In modern Indonesia the demographic study of the population has become a major field of academic interest. The reason is obvious: the endeavour to develop the nation's economy in order to give every citizen a proper standard of living and to guarantee this in the future, bears a strong relation to the size of the population and the desire to stem the tide of excessive population growth. Demographic studies are only recent and the same is true for the statistical material with which these studies work: censuses at a national level and regular registrations of births, marriages and deaths at the basic local level. In Indonesia the first, still imperfect, censuses date from the final decades of the nineteenth century, while regular registration of births, deaths and marriages for the indigenous population has only taken place from the 1930s onwards.

In late May 1904 a small band of people led by a certain Kasan Mukmin, a kyai or rural religious teacher, mounted an uprising in the village of Kebonpasar in Gedangan district of Sidoarjo regency, East Java. It was a single incident in a series of protests involving small groups of affluent peasants in Java between 1880 and 1920 which are difficult to explain in terms of the “moral economy” perspective. J.C. Scott has suggested that increasing intrusion of market economic forces into the indigenous economic life in the process of capitalist economic transformation eroded the subsistence margin of peasants instigating them to mount uprisings. This view may well explain some major peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia, but as Mukmin's uprising illustrates, numerous small rural protests in Java after 1880 occurred in relatively prosperous areas and involved affluent peasants. They were not caused by violation of peasants' perception of moral economy.

The experiment with administrative decentralization in Indonesia started with a new law that was enacted in 1903. The European civil servants believed that this law would protect their position, and they did not foresee two processes that were to gradually undercut this very position. First, the citizens in the municipal councils seized the opportunity to acquire a real degree of autonomy. Secondly, the council became a platform where the Indonesian members voiced their grievances from the 1920s onwards. After the Dutch colonial era, and in particular during the Japanese period and the years of Guided Democracy, the municipalities lost most of their leeway for formulating an autonomous policy and devising budgets to the central government. Now, starting with Law 5 issued in 1973, the New Order government of Indonesia has again embarked on the path of administrative decentralization.

Religious conversion juxtaposes new beliefs and practices with previous ones, the relationship between the old and new often put in terms of substitution, superimposition, renaming, or rejection. Conversion in Anakalang, a district of West Sumba in the Indonesian Province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, differs from many of the situations of recent religious change in Southeast Asia in that it is not motivated primarily by the demands of creating a distinctive ethnic identity, differentiating status groups within a single society, or compelling personal visions. This paper focuses on some of the ramifications that religious change has for Anakalangese understandings of history and tradition. In contrast to many students of ethnicity and religion elsewhere in Southeast Asia, I would argue that in Sumba, at the present historical moment, identity formation and boundary maintenance do not serve as major motives and are not sufficient explanations for local historical responses to religious change. The need for an explicit “identity” may not be given requiring no further explanation, for it arises under specific historical and political circumstances.

In the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, that is Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and, to some extent, Vietnam, the articulation of secular and religious authority developed in historically particular ways. Scholars have explained these historical changes in terms of religious and political modes of constructing and negotiating power characteristic of the galactic polities of Southeast Asia and their Theravāda Buddhist tradition, such as state-saṇgha relations and the notion that one's position within the social hierarchy is perceived as a function of, and hence validated by, one's ability to engage in merit-making ritual exchange to support the Buddhist dispensation generally and the saṇgha in particular. Trevor Ling has argued that the differences created by country-specific developments in the social history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia are more significant than communalities found in the Pali scriptural tradition.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1970, when the first volume of the Journal of South-East Asian Studies made its appearance, I was living in a rather remote mountain village in Phrao district, northern Thailand, about to complete a four-year field project with the Lahu Nyi. I was one of close to a dozen social and cultural anthropologists, at various stages in their professional careers from Ph.D. candidates (such as myself) to seasoned professionals (like the late Bill Geddes), at work among Thailand's so-called “northern hill tribes”. The small expatriate community in the charming Chiang Mai of those days readily joked about “the anthropologist behind every bush in the northern hills”. In fact there were good reasons for this heavy concentration of anthropological research at that time. The 1960s were perhaps the halcyon days for social and cultural anthropology in the Western academy; naturally this happy situation was reflected in the numbers of doctoral candidates proceeding to the field. Moreover, within the mainland Southeast Asia of that time, only Thailand provided academic researchers with relatively easy and more-or-less safe access to its mountain peoples.

One of the most remarkable features of the past twenty years of scholarship on the Southeast Asian performing arts has been the sparking off of ideas between Southeast Asian-born scholars, whether trained in Southeast Asian universities or overseas, and Western scholars of the Southeast arts who live in North America, Australia, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In colonial Indonesia (until 1945) and Malaysia (until 1957), research agendas of Dutch and British scholars respectively had complied with the social, economic and political priorities of the colonial powers and associated local court-centred artistic interests, though not always consciously. In Thailand, which was the only country in the region not to be colonized by a European power, Thai scholars had been actively researching their own court performing arts in the late colonial era but were nevertheless influenced by the colonial ethos of the region. In the past twenty years or so, the developing dialogue and contradictions between Southeast Asian and foreign scholars, each with their own partly distinctive assumptions and methodologies based on the priorities of their respective traditions and governments, have resulted in a healthy divergence, convergence, and cross-fertilization of ideas.

Thirty years ago, a theory of Philippine politics emerged that until now remains the most influential among academics and is widely adopted by journalists, diplomats and other observers of the Philippines. Its argument, in brief, is that Philippine politics revolves around interpersonal relationships — especially familial and patron-client ones — and factions composed of personal alliances. I refer to this as the patron-client, factional framework pcf, for short). It deserves to be influential; after all, patron-client and other personal relations are indeed significant in Philippine political life. These are also important features in many other countries; hence, the pcf framework developed for Philippine studies has contributed as well to comparative political studies.