New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint(Oxford University Press, 2019). This book examines the protests and the associated violence from a sound studies perspective. The book is an ethnographic study of the sounds that accompanied the protests: music, rally speeches, sound trucks, mobile phone ringtones, whistle-blowers, hand-clappers, and much more. All these sounds, in Tausig’s words, “pulse with meaning”. A fascinating theoretical argument weaves the different sounds discussed in the book together: that constraints on movement in the political realm are reflected in constraints on movement in the sonic world. And towards the end of the book, in a Bang

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s struggle to insulate itself from global trends as well the impact of the rise of ultra-conservative attitudes in its majority Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, but also increased difficulty in balancing rival powers China and the United States. If that were not enough, Singapore is juggling multiple issues at a time that it is transiting to a new generational leadership faced with the challenge of ensuring that Singapore remains relevant to its neighbours as well as the international community at large.To do

How do you understand mindfulness? Is your understanding limited by your own culture’s definition of what mindfulness is? These are some of the questions you will ask yourself while reading Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell University Press). In today’s podcast, Prof. Julia Cassaniti takes us on a tour of three Theravada Buddhist countries (Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka) to show us how mindfulness is understood in this region and what this, in turn, can teach the West about its own understanding of the concept. This is an insightful read not only for academics interested in contemporary Buddhist studies in the countries surveyed, but also for anyone interested in broadening their perspective on what the term ‘mindfulness’ means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi Veerapaspong, if and when it might one day be possible to write a book on “memories of dictatorship” in Thailand. Concluding that today a clear end to dictatorship is not in sight, she invokes Howard Zinn to insist that nevertheless, “We must not accept the memory of states as our own… it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus has suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners”. It is in this spirit that she takes up the task of writing a history of impunity: one that “aims to explicitly challenge the repressive organs of the state and their ongoing evasion of accountability”.How she pursues that aim and what she uncovers is the topic of this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, in which Tyrell talks about Thailand’s exemplary injustice cascade, distinguishes a history of impunity from a history of human rights abuse, and reflects on her

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces u

Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We are especially familiar with those haunting images of the face of King Jayavarman VII, represented in the stone sculptures of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Archaeologists and historians tend to relate the history of the Angkorean era through the dynasties of great kings. These are, of course, all male images. But this apparent maleness of the Angkorean state contrasts with one of the paradigms of Southeast Asia as a cultural zone: the comparatively high status of women. Ashley Thompson addresses this apparent contradiction in her new book titled, Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge, 2016). Among the themes of this rich, challenging, and provocative book is the gendered nature of the Angkorean state.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East.  This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers.  This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers.  And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War.Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers.  Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in com

In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship between the Vietnamese diasporic community and its home country, the former South Vietnam. Central to Bui’s argument is his use of Richard Nixon’s definition of Vietnamization as a way to frame the postwar afterlives of South Vietnamese refugees, their descendants, and those remaining in Vietnam today. While Nixon used this term as a military strategy to pull the U.S. military out of Vietnam, Vietnamization for Bui is a way to highlight how this Cold War term continues to function as an ideology and a discourse in the Vietnamese American community. Bui utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that includes discourse analysis, interviews, archival research, and personal narrative, in tackling questions of memory, loss, national identity, sovereignty, and agency. This book is both a critical investigation and a tribute to the refugee community that is a legacy of th

Thailand is one of the world’s last remaining military dictatorships, and the last in Asia. While we are familiar with the Thai military’s frequent interventions in Thai politics, we know rather less about its external security role. As rivalry between the superpowers, the United States and China, has grown in recent years, Thailand’s strategic position in the East Asian region has become increasingly important. But what do we know about Thailand’s “strategic culture”? How does the country’s security elite, including the military, think about “war, force, and security”? This is the subject of Greg Raymond’s timely new book, Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press, 2018). At a time when the Thai military, and in particular, its controversial relationship with Thailand’s monarchy, are under great scrutiny, the subject of this book has implications not only for Thailand, but for the broader region.Listeners to this episode may also enjoy listening to Lee Morgenbesser, Behind the Fac

Michael Walzer once began a book with the advice of a former teacher to “always begin negatively”. Tell your readers what you are not going to do and it will relieve their minds, he says. Then they will be more inclined to accept what seems a modest project. Whether or not Ward Keeler had this writing strategy firmly in mind when he wrote the preface to The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), it’s the one he adopts, and with the recommended effect. Anticipating that the reader picking up a book on Burma with both “hierarchy” and “masculinity” in its title might be looking for answers to the question of how and why military men dominated the country for so long, and how and why everyone else tolerated them for as long as they did, he tells the reader that he leaves it to them “to speculate as to how such notions as the workings of hierarchy or the location of power ‘above one’s head’ encouraged… members of the former regime to impose control ov

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of modern Vietnam. Christopher Goscha’s award-winning new book, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016), brilliantly paints a picture of an ancient, diverse, and complex country which had already begun to modernize before the arrival of the French (let alone the Americans) and which was itself an imperial power. In Vietnam: a New History Ho Chi Minh and the communists were not the only anti-colonial nationalists, but rather one of a number of groups fired by the radical new idea of republicanism.Vietnam: a New History takes us beyond the bitter divide in Vietnamese historiography between the “orthodox” and “revisionist” interpretations of Vietnam’s modern history. Goscha provokes the reader to become aware of the haunting possibility that Vietnam’s modern history could have been different – which in turn stimulates

In his recent monograph, The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Protection, and Healing in Burmese Buddhism(Columbia University Press, 2018), Thomas Patton examines the weizzā, a figure in Burmese Buddhism who is possessed with extraordinary supernatural powers, usually gained through some sort of esoteric practice. Like the tantric adept in certain other Buddhist traditions, the weizzā can use his skills both to manipulate human affairs in the present world and to help people progress towards Buddhist soteriological goals. The weizzā is thus a morally ambiguous figure, for while this Buddhist wizard might heal a sick relative or help one’s karmic circumstances, he might just as well cast an evil spell. Indeed, it is precisely because of the weizzā’s perceived power that these wizards and their devotees have been persecuted by both the government and Buddhist monastic leaders, and why this tradition has largely existed at the margins of state-sanctioned orthodoxy and orthopraxy.Patton shows that while prototypes for th

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during the 20th and 21st centuries, and offering a convincing account of how one – Myanmar – has to some extent managed to emerge from its ‘pariah’ position in recent years, whilst the other – North Korea – remains largely excluded, whatever recent signs of detente across the 38th parallel.Abrahamian's work on each place is based on years of firsthand experience in these ‘outposts of tyranny’, as former-US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice dubbed them in 2005 (p. 2), and he is thus able to offer us vital context for both the latest warming in inter-Korean relations and Myanmar's recent slide back into partial outcast status

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.Daromir Rudnyckyj is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria.Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hones in on this ghostly theme in contemporary Thai cinema to explore the subjects of female desire and queer sexuality. In doing so she raises questions about a central concept in Queer Theory: the nature of desire. Fuhrmann identifies a tension between Western liberal and everyday Thai Buddhist understandings of desire. Arguably, Buddhist teaching about desire is one factor that has contributed to Thailand’s reputation for being a “queer-friendly” country. Indeed, it is even marketed as a “gay paradise”. But the reality i

If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and rising inequality? But it can, and it does. The book is a masterpiece of social scientific scholarship and critical political praxis. Through a longitudinal ethnography conducted over twenty years, the book follows the consequences of Indonesian highlanders’ fateful decision to plant the booming cash crop of the 1990s, cacao. That decision, Li shows, was the reason that capitalism took root and developed apace in the highlands over the coming decades. All the telltale signs of capitalist relations emerged: land was privatized, commons eroded, classes differentiated, and wealth and poverty co-created. Instead of coming as an imposition from the

From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures in this debate was the great writer, journalist, public intellectual – and pious Muslim from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, better known by his pen-name, Hamka. Largely self-taught, Hamka was one of Indonesia’s most prolific writers. Between the 1920s and his death in 1981 he penned novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, self-help books, travel books, histories, and many studies of Islam, including a famous thirty-volume commentary on the Qur’an. In Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), James R. Rush traces the development of Hamka’s thinking as expressed through these works against the backdrop of Indonesia’s tumultuous modern history, including late Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, the In

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents, Peter Zinoman observes in the opening pages of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014), “as a lower-class, untraveled, half-educated, opium addicted, colonized subject from a remote outpost of France’s second-rate empire”. He died in 1939, aged just 28. Today he is remembered as a literary giant, for Zinoman, comparable to Orwell in the English-reading world. Like Orwell, he was a complex and defiant figure whose work crossed genres and drew deeply on his rich life experiences as well as his wide reading in literature, politics, and psychology. His views on a range of topics attracted heated debate in his own lifetime, in which he engaged vigorously. He had a persistent interest in sexuality