Forests, as physical entities, have received considerable scholarly attention in political studies of Asia and beyond. Much less notice has been paid to the significance of forests as symbols that enable commentary on identity, aspirations, and authority. Natural Potency and Political Power, an innovative exploration of the social and political importance of forests in contemporary Laos, challenges common views of the rural countryside as isolated and disconnected from national social debates and politics under an authoritarian regime. It offers instead a novel understanding of local perspectives under authoritarianism, demonstrating that Lao people make implicit political statements in their commentary on forests and wildlife; and showing that, in addition to being vital material resources, forests (and their natural potency) are linked in the minds of many Lao to the social and political power of the state. Sarinda Singh explores the intertwining of symbolic and material concerns in local debates over conservation and development, the popularity of wildlife consumption, the particular importance of elephants, and forest loss and mismanagement. In doing so, she draws on ethnographic fieldwork around Vientiane, the capital, and Nakai, site of the contentious Nam Theun 2 hydropower project—places that are broadly reflective of the divide between urban prosperity and rural poverty. Nam Theun 2, supported by the World Bank, highlights the local, regional, and global dynamics that influence discussions of forest resources in Laos. Government officials, rural villagers, and foreign consultants all contribute to competing ideas about forests and wildlife. Singh advances research on forest politics by rethinking how ideas about nature influence social life. Her work refutes the tendency to see modern social life as independent of historical influences, and her attention to viewpoints both inside and outside the state prompts an understanding of authoritarian regimes as not only sources of repression, but also sites of negotiation, engagement, and debate about the legitimacy of social inequalities.

Sweeping through the history of Western philosophy of law, Emanuele Castrucci deals with the metaphysical idea of potency as defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche, upsetting entrenched theories of jurisprudence. From classical Greek philosophy to Jewish biblical exegesis, via Christianity; from Aristotle's Metaphysics to its Arabic interpretations; from the genesis of natural law theory (Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ockham), to Kant and Enlightenment natural law theory, to Carl Schmitt, Castrucci shows how philosophical rationalism has failed to contain absolute power in a juridical sense.

This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the country's extraordinary transitions—from French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development state—through the lens of physical culture, Simon Creak's lively and incisive narrative illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. Creak argues that sport and related physical practices—including physical education, gymnastics, and military training—have shaped a national consciousness by locating it in everyday experience. These practices are popular, participatory, performative, and, above all, physical in character and embody ideas and ideologies in a symbolic and experiential way. Embodied Nation takes readers on a brisk ride through more than a century of Lao history, from a nineteenth-century game of tikhi—an indigenous game resembling field hockey—to the country's unprecedented outpouring of nationalist sentiment when hosting the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. En route, we witness a Lao-Vietnamese soccer brawl in 1936, the fascist-inspired body ethic of the early 1940s, the novel modes of military masculinity that blossomed with national independence, the spectacular state theatrics of power represented by Olympic-inspired sports festivals, and the high hopes and frequent failures of socialist sport in the 1970s and 1980s. Of central concern in Creak's narrative are the twin motifs of gender and civilization. Despite increasing female participation since the early twentieth century, he demonstrates the major role that sport and physical culture have played in forming hegemonic masculinities in Laos. Even with limited national sporting success—Laos has never won an Olympic medal—the healthy, toned, and muscular form has come to symbolize material development and prosperity. Embodied Nation outlines the complex ways in which these motifs, through sport and physical culture, articulate with state power. Combining cultural and intellectual history with historical thick description, Creak draws on a creative array of Lao and French sources from previously unexplored archives, newspapers, and magazines, and from ethnographic writing, war photography, and cartoons. More than an "imagined community" or "geobody," he shows that Laos was also a "body at work," making substantive theoretical contributions not only to Southeast Asian studies and history, but to the study of the physical culture, nationalism, masculinity, and modernity in all modern societies.

Nations in Southeast Asia have gone through a period of rapid change within the last century as they have grappled with independence, modernization, and changing political landscapes. Governments and citizens strive to balance progress with the need to articulate identities that resonate with the pre-colonial past and look towards the future. Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia addresses how puppetry complements and combines with urban spaces to articulate present and future cultural and national identities. Puppetry in Southeast Asia is one of the oldest and most dynamic genres of performance. Bangkok, Jakarta, Phnom Penh, and other dynamic cities are expanding and rapidly changing. Performance brings people together, offers opportunities for economic growth, and bridges public and private spheres. Whether it is a traditional shadow performance borrowing from Star Wars or giant puppets parading down the street-this book examines puppets as objects and in performance to make culture come alive. Based on several years of field research-watching performances, working with artists, and interviewing key stakeholders in Southeast Asian cultural production-the book offers a series of rich case studies of puppet performance from various locations, including: theatre in suburban Bangkok; puppets in museums in Jakarta, Indonesia; puppet companies from Laos PDR, the National Puppet Theatre of Vietnam, and the Giant Puppet Project in Siem Reap, Cambodia; new global puppetry networks through social media; and how puppeteers came together from around the region to create a performance celebrating ASEAN identity.

Schindler shows that liberalism is wrong, not because it has simply “relegated God to the private,” but because it has inverted the world: giving us power without authority, in what becomes a closed, necessarily totalitarian, horizon. Here, nothing else can be done with the transcendent God but to find a quiet little place to keep him, harmless and out of the way. When we let God out, a cosmic hierarchy of act—of participation in Being Himself—explodes into view. And this changes everything. A true integralism, a true postliberalism, moves politics back into a cosmos that is itself analogically ordered to participation in the life of God. With The Politics of the Real, Schindler has elevated the postliberal conversation. — Andrew Willard Jones Director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville and author of Before Church and State

Southeast Asia has undergone innumerable far-reaching changes and dramatic transformations over the last half-century. This book explores the concept of power in relation to these transformations, and examines its various social, cultural, religious, economic and political forms. The book works from the ground up, portraying Southeast Asians’ own perspectives, conceptualizations and experiences of power through empirically rich case studies. Exploring concepts of power in diverse settings, from the stratagems of Indonesian politicians and the aspirations of marginal Lao bureaucrats, to mass ‘Prayer Power’ rallies in the Philippines, self-cultivation practices of Thai Buddhists and relations with the dead in Singapore, the book lays out a new framework for the analysis of power in Southeast Asia in which orientations towards or away from certain models, practices and configurations of power take centre stage in analysis. In doing so the book demonstrates how power cannot be pinned down to a single definition, but is woven into Southeast Asian lives in complex, subtle, and often surprising ways. Integrating theoretical debates with empirical evidence drawn from the contributing authors’ own research, this book is of particular interest to scholars and students of Anthropology and Asian Studies.

This book examines proximity as a benchmarked concept that can be deployed across a range of humanities disciplines to rethink the ways in which existences in the world are always already coexistences – and to parse the heuristic, ethical, epistemological, praxeological consequences of this recognition. The volume: - Brings together diverse theoretical approaches and utilizes a range of methodological instruments – conceptual, textual-analytic (whether in the realm of literary or religious studies, or theology or law), archival, digital, sociological or politological; - Includes empirical case-studies that allow calibrated and scaled exemplifications; - Launches forays onto unexplored conceptual terrain, or call into question hallowed truths of scholarly procedure. The volume will be essential reading for students and early researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.