During the Japanese invasion of Java, local nationalists came to the fore and set up Merdeka Committees to welcome their “liberators”. The high hopes they entertained that the Japanese would give them a say in the local administration and economy, or even grant them independence, turned out to be an illusion.

Nationalism in the Philippines is undergoing the fate of ideologies and ideas that have passed from the vocabulary of critical and original thinkers, into the language of popular discussion. As a concept and as a political force, therefore, nationalism is in the process of losing in precision what it is gaining in popular appeal. Its triumph in Filipino politics is pointedly shown by the diligence with which partisans of opposing political interests and orientations all claim to be the faithful and discerning interpreters of nationalism. Its triumph as an idea is similarly shown by the indiscriminate use of the term by social commentators who have no more than vague and hazy impressions of ideological distinctions.

The study describes an asymmetric relationship between Vietnamese Caodaists, followers of the Cao Dai religion, and the Japanese during World War Two. The Caodaists maintained a pro-Japanese stance throughout the occupation, based on their judgement that they could in this way advance the nationalist cause and achieve independence from French rule. The position of the Caodaists immediately after the end of World War Two was adversely affected as a result of their wartime collaboration.

The transition from Late Iron Age to early state societies in the riverine lowlands of the Mun Valley and northern Cambodia took place rapidly in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Defining the former involves archaeological excavation, whereas the latter is best known from surviving temple structures and inscriptions in addition to the results of archaeological fieldwork. Several common threads link the two phases of cultural development. From the late fifth century BCE, Iron Age communities participated in the growing maritime exchange network linking Southeast Asia with China and India, bringing exotic ideas and goods into the hinterland. Iron itself had a major impact on agriculture and warfare. Salt, a vital commodity that is abundantly available in the Mun Valley, was exploited on an industrial scale. By the fifth century CE, an agricultural revolution involving permanent, probably irrigated, rice fields and ploughing underwrote a rapid rise of social elites. These leaders in society, named in the early historic inscriptions, maintained and elaborated prehistoric innovations.

The Sěrat candraning wanita (Book of descriptions of women) is a voluminous Javanese manuscript written in Yogyakarta in the 1930s. This handbook for would-be husbands is basically an instruction manual, informing its (male) readers how to choose a good wife/sexual partner (based on physiognomy) and how sex works (based on ‘the etiquette of sexual intercourse’). It can be regarded as the swansong of pre-modern Javano-Muslim erotology.

An insuperable difficulty presents itself in tracing with any degree of correctness the origins of a barbarous race of people who possess no written character, and whose history is clothed in the obscurity of legendary traditions handed down to successive generations by oral Agency alone, in which much of the fabulous becomes mixed with certain transactions of a nature to state indefinitely the ‘era’ of their occurrence, but affording no positive source from whence to derive anything approaching a correct ‘data’. It is then thus with the race of the ‘Kaya’, so called by themselves in their own language, that of ‘Karen Nee’ or ‘Red Karens’ being given to them by the Burmese and surrounding people, from the predominating color of their costume — the short drawers and turban being generally of that color, which distinguishes them from other tribes of ‘Karens’ whose attire consists of a white tunic and are on that account termed ‘Karen Pyee’ or ‘White Karens’.

Within the plural society of Malaysia, Indians reflect a pluralism every bit as complex and resulting in problems that are a smaller version of those faced by the nation. Indian society is segmented on a variety of grounds, each segment operating with its own autonomy and yet entering into a competitive coexistence with others to impose its interests as the dominant ones of “the Indian community” of Malaysia. These inner strains and stresses among groups struggling to assert community leadership have a long history and proceed from a background of economic, social, and cultural factors that have characterized Indian migration and settlement in peninsular Malaya. It is the aim of this paper to look at these segments of Indian society, the kinds of leadership they produced, the interactions of that leadership among each other for a period of about fifteen years after 1945. An attempt is made to isolate a number of the major groups and segments of society, to categorize the types of leaders emerging among them, to note the links between these leadership types and thus provide a profile of the society's leaders in this period.

Jamit Singh's legacy as a charismatic trade unionist and political activist on Singapore's waterfront coincided with its changing political developments. He was instrumental in bringing about this change by transforming the dock workers into an effective political force. His subsequent banishment by the People's Action Party government brought an end to a colourful episode in the history of Singapore's harbour.

Many writers have shown that Peninsular Malaysia is undergoing rapid urbanization. The proportion of the total population living in urban areas, for instance, increased from 15·9 per cent in 1947 to 28·7 per cent in 1970. This growth is more readily appreciated if it is noted that the per annum urban population increase after independence (that is, between 1957 and 1970) is nearly twice the per annum increase in the previous inter-censal period (1947–1957). This rapid urbanization ushers in many political, social and economic problems among which is the unbalanced ethnic constituents of the urban population.

Although nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in Siam tried to debunk local spirit beliefs and witchcraft accounts, they and their actions were perceived in terms of local supernaturalist frameworks. Late twentieth-century Thai Christians, supernaturalists themselves, have reclassified local spirit activity through their own Christian frameworks, using local vocabularies of spirit phenomena but retaining master categories of interpretation and practice drawn from North American evangelicalism. This practice puts Thai Protestant churches in a direct dialogue with their cultural contexts and leaves them positioned to benefit from Thailand's increasing religious pluralism.

Considering that, except for the initial period of the Emergency, Malaysia as a country attracted far less attention internationally than most of the other countries in Southeast Asia, it is somewhat surprising to find that many foreign historians did not hesitate to make Malaysian history the subject of their scholarly works. L.A. Mills wrote in 1924, 1942, and again in 1958; Rupert Emerson in 1937. In 1935, a Ph.D. thesis was completed by M.I. Knowles in the University of Wisconsin. In 1943, Virginia Thomson wrote Postmortem on Malaya. The post-1950 situation was even more exciting. Numerous theses on Malaysia were written in various universities in the world — among them SOAS, ANU, Hong Kong, California, Columbia, and Duke. Of course, by far the greatest volume of work was done in the University of Malaya (Singapore) itself where, between 1951 and 1961, more than a hundred theses were completed at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Understandably, in the mid-sixties, there was a growing feeling that the field was being exhausted.

In his two pioneer studies on the Nanyang Chinese national salvation movement between 1908 and 1941, Professor Yoji Akashi stresses developments in China, and the extension of KMT and CCP structures in the Nanyang as basic “to any investigation of Nanyang Chinese political motive and orientation”. These developments, if viewed from a rather Sino-centric standpoint, are indeed important in explaining why the Singapore hua-ch'iao (overseas Chinese) responded as they did to the Double-Seventh Incident of 1937. However, contemporary local sources reveal that forces and conditions in Singapore played a decisive part in shaping the stand and modus operandi adopted by Singapore Chinese at the outbreak of the 1937 Sino-Japanese War.

Since the end of the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste in 1999, a significant revival of local cultures and identities in public life has been occurring. In this article I discuss aspects of identity and culture among Fataluku-speaking people in relation to the recent establishment of the Nino Conis Santana National Park over much of their homeland. Today Fataluku cultural and historical stories provide a basis for their status as an autonomous and sovereign cultural group, as well as a legacy of intercultural negotiation and alliance that arguably reflects regional patterns of migration and social change over thousands of years. With the park's 15,000 residents continuing to rely on its forests and reefs for subsistence, recent restrictions on hunting have highlighted the need for increased local community support if the park is to achieve its conservation aims. I argue that long-standing traditions surrounding the negotiation of social and political change within Fataluku society provide a potential basis for cooperation with the new nation–state and for developing community-oriented park management policies.

About the middle of the thirteenth century the great Arab scholar, Ibn Sa'id, compiled his Bast al-Ard or Geography, in which he collected many ancient texts; amongst them is the following, which may offer a clue to the early history of Brunei:

[The Khmers] lived with the Chinese in the eastern regions of the earth. Discord having broken out amongst them, the Chinese chased them towards the islands, and they remained there a certain time. The name of the King was Kamrun. Following this, discord broke out amongst them when they were in the islands, of which we shall speak later. Then those who did not form part of the Royal Family went away to the great island [Madagascar], and their Sultan dwelt in the city of Komorriya.

“If you want to write a real Burmese story”, U Nu once told an audience of Burmese writers, you “must know the real Burmese background”. It is advice that applies to foreign as well as indigenous writers and, in most cases, non-Burmese writers have followed it. The recommendation is important because fiction provides a popular entryway for the “average” reader to reach beyond his normal range of knowledge and imagination; it is more likely that he will have read a novel or short story rather than a history or a scholarly work and it is from this source that he will have formed his ideas and adopted his stereotypes. Thus, it is necessary that the available literature is good, that it is accurate in its descriptions of the locale and the behaviour of the people, that it catches the nuance of local speech and expression, that it reflects the psychology of the subjects when it discusses them rather than imputing alien speech, values, and attitudes.

In 1690, the previously sympathetic Nguyễn ruler of Cochinchina (located in south-central modern Vietnam) prohibited Christian religious practice in his state. Uniquely in the history of Catholicism in early modern Vietnam, however, the ban did not lead to a persecution of believers. The following article, based extensively on archival materials from the Missions-Étrangères of Paris, historicises this event and the steps leading up to it in 1688–89. It argues that to understand what was happening on the ground in Cochinchina, and why, we need to analyse the way global and regional factors intersected with local, and even personal, ones to cause a prohibition of Christian practice in early 1690, an event for which internal Catholic dissention was almost entirely responsible.

The purpose of the present essay is not to present a history of Philippine archaeology; several preliminary attempts have been made in this regard which may be consulted. Rather, the aim of this paper is to pause for a moment and look across the landscape of Philippine archaeology to assess what has been accomplished to date, to ponder strength and weaknesses of the field at this time, and to consider future directions. Nevertheless, the shape of any landscape is the result of historical events and processes that need to be taken into account if we want to understand its present form and assess its future potential and development. Thus, it will be necessary to include in the following thoughts historical perspectives which will help to explain how and why certain concepts, methods and research practices arose in the context of Philippine archaeology and came to determine our picture of Philippine prehistory.

The People's Action Party, or the PAP as it is more commonly known, carries the unique distinction of being the first Southeast Asian political party to control all the seats of the legislature through free elections. Since the general elections of April 1968, when the PAP won all the 58 seats (51 of which were uncontested) Singapore has had a one-party Parliament. Yet when the Party was inaugurated in 1954 its policies were criticised by a local paper as being “nicely calculated to attract the unthinking, a feast of promise with little regard to facts”.

This article considers the intricate entanglements of ritual, history and power by focusing on the recent rejuvenation of ritual practices pertaining to former kings as enacted in contemporary Huế, the former imperial capital of Việt Nam (1802–1945). It examines how the Nguyễn monarchs, who were previously repudiated by the early socialist regime, have been ritually reinstated as extraordinary ancestral figures and acknowledged as potent spirits to whom many turn for blessings. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material, the article traces changes in the locals' ritual engagements with the royal dead and pays attention to fluctuations in the posthumous fate of the Nguyễn royalty while highlighting the city's transformation from imperial capital to a tourist marketplace via the horrors of the battlefield.