This paper discusses the political ideas of a well-known Islamic intellectual of Lanao del Sur in the Philippines, namely Ahmad Bashir. It examines the concept of the state as expressed in his representative book entitled, History of Islam in the Philippines, which was written in Arabic and published in 1964.

Bashir was a reformist ulama who had studied in Islamic schools in Mecca in the mid-20th century. He founded a reformist Islamic school in Lanao del Sur in Mindanao in 1957. Concepts such as umma （community）, waṭan （homeland） and notions concerning the state that appear in his book, reveal features associated with the “moderate Islamic reformist” school of the first half of the 20th century, as represented by Rashīd Riḍā.

Furthermore, Bashir declares in his book that since Islamic states had once exercised jurisdiction all over the Philippine archipelago prior to the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, and since most of the residents of the archipelago at the time were Muslims, hence the Philippine archipelago was originally the land of Islam, and the Philippine people were originally Muslims. The historiography of Bashir as revealed in his book describes the history of Islam in the Philippines as a struggle by Muslims in the country to defend their religion, waṭan and freedom, against colonial aggression and invasion.

Bashir focused his efforts on Islamic propagation and educational reform. He avoided confronting the Philippine state, which was largely non-Muslim, and adopted instead a strategy of developing Islamic networks and strengthening the Muslim community in the country, by utilizing the resource of the state. This strategy required a logic that would legitimize the Philippine state from an Islamic point of view, and hence as a response to this need, Bashir reinterpreted the Philippine state and history from the standpoint of “moderate Islamic reformism”. Hence the historiography revealed in the History of Islam in the Philippines may be viewed as a means to endorse the contemporary Philippine state and Philippine nationalism, from an Islamic perspective.

Bashir not only imbibed the political concepts of “moderate Islamic reformism” of the first half of the 20th century, but urged on by such reasoning he also reinterpreted Philippine history, portrayed the people’s collective past and present, and envisioned their shared future.

U.S. colonial education has largely been depicted as a benevolent policy of U.S. colonialism, where American teachers brought progressive values and modern knowledge to the Philippines and the Filipinos were eager students of this education. The present article describes an aspect of colonial education that would interrogate this logic of benevolence. In history books and official documents, there have been a few vague references to the mass walkout of students--generally described as “school strikes”. The present study of social history explains the most serious school strike in detail by analyzing official publications, newspaper articles, internal documents and poems.

The most serious of the school strikes took place in 1930. There was a series of rallies between February and March of 1930. The fiasco was initiated by the racial slurs of an American teacher. In one Thursday morning, having heard one more time of her calling them names and insulting the Filipinos as a whole, high school students of Manila North High School walked out of the classroom. Along with students from nearby high schools and colleges, they held meetings and petitioned to get rid of this teacher. After an investigation, Director of Education decided to dismiss her by demanding her to submit resignation. He also decided to expel four student leaders for inciting the strike. In order to rescue the four students, who had stood up for their national pride in the eyes of the fellow students, a second strike took place. It became a serious crisis in the history of the colonial education. At one time, a few thousand students were on the streets. It was no longer an issue solely of the students. The school strike was supported not only by their parents and local politicians but also by ardent nationalists and emerging communists. This strike, however, came to an end rather abruptly. To end the school strike, Director of Education decided to close the high schools in Manila. A mass of students went back to the schools to apply for grades and, as a requirement, they submitted retractions that their participation was coerced.

This school strike puts the colonial order in a new perspective. Against religious millenarianism and armed rebellions, the colonial state wielded a heavy hand on those who opposed. The student strike did not pose such an intense conflict and, in the end, most of the students assented that they participated in the strike due to coercion. The case of the 1930 school strike shows that, in the extremes of ideological control, the colonial state forced the colonizers and the colonized to feign willingness to cooperate with each other. In this way, the logic of benevolence was preserved.

This article focuses on spirit belief in northeastern Thailand from an anthropological viewpoint. The studies on phi belief were conducted through three aspects: classification, structural functionalism, and historical sociology. However, these aspects consider the concept of phi as being stable and the historical changes are difficult to identify or they depict the contrast between Buddhism and phi belief cursorily. I attempt to investigate the multi-layered knowledge concerning phi within village life by introducing various views of the villagers and analyze the diverse meanings of phi belief, especially focusing on the boundary dividing benevolent and evil spirits.

People in northeastern Thailand believe in various spirits called phi, which are usually categorized into benevolent and bad spirits. Benevolent spirits include ancestral spirits, natural spirits, such as water and forest spirits, and village guardian spirits, while evil spirits include ghosts of unusual deaths and spirits with special names ─ phi pop, phi phrai, etc. Benevolent spirits are believed to protect villagers if they are treated appropriately. Although ancestral spirits sometimes bring diseases to their descendants, they are appeased and asked what they want. On the other hand, evil spirits also bring diseases to the villagers, and sometimes, villagers are possessed by them. At such times, the evil spirits are caught, expelled, or killed by religious specialists.

The villagers react differently toward benevolent and evil spirits, but the concepts of benevolent and evil spirits cannot be isolated from each other easily. In my research, one guardian spirit was regarded as evil. It was said to bring misfortune to the village and therefore expelled by religious specialists. Another guardian spirit was ignored by villagers recently, and they placed a Buddha statue into the shrine instead of the symbol of the guardian spirit. Some of the benevolent spirits could be looked upon as evil.

In this situation, religious specialists called mo tham deal with the evil spirits. Mo tham are expert exorcists of evil spirits. Their magical power is derived from Buddhist dharma. Mo tham consider phi as evil even if they are benevolent spirits, including village guardian spirits. However, other religious specialists called cham deal with the village guardian spirit. Cham are a medium between the villagers and guardian spirits, helping villagers seek the spirits’ help. Cham consider the guardian spirit to be benevolent.

By comparing the opinions of the two religious specialists regarding village guardian spirits, I attempt to extract the two incompatible logics behind phi belief: the mo tham’s Buddhist logic, which always considers phi as evil or foes of Buddha and the village community’s ethic, which has been shared since the establishment of the village and emphasizes mutual aid among villagers. The former is concerned with the history of nation building since the twentieth century, and the latter is related to the moral economy of the barren frontier land of northeastern Thailand. The concepts of the benevolent and evil spirits appear to waver between these two logics.

This article aims first at describing concretely activities of home village association in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, taking example of Havi-village association in HangHom street, which have not been researched and reported up to now at all in the studies of social sciences and humanities in Vietnam. The descriptions and analysis on the activities of this home village association spread over its regulations, its organization and board members, its account or revenue and expenditure, members’ contributions to association and so on. Secondly, this article analyzes the close relationship between city and village, HangHom community in Hanoi and Havi-village, showing urban residents’ frequent participation in rural rituals and annual calendar rites in village and their religious donation to construction of new pagoda, new bell, new path to cemetery and so forth. Finally, the author shows the tight reciprocal urban-rural relationship between HangHom street community in Hanoi with the origin of Havi-village and its home Havi-village with the form of religious contributions of village to city and economical contributions of city to village.

The focus of this paper is on the influence of Masyumi leaders on the student dakwah movement in Indonesia. Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia （DDII）, which was an organization established by the former Masyumi leaders, led the early stage of the student dakwah movement and built a base of the movement which consequently expanded throughout the country.

The early stage of the movement in this paper is set from the late 1960s up to the mid 1980s, when Suharto regime was built and its dictatorship was installed.

The student dakwah movement has developed mostly among the secular-educated young elites in the urban national universities.

Masyumi was an Islamic party which exerted a strong power in the parliament in the 1950s, however, it was banned in 1960 by Sukarno over the charge of the revolt in Sumatra in the late 1950s. Masyumi was not allowed the reinstatement under the new Suharto regime. Natsir, a chairman of Masyumi, and his colleagues gave up their political activities and set up DDII in 1967 to carry out the Islamic dakwah.

One of the main concerns of DDII was university, along with mosque and pesantren. Under the Suharto regime that put a strong pressure on Islam, DDII supported to build mosques in universities all over the country by using the aid money from the Middle East, and published the Islamic books that were translated from Arabic to Indonesian in order to introduce the thoughts and the activities in other Islamic countries to Indonesia. At the same time, DDII provided scholarships for students to study Islam in the Middle East and carried out the training for them to be Dakwah activists. Through the young dakwah activists, who were trained by DDII, the dakwah movement could expand widely.

This paper is mainly based on the results of the interviews to the concerned people and the internal documents or memoirs of DDII. It is often discussed that the student Dakwah movement in Indonesia is influenced by the thoughts of Islamic reformism in the Middle East, and is less connected with Indonesian domestic organizations on the other hand. However, the paper shows that the former Masyumi leaders and DDII made great contribution to establish the basis of the movement at least in the early stage of the movement.

This paper describes how traditional medicine has been viewed and practiced throughout modern Vietnamese history. Vietnamese traditional medicine comprises two elements: thuoc Nam, which originated in Vietnam, and thuoc Bac, which is grounded in Chinese medicine. When discussing Vietnamese medicine, thuoc Nam is often referred to as the “original medicine” and one that represents “Vietnameseness.” This is in spite of the fact that the differences between two medicines are vague. At present, the Vietnamese government classifies both forms of medicines as “traditional medicine” (y hoc co truyen). It is also known as “national medicine” (y hoc dan toc) or “Eastern medicine” (dong y). This paper clarifies that traditional medicine was viewed differently from the North to the South. In addition, it outlines how traditional medicine acquired the label Y Hoc Dan Toc, or national medicine, after the unification of Vietnam under the influence not only of Vietnamese nationalism towards foreign countries but of nationalism by the state to unify its country.

The term Thuoc Nam emerged against the backdrop of Vietnam seeking sovereignty from China, and reflects the dichotomy of the “north” (China) and the “south” (Vietnam). After the French colonization, the concept of the “West versus the East” had surfaced within the field of Vietnamese medicine. During the Indochina and Vietnam wars, medical practitioners and researchers began studying medicinal plants out of necessity in the battlefields. Around the same time, Ho Chi Minh asked the Ministry of Health of North Vietnam to promote thuoc Nam and thuoc Bac, and as a result, the North Vietnamese government formulated a policy for promoting both forms of medicine as integrated traditional Vietnamese medicine. Through this development process, thuoc Nam and thuoc Bac received considerable attention in North Vietnam.

On the other hand, journals and ethnographic works in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, did not use the terms thuoc Nam or thuoc Bac when Vietnam was divided into the North and South. Instead, they used dong y and Viet y for traditional medicine. Further, traditional medicine in Saigon mainly comprised Chinese medicine. Thus, it can be concluded that thuoc Nam, which originated in North Vietnam, was not as commonplace in the South as it was in the North.

After the unification of North and South Vietnam in 1976, the new government officially gave traditional Vietnamese medicine the label “national medicine” in the hope that it would be shared by both regions and appeal to the notion of unified single Vietnam. In addition, this move aimed to clearly differentiate between Vietnamese and Chinese medicine, especially at a time when deterioration of Vietnam’s relationship with China had become more obvious than before.

This paper analyses a French document entitled “Affaire des jeux a Kompong-Cham ── un théatre chinois pour divertir la population.” in the possession of the National Archive in Phnom Penh （Document No. 9454）， compiling investigative materials of the gambling hall held by a Chinese merchant in Kompong-Cham city during the Khmer New Year season in 1916.

Kompong-Cham is the third city of the Kingdom of Cambodia today， being located midstream along the Mekong River. It came into existence rather recently and appeared in a French record for the first time in 1881.When steamships were introduced into the Mekong River in the late 19th century， however， the port of Kompong-Cham was chosen as a way station between Phnom-Penh and Kracheh， and its hinterland attracted a great deal of interest as the granary of Cambodia in accordance with the progress of transportation. Since the French colonial authority installed a Residence in Kompong-Cham in 1898， a great number of Chinese merchants had flowed in and built a commercial district where tiled shophouses stood in a row along streets around a market. The owner of the house where the gamble in question went on was a Chinese merchant S， who was 32 years old in 1916， therefore supposed to be born somewhere outside of Kompong-Cham and immigrated into the new town born on the midstream of the Mekong River as a youth with his parents. Because he signed to the statement in Chinese characters， his communicative ability in Cambodian or French can not be proved from this document.

The main exports from Kompong-Cham in those days were rice and fish and S himself was a merchant of paddy as well as a farmer of fishery. The season between Chinese New Year in February and Khmer New Year in April was a busy season of exporting paddy and fish， and also of gambling， because local colonial authority connived at gambling indoors for this period of New Year. S’s gambling house attracted customers from all the provinces along the Mekong River between Phnom-Penh and Kracheh， including European colonial officials in Kompong-Cham city. The inspector found that European officials vaguely believed that gambling was a “charity for war” and S just wanted to earn cash to pay the license fee of fishery of that year.

Colonial officials were the only European inhabitants of local cities in Cambodia in contrast to Chinese merchants who made up a majority of urban population. The French Resident controlling the district of Kompong-Cham did not arm himself to suppress gamblers and had not much incentive to do that as long as the resource for the license fee of fishery was ensured by running a gambling house.