From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular music, considering not just singers and musicians but their fans as well, showing how the music was intrinsically bound up with modern life and the societal changes that came with it. Rea...

Francio Guadeloupe has lived in both the Dutch Antilles and the Netherlands. An anthropologist by vocation, he is a keen observer by honed habit. In his new book, he wields both personal and anthropological observations. Simultaneously memoir and astute exploration, Black Man in the Netherlands charts Guadeloupe’s coming of age and adulthood in a Dutch world and movingly makes a global contribution to the understanding of anti-Black racism.Guadeloupe identifies the interse...

"This excellent volume, edited by Ooi Kee Beng and Wan Hamidi Hamid, discusses what it means to be Malay in Malaysia. And in doing that, it seeks to be much more..Being a Malay is about expressing the cultural interactions and assimilations that undeniably take place among the various ethnie that inhabit and have inhabited Malaysia. It is not only about being Malay, or being Malaysian. It is about being humans." - Senator Ariffin Omar.This collection of nine essays by young and 'you...

What does it mean to be Malay in the 21st century? Especially in a country like Malaysia where identity politics is questioned on an almost daily basis, and policed by the state. 16 years later after the publication of I Am Muslim, Dina Zaman returns to write a memoir, writing about what it means to be Malay, and Muslim in the 21st century.The writer embarked on Malayland during the Covid pandemic, to understand the anger and frustrations of her fellow ethnic Mala...

The seductiveness of touristed landscapes is simultaneously local and global, as travelled places are formed and reworked by the activities of diverse, mobile people, in their desires to experience situated, sensuous qualities of difference. Cartier and Lew’s interesting and informative book explores contemporary issues in travel and tourism and human geography, and the complex cultural, political, and economic activities at stake in touristed landscapes as a result of globalization.

For anyone wanting to move beyond tired travel guide cliches, A Geek in Indonesia is a hip, irreverent and streetwise introduction to Southeast Asia's biggest country.Jump from the beaches of Bali to a tour bus circuit of the fascinating island of Java and come face to face with the reality of 21st-century Indonesia—from local fashion bloggers and the world's most avid tweeters to feminist activists, punk pioneers, and scandalous celebrities. Discover the ...

This VSI offers readers something no other introduction to folk music does: a cross-cultural, comparative approach, a survey of the basic issues as they have unfolded over time, and specific examples from widely differing sites of how folk musicians themselves, as well as corporations, non-governmental organizations, and governments have made full use of the available resources, older and newer strategies, and multiple agendas that keep the folk music process alive in an increasingly inter...

Can tourism help a poor remote community to develop? How much does tourism change a village? How can a village have the benefits tourism offers without the problems it can cause? These are the questions that lie at the core of this text. Using an anthropologist’s eye and a high degree of trust, this book uncovers the story of tourism development in two small villages on a remote island of Eastern Indonesia.The ethnography provides a rich description of life in a non-western marginal commun...

Written by an established expert on Thailand, this is one of the first books to fully investigate the Thai media’s role during the Thaksin government’s first term. Incorporating political economy and media theory, the book provides a unique insight into globalization in Southeast Asia, analyzing the role of communications and media in regional cultural politics.Examining the period from the mid 1990s, Lewis makes a sustained comparison between Thailand and its neighbouring countrie...

This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label's releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, r...

Bangtan Remixed delves into the cultural impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, fan culture, and capitalist moment. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging transnational perspectives. From tracing BTS’s hip hop genealogy to analyzing how the band’s mid-2020 album reflects the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrating how Baroque art history influenc...

For more than three decades Malaysia's economic growth has been driven in part by the skills and sweat of large numbers of migrant workers. The country has become the temporary home for more than two million documented migrants. Many more than that are undocumented, living precarious lives on the margins of society. In cities like Kuala Lumpur and George Town, workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, the Philippines, Vietnam and China contribute in seen and unseen ways to the live...