The latest historical and anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history on Southeast Asia, these articles offer new understandings of classical Hindu and Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia and their relationship to the regionÍs medieval cultures. The articles are presented under four headings: Art, religion and politics (Buddhist monuments in Java and Cambodia); Southeast Asian transformations (cultural exchange with South Asia); Technology (workmanship in art and material culture); and Southeast Asia between past and present.

This collection deals with the development of complex societies in Southeast Asia from the Neolithic until the later historic period. The authors present data from recent excavations as well as new analyses of previous finds, with a focus on cultural exchange and interactions with the natural environment. The volume is divided into four parts: the Neolithic period in Southeast Asia (common origins, cultural diffusion and antiquity of human occupation); the Bronze-Iron Age in mainland Southeast Asia (new dating, mortuary practices, and material culture); long-distance exchange relations between China and the Middle East; and early Indianized polities (natural environment and material culture).

Thailand has become well known throughout the world for wonderful cuisine, great package holidays, sumptuous temples and textiles. Noticeably absent from glossy tourist brochures but equally well known throughout the Western world is Thailand's seedier side - the world of child exploitation, rampant prostitution and AIDS. Thailand maintains its appeal by slipping the ugly and painful out of sight and by promoting women as exotic visual icons through beauty contests, state rituals and the sex trade. This book explores the construction of gender in Thailand and in particular the role Bangkok plays in establishing gender relations for the whole of the country. It examines the historical and cultural processes underlying Thai public culture, including historical theme parks. The author demonstrates how the materiality of the Thai world shapes gender relations and how Buddhism discourages essentialisms, including fixed binary gender identities. Throughout the book, appearances are shown to be critically important, and the essentialism of gender is maintained through display, public presentations, and everyday material practices. Anyone wishing to understand the complexity of Thailand will find this book provides a highly readable and insightful analysis.

Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, this innovative book explores materiality, embodiment, memory, imagination, and identity among refugees, providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience, self, and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive, represent, manipulate, use as metaphor, and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces, and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile. The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality, and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects, spaces, and bodies, are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology, aesthetics, and beyond, as well as from refugee studies and anthropology, the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material, visual, spatial, and embodied aspects of forced migration, providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality.

This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam’s semicolonialism in the late nineteenth century, the concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and dynastic succession, the relationship of manual knowledge to ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more familiar topics under Reynolds’s microscope, treated with new material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and religious history.

This second volume of Studies in Art, Science, and Technology unites studies by scientists, curators, and conservators, all of which are published here for the first time. Essays and technical notes address a variety of themes, such as connections between technology and aesthetics, aging processes of artworks, attribution and dating issues, and conservation theory. Specific examples from throughout art history add context and help promote deeper understanding. A wide range of objects are discussed in the texts, including medieval sculptures, Baroque musical instruments, Egyptian stone works, photographs, enamels, and paintings. The refined analyses of these works will prove relevant and enlightening to an interdisciplinary professional audience.

The past decade has seen a major structural shift in broadcasting in Southeast Asia, with the development of digital satellite and cable broadcasting. This shift has impacted upon some of the most information-sensitive governments in the world: Singapore, Malaysia and, until recently, Indonesia. Atkins traces this development in five countries, showing that the challenge to authoritarian regimes, anticipated by modern theorists as a result of the globalization of news and information, is not materializing. Instead, a new commercial elite has arisen, Southeast Asia's own mini-moguls, who act as gatekeepers for state interests, as partners to global media companies.