During the reign of Sultan Ala'uddin (r. 1593–1639), the Makassarese of Gowa and Talloq initiated a new form of historical writing known as lontaraq bilang. This article argues that this genre represents an Islamic form of historical writing that simultaneously integrated distant places and events within the structure of Makassarese history and Makassarese people and practices within the umma and the structure of Islamic history. Examining this islamisation of history writing yields new insight into premodern Makassarese notions of empire, social change, and religious identity. Lontaraq bilang are an important source of insight into how Makassarese grappled with what it meant to be Muslim and how processes of islamisation were transforming (or should ideally transform) their society.

The study presents a relational database of words referring to material items and institutional processes in over 700 Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian inscriptions, from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries CE. The lexical items within the database have been spatially and temporally referenced, and a geographic information system (GIS) is used to show trends and anomalies over time and space in the distributions of temple sites; key items and materials; and the roles of the rulers, the founders, the donors and temple workers. The current study identifies changes in the socio-economic institutions and relationships within Khmer society through the Pre-Angkorian and into the Angkorian period in Cambodia.

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 that by 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.

Female slaves in VOC-controlled Southeast Asia did not fare well under a legal code which erected a firm partition between free and slave status. This codification imposed a rigid dichotomy for what had been fluid, abstract conceptions of social hierarchy, in effect silting up the flow of underclass mobility. At the same time, conventional relationships between master and slave shifted in the context of a changing economic climate. This article closely narrates the lives of several eighteenth-century female slaves who, left with increasingly fewer options in this new order, resorted to running away.

This article argues for a reassessment of the history of the Singhasari period based on disambiguating diverse historical sources that have often been combined to produce a seamless narrative, when in fact the textual record is marked by conflict, contradiction and ambiguity. The author proposes a basic division between the perspective of kakawin literature, which represents the interests of royal and priestly actors with a large stake in maintaining a fixed symbolic order, and literature in Middle Javanese, which reflects the more personal values that arose among young royals competing for favourable position in the core-line status hierarchy. The author further claims that symbolic initiatives of Krtanagara (1265–92 CE) that led to his identification as ‘the god Shiva-Buddha’ were not aimed at producing a syncretic religious system, but rather a politico-religious hegemony that had profound effects on the shape of statecraft during the Majapahit era.

Since the inauguration in 1986 of the reforms known as Đổi Mới, ritual and religious practices have proliferated in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This renewed interest in religious and ritual practice has been the object of intensive scholarly interest both in Vietnam and outside, and has been interpreted in terms of revival (phục hồi), invention and politics of tradition. This collection of articles deals with this phenomenon of ritual revival in Vietnam as well but attempts to go beyond the – by now common – approaches that connect it with the emerging religious practice and political liberalisation, economic reform and the emerging market in the context of Đổi Mới. Instead, these papers explore in more depth the ritual dimensions of life from the central state down to the individual level.

By utilising a large number of historical and literary sources in Chinese and European languages, this article discusses the spread of Burmese bells (penis inserts) to China between the late sixteenth and early twenty-first centuries, a topic that has hitherto been understudied. It details the social factors behind each phase of transmission, the Chinese adaptation of a Southeast Asian practice, and physical description of Burmese bells. The research provides a new perspective to Southeast Asian–Chinese interactions and stresses the Southeast Asian cultural influence on Chinese society and sexual behaviour. It also argues that aphrodisiacs, like other commodities, have a legitimate place in Asian history.

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.

A biography of Prince Phetsarath highlights how a specific idea about Laos and its culture was formed under French colonial rule and nurtured under the Japanese occupation and its aftermath. During these periods, Phetsarath's understanding of Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism. While ultimately a study of failure, Phetsarath's activities show that anticolonial nationalism did not always have to be linked to Communist movements to be ‘revolutionary’, and suggests the importance of taking into account non-revolutionary and non-Communist actors – even members of royal blood – in order to better understand the complexity that went into the making of modern postcolonial states.

This article explores ‘ancestor worship’ from the viewpoint of villagers in the Red River Delta, as a meaningful practice reverberating across spiritual, social and moral realms. I describe two cases of what is locally termed ‘remembering the moral debt to our grandparents’. The first case involves the personal interactions of an older unmarried woman with her deceased parents, while the second focuses on the re-incorporation of a prominent local lineage organisation. I then analyse how war, revolution and reform have shaped the way villagers ‘remember the debt’ at home and in lineage halls.

Tai Lue and Lua people are struggling to maintain access to resources in a northern Thai national park. Contrasting outcomes for Tai Lue and Lua relations with the park can largely be explained by political, economic and discursive structures and the interests, attitudes and actions they promote. In particular, the racialisation of resource use constrains the ability of minority upland groups like the Lua to secure recognition and legitimacy for their resource use practices.

Ever since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

Since the 1990s, the Temple of the Lady of the Treasury of Bắc Ninh province has become a religious destination for local people as well as thousands of pilgrims from around the country. The resurgence of this cult is one of the most visible manifestations of the Đổi Mới (Renovation) revival of religious practices after decades of discouragement and suppression. It also illustrates some of the profound socio-economic changes that have taken place since the advent of Đổi Mới in 1986.

In 1925, Alexander Paterson, a Commissioner for Prisons in England and Wales, arrived in Rangoon to advise the local government on gaol conditions in Burma. This paper explores why the Burma prison administration invited Paterson, examines his findings and proposals – that included the suggestion that no convict should spend more than two years in gaol – and considers the fate of his recommendations. Paterson's visit and views are set in the social and political contexts of British rule in Burma at that time.

By embodying the paradoxes found in three webs of signification – panaad (devotional promise), sacred camp and carnivalesque during the Ati-atihan festival – Augusto Diangson, an individual of the ‘third sex’, was able to claim membership in the Roman Catholic community of Kalibo, Aklan in the Central Philippines while also negotiating the Church's institution of heterosexuality. The narratives of mischief and the gender ambiguity of the Santo Niño or the Holy Child Jesus, the centre of Ati-atihan's religious veneration, further enabled Diangson to interact with Kalibo's Roman Catholicism. Through an analysis of Diangson and his participation in the festival, this article exposes how ordinary individuals in extraordinary events localise their faith through cross-dressing and dance performance. Seen throughout the Philippines, these processes of mimicry and gender transformation transport individuals into zones of ambivalence and contradictions in which they are able to navigate through the homogenising discourse of their culture and the Church's homogenising myth of Roman Catholicism.

This article examines the changing dynamics of ritual engagements with the ‘exceptional dead’ in northern Vietnam. Since its inception, the socialist state has attempted to control which exceptional dead its citizenry can ritually engage in order to advance revolutionary goals. Although it was successful in this effort for several decades, since the early 1990s both the state and the population have begun ritually engaging a wider number of exceptional dead. This article examines the implications of this change with regard to political legitimation, access to sacred space and the changing role of the exceptional dead in people's lives.

Ayu Utami's Saman, published in May 1998, describes female sexuality openly, a factor which has caused some controversy in Indonesia. Several critics have applauded the explicit descriptions of sexuality in this novel, claiming they are a means of ‘talking back’ and/or challenging patriarchal authorities in Indonesia. In contrast, some senior and well-known Indonesian writers have alleged that the novel is an example of the increasing Westernisation of their culture. The contemporary debate regarding depictions of sexuality in Saman, however, has failed to appreciate the complex post-colonial situation of the novel.

This study offers an approach about the nature of peasants and the reasons for their political actions. It examines the views of different parties towards the question on how land should be owned, managed, used, by whom, for whose benefits, and uncovers as well as explains the resulting conflicts over land rights in the Red River Delta since decollectivisation. It postulates that the contending views among parties over decision-making, distribution, and holding of land rights, create dynamics for conflicts, which take place under the form of public resistance, in a number of communities.

This article will examine the motivations for being spirit mediums, practitioners of the lên đồng rituals associated with the Mother Goddess (Đạo Mẫu) religion, which is unique to the ethnic Vietnamese. Drawing on the life stories of mediums interviewed in northern Vietnam, I will show that these people practise the rituals primarily because they themselves view this role as their destiny and because they expect it to bring them good health and auspiciousness.

Cambodia is now in the midst of reconstruction after decades of organised violence and socio-cultural disruption. This paper explores how rural Cambodians are trying to recreate order in their local worlds and it questions what impact the recent deluge of consumer values, delivered through a post-socialist political filter, is having on these efforts.