Some names, like “rose”, acknowledge what exists. Others, like “unicorn”, create what otherwise would not exist. In between lie names that simultaneously describe and invent reality. “Southeast Asia” is one of these.

Some who study the region treat it as if it were Shakespeare's rose: a reality existing independently of its name. Others would agree with Waddell that an observer of “Southeast Asia” who uses the name incautiously risks hallucinating unicorns: projecting homogeneity, unity, and boundedness onto a part of the world that is in fact heterogeneous, disunited, and hard to delimit.

In the classical Burmese state, land and labour were categorized as either crown or private. State or crown land (mye-taw) was composed largely of the best irrigated tracts in the dry zone, usually worked by crown labour called kyun taw or ahmudan—depending upon the period of study—subject to service tenure, whose produce went to kyi-taw or royal granaries. These crown lands and labour were administered by temporary and permanent clients of the king in return for certain rights and privileges. Exempt communal or ancestral land (bòbábaing mye) was owned collectively, usually by villages of non-indentured people (athi) who, in lieu of corvée, submitted per capita taxes to the crown, determined by a complicated system based on their occupations. Sańghika or religious lands (wáthúkan mye) were either owned outright by the church or held in perpetuity as endowments. The tax exempt produce from glebe lands paid for the maintenance of religious buildings and monasteries, the monks, and for the care of their students and their servants (hpayà-kyun) who were exempt from both corvée as well as per capita tax.

In Bugis-Makassar society a king was identified in terms of his function in assuring the spiritual and material well-being of the whole community. Though distinguished from the rest of the population by the paraphernalia and “white blood” of kingship, the individual ruler did not reign in splendid isolation from the people. He was a visible presence whose active participation in the affairs of the community was an expected norm. On one level, he was regarded as an essential intermediary or link between mankind on this earth and the gods (or God) of the Upperworld; and, on another level, he was seen as an instrument of the people in maintaining the adat, or the laws and customs of the land. These two variant but co-existing beliefs in the role of kings reflect an existing tension between the rulers and the adat guardians, which had its roots at the very inception of kingship in this society.

When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?

I make the following observations from the vantage point of a philologist and anthropologist. I presuppose Michael Aung-Thwin's paper, “Hierarchy and Order in Pre-Colonial Burma”, as background, and I do not propose to recapitulate his treatment of the facts.

For more than two decades, the standard account of the Filipino side of the Philippine-American War has been Teodoro Agoncillo's Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic. Agoncillo's book is, by the author's own admission, a celebration of the role of the Filipino “masses” in the second phase of the Philippine Revolution. “If I appear inclined to sympathize with the masses”, he writes, “it is because their faith in the cause of the Republic was unshaken and their patriotism and self-sacrifice unsullied by selfish motives.” The villains of his story are the “Haves” (Agoncillo also refers to them as the “plutocrats” and the “middle class”) who, in his view, betrayed their countrymen by collaborating with the Americans and undermining the war effort. He directs his harshest criticism at Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda, Cayetano Arellano, and other Manila-based men of means. Agoncillo repeats this story, albeit in briefer form, in a popular college-level text, which he coauthored with Milagros Guerrero.

Over the past several decades a considerable body of scholarly literature has accumulated concerning the evolution of Thai social and political patterns, behaviour, and values, and our study of Thai society now is much more solidly-based than it was only a generation ago. One might legitimately begin to wonder, however, whether we might not “have it all wrong”. The question is not entirely flippant. Much of what has been written on such subjects has little solid historical depth. Historians' study of Thailand prior to the nineteenth century remains relatively superficial, based on very scanty sources; and to the extent that social scientists and others have depended on the historians, none would argue that they have been completely well-served. Even more seriously, however, one can argue that there has been a good deal of reading contemporary and recent situations back into the past; and even historians' analyses of pre-Chakri social and political history have been all too readily the prisoner of a narrow, linear view of Thai history as the political succession of kingdoms from Sukhothai to Ayudhya to Bangkok.

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

In July 1925, the British Cabinet seemingly sealed the fate of the Kuomintang (KMT) movement in Malaya and Singapore by agreeing that “the Governor of the Straits Settlements should be authorised to take the necessary steps for the suppression of the Malayan branches of the Society of Kuo Min Tang”. Although this ban was legally, albeit loosely, imposed by the Governors, Sir Laurence Guillemard and Sir Hugh Clifford, it did not succeed in ending the movement as they had expected. Thus, the KMT movement remained a nagging problem for the British authorities until Sir Cecil Clementi took a strong stand to enforce the ban in February 1930, which effectively paralysed the KMT movement in Malaya and Singapore.

This paper examines Japanese attitudes toward the independence movement in Vietnam, the Japanese idea of “independence”, and Japanese relationships with the Vietnamese nationalists during the period between 1940 and 1945.

The Japanese used French Indochina, one constituent of which was “Vietnam”, as a supply base and a stepping stone for their troops on their way to other battle grounds such as Burma, Singapore, Indonesia, or the Philippines. The defeated units were returned to Vietnam, rested, and reorganized into new military units. Coal and rice and other foodstuffs used by the Japanese in these battlefields often came from Vietnam. For these objectives, the Japanese kept the political and administrative structure of French Indochina intact under the French. But on 9 March 1945, the 30, 000-man Japanese military attacked the 50, 000-man French Indochinese Army in a surprise attack under the command of Lieutenant General Tsuchihashi, commanding general of the 38th Army. (This operation is identified in Japanese military terms as “Meigo Sakusen” [Bright Moon Action].)

My comments on the four papers here are not in any way a unified essay, but rather are some reflections as well as questions I was inspired to ask by reading the papers. The papers fall together into two pairs of related essays, one pair, comprising the papers by Lehman and Aung-Thwin, being largely concerned with “bonded” relationships in the general context of traditional societal organization in Burma and Thailand, and the other pair of papers, by Wyatt and Kirsch, focusing on a particular early northern Thai law code, the so-called “Laws of King Mangrai”, and what it suggests about the society in which and for which it was written.

Using the chbap to analyze pre-cotonial Cambodian society is difficult because these gnomic, normative poems are only incidentally concerned with the ways in which that society was put together. Moreover, it is hard to determine how firmly they are anchored in the times when they were written: how useful is a seventeenth century chbap, after all, in helping us to understand eighteenth-century society? Another problem with using them is that they often provide an idealized picture, suggesting norms of behaviour rather than describing or analyzing the ways in which people behave. Because of this, the poems belong to more than one century at a time. Finally, like anything written down in a largely illiterate society, the chbap encapsulate and pass on the ideology of a minority élite. It can be argued that this ideology, in pre-colonial Cambodia at least, was rarely at odds with the ideology of the rural, illiterate poor; but this may be a circular argument, brought on by the widespread popularity, imposed by the elite over several centuries, of the chbap themselves.

In recent discussions of trade and industrialization strategies in Asia, much attention has focused on the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of Northeast Asia and ASEAN's rapid industrial growth, but the experience of some other, more inward-looking countries has been largely ignored. The NICs and most of the ASEAN countries have completed a phase of import-substituting industrialization and have subsequently embarked on a vigorous export-oriented drive, especially in the field of labour-intensive manufactures. Their record, however, is in sharp contrast to that of some other countries in the region, where the manufacturing sector is still in a relatively early stage of development.

This paper examines a system of economic relations in Northern Thailand linking Karen and Hmong communities in the western highlands with traders from the lowlands. I shall describe the salient features of this tripartite system as it existed in the late 1960s and argue that it was essentially a product of opium cultivation and commerce. I also argue that it contributed towards a serious level of indebtedness among Karen and that this indebtedness tended, in turn, to widen wealth differences in Karen communities. Finally, I shall consider some of the economic changes that have led to a breakdown in the system i n recent years.

Lucien Hanks titled this symposium a “quest” into the nature of Southeast Asian societal organization prior to the eighteenth century. This paper represents such a quest in the sense of a journey of inquiry into post-Angkorean Cambodia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explore the basic problem posed by Hanks: whether pre-colonial society was organized into horizontal castes/classes or vertical “entourages/circles”. My attention will be directed primarily to sociopolitical organization, while David Chandler focuses more on norms and ideology.

To analyze Vietnamese social organization, we must put aside ourimage of it as similar to that of China, with its patrilineal clans. Writings on Vietnam have portrayed a country molded by its northern neighbour in the “thousand years of Chinese domination” of the first millennium A.D. to such an extent that all things Vietnamese must needs be seen in a Chinese and indeed a Confucian light. Socially, this means domination by the male and the father, patrilineal succession, and clan organization, that is, a certain rigidity in social organization.

When launching the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) in 1969, the then Deputy Prime Minister (the late Tun Abdul Razak) stressed that diversification was Malaysia's greatest need in agriculture, and a few weeks later, in an opening address to a conference on crop diversification organized by the Incorporated Society of Planters, he stated that agricultural diversification had been a national objective for some years. The steady progress towards that objective, he claimed, was “evidenced by the rapid increase in palm oil production, the expansion of acreage planted to high yielding padi varieties, recent increases in tapioca production, and current interest in sugar cane, cocoa, maize, soya beans, groundnuts”.

The understanding of Vietnamese society and social relations remains problematic. Even for recent times there is a dearth of research on basic facets of Vietnamese social structure. Scholars remain all too indebted to Hickey's study of Khanh Hau, which, dealing with a single and in some ways unique Southern village, can hardly be taken as representative given the wide regional and class differences characteristic of Vietnamese society. Moving backwards through time, the central elements of social relations become increasingly difficult to examine. The reasons lie both in an inevitable emphasis on what can loosely be called political history (e.g., the effects of French colonial rule, the resistance against that rule, the administrative problems faced by the early Nguyễn dynasty, or the recurring issue of war—and peace—with China) and the increasing narrowness of the documents available for study (i.e., the inevitability of reliance on official documents such as dynastic histories and legal codes).