This article examines the highly ornamented Burmese manuscript known as the Kammavāca to understand what its luxurious materials and distinctive illustrations reveal about Buddhist practice and politics in Burma's last kingdom, the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885). This article shows that the illustrations on Kammavāca manuscripts transformed during the Konbaung dynasty to feature new sword-wielding guardians. This article argues that this militarisation was part of the Burmese kingdom's increasing reliance on ritual practices and religious materials to fortify a kingdom at war with the British and threatened by ethnic divisions.

Beginning in 2020, young people in Thailand have led rallies to protest the interference of the military and the monarchy in politics. They have also condemned the role played by Buddhist discourse and court ritual in celebrating kings as divine. ‘No God, No King, Only Human’ reads a protest sign. Simultaneously, however, some groups of protesters have used the same ‘religious’ repertoire, such as the astrological tradition of the court, in their activism, turning it into an instrument of resistance. This article explores this apparent ambivalence via an ethnographic focus on divination, a long-standing central feature of Thai politics. Drawing from a decade of fieldwork conducted with diviners (mo du) and their clients from both pro-regime and pro-democracy camps, including prominent young activists, I argue that progressive individuals do not necessarily need to reject cosmological ideas and rituals deemed conservative in order to resist. Rather, many proactively co-opt them to enhance their own position in the polity, further demonstrating the inability of those in power to live up to accepted moral standards. This strategy, which builds on a Southeast Asian tradition of millenarianism, mobilises dogmatic notions including karma in support of narratives and practices of resistance.

While studies of commerce and trade in Manila's ‘Golden Age’ are common, the impact of the city's multiethnic society on the daily lives of its inhabitants has often been harder to gauge. Based on 98 Inquisition cases, this article examines the widespread use of folk magic in colonial Manila, offering new insights into cultural interactions and inviting new reflections on the nature and extent of colonial domination. Folk magic—also known as hechicería—was an important part of cultural life within Spanish communities across the empire in the early modern period. Encompassing a variety of different practices, including the use of love charms, luck charms, spell-casting, and divination, it offered individuals opportunities to mediate their relationships, particularly with members of the opposite sex. These practices connected European folk traditions with Asian knowledge of botany, medicine, and spirituality to fulfil the needs of the Spanish community for magic. At the same time, this blending of Spanish and Asian cultures was subversive of colonial authority. Folk magic practices challenged the progression of ‘pious imperialism’ that pitted Christianity against indigenous traditions, creating spaces of cultural exchange where the balance of power between cultures was more evenly felt than often assumed.

This article investigates the understudied mission of Bishop Carlo van Melckebeke CICM as Apostolic Visitor for the Chinese overseas from 1953 to his retirement in 1970. Although Chinese had settled overseas from as far back as the twelfth century, the Catholic Church never had a significant presence among these communities, except in British colonial era Singapore-Malaya. Following the mid-twentieth century forced exodus of Chinese seminarians and Western missionaries from the mainland after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Holy See responded by redirecting missionary efforts through the initiatives of Bishop van Melckebeke and his colleagues to this major ethnic group scattered across the world. This article deals with this unprecedented apostolate to these diasporic communities, in a substantially different manner from previous scholarship on Catholicism in China in terms of notions of institution, and the framing of missionary activities, networks, and resources. Based on archival resources, media reports and interviews, it recounts how the Office of Apostolic Visitor and the Singapore Catholic Central Bureau extended their mission beyond the politics of the Cold War, and organised a variety of ministries to serve the overseas Chinese population residing on five continents.

This article investigates the history of the ethnonyms Temoq, Semelai, Semaq Beri and Jakun, which label Orang Asli groups in the south-central lowlands of Peninsular Malaysia. It combines ethnographic and historical accounts and census analysis to argue that each of these ethnonyms, in the twentieth century, became attached to the groups that now carry them by R.J. Wilkinson and other colonial administrator/anthropologists who were primarily concerned with finding traces of supposed primitive ancestors of modern humans, but who determined that language had to be used as a proxy toward that end. Clarifying the basis of that classification makes the system of ethnonyms that became official somewhat clearer. The article delves deepest into the genesis of ‘Temoq’, through an analysis of the ethnography of H.D. Collings and through the linguistics of the word. It argues that the Semelai word tmoʔ derives from the Malay word tembok [təmboʔ], meaning ‘tattered and dissolute in appearance’, and has been used by the Semelai to achieve social distance from the Temoq, who the Semelai also call /smaʔ bri/ ‘forest people’. It further suggests that the people now known as Temoq may themselves have once been known as ‘Semelai’.

In the late nineteenth century, British commercial interests in Asia and back home visualised a railway connecting British Burma with inland China, which they saw as a vast unexplored market. British engineers and adventurers were then employed by the commercial bodies to investigate the economy and geography of Yunnan and Upper Burma for the project. The railway was eventually rejected by the British as being unviable and unprofitable. The colonial knowledge created by these missions (in the form of travelogues, survey reports, interviews and studies) was later interpreted by Chinese nationalists as evidence of Britain's ambitions to colonise southwest China in 1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) and 1927 (the Northern Expedition) when the Chinese nation was in deep crisis. But the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War led the Chinese Nationalist government to reconsider the Yunnan–Burma railway as necessary infrastructure for obtaining foreign supplies to save the nation. The colonial knowledge produced by British explorers and merchants earlier was reinterpreted by the Nationalists to try to persuade the British authorities to construct the Burma section of the railway. By tracing the history of this failed project, this article argues that nationalist understandings of colonial infrastructure were far from fixed and consistent. It recounts the circulation of colonial knowledge on the Yunnan–Burma railway from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, showing how different nationalist agents in Asia interpreted and reinterpreted colonial infrastructure at various critical periods.