the highlands of Laos - among the least-urbanized nations of the world - to the cities of late...

Dari Pemungutan Tripang ke Penundaan Udang: Selarah Berkembangan Perusahaan Perikanan di Borneo Utara, 1750-1990.
September 1, 1997... In his introduction, Mohd. Raduan Mohd. Ariff discusses the importance of maritime Southeast Asia in the history of the region but points out that existing studies on this subject tend to concentrate on the trade and politics relating to core...

Borneo Log: The Struggle for Sarawak's Forests.
September 1, 1997... Borneo Log is a personal account of the impact of logging of montane rainforest in Sarawak, mainly set in 1990, when extremely rapid changes in attitude to logging were occurring. It is a surprising blend of personal account and comprehensive...

British Colonial Rule and the Resistance of the Malay Peasantry, 1900-1957.
September 1, 1997... In the above book, Nonini has adopted the humanist and historicist Marxist approach to interpret resistance of Malay peasants to British colonial rule. Like other works on the subaltern society, such as the well-written Weapons of the Weak by...

Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society.
September 1, 1997... In the author's own phrasing, data from Negeri Sembilan are "highly conducive to a critical evaluation of theoretical debates concerning systems of exchange and prestige, conventional analytic distinctions between kinship and gender, the loci of...

The Katipunan and the Revolution: Memoirs of a General with the Original Tagalog Text.
September 1, 1997... This book is a very important work and the publication by the Ateneo de Manila University Press is very timely because of the celebration of the Centennials of the Philippine Revolution and the Declaration of Philippine Independence (1996-98)....

The Revolution Falters: The Left in Philippine Politics After 1986.
September 1, 1997... Some months ago, The Manila Times (30 October 1996, p. 6) editorialized that being a Leftist in the Philippines had lost its glamour, no longer was it "worn like a badge of honor". Nowadays, with Marcos long out of office, who even cares what the...

A Captive Land: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines.
September 1, 1997... This volume, published in 1992, is a classic work in the political economy of agrarian reform in the Philippines. Students from a broad range of disciplines and sub-disciplines have benefited tremendously from this work - and many more will. It...

Agrarian Reform in the Philippines: Democratic Transitions and Redistributive Reform.
September 1, 1997... Inequitable land distribution has been a political, social, and economic issue for generations in the Philippines. Several studies on the problem have been done, many of them pointing to the inability and unwillingness of the state, whether...

Mindoro: A Social History of a Philippine Island in the 20th Century.
September 1, 1997... This book is an English translation of Schult's revised doctoral dissertation. It is an attempt to produce a social history of Mindoro in the same genre as John Larkin's important work, The Pampangans. Colonial Society in a Philippine Province...

Meanings of Multiethnicity: A Case-Study of Ethnicity and Ethnic Relations in Singapore.
September 1, 1997... Lai Ah Eng's Meanings of Multiethnicity provides a useful anthropological case-study of the interweaving of local ethnic relations and the broader context of nation building and state management of multiethnicity in Singapore. After a brief...

Xinjiapo huashe yu huashang.
September 1, 1997... This collection of articles which has been printed separately elsewhere since the 1970s is a timely publication and matches the current academic interest in the nature of Chinese entrepreneurship. Apart from striking a balance in portraying both...

Secret Documents on Singapore Mutiny 1915.
September 1, 1997... Dr. Sareen's work has brought together a valuable set of documents on the Singapore Indian Mutiny of 1915 collected from a selection of wide-ranging and relevant archives in India, Britain and Singapore. It includes such important official...

Ramayana: A Living Tradition.
September 1, 1997... The first temporary exhibition of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) in Singapore focuses on an immense and magnificent topic: the Ramayana Epic. This grand saga, in itself a culture and a religion, combines the gravity of themes with a breadth...

Counting the Costs: Economic Growth and Environmental Change in Thailand.
September 1, 1997... This book illustrates the complexity of Thailand's environmental issues, and the difficulty in reaching a consensus on how to approach or deal with them. The twelve chapters derive from a panel at the Fifth International Thai Studies Conference,...

Ecology and Practical Technology: Peasant Farming Systems in Thailand.
September 1, 1997... Shigeharu Tanabe's Ecology and Practical Technology: Peasant Farming Systems in Thailand is a comparative study of peasant rice production in two ecological regions of Thailand, the intermontane north and the central plains. Based on ethnographic...

The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy, and Revolution, 1860-1920.
September 1, 1997... The fragmentation of Viet Nam's geographical and political space has been a central question in Vietnamese studies for some time. The monography that Pierre Brocheux presents to us is drawn from his 1969 dissertation and addresses this issue. The...

Muc luc Chau Ban trieu Nguyen (Catalogue of the Nguyen Archives).
September 1, 1997... Writing a review of this two-volume work published more than thirty years ago is a melancholy task. The work itself is only part of an unfinished project of the late Professor Chen Chingho, one of the best-known historians to have worked on...

The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics.
September 1, 1997... In 1993 while I was busy talking to cyclo peddlers and housemaids for research on the rural-urban migration into the Hanoi region, a Vietnamese friend said to me: "Go and read 'I Pulled a Rickshaw' and 'Households Servants'. They said it all."...

From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention and the Lessons of Vietnam.
September 1, 1997... The main purpose of this book is to provide a cogent framework for drawing meaningful lessons about the Vietnam War and America's participation in it. To do so, the author builds a set of case studies of people's war into a comparative structure...

Sur la route mandarine.
September 1, 1997... These two volumes form part of a collection of French-language reprints of publications concerning pre-war Indochina. The series includes books by Pierre Loti, Roland Meyer, J.A. Pourtier, Maurice Maindron, Pierre Benoit, Henry Daguerches, Judith...

Le Sampanier de la baie d'Along.
September 1, 1997... These two volumes form part of a collection of French-language reprints of publications concerning pre-war Indochina. The series includes books by Pierre Loti, Roland Meyer, J.A. Pourtier, Maurice Maindron, Pierre Benoit, Henry Daguerches, Judith...

Betonamu sonraku no keisei: sonraku kyoyuden = konden sei no shiteki tenkai. (The Formation of Villages in Vietnam: The Historical Development of the 'Cong dien' System)
September 1, 1997... In order to trace the formation of self-governance in Vietnamese villages, this book examines the development of the Cong dien system which existed in Vietnam (especially in the northern regions) from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries....

Memoria das Armadas: Chuan Dui Pu Wang Lu (Memorandum of the Fleets).
September 1, 1997... The present volume is a sumptuous edition in the large format (45 x 29.5 centimetres) of the Memoria das Armadas limited to an printing of 3,500 copies. The original manuscript is owned by the Academia das Ciencias de Lisboa and the forward is...

Ethnic Politics.
September 1, 1997... In the post-Cold War period ethnic relations and ethnic conflicts have attracted increased scholarly attention. Milton J. Esman's study forms part of the growing literature in the field. Esman has structured his study in the following way....

Profile of a Little-known Tribe: An Ethnographic Study of Lisus of Arunachal Pradesh.
September 1, 1997... Despite its many inadequacies of scholarship and production, there are good ethnographic and pedagogic reasons why this book should receive at least limited academic exposure. Librarians responsible for Southeast Asian collections need to be...

Kith and Kin Politics: The Relationship between Laos and Thailand.
September 1, 1997... Arguably this small book had better been given for review to a political scientist, accustomed to taking the macro-view, rather than to a social anthropologist, rather more at home in Southeast Asia's villages and provincial towns than in its...