This book brings a new approach to the study of political change in East and Southeast Asia and demonstrate the importance of political ideas behind policies and politics. The traditional approach to studying the politics of a region is to focus on events, personalities, issues - the mechanics of the political process. What this volume looks to do is to step back and examine ideas and visions, as well as those who articulate them and/or put them into operation.

The contributors thus aim to conceptualize what discourse means for political change in East and Southeast Asia, and how...

Borneo, with its tales of White Rajahs and tribes of headhunters, has long excited the Western imagination. Today, however, there is another green imagination at work. Mention of the island is more likely to evoke images of tropical deforestation and concern about the cruel dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples who once lived in relative harmony with their environment.

It is perhaps not suprizing then, that most books dealing with the nomadic hunter-gatherers of Borneo have principally been pictorial studies. There is indeed a dearth of scholarship regarding these...

Food has an important role in establishing and structuring social and kin relations in Southeast Asian societies. For this reason, there is growing interest within anthropology in understanding how the production, processing and consumption of food is one important basis for the construction of ties of relatedness, so-called 'kin' ties. These are often based at least partly on 'shared substance'. In this respect, a book on Southeast Asia is especially interesting in understanding kinship since the region is generally taken to include a number of distinct types of kin structures.

This...