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"Examines a large number of Europeans who, disillusioned with western culture and religion after World War I, and anticipating the spiritual seekers of the counterculture, turned to the religious traditions of Asia for inspiration. Harshly criticized by both scholars and religious reformers, their project of "Gnostic Diplomacy" became of continuing relevance in a time of violent clashes between inhabitants of 'secular' and 'sacred' worlds"--

This penetrating book re-examines t̀he project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative èthnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of p̀opular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology

This paper reports on an ongoing research project on "New Southeast Asian Spiritualties" and offers a preliminary analysis of new Muslim religiosities in the Jakarta metropolitan area (Jabodetabek). Most of the analyses of the pro­cesses of "Islamization" in places like Indonesia and Malaysia in the last few decades focus on a particular set of social cum political agendas: the impo­si­tion of sharia law, the Islamization of the state apparatus, the in­creased emphasis on the external markers of 'Islamic identity' and the like. Yet, there appears to be an equally significant, even sometimes opposing, tendency among Southeast Asian Muslims that involves them in seeking out more intense and personalised 'inner' forms of religious experience, a pro­cess with parallels elsewhere in the world. In the paper, I discuss examples of this tendency based on fieldwork in the greater Jakarta area, and ask about its implications for current understandings of the consequences (for democracy, secularism, human rights, gender relations, etc.) of Islamization in Southeast Asia.

Probably the most influential critique of social theorizing about the non-West in recent years has been one emanating from a `subalternist' perspective, by which I mean a critique mounted if not by, then in the name of, peoples/cultures/modes of thought that have been dominated culturally by `the West'. The rapid rise to prominence - economic, political, strategic and cultural - of an increasingly large number of nation states in the Asia-Pacific region poses a rather different kind of challenge to western perspectives on the project of modernity, a challenge to which social theory has yet to formulate an adequate response. Focusing on Malaysia, this paper examines the claims advanced by certain members of the new Asian political elite and intellectuals that Asian countries have discovered divergent trajectories of modernization, and argues that attempts on the part of contemporary western observers to dismiss these claims have so far been unconvincing. This suggests that social theorists need in future to give more serious consideration to the possibility that the `rise of Asia' represents a new kind of modernization.

Observes that an influential strand of current social critique stems from the position of subaltern groups dominated culturally by the West. However, the rapid rise of Asian Pacific nation-states is suggested to pose a different challenge to Western perspectives on modernity. Drawing on an analysis of claims advanced by Singaporean & Malaysian political & intellectual leaders, Lee Kwan Ew & Mahathir Mohamad, it is shown that Asian countries offer different understandings of modernization, which are described as a coherent set of Asian values that, in many ways, contradict Western value systems. Further, efforts by Western commentators to dismiss Asian values have been largely unsuccessful. It is concluded that Asian values have not been articulated from a subaltern position to the West &, thus, must be treated as different critiques of Western perspectives of modernity. 22 References. Adapted from the source document.

Suggests that, to assess the impact of the new middle class in Malaysia, one must discard the notion of a unified class & examine the cultural, political, & economic processes out of which these classes have been constituted. It is shown that economic prosperity in Malaysia has engendered the growth of a variety of occupational categories, including professional & technical workers, state-sponsored Malay entrepreneurs, Chinese owners & managers of small businesses, & party-sponsored capitalists. The literature on Malaysia has generally ignored these classes, in favor of concentrating on either the elite or peasant classes. But it is argued that the structural changes in the Malaysian economy since the 1960s have developed in response to political pressure exerted by these classes in the decade or so after independence. Further, these classes have stressed a form of political modernism that the major parties have not been able to ignore. The middle classes are described as playing a central role in the legitimation of & resistance to political regimes & in cultural representations of the new Malay order. 1 Table. D. M. Smith

The author explores a number of issues in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, particularly those which arise from a consideration of "culture" and its role in anthropological analysis. The middle classes in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bali as cultural builders are briefly examined. (DÜI-Sen)