What is the modern in Southeast Asia's architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia's modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology, and power. ......
Mangkunagara I (1726-95) was one of the most flamboyant figures of 18th-century Java. A charismatic rebel from 1740 to 1757 and one of the foremost military commanders of his age, he won the loyalty of many followers. He was also a devout Muslim of the Mystic Synthesis style, a devotee of Javanese culture and a lover of beautiful women and Dutch ......
New insight into the defense history of Singapore. Even small states can have grand strategies. Singapore, despite its poor natural resource endowment, small population, and size, has often been described as punching above its weight in international affairs. Part of this stems from the way Singapore strategically integrates the different ......
Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City
An analysis of the human-animal relationship in post-colonial Singapore. Modern Singapore is the Garden City, a biophilic urban space that includes a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans, even polar bears. Singaporean Creatures brings together historians to contemplate this human-animal relationship and how it has shaped ......
Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities
A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages. Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, ......
Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia. They have played many roles over the longue-durEe: in certain periods proving central to the ability of land-based polities to generate wealth, by sourcing valuable maritime commodities, facilitating trade, forming a naval force to secure and protect ......
Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor's West Mebon Visnu
A fully illustrated archaeological and art historical analysis of one of the most important artworks of Angkor, rewriting the chronology of the royal capital. In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Visnu, the largest ......
Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar
A deeply human portrait of a region defined by conflict and military dictatorship. Pursuing Morality is an in-depth and fascinating study of ordinary life in Myanmar's southeast through a unique ethnographic focus on Buddhist Plong (Pwo) Karen. Based on extensive in-depth fieldwork in the small city of Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State, Justine ......
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World
This stimulating new reading of constructions of ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore is an important contribution to understanding the powerful linkages between ethnicity, identity and nationalism in multi-ethnic Southeast Asia. The narrative of Malay identity devised by Malay nationalists, writers and filmmakers in the late colonial period ......
