by Tilman Baumgärtel
Hong Kong University Press, 2012

The rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, following the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers there, is among the most significant recent developments in global cinema. The advent of affordable and easy access to digital technology has empowered startling new voices from a part of the world rarely heard or seen in international film circles. The appearance of fresh, sharply alternative, and often very personal voices has had a tremendous impact on local film production. This book documents these developments as a genuine outcome of the democratization and liberalization of film production. Contributions from respected scholars, interviews with filmmakers, personal accounts and primary sources by important directors and screenwriters collectively provide readers with a lively account of dynamic film developments in Southeast Asia.

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edited by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay
Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2011

Since the late 1990s, a vivid new sphere of cinematic practice in Southeast Asia has emerged and been identified as independent. What exactly does this term mean in relation to the way films and videos are made, and the way they look? How do issues of festival circulation, piracy, technology, state and institutional power, and spectatorship apply to practices of independent cinema throughout the diverse region? The authors who speak in this volume—contemporary filmmakers, critics, curators, festival organizers—answer these questions. They describe and analyze the emerging field of Southeast Asian cinema, which they know firsthand and have helped create and foster.

Glimpses of Freedom is the outcome of a project collaboratively conceived by a new generation of scholars of cinema in Southeast Asia, inspired by the growing domestic and international visibility of notable films and videos from the region. Contributors include internationally esteemed independent filmmakers, critics, and curators based in Southeast Asia, such as Hassan Abd Muthalib, Alexis A. Tioseco, Chris Chong Chan Fui, and John Torres. International scholars such as Benedict Anderson, Benjamin McKay, May Adadol Ingawanij, and Gaik Cheng Khoo contextualize and theorize Southeast Asia’s “independent film cultures.” The interaction between practitioners and critics in this volume illuminates a contemporary artistic field, clarifying its particular character and its vital contributions to cinema worldwide.

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edited by David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto (Editor)

Routledge, 2011

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through cultural interpretation, and how film also serves as a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge, or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses as much on films as it does on the societies from which these films emerge: it considers the reasons for film-makers taking the positions they take; the positions and counter-positions taken; the response of different communities; and the extent to which these interventions are connected to global flows of culture and capital.

The wide range of subjects covered include documentaries as political interventions in Singapore; political film-makers’ collectives in the Philippines, and films about prostitution in Cambodia and patriotism in Malaysia, and the Chinese in Indonesia. The book analyses films from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, across a broad range of productions – such as mainstream and independent features across genres (for example comedy, patriotic, political, historical genres) alongside documentary, classic and diasporic films.

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by Jose B. Capino
University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Philippine cinema, the dream factory of the former U.S. colony, teems with American figures and plots. Local movies feature GIs seeking Filipina brides, cold war spies hunting down native warlords, and American-born Filipinos wandering in the parental homeland. The American landscape furnishes the settings for the triumphs and tragedies of Filipino nurses, GI babies, and migrant workers.

By tracking American fantasies in Philippine movies from the postindependence period to the present, José B. Capino offers an innovative account of cinema’s cultural work in decolonization and globalization. Capino examines how a third world nation’s daydreams both articulate empire and mobilize against it, provide imaginary maps and fables of identity for its migrant workers and diasporan subjects, pose challenges to the alibis of patriarchy and nationalism, and open up paths for participating in the cultures of globality.

Through close readings of more than twenty Philippine movies, Capino demonstrates the postcolonial imagination’s vital role in generating pragmatic and utopian visions of living with empire. Illuminating an important but understudied cinema, he creates a model for understanding the U.S. image in the third world.

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by Ben Murtagh
Routledge, 2013

Indonesia has a long and rich tradition of homosexual and transgender cultures, and the past 40 years in particular has seen an increased visibility of sexual minorities in the country, which has been reflected through film and popular culture. This book examines how representations of gay, lesbian and transgender individuals and communities have developed in Indonesian cinema during this period. The book first explores Indonesian engagement with waria (male-to-female transgender) identities and the emerging representation of gay and lesbi Indonesians during Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-98), before going on to the reimagining of these positions following the fall of the New Order, a period which saw the rebirth of the film industry with a new generation of directors, producers and actors. Using original interview research and focus groups with gay, lesbi and waria identified Indonesians, alongside the films themselves and a wealth of archival sources, the book contrasts the ways in which transgendered lives are actually lived with their representations on screen.

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by L. Ayu Saraswati
UH Press, 2013

In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.

The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

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by Catherine Allerton
UH Press, 2013

The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways “lively,” re-traveling routes between houses and villages and highlighting the advantages of mobility. Through everyday and ritual activities that emphasize “liveliness,” the land gains a further potency: the power to evoke memories of birth, death, and marriage, to influence human health and fertility.

Potent Landscapes is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behavior, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates Manggarai place-making and mobility within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism.

Written in a clear and accessible style, Potent Landscapes will appeal to students and specialists of Southeast Asia as well as to those interested in the comparative anthropological study of place and environment. The analysis moves out from rooms and houses in a series of concentric circles, outlining at each successive point the broader implications of Manggarai place- and path-making. This gradual expansion of scale allows the work to build a subtle, cumulative picture of the potent landscapes within which Manggarai people raise families, forge alliances, plant crops, build houses, and engage with local state actors. Landscapes are significant, the author argues, not only as sacred or mythic realms, or as contexts for the imposition of colonial space; they are also significant as vernacular contexts shaped by daily practices. The book analyzes the power of a collective landscape shaped both by the Indonesian state’s development policies and by responses to religious change.

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by Eve Monique Zucker
UH Press, 2013

In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998.

Anthropologist Eve Zucker’s ethnographic fieldwork (2001–2003, 2010) uncovers the experiences of the people of O’Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. She examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O’Thmaa with villages in a neighboring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. Zucker argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers’ responses to changes in recent years.

More positively, Zucker persuasively illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation. This point is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Forest of Struggle offers a compelling case study that is relevant to anyone interested in post-conflict recovery, social memory, the anthropology of morality and violence, and Cambodia studies.

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by Sverre Molland
UH Press, 2012

For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? This provocative new book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organizations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce.

Author Sverre Molland provides an insider’s view of recruitment and sex commerce gleaned from countless conversations and interviews in bars and brothels—a view that complicates popular stereotypes of women forced or duped into prostitution by organized crime. Molland’s fine-grained ethnography shows a much more varied picture of friends recruiting friends, and families helping relatives. A recruiter rationalizes her act as a benefit or favor to a village friend; relationships between prostitutes and bar owners are cloaked in kin terms and familial metaphors. Sex work in the Mekong region follows patron-client cultural scripts about mutual help and obligation, which makes distinguishing the victims from the traffickers difficult. Molland’s research illuminates the methods and motivations of recruiters as well as the economic incentives and predicaments of victims.

The Perfect Business? is the first book to go beyond the usual focus on migrants and sex commerce to explore the institutional context of anti-trafficking. Its author, himself a former advisor for a United Nations anti-trafficking project, raises crucial questions about how an increasingly globalized development aid sector responds to what might more accurately be described as an extraterritorial development challenge of human mobility. His book will offer insights to students and scholars in anthropology, gender studies, and human geography, as well as anyone interested in one of the most controversial issues of development policy.

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by Sarinda Singh
UH Press, 2012

Forests, as physical entities, have received considerable scholarly attention in political studies of Asia and beyond. Much less notice has been paid to the significance of forests as symbols that enable commentary on identity, aspirations, and authority. Natural Potency and Political Power, an innovative exploration of the social and political importance of forests in contemporary Laos, challenges common views of the rural countryside as isolated and disconnected from national social debates and politics under an authoritarian regime. It offers instead a novel understanding of local perspectives under authoritarianism, demonstrating that Lao people make implicit political statements in their commentary on forests and wildlife; and showing that, in addition to being vital material resources, forests (and their natural potency) are linked in the minds of many Lao to the social and political power of the state.

Sarinda Singh explores the intertwining of symbolic and material concerns in local debates over conservation and development, the popularity of wildlife consumption, the particular importance of elephants, and forest loss and mismanagement. In doing so, she draws on ethnographic fieldwork around Vientiane, the capital, and Nakai, site of the contentious Nam Theun 2 hydropower project—places that are broadly reflective of the divide between urban prosperity and rural poverty. Nam Theun 2, supported by the World Bank, highlights the local, regional, and global dynamics that influence discussions of forest resources in Laos. Government officials, rural villagers, and foreign consultants all contribute to competing ideas about forests and wildlife.

Singh advances research on forest politics by rethinking how ideas about nature influence social life. Her work refutes the tendency to see modern social life as independent of historical influences, and her attention to viewpoints both inside and outside the state prompts an understanding of authoritarian regimes as not only sources of repression, but also sites of negotiation, engagement, and debate about the legitimacy of social inequalities.

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by Catherine Diamond
University of Hawai’i Press, 2012

Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, in this wide-ranging look at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, Catherine Diamond shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. Diamond examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works, with their interconnected styles, stories, and ideas, are being presented for local audiences. She not only places performances in their historical and cultural contexts but also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious movements of the last two decades.

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by Maung Khe Sein
Orchid Press, 2006

This is an exploration of the life of Po Sein, the “father of Burmese theatre”, consummate performer, innovator, romantic and lover. His story is also the history of the development of Burmese performing arts during the 20th century.

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by Michael Bodden
Ohio University Press, 2008

Resistance on the National Stage analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater practitioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto. It examines the work of an array of theater groups and networks from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta that pioneered new forms of theater-making and new themes that were often presented more directly and critically than previous groups had dared to do.

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by Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen
Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2010

Mutual borrowing, fluid transactions and transformations of performances and performers have a long and enduring history in Southeast Asia, but this trend has been heightened and made more vivid in the contemporary period. The omnipresence of global communications has provoked and inspired yet more novel experiments and collaborations between cosmopolitan artists and globally-oriented performers. This volume offers vital insights into recent developments in Southeast Asian performance. It demonstrates the ways in which contemporary artists and performers are increasingly working betwixt the traditional boundaries of the nation and discourses of identity. The essays collected here are testament to ongoing conversations and relations among scholars, practitioners and scholar-practitioners in Southeast Asia and around the world.

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by Matthew Isaac Cohen
Ohio University Press, 2006

Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights, European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories. The actors were primarily Eurasians, the original backers were Chinese, and audiences were made up of all races and classes. The Komedie Stamboel explores how this new hybrid theater pointed toward possibilities for the transformation of self in a colonial society and sparked debates on moral behavior and mixed-race politics. While audiences marveled at spectacles involving white-skinned actors, there were also racial frictions between actors and financiers, sexual scandals, fights among actors and patrons, bankruptcies, imprisonments, and a murder. Matthew Isaac Cohen’s evocative social history situates the Komedie Stamboel in the culture of empire and in late nineteenth-century itinerant entertainment. He shows how the theater was used as a symbol of cross-ethnic integration in postcolonial Indonesia and as an emblem of Eurasian cultural accomplishment by Indische Nederlanders. A pioneering study of nineteenth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, The Komedie Stamboel gives a new picture of the region’s arts and culture and explores the interplay of currents in global culture, theatrical innovation, and movement in colonial Indonesia.

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by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Penguin Books, 2005

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s transcendent novels have become part of the world literary canon, but it is his short fiction that originally made him famous. The first full-size collection of his short stories to appear in English, All That Is Gone draws from the author’s own experiences in Indonesia to depict characters trying to make sense of a war-torn culture haunted by colonialism, among them an eight-year-old girl soon to be married off by her parents for money and an idealistic young soldier who witnesses the savage beating of a man accused of being a spy. Though violence and brutality pervade these tales, there is present throughout a profound sense of compassion—an extraordinary combination of despair and hope that gives All That Is Gone rare power and beauty.

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by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Hyperion, 2003

The Girl from the Coast tells the story of a beautiful young woman from a fishing village who finds herself in an arranged marriage with a wealthy aristocrat. Forced to leave her parents and home behind, she moves to the city to become the ‘lady’ of her husband’s house. Pramoedya’s breathtaking literary skill is evident in every word of this book, one of his classic works of fiction made especially poignant because it is based on the life of his own grandmother.

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by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Penguin, 2006

Pramoedya Ananta Toer is Indonesia’s most celebrated writer, with over thirty works of fiction translated into over thirty languages, and the recipient of many major international awards, including the grand prize in the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize competition, Japan’s highest literary honor. Narrated in the first person in Pramoedya’s signature style, It’s Not an All Night Fair tells the deeply affecting story of a son returning home to central Java to confront the fact of his father’s death. Struggling to understand his reticent father, the son embarks on a personal quest to find value and meaning not only in his father’s life but also in his own.

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by André Vltchek, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Nagesh Rao (Editor), Rossie Indira (Contributor)
Haymarket Books, 2006

In these remarkable interviews with André Vltchek and Rossie Indira, edited by Nagesh Rao, Indonesia’s most celebrated writer speaks out against tyranny and injustice in a young and troubled nation. Toer here discusses personal and political topics he could never before address in public.

Toer is best known for his novels comprising the Buru Quartet. The New York Times described his autobiography as a “haunting record of a great writer’s attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive under terrible conditions.”

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by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Select Publishing, 2008

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) was undoubtedly Indonesia’s most significant novelist and writer. After the 1960 publication of this book, now translated for the first time, Pramoedya spent some 20 years in prison often in appalling conditions. The book sets out in the form of nine letters much of the author’s humanist and deeply anti-racialist philosophy as it discusses the history and needs of Indonesia’s large and long-established Chinese population who were facing increasing official discrimination. These essays on the author and his works are by internationally recognised specialists in Indonesian history and literature.

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edited by Kennon Breazeale
Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1999

“This truly impressive volume has stood the test of time and relevance as scholars and others alike continue to discuss the transnational maritime connections across Asia. One of the major accomplishments of this volume, however, is that rather than place the focus of the narrative on the rise of the European trading companies in the region during the Early Modern period, readers are rather encouraged to refocus on the rise of Ayutthaya as “one of the most powerful polities in this part of the world.” (Preface) The volume bears relevance to scholars of Thailand and Southeast Asia alone as it neatly traces the development of the second major Thai state, or rather state-like polity (after Sukhothai), in the region during its four hundred and sixteen year long apogee from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, through an assertion of the evidence mounted in this volume it is possible to assert that Ayutthaya bears not only regional but also global significance as the well protected hinterland location of this up-river polity provided a comfortable location of exchange between the Oceanic networks stretching from the Mediterranean through the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the straights of Melaka outward to the Vietnamese Coast, the South China Sea and Eastern Asia.”

From a review by William Noseworthy

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by Michael Smithies
Silkworm Books, 2000

This long-forgotten tale of the shipwreck off the coast of Africa of a Siamese embassy to Lisbon in 1686 lay buried in the text of a French book printed 300 years ago. The author of the text was the intrepid and intriguing Jesuit Tachard, who published accounts of his first two journeys to Siam. In his second book, written when he was King Narai’s personal envoy to Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI, Tachard relates the account of the shipwreck as told by one of its survivors, Ok-khun Chamnan Chaicong, who was accompanying Tachard on his return to France. Ok-khun Chamnan, during his odyssey as part of the aborted embassy to Portugal, spent nearly a year in Goa, where he learned Portuguese; a month traveling overland from Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope; four months at the Dutch settlement at the Cape; six months in Batavia; and several months at sea. On his return to Siam in 1687 he was ordered to greet the French envoys La Loubre and Szberet soon after their arrival. The adventures of this Siamese khunnang did not end with his unsuccessful journey to Lisbon. He went on to Europe in 1688, visited the Riviera and Rome in winter, met the pope, and then in 1689 had an audience with Louis XIV. He converted to Catholicism and returned from Europe in 1690, disembarking at Balassor in Bengal before returning to Ayutthaya overland from Mergui. This extraordinary account has been translated into English for the first time, and is accompanied by three contemporary texts by Choisy, Tachard, and La Loubre describing the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

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by Stefan Eklof
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2006

Southeast Asia contains some of the world’s busiest shipping waters, particularly the Indonesian archipelago, the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea. The natural geography and human ecology of maritime Southeast Asia makes the area particularly apt for piracy. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that these waters are also the world’s most pirate-infested, accounting for over a third of the total number of pirate attacks world-wide. The figures have increased in recent years, as transnationally organized crime syndicates have extended their activities in the area. Meanwhile, the capacity of the state authorities in the region to suppress piracy appears to have declined, fuelling suspicions that sections of the maritime authorities are colluding with some of the organized pirate gangs that they are supposed to be combating. Not surprisingly, piracy has a long history in the region, and in several instances during the last 250 years, pirates have disrupted peaceful trade and communications. This text traces the shifting character and development of Southeast Asian piracy from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how political, economic, social and technological factors have contributed to change – but have by no means exterminated – the phenomenon.

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by Kenneth R. Hall
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011

This comprehensive history provides a fresh interpretation of Southeast Asia from 100 to 1500, when major social and economic developments foundational to modern societies took place on the mainland (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and the island world (Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines). Kenneth Hall explores this dynamic era in detail, which was notable for growing external contacts, internal adaptations of nearby cultures, and progressions from hunter-gatherer and agricultural communities to inclusive hierarchical states. In the process, formerly local civilizations became major participants in period’s international trade networks.

Incorporating the latest archeological evidence and international scholarship, Kenneth Hall enlarges upon prior histories of early Southeast Asia that did not venture beyond 1400, extending the study of the region to the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511. Written for a wide audience of non-specialists, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in Asian and world history.

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by Shirley Fish
AuthorHouseUK, 2011

During the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the transpacific treasure galleons sailed annually from Manila to Acapulco. In Manila, the vessel was loaded with the scented spices of the East, luxurious silks from China, exquisite hand crafted lacquerware from Japan and a multitude of Oriental goods that the Spaniards of New Spain longed to own. The returning galleon from Acapulco to Manila, carried as much as 2.5 million silver pesos in payment of the goods sent to the New Spain in the previous year, as well as a yearly silver subsidy of 250,000 reales for the maintenance of the colonial government in the Philippines. But while the galleons mainly sailed alone and unaccompanied from Manila to Acapulco and vice versa, they were vulnerable to a host of calamities and misfortunes. A fire on board the vessel or a terrifying storm could end the voyage and the lives of every one on the ship even before the galleon was able to reach land. Additionally, the commanders of the galleons were always threatened by lurking pirates and privateers who preyed on the vessels and coveted the treasures they carried. The book describes in detail how the galleons were attacked at sea and how they fought against enemy vessels, as well as how many of the ships sank or were shipwrecked over the years. It also covers their management, construction, manning, weaponry, navigation, daily life on the ship, provisions, cargoes and voyages. The book contains an annotated list of the galleons sailing between the Philippines and Mexico from 1565 to 1815. This informative book is the first of its kind to cover such an expansive history of the Pacific galleons which up to this point had remained largely untold.

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Edited by Watson and Ellen
University of Hawaii Press, 1993

Witchcraft holds a perennial fascination for scholars and the public at large. In Southeast Asia malign magic and sorcery are part of the routine experience of villagers and urban dwellers alike, and stories appearing in the press from time to time bear witness to a persisting public concern. The essays presented in this volume describe what people believe and what actions result from those beliefs. Not surprisingly, given the range and variety of cultures, considerable differences exist in the region. Among some cultures, in Thailand and Indonesia for example, sorcerers are said to possess spirits that empower them to cause illness and misfortune. Elsewhere, in Malaysia and Sumatra, the power of the dukun derives from the accumulation of arcane knowledge and mystical practice. Contributors describe the witches and sorcerers they have met and suggest both how their societies look upon them and how we in turn should regard them. Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia will appeal to scholars and students of social anthropology and comparative religion. Its substantial contribution to theoretical and comparative issues in a Southeast Asian context provides a fresh perspective on a stimulating topic.

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by Alex G. Paman
Tuttle Publishing, 2011

Ghost stories are commonplace in traditional Filipino culture, with virtually every family having their own personal accounts of encounters with the supernatural. Passed on from generation to generation, these tales act as a bridge to the past, to a time lost or nearly forgotten.

Full of ghostly encounters with all manner of things eerie and terrifying in the Philippines, Filipino Ghost Stories is a collection of creepy tales that have been told in the author’s family for generations. The book delivers terrific entertainment—and some good chills—for those interested in the Philippines and aficionados of the supernatural alike.

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by Lansell Taudevin
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010

Malaysia is a country riddled with folklore of ghosts: hantu, pontianak, tigbanua, djinn and so on. There are hundreds. This books takes a light hearted look at some of the ghost stories that are popular in that country. read and believe – if you will!

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by Nigel Barley
Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd., 2010

Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies – ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter – transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies’ house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture. Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters that inhabited it.

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Edited by Fjelstad and Nguyen
Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2006

Essays examining the resurgence of the Mother Goddess religion among contemporary Vietnamese following the economic “Renovation” period in Vietnam. Anthropologists explore the forces that compel individuals to become mediums and the social repercussions of their decisions and interactions.

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by Lee Jones
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Drawing on the fields of political economy and historical sociology, Lee dispels the overwhelming consensus among scholars that members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) never interfere in the internal affairs of other states, and pioneers a new approach to the understanding of regional politics in Southeast Asia.

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by Lee Yoong Yoong
World Scientific Publishing Company, 2011

The initiative to establish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community was adopted by the ten leaders at the 2003 Bali Summit in Indonesia. Since then, the concept of a community-building process in ASEAN has become an issue that attracts a great deal of attention from scholars and experts around the world.

ASEAN Matters! Reflecting on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations carries essays with different perspectives on critical issues relating to the three pillars in building the ASEAN Community, namely the ASEAN Political and Security Community; the ASEAN Economic Community; and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. In a nutshell, this book provides broad and invaluable insights into the role ASEAN plays in enhancing peace, prosperity, and stability in the Southeast Asian region.

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Edited by Michael G. Plummer and Chia Siow Yue
Insitute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009

The ASEAN Economic Community constitutes the most ambitious programme of economic cooperation in the developing world. Its goal is to create no less than a free flow of goods, services, foreign direct investment, and skilled labour, as well as a freer flow of capital, throughout the region. Implementing this agenda will be technically and politically difficult. Hence, understanding the potential economic “payoff” is of the essence. The goal of this book is to assess empirically the likely economic effects of the AEC on the ASEAN Member States and associated stakeholders. It mobilizes a number of techniques to do so, and finds that the likely effects will be large, even greater than the anticipated effects of the Single Market Program in Europe, for example. The AEC will help the region improve competitiveness, facilitate the creation of production networks, foster the diffusion of “best practices,” and help ASEAN project its interests more effectively in an increasingly integrated, global economy.

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by Jurgen Haacke
Routledge, 2005

Examines the origins of ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture and goes on to assess whether it is likely to remain salient as the political, economic and security context in which regional leaderships operate is undergoing further change.

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by Amitav Acharya
Routledge, 2009 (2nd edition)

This second edition of Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia takes the excellent framework from Acharya’s first edition and brings it up-to-date, looking at ASEAN’s comprehensive and critical account of the evolution of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.

Key issues in determining the future stability of the Southeast Asian and Asia Pacific region are covered, including:

• intra-regional relations and the effect of membership expansion
• the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asian regionalism
• ASEAN’s response to terrorism and other transnational challenges
• debates over ASEAN’s non-interference doctrine
• the ‘ASEAN Security Community’ and the ASEAN Charter
• the impact of the rise of China and India and ASEAN’s relations with the US and Japan.

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by Marc Perlman
University of California Press, 2004

The gamelan music of Central Java is one of the world’s great orchestral traditions. Its rich sonic texture is not based on Western-style harmony or counterpoint, but revolves around a single melody. The nature of that melody, however, is puzzling. In this book, Marc Perlman uses this puzzle as a key to both the art of the gamelan and the nature of musical knowledge in general.

Some Javanese musicians have suggested that the gamelan’s central melody is inaudible, an implicit or “inner” melody. Yet even musicians who agree on its existence may disagree about its shape. Drawing on the insights of Java’s most respected musicians, Perlman shows how irregularities in the relationships between the melodic parts have suggested the existence of “unplayed melodies.” To clarify the differences between these implicit-melody concepts, Unplayed Melodies tells the stories behind their formulation, identifying each as the creative contribution of an individual musician in a postcolonial context (sometimes in response to Western ethnomusicological theories). But these stories also contain evidence of the general cognitive processes through which musicians find new ways to conceptualize their music. Perlman’s inquiry into these processes illuminates not only the gamelan’s polyphonic art, but also the very sources of creative thinking about music.

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by Margaret J. Kartomi
University of Rochester Press, 2002

This is the story of a particular Javanese group of ‘matching’ musical instruments called the gamelan Digul, and their creator, the Indonesian musician and political activist Pontjopangrawit (1893-ca. 1965). He was a superb Javanese court musician, who had entertained at the of king Paku Buwana X as a child. In this magnificent artistic environment he learned how to build gamelans, and also became a sought-after teacher. Involved in radical political activities, Pontjopangrawit was arrested in 1926 for his participation in the movement to free Indonesia from Dutch rule, and spent the next six years in the notorious Dutch East Indies prison camp at Boven Digul. Made in 1927 entirely from ‘found’ materials in the prison camp, including pans and eating utensils, the gamelan Digul became a symbol for the independence movement long after Pontjopangrawit’s own release in 1932. In the 1940s, it was transported to Australia, where the Dutch and their prisoners took refuge from the Japanese invaders. At first interned as enemy aliens by the Australian government, the ex-Digulists were finally released. Cultural activities within the Australian Indonesian community involving the gamelan Digul served to create sympathy and interest for Indonesia’s independence, which was granted in 1945. Tragically, Pontjopangrawit himself was later arrested by the Indonesian goverment during the 1965 revolution, and died in custody. This book’s musical and political discussions will interest all those concerned with Indonesian and Southeast Asian music, performing arts, history and culture as well as the beginnings of Australian-Indonesian friendship.

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by R. Anderson Sutton
Cambridge University Press, 2008

This book is a wide-ranging study of the varieties of gamelan music in contemporary Java seen from a regional perspective. While the focus of most studies of Javanese music has been limited to the court-derived music of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, Sutton goes beyond them to consider also gamelan music of Banyumas, Semarang and east Java as separate regional traditions with distinctive repertoires, styles and techniques of performance and conceptions about music. Sutton’s description of these traditions, illustrated with numerous musical examples in Javanese cipher notation, is based on extensive field experience in these areas and is informed by the criteria that Javanese musicians judge to be most important in distinguishing them.

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by Michael Tenzer
Tuttle Publishing, 2011

This authoritative book, newly revised and updated with an audio CD of recordings, presents an introduction to the basic types of Balinese gamelan ensembles, each with its own established tradition, repertoire and context. The instruments and basic principles underlying the music are introduced, providing listeners with the means to better appreciate the music. A portfolio of color photographs and a brief guide to studying and experiencing music in Bali will prove indispensable to visitors and gamelan aficionados around the world.

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by Michael Tenzer
University of Chicago Press, 2000

The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering tones, breathless pace, and compelling musical language, has long captivated musicians, composers, artists, and travelers. Here, Michael Tenzer offers a comprehensive and durable study of this sophisticated musical tradition, focusing on the preeminent twentieth-century genre, gamelan gong kebyar.

Combining the tools of the anthropologist, composer, music theorist, and performer, Tenzer moves fluidly between ethnography and technical discussions of musical composition and structure. In an approach as intricate as one might expect in studies of Western classical music, Tenzer’s rigorous application of music theory and analysis to a non-Western orchestral genre is wholly original. Illustrated throughout, the book also includes nearly 100 pages of musical transcription (in Western notation) that correlate with 55 separate tracks compiled on two accompanying compact discs.

The most ambitious work on gamelan since Colin McPhee’s classic Music in Bali, this book will interest musicians of all kinds and anyone interested in the art and culture of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Bali.

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