In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of...

This penetrating book re-examines 'the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative 'ethnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of 'popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion.

Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred examines a large number of Europeans who, disillusioned with western culture and religion after World War I, and anticipating the spiritual seekers of the counterculture, turned to the religious traditions of Asia for inspiration. Harshly criticized by both scholars and religious reformers, their project of "Gnostic Diplomacy" became of continuing relevance in a time of violent clashes between inhabitants of 'secular' and 'sacred' worlds.