Category: Southeast Asia

Continuity and Change in North Vietnam

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Tradition, RevolutionTradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006, by Hy V. Luong, examines both continuity and change over eight decades in a small rural village deep in the North Vietnamese countryside. Son-Duong, a community near the Red River, experienced firsthand the ravages of French colonialism and the American war, as well as the socialist revolution and Vietnam’s recent reintegration into the global market economy. In this revised and expanded edition of his 1992 book, Revolution in the Village, Hy V. Luong draws on newly available archival documents in Hanoi, narratives by villagers, and three field seasons from the late 1980s to 2006. He situates his finely drawn village portrait within the historical framework of the Vietnamese revolution and the recent reforms in Vietnam.

January 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3423-4 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Art as Politics Wins AJCU Award

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Art as PoliticsArt as Politics: Re-Crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia, by Kathleen M. Adams, has been awarded the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities’ Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in the Social Sciences:

“This book is quite rare because it combines sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis, extensive firsthand field research, and a narrative that is both compelling and delightful to read. . . . Adams’ understanding of the complex effects of global tourism on indigenous cultures is even further amplified by her reflections about how anthropology itself is far from a neutral actor in this process. Her stories about how the various elements of Toraja society try to get her to validate their own identity and status struggles wonderfully balance academic theories with personal experience. This is not only social science at its best but it is written with the emotion and insight of excellent literature.”

Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture

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Spirits of the PlaceSpirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture, by John Clifford Holt, is a rare and timely contribution to our understanding of religious culture in Laos and Southeast Asia. Most often studied as a part of Thai, Vietnamese, or Khmer history, Laos remains a terra incognita to most Westerners—and to many of the people living throughout Asia as well. Holt’s new book brings this fascinating nation into focus. With its overview of Lao Buddhism and analysis of how shifting political power—from royalty to democracy to communism—has impacted Lao religious culture, the book offers an integrated account of the entwined political and religious history of Laos from the fourteenth century to the contemporary era.

“John Holt’s study of Lao Buddhism makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the understudied religious culture of Laos. Of special value are the comparisons Holt draws between Lao and Sinhala religious culture, and the insight achieved when Buddhist conceptuality, symbol, and ritual are seen through the lens of the indigenous Lao religious substratum rather than vice versa.” —Donald K. Swearer, Director, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3327-5 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Free Noli Me Tangere with Purchase of El Filibusterismo

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Purchase a paperback copy of El Filibusterismo at the regular price of $26.00 and receive a free copy of its predecessor, Noli Me Tangere. Both ship as a set at no additional cost. To receive your free book, you must reference code “RIZAL” when ordering by phone, email, or online (in the comments box).

Take advantage of this offer to enjoy these two classics of modern Philippine literature!

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)

Cambodge Wins Major SEA Studies Book Award

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Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945, by Penny Edwards, was awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in March 2009.

“In Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, Penny Edwards examines brilliantly the metamorphosis of the kingdom of Cambodia into the French-Khmer colonial entity of Cambodge—the chrysalis from which today’s Cambodia has emerged. Demonstrating a masterful command of scholarship and of archival, literary, and popular sources, Edwards reveals not a simple dance of colonial domination and resistance but an array of complex collaborations through which Khmer subjects adapted, and embraced as their own, processes set in train by the French: to iconize and secularize Angkor Vat; to promote a Khmer Buddhism separate from Thai influence and free of hoary superstitions; and to root ‘Khmerness’ both in a romanticized antiquity and France-led modernity.

In a narrative that is elegantly crafted and ultimately gripping, Edwards links the colonial world of schools, research institutes, and print culture and of museums, monuments, and tourism to the post-colonial nation-building projects of Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot. In doing so, she brings legibility to highly theorized subjects such as hybridity, authenticity, and nationalism and both complicates and enriches our understanding of the colonial era and its legacies in modern Southeast Asia—demonstrating, as Harry J. Benda did, how rigorous historical scholarship can expose surprising ways in which the past is complicit in the present.”

Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines

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Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benign than what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, by Linda A. Newson, illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions.

“The book is truly remarkable in breadth and depth and has the power of a prosecuting attorney’s relentless presentation of a damning circumstantial case: the reader’s resistance gives way under the sheer weight of the evidence. We hear many different voices (some ecclesiastical, some civil or military) reiterating the same sad tale of depopulation and slow recovery. Others have, on less evidence, surmised some of this story of loss, but no one before has effectively estimated its depth or duration. The tale deserves to be told.” —Norman G. Owen, editor, The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia

April 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3272-8 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

Colonial Legacies Longlisted for 2009 ICAS Book Prize

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The International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize is a global competition that provides an international focus for publications on Asia while at the same time increasing their visibility worldwide. The coveted book prizes are awarded for best studies in the humanities and the social sciences.

Colonial Legacies: Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia, by Anne E. Booth, has been longlisted in the social sciences category. Winners will be announced at ICAS 6, which will be held in August 2009 in Daejeon, Korea.

Being Dutch in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500-1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, distributed by UH Press for NUS Press (Singapore) has been longlisted in the humanities category.

UH Press Author Wins Outstanding Book Award

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This month the Conference on College Composition and Communication will present it’s 2009 Outstanding Book Award to John M. Duffy for his book, Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community. As the book award committee noted in its discussion of the book, “it richly conceptualizes the study of literacy by considering its historical, personal, institutional, cultural, and transnational dimensions.”

The CCCC Outstanding Book Award is presented annually to authors or editors of a book published two years previously that makes an outstanding contribution to composition and communication studies. Books are evaluated for scholarship or research and for applicability to the study and teaching of composition and communication.

A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society

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During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company’s Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society, by Anoma Pieris, investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. It relates the story of a city, Singapore, and a contemporary city-state whose plural society has its origins in these historical divisions.

Writing Past Colonialism
February 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3354-1 / $28.00 (PAPER)

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