Fighting arts have their own beauty, internal philosophy, and are connected to cultural worlds in meaningful and important ways. Combining approaches from ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, performance theory and anthropology, the distinguishing feature of this book is that it highlights the centrality of the pluripotent art form of pencak silat among Southeast Asian arts and its importance to a network of traditional and modern performing arts in Southeast Asia and beyond. By doing so, important layers of local concepts on performing arts, ethics, society, spirituality, and personal...

Faith and the State offers a comprehensive historical development of Islamic philanthropy--zakat (almsgiving), sedekah (donation) and waqf (religious endowment)-- from the time of the Islamic monarchs, through the period of Dutch colonialism and up to contemporary Indonesia. It shows a rivalry between faith and the state: between efforts to involve the state in managing philanthropic activities and efforts to keep them under control of Muslim civil society. Philanthropy is an indication of the strength of civil society. When the state was weak, philanthropy...

In Workers, Unions and Politics. Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, John Ingleson revises received understandings of the decade and a half between the failed communist uprisings of 1926/1927 and the Japanese occupation in 1942. They were important years for the labour movement. It had to recover from the crackdown by the colonial state and then cope with the impact of the 1930s depression. Labour unions were voices for greater social justice, for stronger legal protection and for improved opportunities for workers. They created a discourse of social rights and wage justice. They were...

Between Harmony and Discrimination explores the varying expressions of religious practices and the intertwined, shifting interreligious relationships of the peoples of Bali and Lombok. As religion has become a progressively more important identity marker in the 21st century, the shared histories and practices of peoples of both similar and differing faiths are renegotiated, reconfirmed or reconfigured. This renegotiation, inspired by Hindu or Islamic reform movements that encourage greater global identifications, has created situations that are perceived locally to oscillate between...

In this biography Nico J.G. Kaptein studies the life and times of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822-1914), the most prominent Muslim scholar of his era in the Netherlands East Indies. During his long career, he provided guidance to the Muslim community and from 1889 onwards simultaneously served the colonial government as advisor for Muslim affairs after the famous C. Snouck Hurgronje had engaged him. Based on an analysis of his writings, Kaptein focuses on the question of how Sayyid ʿUthman viewed the place of Islam in the colonial state and the many reactions this provoked, both nationally and...

The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script.The approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives. Scholars have long recognized a gap between the practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. The question is what impact this gap should have on our conception of 'the text'. Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese...

In this monograph Philipp Bruckmayr examines the development of Cambodia’s Muslim minority from the mid-19th to the 21st century. During this period Cambodia’s Cham and Chvea Muslims established strong relationships with Malay centers of Islamic learning in Patani, Kelantan and Mecca. During the 1970s to the early 1990s these longstanding relationships came to a sudden halt due to civil war and the systematic Khmer Rouge repression. Since the 1990s ties to the Malay world have been revived and new Islamic currents, including Salafism and Tablighism, have left their mark on contemporary...

Letters without Capitals: Texts and Practices in Kim Mun (Yao) Culture examines the writing culture of Kim Mun communities in Southeast Asia and China. The Kim Mun, who belong to the Yao ethnic group, are renowned for their Daoist religious practices and religious texts written in Chinese script. This work takes an unpublished Kim Mun letter that was composed in Laos and sent to Vietnam as its centrepiece. Through an analysis of the letter, one which uses ethnographic accounts of Kim Mun communities and studies of Kim Mun literary and religious texts, it demonstrates that writing is a...

Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern...