Category: anthropology

The City in Southeast Asia

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The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes and Policy, by Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dick, explores the ways of moving beyond outmoded paradigms of the Third World City. Under “Patterns,” the authors look at the “global cities” of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, and then the national capitals of Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila, in relation to the second cities of Chiang Mai, Surabaya, Cebu, and Penang. “Processes” focuses upon the privitization of climate through air-conditioned environments, the industrialization of consumption in the form of large shopping malls, the role of cities as platforms for the globalization strategies of Asian multinationals, and the contest at street-level between public and private space. Finally, “Policy” addresses governance and markets with regard to key issues in urban and land-use planning.

July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3313-8 / $34.00 (PAPER)

New in the ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series

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Studies of the Tai world often treat “state” and “community” as polar opposites: the state produces administrative uniformity and commercialization while community sustains tradition, local knowledge, and subsistence economy. This assumption leads to the conclusion that the traditional community is undermined by the modern forces of state incorporation and market penetration. States rule and communities resist. Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew Walker, takes a very different view. Using thematic and ethnographic studies from Thailand, Laos, Burma, and southern China, the authors describe modern forms of community where state power intersects with markets, livelihoods, and aspirations.

July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3359-6 / $29.00 (PAPER)


Community still provides a rallying point for urban low-income residents of the off-street neighborhoods (kampung) in Yogyakarta and in other cities of Java. However, the nature of community changed dramatically during the economic and political transition that followed the fall of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia. Under Soeharto, kampung residents both cooperated in the supervision of their lives by the state and explored forms of sociality that gave some protection from collusion with the state. With the demise of the New Order and the rise of policies promoting decentralization, urban society changed under the impact of political reform, globalization, global and local patterns of consumerism, and kampung expressions of community. In Kampung, Islam and State in Urban Java, Patrick Guinness examines these processes in terms of economic, political and ritual patterns, and from the perspectives of kampung leaders and enterpreneurs, kampung youth, formal and casual labor, and NGO volunteers working in these neighborhoods.

July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3360-2 / $32.00 (PAPER)

Painters in Hanoi Now Available in Paperback

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Painting has played a significant role in modern Vietnam. Postage stamps, billboards, and annual national exhibitions attest to its fundamental place in a country where painters may be hailed as national heroes and include among their number fervent nationalists, propagandists, even dissidents. As Vietnamese painting has gained prominence in the contemporary transnational art circuits of Southeast Asia, many artists have become millionaires, yet Vietnamese painting is generally overlooked in art history surveys of the region. Nora Taylor sets out here to change that. Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art engages with twentieth-century Vietnam through its artists and their works, providing a new angle on a country most often portrayed through the lens of war and politics.

“Painters in Hanoi adds important perspectives to the growing body of literature on contemporary Southeast Asian art, as it also illuminates the highly specific political, economic, and social conditions that shape but do not determine that art. Taylor’s deeply satisfying work further erodes unitary notions of an artistic modernity and the authority of Euro-American paradigms of art history and art making to explain art production throughout the world. She convincingly demonstrates that artistic identity never remains stable but is always asserted, tested, defined, and redefined in local and now global social worlds.” —Journal of Asian Studies

July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3355-8 / $26.00 (PAPER)

Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics

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Although gossip is disapproved of across the world’s societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of politics: through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. Based on author Niko Besnier’s intimate ethnographic knowledge of Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions—the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice—that are rarely wedded successfully.

July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3338-1 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Traditional Micronesian Societies

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Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization, by Glenn Petersen, explores the extraordinary successes of the ancient voyaging peoples who first settled the Central Pacific islands some two thousand years ago. They and their descendants devised social and cultural adaptations that have enabled them to survive—and thrive—under the most demanding environmental conditions. The dispersed matrilineal clans so typical of Micronesian societies ensure that every individual, every local family and lineage, and every community maintain close relations with the peoples of many other islands. When hurricanes and droughts or political struggles force a group to move, they are sure of being taken in by kin residing elsewhere. Out of this common theme, shared patterns of land tenure, political rule, philosophy, and even personal character have flowed.

June 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3248-3 / $42.00 (CLOTH)

Talking Hawaii’s Story

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Published for the Center for Oral History and the Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai‘i, Talking Hawai‘i’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People is the first major book in over a generation to present a rich sampling of the landmark work of Hawai‘i’s Center for Oral History. Twenty-nine extensive oral histories introduce readers to the sights and sounds of territorial Waikiki, to the feeling of community in Palama, in Kona, or on the island of Lana‘i, and even to the experience of a German national interned by the military government after Pearl Harbor. The result is a collection that preserves Hawaii’s social and cultural history through the narratives of the people who lived it—co-workers, neighbors, family members, and friends.

May 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3390-9 / $19.00 (PAPER)

The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers

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In today’s world hunter-gatherer societies struggle with seemingly insurmountable problems: deforestation and encroachment, language loss, political domination by surrounding communities. Will they manage to survive? This book is about one such society living in the monsoon rainforests of western Nepal: the Raute. Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers, by Jana Fortier, explores how this elusive ethnic group, the last hunter-gatherers of the Himalayas, maintains its traditional way of life amidst increasing pressure to assimilate.

“Jana Fortier has made an important and original contribution to the ethnography of Nepal that focuses our attention on one of that country’s least known ethnic groups, the foraging people known as the Raute; indeed, her book is one of only a small handful of monographic-length treatments of foraging peoples in South Asia since Seligmann’s work on the Veddahs of Sri Lanka. In exploring the way the nomadic Raute have managed to resist the pressure of the wider world around them to settle down and to heed the seductive overtures of ‘development’, Fortier makes a compelling case for respecting the autonomy of foraging people and learning from a vanishing way of life. This is an exemplary work of scholarship based on meticulous and difficult fieldwork. Fortier’s prose is lucid, engaging and accessible, and this book will be an ideal text for undergraduate classes.” —Arjun Guneratne, Macalester College

May 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3356-5 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Movement, Gender, and Cook Islands Globalization

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Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender, and Cook Islands Globalization, by Kalissa Alexeyeff, is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. Alexeyeff reconfigures conventional views of globalization’s impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production.

“Dancing from the Heart is written from the heart. This book is a wonderful evocation of contemporary Polynesian life, joy, and loss. Yet it is also analytically adventurous. Cook Island dance becomes a lens through which questions of gender, performance, embodiment, and globalization come into focus in novel ways. This is surely one of the finest of recent Pacific ethnographies.” —Nicholas Thomas, Univeristy of Cambridge

March 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3244-5 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Ethnobotany of Pohnpei

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Ethnobotany of Pohnpei: Plants, People, and Island Culture, compiled and edited by Michael J. Balick and others, examines the relationship between plants, people, and traditional culture on Pohnpei, one of the four island members of the Federated States of Micronesia. Traditional culture is still very strong on Pohnpei and is biodiversity-dependent, relying on both its pristine habitats and managed landscapes; native and introduced plants and animals; and extraordinary marine life. This book is the result of a decade of research by a team of local people and international specialists carried out under the direction of the Mwoalen Wahu Ileilehn Pohnpei (Pohnpei Council of Traditional Leaders). It discusses the uses of the native and introduced plant species that have sustained human life on the island and its outlying atolls for generations, including Piper methysticum (locally known as sakau and recognized throughout the Pacific as kava), which is essential in defining cultural identity for Pohnpeians.

The work also focuses on ethnomedicine, the traditional medical system used to address health conditions, and its associated beliefs. 387 color illus.

Published in association with The New York Botanical Garden
February 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3293-3 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore

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Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. The Binding Tie: Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore, by Kristina Göransson, explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change.

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
January 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3352-7 / $26.00 (PAPER)

Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2008 Announced

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Each year Choice Magazine, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, compiles a distinguished list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The following three UH Press books were recognized for 2008. A complete list of titles will be available in Choice’s January 2009 issue.

Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China
by Grace S. Fong

“Takes the discussion in an exciting new direction. . . . The greatest contributions of this book . . . are the introductions of various women writers and the translations into English of their compositions, many discovered by the author and not heretofore translated into English. . . . Essential.” —Choice (November 2008)

Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano

“Since English-language scholars have rarely dealt with Japanese film of the 1920s and 1930s, outside the work of canonical directiors like Kenji Mizoguchi, this study is welcome. . . . Wada-Marciano offers groundbreaking analyses of such genres as the ‘middle-class’ film and the woman’s film. A final chapter provides a rich study of the links between national identity, modernity, and the signature style of Shochiku film studio. The end result is sure to stand as a definitive work for years to come. Essential.” —Choice (October 2008)

The Sociology of Southeast Asia: Transformations in a Developing Region by Victor T. King

“Victor King has produced a lucid, comprehensive, and challenging analysis of the state-of-the-art of Southeast Asian sociology. The book is not only an excellent textbook for courses on Southeast Asia or development sociology, but also ‘required reading’ for all social scientists embarking on research on the area. I am certain that it will become a long-lasting addition to the standard literature on Asia.” —Hans-Dieter Evers, University of Bonn

Carlos Andrade Book Launch at Native Books

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Carlos Andrade will read from and discuss his recently published book, Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, on Thursday, October 30, 6:30-8:30 p.m., at Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i, Ward Warehouse. A book signing and light refreshments will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Andrade is associate professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i and director of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies. Ha‘ena reveals the complex history of a rich and fertile ahupua‘a in north Kaua‘i, blending folklore, geography, history, and ethnography.

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