Tours of Vietnam and Holiday Time in Thailand
There is a book that came out in 2009 called Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory by Scott Laderman. This is what the description about the book says:…
The Online Presence of Southeast Asian History Faculties/Departments
Partly out of curiosity, and partly because I often hear academics in Southeast Asia talk about their desire to “engage” internationally and to raise the stature of their respective universities…
Victor Goloubew and the Disappearance of the Indonesien Creators of the Bronze Drums
In 1929, Victor Goloubew, a Russian-born scholar who worked for the French École française d’Extrême-Orient, publshed an article in which he examined some of the materials that had been found by Louis Pajot in his excavations at Đông Sơn.
At that time, it was still not clear to scholars who had originally made the bronze drums. Hirth had argued that they had been created by the Chinese during their expeditions against savages (man 蠻) in the south in the first century CE, whereas De Groot had contended that the bronze drums were created by those very people whom the Chinese had campaigned against.
Teaching Vietnamese to the Cham in South Vietnam
Today I also found some texts that were used to teach the Vietnamese language to ethnic minorities in South Vietnam. This one is for the Cham, but there were other…
Vietnamese and English at the University of Hue
The academic world in many parts of Asia has become “English crazy” in recent years. In an effort to “internationalize” education, universities in countries where English is not a native…
Missing Voices in Vietnamese History
Scholars in the English-speaking world really did not start to research and write about Vietnamese history until the 1960s-1970s. At that time Vietnam had already become independent from French colonial…
Modern Indonesians and Medieval Việt
I recently started reading the famous Indonesian novel Never the Twain (Saluh Asuhan) by Abdoel Moeis. Written in 1928, it is about a young Minangkabau man, Hanafi, who has become…
A Chinese Hawaiian Beauty Queen and Singaporean Satay in 1962
The Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii has been hosting a beauty pageant since 1950 as part of a larger event known as the Narcissus Festival. The pageant is for…
Music and the (Un)Importance of a Southeast Asian Cultural Substratum
In 1993, the same year that O. W. Wolters gave the speech in Jakarta about Southeast Asia that I mentioned in the previous post, Vietnamese scholar Đinh Gia Khánh published a…
Flying Heads, Third Gender Spirit Mediums and Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study
Someone asked me today to suggest some books about the general history of Southeast Asia, and this reminded me of a larger “problem” that I’ve been thinking about for a…