People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called “Malay”, or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of …

Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness Read More »

Indonesian translation of An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (2004) by Anthony Reid. Sumatra adalah sebuah pulau yang sangat luas dan belum banyak diteliti, berpenduduk 43 juta jiwa dan terdiri atas berbagai suku bangsa. Selain dari karya besar William Marsden pada 1783, sedikit sekali tulisan serius mengenai sejarah Sumatra, dan sedikit lagi …

Menuju Sejarah Sumatra: Antara Indonesia dan Dunia Read More »

Using the case of Singapore, this book examines the production of a set of institutionalized relationships and ethical meanings that link citizens to each other and the state. It looks at how questions of culture and morality are resolved, and how state-society relations are established that render paradoxes and inequalities acceptable, and form the basis …

Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society Read More »

Indonesia has been torn by massive internal conflicts over the last decade. The absence of functioning national tools of reconciliation and the often limited success of an internationally established ‘reconciliation toolkit’ of truth commissions and law enforcement, justice and human rights, forgiveness and amnesty, requires us to interrogate commonly held notions of reconciliation and transitional …

Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots Agency for Peace Read More »

Call# BL60 Tur 2011 ISBN: 9780521675321(pbk.)/ 9780521858649 (hardback) Religion is now high on the public agenda, with recent events focusing the world’s attention on Islam in particular. This book provides a unique historical and comparative analysis of the place of religion in the emergence of modern secular society. Bryan S. Turner considers the problems of …

Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State Read More »

Presenting both the need for – and difficulty of – introducing effective cultural resource management (CRM) in the region, ‘Rethinking Cultural Resource Management in Southeast Asia’ explores the challenges facing efforts to protect Southeast Asia’s indigenous cultures and archaeological sites from the ravages of tourism and economic development. Recognising the inapplicability of Euro-American solutions to …

Rethinking Cultural Resource Management in Southeast Asia: Preservation, Development, and Neglect Read More »

In The Halal Frontier Johan Fischer shows that halal (literally lawful or permitted) is no longer an expression of esoteric forms of production, trade and consumption, but part of an expanding globalised market. This book explores modern forms of halal understanding and practice in the halal consumption of middle-class Malays in the diaspora.

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself king and inaugurated a series of upris-ings that would later crupt into one of the largest anticolonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history. Treated as an imposter by the British, a hero by …

The Return of the Galon King: History, Law and Rebellion in Colonial Burma Read More »

The twelve chapters of this books derive from the reflections of a prominent historian on the nature of modern Indonesian history, over a 40-year time span. A central thread running through the volume is the importance of the fact that Indonesia entered the modern community of nation-states through political revolution. This revolution has often been …

To Nation by Revolution – Indonesia in the 20th Century Read More »