Bøger i Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory serien

Anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first ""liberated"" parts of upland country.

How do the people of a morally shattered nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. Boreth Ly explores the ""traces"" of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians deal with trauma on such a vast scale.

Offers the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage.

For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted metis children - those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers - from their homes. The Uprooted offers an in-depth investigation of this child-removal programme: the motivations behind it, reception of it, and resistance to it.

This is a study of moral subjectivity among Minangkabau people in a small city in West Sumatra, Indonesia, at the beginning of the 21st century.

Presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala-"the woman of the times"-who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s.

An ethnographic exploration of health, illness, and healing among a poor, rural Indonesian people

Explores the intersection of art, identity politics, and tourism in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this book offers a portrayal of the Sa'dan Toraja, a predominantly Christian minority group in the world's most populous Muslim country. It illustrates how art can serve as a catalyst in identity politics.

Focuses on the middle generation, caught between elderly parents who grew up speaking dialect and their own children who speak English and Mandarin. This book examines the many different levels at which the contract operates within Singaporean families.

An eye-opening reassessment of the meaning of revolutionary politics in socialist Vietnam from the Vietnamese perspective

This book sets aside the usual scholarly categories for understanding religion and colonialism: lenses of nationalism, modernity and colonial assimilation, to immerse itself in the world of Burmese Buddhist lay associations and the responses to British colonialism at the turn of the 20th century.

Have the forces of capitalism facilitated the dissemination of Western-style gay and lesbian identities throughout the developing world as some theories of transnationalism suggest? Megan Sinnott engages these issues by examining the local culture and historical context of female same-sex eroticism and female masculinity in Thailand.

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research on the Philippine island of Siquijor, this volume explores myths, meanings, and practices of development and its counterparts, progress and modernization. It does so not only by considering development as planned, community-wide interventions aimed at society-wide improvements in living standards, but by recognizing that development is personal.

Visual evidence is the sine qua non of the modern criminal process - from photographs and video to fingerprints and maps. Siam's New Detectives, covering the period between the late nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War, offers an analytical history of these visual tools as employed by the Thai police when investigating crime.

Traces the role of written Buddhist texts in the predominantly oral milieu of northern Thailand from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This work examines how the written word was assimilated into Buddhist and monastic practice in the region, considering the use of manuscripts for textual study and recitation.

An unusual ethnography of Catholic sisters in the Philippines

Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck - by the controversial Vietnamese writer Vu Trong Phung - is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan.

Offers an ethnography of young Cambodian women who move from the countryside to work in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh. This book challenges the views of these young rural women - that they are controlled by global economic forces and national development policies or trapped by restrictive customs and Cambodia's tragic history.