Scholars studying international retirement migration (IRM) refer to lifestyle migration to explain the motives and aspirations of older individuals who choose to relocate out of their home country. Here I investigate French retirees’ reasons for migrating to Southeast Asia, and their sense of purpose in doing so. Interviews with 17 retirees living in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and Vientiane, Laos, whose narratives evoked some degree of historical relevance, suggest that certain migration choices are best understood in the context of a postcolonial moment comprising colonialism and its dissolution, the Cold War, and the postcolonial diaspora. Such an approach illuminates the relationship between history, migration, and pensioners’ respective biographies in explaining their retirement journeys to former colonies, and in how these experiences foster multifaceted hybrid identities embedded in various historical moments.

Air pollution created by agricultural burning has become a critical environmental problem across Southeast Asia, but the solution to it remains unclear. In this essay I discuss the haze crisis in a small community in Northern Thailand, and show how an increase in contract farming is accompanied by a decrease in agricultural spirit rituals. I argue that this change represents a broader shift in the cosmopolitical ecology of the region, as large agricultural businesses hide behind continuing narratives about ‘slash-and-burn’ ‘hill tribes’ to advance an environmentally unsustainable agenda.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a marked rise in the number of recorded murders in British-ruled Burma. The sentence for murder prescribed by the Indian Penal Code—in force in Burma as a province of British India—was death or transportation for life. However, while Burma's murder count was rising sharply, the number of executions taking place in the province's jails remained broadly stable, with perhaps a tendency to fall, and indeed it fell decisively at the end of the 1930s. By that point, a high standard of evidence was being increasingly demanded for conviction for murder and increasingly the death penalty was being imposed only when murder had clearly been premeditated. In other words, in the administration of justice in murder cases, the rule of law had been markedly tightened. The focus in the article will be on the local pressures, on the practices and perspectives of Burma's colonial administration and of the Burmese themselves that led in time to a decisive fall in the number of convicted murderers who were hanged for their crime.

Like coeval classical kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the Dali Kingdom (937–1253 CE) of Yunnan adopted politico-religious ideologies for Buddhist kingship. Understanding Buddhist kingship as a medium for bolstering both spiritual and temporal authority, this article investigates if relations between twelfth-century Duan monarchs and their Gao ministers of state were the same as those depicted in post-thirteenth-century sources and scrutinises the argument for the eighteenth monarch Duan Zhixing (r.1173–1200) promoting himself as a dharmarāja to assert superiority over his Gao ministers. I reframe Duan-Gao relations from one of tension and conflict to one of collaboration, and postulate twelfth-century Duan-Gao relations then changing before the 1250s, when thirteenth century sources mention Gao domination. I argue for a working hypothesis of the dissemination of Duan Zhixing's politico-religious ideology dovetailing with administration at the kingdom's core areas. Dissemination was implemented by Gao ministers of state and monks from the royal Chongsheng Temple, and the process reveals a collaborative rather than confrontational relationship between Duan monarchs and the Gao clan.

This is the first article-length study of Kuwentong Kutsero (A Coachman's Tales), an immensely popular radio comedy in mid-twentieth century Philippines. This sitcom had two iterations: the first aired a few years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in the country, while the second dominated the airwaves in the postwar years and enjoyed even greater success than its predecessor despite major changes in the script. The programme was so influential that the phrase kuwentong kutsero entered the Tagalog lexicon as an idiom to mean tall tales. Such a level of success was ironic considering that in the postwar decades the cochero as an actual occupation was on its way to obsolescence. This article argues that the reformatted programme was able to improve on the breakthroughs of the original because of the changes in the language used, the type of humour employed, and the topics tackled—factors that could only be understood if analysed alongside the historical experience of actual rig drivers.

While 1880 is remembered in the Philippines for a great earthquake that struck Manila and 1882 for a highly destructive typhoon that caused untold damage, the everyday disasters that happen all too often across the archipelago are soon forgotten. The interest is in the ‘big’ event, and historiography rarely focuses on less spectacular occurrences. 1881 was one such year when ‘nothing really much’ happened. And yet, a closer examination of the archival record reveals 12 months of earthquake, volcanic eruption, typhoon, storm, flood, and fire that afflicted people across the archipelago. These everyday calamities are historically such an integral part of Filipinos’ lives that they have shaped both their histories and their customs. More than the severity of the event, it is the frequency with which people have had to deal with calamity as an everyday event that has engendered socio-economic adaptation and cultural change. By examining the full range of disasters that people in the Philippines faced in 1881, this article examines the significant impact that geophysical and meteorological forces have had in influencing the daily lives of Filipinos in the past as they continue to do so in the present.

This article reads Filipino director Lino Brocka's film Orapronobis (1989) as a commentary on the 1987 Philippine Constitution, a post-dictatorship document which the director helped draft as a member of the Philippine Constitutional Commission. Using a ‘law and film’ approach, the article argues that the film visualises law's limit concepts such as the state of exception, hostis generis humani, and constituent power. The film depicts the failure of words to control the political world that results in a dystopian constitutional order where human rights monsters and revolutionaries contend. Through an exploration of law's limit concepts, Brocka's Orapronobis represents the limits of Philippine constitutionalism.

Despite the fact that Burmese courts had sizeable harems and that eunuchs are typically associated with harems, little attention has been paid to the presence of eunuchs in Burmese courts. This essay provides an overview of the existing English-language literature on eunuchs in Burmese courts, focusing on the three Burmese courts for which mention of eunuchs has survived in the historical record, namely the court at Pegu of the Taungoo dynasty (1486–1599), the court of Mrauk U of the Arakan kingdom (1429–1785), and the so-called ‘Court of Ava’ of the Konbaung dynasty (1765–1885). Noting the descriptions of eunuchs as Muslim, the essay considers the evidence regarding their numbers, their functions, and their possible origins.

This article argues that ritual remains a potent instrument for the generation of national identity and citizenship in Southeast Asia. We focus our analysis on the ritualisation of public space in Bangkok, Thailand, under the military-led government of General Prayut Chan-o-cha. The authors provide an ethnographic analysis of Sanam Luang, arguing that between 2016 and 2017 funeral rites held in this public space would reanimate it as a catalyst of national unification. As in other cases of ritual in public space, however, the intensified securitisation and control over national mourning for King Bhumibol by the military government, gave way to a range of reactions, including increased protests and criticism of the ruling government and Thailand's lesé-majesté laws by a predominantly youth-led movement in 2020.

Central to this article are the minutes of nine codification meetings held in 1865 at various locations in West Sumatra. During these meetings the draft regulations for a new colonial legal system were discussed and negotiated by West Sumatran elites and Dutch officials. This episode and its unique archives serve as a microhistory of lawmaking, legal translation, and erasure. The article argues that the process of making colonialism procedural, as well as the genealogical workings of colonial knowledge production, are crucial to understanding the making and unmaking of law in the context of legal pluralities. It shows that finding similarities in interests and worldview, moments of ‘erasure through translation’, the symbolic language of fluidity of adat and legal hybridity, as well as the archival power of the material and the spatial elements of both the meetings and the minutes, were vehicles through which codification in West Sumatra was attempted and contested.

During the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, military and civilian officials governing Singapore used a combination of State Shinto and sport to assist in culturally assimilating Singapore into Japan's Empire. A planned massive sports complex was to be located at Singapore's own State Shinto shrine, the Syonan Jinja, which was partly modelled on Japan's Meiji Shrine which regularly held on its own grounds sports events and games that mixed the rituals of State Shinto with athleticism. Participation in sport was used to assimilate local populations into an imperial identity, united under the helm of the Japanese Emperor.

This article analyses how families and communities in Shan State, Myanmar, have responded to rising youth drug use, and the impacts that these responses have on young people. It first examines the factors that have caused drug production and drug use amongst youth in Shan State to increase over the past three decades and places these phenomena in the context of wider political and economic transformations that have shaped Myanmar's borderlands since the late 1980s. Drug-related harms among Shan youth have overwhelmed family and community coping mechanisms in a context where state responses have been ineffective and inadequate. Consequently, families have resorted to increasingly desperate ways to try to protect young family members from drug use. This article focuses on two responses. First, the decision by rural families to send sons and daughters away to big cities or to neighbouring countries to avoid the local drug environment. Second, the decision to send children experiencing drug harms to treatment centres operated by ethnic armed organisations. Both responses, this article argues, expose young people to new forms of vulnerability. Finally, the article reflects on some of the challenges the drug problem poses for government and communities, and offers suggestions for alternative responses.