BiblioVault - Books about Asia, Southeastern

The American Colonial State in the Philippines

Global Perspectives

Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

In 1898 the United States declared sovereignty over the Philippines, an archipelago of seven thousand islands inhabited by seven million people of various ethnicities. While it became a colonial power at the zenith of global imperialism, the United States nevertheless conceived of its rule as exceptional—an exercise in benevolence rather than in tyranny and exploitation. In this volume, Julian Go and Anne L. Foster untangle this peculiar self-fashioning and insist on the importance of studying U.S. colonial rule in the context of other imperialist ventures. A necessary expansion of critical focus, The American Colonial State in the Philippines is the first systematic attempt to examine the creation and administration of the American colonial state from comparative, global perspectives.

Written by social scientists and historians, these essays investigate various aspects of American colonial government through comparison with and contextualization within colonial regimes elsewhere in the world—from British Malaysia and Dutch Indonesia to Japanese Taiwan and America's other major overseas colony, Puerto Rico. Contributors explore the program of political education in the Philippines; constructions of nationalism, race, and religion; the regulation of opium; connections to politics on the U.S. mainland; and anticolonial resistance. Tracking the complex connections, circuits, and contests across, within, and between empires that shaped America's colonial regime, The American Colonial State in the Philippines sheds new light on the complexities of American imperialism and turn-of-the-century colonialism.

Contributors. Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso, Paul Barclay, Vince Boudreau, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Paul A. Kramer

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Beyond Binary Histories

Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830

Victor Lieberman, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Seeking to transcend the hoary insistence on East-West dichotomies, this collection looks for transformations in cultural and political organization across Eurasia that were both more general and more psychologically significant to pre-1830 actors themselves than the problem that has obsessed twentieth-century comparativists, namely, the origins of a unique European industrialism. Specifically, it contains nine coordinated essays which explore the proposition that the integration of isolated units to form more cohesive systems in France, Russia, and other European countries ca 1000-1830 corresponds in important respects to integrative processes in parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Japan.
The collaborators of this project show, in varying degrees, that political centralization in these areas reflected and inspired the creation of vernacular literatures at the expense of more universal languages. They illustrate that societies in widely separated areas, with no obvious links, became more literate, mobile, specialized, and commercial at roughly the same time. And they point out that administrative development in many of these same areas showed curiously synchronized cycles. Finally, having defined Eurasian parallels and sketched their limits, they push on to explore the underlying dynamics of these discoveries, scrutinizing the role of guns, global climate, markets, new information networks, institutional pressures, and sixteenth-century messianism.
Insofar as similarities between some European and Asian areas exceeded those between different sectors of Asia, this collection invites historians to reject continental perspectives in favor of more thematic, contextually-specific categories. But at the same time, it raises the possibility of a broad "early modern" period for Eurasia at large.
The contributors are Mary Elizabeth Berry (University of California, Berkeley), Peter Carey (University of Oxford), James B. Collins (Georgetown University), Valerie Kivelson (University of Michigan), R. I. Moore (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), John K. Whitemore (University of Michigan), and David K. Wyatt (Cornell University).

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Culture and the Question of Rights

Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Charles Zerner, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims.
Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts—natural resource frontiers—this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation—from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities’ struggles to retain their gardens, forests, fishing territories, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat.

Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

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Forgotten Armies

The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

Harvard University Press, 2005

In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world.

More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

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Heartwood

The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America

Wendy Cadge

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Theravada is one of the three main branches of Buddhism. In Asia it is practiced widely in Thailand, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. This fascinating ethnography opens a window onto two communities of Theravada Buddhists in contemporary America: one outside Philadelphia that is composed largely of Thai immigrants and one outside Boston that consists mainly of white converts.

Wendy Cadge first provides a historical overview of Theravada Buddhism and considers its specific origins here in the United States. She then brings her findings to bear on issues of personal identity, immigration, cultural assimilation, and the nature of religion in everyday life. Her work is the first systematic comparison of the ways in which immigrant and convert Buddhists understand, practice, and adapt the Buddhist tradition in America. The men and women whom Cadge meets and observes speak directly to us in this work, both in their personal testimonials and as they meditate, pray, and practice Buddhism.

Creative and insightful, Heartwood will be of enormous value to sociologists of religion and anyone wishing to understand the rise of Buddhism in the Western world.

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Home and Hegemony

Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Kathleen M. Adams and Sara Dickey, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

In the intimate context of domestic service, power relations take on one of their most personalized forms. Domestic servants and their employers must formulate their political identities in relationship to each other, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes challenging broader social hierarchies such as those based on class, caste or rank, gender, race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and kinship relations.
This pathbreaking collection builds on recent examinations of identity in the postcolonial states of South and Southeast Asia by investigating the ways in which domestic workers and their employers come to know and depict one another and themselves through their interactions inside and outside of the home. This setting provides a particularly apt arena for examining the daily negotiations of power and hegemony.
Contributors to the volume, all anthropologists, provide rich ethnographic analyses that avoid a narrow focus on either workers or employers. Rather, they examine systems of power through specific topics that range from the notion of "nurture for sale" to the roles of morality and humor in the negotiation of hierarchy and the dilemmas faced by foreign employers who find themselves in life-and-death dependence on their servants.
With its provocative theoretical and ethnographic contributions to current debates, this collection will be of interest to scholars in Asian studies, women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
Kathleen M. Adams is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Loyola University of Chicago. Sara Dickey is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College.

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New Terrains in Southeast Asian History

Abu Talib Ahmad

Ohio University Press, 2003

At a watershed moment in the scholarly approach to the history of this important region, New Terrains in Southeast Asian History captures the richness and diversity of historical discourse among Southeast Asian scholars. Through the perspectives of scholars who live and work within the region, the book offers readers a rare opportunity to enter into the world of Southeast Asian historiography. Individual chapters subject the dominance of national narratives to critical reflection and deconstruction, while others highlight the need to go beyond essentially political narratives to seek out deeper cultural, economic, and social structures by utilizing new sources, methodologies, and concepts. Taken as a whole, the book contends that new terrains in Southeast Asian history may be found “at the interstices and on the margins” where nations, societies, or cultures engage the unending processes of historical change.

The contributors are Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail, Abu Talib Ahmad, Andrew Hardy, Badriyah Haji Salleh, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Ni Ni Myint, Dhiravat na Pombejra, Hong Lysa, Huang Jianli, Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, M. R. Fernando, P. Lim Pui Huen, Paul H. Kratoska, Tan Liok Ee, Thongchai Winichakul, and Yong Mun Cheong.

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Regionalism and Rivalry

Japan and the U.S. in Pacific Asia

Edited by Jeffrey A. Frankel and Miles Kahler

University of Chicago Press, 1993

As Japan's newfound economic power leads to increased political power, there is concern that Japan may be turning East Asia into a regional economic bloc to rival the U.S. and Europe. In Regionalism and Rivalry, leading economists and political scientists address this concern by looking at three central questions: Is Japan forming a trading bloc in Pacific Asia? Does Japan use foreign direct investment in Southeast Asia to achieve national goals? Does Japan possess the leadership qualities necessary for a nation assuming greater political responsibility in international affairs?

The authors contend that although intraregional trade in East Asia is growing rapidly, a trade bloc is not necessarily forming. They show that the trade increase can be explained entirely by factors independent of discriminatory trading arrangements, such as the rapid growth of East Asian economies. Other chapters look in detail at cases of Japanese direct investment in Southeast Asia and find little evidence of attempts by Japan to use the power of its multinational corporations for political purposes. A third group of papers attempt to gauge Japan's leadership characteristics. They focus on Japan's "technology ideology," its contributions to international public goods, international monetary cooperation, and economic liberalization in East Asia.

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Tensions Of Empire

Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World

Ken’ichi Goto

Ohio University Press, 2003

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia. It also examines Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia and the lingering ambivalence toward Japanese involvement in Asia and toward the war in particular.

Drawing on extensive multilingual archival research and interviews, Ken‘ichi Goto has produced a factually rich and balanced view of this region’s historical events of the last century.

Tensions of Empire features detailed discussions of Portuguese Timor in the 1930s and 1940s, the decolonization of Malaya, and twentieth-century Indonesia. This extended inquiry yields a unique view of the complicated network within and beyond the colonial and imperial relationships between a one-time nonwestern colonial power and an entire region.

Of great interest to students of Japan-Southeast Asia relations and to specialists in the modern history of both Southeast Asia and Japan, Professor Goto’s Tensions of Empire is a fascinating account of Japan’s recent past from the inside.

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Trade and Structural Change in Pacific Asia

Edited by Colin I. Bradford Jr. and William H. Branson

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The rapid development of Pacific Asia over the past twenty years offers an excellent opportunity to analyze the dynamics of economic growth. Trade and Structural Change in Pacific Asia explores the nature and causes of changes that have occurred in the economic structure of Pacific Asia, the relationship between these changes and economic growth, and the implications of these changes for trading relationships.

Themes in the research reported here includes the sectoral composition of output and trade; rates of structural change in production and exports and their relation to economic growth; the effect of abundant resource endowments on industrialization and manufactured exports; the nature of the mix between active government policies and market forces; and the balance between demand-determined and supply-determined industrialization and exports. Many of the issues explored have important implications for United States foreign economic policy, and the volume includes a look at the basic economic and political forces influencing shifts in United States trade policy in the postwar period.

A timely and informative analysis, the volume probes the causes and consequences of economic growth in Pacific Asia, focusing on the interaction of exports of manufactured goods and the developmental process. The results reported contribute to ongoing research in structural change and economic policy and will be important to economists working on empirical patters in international trade and the process of economic development.

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Trans-Status Subjects

Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia

Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.

The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects.

Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

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