Southeast Asian Studies最新文献

{"title":"Economic development via dam building: The role of the state government in the sarawak corridor of renewable energy and the impact on environment and local communities","authors":"A. Aeria","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_373","url":null,"abstract":"Since 1970, as a consequence of Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP) and its integration into the global economy, the development achievements and per capita GDP growth of the resource-rich state of Sarawak have been impressive—although not without problems. Since timber and petroleum resources are exhaustible, and there is a concern with finding new sources of growth and revenue, the federal and state governments advocated industrial diversification in 2008 via the development of a multibillion-ringgit regional development corridor called the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE). Central to the success of the huge developmental corridor was cheap hydroelectric power (HEP). For the Sarawak government, SCORE’s launch and eventual success were based on the availability of abundant water resources and suitable hydropower dam sites in the state. Yet, SCORE is likely to contribute to further environmental degradation and impact negatively upon the livelihoods and welfare of local communities. This paper examines this recent development trend and its consequences. Specifically, it examines the role of the Sarawak state government in advocating the construction of numerous HEP dams, the role of foreign and local investment in SCORE, and their collective impact upon the environment and local communities. What this paper reveals is the nexus of close relationships that binds key politicians in the state administration with crony businesses associated with foreign-linked contracts that has proven to be destructive socially and environmentally","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"373-412"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_373","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Maurizio Peleggi, ed. A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds","authors":"Sing Suwannakij","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_556","url":null,"abstract":"A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds Maurizio Peleggi, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2015, 208p.When a stellar cast gathers for the festschrift, the result is both a thoughtful reflection on the past oeuvre by Craig J. Reynolds, who inspired the essays, and a peek into the various issues and debates that will characterize the future of Thai studies.If not directly mentioned, Reynolds' influence and carefully crafted concepts from his decadeslong career in Thai and Southeast Asian Studies pervade the book. This can partly be attributed to the contributors' association with Reynolds as his students, colleagues, and friends. However, it would be wrong to assume that the volume represents a closed academic circuit. Reynolds' opuses span from the 1970s to the 2010s and counting. His seminal works illuminate important aspects of these often turbulent decades, such as the analyses of Buddhist and Marxist writings in Thailand and beyond, the charting of previously under-explored terrain of historiography in Southeast Asia, the clearing of the ground for intellectual and social histories in the area, the probing of the ideas of national identity and globalization, and the meditation on varied aspects of power, including its unorthodox linkage with magic and local knowledge. All the while, he widely borrows conceptual tools from, inter alia, semiotics, feminism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, but always subjects them to scrutiny and test in the Southeast Asian weather. The editor Maurizio Peleggi's introductory chapter well captures this across-the-board and seasoned nature of Reynolds' works and thoughts.In the essays that follow, three Reynolds' leitmotifs emerge quite clearly, namely: (1) power in its multifarious manifestations, (2) an emphasis on the outcasts of Thai history, and (3) knowledge, especially in its written forms of manual and historiography. All three permeate the chapters, although some bring each of these themes out more evidently than others.One common ground of all authors is that power operates in many fields. It operates in art historiography, in artifact of museological practices, in Buddha statues, and in beauty. Rather than in the eye of the beholder, according to Peleggi in his own essay (Chapter 4), Thai art is a discursive field of power, an intense playground of national myth and colonial rule. Power also operates in the visual sense as art history (and arguably all histories) works \"to make the past synoptically visible\" (p. 92), especially through classifying and inscribing meaning in objects. In Chapter 7, Yoshinori Nishizaki argues along the same line, though in a different context, that visibility is a matter of power. In his analysis, it is inscribed in a grandiose observation tower in the provincial city of Suphanburi, the public work that has become a symbol, a source of collective pride and social identity","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"556-560"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Milagros Camayon Guerrero. Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898–1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael)","authors":"P. Reyes","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_560","url":null,"abstract":"Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael) Milagros Camayon Guerrero Quezon City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2015, 295p.Luzon at War has been long in coming. As a dissertation at the University of Michigan in 1977, it has eluded Filipino historians for years; that it is finally out as a book is a happy occasion. Prior to the writing of Luzon at War, its author-Milagros Guerrero-has co-written with the celebrated Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo the highly influential History of the Filipino People, and has also worked with renowned historian Renato Constantino in the edition of the five-volume compendium The Philippine Insurgent Records. As such, when she arrived in the United States for her graduate studies, wrote Vicente Rafael, she \"was already known\" as a scholar of the Philippines (p. 3). She has delved into the genre of \"history from below\" and studied the tumultuous period of the Philippine Revolution and the nascent republic from the perspective of the periphery and the marginalized. She has looked beyond the political developments in social and political centers of Malolos and Manila, examining the social realities of the Revolution among the masses in the provinces instead. Using declassified sources on the Filipino state, taxation, landownership, and popular movements in particular, Luzon at War illustrates the variegated discord in society from 1898 to 1902, as the Spanish colonizers exited and the republic fought for its existence by warding off the onslaught of the American imperialists on the islands and its people.Five chapters comprise the book. Guerrero painstakingly provides a \"serious and realistic analysis of the mechanisms of political and social change outside Manila and Malolos\" and introduces her readers to the difficulties of both the government and the governed during the birth of the Philippine nation state (p. 23). She claims that in 1898 the Tagalog provinces of Luzon welcomed the Revolutionary Government by Emilio Aguinaldo. Townsmen organized militias, which attacked Spanish outposts and welcomed state envoys and other insurgent troops. To underline the country's independence and prove that Filipinos could govern, Aguinaldo called for a nationwide reorganization. In response Manila, still at a quandary from the occupation of American and Filipino forces and nearby provinces elected prominent members from the cacique ilustrado or principalia (landowning, educated or privileged) class. Conflict characterized the transfer of power-civilian appointees contended with military commanders, who were uneasy to share powers or refused to accept their subservience to civilians. Free from the constraints of the outgoing colonial regime, which they also served, and far from the central Aguinaldo government in Malolos, new provincial officials collected taxes and rents and maintained peace and internal security with impunity. Longentrenched ruling families used their","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"560-563"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Case of Regional Disaster Management Cooperation in ASEAN: A Constructivist Approach to Understanding How International Norms Travel","authors":"M. Rum","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_491","url":null,"abstract":"I IntroductionI-1 BackgroundThe 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) started cooperating on disaster management under the framework of the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER), signed in 2005 and in force since 2009. Cooperation under AADMER is an institutionalized expression of the member states' joint efforts. Previously, ASEAN worked in an ad hoc manner to deal with major natural disasters, especially the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004 and Myanmar's 2008 Cyclone Nargis.ASEAN now has two operating arms for disaster management. To facilitate the institutionalization of regional cooperation, the ASEAN Secretariat established a division responsible for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (DMHA). This division works to help the 10 member states discuss the agreement, facilitate meetings to formulate standard operating procedure, and assist the parties in building a working plan for future development several years ahead. In addition, for executing mandated works such as dispatching emergency response and survey teams, coordinating aid from different member states, and delivering such aid to the field, the 10 member states established the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (the AHA Centre) in November 2011, headquartered in Jakarta. The AHA Centre has been involved in some major humanitarian operations, such as in Thailand's floods of 2011-12, the Philippines' Typhoon Bopha in December 2012, response preparation on the eve of Myanmar's Cyclone Mahasen in May 2013, the Aceh's Bener Meuria earthquake in July 2013, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in November 2013.1 This development is considered relatively progressive for ASEAN, which was originally established in 1967 as a political effort to contain Communism.I-2 Significance of the StudyThe development of ASEAN is not a unique phenomenon in the contemporary world. Within the last decade there have been many other intergovernmental arrangements established by different actors. The international community has agreed to further support the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) of2005 as the basis for strengthening global, regional, and local empowerment to tackle disasters. Hence, the growing trend of empowering intergovernmental cooperation in disaster management is interesting to examine from the perspective of international relations.In accordance with the HFA 2005, regional organizations are also strongly urged to establish their own frameworks for disaster management cooperation. According to Elizabeth Ferris and Daniel Petz (2013), there are 13 regional organizations working on their own frameworks for disaster risk reduction and management. International disas1) ter management involves a large number of nations, including ASEAN members.One motive seems to be positive: in today's international politics, regionalism plays an important role in effectively bridgin","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"491-514"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_491","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Highland Chiefs and Regional Networks in Mainland Southeast Asia: Mien Perspectives","authors":"Jiem Tsan Le, Rich Cushman, H. Jonsson","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_515","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionIn the studies of highland societies of mainland Southeast Asia, it is somewhat rare to get a glimpse of chiefs as a significant component of regional networks of relations. When anthropologists studied Thailand's hill tribes since the 1965 founding of the Tribal Research Center, their mandate was to examine the socio-economic characteristics of the six main tribes: Akha, Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Lisu, and Mien (Geddes 1967; 1983). The resulting works described for the most part egalitarian village societies that had no links to lowland national society (Walker 1975; McKinnon and Wanat 1983; McKinnon and Vienne 1989). It was primarily the research of Ronald D. Renard (1980; 1986; 2002) with the Karen, independent of the Tribal Research Center since he was a historian and they were all ethnographers, that has insisted on the importance of long-standing connections between upland and lowland regions, and on the positive role of chiefs.But recent work on upland-lowland relations in Laos, Burma, and southern China flows in a similar direction to Renard's research and suggests that interethnic uplandlowland networks may have been historically the predominant form of political organization in this region (Badenoch and Tomita 2013; Boute 2011; 2015; Chen 2015; Evrard 2006; 2007; Hayami 2004; 2011; Ikeda 2012; Jonsson 2005; 2014a; Kojima and Badenoch 2013; Sprenger 2006; 2010). Other recent work suggests that the attribution of statelessness to highland peoples may express recent dynamics of dispossession, rather than any intrinsic feature of highland societies over the last millennia (Scott 2009; Kataoka 2013). Both issues encourage a move away from the ethnographic focus on ethnic groups as distinct from one another and toward an ethnological focus on patterns and variations that transcend ethnic labels and leave questions with the state/non-state binary.The main text of this article is a Mien history that was recorded in 1972 and centers on the life of a particular Mien chief (Le and Cushman 1972). His name was Tang Tsan Khwoen, and he later received the Thai title Phaya Khiri (\"mountain chief\") from the king of Nan, and the family name Srisombat which many of his descendants still carry. The story was told by Le Jiem Tsan to researcher Richard D. Cushman in the village of Khun Haeng, Ngao District of Lampang Province, on June 1, 1972. Most of Cushman's recordings with Le Jiem Tsan and others are in the Mien ritual language, but the chief's life-story and a few other recordings are in the everyday language. Le Jiem Tsan died before 1980 and Richard Cushman in 1991. Because I (HJ) was somewhat familiar with the individual chief from ethnographic research among his descendants (Jonsson 1999; 2001; 2005) I am able to check some of the information against other sources. The Mien story shows the ease and normalcy with which relations between hill peoples and lowland rulers were established, and I situate the story against the general trend in northe","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"515-551"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Andrew C. Willford. Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p.","authors":"R. Daniel","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_571","url":null,"abstract":"Andrew C. Willford. Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p. Author(s) Daniel, Rajesh Citation Southeast Asian Studies (2016), 5(3): 571-575 Issue Date 2016-12 URL http://hdl.handle.net/2433/217859 Right ©Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"571-575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When Memory Speaks: Transnational Remembrances in Vietnam War Literature","authors":"Q. Ha","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.3_463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_463","url":null,"abstract":"The conflicting attitudes toward, and the moral dilemmas surrounding, the Vietnam War are recorded extensively in Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, and American histories and literatures. Each side interprets the war from its own partisan perspective, creating a plethora of opinions and well-argued positions on the political and military conflict. The year 2015 marked the 40th anniversary of Vietnam's reunification, and although nearly half a century has elapsed, the Vietnam War remains actual in the socio-political determinants, literary productions, and cultural memories of both Vietnam and the United States. Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, \"So much is told about Viet Nam, and so little is understood\" (V. T. Nguyen 2006, 13), and Neil L. Jamieson advises the Americans to \"learn more about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own,\" because the Vietnam War is an important event that Americans must excogitate in their attempt to understand the Vietnamese and them· selves (Jamieson 1993, x). Discourses on the Vietnam War, in the West and particularly in the American cultural memory, have been criticized for their exclusion of the Vietnamese experience and suffering, and even if the Vietnamese are present in U.S. films and books, they tend to be presented as \"shadowy cardboard figures, merely onedimensional stage props for the inner workings of the American psyche\" (ibid.). Thus, in order to gain a multidimensional understanding of the war, Edward Miller and Tuong Vu suggest a new critical approach, dubbed \"The Vietnamization of Vietnam War Studies\" (Miller and Vu 2009, 2) that accentuates \"Vietnamese agency and the sociocultural dimensions of the event as lived and experienced by Vietnamese\" (ibid., 5). This approach facilitates examinations of how the war exercises perennial effects upon Vietnamese society and its postwar mentality and how it enriches our knowledge about this conflict. In this article, I respond to the appeal made by Miller and Vu above by highlighting several problems occurring in representations of the war in both U.S. and Vietnamese literature in order to challenge or debunk certain misconceptions about the Vietnamese experience. My analysis of Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War and Dang Thuy Tram's Last Night I Dreamed of Peace will indicate that these two Vietnamese literary texts function to humanize victims and pay due respect to the wounded and the dead on the Vietnamese side, thus challenging the way U.S. and Vietnamese American cultural politics funnel \"all of these histories into the single story\" that serves a narrow ideological agenda (Nguyen-Vo 2005, 171). The nameless faces and the faceless names of the Vietnamese victims of the war that Bao and Dang lament demand questioning the \"narcissistic myths of the war as a US tragedy\" (Schwenkel 2009, 39).Epic Heroism in Vietnamese Literature about the Vietnam War, 1960 to 1975Prior to considering the two literary texts selected f","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"463-489"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.20495/SEAS.5.3_463","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kelvin E. Y. Low. Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, xiv+252p.","authors":"Cheun Hoe Yow","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.2_335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.2_335","url":null,"abstract":"<Book Reviews>Kelvin E. Y. Low. Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, xiv+252p. Author(s) Yow, Cheun Hoe Citation Southeast Asian Studies (2016), 5(2): 335-337 Issue Date 2016-08 URL http://hdl.handle.net/2433/216597 Right ©Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"335-337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, eds. Unequal Thailand: Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power","authors":"T. Rhoden","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.2_350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.2_350","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"350-353"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Albertus Bagus Laksana. Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java","authors":"Julius Bautista","doi":"10.20495/SEAS.5.2_356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.20495/SEAS.5.2_356","url":null,"abstract":"Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java Albertus Bagus Laksana Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, xiii+252p.Albertus Bagus Laksana's Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java is a rich, intricately textured comparative ethnography of Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage traditions in south central Java. The empirical data-derived from participant observation, direct-interview, discourse analysis, and archival research-is organized into two balanced sections, while a concluding analysis discusses the culturally-specific aspects that condition religious pluralism in Java. What is most interesting is that Laksana confronts the reality of this pluralism through a methodology of \"double visiting,\" moving \"back and forth between my own tradition of Catholic Christianity and the tradition I visit, Islam\" (p. 191). In tackling multiple sites of investigation, Laksana's work demonstrates a remarkable kind of empirical cavalier not commonly seen in a single piece of indepth ethnographic work.There would still be many in the social sciences who would harbor some misgivings about this multi-sited methodology, which carries with it the inherent risk of compromising ethnographic depth, attenuating the empirical potency of fieldwork, and undervaluing the voices of the subaltern. Laksana's rationale for comparison, however, is not analytic breadth per se, but his own theological formation in which multi-sited research is \"a real religious pilgrimage to God and His saints where on various levels I learn more about God, my own self, and my religious tradition, from the richness of the Muslim tradition . . .\" (p. 191). This work is a deliberate and explicit deployment of the new comparative theology, promulgated by Francis X. Clooney (2010), in which the close exposure to and study of the religious other is coterminous with the pursuit of personal theological edification. In this way, the multi-sidedness of Laksana's empirical purview cannot be evaluated solely by the standards set in the social science academy.The main argument of this book resonates strongly with its author's personal theological journey: that \"complex religious identity\" in Java is characterized by an intimate embrace of religious alterity, one that occurs through the medium of indigenous, sub-religious concepts. The persuasiveness of this argument is contingent upon the acceptance of two assumptions: firstly, that there is a largely unproblematic fluidity between culture and religion, and secondly, that there exists an autochthonous, inclusive Javanese religio-cultural sensibility that remains as the basis of intersubjective Javanese humanness, regardless of centuries of religious formation. Each of the two main sections that frame the analysis explore the theological and empirical elasticity of this central theme.Part I, which comprises of three chapters, draws momentum from an examination of how Javano-Muslim \"sacred history\" is animated by the Arabic conc","PeriodicalId":42525,"journal":{"name":"Southeast Asian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"356-359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.20495/SEAS.5.2_356","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67626359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}