Published in the year 2004, The Cambodian Version of the Ramayana is a valuable contribution to the field of Asian Studies.

Spanning more than a millennium, this anthology gathers literary sources from across the entire region of Southeast Asia. Its 24 selections derive from a variety of genres and reflect the diverse range of cultural influences the region has experienced. The literary excerpts illustrate the impact of religious and ideological currents from early Buddhism to Islam and Roman Catholicism. The selections reveal how cultural influences from South Asia, China, the Arabic world, and Europe arrived in Southeast Asia and left their marks in the realms of literature, society, and culture. The readings include religious works, folklore, epic poems, short stories, and the modern novel. They range from the Cambodian medieval version of the Ramayana to the 16th century Javanese tales to modern Thai short stories and include selections from Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Philippines, and Burma.

With nearly 400 pages, Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages is an outstanding collection of classic and contemporary writing. The volume emerges from the thirty-year effort of a community to gather Cambodian literary and cultural works. In doing so, they not only translated rare works into English for the first time, but also helped to rescue writing lost during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Readers will find the following and more: -Cambodian writing ranging over fourteen hundred years, from the seventh century to the present; -translations of classical texts;selections of modern Cambodian poetry, prose, and folk theater; -contemporary writings by Cambodian refugees and children of the diaspora living in countries from Australia to the United States, Canada, and Europe; -visual art, including oil paintings by Theanly Chov and excerpts from a graphic novel by Tian Veasna. "The work included in Out of the Shadows of Angkor is just a part of the vast, diverse repertoire of Cambodian literature created by those born in Cambodia, in the camps, and in new lands. Soth Polin once told me, 'What we have lost is indescribable . . . what we have lost is not reconstructable. An epoch is finished. So when we have literature again, it will be a new literature.' We hope this book brings out of the shadows some of the lost, hidden, and emerging gems of Cambodian literature--past, present, and moving into the future." --From the overview essay by guest editor Sharon May

The ancient Indian epic poem Ramayana has been disseminated throughout large tracts of Southeast Asia since the 9th century. Versions of the epic poem have come to adopt and reflect the unique characteristics of the countries and regions where it has gained cultural currency. The epic has been a source of popular themes in both traditional and contemporary art forms, including literature, performing arts, fine arts, and films. This book showcases Ramayana theater as a platform where the multiple meanings and senses of values are negotiated. It focuses on the relationships between the cultural representation and the various meanings of Ramayana theater, as well as other dramatic art forms. Focusing on the various contemporary contexts of art performances where the epic poem has been represented, the book also presents the ideologies and moral values contained in the theatrical forms of the epic poem. It discusses various performance contexts, such as diaspora communities, production of popular content culture, cultural diplomacy, designation as intangible cultural heritage, transmission, tourism, and the representation/exhibition of culture, as well as the performance in rituals. It also includes works of three contemporary and inspiring artists: cross-gender dancer Didik Nini Thowok, animator as well as puppeteer Nanang Ananto Wicaksono, and composer Ken Steven.

The Angkorian World explores the history of Southeast Asia’s largest ancient state from the first to mid-second millennium CE. Chapters by leading scholars combine evidence from archaeology, texts, and the natural sciences to introduce the Angkorian state, describe its structure, and explain its persistence over more than six centuries. Comprehensive and accessible, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone studying premodern Asia. The volume’s first of six sections provides historical and environmental contexts and discusses data sources and the nature of knowledge production. The next three sections examine the anthropogenic landscapes of Angkor (agrarian, urban, and hydraulic), the state institutions that shaped the Angkorian state, and the economic foundations on which Angkor operated. Part V explores Angkorian ideologies and realities, from religion and nation to identity. The volume’s last part reviews political and aesthetic Angkorian legacies in an effort to explain why the idea of Angkor remains central to its Cambodian descendants. Maps, graphics, and photographs guide readers through the content of each chapter. Chapters in this volume synthesise more than a century of work at Angkor and in the regions it influenced. The Angkorian World will satisfy students, researchers, academics, and the knowledgeable layperson who seeks to understand how this great Angkorian Empire arose and functioned in the premodern world. The Prologue and Chapters 2, 10, 15, 23, 30 and 32 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities. It presents a trilectic approach to archaeological study of religious landscapes that combines Indigenous philosophies with the spatial and semiotic thinking of Lefebvre, Peirce, and proponents of assemblage theories. Case studies from ancient Angkor and the Andes reveal how rituals of place-making activated processes of territorialization and semiosis fundamental to the experience of political worlds that shaped power relations in past societies. The perspectives developed in the book permit a reconstruction of how landscapes were variably conceived, perceived, and lived in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre, and how these registers may have aligned or clashed. In the end, the examination of built environments, infrastructures, and rituals staged within specialized buildings demonstrates how archaeologists can better infer past ontologies, cosmologies, ideologies of time and place, and historically specific political struggles. The study will appeal to students and researchers interested in ritual, infrastructures, landscape, archaeological theory, political institutions, semiotics, human geography, and the civilizations of the ancient Andes and Angkor.

This book represents the first ever published introduction to the comparative study of traditional Asian literatures, embracing three vast literary zones: Arab-Islamic, Indo-South East Asian and Sino-Far Eastern. The aim of the book is to outline the main properties of Asian literatures in the period of 'reflective traditionalism' (the early centuries CE to the first half of the 19th century), when the creation of a vast body of aesthetically significant works was coupled with the emergence of literary self-awareness: when the nature of the creative process, the poetics and functions of the literary works, and the ways of their influence on the reader were thoroughly comprehended and committed to writing for the first time. The book is intended for specialists in Asian literatures, comparative literature, and literary theory, and for students of these topics.