Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred examines a large number of Europeans who, disillusioned with western culture and religion after World War I, and anticipating the spiritual seekers of the counterculture, turned to the religious traditions of Asia for inspiration.

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology.

Cultural politics have undergone a resurgence in the last decade: nationalisms in Eastern and Central Europe, tribalisms in Africa, racial and ethnic movements in the Americas and Australasia have left the world in the grip of the "politics of recognition". Until this book, however, little attention has been paid to the significance of cultural politics in Southeast Asia, whose people are often assumed to be dedicated to the single goal of economic development. This study of a variety of Southeast Asian countries - including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand - reveals that such issues of culture and identity politics are, in fact, of primary importance to the people of the region and their leaders. Key questions dealt with in this study include: the conflicting interests of "indigenous" peoples and the largest immigrant group in the region (the "overseas Chinese"); the impact of globalization on concepts of national citizenship; the role of both Islam and gender in cultural nationalism; and the significance of the Internet in defining and eroding definitions of national and cultural identity.

This penetrating book re-examines `the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative `ethnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of `popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion.

This stimulating new reading of constructions of ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore is an important contribution to understanding the powerful linkages between ethnicity, identity, and nationalism in multiethnic Southeast Asia. The narrative of Malay identity devised by Malay nationalists, writers, and filmmakers in the late colonial period associated Malayness with the village (kampung), envisaged as static, ethnically homogenous, classless, indigenous, subsistence-oriented, rural, embedded in family and community, and loyal to a royal court. Joel Kahn challenges the kampung version of Malayness, arguing that it ignores the immigration of Malays from outside the peninsula to participate in trade or commercial agriculture, the substantial Malay population in towns and cities, and the reformist Muslims who argued for a common bond in Islam and played down Malayness.For sale in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand by NUS Press (Singapore)