Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Southeast Asia

Timor has been a divided island at least since the seventeenth century when Dutch and Portuguese colonial empires competed for its control. Despite this fragmentation, the weaving of cloth has remained intimately linked to the cultural history of the Timorese peoples as a whole. Handwoven cotton garments serve as markers of identity and nurture social relationships when they are exchanged.

Women in Timor weave an impressive variety of cloth, routinely combining more weaving techniques than any other region of Southeast Asia. This technical prowess and diversity of design make...

Jim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a...

Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "New World" and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia.

In recent years, global attention has focused on how women in communities of Muslims are revitalizing Islam by linking interpretation of religious ideas to the protection of rights and freedoms. Humanizing the Sacred demonstrates how Sunni women activists in Malaysia are fracturing institutionalized Islamic authority by generating new understandings of rights and redefining the moral obligations of their community. Based on ethnographic research of Sisters in Islam (SIS), a nongovernmental organization of professional women promoting justice and equality, Basarudin examines SIS...

Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the...

In recent years, global attention has focused on how women in communities of Muslims are revitalizing Islam by linking interpretation of religious ideas to the protection of rights and freedoms. Humanizing the Sacred demonstrates how Sunni women activists in Malaysia are fracturing institutionalized Islamic authority by generating new understandings of rights and redefining the moral obligations of their community. Based on ethnographic research of Sisters in Islam (SIS), a nongovernmental organization of professional women promoting justice and equality, Basarudin examines SIS...

This book is a pioneering study of Philippine democracy, one of the oldest in the Asian region, vis-a-vis Habermasian critical theory. Proceeding from a concise examination of the theory of law and democracy found in Habermas's Between Facts and Norms, Ranilo Balaguer Hermida explains how the law occupies the central role in both the legitimation of political power and the attainment of social integration. He then discusses how Habermas proposes to resolve the...