Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island’s economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes servicing working class tourists from Singapore. Indonesians also move across the border in search of work in Malaysia and Singapore as plantation and construction workers or maids. Export processing zones such as Batam are both celebrated and vilified in contemporary debates on economic globalization. The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands, by Johan A. Lindquist, moves beyond these dichotomies to explore the experiences of migrants and tourists who pass through Batam. Johan Lindquist’s extensive fieldwork allows him to portray globalization in terms of relationships that bind individuals together over long distances rather than as a series of impersonal economic transactions.

“A fine-grained picture of working class Indonesians and Singaporeans who travel in opposite directions in pursuit of jobs, money, sex, drugs, legitimacy, and bright lights. They cross multiple barriers—national, urban, moral, gender, and religious—in order to attain some measure of individual success in the globalizing economies that link Singapore’s development with Indonesia’s supply of cheap migrant workers. The ethnography is rich and fascinating, and it captures a complex shifting world with delicacy, grace, and clarity.” —Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3315-2 / $22.00 (PAPER)

The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia

When students from a Muslim boarding school were convicted for the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali, Islamic schools in Southeast Asia became the focus of intense international scrutiny. Some analysts have warned that these schools are being turned into platforms for violent jihadism. Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia, edited by Robert W. Hefner, is the first book to look comparatively at Islamic education and politics in Southeast Asia. Based on a two-year research project by leading scholars of Southeast Asian Islam, the book examines Islamic schooling in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the southern Philippines. The studies demonstrate that the great majority of schools have nothing to do with violence but are undergoing changes that have far-reaching implications for democracy, gender relations, pluralism, and citizenship.

“This is a timely, well-conceived, and extremely well-crafted volume that addresses topics of the utmost importance in today’s increasingly globalized—and dangerously fraught—world. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and to general readers with vastly different levels of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of modern Asia and the culture and politics of contemporary Islam.” —Michael G. Peletz, Emory University

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3316-9 / $24.00 (PAPER)

The Islamization of Law in Modern Indonesia

Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Law in Modern Indonesia, by Arskal Salim, examines Muslim efforts to incorporate shari’a (religious law) into modern Indonesia’s legal system from the time of independence in 1945 to the present. The author argues that attempts to formally implement shari’a in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, have always been marked by tensions between the political aspirations of proponents and opponents of shari’a and by resistance from the national government. As a result, although pro-shari’a movements have made significant progress in recent years, shari’a remains tightly confined within Indonesia’s secular legal system.

“Challenging the Secular State offers both in-depth description and insightful analysis of some of the most important aspects of modern debates over Islamic law in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. It is the kind of sophisticated treatment of local complexities that is long overdue and as such deserves the attention of readers in both Southeast Asian and Islamic studies.” —Michael Feener, National University of Singapore

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3237-8 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

The Attractive Empire Now Available in Paperback

The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan, by Michael Baskett, is now available in paperback.

“Michael Baskett removes imperial Japanese film from its solitary confinement and commandingly analyzes how it functioned internationally. He commits a depth of research rarely found in English-language studies of Japanese cinema, and his mastery of the primary and secondary sources from beyond Japan’s borders distinctly set his book apart from previous scholarship on the subject. Not only is this a work that historians and film scholars will appreciate but also one that I look forward to assigning to undergraduates.” —Barak Kushner, Cambridge University

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3223-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Prophet Motive Now Available in Paperback

Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan, by Nancy K. Stalker, is now available in paperback.

“Nancy Stalker’s study of Deguchi Onisaburô and the Japanese new religion Oomoto sheds new light on issues of religious leadership, charisma and entrepreneurship. In analysing how one seminal new religion expanded in early twentieth-century Japan, she focuses on what she terms Onisaburô’s ‘charismatic entrepreneurship’ to demonstrate the close links between innovative leadership and religious success. In so doing she contributes significantly to the study of new religions by demonstrating the importance of entrepreneurial leadership and the close and essential links between religion and economics. . . . By widening her focus to the Japanese new religions in general, Stalker shows Onisaburô to be one of the most important figures in Japanese religious history. His activities, such as his espousal of art, internationalism and peace messages, have served as a virtual blueprint of activity for many subsequent Japanese religious leaders. She demonstrates further the significance of Oomoto as one of the most seminal new religions of the twentieth century.” —Ian Reader, University of Manchester

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3226-1 / $26.00 (PAPER)

Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “endlessly interpretable,” and food, like literature, “looks like an object but is actually a relationship.” So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, by Tomoko Aoyama, explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people’s relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo).

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3285-8 / $52.00 (CLOTH)