The influence of Christianity in Karen communities of Northern Thailand is increasing. Thai Buddhism is still marginal but growing, reducing the power of traditional beliefs, particularly ancestor worship. Despite conflicts between Christians and non-Christians, differing attitudes among the various Christian denominations towards Karen tradition and intra-ethnic dissociation based on religion, a distinctive Karen ethnic identity persists irrespective of religion, though the association between religious and ethnic identity varies.

As recently as 1875 Thailand had an extremely decentralized political system in which regional and local authorities enjoyed considerable autonomy from the central government. By the end of King Chulalongkon‘s reign in 1910, however, a very centralized political system had emerged in Thailand. This rather remarkable transformation from decentralization to centralization has usually been explained in terms of Western diplomatic and economic pressure upon the Thai government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the reforms which the government undertook to meet this pressure. Earlier studies by scholars such as Walter Vella, D. G. E. Hall, and John F. Cady have strongly emphasized the importance of Western pressure and advisers for the transformation of the Thai political system. More recent studies, in particular those of David Wyatt, have emphasized the importance of domestic factors in this process of change and stressed the creativity of the Thai response to the West. All of these studies have in common, however, an emphasis upon the importance of national level politics in the process of centralization. It will be the argument of this paper that it is also necessary to examine provincial-level politics in the period from 1875 to 1910 to understand why centralization in Thailand was so thoroughgoing and why it proceeded so rapidly. For this purpose the paper will focus on northern Thailand in the area which is now covered by the provinces of Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Lampang, Phrae, and Nan.

In most narratives, the beginning of the oil palm industry in Southeast Asia boils down to entrepreneurial spirit, scientific research, and good fortune. The colonial context in which the industry emerged barely figures in the story. This article argues that colonial power was critical, providing access to land and labour that proved more important than plant selection, capital, or technology. The plantation model pushed the region ahead of Africa as the leading exporter of palm oil by the late 1930s, but its future was in doubt as the Depression and Second World War shattered the colonial order.

This article presents the hard work, and eventual failure, of the elder branch of the main lineage within a village of steel producers to reaffirm local identity through the recreation of a common ritual space dedicated to the spirit of the village's founder, original artisan, and their ancestor. It presents this process as a struggle over the meanings and representations of community and space in a time of rapid social and economic transformation. The ultimate failure of this struggle, which only becomes evident after 15 years, has affirmed something else: the spaces of practice associated with the village's public administration and family-based commercial interests.

The full story of the Indians in Malaya has yet to be told. Here an attempt is made to assemble the information relating to some aspects of their settlement in Singapore over the last one hundred and fifty years.

This article examines the establishment by the Thai court in the late nineteenth century of what was to become the "national library", an institution modelled on colonial scholarly societies being set up at the time. It examines its role in the construction of a corpus of a knowledge about the "Thai nation".

The changing role of women's economic activities in developing countries is a topic of particular importance, not only because women represent a significant resource of much underutilized labour in the non-household sector but also because women's activities are intimately tied to the structure of the family. Low levels of female participation in the labour force suggest that much of the potential human talent and skills in a society are restricted to household endeavours. For the objectives of both eliminating discrimination against women in employment and expanding the pool of human resources for development, there is a growing scientific and policy interest in the study of socioeconomic development and women's labour force participation. Of considerable interest is the relationship between women's economic roles and fertility. While the causal structure of this relationship is still an unresolved topic, there is a basic consensus that the transition from high to low fertility levels is closely intertwined with the changing social and economic roles of women.

Prior to entering a coalition with the ruling Alliance party at the beginning of 1973, and incorporation in the broader National Front coalition in June 1974 Parti Islam Se Malaysia (usually abbreviated to Party Islam or PAS, though until recently widely known as the Pan Malayan Islamic Party) had long been established as Malaysia's leading opposition party; within the National Front its position is second only to that of the Alliance. Nonetheless political scientists and historians have devoted little attention to this party, though they have almost uniformly condemned it for an alleged association with a most reactionary form of Malay communalism. Not surprisingly the picture that has emerged is partial and rather obscure. For example, we know little of the events surrounding the party's origins and its initial formative years: virtually all accounts of PAS begin with its successes in the 1959 national and state elections, and the few statements hazarded on its earlier history have been incomplete and factually wrong. In this article I want to clarify some of the factual confusion relating to these events, and to offer an interpretation of the various ideological forces that gave rise to the formation of this party.

There are only a few studies on the Indonesian youth movement in the pre-World War II period. Apart from those dealing with specific organizations and hence not concerned with the more general trend, most of the authors tend to emphasize the unity of the movement after the 1928 youth congress. The usual story told is that after that year, a clear concept of an Indonesian nation emerged and the movement was no longer divided. There is hardly any discussion about the division between secular and Islamic movements. Concerning Indonesian national symbols, the impression is created by these authors that they were adopted unanimously in 1928 although evidence shows that at that time only certain groups accepted them. The general acceptance of these national symbols took place only late in the thirties.

The notion of dhammamātā is one of the last items of the legacy of the late Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu. In order to accord women practitioners better social status and provide them with opportunities for spiritual training, Buddhadāsa avoided committing himself to the reintroduction of bhikkunī ordination. Instead, he proposed the notion of dhammamātā, which literally means ‘dhamma mother’. This article postulates thatby using the metaphor of the mother, Buddhadāsa invited less conflict, appealing to the high respect which Thai people generally held for women. Moreover, the article argues that with dhammamātā Buddhadāsa challenged the common notion of motherhood which usually regards women as nurturers of the Sanġha. Dhammamātā nurture people's spirituality through their teaching and virtues. Whilst the social impact of dhammamātā cannot be compared to that of bhikkunī, whose yellow robes visually suggest a status equivalent to that of male bhikkhu, the concept of dhammamātā was a new creation revolving around the image of the female religious teacher, a role that Buddhist women had wanted.

The article studies migrants from Uttar Pradesh in Singapore who have historically identified themselves as ‘Hindustani’ – a group that has largely been ignored in historical literature of the Indian diaspora in Singapore. Through an examination of British expansion in India in the early nineteenth century, parallel developments in Southeast Asia, community publications and oral testimonies, the article attempts to ‘(re)discover’ the history of Hindustani migration in Singapore.

Writing about political parties in Indonesia makes one suddenly aware of how little research has been done on the subject. With the decline of the parliamentary system since 1957, interest has shifted away from the party order towards the forces of Guided Democracy: President Soekarno, the army, and the Communists. Among the parties, only the Communists have received a great deal of specific attention.

The Shan State Army-South (SSA-S) is today one of Burma's largest remaining ethnic opposition armies. This paper investigates ethnic politics of the SSA-S and their strategic use of media. It argues that Shan insurgency today has moved into a new phase characterised by its intense involvement with mass media. The paper examines, on the production side, the Shan insurgency's media products and its networking with the Thai press. On the reception side, it explores how the images of ethnic insurgency are consumed by Shan audiences living in exile, analysing how long-distance Shan nationalism is generated through the spectatorship of these ‘militarised’ images.

When launching the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) in 1969, the then Deputy Prime Minister (the late Tun Abdul Razak) stressed that diversification was Malaysia's greatest need in agriculture, and a few weeks later, in an opening address to a conference on crop diversification organized by the Incorporated Society of Planters, he stated that agricultural diversification had been a national objective for some years. The steady progress towards that objective, he claimed, was “evidenced by the rapid increase in palm oil production, the expansion of acreage planted to high yielding padi varieties, recent increases in tapioca production, and current interest in sugar cane, cocoa, maize, soya beans, groundnuts”.

There is considerable concern amongst development planners at the large and apparently growing areal disparities in the level of development in many underdeveloped countries. A number of theoretical studies support the view that economic growth inevitably results in widening disparities in the initial stages of economic development which may or may not be reversed with later growth. Empirical studies, although frequently lacking in comparability and deficient in data, confirm the existence of widening disparities in a large number of countries. Some planners have questioned the policy of maximising growth of gross product as the panacea for under-development and attempted to ensure more even patterns of development. Where economic and political unrest, including “insurgent activity”, have occurred, and have been equated by government officials with regional concentrations of poverty, further weight is given to policies directed towards reduction of regional disparities. However, where the results of schemes aimed at reducing regional imbalance have been assessed the success rate is slight. This paper examines the experience of Northeast Thailand, the Korat plateau, as an example of a backward region that has had considerable planning effort directed at it over the last twenty years.

Western historiography assumes a chronological linear unfolding of progress, and early Western commentators on Asian societies tended to see them as stagnant variants of earlier phases in European history, as feudal despotisms and passive, unchanging village communities. In assessing levels of “development” or “progress” such observers looked for recognizable specialist institutions in politics and the economy; finding few such institutions, they saw only “backwardness”. To most Europeans, trying to make sense of unknown societies and cultures, the alien could only be made comprehensible by identifying it with the familiar. It was then all too easy to proceed as if the unknown was simply a mutant or primitive version of the known. Ideas, social relationships and values which were literally beyond their ken, were often simply not seen at all. In their observations of both political and economic systems, they saw decline, corruption and confusion because they failed to recognize the patterns which structured society. So it seemed natural that the West should dominate such societies and guide them on the correct path.

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 them have switched to a partly settled way of life and some form of agriculture, but even these groups still rely heavily on the forest, collecting jungle products for trade and, often, processing the wild sago palms for their subsistence while collecting. The Bukat, one of these partly settled groups, are found (see Map 1) in Indonesia's West Kalimantan (three hamlets, totalling 300 persons) and East Kalimantan (one hamlet of 150), and in Malaysia's Sarawak (one hamlet of 150).