Southeast Asia has in recent years become a crossroads of cultures with high levels of ethnic pluralism, not only between countries, sub-regions and urban areas, but also at the local levels of community and neighbourhood. Illustrated by a series of international case studies, this book demonstrates how the forces of 'post-colonialism' in their various manifestations are accelerating social change and creating new and 'imagined' communities, some of which are potentially disruptive and which may well threaten the longer term sustainability of the region. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book brings together geographers, historians, anthropologists, architects, education specialists, planners and sociologists to make connections and new insights and to provide a truly comprehensive view of heritage, culture and identity in this dynamic region.

The rapid postwar economic growth in the Southeast Asia region has led to a transformation of many of the societies there, together with the development of new types of anthropological research in the region. Local societies with originally quite different cultures have been incorporated into multi-ethnic states with their own projects of nation-building based on the creation of "national cultures" using these indigenous elements. At the same time, the expansion of international capitalism has led to increasing flows of money, people, languages and cultures across national boundaries, resulting in new hybrid social structures and cultural forms. This book examines the nature of these processes in contemporary Southeast Asia with detailed case studies drawn from countries across the region, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At the macro-level these include studies of nation-building and the incorporation of minorities. At the micro-level they range from studies of popular cultural forms, such as music and textiles to the impact of new sects and the world religions on local religious practice. Moving between the global and the local are the various streams of migrants within the region, including labor migrants responding to the changing distribution of economic opportunities and ethnic minorities moving in response to natural disaster.

Southeast Asia, until the Asian economic crisis of 1997-2000, was a high economic growth area. However, despite the neo-liberal and globalizing logic of capitalism, local conditions and cultures determine that capitalism will spread in ways not entirely consonant with its Western origins. Capitalism is not a free-floating entity -- it is a socially embodied phenomenon that needs to function in various cultural contexts. Consequently, the tension between the universal status that some claim ca...

A new edition of this classic study of mandala Southeast Asia. The revised book includes a substantial, retrospective postscript examining contemporary scholarship that has contributed to the understanding of Southeast Asian history since 1982.

This volume cross-examines the stability of heritage as a concept. It interrogates the past which materialises through multi-layered narratives on monuments and other objects that sustain cultural diversity. It seeks to understand how interpretations of “monuments” as “texts” are affected at the local level of experience, even as institutions such as UNESCO work to globalise and fix constructs of stable and universal heritage. Shifting away from a largely Eurocentric concept associated with architecture and monumental archaeology, this book reassesses how local and regional heritage needs to be balanced with the global and transnational. It argues that material objects and monuments are not static embodiments of culture but are, rather, a medium through which identity, power and society are produced and reproduced. This is especially relevant in South and Southeast Asian contexts, where debates over heritage often have local, regional and national political implications and consequences. Reevaluating how traditional valuation of monuments and cultural landscapes could help aid sustainability and long-term preservation of the heritage, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of South and Southeast Asian history, heritage studies, archaeology, cultural studies, tourism studies and political history as well.

No part of the world has been affected more by globalization in recent decades than Southeast Asia. This has led many observers to believe that the region’s present experience with globalization is at once unprecedented, inevitable, and irreversible. Professor Peter A. Coclanis challenges such beliefs, and, in so doing, provides a history of globalization in Southeast Asia over the past two millennia. Employing Stephen Jay Gould’s famous temporal metaphors — time’s arrow and time’s cycle — Coclanis traces the trajectory of globalization, arguing that globalization has ebbed and flowed in the region over the centuries, that globalization is best viewed as a process rather than a permanent condition, and that its effects have differed considerably across space and over time. Professor Peter A. Coclanis is Associate Provost for International Affairs and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was Raffles Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore in 2005.