Orang Asli Women of Malaysia: Perceptions, Situations & Aspirations

Orang Asli women once had important responsibilities and functions that are now labeled “male-only”. This discrimination spread throughout Orang Asli society during the last few centuries as Orang Asli came into contact with male-dominated cultures and internalized these alien norms for gender roles. It is the stealthy, relentless erosion of Orang Asli life in general, …

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WPS 77 Producing Singaporeans: Family Policies and their “Latent” Effects

Like many other “late industrializing” countries, Singapore faces a downward trend in marriage and fertility rates that have come to be seen as urgent national problems. The Singapore state has made numerous attempts to shape Singaporeans’ behaviour—using housing policies, tax incentives, and various campaigns to entice them to marry and have children. Combining data on …

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WPS 76 The Emergence of a Transnational Healthcare Service Industry in Malaysia

The recent history of healthcare privatisation and corporatisation in Malaysia, an upper middle-income developing country, highlights the complicit role of the state in the rise of corporate healthcare. Following upon the country’s privatisation policy in the 1980s, private capital made significant inroads into the healthcare provider sector. This paper explores the various ownership interests in …

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Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World

This simulating new reading of constructions of ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore is an important contribution to understanding the powerful linkages between ethnicity, religious reform, identity and nationalism in multi-ethnic Southeast Asia. The narrative of Malay identify devised by malay nationals, writers and filmmakers in the late colonial period associated malayness with the village or …

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WPS 75 Cultural Resource and Heritage Issues of Historic Champa States: Champa Origins, Reconfirmed Nomenclatures and Preservation of Sites

In this paper the author has firstly reconfirmed some names related to the most northern minor states of the Champa kingdom that were noted in Champa inscriptions during the eleventh to fifteenth centuries and are presented in comparison with the place names of the current provinces of Quảng Bình, Quảng Tri, Thừa Thiên-Huế in Central …

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WPS 74 Ethnos (minzoku) and Ethnology (minzokushugi) in Manchukuo

I explore how the rhetoric of nationality or ethnos (minzoku) became a central element in Japanese imperial ideology of Manchukuo and Asia in the Pacific War. Japanese imperialism from the 1930s sought to put nationality at the center of its expansionist ideology. At the same time, anthropology or ethnology (minzokushugi), became the means to study …

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WPS 73 Regionalism in Myanmar’s Foreign Policy: Past, Present and Future

This paper examines regionalism in Myanmar foreign policy mostly in the context of ASEAN-Myanmar relations and it argues that Myanmar’s decision to embrace regionalism was primarily motivated by her desire to enhance state security, which also meant regime security; the threat to which was more internal than external in nature. Her subscription to regionalism was …

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Telisik Tradisi (in Indonesian; Management of Traditional Arts)

Telisik Tradisi: Pusparagam Pengelolaan Seni, is the product of a research project on management of the traditional arts in Indonesia conducted by the Kelola Foundation. Edited by Jennifer Lindsay, the writing team comprises Aton Rustandi Mulyana, Andi Aguyssalim AJ and Ediwar Chaniago. Essays discuss management issues facing performing groups for Sisingaan in West Java (Kabupaten Subang), Tarling from Indramayu, …

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Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History and Identity

Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos—a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book—Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation …

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