New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

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 – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont created as he produced the project, which add to a broader understanding of the images in volume one. Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the worlds most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world. Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondents Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan, and in 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 corrects his thesis by pointing to how orientalist forms of knowledge and modes of inquiry could be put to the service of nascent nationalist projects. Filipino polymaths used expertise obtained in ethnology, philology, orthography, folklore and history to advance claims that situated them as the equals of, and sometimes superiors to, their archipelago’s Hispanic rulers. Drawing on Spanish, German, French, English and Tagalog language sources, Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados is a study of the colonial encounter in the best traditions of Southeast Asian scholarship. Not only does it offer a nuanced telling of the colonial intellectual encounter with the islands, and an intelligent and engaged critique of postcolonial scholarship; it is also a compelling history of the Filipino present. Megan Thomas joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss colonial forms of knowledge and the difference between India and the Philippines, racial theory in 19th century Filipino nationalism, the letter K controversy, and the legacy of the late, great Ben Anderson. (Visitors to the website in the Philippines can go to the Anvil Publishing website to order the 2016 reprint of the book, with a new introduction by Caroline Hau.) Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 for reform in Myanmar together with an informed reading of how and why reforms have succeeded. Beginning her narrative in 2005, Lall describes how even in the period of unmediated military rule in the mid-to-late 2000s, people in Myanmar began to anticipate and act to effect changes that at the time were not easily discerned, yet which gave rise to conditions that enabled the more substantive changes of the 2010s. Closing with the overwhelming victory of the National League for Democracy in the 2015 general elections she offers a sober but optimistic view of the country’s current conditions and future prospects. Marie Lall joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Myanmar’s resilient civil society, the peace process, educational reforms, the rise of Buddhist nationalism, and hopes for years to come. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 nuanced story of regional and global interconnectedness through masculinity, national pride and competitiveness. By tracking the idea and practice of physical culture alongside changing conceptions of civility and development Creak shows that there is much more to sport, even in the unlikeliest of places, than meets the eye. Describing it as “one of the most fascinating books I have read in years,” Justin McDaniel writes that Embodied Nation “should become a model for the study of masculinity and sports culture in the [Asian] region and beyond.” Simon Creak joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss bodily training and aesthetics in the colonies of France, the relationship between physical exercise and militarization, athletic theatrics and state power, socialist spectator sport, and the malleability of what counts as success in competition on the field and off. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 reproduce the binaried, linear thinking inherent to terms like “rule by law,” Cheesman exposes and repairs a significant conceptual weakness in rule of law scholarship through the analytic lens of law and order. Martin Krygier writes, “Opposing the Rule of Law combines three elements rarely seen in one place: fine-grained, indeed masterly, unravelling of Myanmar criminal laws social and political history, character and significance; an original and sophisticated account of the rule of law and its enemies in Myanmar, generally, and in principle; and uncommonly fine prose. It is a tour de force, instructive–indeed illuminating–and a pleasure to read.” Eve Darian-Smith highlights the study’s rich empirical research and assesses the book as “an extraordinary achievement.” Engaging with Opposing the Rule of Law’scareful and nuanced analysis reveals that this praise, from leading scholars of rule of law, social theory, legal anthropology, and socio-legal studies, is well deserved. Jothie Rajah is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. She writes on rule of law discourses and can be reached at jrajah@abfn.org.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 experience not as an arrival, but as a continued entrapment within the structures and politics set in place upon migration. Situating Ra’s story within a larger context of liberal warfare, Tang asks how the refugee narrative has operated as a solution to Americas imperial wars overseas, and to its domestic wars against its poorest residents within the hyperghetto. Christopher B. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Quarterly, Games and Culture, M.E.L.U.S. (Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States) and the anthologies Global Asian American Popular Cultures (NYU Press) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge). He writes book reviews for Asiatic, MELUS, and spent two years as a program director for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. His fiction, published under his alter ego Kawika Guillermo, has appeared in numerous journals, and he writes regularly for Drunken Boat and decomP Magazine. His debut novel, Stamped, is forthcoming in 2017 from CCLAP Press.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 Communist histories tend to present the Catholic Church as the friend of French colonialism with Catholic apologists defending their Church’s role in Vietnamese history in accordance with nationalist standards. In his book, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012), Dr. Charles Keith challenges such overly simple narratives by tracing the transformations in the Catholic Church in Vietnam from the pre-colonial, through the colonial, to the post-liberation periods (ending in approximately 1954). For instance, through his careful, rich, and detailed study, Keith shows how Vietnamese Catholics could remain Catholic while being at times pro-colonial, anti-colonial, pro-left, anti-Communist, and other places within and without these labels as their community transformed from a colonial to a national Church. Thus, Keith’s study is well worth a read for anyone interested in Vietnamese history or the history of Christianity.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 make them accessible to the large number of non-Thai meditators who come to these centers. While at first sight the topic of meditation centers in Thailand might appear fairly narrow and easy to delimit, Schedneck shows that to understand both the histories of these centers and the ways in which they currently operate, one must locate these institutions in the broader contexts of Southeast Asian history, European intellectual and colonial history, and Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. After covering the rise of mass meditation movements (a process that can be traced in part to developments in late nineteenth-century Burma), Schedneck turns to the way in which the meditation centers where she conducted her fieldwork have created two systems within a single institution: one for Thai retreatants, and the other for foreigners. Not only does the social interaction between teacher and student differ in the two systems, but so too does the way in which meditation is taught. Thai participants understand meditation as but one of a number of activities that are meaningful according to a worldview based on Buddhist ideas and values, and they are taught accordingly. Non-Thai meditators, who are almost exclusively from the West, are instead presented with meditation as a secular practice that is to be understood in psychological and universalistic terms, and is largely a matter of individual development. This difference is in turn related to the motivations and preconceptions about Buddhism and Asia that foreign meditators bring to the retreat. Schedneck positions such motives and assumptions in the larger contexts of Buddhist modernism, Orientalism, and the history of European views of Buddhism (both of the Enlightenment and Romantic varieties). As part of this discussion, she clarifies the way in which many first-time retreatants’ associate Buddhist meditation with nature, or, alternatively, see it as a form of therapy through which individual transformation and healing can be realized. However, Western objectifications of Buddhism constitute but one aspect of Schedneck’s multi-faceted exploration of the international meditation centers. Her novel research into the ways in which individual meditation centers, the World Buddhist Federation, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand have portrayed and promoted these centers, is the “commodification” in the subtitle of the book. Schedneck demonstrates that the repackaging of Buddhist meditation is neither a wholesale adaptation of Western modernity nor a conscious attempt at securing tourist spending, but rather a creative adaptation through which Buddhism and meditation are rendered intelligible and meaningful to those who are culturally unfamiliar with both. And Schedneck is careful to point out that this dynamic is as old as Buddhism itself, for Buddhism’s two-and-a-half-millennia survival was possible only because Buddhism was translated into the languages of, and adapted to the thinking of, those cultures to which it spread. One of the most satisfying features of the book is the inclusion of excerpts from some of the interviews that Schedneck conducted with over sixty international meditation teachers and students. In addition, we find fascinating descriptions of the retreat centers at the center of her research and of the details of daily life during a retreat: schedu...Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 nation” together with thought-provoking discussions of memory practice and the writing of history via ethnography. Concentrating on the accounts of Karo women about their struggle against Dutch colonizers and Japanese invaders, Steedly situates the fight for independence in the day-to-day activities of North Sumatra’s entire population. In so doing, she offers a much more richly textured account than conventional histories concentrated on male-dominated politics, military strategies and moments of combat provide, one that “moves toward difficulty rather than simplification, one that compels as well as enacts the strategies of patient and engaged reading”. Mary Steedly joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Karoland, buried guns, the language of “struggle” rather than “revolution”, Sinek’s song, the importance of narrative, and what it means to do ethnographic history.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

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 workers can also succeed in transcending or building on their cultural ties to form larger movements for labour rights. Through detailed study of 33 cases from French colonial Indochina to present day Vietnam, Tran tracks labour activism across a range of political and economic conditions, industries and sectors. Concentrating on the period since economic reform and liberalization from 1986 to the present, she compares worker agency in state-owned and equitized factories, factories with foreign-direct investment and domestic privately owned factories, to arrive at findings that speak to conditions not only in Vietnam today, but also to the lives and struggles of workers across much of Southeast and East Asia. Angie Tran joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about trends in labour unrest in Vietnam, the importance of legal claims to workers rights, cicada factories, and time taken to read graffiti on toilet walls.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies