Through my relationship with a tomboi in West Sumatra, I learned some of the ways in which my concept of “lesbian” was not the same as my partner’s, even though we were both, I thought, women-loving women. This article explores how tombois in West Sumatra both shape their identities from and resist local, national, and transnational narratives of gender and sexuality.

This description of 1990 West Sumatra shows something of how gender and sexuality are understood across Southeast Asia. The article presents identity as a negotiation between others’ expectations and an individual’s complex (socially-conditioned!) desires.

The cockfight (tetadjen; sabungan) is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. […] Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.

Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations.

No one enters Burmese traffic with any assumptions about fundamental rights. Pedestrians, certainly, enjoy no “right of way.” No one, by the same token, is ever excluded from the game as long as they remain in motion. […] If you get ahead, you were right to try. If you don’t, you were right to yield. What’s to argue?

When it comes to hierarchies, Southeast Asia can be frustratingly (even scandalously) foreign for those of us raised in egalitarian, Western democracies. This is a book which explains clearly and sympathetically, but not uncritically, the logic behind Burma’s hierarchical arrangements with a close focus on the unique role of monks and gender.

A ruler had no power to enact law. He was born to maintain order and peace and to protect his subjects from dangers…

The fascinating history of the law: first as it was understood in ancient India, then as it was practiced in medieval Burma, and finally how it was enacted in modern Thailand.

The khwan may therefore be described as something in the nature of a principle of life, vital to the welfare of man and animals.

An exploration of the Thai belief in animating spirits (ขวัญ) and the various rituals and ritual implements that attend them, including a thorough description of the บายศรี offering.

Even after leaving the forest, one man explained, Khmer tradition held that if one failed to make an offering of thanks, the spirits would seize and kill the ungrateful person.

From the point of view of both language and contents, I conclude that the Pāli inscriptions of Burma and Siam give firm evidence for a Theravādin presence in the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya basins, from about the fifth century CE onwards.

Brown divides his presentation into three periods. First is the Indiegenous Bronze Age, around 2000 BCE; second, Indian contact, 2nd century CE to 5th century CE; third, Indian-related art, 5th century onward. While showcasing the art of early Southeast Asia and its history, Brown explores topics such as the lack of diety images in pre-Indian art and the miraculously sudden transition to such anthropomorphic images.

Not just a catalog of sculptures, the included essays by leading scholars explain much of what is known about the early history of Southeast Asian polities and their Indic religions.

Reverse glass paintings, a form of Chinese export art, were extensively traded in the nineteenth century. Several examples are on display in prominent Thai Buddhist monasteries in Bangkok.

King Nangklao of Siam, Rama III, encouraged Sino-Siamese trade that brought Chinese objects and images to nineteenth-century Siam. The ideals of accretion and abundance characteristic of Thai Buddhism and the sinophilia of Rama III facilitated the construction of “Chinese-style” Thai temples. Glass paintings with scenes of the Pearl River Delta, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, auspicious objects, and bird-and-flower compositions were installed in temples and inspired new directions in Thai mural painting.

May the dead    be ever-evidenced
        May their clandestine names
bellow from the mouth…

The Five Buddha Districts system prevailed from the 1790s to the 1880s on the frontier between Yunnan, in Southwest China, and the Burmese Kingdom, in the mountainous areas to the west of the Mekong River. Through more than a century of political mobilization, the Lahu communities in this area became an integrated and militarized society, and their culture was reconstructed in the historical context of ethnic conflicts, competition, and cooperation among the Wa, Dai, and Han Chinese settlers. The political elites of the Five Buddha Districts, however, were monks who had escaped the strict orthodoxy of the Qing government to become local chieftains, or rebels, depending on political changes in southern Yunnan.

The relationship between Cambodians and Angkor still persists as a place of ancestors, worship, and religious rituals. We believe that Angkor is the most sacred place in Cambodia.

We have been through such hardship and danger together. Now we must love one another.

… independence was perceived as an opportunity for a particular ethnic group

The fishing is good. Ma Be can be proud of his young pupil.

A short film about a tribe of hunters in Vietnam.

This inspiring and engaging collection of short stories will be useful for both scholars and students of Thai Buddhism who are curious to learn what the tradition was like before the modern state.

The letter sent to the royal court at Kandy on behalf of the king of Siam, and published [here], includes some information of considerable interest for the study of the history of Pali texts. For a shipment, which comprised no less than 97 books no longer extant on the island and therefore asked for in a second document accompanying this letter, is said to have been dispatched together with the letter.

… there are at least three major orientations within Sinhalese religion: 1) Bodh Gaya, commemorating the enlightenment experience; 2) Kataragama, where access to transformative “this-worldly” sacral power is sought; and 3) Kandy, where religion legitimates a people’s cultural and political past and present through civil ceremony

What all three pilgrimages have in common is functional in nature: the need to cope with various manifestations of dukkha

Aśoka (c. 268-232 BCE) and Jayavarman VII (1182-1220?), two of the greatest rulers of India and Southeast Asia, were Buddhists by any definition. However, the puzzling problem is that their deaths were followed by an inexorable decay of their erstwhile great empires.

Over 15,000 photographs of Buddhist archeological sites, pilgrimage centres, and temples in SE Asia, as well as Videos, Maps, Posters, etc.

… in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia

A country-by-country profile of Southeast Asia and its relations with the PRC.

One day these novices come up to me after class and they say, “Mr. Tom, can we talk to you about something?” I say, “Of course” expecting some rich conversation about the religious life or something… and they start breaking out into two or three part harmony

A brief interview about the extensive network of monastic schools in Southeast Asia and the ethnic minorities who leverage them for mobility.

… the majority of its residents have to extract groundwater to survive. And it’s causing the city to sink.

Notice in particular how the looting was worse during the Cold War than during the colonial period, with American-backed militias instrumental in the efforts on both sides of the border.

… a historically and contextually sensitive understanding of elite lay Buddhist women in Sri Lanka, bringing a “critical yet empathetic look” at their participation in ethno-nationalist Sinhala Buddhist hegemony

I think we cannot talk about the Rohingya genocide or this persecution of Muslims in Burma without talking about western and Asian investors

An interview with the first author of the book by the same name.

… the vinaya is nearly as central to the Buddhist religion as the shari’a is to Islam. If we were to rank religions in order of legalism, Theravāda would come at the legalistic end of the scale, near to Islam and far from, for example, Taoism.

The fascinating history of Burmese law demonstrates and explains the relationship between textual conservativism and legal sovereignty in the Theravāda world and the profound effect this had on Buddhist discourse in the region.

I had this sureal sense of vertigo where I felt like I was constantly teetering over the edge of something that I didn’t understand. The entire town was built on top of bombs.

Leah Zani discusses her field work in Laos, where the CIA secretly carried out the largest bombing campaign in history, and how she navigated and charted this delicate history of military waste.