Monthly Archives: August 2016

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance Henry Spiller Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015, xii+266p. In this monograph, Henry Spiller has critically examined the self-fashioning of four North American figures who positioned themselves as masters of Javanese dance and/or music to Western […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  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 […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia Catherine Allerton Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013, xi+221p. Potent Landscapes, by Catherine Allerton, is an engagingly written anthropological study of place and culture in Southeast Asia. Its ethnographic focus is a two-placed, partly resettled village (p. 5) […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Unequal Thailand: Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, eds. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 216p. Does Thailand have an Oligarchy? If so, how do we define it for the national case of Thailand? And most importantly for this collection of essays, […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  The Barefoot Anthropologist: The Highlands of Champa and Vietnam in the Words of Jacques Dournes Andrew Hardy Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2015, 160p. The Barefoot Anthropologist follows the footprints left by the unconventional priest-turned-anthropologist Jacques Dournes. This is an excellent book about this unusual scholar […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Mourning Headband for Hue: An Account of the Battle for Hue, Vietnam 1968 Nha Ca. Translated with an Introduction by Olga Dror Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, 378p. Literary fiction has long provided some of the most evocative images of warfare, and the struggle for […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos Simon Creak Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015, xvi+337p. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on an under-studied country, Laos, on an also under-studied topic, sport in relation to nationalism and masculinity. […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi Nilanjana Sengupta Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 407p. The female voice of the title of Nilanjana Sengupta’s book belongs to four twentieth century women writers and activists: Khin Myo Chit, Ludu Daw […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China Kelvin E. Y. Low Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, xiv+252p. The term “Samsui” refers to a specific location in the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong province, the southern part of China, […]

Contents>> Vol. 5, No. 2  BOOK REVIEWS Women and Sharia Law in Northern Indonesia: Local Women’s NGOs and the Reform of Islamic Law in Aceh Dina Afrianty London and New York: Routledge, 2015, viii+194p. One of the earliest Islamic legal texts available to us from the Malay world was written […]