New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) is a rewarding, multilayered study of how Thailand became the Kingdom of Crime, and its police, masters of simulation and representation. While working towards an account of the visual culture of criminality, Samson Lim carefully documents the establishment and growth of the police force i...

In his recent monograph, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2015), Erik W. Davis explores funerary ritual in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism and the way in which Buddhist monks manage death such that its negative power is harnessed and used for the reproduction of morality and of a particular social reality. The book is organized around two themes, wh...

Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) begins with two related puzzles: why does Vietnam simultaneously plant and cut trees at unprecedented rates; and, if reforestation projects that clear native species and mono-crop Australian exotics do not protect habitat, what do they aim to achieve? To answer these questions, Pamela McElwee p...

In Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (SUNY Press, 2016; in paperback from 2017), Patrick Jory offers a compelling reinterpretation of religious text as political theory. The Vessantara Jataka is one of the most historically significant stories of Gautama Buddha’s previous births. Rather than reading the jataka as religious narrative or folktale, J...

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2016) is a book about Indonesian youth activism both before 1998 and after. But it is no ordinary chronological study, a story told in halves with Soeharto’s end days in its interval. Rather, following a cue from her interlocutors, Doreen Lee enfolds the past into the present by attending to how urban acti...

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – th...

In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences contributed to the making of the Philippines. While attending to the political concerns that drive Edward Said’s critique of orientalism, Thomas correct...

A lot has been going on in Myanmar in the last few years, and even people who are deeply familiar with the country have had trouble following and interpreting the many changes. Fortunately, Marie Lall’s new book, Understanding Reform in Myanmar: People and Society in the Wake of Military Rule (Hurst, 2016), brings the close attention to events of someone who has been intimately involved in efforts...

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, Creak draws on rarely accessed archival material to tell a fascinating and nuanc...

Working against the tendency to conflate the analytic categories “rule of law,” and “law and order,” Nick Cheesman’s Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge University Press, 2015) makes a significant two-fold contribution, one as “the first serious attempt for half a century to situate Myanmar’s courts in its politics;” and the other, that rather than reproduc...

Eric Tang’s book, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an intimate ethnography of a single person, Ra Pronh, a fifty year old survivor of the Cambodian genocide, who afterwards spent nearly six years in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before moving to the Northwest Bronx in 1986. Through Ra’s story, Tang re-conceives of the refugee...

The relationship between religion, imperialism, and national identity can be quite complex. At the same time, nationalist readings of history, particularly when they are combined with other ideological perspectives, can easily provide reductionist narratives that do not due full justice to these complicated realities. The history of Catholicism in Vietnam is a case in point, as nationalist and Com...

In her recent monograph, Thailand’s International Meditation Centers: Tourism and the Global Commodification of Religious Practices (Routledge, 2015), Brooke Schedneck examines Buddhist meditation centers in Thailand and draws our attention to the way in which these institutions have creatively (though not always intentionally) altered Buddhist meditation and the meditation retreat format so as to...

Mary M. Steedly‘s book, Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence, is “one of a kind and will continue to be so,” writes Benedict Anderson. This is high praise from one of the greats of Southeast Asian studies. A reading of Rifle Reports reveals why it is praise that is so well deserved. Steedly deftly weaves the stories of Indonesian independence told to her on “the outskirts of the natio...

Labour consciousness is not just class-based; it also emerges out of cultural identities, as Tran Ngoc Angie argues powerfully in Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2013). Vietnamese workers habitually form relationships based on native place, ethnicity, religion and gender. At critical class moments, as Tran calls them, these...

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detail...

In Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) Khairudin Aljunied tells a neglected story of anticolonial politics in Malaya from the late 1800s to the Emergency. Whereas other scholars working from imperial archives have downplayed the role of radicalism in nationalist resistance and the struggle for Malayan independence, Khairudin “seeks to resc...

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis....

In The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation(University of Hawaii Press, 2015), Shane Strate tracks the movements of two competing narratives of national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century Siam, subsequently Thailand. Against the dominant narrative of royal nationalism, he shows how in moments of crisis another narrative of national humiliation functions to bond ci...

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), is almost impossibly vast in scale and ambitious in scope, ranging across familiar territory while drawing out major new themes in...

When a revolutionary party aims to take administrative control of the countryside, what kinds of devices, training and documents does it use? And what are their consequences? In The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Ken MacLean explains that confounded by its inability to get a clear reading of its own practices,...

Researching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants “experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way”, yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond ess...

“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015) is a powerful and multilayered book that upbraids overseas Chinese studies for their neglect of class. Bringing class struggle and identity firmly to the centre of his analysis, Donald Nonini argues that scholars of the overseas Chinese have not accounted for class and its role in state formation ade...

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitt...

Policymakers around the world design projects in which the demands of citizens for basic services are cast as a problem of poverty. Villagers are expected to prove their worthiness for charitable projects and participate with gratitude in schemes for their gradual improvement. When projects fail, the recipients get blamed for being corrupt, ignorant, or disinterested in their own welfare. In Field...