The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, is a community of multiple identities. Over time, its citizens' loyalties were formed around national and transnational frameworks involving ethnic, religious, and ideological affinities. In the post-independence period, they were affected by decolonization, nation-building, the Cold War, globalization, and China’s rise. As a result, the region is emerging as a confluence of competing and overlapping identities. In recent years, new collective imaginations about the region's future have appeared, committing member states to directions beyond the politico-economic realm. Yet there is a risk that more exclusive visions, based on national, religious, ethnic, or other allegiances, will hold sway. This book unpacks these competing identities. Rich in ethnographic and historical material, it examines identities shaped by generational markers, transnational linkages, and shared experiences of violence.

During the past four decades an impressive corpus of manuscripts and epigraphical material in Thailand, Laos, and adjacent Tai-speaking areas has been surveyed, documented, and digitized. Scholarly interest in this material has not been restricted to philological and historical studies of the texts contained in manuscripts and inscriptions but has extended to its material aspects, which encompass manuscripts written on palm-leaf, various forms of paper, cloth, bamboo, and other organic material, and inscriptions on stone, metal, and wood. In Manuscript Cultures and Epigraphy of the Tai World, Volker Grabowsky seeks to explore the production, use, and transmission of manuscripts both as containers of traditional knowledge and as objects used in daily life, rituals, and ceremonies. Particular emphasis is given to the relationship between manuscripts and inscriptions, as both have influenced each other to no small degree. Through a comprehensive look at the Tai-language literature's chronological and synchronic development, readers will learn the social importance of these literary productions.

Written by a multinational team of experts who deploy their disciplinary strengths in history, sociology, social anthropology, political science, and philology to analyze a wide range of sources, including royal chronicles, missionary dictionaries, colonial archival documents, audio- and videotapes, and face-to-face interviews, Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia adds to the small but growing body of publications on warfare in Southeast Asia and colonial armies. Military-society relations are examined in a wide range of ways: traditional strategies of augmenting populations, mutinies, and mutiny attempts, imperial anxieties, Japanese military legacies, the transoceanic experiences of Southeast Asian and European soldiers, postwar demobilizations and postconflict biographies, and the transformation of communist guerrillas into guardians of the state and their development of capitalist enterprises. This volume will be of interest to Southeast Asianists and military historians alike as it not only covers traditional territorial grounds, thematic terrains, and temporal landscapes but also extends to individuals and further includes the national, regional, and transnational lives of military institutions.

The research presented in this volume analyzes the impact of ethnic change and religious traditions on local, national, and regional identities. Case studies include the Bru population in Laos/Vietnam, hill tribe populations without citizenship in northern Thailand, the Lua also in northern Thailand, the Pakistani community in Penang, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Leke religious movement in Thailand/Myanmar, political Islam in Indonesia, Sufi Muslims in Thailand, pluralism in Penang, the Preah Vihear dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, and hero cult worship in Lan Na. Historians and social anthropologists variously tackle these issues of identity and integration within the kaleidoscope of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures that make up Southeast Asia.

The Tai Lu are a Tai-speaking group closely related to the Khon Muang or Tai Yuan, the dominant ethnic group in Northern Thailand. According to their own historical tradition, the ancestors of the Tai Lu migrated from what is now northwestern Vietnam into the southern part of Yunnan, where they founded their own kingdom in the twelfth century. Today, the Tai Lu are the most important population group within the so-called "Economic Quadrangle" of the Upper Mekong, which plays an increasingly important economic and geopolitical role.

"Chronicle of Sipsong Panna" offers the first English translation of four different versions of the Chronicle of Moeng Lu (also known as Sipsong Panna) based on the oldest extant manuscripts. The volume provides a comprehensive analysis of Tai Lu historical sources and a valuable introduction to the history and society of the Upper Mekong region.

Foon Ming Liew-Herres is the author of "Treatises on Military Affairs of the Ming Dynastic History." Volker Grabowsky is professor of Thai studies at the University of Hamburg. He is co-author with Renoo Wichasin of "Chronicles of Chiang Khaeng: A Tai Lu Principality of the Upper Mekong."