Bringing to light the first known Urdu primary source on Islam in colonial Burma, this essay examines the polemical encounter with Buddhism in the years surrounding the Third Anglo–Burmese War. Using the model of religious economy, the Urdu Sayr-e Barhma is contextualised amid the religious pluralisation and competition that accompanied colonisation as a multitude of religious ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘firms’ rapidly entered the colony. Among them was the Indian Muslim author of Sayr-e Barhma, which provided a detailed account of the history, language and theology of Burman Buddhists and included an account of a public debate which, it claimed, culminated in the conversion of the Thathanabaing (Primate). Against the long-standing historiographical emphasis on the economic roots of anti-Indian sentiments in colonial Burma, this essay points to the religious dimensions of these enduring antagonisms.

Visual arts maintain a colourful presence at Buddhist funerals in Northern Thailand. These arts are not made for mere decoration but serve an active and essential role in the ceremonies that take place after death. They echo funerary themes of the impermanent nature of life and the importance of a life filled with merit. This article examines cremation structures and funeral banners of Northern Thailand and argues that these arts not only hold significance for the living and the dead, but that in giving form to abstract concepts they have the power to guide observers in their beliefs regarding the dynamics of life and death.

This article traces the etymology of the term ‘revolution’ as it developed in Việt Nam between the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It argues that the term was slow to catch on, and that activists who used it did so in often contradictory ways. The term's historical development complicated efforts to fix its meaning, and it was not until the later part of the 1920s that it came to be consolidated, in part through Hồ Chí Minh's publication of a short book entitled Đường Kách Mệnh (The road to revolution).

Community radio has strongly changed Thailand's centralised media landscape. This article analyses community radio's role in establishing a public sphere in the context of Southern Thailand's ongoing Malay Muslim insurgency. This article argues that although the new community radio stations potentially provide ethnic communities, particularly Malay Muslims, with a chance to broadcast in their own language, these stations are dominated by middle-class broadcasters and commercial interests. More politically-oriented community radio stations in Southern Thailand feel threatened by both the Thai military's attempts to intimidate them or influence their programming as well as by militant threats to broadcasters who show favour to the Thai armed forces, which results in the self-censorship of sensitive topics. In addition, the community radio sector is fragmented between Malay Muslim and Buddhist broadcasters.

The Orang Sakai of Mainland Riau, on the east coast of Sumatra, have an elaborate performing art genre through which they physicalise the unseen spirit-dimension in a shamanic ritual called dikei. Their shamanic ritual utilises songs, dance as well as comedy. This article elaborates on how songs and dance visualise the unseen beings and provides detailed examples of Sakai performances during which shamans ‘dance with’ or ‘move with’ the spirits. A second theme of the article is the question of the relationship between the meaning of ‘performance’ and fakery, and suggests that there are three types of performed fakery, two of which are accepted as valid and necessary performances which technically contribute to the performance of medicine and the physicalisation of spirit presence.

The 1930s Depression caused an enormous growth in urban poverty in colonial Java. Informal neighbourhood networks could no longer cope with the unemployed, the homeless and the destitute. Politically conscious Indonesians were convinced that the colonial state was concerned only with poverty among Europeans. They responded by creating new charities focused on the Indonesian lower classes. Many provided middle-class women with opportunities for leadership denied them in the political and labour movements. However, those who managed the charities had no concept of empowering the poor. In dispensing support they made a clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Nevertheless their charitable work enabled thousands of Indonesians to survive the Depression years.

For decades after their introduction in 1854, state-defined categories of subjects and citizens in the East Indies remained largely uncontested. But a furore erupted when Indo-Europeans — legally Europeans and citizens of the Netherlands — demanded rights to own land, rights exclusively apportioned to the autochthonous population. This article recounts a contentious campaign in the 1930s by the Indo-European Association to gain rights to own land, and the vehement rejection by Indonesians expressed in various civic outlets. I argue that by challenging state categories of entitlement, race, and belonging, the debates on rights to own land defined more sharply notions of citizenship among the Indies population. Drawing on ‘acts of citizenship’, I situate the discourse of rights at the centre of the debate on colonial citizenship. In so doing, I offer an insight into the genealogy of exclusion that has haunted the idea of citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia.

This article examines wayang potehi, a cloth glove puppet theatre of southern Fujian origin performed on Java. It outlines the genre's emergence in Fujian, its arrival in the archipelago, and historical and contemporary practice. This article seeks to respect potehi's Hokkien roots, Indonesian practice, and the place of its genre in a dynamic regional history as it traces the development, practice and uses of the genre. Contemporary potehi patronage often exhibits the strategies of the mixed-culture non-Chinese-speaking communities of East and Central Java to perform a streamlined, integrationist, and loyal Sino-Indonesian identity.

Challenging conventional wisdom, this article argues that Indonesia — long home to both large-scale transmigration programmes and a range of conflicts — has not witnessed transmigrant conflicts. The vast majority of Indonesian transmigrants were resettled in parts of Sumatra which have remained peaceful. In some conflicts, the role of transmigration has been exaggerated. In others, interethnic violence has involved spontaneous migrants rather than state-led transmigrants. We conclude with a discussion of two potential outliers, where violence has been directed towards transmigrants, but only those from disaster-affected regions who arrived en masse. This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the distinctions between different forms of internal migration, some of which have the potential to spark future violence in recipient areas and communities.

In the 1940s and 1950s, several organs of the newly independent Indonesian state oversaw the standardisation of the Indonesian national language. In this process, Western-oriented bureaucrats pushed the language towards European normativity, significantly decreasing the influence of Arabic. While this reform carried symbolic meaning, the practical ramifications on Indonesian orthography, spelling, and word selection also carried real, non-symbolic effects on the accessibility of this language to Indonesian Islamic leaders. Standardising orthography to use the Roman alphabet rendered many Muslims illiterate in a language they had been using for decades. Choices in word selection and spelling limited the Islamic meanings that the new language could carry, thus impacting how Muslims could use the national language for religious and other purposes. Indonesian linguistic reform carried serious social and political consequences in addition to the symbolic meanings often studied.

After the restoration of the Lê dynasty, the Red River delta region was flooded with military men who set up and controlled irregular departments from the end of the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. The imperial administration became a shell during the Lê-Trịnh period, with the Trịnh Lords as de facto rulers who constructed their own parallel government on the basis of these local departments. This analysis of contemporary inscriptions indicates that the Trịnh Lords subsequently expanded their administration and secured their rule by absorbing large numbers of Red River delta literati, while retaining many eunuchs in influential financial and military roles. Overall, the Trịnh bureaucracy, comprising of the Lục Phiên and Lục Cung, was a kind of financial organisation combined with a military district system because it harnessed the existing military organisation.

In 2010, La Galigo, a Bugis mythological epic describing the founding of the human world, was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. This accolade again brought La Galigo into the international spotlight, as had occurred when Robert Wilson's stage play I La Galigo, based on this epic, debuted in Singapore in 2004. Wilson's production received acclaim and critique, with reviews primarily focusing on his ability to achieve an authentic representation of Bugis identity and their past. These responses raise questions around the presupposition that there is an authentic Bugis identity and past that can be publicly recreated. This article analyses the concept of authenticity through reviews of Wilson's production and the work of key theorists to show that for many people, authenticity is achievable and of critical importance in underpinning any sense of a unified and singular ethnic identity, while for others, identity is always already a mix of different global influences and as such is either irrelevant, or liberated from a sense of a singular heritage.

This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society.

This article looks at two contemporary films by Vietnamese women. In Việt Linh's Travelling Circus (1988) and Phạm Nhuệ Giang's The Deserted Valley (2002), a female gaze is sutured to that of an ethnic minority character's, a form of looking that stresses a shared oppression between women and the ethnic Other. While clearing a space for a desiring female gaze in Vietnamese film, they nonetheless extend an Orientalist view of racialised difference. A feminist film optic, one that does not consider industry history and constructions of race, fails to mark out the layered relations of looking underlying Vietnamese filmmaking. This study attends to the ways women filmmakers investigate gendered forms of looking, sexual desire and otherness within the constraints of a highly male-dominated film industry.

In the wake of the bloody coup of 1 October 1965, three young Indonesia scholars, Ruth McVey, Fred Bunnell, and Ben Anderson, all working with George Kahin at Cornell University, set out to explain how things had gone so wrong. They began their analysis with a careful examination of the patterns of promotion and transfer in the Indonesian military, which seemed to indicate that tensions between Javanese and other officers played a major part in the coup. Keen to make this information available to other scholars, they quickly wrote up a draft version of their findings and tentative conclusions, and circulated it to a few friends and colleagues. This fateful decision, ironically, would reshape our understanding of Siam. Subsequently banned from entering Indonesia, McVey and Anderson would produce influential work on Siam, while mentoring younger scholars through thesis supervision and edited volumes. This collection, Exploration and irony in studies of Siam over forty years, is comprised of nine of Anderson's articles each outlined below, with an introduction by Tamara Loos, a successor of Anderson as director of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program. Loos' introduction places the articles in historical perspective, and in the context of Anderson's own personal history, including his networks of colleagues and students, and his other work. The essays provide an opportunity to reflect on Anderson's contribution to Siam Studies, as they illuminate the influence he had in opening up new directions for research, and new ways of conceptualising Thai politics.

This is an examination of the recent work of Indonesian visual artist FX Harsono in relation to Chinese Indonesian identity, the erasure of history, and the challenge of communicating through trauma. It is my hope that this work will contribute to the dialogue on both the Chinese Indonesian experience and large-scale ethnic violence.