Asian Studies Book List · 
Asian Studies titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
Military Ascendancy and Political Culture
A Study of Indonesia's Golkar
Most of the earlier studies on the Indonesian political party, Golkar, tend to view the organization solely as an electoral machine used by the military to legitimize its power. However, this study is different in that it considers Golkar less an electoral machine and more as a political organization which inherited the political traditions of the nominal Muslim parties and the Javanese governing elite pre-1965, before the inauguration of Indonesia’s New Order.…
Studies in Austronesian Linguistics
This volume consists of seventeen articles by scholars including Robert Blust, Paul Hopper, A. L. Becker, Sarah Bell, J. C. Catford, Talmy Givón, J. W. M. Verharr and John U. Wolff. Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Chamorro, Malay, Old Malay, Javanese, Old Javanese, Indonesian, Niases, Loniu, and Niuean are some of the languages discussed in the study.…
Running Amok
An Historical Inquiry
Amok, one of the few Malay words commonly appearing in English, names a syndrome of unpredictable and indiscriminate homicidal behavior with suicidal intent. In tracing the development of this behavioral pattern, Spores examines historical data, including frequently colorful colonialist accounts of such episodes, from British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies during the period 1800–1925.…
Spectator Society
The Philippines Under Martial Rule
As the first post-war president of the Philippines to win reelection, Ferdinand Marcos enjoyed grassroots popularity and was also highly esteemed by the officer corps and rand-and-file of the armed forces.…
From Kampung to City
A Social History of Kucing Malaysia, 1820-1970
One of the major processes in modern Southeast Asian history has been the development of ethnically heterogeneous towns and cities. Kucing, an intermediate-sized urban center in Sarawak, Malaysia, is today an institutionally complex, predominantly Chinese city of 100,000 led by modern political leaders.…
Report on Brunei in 1904
In 1904 the British Protectorate of Brunei had reached the nadir of its fortunes. Reduced to two small strips of territory, bankrupt, and threatened with takeover by the Rajah of Sarawak (Sir Charles Brooke), Brunei received M.…
The Lê Code
Law in Traditional Vietnam
By Ngọc Huy Nguyễn, Tài Văn Ta and Binh Tu Tran
The Lê Code: Law in Traditional Vietnam is the first English translation of the penal code produced by Vietnam’s Lê Dynasty (1428-1788). The code itself was the culmination of a long process of political, social and legal development that extended into the period of the succeeding Nguyen Dynasty and, in many respects, into the twentieth century.…
Mode in Javanese Music
One of the most controversial aspects of Javanese gamelan music is its musical mode, pathet. From her experience as a performer of sindhenan, or female singing, Walton analyses the melodies and defines the basic laws of mode for sindhenan.…
The Japanese Experience in Indonesia
Selected Memoirs of 1942-1945
By Anthony Reid
Edited by Oki Akira
Although the wartime Japanese military administration of Indonesia was critical to the making of modern Indonesia, it remains shrouded in mystery, in part because of the systematic destruction of records following the Japanese surrender.…
Change and Continuity in Minangkabau
Local, Regional, and Historical Perspectives on West Sumatra
By Lynn L. Thomas and Franz Von Benda-Beckmann
Social scientists have long recognized many apparent contradictions in the Minangkabau. The world’s largest matrilineal people, they are also strongly Islamic and, as a society, remarkably modern and outward looking.…
Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry
By Julia Lin
This first critical study of major contemporary Chinese poets in English treats the work of Chi Hsien, Cheng Ch’ou–yu, Chou Mengtieh, Lomen, Yungtzu, Ya Hsien, Yip Wai–lim, Wu Sheng, and Yu Kuang-chung.…
The Red Earth
A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation
By Binh Tu Tran
Edited by David G. Marr
Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics.…
Language and Social Change in Java
Linguistic Reflexes of Modernization in a Traditional Royal Polity
Errington explores linguistic evidence of social change among the traditional priyayi elite of Surakarta in south-central Java. Employing data from texts, interviews, observed speech, and questionnaires, he shows a progressive leveling in the language used to denote traditional status differences, and he demonstrates how perceptions of speech styles reflect etiquette and the views of the users.…
History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani
This translation of Ibrahim Syukri’s Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani (SKMP) makes available a little known but important manuscript published privately ca. 1950 and printed in jawi (Malay written in a modified Arabic script).…
Vocabulary Building in Indonesian
An Advanced Reader
An outstanding advanced text intended to complement and supplement Indonesian language materials now available. The author takes the student through a series of original essays and previously published material on a variety of subjects, not merely explaining grammatical and vocabulary matters, but offering detailed discussions of nuances, alternative meanings, synonyms and antonyms.…
Javanese
A Cultural Approach
By Ward Keeler
Foreign language lessons often provide translations into a foreign language of phrases students would normally use in their native language and cultural setting. Particularly when studying a non-Western language, such direct translation is very misleading.…
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