New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Buddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhist world was subject to European colonial rule. Of all those Westerners who became interested in, and sought to promote Buddhism at this time, perhaps no-one is more unusual and interesting than U Dhammaloka, an Irishman who “went native” and became a Buddhist monk in British Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. U Dhammaloka is now the subject of a fascinating new book, The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020) cowritten by Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking. Beyond the story of this intrepid Irishman, this book is also a social history of British Burma at the height of European imperialism. But what is distinctive about this social history is its focus on white, working-class Europeans in the highly cosmopolitan colonial states at this time. Some of them, and U Dhammaloka was one, shared political sympathies with the Asian subjects of these colonial states.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon the histories of societies based on wet-rice cultivation to chart an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation. It traces inter-state linkages and the growth of commercialization without capitalism in the Indian Ocean World.Dr. Ravi Palat is professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton. His research interests include world-systems analysis, historical sociology, political economy, and the sociology of food. Currently working on cuisine as an element of state formation and the cultivation of a national culture; on the Americas in the making of early modern world-economies in Asia; on the parallel transformations of China and India since the mid-1800s; and on a critique of contemporary area studies. Earlier work centered on the political economy of east and southeast Asia in the context of contemporary transformations of the capitalist world-economy; and on the making of an Indian Ocean world-economy.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years, which have seen a spate of books with liberalism in the title: on Islam in Indonesia, capitalism in Singapore, post-colonialism in the Philippines, and now, Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018). In this new study, Roman David and Ian Holliday draw on extensive survey and interview data to argue that people in Myanmar show inconsistent commitments to the tenets of liberalism in its adjacent aspects: by being, for instance, highly tolerant of some minority groups but highly intolerant of others, notably Rohingya; and, by showing support for democracy but also for the military’s continued role in national politics. They characterize this condition as “limited liberalism”, which they distinguish from semi-liberalism and other hybrid types.Roman David and Ian Holliday join us on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about limited liberalism in Myanmar and beyond, about trust in government and the Coronavirus pandemic, prospects for transitional justice, and about doing survey and interview research on politics in Myanmar in the 2010s.Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in:• Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination and Democracy• Helen Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First CenturyNick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Leah Zani, a public anthropologist and poet based in California, about her truly wonderful book Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Duke University Press, 2019).Her research takes place half a century after the CIA’s Secret War in Laos – the largest bombing campaign in history, which rendered Laos the most-bombed country in the world. Dr. Zani examines the long-term effects of air warfare by looking at how the explosive remnants of war build themselves into people’s everyday lives, and how people embody the extreme uncertainty of a peace haunted by war.The book is striking in a thousand ways, but perhaps what stands out its being composed as ethnography interspersed with “fieldpoems”. Foregrounding the blurry line between war and peace, Bomb Children is a patient and careful ethnography that looks at how people build lives in worlds that continue to explode.In today’s conversation, I ask Dr. Zani about how to write ethnography about not-knowing, the unique analytic of parallelism she developed for her research, the recursive relationship between method and theory in anthropology, and what poetry can offer ethnographic analysis.Dr. Zani received her PhD from University of California, Irvine in 2017 and is the poetry editor (!) at Anthropology and Humanism. She can be found online here https://www.leahzani.com/ and on Twitter @leah_zani.Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. He is based in Mexico City and he researches the city’s repeating earthquakes. He is a contributing editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab (https://www.urgentemergent.org/), and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich. He and his friends were permanently fired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020, but he hopes we can all get our jobs back soon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography.The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including migrations of traders, indentured laborers, civil servants, sailors, and slaves throughout the entire basin. The Indian Ocean in World History also discusses issues of trade and production that show the long history of exchange throughout the Indian Ocean world; politics and empire-building by both regional and European powers; and the role of religion and religious conversion, focusing mainly on Islam, but also mentioning Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Using a broad geographic perspective, the book includes references to connections between the Indian Ocean world and the Americas. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Alpers looks at issues including the new configuration of colonial territorial boundaries after World War I, and the search for oil reserves.Edward Alpers is a professor of history at UCLA.Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the lives of the people. The Buddha in Lanna: Art, Lineage, Power, and Place in Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) offers the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of Buddha statues.Drawing on palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions, many never previously translated into English, the book reveals the key roles that Thai Buddha images have played in the social and economic worlds of their makers and devotees from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.Author Angela S. Chiu introduces stories from chronicles, histories, and legends written by monks in Lanna, a region centered in today’s northern Thailand. By examining the stories’ themes, structures, and motifs, she illuminates the complex conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society.Buddha images were depicted as social agents and mediators, the focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, as the very generators of history itself. In the chronicles, Buddha images also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, thereby integrating Buddhist and local conceptions of place.By comparing Thai Buddha statues with other representations of the Buddha, the author underscores the contribution of the Thai evidence to a broader understanding of how different types of Buddha representations were understood to mediate the “presence” of the Buddha.The Buddha in Lanna focuses on the Thai Buddha image as a part of the wider society and history of its creators and worshippers beyond monastery walls, shedding much needed light on the Buddha image in history. With its impressive range of primary sources, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist art history, Thai studies, and Southeast Asian religious studies.Olivia Porter is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her research focuses on Tai Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and its borders. She can be contacted at: olivia.c.porter@kcl.ac.ukSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did the word “Jakarta” appear as graffiti on the streets of Santiago in 1973? Why did left-wing Chilean activists receive postcards in the mail with the ominous message “Jakarta is coming”? Why did a Brazilian general lose his temper in an interview with university students, threaten their safety, and yell the name of Indonesia’s capital city?In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020) journalist Vincent Bevins links the history of the overthrow of Sukarno – a leader of 1960s Third Worldism –, the rise of the Suharto – one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators – , and the slaughter of 500,000 to one million Indonesians allegedly linked to the Indonesian Community Party (the PKI) to the Latin American “dirty wars”, including Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America. This is a major achievement and something that very few scholars have been able to do.Bevins persuasively argues that the long-ignored and even silenced history of Indonesia 1965 was of truly world historical significance.The Jakarta Method joins a growing body of scholarly work on what some call a “political genocide” and what a 1968 CIA report deemed “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”. By showing how the overthrow of the radical Sukarno, the rise of the pro-American Suharto, and the brutal destruction of the largest Communist party outside of the USSR and the PRC impacted both right-wing generals and left-wing revolutionaries from the streets of Rio de Janeiro to the jungles of Cambodia, The Jakarta Method is a much needed and very welcome globalization of this history.Vincent Bevins is a native Californian who attended UC Berkeley before he began his career as an international correspondent in Venezuela. He worked for the Financial Times in London, covered Brazil and the southern cone for the Los Angeles Times, and then moved to Jakarta where he reported on Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. He spoke to us from Sao Paulo, Brazil about The Jakarta Method. An excerpt of the book appeared in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envision a new nation-state. The book tackles this topic on both military and political fronts; paying attention not only to how Islam energized the Indonesian Revolution but also to how revolution refreshes the practice and social organization of Islam. While much of the present historiography on the Indonesian Revolution has centered on the secular nationalist leaders as primary historical actors, this book refocuses attention on how the revolutionary movement drew additional vitality from a diverse group of pious Muslims. Integrating the experiences of relatively obscure military veterans with well-known Muslim politicians, the book is one of the first to provide a coherent survey of the multi-faceted ways Islam became entangled with Indonesia’s revolutionary ideology across different ethnic communities.In this podcast, we discuss the notion of Muslim piety and how stories from veterans of the revolution break down orthodox-heterodox binaries in the practice of Islam, the mutations of religious authority during a tumultuous period, the politics of forming a national bureaucracy to govern Islam and enduring legacies of Indonesia’s Revolution.Kevin W. Fogg is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is the associate director at the Carolina Asia Center. He is also a research associate at Brasenose College and the Faculty of History, Oxford University. Find him online at www.kevinwfogg.net.Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarienSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On the night of September 30/October 1, 1965, a bungled coup d’état resulted in the deaths of a handful of Indonesian generals and a young girl. Within days the Indonesian army claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, was responsible.This set in motion the confusing, mysterious, and often perplexing events in 1965 that led to the downfall of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno – an anti-imperialist who sought to combine the forces of nationalism, religion, and communism – and the rise of the authoritarian General Suharto who ruled Indonesia for 32 years – a period of far-right military dictatorship known as the New Order.As part of Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno, the circle of officers around him incited regional officers to start a campaign of arrest, detention, torture, and mass murder of millions of Indonesians. We don’t have exact numbers, but somewhere between 500,000 and a million were killed and an equal number sent to brutal prisons throughout the nation’s sprawling archipelago, Buru Island being the most infamous.Prisoners worked as slave labor for years. After their release, they were subject to official repression and were treated as social pariahs. Even the children of former prisoners faced discrimination. Allegedly this wave of violence was directed at the massive Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, but in reality, scores of other leftists including feminists, labor organizers, and artists fell victim to the bloody purge.Because the killers ran the state for decades, a generation of Indonesians were fed a steady stream of lurid propaganda that falsely claimed the PKI was planning its own campaign of mass murder.John Roosa’s Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia, University of Wisconsin Press, 2020 is a carefully crafted study of these events that sheds light on the mechanics of mass murder and dispels a number of myths about this dark moment in Indonesian history.Based on decades of interviews and archival research the book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarly work on what some have termed a political genocide and what a 1968 CIA report called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”.John Roosa is an Associate Professor of history at the University of British Columbia.Buried Histories is a sequel to his previous book, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup D'État in Indonesia, the definitive political history of the event that set the Indonesian genocide in motion.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies