Abstract: In October 2012, Wang Jisi, the influential dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies, published an opinion piece in China’s Global Timesrecommending that China rebalancesits geopolitical strategy westwards towards Central Asia and Eurasia (Wang, 2012; Yun, 2013). Professor Wang’s Western strategy would be made state policy the following year when Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the 21stCentury Maritime Silk Road (MSR), thereby expanding Professor Wang’s initial vision beyond the Eurasian landmass to the nations of the Indian and Pacific Oceans (Lim, 2015b). The SREB and MSR together constitute both arms of the “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) development framework. OBOR’s potential reach is enormous: China’s OBOR partners presently number over 60 nations with a combined population of 4.4 billion (“Urgent: ‘Belt and Road,’” 2015). Keywords: China, Development, Foreign Direct Investment, Infrastructure, Southeast Asia

Abstract: In the 1940s and 1950s, several organs of the newly independent Indonesian state oversaw the standardisation of the Indonesian national language. In this process, Western-oriented bureaucrats pushed the language towards European normativity, significantly decreasing the influence of Arabic. While this reform carried symbolic meaning, the practical ramifications on Indonesian orthography, spelling, and word selection also carried real, non-symbolic effects on the accessibility of this language to Indonesian Islamic leaders. Standardising orthography to use the Roman alphabet rendered many Muslims illiterate in a language they had been using for decades. Choices in word selection and spelling limited the Islamic meanings that the new language could carry, thus impacting how Muslims could use the national language for religious and other purposes. Indonesian linguistic reform carried serious social and political consequences in addition to the symbolic meanings often studied.

Abstract: This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society.

Abstract: The mass migration to Burma of Indian labourers, moneylenders and capitalists was one of the most transformative interactions between South and Southeast Asia in the modern era. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and peaking in the 1930s and 1960s, the perceived Indian threat to the economic, political and religious primacy of ethnic Burmans was expressed in riots and protests that ultimately led to the separation of Burma from British India in the late colonial period and the postcolonial diminishing of Indian and Muslim rights. This was all the more true in the new coastal cities, particularly Rangoon, towards which Burma's political and commercial economy was pulled from the pre-colonial capitals of the interior. Research on the causes of these tensions began as early as the 1920s, with colonial quantitative methods setting an enduring explanatory agenda that has continued to focus on economic causes of tension. (1) While there is little doubt about the material dimension of these tensions, the study of Burmese nationalism has also long drawn attention to the importance of cultural factors (particularly the Burman-Buddhist nexus) and actors (particularly the politicised monk). (2) Yet despite what is now the best part of a century of investigation into the contours of Indo-Burman interactions, researchers still lack evidence for the cultural and discursive side of the encounter by way of perceptions of Burma by Indian migrants and settlers from outside the Anglophone elite. (3) Since Indian colonial settlement in Burma raises the difficult question of what Thomas Metcalf has conceived as 'Indian sub-imperialism' around the Indian Ocean, such textual evidence is important, not least because postcolonial theory has shown that colonialism was as much a discursive as an economic process. (4) To investigate the Indian side to the fraught encounter across the Bay of Bengal, this essay uses a colonial Urdu book about Burma as an insider account of a larger transformative process. That process was the transformation of Burma's religious economy into a more pluralistic, productive and competitive terrain of exchange than it had been before the influx of non-Buddhist religious actors during colonial rule. By documenting this transformation, the essay not only aims to move forward discussions of the discursive and cultural dimensions of Indo-Burman antagonism. It also aims to place Burma into a larger Indian Ocean context by showing the local unfolding of a regional transformation that also took place in other colonised regions of the Indian Ocean. (5) Since the Indian text in question was written by a Muslim religious actor (and, it is argued, was primarily addressed to a readership of other religious actors) the following pages examine its contents to shed light on the discursive and practical strategies of Muslim religious actors as they entered colonial Burma's pluralising and increasingly competitive religious economy. By pointing to these Muslim religious actors as the hitherto silent counterparts to the boisterous and better-known Buddhist monks of Burma's colonial public sphere, Sayr-e Barhma ('Burmese journey') allows us to position religious specialists, namely the mawlwi beside the pongyi, as shapers of public opinions about the ethno-religious 'other'. The use of such Urdu materials to understand the history of Burma represents one of the many ways in which Indian Ocean Studies can redress the legacy of Area Studies' creation of artificial historiographical and linguistic boundaries between South and Southeast Asia. (6) In order to read Sayr-e Barhma as both a record and outcome of these larger transformations, this essay contextualises the book as a dialogical text produced through its author's interactions with Burmese texts, persons and places. (7) As we see below, the core section of Sayr-e Barhma consists of what its author claims was the dialogue of his dramatic public debate with the Thathanabaing, the head of Burma's Buddhists. …

Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of Bissu Puang Matoa Saidi, Puang Petta Bala Sari and Jack Davies While authenticity as a philosophical concept has long been used to structure debate on individual identity, in more contemporary parlance authenticity has been additionally used to assess anything from participants in reality TV shows to social media postings. Authenticity's wide deployment has meant academia has engaged the concept in a diverse range of fields, notably tourism studies, performance studies and identity studies, but also increasingly in the area of cultural authenticity, especially in a collective sense. (1) This article builds on this latter field of cultural authenticity by extending thinking on authenticity as it relates to ethnicity. As the backdrop of this analysis, I examine reviews of Robert Wilson's stage play I La Galigo, a production that draws on the mythological Bugis epic La Galigo. (2) For readers with a background and interest in Indonesia, the article will be of value in its assessment of the recreation and reification of ethnic identity; for readers versed in performance studies, the article offers insight into the ways in which reviews and critique structure discourse around visual displays of origin narratives; for readers with an interest in authenticity, the article examines recent theorisation to tangibly show how the trope is deployed to serve various ends--from promoting a singular view of subjects to embracing cultural hybridity. The subject of this article is the performance piece I La Galigo, which is based on La Galigo. La Galigo is an origin narrative of the Bugis--an ethnic group numbering around five million people in South Sulawesi, Indonesia--which describes the founding of Middle Earth, the place where the offspring of the gods descended to live as humans. In 2004, Robert Wilson's stage play, based on this narrative, debuted in Singapore, before being staged throughout Europe, the United States, and Australia (Fig. 1). It was not until 2011 that the play was finally staged in South Sulawesi. (3) More details concerning the production's genealogy are given in the following sections. Wilson's production received both acclaim and critique and many reviews focused on Wilson's ability to create an authentic representation of Bugis identity and envisaged past. That authenticity became a central measure of the production's success speaks to the importance placed on authenticity in both media studies and everyday public discourse. In what follows, I use reviews of Wilson's production as a site for analysis of authenticity. (4) In analysing notions of authenticity this article is divided into four substantive sections. First, I introduce the La Galigo epic. La Galigo (Sure' Galigo or Sureq Galigo) is the term used to describe the origin narrative, while I La Galigo is the name of the stage play, and also the name of the central protagonist in the epic. Second, I turn to an analysis of reviews of Wilson's theatrical production. Some reviews centre on aspects such as lighting or the execution of dance pieces, but many focus their review on the degree of authenticity achieved. Third, I explore notions of ethnicity, identity and Indonesian nation-building as they intersect with the trope of authenticity. In the final substantive section I frame the concept of authenticity by presenting a short historical overview of the development of the term, and analyse recent theoretical innovations concerning authenticity, primarily in the work of Marcus Banks, Charles Lindholm and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. The article concludes by showing that while for many Bugis and non-Bugis theatre reviewers and commentators, there is and should be a singular definable Bugis identity, for others, Bugis identity is always already a mix of different global influences. It is this latter awareness of the dynamic nature of authenticity that resonates with theoretical insights embracing cultural flux in analyses of authenticity. …

Abstract: For decades after their introduction in 1854, state-defined categories of subjects and citizens in the East Indies remained largely uncontested. But a furore erupted when Indo-Europeans — legally Europeans and citizens of the Netherlands — demanded rights to own land, rights exclusively apportioned to the autochthonous population. This article recounts a contentious campaign in the 1930s by the Indo-European Association to gain rights to own land, and the vehement rejection by Indonesians expressed in various civic outlets. I argue that by challenging state categories of entitlement, race, and belonging, the debates on rights to own land defined more sharply notions of citizenship among the Indies population. Drawing on ‘acts of citizenship’, I situate the discourse of rights at the centre of the debate on colonial citizenship. In so doing, I offer an insight into the genealogy of exclusion that has haunted the idea of citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia.

Abstract: From the mid-1920s, Indian music scenes developed in Singapore that were not just about the construction of regional and religious forms of Indian diasporic belonging. Drawing upon European, Chinese and Malay influences (musical and otherwise), and performing in contexts that were uncommon in India, Singaporean Indian musicians contributed to non-Indian musics, while incorporating non-Indian influences into Indian genres. Such musical–communal interactions functioned in colonial Singapore to locate the island as a hub for the constitution of a ‘Malayan Indian sonic geography’. By encouraging links between various Indian and other communities throughout the peninsula via radio, films, recordings, touring networks, and performances at hotels and amusement parks, music became a means for Indian communication and integration in colonial Malaya — a sonic geography that would be significantly transformed, though not eliminated, after Singapore and Malaysia parted ways in 1965.

Abstract: There is little research on Islam and Muslims in Vietnam . This paper seeks to address this gap in the lierature on Islam in SE Asia .In particular, we shall show the close historical tieswith the MalayMuslims in the Malay world, especially Malaysia since the earliest centuries of the coming of Islam to the region either in the context of religious, cultural or other factors. This article aims to explore the isources, methodology, and key issues facing the field of Islamic Thought of the Cham-Malay-Muslim community. Next,the issue of challenges to that community whether internal, external, top-down, or bottom-up..The study will involve two methods of research, libraryand fieldwork. In summary, the findings show that Islam and the MalayMuslim community in Vietnam face many issues and challenges in the era of globalization due to various internal and external factors. We shall also consider how these problems may be addressed, and solved in appropriate way to ensure survival in the short and long term. Keywords: Muslim, Melayu, Cham, Pemikiran Islam, Akidah

Abstract: There was little state-provided social security in colonial Indonesia. The state confined itself to subsidising the services of churches and charities, with most of the subsidies going to organisations that supported impoverished Europeans. The 1930s Depression put enormous pressure on social security networks, both European and Indonesian. It was a particularly difficult decade for many Indonesians living in the towns and cities of Java. The colonial government believed that those who lost their jobs would return to their villages of origin, where they would be supported by extended families and traditional mutual support structures. Some did retreat to the villages, and many circular migrants stayed there because seasonal work in the towns was no longer available. However, by the 1930s increasing numbers of urban people no longer had strong connections with the village world: indeed, about half of the population of the three largest cities of Batavia, Surabaya and Bandung had been born there. Many others were aware that the villages of Java could no longer offer much support. Some who did leave the towns and cities quickly experienced the poverty of rural Java and drifted back. The informal social security networks, which had struggled to cope with the rapid growth of urban Java since the late nineteenth century, were overwhelmed by the tens of thousands who lost their jobs and the thousands of others who sought refuge from rural poverty. (1) Existing organisations continued to reach deep into local communities. For many urban Indonesians Islamic charitable organisations and local mosques were important sources of support. The history of Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia has recently been the subject of an extended study, including a discussion of the welfare arms of Muhammadiyah, the modernist Islamic organisation founded in 1912. Muhammadiyah was the largest Indonesian-managed social welfare organisation in the colony, operating schools, orphanages, polyclinics and poorhouses, motivated by a belief in the duty of Muslims to help the poor and the needy, and influenced by the importance of welfare and educational arms for the expansion of the Catholic Church in Indonesia. (2) Faith-based charities, such as those created by Muhammadiyah or the Catholic and Protestant Churches, expanded their work among the urban poor during the Depression years. They were joined by a growing number of secular charities. Begun in a small way in the late 1920s as part of the nationalist agenda to create a stronger civil society, secular charities quickly expanded in the 1930s as middle-class Indonesians became increasingly aware of urban poverty. In a letter to her former Dutch head teacher in 1932, for example, a young Javanese woman from a middleclass family in Tegal, Central Java, noted that 'poverty-stricken people still bother us by coming to the house every day to ask for alms. Especially before and during lebaran the number of beggars overwhelmed us.' (3) A few years later, in 1935, an Indonesian member of the Provincial Council of East Java spoke of 'a flood of beggars in the towns'. (4) Dutch and Indonesian-language newspapers in the 1930s frequently used the metaphor of'floods' hitting the towns and cities of Java: floods of vagabonds, floods of unemployed, floods of labourers returned to Java from the Sumatran plantations, floods of rural poor, floods of prostitutes. (5) The histories of Indonesian charities in the 1930s have received little attention. This is partly explained by the paucity of official sources and the absence of records from the organisations themselves. Recovering their histories entails a heavy reliance on scattered reports in the Indonesian and Dutch language press. These sources provide only a limited view of the extent of their activities and inevitably bias the story towards the larger organisations led by prominent people that attracted the attention of the press. As Frank Prochaska has reminded us in discussing philanthropy in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, many small local organisations quietly went about their work, their relief efforts known only to those who volunteered and those who were helped. …

Abstract: The Agenda for this International Symposium bravely calls for a return to theg boards and a reconstruction of our historical understanding of the region. Itis a al debate to bring out the old Chinaware and break crockery. It is the fundamentals that the past can be correctly read, that the correct questions canbe asked and the answers searched. It is not the intention of this paper to present new evidence. That was done in a series previously and extensive research work organised by the Department Studies, University of Malaya. Each paper and academic exercise challenged the existing parameters of nation-states and that of the region. This paper willdraw evidence from that collective body of knowledge.

Abstract: Before the advent of Islam, Malay societies professed animism. This situation changed after the advent of Islam that brought the concept of Tawhid (monotheism) by denying the existence of polytheism. Starting with the concept of the oneness of God and the worship of Islam has attracted wide interest in the local community. Since the advent of Islam, the Malay customs which contradicted Islam were gradually abandoned. This article will discuss the theoretical concept of Islam and local wisdom in the Malay world. On this basis, this paper had focus on a several aspects, namely the basic concept of local wisdom, Islam and Malay strengthening local wisdom. Keyword: Local wisdom, Malay world, Malay Polinensia, Working Ethos, Malay Leadership

Abstract: Under conditions of colonial subjugation and anti-colonialism, artistic expression and issues of originality often became anxious and highly politicised social matters with public consequences. The socioeconomic transformations of decolonising and postcolonial nations radically altered the public sphere as can be observed in the realm of cultural production. A postcolonial critique, as Robert Young explains, takes a theoretical and political position, which 'embodies an active concept of intervention within such oppressive circumstances'. (1) The term postcolonial in this essay is not used as an interventionist concept, however, but signals the conditions brought about after colonialism and imperialism. Subsequent historical circumstances may still be positioned within what Young has described to be 'imperialism in its later sense of the global system of hegemonic economic power'. (2) This article argues that sociopolitical events in the late colonial period, often overlooked, were nonetheless significant precursors to the modern art of postcolonial nations. The unique conditions of postwar British Malaya provided fertile grounds for the fermentation of 'new' identities, which radically transformed the social, cultural and economic landscape. British colonial administrators and their families, though a minority, had brought along a system of making and appraising art that was familiar to them, wielding immense influence and authority on its development even as such forms of art became popularised in the colonies over time. Whilst access to such art practices generally remained confined to the more privileged (for example, middle-class European expatriates or the daughters of rich Chinese merchants), there was no stopping talented colonial subjects from developing their talents and skills in similar art forms through emulation or direct study. The problem, however, was not whether colonial subjects were capable or incapable of making good art, though that appeared at the outset to be the focus of debate; rather, it was a matter of recognising the significance of that art as objects of aesthetic pleasure. (3) To be able to do so would necessarily identify the persons involved as capable of partaking in such activities of cultivated pleasure that historically were the prerogative of the European upper class. Pierre Bourdieu observes that for an art to imitate art instead of nature, it inevitably contains reference to its own history and demands to be perceived historically, that is 'it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated "reality", but to the universe of past and present works of art'. (4) More significantly, the 'eye', which seeks to recognise, Bourdieu argues, is 'the product of history reproduced by education'. (5) Implicit in the cultivation of one's eye is the cultivation and recognition of 'high culture'. This process is best exemplified by the way Western upper-middle classes converted economic capital into cultural capital in the nineteenth century as they erected concert halls, art galleries and other 'temples of culture'. (6) In nineteenth-century Europe there was a decisive shift towards commercialisation in art, as well as the rise of institutions promoting national art and culture. This shift occurred in Malaya (later, Singapore and the Federation of Malaysia) (7) in the mid-twentieth century, as observed from the financing and building of cultural centres, museums, art galleries and academies. This included the founding of an arts council and the dispatching of scholars overseas to learn how to contribute to and manage this enlarged cultural infrastructure. The urgency of establishing a common identity was vividly felt in Singapore, which sought to bridge the gulf separating it from the rest of Malaya. Stirrings of nationalism were triggered in part by Japan's capture and occupation of Singapore in 1942, which reflected the ineptitude of the British as colonisers. …

Abstract: This study examined the factors that encouraged and influenced the intention to make repayment of education loan, National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) in Malaysia. The study adapted the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) based on the study of Fishbein and Ajzen (1980) whose aim was mainly to predict the attitudinal influence and behavioural intention. In order to investigate people's thinking process that leads to the decision of repayment, the study would be a descriptive study based on 300 participants who graduated from one of the public universities in Malaysia. The correlation analysis resulted from this study confirmed previous researchers' observations that linked higher educational loan repayment commitments with a higher ability to predict attitudinal influence and behavioural intention. The results suggested that among the three factors namely; attitude towards education loan repayment; perception of affordability of loan repayment that affects the quality of life after graduation, and perception towards loan agreements were the most important predictors of repayment of education loan management. The findings from this study could assist the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) to understand further their borrower insights in paying back loans owed. The knowledge can also assist policymakers to understand better specific strategies, approaches and other relevant matters in making sure that borrowers comply with the repayment conditions while not being a burden to both government and the public. Key words: Education loan repayment, Theory of reasoned action, attitudinal influence, and behavioural intention.

Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of Ki Sesomo This article examines a Sino-Indonesian form of theatre, specifically the cloth glove puppet theatre of southern Fujian (Hokkien) origin known as budaixi (Pinyin), potehi (Hokkien pronunciation) or wayang potehi (in Indonesian). Using secondary scholarship, colonial and contemporary newspaper reports, and fieldwork, this article outlines the genre's emergence in Fujian, its arrival in the archipelago, and historical and contemporary practice there. This theatrical tradition develops from the historical maritime networks of southern coastal Chinese populations in Southeast Asia, contributing to and illustrating the complex meanings of Sino-Indonesian identity. Examples of contemporary potehi patronage constitute strategies used by Sino-Indonesians, in this case the mixed-culture non-Chinese-speaking communities of East Java, to perform an ethnic identity for the larger public, while the form's practitioners are now overwhelmingly non-Chinese. Since potehi is today consistently cast by its patrons, practitioners and scholars as a part of Indonesian heritage, the ways that it can be construed as a form of wayang (and thus, an Indonesian genre) are gaining emphasis. Deployment of the genre in scholarship and society advances an integrationist view of Sino-Indonesian ethnic identity. Scholarship on Sino-Indonesian communities always navigates tensions of identity. Some privilege a Sinocentric view with overseas populations envisaged in relation to China; when the receiving country is the subject of study, diasporic connections or origins may be neglected in favour of an emphasis on its contribution to a core 'native' culture. Naturally, this tension can also be found in the scholarship on Overseas Chinese performing arts, with some stressing and some effacing of 'Chineseness'. Mainland Chinese scholarship on budaixi has largely regarded Southeast Asian practice as unchangingly 'Chinese', while also being inclined to regard it as of marginal interest (and impractical to research) due to its position on the periphery and its linguistic otherness. Conversely, Indonesian and Western Indonesianist scholarship have been weak on the Chinese origins of this genre and the relations that should be traced with existing practices elsewhere (i.e. in Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore). (1) This article seeks to respect Hokkien roots, Indonesian practice, and the position of this genre in a dynamic regional history while tracing the development and practice of the genre. Critical studies of Asian or transnational performance have absorbed from ethnic studies the idea of the 'flexible indeterminacy and contestability of Chineseness ... remade and reshaped in different conditions of diaspora' (2) acknowledging that '"Chineseness" as an ethnic marker is no longer a theoretical given but a malleable category which fluctuates according to its immediate environment'. (3) The existence of highly mixed assimilated communities and huge regional variation within Indonesia means that the terms of 'Chineseness' vary strongly by location and generation. (4) This article attempts to map the diasporic origin of the art and local context of this identity, taking the malleability and indeterminacy of 'Chineseness' in Indonesia as a theoretical starting point, and identifying a public performance of potehi as a way of shaping that local 'Chineseness'. The existence of parallel traditions elsewhere in Southeast Asia, not to mention the genre's radically divergent development in mainland China and Taiwan, puts pressure on concepts of tradition and ethnic identity. While the historical portion relies heavily on secondary scholarship and available newspaper reports of the era, the section dealing with the current practice of potehi is based on fieldwork with potehi troupes in October and December 2012 as well as in January and May 2013, observing performances at resident troupes in Surabaya, Gudo (Jombang) and Mojokerto; as well as performances of such troupes 'away' in Blitar and Yogyakarta. …

Abstract: In the wake of the bloody coup of 1 October 1965, three young Indonesia scholars, Ruth McVey, Fred Bunnell, and Ben Anderson, all working with George Kahin at Cornell University, set out to explain how things had gone so wrong. They began their analysis with a careful examination of the patterns of promotion and transfer in the Indonesian military, which seemed to indicate that tensions between Javanese and other officers played a major part in the coup. Keen to make this information available to other scholars, they quickly wrote up a draft version of their findings and tentative conclusions, and circulated it to a few friends and colleagues. This fateful decision, ironically, would reshape our understanding of Siam. Subsequently banned from entering Indonesia, McVey and Anderson would produce influential work on Siam, while mentoring younger scholars through thesis supervision and edited volumes. This collection, Exploration and irony in studies of Siam over forty years, is comprised of nine of Anderson's articles each outlined below, with an introduction by Tamara Loos, a successor of Anderson as director of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program. Loos' introduction places the articles in historical perspective, and in the context of Anderson's own personal history, including his networks of colleagues and students, and his other work. The essays provide an opportunity to reflect on Anderson's contribution to Siam Studies, as they illuminate the influence he had in opening up new directions for research, and new ways of conceptualising Thai politics.

Abstract: The ASEAN China Free Trade Area (ACFTA) came into effect on January 1, 2010. Since the enactment of the ACFTA, China is expected to benefit from a zero-tariff treatment or lower trade barriers from ASEAN countries. The ACFTA will open a huge export market to China. The major issue of the ACFTA is to what extent members of ASEAN are able to compete with cheaper Chinese goods in the regional market. ASEAN and China each possess similarities in the production and export of goods, particularly manufactured goods that include the textile and clothing sector. The ACFTA will influence competitiveness and comparative advantage among members of ASEAN in the textile and clothing (T&C) industry. Manufacture and trade associations (or business chambers) of the ASEAN T&C industry in particular have warned that the ACFTA would cause significant damage to the ASEAN T&C sector. Members of ASEAN are incapable of competing with Chinese T&C products. The main objectives of this study is to investigate the impact of the ACFTA on the textile and clothing industry based on manufacture associations within the textile and clothing industries of three main members of ASEAN namely Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Keywords: Free Trade Area, ASEAN, China, Textile and Clothing, Trader Associations

Abstract: This article traces the etymology of the term ‘revolution’ as it developed in Vieṭ Nam between the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It argues that the term was slow to catch on, and that activists who used it did so in often contradictory ways. The term’s historical development complicated efforts to fix its meaning, and it was not until the later part of the 1920s that it came to be consolidated, in part through Ho Chi Minh’s publication of a short book entitled Đu o ng Kach Meṇh (The road to revolution).

Abstract: After the restoration of the Le dynasty, the Red River delta region was flooded with military men who set up and controlled irregular departments from the end of the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. The imperial administration became a shell during the Le-Trịnh period, with the Trịnh Lords as de facto rulers who constructed their own parallel government on the basis of these local departments. This analysis of contemporary inscriptions indicates that the Trịnh Lords subsequently expanded their administration and secured their rule by absorbing large numbers of Red River delta literati, while retaining many eunuchs in influential financial and military roles. Overall, the Trịnh bureaucracy, comprising of the Lục Phien and Lục Cung, was a kind of financial organisation combined with a military district system because it harnessed the existing military organisation.

Abstract: NGOs in Malaysia can be categorized in different groups based on their activities and purposes. The aim of NGOs is to develop communities through their social service initiatives. Good governance and effective communication within the NGOs are essential to run community development projects smoothly and make them successful. The main objective of this study is to determine the flow of communication between NGO officers and community members to ensure community participation in Malaysian NGOs. The NGOs need to determine what level of communication adaptation is important in their context and explore how best the systems of participation that can help them improve their communication works. Field research data collection method was used to collect data from 100 direct beneficiaries of one NGO. Graphical diagram presentation and multi-linear regression methods were used to describe the findings. This study adds value to the existing body of knowledge by extending clarity on the subject of the adapting and standardizing of the communication system in NGOs. The data shows that the nature of communication system of NGOs is an important factor to increase community participation. Keywords: communication, community participation, NGO,social service, communication system, Malaysia.

Abstract: Spanning over sixty years, Vietnamese cinema has undergone a number of dramatic transformations. It is marked by a film history that intersects with the country's own turbulent political history. (1) Some of the most acclaimed films have centred on the two Indochina wars that pockmark the country's past, and the problems that have beset postwar Vietnam. Since the economic reforms (Doi Mol) were introduced in 1987, however, Vietnamese films have become more transnational in their production and distribution. For example, Vietnamese diasporic directors from the United States and other countries now make and screen their films in the country. Also remarkable is the reverse flow of directors from Vietnam who travel to foreign countries like the United States to go to film school or screen their films at various international film festivals. Seeking to develop its film industry in the twenty-first century, Vietnam has allowed for the privatisation of production studios in the country, and in the wake of becoming a World Trade Organisation member in 2006, it has liberalised its film market. Parallel with the country's move towards globalisation, films are now being made, disseminated, and screened with a political and economic imperative. Vietnamese cinema and the changing shape of its landscape formulate the grounds for this essay's inquiry into two films by Vietnamese women, Viet Linh's Ganh Xiec Rong (Travelling Circus, 1988) and Pham Nhue Giang's Thung Lung Hoang Vang (The Deserted Valley, 2002). It is within the context of a mostly state-controlled and male-dominated film industry that a woman's directorial point of view appears so singular. In an early essay on Vietnamese cinema, John Chariot observes that filmmakers hold a majority of the governmental positions of power in the industry, which has enabled them some flexibility in defining the aesthetic parameters of a national cinema and negotiating with the ways that their films are made and distributed. What Chariot does not note is that most of these filmmakers are male. (2) Only a few of the country's canonical films have been directed by women, and among a handful of female directors, Linh and Pham are two of the best-known women filmmakers working in an industry that is not only controlled by men, but also saturated with filmic images of women as suffering heroines. (3) Because of this dominance, I focus on the female gaze in Linh's and Pham's films to contend that on display in their work is a powerful, desiring female gaze. It is, furthermore, a gaze that stresses a shared oppression between women and the ethnic Other. Such texts by women must be commended for the ways they critique state paternalism and patriarchal control. They also posit an important alliance among minority populations in Vietnam. Indeed, as this article shows, Linh's and Pham's films explore the politics of looking much more incisively than the male-directed films that have come before and after them. However, these women's films can also be faulted for their depictions of ethnic minorities. Minority men and women appear child-like and close to nature in their films, characteristics that lend themselves to the films' tragic conclusions in which they stand outside of a statist calculus of economic development and modernisation. And yet, if such characters are left behind in modernity, the female protagonists are also marginalised within an order of socialist patriarchy. This marginalisation, I contend, is re-enacted beyond the frames of the films and manifested in the lack of opportunities that are available to women directors in the Vietnamese film industry and its institutions of power. My study investigates the gaze in Travelling Circus and The Deserted Valley to demonstrate that while Linh and Pham offer insightful perspectives into women's lives, their films also depict the ethnic Other in exoticised terms. It revisits gaze theory to test this theory's utility within the context of Vietnamese cinema and its industry during the country's transition to market socialism and a more globalised economy. …

Abstract: This paper calls for an interdisciplinary approach to policy formulation regarding the language of education in the Philippines. It has been long agreed upon that for the students to comprehend pieces of instruction, the medium of instruction is important. Continually shifting policies among three important languages has born different outcomes. However, given their high linguistic diversity, communities in the Philippines have become even moremultilingual and multicultural. Constant and rigorous dynamics among the members of these communities has made some of these policies dA©modA© since most of their research database has been exclusively between education and language studies. The bases for the formulation of policies on the language of the education system are the test-results-based outcomes on learning based on experimental settings and sometimes on the advocacies of particular groups. There is indeed a call for other perspectives from different fields and methodologies to contribute to the formulation of the language policy. It is on this note that this study attempts to integrate different social sciences in (re)discovering methodologiestoward the possible encompassing determination, or non-determination, of a medium(s) of instruction. Keywords: language education, medium of instruction, Philippine society and culture, sociolinguistics

Abstract: This article discusses the abolition of local government elections in Malaysia. Due to the abolition, the practice of government appointmen to select local councillors for every local authority in Malaysia prevailed after 1965. However, citizens are unaware of the factors that caused the repeal of local democracy in Malaysia. Hence, the objective of this paper is to examine what are the factors that have stopped local government elections in Malaysia since 1965. Themain factor affecting abolition was the confrontation between Malaysia and Indonesia. Nevertheless, there are other factors which also contribute to this situation. The identified factors are as follows: internal problems in local authorities, as strategy for Alliance (Perikatan) to seize power in urban areas, declining voter’s supports towards the Alliance party and also racial sentiment. The repeal however has implications for current practice. Among the implications are: issue of accountability among the appointed councillors, transparency and efficiency , confusion of the rol federal and state government and also political interference in local government affairs. Despite efforts to reinstate local elections, they have not been reinstated. Keywords: Abolition factors, issue of local election, abolishment implication, local authority, political party, election

Abstract: Death and its aftermath are fraught with uncertainty. The living employ rituals and ceremonies as ways to frame and manage this uncertainty and hold great significance through the words and actions that are utilised throughout. Central to the ceremonies, and of assistance with the transition of death in general, are works of art that put the concerns and wishes of the living for the dead into physical form. The majority of these objects are temporary, either burned together with the body or displayed for some time at the wat (Buddhist temple-monastery). The Northern Thai response to death and its manifestation in cremation structures and banners is not unique in that it is part of a larger visual language seen throughout Southeast Asia and the Buddhist world. However, relatively little attention has been given to these works of art and the role of materiality in Buddhist funerals. (1) Yet the relationship that is formed between the funerary arts, the deceased, and the attendees of the funeral demonstrates the agency of these art objects in transforming the trajectory of the deceased's next life and the expectations of the living. (2) Because of their temporary nature, funerary arts have been continually overlooked by art historians used to accessing extant materials in collections and archives, and also by Buddhist studies scholars focusing on the texts and actions employed in the ceremonies. Drawn from my observations of funerals from 2006 through 2014 in Chiang Mai and Lamphun provinces and interviews with monks, novice monks, producers of funerary arts, and members of the general population in 2013 and 2014, the research presented here seeks to reflect the active culture of Buddhist practice in Northern Thailand. For the most part these interviews and funerals took place in or near cities. Comparative research in more rural areas is needed. This work explores the impermanent arts of the funeral, at a time when many worry that Northern Thai practices are disappearing in favour of traditions imported from Bangkok. This article aims to open a dialogue on the arts of death and cremation in Southeast Asia through a discussion of Northern Thai banners and cremation structures, and encourage a greater collaboration between ethnographic and art historical methods in the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Doing so will lead to the recognition that funerary arts create an experience that cannot be overlooked, an experience that ensures the connection between the material and the spiritual realms. Through their use at funeral ceremonies, funerary arts become the agents that assure a successful transition from death to rebirth and from one world into the next. The temporary arts of funerals in Northern Thailand and across Buddhist Southeast Asia are impermanence made physical. (3) Coupled with the words and actions of monks throughout the funeral, funerary arts help to mediate the boundary between the living and the dead that is present until the deceased is cremated. (4) The arts of this study make the reality of death and transition immediate and tangible. They also serve as reminders of Buddhist ideals like impermanence (anicca) and non-substance (anatta), as well as local Southeast Asian Buddhist values such as the importance of merit and the riches that await the meritorious once they reach the heavenly realms. By giving physical form to these abstract concepts, funerary arts provide materiality to the otherwise immaterial; they play a critical role in engaging viewers to consider a life well-lived, reflect on their own lives, and imagine the possibilities for improvement in their next birth cycle. As such, they are part of the larger world of Buddhist art that focuses on the accessibility of the immaterial through an aesthetically pleasing, concrete form. The role of objects in religious practice, for which the Northern Thai funerary arts are an exceptional example, cannot be overstated. …

Abstract: The place of women in decision-making at various strata of living has been a front-burner issue inthe current milieu. The population of women in Malaysia is almost as equal the population of men. The Malaysian women have been found to excel in academic and even professional labour market than the men. Thus, they are naturally imbued with the skills and intellectual capabilities to contribute to the Malaysian national development. Notwithstanding the perceived superiority in the intellectual capability of the Malaysian women, the number of women allowed to participate in nation building in the country is abysmally low. Researchers have shown that the women have been facing challenges in assuming political positions where they can adequately and practically contribute to national development. The paper is an exploratory legal research. Therefore, employing an analysis of both primary and secondary documentary data, the paper investigates the factors that contribute to the inhibition of Malaysian women in this regard despite their landmark educational and professional progressions and achievements. The paper argues that Malaysia will profit better in its national development and nation building programmes if more women are allowed to participate in national governance. There is, therefore, the need to introduce fresh approaches and perspectives to the current efforts by the Malaysian government to ensure that it keeps up with its commitment towards the millennium development goals. Keywords:women, decision making, national governance, Malaysia.

Abstract: Based on data gained from qualitative research techniques, this paper presents and discusses the opinions of leading Singaporean oppositional grassroots activists about the state of play in Singaporean politics and civil society and likely developments over the next ten years. Our interviewees show that the Singaporean grassroots opposition activist community, while small, is passionate and committed to taking its country away from the right-wing authoritarian pathway. Those activists more interested in civil society and NGOs than contesting elections are eager to expand and deepen the civil society in Singapore. We also find that certain school-age opposition activists have already decided that the official establishment ideology, as taught in school textbooks, is not the reality of Singapore’s history as they understand it. Activists will continue to focus on the income-inequality problem and human rights issues surrounding Article 377A of the Penal Code (which continues to make homosexual sexual acts between males illegal), the Internal Security Act (which allows detention without trial), and use of defamation suits by ruling-party politicians to bankrupt opposition party politicians and activists. Keywords: Alienation, Civil society, Grassroots activism, Income inequality, Poverty, Singapore opposition parties, Singapore politics, Youth activism.

Abstract: The ascent of the ancient Khmer empire to its apogee in the twelfth century is attested in the vast, unprecedented expansion of ceremonial architecture under Jayavarman VII. In a long reign from 1182/83--c. 1218 CE, the king built the temple complexes of Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, Banteay Kdei, Bayon and Banteay Chhmar, as well as the 9 sq. km walled city of Angkor Thom. (1) His architecture projected powerful new concepts in what French historians called the 'Bayon style', named after the towering Buddhist state temple erected at the heart of Angkor Thom. Several of the king's temples went through different construction phases as religious and ceremonial demands on space evolved, and during the last building phase large, open, pillared halls adorned with female dancing figures were added to all his temples on the main axis, creating the final approach to the temple. (2) French scholars remained unsure of their function and chose the term salles aux danseuses ('halls with dancers'), based on the reliefs of dancing female figures carved into the architraves and pillars of the halls. (3) The structure and positioning of large, open pillared halls erected on the axial entrances to Jayavarman's central sanctuaries recall the Indian mandapa design of colonnade and sculptural pillars set in large temple compounds. Mandapa literally means 'the one that protects the decoration'. (4) Focusing on the halls with dancers, a distinct architectural feature of Jayavarman VII's temples, this article explores the possibility of a link between the architecture, associated inscriptions, dance and music rituals (5) evolving in Angkor and the contemporary Indian Chola temples that housed several mandapas. The article argues that the architecture of the halls with dancers worked in tandem with ritual practices to provide a symbolic and possibly actual space for encountering the divine. Plan and design of the 'halls with dancers' Both Ta Prohm and Preah Khan have such pillared structures situated at the eastern axis and principal approach to the main sanctuary (Fig. 1). They are rectangular cruciform structures with approximately one hundred pillars dividing the space into four courtyards with surrounding galleries. The central bay of the hall corresponds in width to that of the central sanctuary. Two side aisles are half the width of the central aisle. Several female figures in ardhaparyanka (half cross-legged) (6) dance posture adorn the columns and gopura (ornamental entrance) friezes. The halls with dancers are set between large water tanks between the second and the third enclosure walls of the temple complexes. They would have been covered with high barrel-vaulted roofing as can be seen today in the restoration work at Ta Prohm. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] At the Bayon temple, according to Olivier Cunin, in the last phase a long causeway was built to project out from the main eastern entrance and was lined with naga balustrades and flanked with artificial water tanks. A raised platform in the shape of a Greek cross (Fig. 2) was later built onto the causeway and a large, pillared wooden structure added. (7) This open wooden hall, in front of the eastern gopura and sanctuary BY55, composed the final approach to the central sanctuary of the temple. As the wooden structure of Bayon temple was positioned on the axial approach to the central sanctuary, like the halls with dancers in the king's other temples, this building classifies alongside the others, by its structure and positioning, as a 'hall with dancers'. The halls with dancers are a prominent architectural feature and are noteworthy for two reasons: they contain finely carved reliefs of several hundred female dancers and they are a dateable architectural element distinctive of the final phase of the king's construction programme. Jayavarman's purpose in providing this sacred space on an unprecedented scale as the final addition to these temples has yet to be studied. …

Abstract: Community-based conservation is increasingly drawing attention in South East Asian countries. However, the approach is not necessarily compatible with administration style preferred in some Asian developing nations. The study examines how the new approach was interpreted and transformed in the course of its localisation and how community members reacted with the unfamiliar attempt, through a case study on Ma’daerah sea turtle sanctuary project conducted in Terengganu State, Malaysia.Keywords: Conservation, Community, Sea turtle, Localisation, Passive Resistance

Abstract: Since 2013 I have been living and teaching in Jakarta. During my time here I have encountered, through friends, colleagues, students, and family, fragmentary descriptions of life under Suharto in the latter half of the twentieth century and the riots in the late 1990s. A relative, for example, recently apologised when she could not sustain a conversation in Mandarin, explaining that when she was young the language was not allowed; a friend reported that as a teenager he was not permitted to attend a state university because he was officially classified as Chinese; at the age of 12 my wife was sent from her family home to be educated in Singapore because Jakarta was no longer safe. These and other stories trace the shape of a long history of violence and mass expulsion to which Chinese Indonesians have been subjected. Anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia spans multiple generations and amount to, potentially, more than a million lives lost, with many more individuals displaced, traumatised, and financially ruined. I am motivated to write this article because I hear in these fragments a yearning for acknowledgement; attendant to the act of mourning is the need for public recognition of what has occurred and efforts toward emotional reparation. While, as shall be discussed below, certain scholarly and investigative work has attempted to address this need, and the Indonesian government has facilitated a (perhaps superficial) revival of Chinese language and culture, such gestures toward public recognition have not been generally forthcoming. The visual artist FX Harsono represents one of very few individuals I have encountered who has been able to collect some of the fragments of Chinese Indonesian history and assemble from them a means toward mourning and recognition of what took place. This essay will begin with a brief overview of the political and historical circumstances of Chinese Indonesians, particularly in terms of the rhetoric that has informed their relationship with their non-Chinese neighbours. It shall then examine the process of mourning in the work of Indonesian artist FX Harsono, specifically the ways in which his recent work explores both the relationship between language and identity and the gaps in Chinese Indonesian history, and attests to the anti-narrative effect of trauma. The central argument is that Harsono's work attests to the inadequacy of the superficial celebration of Chinese culture in modern Indonesian society. A history of violence Whilst post-1998 Indonesia is being heralded as a model of transition from dictatorship to democracy, beneath that success lies a still-palpable rhetoric of religious, political, and ethnic intolerance. Filomeno V. Aguilar contends that 'the segment of the Indonesian population composed of "Chinese" is often excluded from the moral community of the nation because of their supposed absence of "roots" on Indonesian soil [...] Chinese are [... ] ideologically constructed as aliens and often used as scapegoats'. (1) Communities of diasporic Chinese (Orang Tionghoa, or more crudely, Orang Cina) have existed in Indonesia since at least the seventeenth century. (2) Various Chinese Indonesians have been involved in many of the key moments in the country's history such as resistance against the Dutch and the reading of the Youth Pledge in 1928. (3) While Chinese Indonesians themselves have often been divided internally by religion or degree of assimilation, they have typically been regarded as a single group by their neighbours. Despite their long-standing place in Indonesian history (longer, indeed, than can be covered here), and the major contribution made by many Chinese Indonesians to the national economy (as much as 70 per cent of private economic activity), as a group they have been typically viewed as outsiders by other Indonesians. (4) When Indonesia was under colonial rule the Dutch government operated a policy of divide and rule motivated mainly by their fear that the Chinese and the indigenous population might unify against colonial rule. …