Digital tools offer new possibilities for visual research, and such tools can provide methods for revitalising our understanding of the field of culture. Despite the importance of the visual as an element of culture, it is only in the last decade that the visual as a phenomenon of seeing has been a major feature of theoretical and methodological approaches to Southeast Asia. The long traditions of art history, anthropology and related fields in Southeast Asian studies have hitherto been focused on empirical documentation. In studying one aspect of the visual archive created by the polymath Gregory Bateson during his partnership with Margaret Mead, I will draw on methodologies that have their origins in Bateson's writings. These methodologies find fresh conditions in digital environments, in ways that allow us to bring into play a variety of theories of the visible.

This article explores the social and moral implications of Duterte's war on drugs in a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and human rights interventions, the article sheds light on policing practices, social relations, and moral discourses by examining central perspectives of the state police implementing the drug war, of local policing actors engaging with informal policing structures, and of residents dealing with everyday insecurities. It argues that the drug war has produced a climate of ambiguous fear on the ground, which has reconfigured and destabilised social relations between residents and the state as well as among residents. Furthermore, this has led to a number of subordinate moral discourses — centred on social justice, family, and religion — with divergent perceptions on the drug war and the extent to which violence is deemed legitimate.

By the 1890s the Dutch had noticed the escalation of opium addiction in colonial Indonesia. They believed that opium consumption had brought about health problems and other negative socioeconomic effects. Yet, the profitability of opium took precedence over its negative social effects in the Dutch East Indies government's policy, which until the end of the 1920s made almost no substantial efforts to address addiction. It was nongovernmental organisations which took the initiative to install medical facilities for addicts and launch diverse anti-opium campaigns. These organisations marked the rise of modern philanthropic activism in the field of public health as part of the flourishing sociopolitical movements of that time. They also represent the nascent civil society in late colonial Indonesia.

This study of river names seeks to deepen our understanding of the pre-modern environmental history of northern Vietnam. A performative practice, naming places often reveals the transformation of a physical environment into a cultural one. By analysing the names given to antecedents of the Red River in northern Vietnam, this article argues that each historical name reflected its users’ perception of their relationship with a respective river. Toponyms like Lô, Phú Lương, Nhị, and ‘Great River’, therefore, did not simply represent the present-day Red River — a geographical unit that dates to the French colonial period.

This article seeks to explore the impact of digital technologies upon the material, conceptual and ideological premises of the colonial archive in the digital era. This analysis is pursued though a discussion of creative work produced during an international, multidisciplinary artist workshop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, that used digital material from colonial photographic archives in the Netherlands to critically investigate the ways national, transnational and personal (hi)stories in the former colonies in Southeast Asia have been informed and shaped by their colonial past. The analysis focuses on how the artists’ use of digital media contests and reconfigures the use, truth value and power of the colonial archive as an entity and institution. Case studies include: Thai photographer Dow Wasiksiri, who questions the archive's mnemonic function by substituting early twentieth-century handcrafted association techniques with digital manipulation; Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann, who compresses onto the same picture plane different historical moments and colonial narratives; and Indonesian photographer Agan Harahap, who recomposes archival photographs into unlikely juxtapositions disseminated through social media. By repurposing colonial archival material and circulating their work online such a re-imag(in)ing of Southeast Asia not only challenges the notions of originality, authenticity, ownership and control associated with such archives, but also reclaims colonial-era (hi)stories, making them part of a democratic, expanding, postcolonial archive.

This article considers the implications of the popularisation of Facebook groups that share historical photographs for the writing of Thai national and photographic histories. Rather than dismissing these groups as lacking in historical rigour, I propose that the nostalgic impetus behind their formation indicates an important way through which we may rethink the continued relevance of Thailand's history to its current sociopolitical situation. Drawing from Craig J. Reynolds’ (1992) argument regarding the interrelationship between the ‘plot of Thai history’ and the narrative historical form, I consider how this plot might be challenged or displaced through a movement from text to image, and from the material to the digital.

Based on fieldwork conducted among the Buddhist population living in Rakhine State, Myanmar, between 2005 and 2011, this article elucidates how people deal with health and illness and related uncertainties by relying on a multiplicity of conceptions and practices associated with Buddhism, astrology, spirit cults, as well as indigenous and Western medicine. This article unpacks this plurality to show how different components contribute to the healing process in complementary and yet hierarchical ways which hold to a nexus of political, social, medical, economic, cosmological, biological, and environmental factors. It also questions the boundaries between the religious and medical, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, worldly and otherworldly, and natural and supernatural.

In most narratives, the beginning of the oil palm industry in Southeast Asia boils down to entrepreneurial spirit, scientific research, and good fortune. The colonial context in which the industry emerged barely figures in the story. This article argues that colonial power was critical, providing access to land and labour that proved more important than plant selection, capital, or technology. The plantation model pushed the region ahead of Africa as the leading exporter of palm oil by the late 1930s, but its future was in doubt as the Depression and Second World War shattered the colonial order.

Previous research has shown that the New Woman was a global phenomenon and that fiction was crucial to the emergence of this New Woman. One work that was of particular importance was Henrik Ibsen's A doll's house. This article examines the rise of the New Woman in early twentieth century Thailand. It traces the campaigns for gender equality that Thai women waged in local newspapers and magazines. It also examines the reactions towards these campaigns by three major authors, all of whom turned to Ibsen's play in their engagement with the New Woman phenomenon.

This article examines colonial nature-making in twentieth century Philippines. It particularly looks into natural history investigations of the American-instituted Bureau of Science and the ways in which it created a discursive authority for understanding the Philippine natural environment. These biological investigations, the article argues, did not only structure the imperial construction of the colony's nature, but also provided a blueprint for imagining notions of national integration and identity. The article interrogates the link between colonial scientific projects and nation-building initiatives, emphasising the scripting of the archipelago's nature and the creation of a national science through biological spaces.

This comparative study examines the complex, changing configurations of the relationships between the state and mediumship cults, under different regimes and histories in three Southeast Asian states and China. Spirit mediums are endowed with charismatic authority, owing to their access to the supernatural sphere, which stands in implicit tension with the authority of the state. This tension underlies state–mediumship relationships in Southeast Asia, but leads to diverse dynamics, according to the place of religion in each state. In the atheist, communist/post-communist states (China and Vietnam) mediumship is primarily approached as a political issue; in Buddhist Thailand as a religious issue, and in multicultural Malaysia, where Islam is the official religion, as a legal issue. Tensions prevail particularly in the communist/post-communist states, where there has been a resurgence of mediumship cults, even as these are officially proscribed as ‘superstitions’. In Thailand tensions have been ameliorated by a gradual amalgamation of the cults and popular Buddhism, while in Malaysia tensions are prevented by controls over religious practices. Further research on the relatively neglected issue of the relationship between the state and mediumship cults in the emergent regions of the world is suggested.

This article considers the literary curiosity from the Mạc–Lê dynastic wars in the sixteenth century of a poem written by a Mạc-dynasty partisan being interpreted by later generations as having been written to praise the Lê dynasty. It uses textual and contextual analysis to argue that the poem was written to praise the Mạc dynasty but was later revised by scholars of the Lê dynasty.

This article examines the modern kitchen as a technological artefact and a mechanism through which the postcolonial Singaporean state and agents of household consumerism such as advertisers, retailers, home economists, and social scientists constructed the image of a modern Singaporean woman. By revealing how the female consumer-cum-homemaker became a symbol of material success and middle-class status in Fordist Singapore, the article highlights two types of domestication: the subordination of women to the patriarchal imperatives of family and nation, and the transformation of hard successes in the economy into soft comforts in the kitchen. This article suggests that although the state had narrowed the gap between popular expectations for improved living standards and its ability to fulfil them, it also unwittingly enmeshed definitions of femininity, womanhood, and female citizenship in a series of contradictions and tensions that had implications for contemporary Singaporean society.

The Straits of Melaka have long played a central role in the history of Southeast Asia, from facilitating the movement of people, ideas, and commodities to marking the salty edge of states, empires, and sultanates. Networks, circulations, and mobilities have shaped our vision and understanding of this waterway. This article charts a different kind of story, one that explores the Straits not as a space of passage but rather as a place of production. It shows how and why these waters became an industrial fishing zone — an industrial estuary, as it were — in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the case of Bagan Si Api Api, a Hokkien-built town at the mouth of Sumatra's Rokan River, it explains why estuaries and migrants were central to Southeast Asia's urban rise from 1870 to 1940. By looking at the Straits during this pivotal moment, the article reveals the ways in which ecologies, beliefs, technologies, and cultures all combined to shape not only the economic life of Southeast Asia's estuaries, but also, and more importantly, the place of these estuaries in the region's economic life.

On the eve of its foundation in 1954, the Republic of Vietnam had five motorised fishing boats; 20 years later, that figure had swelled to over sixty thousand. This conversion to fossil fuels, along with associated developments like the intensified exploitation of marine ecologies and the use of new synthetic materials, form part of what has come to be called the ‘Great Acceleration’. This article follows a Japanese fisheries expert who spent six years in Vietnam in the early 1960s to explore the physical and conceptual work this process entailed, its entanglement with projects of war-making and nation-building, and the way it was both a product of and producer of the collapse of local ecologies.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.