New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the effects of mass media on the perception and proliferation of these phenomena, de la Cruz charts the emergence of voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. She traces a shift from local to national to transnational contexts, and from the representational to the virtual – in short, Mother Figured explores what Mary tells us about becoming modern. Deirdre de la Cruz is assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies and history at the University of Michigan.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) Khairudin Aljunied tells a neglected story of anticolonial politics in Malaya from the late 1800s to the Emergency. Whereas other scholars working from imperial archives have downplayed the role of radicalism in nationalist resistance and the struggle for Malayan independence, Khairudin “seeks to rescue the Malay radicals from the shadows of nationalist scholarship” and resituate them in accounts of the country’s past, and its present. Concentrating on the period from 1937, with the establishment of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, Khairudin tells a complex story of resistance, collaboration, anxiety, ferment and experimentation under both British and Japanese occupiers. Through close readings of memoirs, poems, newspapers and polemical tracts, he offers a lively and engaging account of political consciousness and action in the era of late European colonialism, amid intense warfare and heavy repression. Khairudin Aljunied joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Malay radicalism and its legacy; warisan and the Malayu Raya; the significance of women for radical anti-British politics on the peninsula; prison stories, and Southeast Asian historiography.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Combining a powerful aesthetic sensibility with excellent scholarship, her book is of rare quality: beautifully written, visually compelling, and passionately argued. Annette Miae Kim joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss sidewalk symbols and vendors, the regulation of public space old and new, the right to the city, pushing the boundaries of the map, and the passing of time along the streets and alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City. To download and view a space-time map and a narrative map from Sidewalk City click here, hereand here. Thank you to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduce these maps on the New Books Network websites. More maps, and more on the book, are available on the Spatial Analysis Lab website.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation(University of Hawaii Press, 2015), Shane Strate tracks the movements of two competing narratives of national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century Siam, subsequently Thailand. Against the dominant narrative of royal nationalism, he shows how in moments of crisis another narrative of national humiliation functions to bond citizens to the state through the solidarity of victimhood. Both narratives rely heavily on the trope of territory lost to French imperialism. In the royal nationalist narrative, the lost territories are cleverly conceded: a finger sacrificed to save the hand. In the national humiliation narrative, duplicitous colonizers betray and embarrass Siam for their own ends, emasculating its geobody through the seizure of vassals on its periphery. National prestige is restored when the military embarks on new expansionist projects to reclaim the nation’s former preeminence. And when plans to regain an imagined lost empire on the Southeast Asian mainland fail, the narrative switches back to the royal nationalism: territories are again given up strategically, not needlessly, for the greater good and survival of the nation. Shane Strate joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss irredentism, anti-Catholicism in wartime Thailand, imperial Japan and pan-Asianism, the challenges of doing archival research on difficult topics, and how attention to history can inform our understanding of present-day politics in mainland Southeast Asia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), is almost impossibly vast in scale and ambitious in scope, ranging across familiar territory while drawing out major new themes in the history of one of the world’s most diverse yet nevertheless coherent regions. Writing against the “seductive pressure” to view past political and cultural arrangements as analogues of our own, Reid draws on the resources of a life spent studying and writing Southeast Asian history to take the reader on a journey from the nagara polities and stateless majorities of a thousand years ago to the rise of high modernism in the places that today we know as Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. His strong engagement with major debates will appeal to specialists, yet the book is also highly accessible to students new to study of the region. Tony Reid joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss civilizations without cities, global war in the Indian Ocean, state evasion, the shared poverty of late colonial rule, and the role of women in the economies and societies of Southeast Asia from earliest times to the present day.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When a revolutionary party aims to take administrative control of the countryside, what kinds of devices, training and documents does it use? And what are their consequences? In The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Ken MacLean explains that confounded by its inability to get a clear reading of its own practices, let alone those of the rural population, the party/state in Vietnam has since the late 1920s layered varied and oftentimes conflicting approaches to the management of information one on top of the other. Although the approaches have differed, all have been premised on a lack of trust: of villagers, of cadres, and of the integrity of the processes of data collection and interpretation themselves. The government of mistrust both produces and is reproduced by the forms of documentation on which it relies. Ken MacLean joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the functions of “legibility devices” in state practice, the periodization of Vietnam’s modern history, the categories “exemplary” and “deviant”, the debate over reform from above and reform from below, and how the government of mistrust persists despite remaining partially illegible to itself.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Researching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants “experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way”, yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond essentialist explanations, Duncan nevertheless insists that the challenge for scholars “is to explain the role of religion in the violence without essentializing it”. In Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2013) he takes up the challenge. Drawing on over a decade of research in North Maluku, and informed by time spent in the region prior to the conflict, Duncan speaks with impressive authority about the before, during and after of the bloodshed. Utilizing work by scholars of political violence and the management of memory like Stanley Tambiah and Steve Stern, he shows how participants themselves produced and reproduced master narratives of holy warfare. In the process, he critiques scholarship that overstates elite agendas and machinations, remaining too focused on the causes of violence and losing sight of how, in the words of Gerry Van Klinken, “a runaway war can become decoupled from its initial conditions”. Violence and Vengeance makes a powerful case for why study of vernacular understandings of conflict matter. The book also is exemplary in demonstrating how such study can and should be done.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015) is a powerful and multilayered book that upbraids overseas Chinese studies for their neglect of class. Bringing class struggle and identity firmly to the centre of his analysis, Donald Nonini argues that scholars of the overseas Chinese have not accounted for class and its role in state formation adequately. Instead, an abiding concern for articulating an imagined essential “Chinese culture” causes scholars to disregard the radical dialectics of state formation and antagonism that crisscross time and space in Southeast Asian postcolonies. Nevertheless, class relations have been fundamental to Malaysian society, and especially, to the making of meaning among its racially differentiated citizenry. Drawing on over three decades of fieldwork, from 1978 to the 2000s, “Getting By is full of detail yet highly readable. Sometimes provocative but always reflective, it is throughout concerned with rethinking premises and questioning assumed knowledge–both of the state in Malaysia and of the academic discipline. In parts political history, in other parts political ethnography, at each point the book couples Nonini’s concern for historical contingency and insularity with larger debates on hegemony, struggle and domination. At a time that it seems to be the fashion for academics to hobnob with policymakers rather than hang out with petty traders or lorry drivers, to demonstrate competencies rather than take up causes, and to produce thought bubbles rather than do deep longitudinal research, “Getting By” is a beautifully unfashionable book that reminds its readers of how much can be learned from staying put, and from thinking and writing plainly about people and things that clearly matter.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitted greenbacks cease to be the stuff of the currency trader or foreign state. Here, they take on new and distinctive roles. They mingle with their counterfeits, the one burned at cemeteries and shrines to satisfy ancestral debts, the other sent by relatives living abroad to acknowledge the debt-bond owed by those who have left the country to those who remain behind. They celebrate the transnational yet also beckon to the intimate. And, they challenge the communist party to reorder its narrative of modernity so as to maintain the primacy of its role in political and administrative affairs. As Truitt herself puts it, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City tells a story of “monetary pluralism rather than tightly wound institutional bets, of the sensuous pleasures of cash rather than calculations of derivatives”. It also tells a story of power: of the claims to power that states make through the production of territorial currency, and of how those claims are undermined by the ways that people use money for their own purposes.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Policymakers around the world design projects in which the demands of citizens for basic services are cast as a problem of poverty. Villagers are expected to prove their worthiness for charitable projects and participate with gratitude in schemes for their gradual improvement. When projects fail, the recipients get blamed for being corrupt, ignorant, or disinterested in their own welfare. In Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos (NUS Press, 2014), Holly High recounts how Laotian villagers participate in road projects they know will fail, attempt to restart irrigation schemes they had only recently thwarted, and engage with a state they distrust not because they lack awareness, but out of culturally embedded desire. Poverty alleviation campaigns aim to enlist people into cooperative projects with appeals to egalitarianism and democratic choice, yet the success of mutual assistance depends on hierarchical relations, the making of extravagant claims, and sometimes, the ritualized delivery of excessive abundance. Little wonder that when budgets are small and official expectations are modest, roads end up going nowhere and irrigation pumps fall idle. Yet, people’s seemingly unrealistic aspirations still lead to realistic choices, and practical outcomes. “If stories of state are to be approached ethnographically, then they must be allowed to catch us,” High writes. As an ethnographer, she acts firmly on this imperative, taking reification of the state seriously, and writing against projects that rush to demystify it. As an author, she catches the reader with her sympathetic portrayals of life in rural Laos, weaving keen insights into evocative narratives to deliver a highly informative and engaging account of the politics of poverty in mainland Southeast Asia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies