Inter-household relations in lowland Lao villages are often characterized by cooperation and mutual support. This study describes norms governing agricultural labour exchange, assistance at household ceremonies, and village-wide projects. Successful cooperation expresses and reinforces values of village mutuality and solidarity which are important principles of Lao social organization and identification.

Among the Chinese associations in Thailand which who have shown the highest rate of expansion the last decades have a philanthropic aim. This paper places such associations in their social, historical, and religious context, and describes their multifarious activities, showing that they play an important role in the persistence of Chinese identity in Thailand.

Recently the Indonesian press has paid increased attention to reports or rumours of the use of sorcery by various people in order to gain or to hold onto official positions, or to influence others who hold such positions. This paper examines rumours concerning these practices in an Indonesian university, considering them both in the context of Javanese cosmological and magical beliefs, and within the social and economic realities of the university community. The conclusion is that whether or not magical attacks actually take place, preventative measures give people a feeling of safety and perhaps smooth the path to success.

The five cases of Protestant Christian practice in Indonesia and Thailand presented in this symposium are used to develop a sociology of Protestantism in Southeast Asia. A review is first undertaken of the history of Protestant missionary activity in Southeast Asia. Protestantism, it is observed, insists on the ultimate authority of the Bible. This authority has not been accepted by Southeast Asians until they have access to the Christian message in their own languages and they are motivated to adopt Christian practices as a means to confront deep crises in their lives. The establishment of Protestant Christianity has entailed the interpreting of the Christian message with reference to the non-Christian contexts in which Protestants in Southeast Asia live.

Although nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in Siam tried to debunk local spirit beliefs and witchcraft accounts, they and their actions were perceived in terms of local supernaturalist frameworks. Late twentieth-century Thai Christians, supernaturalists themselves, have reclassified local spirit activity through their own Christian frameworks, using local vocabularies of spirit phenomena but retaining master categories of interpretation and practice drawn from North American evangelicalism. This practice puts Thai Protestant churches in a direct dialogue with their cultural contexts and leaves them positioned to benefit from Thailand's increasing religious pluralism.

Protestant Akha highlanders of Northern Thailand held a Silver Jubilee in 1987 celebrating the initial conversions to Christianity twenty-five years earlier. The Akha-language translation of the passage from the Gospel of Matthew selected as the Jubilee's theme evokes the image of a laden basket from a pre-Christian folktale accounting for the differentiation of Akha from other ethnic groups, and the Protestant Akha used this traditional image to separate themselves from non-Christian Akha. This paper explores the transformation of a symbolic vehicle for interethnic differentiation into a vehicle for intraethnic differentiation. Use of this laden basket image is viewed as part of intraethnic dialogues of identity, which are themselves embedded in dialogues of identity between Christian as well as traditionalist members of the Akha tribal minority and Buddhist Thai, who are Thailand's dominant majority both politically and culturally.

This article discusses the significance of religious diversity for a minority ethnic group (the Karen) in the midst of integration into the Thai nation state, addressing both the historical and cultural momentum of initial acceptance, and the subsequent diversifying reformulation and redefinition of identity and community through the adopted religions.

Converted by Salvation Army missionaries in the 1920s, Tobaku people in western Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, have made Protestantism indigenous by re-classifying deities and interpreting biblical texts and teachings to support local political, moral, and spiritual expectations. This article discusses twentieth-century changes in deity concepts and ritual practice among the Tobaku.

Reading the Bible is the principal religious practice of many Javanese Protestants. It is here compared to Javanese interpretive approaches to other texts, such as the Qur'an, magical formulae, and schoolbooks. While many aspects of the format of the village Bible study group constitute a break with conventional Javanese interpretive practices, the interpretive discourse of a Bible study meeting is still constrained by long-standing status and gender distinctions. Nevertheless, the innovative format of Bible study opens some room for interpretations that undercut more authoritative and conservative readings.