CSEAS: Weekly Annoucement

Vietnam's Long March from War to Development: Turning Great Power Invaders to Investors
by Tenepalli Hari
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Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights
by Amity Doolittle

In 1990, shortly after a Malaysian politician announced that the boundaries of Kinabalu Park, a primary tourist destination, were to be expanded to include the species-rich tropical forest known as Buka Hempuen, most of the area was burned to the ground, allegedly by local people. What would motivate the people who had for generations hunted and gathered forest products there to act so destructively? In this volume, the author illuminates this and other contemporary land-use issues by examining how resources were used historically in Sabah from 1881 to 1996 and what customary rights of access to land and resources were enjoyed by local people.

Militant Islam in Southeast Asia
by Zachary Abuza

Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand
by S.J. Tambiah

This book describes the religious practices and beliefs of the people of a remote village in north-east Thailand, relating them to the wider context of the civilization in which they are embedded, and examining the relationship of the of the religious practices of the villagers to the classical Buddhist tradition. Because they have based their studies on the Sanskrit and Pali literature, Western observers have tended to dismiss much of the popular manifestation of Buddhism as debased. The author demonstrates that this judgement is misleading, and emphasizes that the contemporary village religion that he describes manifests continuities as well as transformations with respect to the classical literary tradition. The village religion is described primarily through ritual.

World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background
by S.J. Tambiah

This is the first comprehensive and authoritative work on the relationship between Buddhism and the polity (political organization) in Thailand. The book conveys the historical background necessary for full comprehension of the contemporary structural relationship between Buddhism, the sangha (monastic order), and the polity, including the historic institution of kingship. The author delineates the overall relationship, as postulated in early Buddhism, between the monk's otherworldly quest on one side and the this-worldly ordinating role of the monarchy on the other. He also examines the complementary and dialectical tensions that occur in this classical relationship, the king's duty to both protect and purify the sangha being a notable example.

Asian Voices in a Post-Colonial Age: Vietnam, India and Beyond
by Susan Bayly

This study of intellectuals and their cosmopolitan life trajectories is based on anthropological and historical research in Vietnam and India, two great Asian societies with contrasting experiences of empire, decolonization and the rise and fall of the twentieth-century socialist world system. The author explores the role of the intellectual in the economic, social and cultural transformation of the post-colonial world through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork methods.

The Tai Race: Elder Brother of the Chinese
by Wililam Clifton Dodd

The account of Dodd's explorations in the southern part of China, Laos and the northern part of Vietnam is of interest from an ethnographic point of view. The book contains details of the whereabouts, habits, customs, as well as a smattering of the linguistic heritage of a variety of ethnic minorities, some of them here for the first time clearly identified in a printed work.

Global Indonesia
by Jean Gelman Taylor

For hundreds and hundreds of years, Indonesia has been a crucial part of the global trading system, connected to both Asian and European empires. Its far-flung geography and highly differentiated population groups have made it uniquely susceptible to foreign influences that drew it into the capitalist world system that began to emerge in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, the importance today can hardly be exaggerated. It was the primary generator of the 'Asian fly' that laid low economies across East Asia in the late 1990s, and it has now become a center of Islamist politics and social movements (as well as terrorism).

For more information, email asiabook@gil.com.au