South East Asia Research

In the Thai Buddhist monastic order, the Sangha/state confluence, religion and politics constitute an intertwined body/corpus as nation. The body in this context is consistently controlled and organized by religious discourse in the creation of religious technologies of the body. This paper examines the exuberance of two contemporary Thai religio-political articulations in relation to the body metaphor, both responses to the amoral and impersonal forces of globalization. The first is monastic saint Luang Taa Mahaa Bua's nationalistic campaign to save the nation, known as ‘Thais help Thais’; and the second, the machinations of the hyper-modern urban religious movement, Thammakaai.

Literature on the Second World War in South East Asia generally concentrates on the harsh behaviour of Japanese soldiers towards Allied prisoners and local people. The Japanese are remembered as abusive and brutal armed forces. But many local people in north-west Thailand think of the Japanese differently. The Japanese left no bitter memories or painful experiences among the locals. In fact, the Japanese often bought food from the locals and even paid them to work. Despite the hardship of the war, cash was not hard to find, and some locals can remember the luxury of having cash to spend. There was even a love story that later was crushed by the cruel force of war.

The concept of being Malay has a unique significance in Brunei Darussalam. Any understanding of Brunei requires a comprehension of the local importance of being Malay. The history of demographic enumeration in north-west Borneo in the twentieth century illustrates how Brunei differs from her Malaysian neighbours. The polysemous nature of the ethnonym malayu in Brunei entails numerous meanings of ‘Malay’, preventing an understanding of ethnicity based on any ‘one-word-one-meaning’ approach to local reality. The fact that citizenship in Brunei is based on jus sanguinis, rather than jus soli, generates a category of ‘stateless’ persons who are citizens of no country.

This paper draws on a ten-year study of the styles of performance patronage in Java – patronage by the state, the tourist industry and individuals, in contexts from the sultan's court to remote highland villages. It focuses on the latest findings about traditionally-and academically-trained performers in the court city of Yogyakarta. Supported by a number of case studies and survey results, it asks how performers have been surviving the economic crisis that began in August 1997, how they evaluate the different spheres of patronage, and how they see their best options for future survival. The answers to these questions elucidate the ways in which performers' identities are being altered, from both individual and collective perspectives.² The data also raise questions about professionalization, and whether this ubiquitous sign of modernity and globalization is able to deliver the promises it holds out to those who aspire to identify themselves as ‘professionals’.