|
Showing 1 - 24 of
24 matches in All Departments
A global debate has emerged within Islam about how to coexist with
democracy. Even in Asia, where such ideas have always been
marginal, radical groups are taking the view that scriptural
authority requires either Islamic rule (Dar-ul-Islam) or a state of
war with the essentially illegitimate authority of non-Muslims or
secularists. This book places the debate in a specifically Asian
context. It draws attention to Asia (east of Afghanistan), as not
only the home of the majority of the world's Muslims but also
Islam's historic laboratory in dealing with religious pluralism. In
Asia, pluralism is not simply a contemporary development of secular
democracies, but a long-tested pattern based on both principle and
pragmatism. For many centuries, Muslims in Asia have argued about
the legitimacy of non-Islamic government over Muslims, and the
legitimacy of non-Muslim peoples, polities and rights under Islamic
governance. This book analyses such debates and the ways they have
been reconciled, in South and Southeast Asia, up to the present.
The evidence presented here suggests that Muslims have adapted
flexibly and creatively to the pluralism with which they have
lived, and are likely to continue to do so.
A global debate has emerged within Islam about how to coexist with
democracy. Even in Asia, where such ideas have always been
marginal, radical groups are taking the view that scriptural
authority requires either Islamic rule (Dar-ul-Islam) or a state of
war with the essentially illegitimate authority of non-Muslims or
secularists. This book places the debate in a specifically Asian
context. It draws attention to Asia (east of Afghanistan), as not
only the home of the majority of the world's Muslims but also
Islam's historic laboratory in dealing with religious pluralism. In
Asia, pluralism is not simply a contemporary development of secular
democracies, but a long-tested pattern based on both principle and
pragmatism. For many centuries, Muslims in Asia have argued about
the legitimacy of non-Islamic government over Muslims, and the
legitimacy of non-Muslim peoples, polities and rights under Islamic
governance. This book analyses such debates and the ways they have
been reconciled, in South and Southeast Asia, up to the present.
The evidence presented here suggests that Muslims have adapted
flexibly and creatively to the pluralism with which they have
lived, and are likely to continue to do so.
The dead are potent and omnipresent in modern Indonesia. Presidents
and peasants alike meditate before sacred graves to exploit the
power they confer, and mediums do good business curing the sick by
interpreting the wishes of deceased forebears. Among non-Muslims
there are ritual burials of the bones of the dead in monuments both
magnificent and modest. By promoting dead heroes to a nationalist
pantheon, regions and ethnic groups establish their place within
the national story.Although much has been written about the local
forms of the scriptural religions to which modern Indonesians are
required by law to adhere - Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and
Buddhism - this is the first book to assess the indigenous systems
of belief in the spirits of ancestors. Sometimes these systems are
condemned in the name of the formal religions, but more often the
potent dead coexist as a private dimension of everyday religious
practice.A unique team of anthropologists, historians and literary
scholars from Europe, Australia and North America demonstrate the
continuing importance of the potent dead for understanding
contemporary Indonesia. At the same time, they help us understand
historic processes of conversion to Islam and Christianity by
examining the continuing interactions of the spirit world with
formal religion.
The essays reprinted here trace the history of Chinese emigration
into the Pacific region, first as individuals, traders or exiles,
moving into the 'Nanyang' (Southeast Asia), then as a mass
migration across the ocean after the mid-19th century. The papers
include discussions of what it meant to be Chinese, the position of
the migrants vis-A -vis China itself, and their relations with
indigenous peoples as well as the European powers that came to
dominate the region. Together with the introduction, they
constitute an important aid to understanding one of the most
widespread diasporas of the modern world.
The Potent Dead is a collection of studies by leading scholars of
Indonesian culture, history, and anthropology that examines the
death practices and rituals of tribal groups in Indonesia. It
covers an important area of cultural and social history in
Indonesia, with pieces linking the death practices of so-called
tribal groups with historical changes in the country, from on-going
changes in Islam to the roles of forms of modernity.
In this volume Anthony Reid positions Southeast Asia on the stage
of world history. He argues that the region not only had a
historical character of its own, but that it played a crucial role
in shaping the modern world. Southeast Asia's interaction with the
forces uniting and transforming the world is explored through
chapters focusing on Islamization; Chinese, Siamese, Cham, and
Javanese trade; Makasar's modernizing moment; and slavery. The last
three chapters examine from different perspectives how this
interaction of relative equality shifted to one of an impoverished
"third world" region exposed to European colonial power. Anthony
Reid is professor of history and director of Southeast Asian
studies at UCLA.
Water Frontier focuses principally on southwest Indochina (from
modern southern Vietnam into eastern Cambodia and southwestern
Thailand), which it calls the Lower Mekong region. The book's
excellent contributors argue that, during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, this area formed a single trading zone woven
together by the regular itineraries of thousands of large and small
junk traders. This zone in turn formed a regional component of the
wider trade networks that linked southern China to all of Southeast
Asia. This is the "water frontier" of the title, a sparsely settled
coastal and riverine frontier region of mixed ethnicities and often
uncertain settlements in which the waterborne trade and commerce of
a long string of small ports was essential to local life. This
innovative book uses the water frontier concept to reposition old
nation-state oriented histories and decenter modern dominant
cultures and ethnicities to reveal a different local past. It
expands and deepens our understanding of the time and place as well
as of the multiple roles played by Chinese sojourners, settlers,
and junk traders in their interactions with a kaleidoscope of local
peoples.
Between the fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, when the
Renaissance and early capitalism were transforming Europe, changes
no less dramatic were occurring in Southeast Asia. This diverse
tropical region was integrated into a global trade system, while
trade-based cities came to dominate its affairs. Its states became
more centralized and absolutist, and its people adopted scriptural
faiths of personal morality. The pace of these changes finds
parallels only in our own era. Anthony Reid has analyzed and
vividly portrayed this Southeast Asian Age of Commerce in two
volumes. The first volume, published in 1988 to great acclaim,
explored the physical, material, cultural, and social structures of
the region. The concluding volume focuses on the profound changes
that defined the Age of Commerce as a period. The spice trade that
animated the global boom of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries made possible revolutionary changes in urbanization,
commercialization, state structure, and belief. Islam,
Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism made rapid gains in alliance
with the new states. Reid discerns common ground between these
developments and the forces transforming Europe and Japan but
identifies particular limitations on the growth of private capital
and the stability of states in Southeast Asia. A final chapter
explores the crisis in the mid-seventeenth century that disengaged
Southeast Asians from the world economy for the next three
centuries.
This volume traces the second great expansion of the Islamic world
eastwards from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. As the faith
crossed cultural boundaries, the trader and the mystic became as
important as the soldier and the administrator. Distinctive Islamic
idioms began to emerge from other great linguistic traditions apart
from Arabic, especially in Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Swahili, Malay
and Chinese. The Islamic world transformed and absorbed new
influences. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, three
major features distinguish the time and place from both earlier and
modern experiences of Islam. Firstly, the steppe tribal peoples of
central Asia had a decisive impact on the Islamic lands. Secondly,
Islam expanded along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and the
South China Sea. Thirdly, Islam interacted with Asian spirituality,
including Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shamanism. It was
during this period that Islam became a truly world religion.
This exemplary work of international collaboration takes a
comparative approach to the histories of Northeast and Southeast
Asia, with contributions from scholars from Japan, Korea and the
Englishspeaking academic world. The new scholarship represented by
this volume demonstrates that the vast and growing commercial
interactions between the countries of eastern Asia have long
historical roots. The so-called "opening" to Western trade in the
mid-nineteenth century, which is typically seen as the beginning of
this process, is shown to be rather the reversal of a relatively
temporary phase of state consolidation in the long eighteenth
century.
This is an entertaining and thought provoking read, a collection of
over 100 poems from a new author. Anthony undoubtedly had his own
unique style which consistently brings a nice combination of
alliteration and rhyming couplets to the forefront without
sacrificing depth and meaning - in fact many of his pieces carry
very profound and positive messages. There are also quirky,
humorous poems and other light-hearted offerings scattered
throughout helping to set a nice pace that keeps you turning the
pages. Overall the book is more an account of one mans insights
into the world he seems to find himself at odds with, though,
perhaps ironically, they invariably end up conveying sentiments
that I think many of us share. With subjects such as love,
loneliness, politics, family, work and faith - the book gives good
variety whilst managing to maintain a continuity in style &
technique. If you're seeking a breath of poetic 'fresh air' in the
shape of something current & ably crafted then 'Reason For
Rhyme' is a must.
Only recently has the role of Chinese minorities at the forefront
of Southeast Asia's rapid economic growth attracted world
attention. Yet interactions between Chinese and Southeast Asians
are longstanding and intense, reaching back a thousand years and
making it difficult, if not specious, to attempt to disentangle
what is Chinese and what is indigenous in much of Southeast Asian
culture. Sojourners and Settlers, now back in print, written by
some of the most distinguished specialists in the field,
demonstrates the depth of that relationship.
There are reasons for thinking that this is at last Indonesia's
moment on the world stage. Having successfully negotiated its
difficult transition to democracy after 1998, Indonesia has held
three popular elections with a low level of violence by the
standards of southern Asia. Recetly its economic growth rate has
been high (above 6 per cent a year) and rising, where China's has
been dropping and the developed world has been in crisis.
Indonesia's admission in 2009 to the G20 club of the world's most
influential states seemed to confirm a status implied by its size,
as the world's fourth-largest country by population, and the
largest with a Muslim majority. Some international pundits have
been declaring that Indonesia is the new star to watch, and that
its long-awaited moment in the sun may at last have arrived.
Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until
the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an
entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have
sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business
to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses
have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But
at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential
"outsiders". In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of
majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination,
even where they are formally integrated into the nation.
The essays in this book explore the reasons why the Jews in
Central Europe and the Chinese in Southeast Asia have been both
successful and stigmatized. Their careful scholarship and measured
tone contribute to a balanced view of the subject and introduce a
historical depth and comparative perspective that have generally
been lacking in past discussions. Those who want to understand
contemporary Southeast Asia and the legacy of the Jewish experience
in Central Europe will gain new insights from the book.
This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing
discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the
more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These
debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as
sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies.
Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have
remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary
notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadt's
"multiple modernities" which has triggered a host of conference
papers and publications largely within sociology: all the while, it
seems that the literatures, for instance, of multiple modernities
and alternative modernities are each distinguished by the fact that
one ignores the other. It is the principal aim of this edited
volume to subject these disciplinary discussions to a more
encompassing view, assembling contributions from different scholars
who not only work in different disciplines and regional settings,
but who also engage with their research topics in a variety of
approaches and at different levels of analysis. The volume thus
transcends the sometimes narrow boundaries of the debates over
modernities within the established academic disciplines and seeks
to turn the unavoidable friction brought about by this
interdisciplinary setting into most original and insightful
scholarship.
The mid-twentieth century marked one of the greatest watersheds of
Asian history, when a range of imperial constructs were declared to
be nation-states, either by revolution or decolonisation.
Nationalism was the great alchemist, turning the base metal of
empire into the gold of nations. To achieve such a transformation
from the immense diversity of these Asian empires required a
different set of forces from those that Europeans had needed in
their transitions from multi-ethnic empires to culturally
homogeneous nations. In this book, first published in 2009, Anthony
Reid explores the mysterious alchemy by which new political
identities have been formed. Taking Southeast Asia as his example,
Reid tests contemporary theory about the relation between
modernity, nationalism, and ethnic identity. Grappling with
concepts emanating from a very different European experience of
nationalism, Reid develops his own typology to better fit the
formation of political identities such as the Indonesian, Malay,
Chinese, Acehnese, Batak and Kadazan.
The mid-twentieth century marked one of the greatest watersheds of
Asian history, when a range of imperial constructs were declared to
be nation-states, either by revolution or decolonisation.
Nationalism was the great alchemist, turning the base metal of
empire into the gold of nations. To achieve such a transformation
from the immense diversity of these Asian empires required a
different set of forces from those that Europeans had needed in
their transitions from multi-ethnic empires to culturally
homogeneous nations. In this book, first published in 2009, Anthony
Reid explores the mysterious alchemy by which new political
identities have been formed. Taking Southeast Asia as his example,
Reid tests contemporary theory about the relation between
modernity, nationalism, and ethnic identity. Grappling with
concepts emanating from a very different European experience of
nationalism, Reid develops his own typology to better fit the
formation of political identities such as the Indonesian, Malay,
Chinese, Acehnese, Batak and Kadazan.
Separatist feeling in Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province, has
deep historical roots but it is often dismissed as a reaction to a
heavy-handed military presence in the area since 1989. With
Indonesia's 1998 democratisation, expressions of regional feelings
and resentment of the military increased throughout the country,
and Aceh became the next potential candidate to break away from the
Indonesia Republic after East Timor. While Indonesia's claims on
Aceh seem securely based in the common struggle for independence
from the Dutch, Aceh entered the then newly-independent country of
Indonesia after 1945 with an unparalleled history of determination
to resist outside domination. This determination was directed
against the Dutch in the period 1873-1950, but then turned quickly
against the new holders of power in Jakarta. Aceh was largely
absent from world headlines until the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. As
images of the suffering of the Acehnese people beamed across the
world, the need for well-informed international aid for its
reconstruction became evident. This timely book on the history of
Aceh and the Aceh problem contains a balanced coverage from leading
authorities in history, political science and journalism. It is the
best introduction to Aceh available in English.
Moving beyond past histories of Viet Nam that have focused on
nationalist struggle, this volume brings together work by scholars
who are re-examining centuries of Vietnamese history. Crossing
borders and exploring ambiguities, the essays in "Viet Nam:
Borderless Histories" draw on international archives and bring a
range of inventive analytical approaches to the global, regional,
national, and local narratives of Vietnamese history. Among the
topics explored are the extraordinary diversity between north and
south, lowland and highland, Viet and minority, and between
colonial, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and dynastic influences. The
result is an exciting new approach to Southeast Asia's past that
uncovers the complex and rich history of Viet Nam.
"A wonderful introduction to the exciting work that a new
generation of scholars is engaging in."--Liam C. Kelley,
"International Journal of Asian Studies"
This book argues that Western ideas of freedom have become widely accepted in Asia as the key determinant for measuring a range of legal, ethical and political practices. The book finds that modern conceptions of freedom have become adapted to local contexts throughout Asia. The book avoids cultural relativism and generalizations, but does find a number of common ideas relating to freedom across the region. A prestigious group of contributors explores freedom from historical, religious, political and ideological perspectives.
Between the fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, when the
Renaissance and early capitalism were transforming Europe, changes
no less dramatic were occurring in Southeast Asia. This diverse
tropical region was integrated into a global trade system, while
trade-based cities came to dominate its affairs. Its states became
more centralized and absolutist, and its people adopted scriptural
faiths of personal morality. The pace of these changes finds
parallels only in our own era. Anthony Reid has analyzed and
vividly portrayed this Southeast Asian Age of Commerce in two
volumes. The first volume, published in 1988 to great acclaim,
explored the physical, material, cultural, and social structures of
the region. The concluding volume focuses on the profound changes
that defined the Age of Commerce as a period. The spice trade that
animated the global boom of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries made possible revolutionary changes in urbanization,
commercialization, state structure, and belief. Islam,
Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism made rapid gains in alliance
with the new states. Reid discerns common ground between these
developments and the forces transforming Europe and Japan but
identifies particular limitations on the growth of private capital
and the stability of states in Southeast Asia. A final chapter
explores the crisis in the mid-seventeenth century that disengaged
Southeast Asians from the world economy for the next three
centuries. Anthony Reid is professor of Southeast Asian history,
Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.
This volume traces the second great expansion of the Islamic world
eastwards from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. As the faith
crossed cultural boundaries, the trader and the mystic became as
important as the soldier and the administrator. Distinctive Islamic
idioms began to emerge from other great linguistic traditions apart
from Arabic, especially in Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Swahili, Malay
and Chinese. The Islamic world transformed and absorbed new
influences. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, three
major features distinguish the time and place from both earlier and
modern experiences of Islam. Firstly, the steppe tribal peoples of
central Asia had a decisive impact on the Islamic lands. Secondly,
Islam expanded along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and the
South China Sea. Thirdly, Islam interacted with Asian spirituality,
including Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shamanism. It was
during this period that Islam became a truly world religion.
Though wary of China's rapid rise, her neighbors have considerable
experience of dealing with unequal power without surrendering their
autonomy. For its part, China has a long memory of unequal or
"tributary" relations and a relatively brief and turbulent
experience of working within the current useful fiction of
"sovereign equality" in international relations. The emerging
pattern will have to take account of the great discrepancy in
economic and military power between the future China and her
neighbours, and of how such asymmetry can be managed peacefully.
Negotiating Asymmetry explores how the real or imagined norms
governing past relations may shape China's future position in the
region by considering how relationships have changed over the past
two centuries. The volume argues that neither the "Chinese world
order" of tribute relations nor the Westphalia model of sovereign
equality ever operated effectively in Asia, but suggests that the
past does offer strong indicators about the shape of a new order in
Asia.
|
You may like...
The Show
Niall Horan
CD
R213
R185
Discovery Miles 1 850
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Catan
(16)
R1,150
R887
Discovery Miles 8 870
|