This article traces the changing relationships between the living and the dead in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Fuelled with fear, confusion, and massive displacement, these relationships initially consisted of distrustful interactions. Over time, however, reciprocal relations of support were established, enabling a transformation of the dead from frightened and frightening beings, to benevolent allies in the reconstruction of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. These relationships allowed both the living and the dead to be brought in from the ‘forest’, thus showing how managing the dead was an integral aspect of post-conflict security. By comparing such relationships at Choeung Ek Genocidal Center (a national memorial site) and Koh Sap (an island in the Bassac River) this article shows how the dead replicate the locally situated politics of the living in these encounters.

Rangoon circa 1900 was known as ‘one of the best show towns in the East’. As the capital city of Burma, then ruled from Calcutta as a province of India, it was home to more Indian nationals than Burmese. In this cosmopolitan context, two vernacular arts complexes — the Parsi theatre of India and the popular zat-pwe of Burma — flourished, competed, and converged. This article documents the 55-year long engagement of Parsi theatre in Burma within the larger history of global theatrical flows in the Indian Ocean. It highlights the story of Dosabhai Hathiram, a theatre man who rooted himself in Rangoon his entire life. And it asks, why was Parsi theatre celebrated elsewhere in Southeast Asia as a vector of modernity, and yet in Burma it left scarcely a trace behind?

Across the Theravada Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, the Vessantara Jataka has long been the most famous of the stories (jatakas) of the previous lives of the Buddha. However, little attention has been paid to the jataka's historical vicissitudes. Drawing on comparisons with neighbouring Thailand, this essay suggests there have been significant differences in the jataka's performances and interpretations in Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia and Laos. This essay seeks to historicise understandings of the Vessantara Jataka, showing how social movements, state policies and global pressures have shaped understandings of the jataka differently in each country.

The United States’ occupation of the Philippines began with proclamations of a new era of development and the prospect of local political representation. In coming to grips with what they saw as America's civilising mission, colonial scholars and officials sought information about the peoples of the Philippines by conducting a census and various population studies, using an array of methodologies drawn from criminology and physical anthropology. This article traces and critiques representations of the Philippine population in the 1903 Philippine Census as well as in several related studies published in the early American period, which served to reduce the Filipinos to a state of ‘otherness’ which served to justify colonial projects. Several of these racialised studies used the inmates of Bilibid Prison, both alive and dead, as experimental and documentary subjects to create a record of Filipino ‘sample types’ for various administrative and other purposes, such as the exhibition at the St Louis World's Fair of 1904. Bilibid prisoners’ body size, brain weight, skin colour, facial features and other physical attributes were selectively correlated with other colonial constructions of Filipino individuals and groups, such as ‘wildness’ and political maturity.

This article discusses the views and attitudes of the Malay-speaking Muslims of Thailand's Far South (henceforth, simply the Malays) about their collective position in Thai politics. Since 2004, the Far South, comprising the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala, has been engulfed in political violence that has claimed several thousand lives. Consequently, the conflict is often the subject of conversations among the Malays. More importantly, the Malays sometimes evoke their collective memory of episodes of past violence involving members of the Far South Malay society and the Thai state in their discussions about contemporary incidents. Why do the Malays hark back to the past when they discuss contemporary political violence? What connections do the Malays make between past and contemporary events? In this article, I discuss Malay collective memory about the Pattani Demonstration of 1975 and the Tomb of Martyrs at the Tok Ayoh Cemetery in Pattani province. I argue that, among the Malays, historic graves in Thailand's Far South are commemorative objects that aid the circulation of stories about collective victimhood pertaining to events such as the Pattani Demonstration. Such stories are central to the maintenance of a shared sense of community among the Malays vis-à-vis the rest of Thai society.

This article examines the relationship between an important local spirit cult and the construction of Isan political identity in Chaiyaphum province, northeast Thailand. Isan subjectivity has largely been studied through social or political-economic lenses. This study looks, however, at the spiritual experiences and ritual performances that crucially manufacture a local version of personhood. The spectacular annual performance of social memory and historical commemoration of Phaya Lae is constitutive of political identity for the people of Chaiyaphum province. I argue that the rituals surrounding the Phaya Lae cult enable the people of Chaiyaphum to perceive their subjectivity as Thais via the integration of the deity into the historical imagination of the state. I argue further that such local performances of spirit cults sustain Thailand as a ‘ritual state’ in which power and prestige are maintained by ritual enactments both in everyday life and ceremonial events. Through mediumship, the periphery draws charisma from the central Thai state and in turn ritually sustains the potency of the centre.

Since regaining its independence in 2002, nation-building has been the focus of much scholarly research on Timor-Leste. National identity construction is a crucial aspect of this process, yet the ways in which this identity is officially represented has been largely overlooked. This article takes the national flag of Timor-Leste as a case study to explore the ways in which a historic East Timorese national identity has been symbolically constructed and visually embodied. By considering the potency of flags in an East Timorese cultural context, and by analysing the origins of Timor-Leste's flag alongside that of the political party Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária do Timor-Leste Independente), it becomes clear that post-independence re-imaginings of its symbolism have rendered it a powerful national symbol in the contemporary nation-state.

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

This article explores how the islands of Bali and Lombok were racialised through the work of Dutch racial scientist J.P. Kleiweg de Zwaan in the 1930s. An examination of both Kleiweg's published works and his local practices draws attention to the fact that racialisation occurred at different moments of anthropological work, producing different outcomes. The article concludes that anthropologists communicated different versions of racial ideas to international academics and to local communities. The Bali-Aga and Sasak, who were measured, described and photographed by anthropologists, appropriated racial categories which they found meaningful.

This article concerns divergent visualisations about the Ifugao Rice Terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Philippines, which remain central to the economy and lives of the indigenous Ifugao. It focuses on the contrast between the Ifugao internal notion of ‘good’ and the visual emphasis on ‘beautiful’ associated with heritage bodies’ management and conservation of the terraced landscapes. These divergent visualisations frame various actors’ expectations of the terraces. In particular, this article features the community involvement in forums on mapping of core and buffer zones of the World Heritage clusters, and their responses to and criticisms of conservation initiatives in relation to their perceived impact on their livelihoods.

Reynaldo Ileto, in his classic Pasyon and Revolution, sought the categories of perception of the Filipino ‘masses’ that guided their participation in the Philippine Revolution. Among the sources he examined was the Carpio legend, which he unfortunately subsumed to the separate, elite Carpio awit (Tagalog poem). Through a detailed examination of the legend's historical and geographical context, with its invocation of two locations, Pamitinan and Tapusi, I arrive at a different understanding of lower-class consciousness than Ileto. Rather than a counter-rational expression of peasant millenarianism, the legend of Bernardo Carpio was a ‘hidden transcript’ celebrating the history of social banditry in the region.

This article assesses the interconnected nature of Southeast Asia around 1900, the transnational entertainment scene in Southeast Asia, and the role of Singapore as a hub for commerce, shipping, and entertainment. The global and regional development of transportation and communications technology and networks facilitated the movement of people, goods, ideas, and amusement forms. The article is based primarily on archival research from colonial newspapers in the region. It surveys and maps more than one hundred itinerant entertainment companies that travelled throughout Southeast Asia around the turn of the century, thereby creating and visualising a circuit of entertainment.

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the ‘white race’ and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both ‘progress’ and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers’ racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism.

Since the 2008 rice crisis, Malaysia's rice policies have been caught between government efforts to raise production and its support of the country's monopoly rice importer (Bernas). This article argues that when the politics behind the country's policies are revealed, the paradox is more apparent than real. The three principal policy components — gratifying Barisan Nasional's coalition partners in East Malaysia by expanding the acreage devoted to rice; buttressing the rural Malay economy by providing subsidies through a yield-enhancing programme; and relying on big business for financial support (Bernas's new owner is one of Malaysia's richest businessmen) — aim to serve the same end: to perpetuate UMNO's political power amid increasing electoral competition.

Edward Van Roy's Siamese melting pot: Ethnic minorities in the making of Bangkok is a tour de force and one of the most important books on the history of Bangkok and late-modern Thai history ever to be published. It is clearly written and presented, it provides excellent maps, and brings to light little-known sources and surprising facts about the history of the most iconic neighbourhoods in the city. It exposes the histories of various Muslim, Mon, Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese, European, Indian, and other communities in late Ayutthaya and Bangkok, as well as highlights various ways of seeing Bangkok as a feudal city, a vibrant port-city, or a galactic polity. Van Roy also reveals the complexities of defining ethnicity and class in Bangkok's changing neighbourhoods. In this review article I will look closely at two issues Van Roy exposes that need some theoretical and critical interrogation: the ‘galactic polity/mandala’, and ‘ethnicity’. Then I will provide a short vignette about the Chettiar community in Bangkok and the idea of Hinduism in Bangkok history that both supports and supplements Van Roy's excellent research. I write this not to discount or criticise Van Roy's monumental achievement, but because I believe a book this important to the field deserves serious attention and engagement.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.