On the eve of the war against the South Vietnamese regime in 1964, the communist party strove to carve out a new productivist and political elite from the towns and villages of the country. According to a categorization of patriotic exemplarity devised by Ho Chi Minh, "avant-garde workers", "exemplary soldiers" and "new heroes" would fill the ranks of a "new model society", one in which political virtue would serve as the principle to mobilize the masses. This study present and analyzes the process by which "new heroes" were invented. It first develops a picture of what constituted heroes in Vietnamese tradition and history, and then shows how the new model, effectively a Sino-Soviet import, was imposed, only to be slowly distorted by its own cultural rationale and by specific objectives. Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than half a century to the reconstruction of the national imagination and the development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam.

Intended both for students and scholars, this book of personal essays is the first by a group of historians as researchers, writers and teachers specializing in Southeast Asia. The group has not, to our knowledge, as a collective unit at least found any biographers before. They consist of a number of "veterans" who have been invited by Professor Nicholas Tarling to comment on the way they got into Southeast Asian history, its development over the past decades and its future. As result, the essays mainly semi-autobiographical innature, are not only illuminating, but also revel many "trade secrets", why they chose their particular area of specialization, andhow they went on to pusue their research interests, academic careers and writings on their chosen subjects. This is companion volume to New Perspectives and Research on Malaysian History, which is a collection of essays on Malaysian historiography, and is also published by MBRAS to coincide with the celebration of its 130th anniversary in August 2007.

This study examines the Indonesian Muslim intellectuals of the twentieth century and their approaches in dealing with the problems that faced Indonesian Muslims at that time. Like their intellectual ancestors in Islamic history, these recent Indonesian intellectuals carefully examined the society in which they lived. On one level they studied the original and historical teachings of Islam and attempted to fit that message to the Southeast Asian region. On another level they reacted to the great waves of culture that arrived from Europe, North America, and Asia throughout the twentieth century. They did all of this at a time when the Indonesian nation was forming itself, beginning with the nationalist movements of the early part of the century when the Dutch controlled the archipelago, and continuing into the last half of the century when Indonesia was an independent nation.

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. The Ironies of Freedom examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex.

The Javanese -- one of the largest ethnic groups in the Islamic world -- were once mostly "nominal Muslims", with pious believers a minority and the majority seemingly resistant to Islam's call for greater piety. Over the tumultuous period analyzed here -- from colonial rule through japanese occupation and Revolution to the chaotic democracy of the Sukarno period, the Soeharto regime's aspirant totalitarianism and the democratic period since -- the society has changed profundly to become an extraordinary example of the rising religiosity that marks the modern age. Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java draws on a formidable body of sources, including interviews, archival documents and a vast range of published material, to situate the Javanese religious experience from the 1930s to the present day in its local political, social, cultural and religious settings. The concluding part of the author’s monumental three-volume series assessing more than six centuries of the on-going Islamisation of the Javanese, the study has considerable relevance for much wider contexts. Beliefs, or disbeliefs, about the supernatural are important in all societies, and the final section of the book, which considers the significance of Java’s religious history in global contexts, shows how it exemplifies a profound contest of values in the universal human search for a better life.

The Journal of Burma Studies is one of the only scholarly peer-reviewed printed journal exclusively on Burma. The Journal of Burma Studies is jointly sponsored by the Burma Studies Group and the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. It is published twice a year (June and December) by NUS Press, National University of Singapore. The Journal seeks to publish the best scholarly research focused on Burma/Myanmar and its minority and diasporic cultures from a variety of disciplines, ranging from art history and religious studies, to economics and law. Published since 1997, it draws together research and critical reflection on Burma/Myanmar from scholars across Asia, North America and Europe.

The Journal of Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) is published half-yearly by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS). It disseminates knowledge and matters of historical value pertaining to Malaysia and the surrounding region.

Letters of Sincerity is a study in the traditional Malay art of letter writing. The work is based on the Raffles collection of Malay letters first discovered in Aviemore, Scotland, in November 1970. In this book Ahmat Adam provides a transcription form the original Jawi, into Rumi script of a series of letters sent to Stamford Raffles mostly around 1810 and 1811 by rulers of regional Malay polities. He also provides a translation into English, and supplementary notes, which set the letters in the context of the times, and explain the issues which they raise. In the course of this he additionally povides a detailed guide to the intricacies of Malay-Islamic dating which was in use at that time in the Malay-Indonesian world. His study on this aspect of Malay culture is the first to link Malay dating with Sufism.