Books in the Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies series

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. This book examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex.

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communisim illuminates the real and imagined lives of Ton Duc Thang (18881980), a celebrated revolutionary activist and Vietnamese communist icon, but it is much more than a conventional biography. This multifaceted study constitutes the first detailed re-evaluation of the official history of the Vietnamese Communist Party and is a critical analysis of the inner workings of Vietnamese historiography never before undertaken in its scope.In prominence and public visibility second only to Ho Chi Minh, whom he succeeded in the presidency, Ton Duc Thang in fact lacked any real power. Author Christoph Giebel reconciles this seeming contradiction by showing that it was only Ton Duc Thang who could personify for the Party crucial legitimizing ancestries: those that linked Vietnamese communism with the Russian October Revolution, highlighted proletarian internationalism among its ranks, and rooted the Party in Viet Nams south. The study traces the decades-long, complex processes in which famous heroic episodes in Ton Duc Thangs life were manipulated or simply fabricated anddepending on prevailing historical and political necessitiesutilized as propaganda by the Communist Party. Over time, narrative control over these tales switched hands, however, and since the late 1950s the stories came to be used in factional disputes by competing ideological and regional interests within the revolutionary camp.Based on innovative archival research in Viet Nam and France and on analyses of biographical writings, propaganda, and museum representations, the study challenges core assumptions about the history of the Vietnamese Communist Part and sheds light on divisions within the revolutionary movement along regional, class, and ideological lines. Giebel uses the fictions and contested facts of Tons life to demonstrate that history-writing and the constructions of memories and identities are always political acts.

Tam T. T. Ngo is a research fellow in the Department of Religious Diversity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany.

Examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, this title traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values.

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation.Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.

Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian StudiesGathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, Justin McDaniel traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values. He depicts Buddhism as a series of overlapping processes, bringing fresh attention to the continuities of Theravada monastic communities that have endured despite regional and linguistic variations. Incorporating both primary and secondary sources from Thailand and Laos, he examines premodern inscriptional, codicological, anthropological, art historical, ecclesiastical, royal, and French colonial records. By looking at modern sermons, and even television programs and websites, he traces how pedagogical techniques found in premodern palm-leaf manuscripts are pervasive in modern education.As the first comprehensive study of monastic education in Thailand and Laos, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words will appeal to a wide audience of scholars and students interested in religious studies, anthropology, social and intellectual history, and pedagogy.

A collection of 11 essays, featuring debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. It explores themes that have been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam's semi-colonialism in the late nineteenth century, the concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and dynastic succession, and more.

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. The Ironies of Freedom examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex.Nguyen-vo offers an ambitious analysis of gender and class conflicts surrounding commercial sex as a site of market freedom, governmental intervention, and depictions in popular culture to argue that these practices reveal the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism. What the case of Vietnam highlights is that governing with current neoliberal globalization may and does take paradoxical forms, sustained not by some vestige from times past but by contemporary conditions. Of mutual benefit to both the neoliberal global economy and the ruling party in Vietnam is the use of empirical knowledge and entrepreneurial and consumer's choice differentially among segments of the population to produce different kinds of laborers and consumers for the global market. But also of mutual benefit to both are the police, the prison, and notions of cultural authenticity enabled by a ruling party with well-developed means of coercion from its history. The freedom-unfreedom pair in governance creates a tension in modes of representation conducive to a new genre of sensational social realism in literature and popular films like the 2003 Bar Girls about two women in the sex trade, replete with nudity, booze, drugs, violence, and death. The movie opened in Vietnam with unprecedented box office receipts, blazing a trail for a commercially viable domestic film industry.Combining methods and theories from the social sciences and humanities, Nguyen-vo's analysis relies on fieldwork conducted in Ho Chi Minh City and its vicinity, in-depth interviews with informants, participant observation at selected sites of sexual commerce and governmental intervention, journalistic accounts, and literature and films.This book will appeal to historians and political scientists of Southeast Asia and to scholars of gender and sexuality, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and political theory dealing with neoliberalism.

Tam T. T. Ngo is a research fellow in the Department of Religious Diversity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany.

Offers a re-evaluation of the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party and an analysis of the inner workings of Vietnamese historiography. This book challenges core assumptions about the history of the Vietnamese Communist Part and attempts to shed light on divisions within the revolutionary movement along regional, class, and ideological lines.

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but aware of the social and economic possibilities in this gray zone between two oppressive regimes.For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have settled in the cityHokkien, Cantonese, and Hakkaand conflate this diverse population with the state actions of the Peoples Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network. In this first English-language study of the Sino-Burmese, Mapping Chinese Rangoon examines the concepts of ethnicity, territory, and nation in an area where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence.

Examines the many ways in which people living along an international border negotiate their ethnic, cultural, and political identities

The expanding use of money in contemporary Vietnam has been propelled by the rise of new markets, digital telecommunications, and an ideological emphasis on money's autonomy from the state. People in Vietnam use the metaphor of "e;open doors"e; to describe their everyday experiences of market liberalization and to designate the end of Vietnam's postwar social isolation and return to a consumer- oriented environment. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City examines how money is redefining social identities, moral economies, and economic citizenship in Vietnam. It shows how people use money as a standard of value to measure social and moral worth, how money is used to create new hierarchies of privilege and to limit freedom, and how both domestic and global monetary politics affect the cultural politics of identity in Vietnam.Drawing on interviews with shopkeepers, bankers, vendors, and foreign investors, Allison Truitt explores the function of money in everyday life. From counterfeit currencies to streetside lotteries, from gold shops to crowded temples, she relates money's restructuring to performances of identity. By locating money in domains often relegated to the margins of the economy-households, religion, and gender- she demonstrates how money is shaping ordinary people's sense of belonging and citizenship in Vietnam.

Explores the function of money in everyday life in Vietnam

Jayde Lin Roberts is an interdisciplinary scholar of the built environment and a tenure-track faculty member in Asian languages and studies at the University of Tasmania.

Charts Indonesia's turbulent decades of cultural repression and renewal amid the rise and fall of Suharto's New Order regime. This book illustrates ways in which the dissolution of the Indonesian state's monopoly on history is permitting national, local, and individual accounts and representations of the past to emerge.

Mary S. Zurbuchen is director for Asia and Russia programs with the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program. The contributors include Andi F. Bakti, Daniel S. Lev, Hendrik Maier, Kate McGregor, Goenawan Mohamad, Nancy L. Peluso, Tristuti Rachmadi, Anthony Reid, Geoffrey Robinson, Klaus H. Schreiner, Laurie J. Sears, Karen Strassler, Fadjar I. Thufail, Gerry van Klinken, and Paul van Zyl.