This article compares how elite music was classicised or canonised as part of the process of constructing national culture in India, Indonesia and Thailand. Issues examined include the role of the middle class; homogeneity and heterogeneity in national culture; the rise of mass education and innovative forms of musical transmission; the institutionalisation of music theory and music scholarship; dynamic influences from the West; and transformations in the roles of musician, patron and audience.

The trend to portray Indonesian presidents as punakawan (clown servants) in wayang (shadow puppetry) was started under the former President Soeharto. Whereas Soeharto chose to be conveyed as Semar, a clown but also a former god, greater artistic freedom post-Soeharto led to a more farcical depiction of Habibie and Gus Dur as Semar's sons, Gareng and Bagong.

The narrative of the origins of the Lao people in contemporary Lao-language history books and textbooks is divided among divergent interpretations. The most popular reading is the ‘Ai-Lao’ version, an implicit response to Thai nationalist historiography. Marxist-Leninist-orientated historiography, by contrast, resembles the Vietnamese Communist narrative. As far as likely future trends are concerned, a journey back to the ‘roots’ seems ultimately to reveal the biography of a pre-modern spatial identity.

Western secular historiography has conventionally viewed the history of Catholicism in Vietnam through a political optic, a perspective which has distorted the early nineteenth-century religious situation in both Vietnam and France. This article discusses how Vietnamese understood Catholicism at the popular level and what attracted people to the religion, as well as introducing an important European Catholic fund-raising society whose interventions into Vietnam long predated any serious French political designs on the country.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

Preoccupied with French mission agitation in the late 1850s and during the Franco-Spanish invasion of southern Vietnam, scholarship has long neglected the dramatic change taking place in preceding decades at the local level between Catholics and mainstream society. Exploring negotiation between Catholic communities and authorities, as well as organisational shifts in mission activity, this article brings into sharper focus the turmoil of the late 1830s and 1840s Nguyên repression of Catholicism.

Indian esoteric Buddhism: A social history of the Tantric movement. By Ronald M. Davidson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Pp. 475. Maps, Illustrations, Glossary, Bibliographies, Index.