Religious Change in Contemporary Southeast Asia

The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. N. Tarling, [1]Vol 2, Cambridge UP, Sydney, 1992, pp. 529-584.

Paul Stange, Asian Studies, Murdoch University

Seagoing trade made Southeast Asia a fertile meeting ground from early history and at the close of the Second World War Landon aptly characterised the region as a "crossroad of religion". He emphasised that up to then imported religions had been subordinated to ancestral spirit cults which were grounded in relatively autonomous villages and noted that even the westernised elites had adapted modern ideas within a world view shaped by local traditions. In the same breath he suggested that the middle of this century marked a turning point because the closing years of colonial rule and the disruptions of the war had definitively shaken the foundations of local life. Despite the depth of changes since then the region remains a site of encounter between deeply held and widely divergent world views. A rich tapestry of ancient local traditions is still sustained with remarkable force and significant communities derive their practices from all of the major world faiths in many of their forms. The diversity, vitality and depth of religious commitments within the region combine so that it remains an especially rich laboratory for the exploration of religion.
The region is filled with vibrant ritual enactments, such as those in Hindu Bali, and many people routinely enter altered states through ritualised trance, as in Malaysia's annual Thaipusam festival, touching realms of consciousness which are remote for most people in industrialised societies. Meditation practices of Javanese syncretic mystics and the Theravada forest monasteries counterpoint orthodox Islam and ritual Buddhism. Vigorous communities of new Christians exist alongside animists and some, mainly in urban contexts, who live without knowing religious meanings. These diverse experiences of reality, shaped by magical animism, esoteric mysticism, traditional piety, scriptural literalism and modern scepticism, intersect routinely in villages, markets and offices. At the same time, because most people feel their religion is both substantive and significant, contention over spiritual convictions in relation to other spheres of life is foregrounded regularly in the cultural politics of the region.
Every major historical transformation in Southeast Asia has been attended by changes in religion and some have been especially facilitated by the emissaries of new faiths. In the late twentieth century pragmatic utilitarianism may be the most powerful missionary force and the communities of that faith are expanding. But focus on the urban surfaces of local life can obscure the persistence of patterns which are rooted in the animistic and rice growing village substratum of the region. Beneath surface transitions the structures of popular perception and belief remain remarkably cohesive. Changes have generally had their greatest impact on the elites linked to trading ports and temple cities. Even in those contexts whenever local peoples have domesticated imported tools of thought and organisation, including religious systems, they gave local flavour to patterns which were used otherwise elsewhere. The idioms of imported religions accommodated local meanings. Indian deities came as universal terms for spirit forces known already by different names; Confucianism shaped Vietnamese courts while villagers self-consciously retained ancestral culture.
On the other hand the past fifty years have brought previously unimaginable challenge to the spiritual beliefs and practices rooted in regional prehistory. The depth of social transformation has immense implications in every sphere and the population explosion has compounded the pace of change. Most people may still live in villages but recently urban populations have mushroomed dramatically. The demographic revolution means that an increasing majority have grown up in a postwar world dominated by modern states rather than ethnicity, by education in schools rather than village ritual religion, and by monetarised economies rather than communal cooperation. Changes occur not only through the ways in which geographically distinct communities are being tied together, but also through transformations in generational, class and gender relations. At the same time the radical transitions of mid-century ensured that the generation which came of age during and after the Second World War has dominated socio-political institutions through most of the region since then, establishing the predominant tones of cultural evolution into the 1980s.
Change is channeled through metropoles which exemplify the trends they mediate. Premodern capitals, such as Mandalay, Chieng Mai, Surakarta or Klungkung provide contexts for limited maintenance of traditional arts, but insofar as they do they are like the eye of a cyclone. It is the capital cities which provide a paradigm for the nature of wider changes. Their early colonial centres were already superceded by prewar expansion in the late colonial period. The initial bursts of construction in the 1950s, dramatic as they seemed then, now appear hesitant. Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta have seen such profound expansion in the 1970s and 1980s that their origins have been overwhelmed. Where there were canals and tree lined avenues in 1950 we see cement in Bangkok. Skyscrappers and multilaned highways reshape the spaces of Jakarta so that suburbs like Kebayoran, created only in the 1950s, are now almost unrecognisable. Though restructuring is especially concentrated in these metropoles they also reach out to reshape the ambiance of their hinterlands and changes in them properly indicate the depth and pace of wider transformation in the past half century.
In this context recent reformulations of religion are evident through representations in politics as well as through participation in institutions which are conventionally recognised as religious. Spiritual impulses are implicit within national political culture, cultural policies, and popular practices. Here we will start by considering religious change at the macro level and in its external dimensions, by dealing with patterns of cultural change and the institutional levels of religious life. In the most general terms recent political cultures have often aimed to reconstruct essentially religious meanings through neo-traditionalism. Resonance with earlier meanings can be surprising and religious nuances are quite clear, but whenever contemporary elites invoke indigenous spiritual cultures it is within new frameworks which make the process one of reinvention rather than strictly of preservation. It is viewed in that light, as a process of creative reinvention, that neo-traditionalism must be considered a theme of cultural politics in the independent states of the region.
Policies of integration, related to education and the formation of national ideologies, threaten tribal and ethnic minorities such as the Karen and Chin of Myanmar (Burma), the Meo of Thailand, the Jarai in the hills of Vietnam and the Mentawai, Punan or Asmat in remote parts of the archipelago, jeopardising what were until now relatively autonomous identities. Implicitly these policies lead to homogenisation, to inadvertent or intended cultural genocide. This mirrors the green revolution in rice agriculture. In that field the spread of new hybrid species increases uniformity of genetic stock, making crops at once more productive and more vulnerable to pests. Through the self confident modernism of national governments monocultures extend in the social domain with vigour and the same double edge. Even within the dominant ethnic communities the restructuring of recognised religion is influenced by instruments of control which facilitate previously impossible regulation, extending to licensing of folk healers, and new forms of opposition, including militant fundamentalisms.
The micro level involves identification of the major types of religious expression in Southeast Asia and exploration of changes within explicitly religious communities. After focus on the varieties of recent local religious expression we will move toward reflection on the ways in which "experience of what is real" has been evolving. In the innermost dimension this leads toward probing the nature of shifts in the experiential sphere of individual consciousness. Religious changes are not simply a matter of shifting objects of belief or ideology, of altered allegiance to clearly designated organisations or even of changes in the degree to which people are spiritual in orientation. Religion, as we now understand increasingly, is a matter of what we experience as real, of how we know truth, indeed of whether we can believe there is such a thing and equally of how our ways of knowing influence our interactions. Here we will outline the diversity of explicitly religious movements and then move beyond that. Symbolic structures, on the surfaces of cultural life, have been either evolving, as old symbols accommodate new contexts, or shifting, as new systems replace old ones. At the same time and at a deeper level we can also note that the very nature of the relationship between individual experience, cultural structures and social life is also changing. New contexts and mediations have brought new modes of access to what Southeast Asians of this era are able to know or believe as real.

Appropriations of industrial culture

It is most instructive to view the second half of the twentieth century as the period in which Southeast Asian peoples have been gaining control over and creatively adapting their cultures to industrially derived structures. Though usually considered as the era of independence, this historical phase ironically involves the consolidation of interdependence. Local peoples may directly control their domestic politics once again, but their context is clearly one of increasing interdependence and emergent internationalism. Whether through extended warfare, as in Vietnam, or commitment to trade, as in Singapore, new networks of communication and tools of organisation connect people ever more profoundly into world patterns. Where there have been counter currents, such as those ostensibly aiming to establish locally self-sustaining systems in post 1962 Burma or the Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, they have had the flavour of rear-guard actions. Focus on movements of local elites to replace colonial masters directs attention away from critical continuities between colonial and independent systems.
Increasing authoritarianism, economic interdependence, and monocultural modernism are all aspects of the Southeast Asian situation. Early anti-colonial resistance movements, such as the Aceh or Java wars in the archipelago in the nineteenth century or the Saya San rebellion in Burma during the 1930s, centred on revival of social harmony through traditional institutions. In those instances opposition was filtered through and identified with ethnicity, language, or kinship and we thus see peasant, court and religious movements as the dying gasps of traditional entities. Though they connected to nationalism through common underlying aspiration and in the mythologies of subsequent activists they contained no vision of a modern state. In contrast nationalists have competed to create and control modern integrating institutions and westernised local elites appear as their cutting edge. As the first to experience themselves as members of multi-ethnic states, their target has consistently been control of the apparatus which produced them.
In social historical terms the consolidation of modern state systems and increasing interpenetration are powerful themes which cross the boundary between the eras of colonialism and independence. Governments now connect to populations through extensions of the very legal systems, bureaucratic networks, educational and military channels established in the first half of this century under colonialism. If anything the second half of this century has seen increasing pace to forces of transformation only hinted at in the colonial era. The fruits of the industrial revolution at once tie local states to global patterns and bond peoples to each other with new force. Systems of government and taxation; forces of warfare, trade and tourism; state run education and electronic media all intrude increasingly in the lives of even remote peoples. Modern states entail instruments of intervention, through the mechanics of printing and the reach of electronic communications, far more pervasive than those available to earlier systems of power.
Southeast Asian appropriations of new communications media and the apparatus of statehood have been taking place within a context of severe limitation. Everywhere the legacies of colonialism, extremes of political contention, international imbalance, dislocations attending warfare, poverty and rapid urbanisation have imposed heavy costs. Grasping recent changes in religious culture depends on awareness of how economic shifts and population movements threaten the capacity of village communities to sustain old rituals. Warfare, internal migration, new agricultural regimes and deforestation have restructured the physical as well as social environments of tribal minorities and shifting cultivators. Javanese transmigrants to Kalimantan, factory women in Malaysia, Visayan street people in Manila or prostitutes from the Northeast in Bangkok cannot imagine cosmological realities or relate to ultimate meanings in the way their relatively settled rice farming grandparents did as they bowed to Indic styled royalty. In extreme cases, like Pol Pot's Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979, minorities such as the Muslim Chams, and others elsewhere, have been faced with apparently genocidal policies. These factors deeply condition cultural process and establish a vital gestalt for understanding changes in popular culture and religion.
Foregrounding of cultural and religious history enables recognition of local volition in a way even social history may not. The appropriation of new media is not simply a matter of the obvious, of acquiring indigenous control over print, radio, film and television. It is also a way of talking about the wider correlates of new industries, forms of entertainment, militaries, bureaucracy and government. As in earlier phases of evolution adjustments in world view occur as local peoples enter wider circles of contact beyond the region. Earlier cultural and religious changes have only been comprehensible as shifts in vision going hand in hand with social changes as intensified commerce brought Sinic, Indic and Islamic vocabularies into the region. In those instances as their environment changed local peoples found their own purposes fulfilled more clearly through new modes of cultural discourse. Recent trajectories of local development do not match expectations dictated by political economic logic alone, events are still shaped by or refracted through persistently religious cultures. Southeast Asians are once again claiming new voice, though now through their adaptation of industrialised media.
An overview perspective is naturally more easily attained for early and thus distant appropriations of systems of government, writing, trade or agriculture. Insofar as we can achieve such a perspective on the present it marks a distinctive phase of cultural evolution, a change at least as profound as the emergence of states and made more dramatic by the compression of time. Recent changes do not seem incremental, as they may through earlier history, time itself stops appearing as a constant as interpretation nears the present, appearing to accelerate along with technological innovation and population growth. Just as early societies adapted new patterns in unique ways, contemporary peoples now adapt technological structures and rework their world views through a modernity which is not static in any of its manifestations. The undercurrents of indigenous cultural voice are not always obvious, especially as political and economic realities tend to dominate our perception of recent social life. Nevertheless localisation continues even when the warping pressures of circumstance, including extremes of social dislocation and international intervention, are pervasive.
The extension of modern media into village societies has been remarkable. Newspaper and radio communications began to be widely disseminated before the Second World War, now TV and films have been reaching villages as well as towns. Increasing consumerism in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia has fed the communications revolution from the 1970s onward. Burma has been less affected by modern media, as it has been relatively isolated under Ne Win. Radio programs, extension education and new farming methods have all changed cultural attitudes and social relations as well as agricultural practices. In Java some villagers report that only the older strains of rice are connected to spirits; the realms of the devas become distant and the connections loose as new miracle strains and chemical fertilisers move in. Spirits are also less central to social life as customary law is replaced with rationalised and centrally administered justice. Formerly village heads and councils interpreted customs to resolve disputes in an atmosphere theoretically guided by sensitivity to local spiritual atmospheres. Now decisions are coded by Parliaments and, at least in principle, interpreted through bureaucratic representatives.
Every structural reorganisation crystallises new classes and the germinal intelligentsias of the late colonial era, mainly drawn from earlier elites, became the seed for rapidly expanding and increasingly cosmopolitan supercultures. The revolutionary transitions of the postwar era brought other groups into the new elite. The economic strength of migrant Chinese and Indians have given them a central position, however ambiguous and uncomfortable, in major cities. In most parts of the region the military has became a prime channel for upward mobility, allowing some villagers into the newly forming national elites. Secular education, though still underpinned by patronage systems and thus tied to older class divisions, has offered a channel for others who had less scope through traditional monastic or religious schooling. The extent of their socio-economic and political power gives the new elites a magnetic influence in their cultural environment. As the prime mediators of advanced industrial culture the new elites are mediators of foreign influence and produce modes of modernity which are distinctive and local.
National boundaries have been sharply defined on maps only in this century and nationalism is only the political face of response to modernity as mediated by imperialism. Similarly sharpened lines characterise other spheres, as every facet of organisation and consciousness is modernised. As literatures and religions have been articulated increasingly through print they also become defined as text. This has militated against the performance modes and syncretic styles which were predominant in earlier local practices. Scripturalist emphasis on vernaculars brought a shift from an intuitive and participatory ritual style to intellectual sermonising and a contingent preoccupation with ideologically defined purity. Boundaries between worlds of symbolic meaning have sharpened as much as have those between spheres of power. Other domains also become distinct. To question how religion relates to nationalism, as we may reflexively, reflects a mentality once entirely foreign to the region. Traditional validations of power construed politics as one aspect of an also spiritual process and apparent separability, increasingly institutionalised, is one consequence of recent changes.

Spiritual visions of revolution and independence

From a spiritual perspective colonialism was a magical spell as well as a mechanical mastery of institutions, guns and economies. In magical idiom the suppression of will, as in any hegemony, rests on tacit convictions about the way things are and can thus shift suddenly. So in Southeast Asia at the end of the war, as in Europe more recently, change was a matter of how human will was mobilised and perceptual gestalt configured as well as of who held what instruments of social control. Thus an opening through glassnost led to a dramatic shift in perspective on Soviet dominance and this rapidly reconfigured social realities in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. Similarly the enforced quiet of colonial twilight in the depression years was broken dramatically when the Japanese punctured the myth of white supremacy. As the occupation drew to a close in mid-1945 for most Indonesians, Burmese, Vietnamese and Filipinos the prewar order was definitely past, they prepared for an independence which seemed both immanent and cosmologically destined. European blindness to the spiritual depth and nature of this popular sentiment contributed to the protracted and painful transitions which ensued. It is not surprising that the millenarianism of many Southeast Asians has been difficult to grasp for many westerners. Such systems appear simply irrational unless it is recognised that reference is to shifts in atmosphere which everyone registers through different idioms.
Only remote minority groups were untouched by the disruptions of the depression and war years. For the urban based intelligentsias independence meant opportunity to replace Europeans in controlling modern communications infrastructures. The political narratives which constitute most histories focus on contention between those elites but social historians have been consistently drawing attention to the plurality of motives and crosscurrents in the transition years. However sweeping the changes of the postwar years, most people nevertheless remained embedded in ongoing social practices, wanting mainly to be left alone. For them the grand narratives of political drama appeared as tangents which only occasionally intruded. Insofar as most subsistence oriented rice cultivating villagers considered independence, it usually meant aspiration for what was imagined as return to an idealised normalcy and balance in a context of minimised demands from the state. For many other people, whether embracing Christianity as an appropriation of modernity or celebrating established faiths, the momentus shifts at the end of the war opened new spiritual, as well as social and economic, territories.
From most established religious perspectives in the region the transitions and revolutions have been the outer layers of a reshaping which was also taking place spiritually. In the Theravada, Confucian, Muslim and Catholic regions there has been widespread assent to notions that the state is responsible for regulating or providing a positive context for spiritual life. Reformation styled separation of political and religious spheres touched prominent elites, but at the roots of social life traditional visions predominated. Thus among the plurality of interests and ideologies shaping transitions to independence we register powerful groups who pursued visions dominated by spiritual senses of purpose. These resonances are most apparent in the movements toward an Islamic state, termed "Darul Islam" in Indonesia. But similar convergence was also evident in Buddhist senses of the Burmese revolution, in Confucian spirituality implicit within Vietnamese communism and in widespread peasant based millenarianism. These perspectives influenced the transitions to independence and moulded social trends of the postwar era.
The strongest root of religious tension in Indonesia lay in Dutch efforts designed precisely to prevent Islam from becoming a focaliser of nationalist sentiment, to emasculate it by forging strong bonds between the colonial and adat elites. This alliance had deepened a pre-existing polarity between religious and political elites, for instance in Java continuing the subordination of mosque officials (penghulu) to the bureaucratic elite (priyayi). Under the Japanese, however, Islam gained momentum through efforts to orchestrate anti-western sentiments. Recognising the influence of religious teachers the Japanese aimed to mobilise Islamic support throughout the archipelago. By giving separate authority to the Office of Religious Affairs and creating the forerunner of Masyumi, with authority over local Islam, they established a basis for postwar Muslim power, as Masyumi was to became the leading Muslim party during the Indonesian struggle for independence. Thus in the leadup to independence Islam was able to assert a claim toward establishment of an Islamic rather than secular state. Throughout the occupation Japanese reliance on Sukarno gave him an access to radio other nationalists did not have and, as that tool was well suited to his oratorical strengths, his domination of it elevated him to primacy in the public eye. Though secular nationalists thus regained relative strength as the occupation closed, the new institutional basis of Islam irrevocably altered the balance of local powers.
Anderson suggested that Japanese training of a local militia served, like earlier religious training in hermitages or Islamic schools (pesantren), to spiritually prepare youth for the revolution. The deprivations of the occupation focussed senses and concentrated energies; it was like an enforced asceticism tempered by conviction that freedom (merdeka) would follow. This imagery suggests the special qualities of the energies which were unleashed during the period of suspension and excitement in which the Republic was born. Though different participants hold variant views, certainly the early days of the revolution were a turning point many have looked back on with nostalgia. Most leaders of the Republic since then recall what seemed a spiritual unity of purpose which, however momentarily, drew diverse classes and ethnic groups into united effort and aspiration. Whatever the degree of actual unity most were touched by the intensity of the time and those of formative age remained indelibly marked as they moved on to assume leading roles in the Republic. Stringent wartime circumstances and policies combined with chauvinism to eventually alienate most locals but many Javanese initially saw the Japanese as liberators, those predicted by the prophecies of Joyoboyo, a thirteenth century king of Kediri.
Their imagery presented the revolution as a momentary vacuum, a phase of upheaval resulting from the departure of divine sanction (wahyu) from those in power, a time of craziness which sets the stage for a new golden era. Defeudalisation was a prominent theme alongside decolonisation, millenarian senses of the revolution underpinned populist idiom and many new mystical sects crystallised during the revolution. The collapse of the outer walls of the Yogya palace (kraton), was read by some as a physical parallel to a symbolic opening which was connected to deep spiritual changes. Power (kasekten), which had been concentrated in kings and courts, flowed outward so that the communion between human and cosmic planes, previously mediated through royalty, became accessible for all who could receive it. Traditional imagery, as throughout Indianised Southeast Asia, consistently presented events within the human microcosm as interwoven with and parallel to changes in the social and natural orders of the macrocosm. Thus in the idiom of some of these movements the spiritual struggle within the revolution was directed at unseating the imperialism of the mind within the body, an internal reorganisation which was seen as simultaneous with the displacement of Dutch power over national culture.
At the same time more orthodox Muslims aspirations had been long suppressed and were already tuned, through longstanding contacts with Mecca and Cairo, to awareness of European colonialism as a dampening force throughout the Islamic world. Throughout the archipelago Japanese appeals to Islam enhanced conviction that the occupation foreshadowed the creation of the the dar-al islam (the house of Islam). Movement toward an Islamic state had already been a leading current in prewar nationalism and played an especially consistent and powerful role in Aceh, which was never regained by the Dutch. Elsewhere, in Sumatra, Sulawesi, West Java and even along Java's north coast and within its heartlands, Islamic teachers (kyai) and the ideal of Islamic statehood sparked movements which competed with secularism at local and national levels right though the 1940s and 1950s. At their roots these movements were not simple expressions of purism, they also drew from millenarian and magical strands of Islam. In the Darul Islam there was common emphasis on the internal spiritual facet of the holy war, the jihad. It was not only highly educated leaders such as Kartosuwirjo, but also many followers who understood that the establishment and expansion of the house of Islam involved an inner purification rather than only an external war.
Though framed as banditry by the victors, from an internal perspective both the Darul Islam movements and the Moro nationalism of Mindanao and Sulu have expressed widespread conviction that national revolutions remained unfinished so long as the resulting states built on European rather than Islamic models. Like Marxists, for whom the revolution was incomplete without radical social transformation, some Muslims fought for a revolution they never won. In Aceh and along the north coast of Java changes were deep rooted, often spontaneously reflecting populist or religious impulses quite contrary to the thrust of what European cultures could register as national political development. In the southern Philippines the Muslim struggle began later but parallels the Darul Islam in representing revolutionary nationalism in an Islamic mould. The Indonesian nationalist leadership contained these aspects of revolution by standing against changes which could have jeopardised negotiations. As the relatively secularised priyayi, heirs to Indic court traditions but Dutch educated, controlled the bureaucracy, they ensured limits to social and religious versions of the revolution, especially those of the Darul Islam.
Implicitly religious conflict contributed to the elimination of communism as a component of Indonesian nationalism. In 1948 Sudirman's guerrilla armies threatened to break with Sukarno and in the same year enforced demobilisation of communist regiments precipitated killings, centring in the Madiun area of East Java. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was eliminated, as in had been by the Dutch in 1926, and many thousands died in local conflicts, this time overseen by the firmly Muslim West Javanese Siliwangi division. By surmounting these populist guerrilla and communist "threats to nationalism", the leadership gained ground for negotiation, but at the expense of elevating the cleavage between Islam and Javanism to a new order of intensity which persisted through the 1960s. Certainly the post independence divergence between Muslim parties, the traditionalist Nahdatul Ulama and modernist Masyumi, and the syncretic or secular parties, the nationalists (PNI) and communists (PKI), converged with difference in cultural orientation and related to differing underlying spiritual senses of what the national revolution aimed to accomplish.

In Vietnam traditional images presented the end of the war as implying an irrevocable end to the French order, one which had still held a place for imperial rituals. According to local spiritual culture the name for "village" (xa) itself meant at root "the place where people come together to worship the spirits". In the Vietnamese variant of the Chinese model it had still been held, even within the French order, that imperial rituals such as the Nam Giao drew on the power and good will of ancestors, especially those of the royal clan, to guarantee both crops and the social welfare of the population. Rulers had to be tuned to nature and changed according to rythms which, even when not apparent on the surface, were felt in the tight village communities. When the Emperor Bao Dai abdicated on August 22, 1945 he sanctioned the Democratic Republic led by the Viet Minh and entrusted it with the maintenance of his ancestral temples. To villagers, still bound to the land through cults of tutelary spirits focussed on ancestral founders, this act represented more than a change of dynasty. It did not stop all ancestral practices, as festivals like Tet, the lunar New Year celebration of ancestors, continued to have symbollic force as a way of reforging bonds between the ancestors, nature and society. Nevertheless it foreshadowed the end of a profound constellation of relationships between heaven and earth.
Their deeply imbued vision of social order implied for Vietnamese contestants that the tensions at the end of the war would lead to one victor from among the many who initially appeared as candidates, not to pluralistic accord. In the end it appeared that the communists had made the most successful effort to assimilate modern western notions to the universe of Vietnamese discourses. This implied that their victory was not only tactical, but also cultural. In local idiom it was cosmologically determined, a shift in the mandate of heaven which could not be reversed by ploy or strategy. According to Mus's argument the revolution was decided in popular eyes in the critical period from August 1945 to March 1946 and this marked a whole generation of leadership, as the same period also did in Indonesia. This culturally rooted sense of the revolution remained largely invisible to French or American analysts and strategists. By focussing on ideologies, institutional structures and urban centres they consistently failed to register that the mobilisation of popular will, conceived locally as spiritual even when communist, influenced events more than formalised ideologies.
Imperial powers did note that in the Mekong delta the Hoa Hao variant of Buddhism attracted a following, as did analogous Javanese movements, around the founder's visionary projection of French defeat in 1940. Within it practices of individual spiritual enlightenment clearly intermeshed with the impending revolution. As Woodside noted, "...classical culture had been more discredited at the upper levels of society than at the lower and...the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po (whose spirit regularly entered Cao Dai mediums in the 1920s and 1930s) still touched the hearts of more Vietnamese peasants than did the Paris commune." Within the movement much was made of ethnic myths of origin which saw the primordial spiritual strength of the people as lying in a magical prowess which would defeat the technical advantages of modern powers. The strength of the Hoa Hao movement, which had an independent military-administrative structure in the villages of the Mekong delta, provoked violent elimination of its leader in 1947. Hoa Hao prophesy held true in the end, but as a statement about communist rather than syncretic Buddhist power.
In urban centres a vigorous but limited (in 1935 some 2000 adherents) modern revival of Buddhism competed with Marxism in attracting intellectuals to a vision of independence in Vietnam. These new movements, though rooted in older Mahayana Buddhism, emphasised the explication of original scriptures in the vernacular. They especially competed with Catholic missionaries, who had begun to succeed in communicating to villagers through local language, at a time when local Buddhists seemed esoteric and technical, making Mahayana appear as a preserve of monks. At the same time and on another front, examination of how communist intellectuals were drawn together led Marr to note significant resonances between communism and engrained millenarianism. Terms in prison functioned to politicise many who had not previously been radical, forging spiritual bonds which underpinned revolutionary cells. While millenarian religious impulses converged with revolutionary commitment for many, at the same time intellectuals also opted for Marxism as a liberation from what appeared as a stasis oriented Confucian traditionalism.

In Burmese theorising the interchange between Marxism and Buddhism was more direct and profound. Sarkisyanz established that underpinning the ideology of U Ottama in the 1920s there were notions that political struggle for independence paralleled the stages of Buddhist progression toward enlightenment. Pursuit of "nirvana within this world", what appeared as a Buddhist "social gospel", evoked ideals of how the state houses spiritual endeavor which trace as far back as the Indian Emperor Asoka. Communal values of selflessness and an ethos of leveling were related at once to Buddhism and communism within the Thakin movement of the 1930s. Even popular readings of terms such as "revolution" and "liberation" were shaped at critical junctures by Buddhist imagination and constraints. While diverging radically in other respects this convergence fed into the thinking of most nationalists. Aung San's leadership of the revolution brought emphasis on separation of religion and politics and on socialist militancy in modern secular terms. But the culturalist anti-western traditions of U Ottama and Saya San became especially relevant again under U Nu's leadership, after Aung San's death and up to 1962.
Shifts to national sovereignty in both Burma and Indonesia saw movement from the relatively westernised ethos of Aung San, Sjahrir and Hatta to the culturalist orientations of U Nu and Sukarno. In Burma this shift happened quickly. Overt dedication to fostering the Buddhist basis of the state was foreshadowed in 1950 and firmly in place by 1951. U Nu reasserted the traditional role of the state as the protector of religion, seeing it as embodying the cultural values which, following the era of colonial suppression, needed to be enhanced to facilitate spiritual liberation. Socialism continued to be invoked in Burma and Indonesia, but communism was disavowed by the political philosophies which became dominant in both contexts. From 1949 onwards the presence of communist insurgents in the hills led governments, first under U Nu then Ne Win, to emphasise the incompatibility of Buddhism and Marxism, even while they have consistently advocated a Burmese Buddhist socialism.

Revolutionary transitions to independence, as in Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma, sharpen collective focus on spiritual issues in the same way that the prospect of death does for individuals. But even where the political order was relatively stable or transitions less violent we can see a parallel configuration in that religious aspirations have been interwoven with revolutionary movements. In the Philippines the hierarchical organisation of the Catholic Church tied its leadership closely to the state. This paralleled the social linkages between the Thai sangha and royalty, those cases being more aligned in this respect than either was to the pattern of Muslim organisation in the archipelago. But at the grass roots of society Catholic idiom was often also appropriated to converge with calls by the poor for social justice. Within the Church liberation Theology, influenced by currents from Latin America from the 1960s onward, appealed to sectors of the priesthood who identified their mission simultaneously with social and spiritual welfare. The people power revolution, which contributed to the end of the Marcos era in 1986, involved even the hierarchy of the Church and made candlelight prayer vigils a weapon of protest.
In the Thai context it is especially clear that religious purposes inspire modern state construction. Ironically the strength of continuities there have allowed a less ambiguous pursuit of modernity. Some correllates of modernity, repudiated aggressively as too western elsewhere, have been embraced. Nevertheless, as Tambiah has argued, religious purposes continue to inspire government visions of progress:
...from early times Buddhism has been positively related to a conception of an ideal politico-social order, whose cornerstone was a righteous monarch who would promote a prosperous society and religion....Given this interlaced totality of religion and politics, of national consciousness and religious identity, of righteous morality and politics, it is difficult to see in Thailand a secular nationalism dispensing with Buddhist referents in the near future.
Variations of this image of the relationship between religious and socio-political domains have continued to apply throughout the region.
The fundamentalist revivalisms of the 1970s and 1980s makes nonsense of assumption that either Muslims or Buddhist populations would separate, any more than Confucianists ever did, between spiritual and social spheres. Religious impulses intersect with political-economic purposes in underlying postwar state construction throughout the Islamic and Theravada regions. Political process has been consistently construed by most local peoples as a sphere of cultural and spiritual contention. This has often remained the case even when revolutionary actions and political ideologies have appeared secular on the surface. At the rice roots of village societies even ostensibly secular ideologies such as Marxism have intersected with millenarian spirituality. Nevertheless it is apparent that economic concerns and secular politics have appeared to be increasingly separable from spiritual concerns during the past decades.

The generation of national cultures as religious contention

Religious and ethnic identities within each state have been multiple and competing claims to national identity have thus produced prominent fracture lines within all postwar societies. The relationships which were consolidated implicitly in the territories mapped by colonialism have carried into national structures. States like Aceh and ethnic groups such as the Karen and Meo were drawn, more through colonialism than by any earlier states, into social units dominated by Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Javanese, Malay and Tagalog speakers. These majorities are for the most part the occupants of core areas, the centres from early times of intensive rice cultivation, dense population and state formation, and those areas now house the dominant populations of most of the new states. At the same time the social boundaries between local peoples and migrant Indian, Arab and Chinese groups hardened from the turn of the century onward. The fragility of unity and fragmentation of identities has been self-evident. Throughout the region postwar constructions of national culture have self-consciously aimed to produce a dominant mould which would override these profound differences.
Most of the dominant political philosophies of the postwar period can be characterised as "neo-traditional" and insofar as they are they infuse religious meanings within modern politics. Confucianism resonated in Diem's South Vietnam, U Nu's socialism was also Buddhist and Sukarno's Nasakom reflected how Javanist impulses could guide the formation of national ideologies. This is to speak of a positive rather than strictly negative process--when these modern actors appeal to Buddhism or the wayang they actively construct rather than only cynically manipulating older popular symbols. Even Vietnamese communists have prioritised communal values, usually in a manner consonant with Confucian tinged spirituality which some western Marxists have found hard to either grasp or correlate with their politics. Suharto built his striking family grave next to the grave complex of the Mangkunegaraan court, which his wife is distantly related to, and modeled it on the temples of Indic Majapahit. By doing so he clearly aimed to memorialise his role as the man who has guided the nation into modernity, but his manner of doing so emmulates the way Indic kings commemorated their accomplishments. New national rituals, including ostensibly western elections, build on senses of ceremony embedded within local society; religious holidays are designated state holidays and new memorial rites commemorate revolutionary heroes as founding ancestors. These patterns reflect choices guided by deeply worn tracks even if what was once a dirt path may now have become concrete.

Though the power of kings is circumscribed, royalty is a continuing centrepoint of ceremonial life in significant parts of Southeast Asia and wherever it remains it carries religious significance. Kingship remains a central institution in Thailand and Brunei, it continued in Laos through the 1950s and it existed in modified form in Cambodia until 1975. When Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX, of Yogyakarta in Java, died in 1988 the commemoration of his passing drew extraordinary crowds and was widely noted. Ironically he had maintained the magical power of royalty precisely by the strength of his support for the revolution and his role as Vice-President of the Republic in the 1970s. In Cambodia Sihanouk evoked similar sentiments, and for similar reasons, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through having adjusted to constitutional monarchy he preserved the sacral power of royal tradition, accepting homage as had been the due of earlier kings. Considered more widely, as complexes of belief relating to courts and in terms of their residual roles within society at large, traditional courts retain significance in Yogyakarta, Surakarta and in the Malay sultanates, where they still retain religious influence, as well as in Thailand and Brunei, where they are obviously vigorous.
Modernisation was spearheaded by royalty in the Thai case and the nexus bonding the court to the sangha, to village and to distant regions has been gaining strength consistently. The 1932 constitutional revolution turned what was Siam into today's Thailand and repositioned, but did not eliminate, the kingship. Kings have thus retained a powerful ritual and ceremonial place within Thai society. In the postwar period Buddhism has been even more firmly enshrined, theoretically at least, than ever. Along with the monarchy it is as a key ideological basis of the nation. Marshall Sarit, whose views dominated the 1950s and early 1960s, reinstated some of the lapsed ceremonial functions of kingship and looked to Buddhism as a bulwark against what he percieved as the threat of communism. On the other hand the modern forms of Buddhism which have been promoted by the state have also reflected twentieth century adaptations. The most prominent modernist forms, within all of the religions in the region, bring a shift of emphasis toward social action. In any event in Thailand traditional institutions have been reformed and enhanced, now underpinned as they are by modern media, as a basis for the cultural integration of the state.

In Burma virtually all residues of the monarchy were eliminated by British colonialism. Nevertheless the independent state resurrected traditions rooted in local religious notions of kingship. U Nu, who was Premier for most of the period from 1948 to 1962, adhered to a version of socialism which departed from that of his more secular Thakin colleagues of the 1930s. Observers uniformly note the genuine qualities of a personal spiritual commitment he underpinned with a simple lifestyle. U Nu's Buddhism was inseparable from the cult of the nats. He justifed propitiation ceremonies through references to the scriptures, his Pyidaungsu Party gave annual offerings to the spirits and he spent lengthy periods at sites sacred to them, even when deciding economic matters. In 1961 he initiated the construction of 60,000 sand pagodas with iron spires and, as opposition to the declaration of Buddhism as the state religion grew, he spent forty-five days in spiritual retreat on the sacred Mount Popo. Elements of the sangha accused him of prioritising the cults at the expense of Buddhism but there is no doubt he sincerely believed the spiritual health of the population would be enhanced by proclamation of a Buddhist state.
National regeneration and the enhancement of Buddhism were seen as coterminus within a vision of the socialist state framed by Buddhist values. The revival U Nu led emphasised the Buddhist nature of Burma and the importance of its world role as "the strongest home" of its contemporary practice. The Ministry of Religion was established in 1950 and from 1952 onwards the government employed monks to facilitate the encorporation of hill tribes into the nation. It sponsored Mahasi Sayadaw's insight (vipassana) meditation centre in Rangoon, a showpiece of modern Buddhist practice which foreign visitors of the time were regularly introduced to. The Sangayana, the Sixth Great Buddhist Council of 1954-1956, was the centrepiece of revivalism and associated activities coloured the whole decade. It marked the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha and to some extent became the world event it was intended, as representatives from thirty countries met. Building of the Kaba Aye Peace Pagoda began in 1950, on a site selected on the basis of a visionary experience, and the Council took place in the Great Sacred Cave, constructed next to the Peace Pagoda to house 10,000 representatives. At the same time the rebuilding of old derelict pagodas became an object of government policies.
When U Nu campaigned for reelection in 1959 he announced preference for establishment of Buddhism as the state religion, but the ensuing controversies even divided Buddhists. Recurrent disciplinary and factional problems, a residue of the fragmentation resulting from the colonial removal of royal patronage, plagued the sangha, the monastic order, throughout the 1950s. In 1951 a fight followed a refusal to allow pongyis, Burmese monks, free admission to a theatre; in 1954 two pongyis died in a clash over control of a temple school (kyaung); in 1956 factionalism led to rioting of monks in Mandalay; and in 1959 the police resorted to tear gas, arresting 89 monks after student rioting in Rangoon. When legislation was pending to amend the constitution monks objected to the protection it offered to minority religions. It appeared to allow them increased scope for growth by promising minority religions a share of state religious funds. In November 1961 monks went so far as to burn down mosques on the outskirts of Rangoon. When the constititional change went through in 1961 the minorities seethed because the bill did not bring the expected counterbalance of federalism. Mild as the proclamation superficially appeared, the sangha remained split or neutral.
State sponsored revival of Buddhism lost momentum with Ne Win's coup of 1962. The philosophy of the military has been relatively secular, though even it has theoretically prioritised material development only "in balance with spiritual life". The Revolutionary Council announced its guiding philosophy through the Burma Socialist Program Party in January 1963. Elements of both Marxism and Buddhism found a place in that philosophy, but key traditional notions relating to the nats (guardian spirits), Buddhist philosophy of samsara (the "wheel of rebirth") and kamma (karma) were ommitted. Its thrust was humanistic, appealing to spiritual values and affirming that the state had responsibility for the improvement of the spiritual life of its citizens. Ne Win has not tolerated respect for nats. His government launched a concerted attack on spirit beliefs, even banning film productions centring on them. Following Ne Win's coup attempts to pacify minorities forced retraction of the religion bill and worked to exclude the pongyis from politics. After 1962 the Union Buddha Sasana Council was abolished; in 1965 the Vinasaya Act of 1949, the Dhammacariya Act of 1950 and the Pali Education Board Act of 1952 were all repealled and thus the major elements of U Nu's legislation to strengthen the sangha were all eventually eliminated.

Among Vietnamese activists articulate spokespeople like Thien Minh held that Buddhism represented a choice of values not present in either western or communist countries. He commented that "...we are convinced that Buddhism can build up a nation because it represents a unified force and because it teaches the doctrine of tolerance and understanding." Represented by a relatively small sangha, Buddhists were strongest in Central Vietnam. The postwar revival of Buddhism there began in 1951, when a national conference was attended by fifty monks and lay people in Hue. They joined the World Fellowship of Buddhists, which had been formed in Sri Langka in 1950. Buddhists took issue with the Diem government because it so often appeared unwilling to recognise a role for them. Diem's policies appeared to be based on patronage models of government, common throughout the region, more than on Catholicism as such and the Vatican was at pains to dissassociate Catholicism from them.
Tensions mounted around the celebration of Waisak, the celebration of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and passing in early May, when crowds in Hue were met with tanks and nine died, precipitating lengthy petitioning and a series of demonstrations in Saigon as well. The self immolation of Thich Quang Duc on June llth followed a lengthy period of unsuccessful petitioning to Diem on behalf of the Buddhists in 1963. In August 1964 Buddhist antagonism to the Diem government led as far as rioting in Danang, where Buddhist led mobs burned down the huts of Catholic refugees. Buddhist neutralists pressured the Diem government continually. As General Ky assumed power in mid 1965 and the war situation worsened, lay Buddhists backed off their activism to concentrate on education and social welfare activities. They published magazines and periodicals, ran 135 primary and 35 secondary schools and a Buddhist university and also recruited youth to show their strength.
Throughout 1966 tense negotiations continued between Catholic, Hoa Hao, Cao Dai and Buddhist groups and the Ky government over the holding of elections and prospective representation in the constitutional assembly. Periodic violence between the military and Buddhist student groups in Danang and Hue failed to bring responses from the government. In May Thanh Quang, a fifty five year old nun, immolated herself before the Dieu De pagoda in Hue. Her expression unquestionably indicated the spiritual depth of distress at American support for Ky's government, making her death an appeal to the hearts of Americans and symbolising commitment to the spirit of non-violence. But the power of Buddhist activism, strongest in 1963, dissipated gradually in 1966. The appeal to Buddhism as a basis for nationalism was undermined by Cao Dai dominance of Tayninh Province, Hoa Hao power in the western Mekong delta and the semi-autonomy of the Montagnard animists, Khmer border people, and Muslim Cham remnants.

In Indonesia the western notion of division between secular and religious spheres has had only narrow purchase. The few genuinely secular nationalists have always had to address religious, especially Muslim, people, movements and interpretations. At the same time though 90% of the population profess to be Muslim the nation is not characteristically Islamic in the way its cousins of that religion's heartlands are. Variants of animism and mysticism remain significant counterweights to the strength of Islam. Within Sukarno's PNI Javanese spiritual philosophy underpinned political thought; even the communist PKI converged with millenarianism insofar as it extended into Javanese rural life. The place of Islam was a major issue in the lead up to the proclamation of independence, resulting in an ambiguous compromise called the Jakarta Charter. Some Muslims thought this draft preamble to the Constitution, stating that Muslims would be legally required to adhere to Islamic law, would be official. Secularists prevented acceptance of the compromise, arguing it would have endangered the revolution, but until the 1970s recognition of the Charter remained an active objective for Islamic politicians.
Subsequent social tensions have often corresponded with cultural and religious cleavages. Divergence between Muslim orthodoxy and Javanism underlay the rhetoric of the 1950s and remained an explicit focus of tension into the 1970s, as the New Order effectively required membership in a recognised religion. Most Indonesians do believe in God and experience a spiritual dimension as real and one corollary is that they see the national identity as palpable, as a spirit rather than just an abstraction. Insofar as identities are seen as spiritual the reflexive implication has also been that national reconstruction involves a spiritual struggle. For some this has meant movement toward collective realisation of submission to the will of Allah; for others it means repetition of the endless tension between desires, linking us to the material plane, and impulses toward spiritual release. These views, one Islamic the other Indic, are suggestive of the major contenders which have been asserting the right to define the spiritual identity of the national entity in independent Indonesia.
Both the Ministry of Religion and the Islamic parties have had a clearly Muslim interpretation of the national commitment to freedom of religion. As Van Nieuwenhuijze observed at the time of independence many Muslims viewed religion as synonymous with Islam and interpreted religious freedom as meaning "freedom for Islam", since 90% of the population was supposed to be Islamic. Even purist Muslims now realise that this assumption was superficial, but the notion of Islamic domination remains strong. Muslims have gradually and reluctantly accepted that they remain a fractional element within a plural religious scene. Many Muslims continued to feel, as they had under the Dutch, that only political repression prevented them from setting the mould for a nation they ought to have dominated. Until the 1955 elections the leading Islamic parties assumed that all Muslims would vote for them. They were shocked to find that only 42% of the population voted for them and this contributed to Islamic and outer island separatism in the late 1950s.
The elections of 1955 and 1957 remain a marker of religious commitments in the country. Masyumi, representing modernist Islam, was strongest in the outer islands, West Java and in urban areas. The traditionalist Muslim Nahdatul Ulama, the nationalists (PNI) and communists (PKI) all had their roots in the heartlands of Java. After the elections both Muslims and Christians feared growing PKI strength and resented Java-oriented economic policies. The Darul Islam movements had been continuing in Aceh, West Java, and South Sulawesi intermittently through the 1950s. The association of Masyumi with the PRRI rebellion in Sumatra and the Permesta revolt in North Sulawesi in 1958 was used to politically marginalise modernist Islam. The suppression of Darul Islam and the PRRI-Permesta revolts and the nationalisation of businesses, all in the late 1950s, drew the military into civilian administration, transforming it also into the primary new vehicle of national integration and further marginalising Islam politically.
The concept of Guided Democracy elaborated by Sukarno framed politics from 1959 to 1965 and tacitly revived the ethos and style of kraton culture. Both purist senses of Islam and western pluralistic notions of democracy were excluded in favour of syncretic thought and the politics of consensus. Magical senses of power underlay effort to concentrate energy on glorification of the capital and on unifying struggles to liberate Dutch New Guinea and confront "neo-colonialist" Malaysia. He recalled the traditional glories of Majapahit as a peak of the past and model for the present. His populist images of the primal peasant (marhaen) and of principles of cooperation (gotong-royong) and consensus (musyawarah-mufakat) were elevated as national ideology. Nasakom (the acronym for "nationalism-religion-communism") was proclaimed as a synthetic and transcendent ideology and Sukarno presented himself as the mouth-piece of the people, meaning that he conceived of his personal consciousness as being linked to the collective as its prime mechanism of representation. His charismatic invocations of the spirit of 1945 came with opposition, inflation and unresolved ills so that in retrospect even usually sympathetic Javanists felt that it fell short in practice.
Social tensions led toward the coup and counter-coup of 1965. The land reform laws of 1959 were never effected, leading communist cadres to stimulate unilateral seizures which provoked a powerful Muslim counter-offensive. The Aidit PKI implicitly remained a vehicle for abangan expression, finding numerical strength mainly as a counter to rural Islam. Suharto consolidated control when he manoevered Sukarno into providing a authorisation to re-establish order on March 11, 1966, through a letter known by the acronym "SuperSemar". If Sukarno aimed to transcend ideology through synthesis Suharto has aimed to purge politics of ideology; if the "theatre state" resurrected Indic courts the New Order can be represented as a surfacing of village temperament. Suharto is a committed Muslim, but in Javanist terms--a foster father and several of his early advisers participated in a prominent cult of the guardian spirits. The group emphasises pilgrimage to the power points at Dieng and Srandil, both linked to Semar as the guardian (danhyang) of Java, as a route to power. Ironically this Javanist ethos is obscured by cultural defensiveness: it is less articulate than either Indic styled syncretism or traditional religions and the official status of mysticism remains insecure.
Thus the underlying spiritual ethos of the governments led by both Sukarno and Suharto have been inspired by a Javanism within which Islamic sensibility is framed by syncretism. There has been self-conscious emphasis on a corporatist "family principle" which rationalises a consensual basis for the politics of the state. That philosophy was clearly articulated in the nationalist educational philosophy of Dewantoro in the 1920s and remains relevant. Dewantoro's prewar Taman Siswa movement fed into to the national educational system, but has much more significance at present through its relation to national political philosophies. In it a holistic emphasis on collective corporate identity and consensual politics was tied to commitment to develop the whole person in balance by engaging the mind, feeling and will through awareness of all of the senses. Taman Siswa philosophy was connected to mystical theories through Suryomataram, one of the most famous prewar mystic of Yogyakarta, and resonated with the teachings of the Theosophical Society and Maria Montessori.
This philosophy converged with what was to become the dominant philosophy of the nation as expressed in the 1945 Constitution, the Pancasila (the five principles articulated by Sukarno which underlie the state philosophy), Guided Democracy in the late 1950s and, not least, the Golkar organisation under Suharto. It is pointedly emphasised in the exclusive emphasis on the Pancasila demanded by New Order in the 1980s. In 1981 Suharto conflated criticism of himself with that of the Pancasila and in 1983 the MPR (Parliament) formalised the separation of religion and politics, undermining Islamic parties implicitly in the process, by legislating requirement that all political organisations had to adopt the Pancasila as its basis. This was extended to all social organisations and is tied to consistent and self conscious argument that democracy had to be tuned to the "Indonesian soul". Islamic parties commanded around 30% of the vote, despite adverse circumstances in elections in the 1970s, making Islam the clearest oppositional force to the New Order. But recent assessments of Islam in Indonesian politics point out that Muslims have become a majority with a "minority mentality" and that the faith is "an outsider".

State regulation and institutional religion

The consolidation of new states has led to increasing centralised control over institutional religious life, the same powers which limit smuggling or collect revenue have been exercised in regularising religious hierarchies which are increasingly articulated at national level. This trend is both a corollary of the general process of reorganising social life and also due to special interest in mobilising religious institutions for political, cultural and economic purposes. At the same time it is linked to the view, one governments share even when they are ostensibly secular, that the ambit of state authority includes the spiritual welfare of its population. As many prominent neo-traditionalist political philosophies carry religious senses of purpose, intervention by governments in the religious sphere have usually been sanctioned by postwar states.

Within the Theravada states the spread of modern education, as a reorganisation of sangha based education or as a vehicle of new national values, contributes to the reshaping of even popular perceptions of Buddhism. There has been notable progress in this area, with massive rises in adult literacy being achieved during the 1950s. Despite the fact that governments have emphasised secular education religious schooling continues to occupy strong ground. At the same time the lines between traditional religious and modern secular education have also blurred in the postwar period. Religious schools give increasing attention to secular subjects, government sponsorship has extended to religious education and religious education has even expanded within secular systems.
Burma's first constitution, of 1947, recognised only a "special place" for Buddhism in deference to the Karen, Kachin and Chin minorities, to induce them to join the union. Naturally neither Christian Karens nor animists elsewhere were attracted to the prospect of Buddhism as a state religion. Once U Nu was in office in 1948 he nevertheless concentrated on promoting the Buddhist revival as part of his vision of the national revolution, notwithstanding that Burma was not declared as a Buddhist state. The Vinicchaya-Htana Act of 1949, for example, aimed to remove religious disputes from the jurisdiction of civil courts by establishing ecclesiatical courts at the town level throughout the country. It was modified in 1954 to take account of the strength of divergent sects within Burmese Buddhism, as sectarian fissures are prominant and abbots have had more power within their temples (kyaungs) than their colleagues elsewhere.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs was established in 1950, partly to restore cohesion to what had become a fragmented religious structure. Meanwhile the Ministry of Education engaged actively in regulating and supporting monastic examinations and standards within the larger monastic universities. From 1947 onwards there was discussion of establishing a Pali University. On the one hand these moves were designed to counterbalance the long period of absence of royal sponsorship, on the other they served to strengthen government intervention in the affairs of the sangha. This combined with periodic debates through the 1950s over registration of monks and the holding of monastic Parliaments. These interventions provoked some Buddhists, such as the Anti-Hluttdaw Association, to demand the abolition of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in 1959. Registration was an touchy issue partly because revolutionaries in many instances worked through the sangha, gaining a mobility through that they would not otherwise have had.
One notable intervention in Buddhist developments, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Buddhism, was founded through collaboration with the American Ford Foundation in 1954. It implied a mixture of secular and religious objects which sat uncomfortably within Burmese traditions, which separated those spheres. Emphasis on English language learning and both the domestic and international missionary expansion of Buddhism went hand in hand with what became a Burmanisation of the curriculum and personnel. This new style of government and foreign sponsored training was tied to social service. Promotion of Buddhism was directly linked at once to consolidation of the state internally and to projecting its image in the international environment. In Burma by 1962 there were 84 temple schools (kyaungs) which had enough highly trained monks to register as colleges. The Ne Win government has given no encouragement to kyaung schools. They nevertheless remain a vital component of Burmese education, even if the 70% who attended religious schools in 1952 must have declined significantly since.
In Thailand in 1967 half the primary schools were still wat schools where teaching was done by monks. Monastic examination regulations which came into effect in 1910 remain in force and there were 6,634 Nak Dhamma schools and 615 Pali schools. The two wat institutes in Bangkok, Mahamakuta Rajavidyalaya and Mahachulalongkorn Rajavidyalaya, became the basis of modern universities in 1945 and 1947, from that point offering a wide range of modern studies along with Buddhist Pali studies. All of these schools served not only to link the modern state to religious institutions, but also to introduce religious specialists to secular modes of learning. According to figures from 1968 there were about 25,000 wat and 185,000 monks, perhaps one third of them "temporary", in a Thai population of around 34 million. The hierarchy of monastic institutions, leading up toward the elite "university wat" of the capital, matched the socio-political hierarchy of cities. In this context, as often in earlier times, the sangha offered a prime channel for upward mobility and high status, especially for the relatively poorer villagers of the Northeast.
The Thai government has been in the strongest position to patronise Buddhism and it has not held back from fostering and attempting to manipulate the very strong local sangha. The government attitude was reflected in a 1963 pamphlet which indicated that:
...the complexities of living in the modern world...necessitates a close cooperation and mutual understanding between the State and the Sangha working harmoniously together for the economic and spiritual well-being of the people.
The 1963 Sangha Act, initiated under Marshall Sarit, constituted a powerful intervention in the life of the sangha. The previous Acts, of 1902 and 1941, had ironically contained significant democratic features. The 1963 Act centralised power in the name of defusing sectarian rivalry between the cohesive, and hence relatively better represented, modernist Dhammayut and more diffuse Mahanikai sects within the sangha. This restructuring reflected Sarit's recognition that Buddhism and the monarchy remained critical to achievement of modernising objectives. Each adjustment in state policy with regard to the sangha has matched modernising reforms, relating first to the reforms of the nineteenth century, then to 1932 revolution, and finally to Sarit's coup of 1957. Continuous strengthening of the bonds between religion and the state, as hierarchical ties have tightened through the Ministry of Religion, has decreased the prestige and autonomy of local wat.
It is recognised in all village studies of the Theravada countries that through the period since the war monks continue to play a key role as consellors and advisors, as well as as officiants within religious ceremonies. Now their traditional centrality in this respect has been counterbalanced with community development training. In Cambodia Sihanouk held that "...our 70,000 monks are the 'officers' conducting our people to work, just as the officers conduct the troops into combat...." In the late 1960s Mahachulalongkorn University in Bangkok sponsored community development training for monks in centres dispersed though the country. Monks who attended were expected to return to their villages and apply the skills and perspectives gained in whatever way they could and there is little doubt that many, as in the purely secular cadre training programs in Vietnam, absorbed and applied the lessons learned.
In Laos roughly 25% of schools were religious and in 1962 there were 95 Pali schools. There were only a few vernacular high schools up to the time of Pathet Lao victory in 1975. Because the French did not cut the tie between royalty and the sangha in Laos or Cambodia the tie remained relatively tight until the socialist revolutions of the mid-1970s. In Cambodia, as in Laos and Thailand, the state and sangha were also much closer than in Burma. There Buddhist schools included 600 primary, two secondary and one tertiary, the Preah Sihanouk Raj Buddhist University of Phnom Penh. Traditionally schooling reached young males in most villages through the wat but by 1967 all but 10% of schools were in the government system and enrolments were increasing rapidly.
The French and Americans looked to the sangha as a potential counterweight to communism in Laos throughout the 1950s and 1960s and its strength was undermined as a result. The sangha was particularly deeply divided between Mahanikai and Dhammayut sects, a tension lending itself to factionalism, and at the same time strongly committed to a vision of itself as the prime vehicle of Lao culture, a mission easily construed as counter to American secularism. By the early 1970s, especially as the Pathet Lao gained strength through growing anti-Americanism, the politicisation of the sangha, ironically facilitated by its own initiatives to broaden its base through encouraging lay missionising and meditation, had undermined its role within Lao society. With its victory in 1975 the Pathet Lao made every effort to use monks in order to extend its message to the population. It anounced policies of religious freedom and there was already a strong basis for collaboration, as notions of Buddhist socialism were well established. At the same time the new government set out to reeducate monks, restrict their privileges and bypass their central social and symbolic role. By 1979 the number of monks was said to have dropped from 20,000 to 1,700 and the subordination of the sangha to politics appeared to be complete.

A subordinate position in political terms has limited Muslim influence over national institutions in Indonesia but in the cultural and religious arenas the balance of power differs. In that domain other parties respond increasingly to Islam in the sense that discourses about religious issues are framed increasingly by Islamic idiom. The state endorses an Islamic sense of God and requires citizens to identify with a religion Muslims can acknowledge as such; it sees itself as having an active responsibility in the religious sphere in terms no secular western state does. In each of these spheres Islamic discourses define the context of Indonesian spiritual life, influencing other strands of religion implicitly and pervasively. Even Suharto was always guarded in reference to his early Javanist preferences and Muslims still associate related practices with the residue of pre-Islamic traditions. International tarekats have remained active but at the national level their significance declined until the 1980s, when a revival became noticeable. Mysticism is often seen now as irrational, a projection or fantasy contrary to the realities of development and modernity and related practices have been consistently on the defensive, certainly vis a vis government agencies.
Though failing to claim the Indonesian nation fully for Islam, the strength of Masyumi as an umbrella Muslim party, was sufficient to ensure rapid establishment of a Ministry of Religion. This was dominated by the NU until 1971, at which point the New Order effectively displaced that party as the dominating force behind the Ministry. Though responsible for all religious communities funds within it are allocated according to census statistics and Islam has thus dominated it heavily. The Ministry administered government subsidies to more than 13,000 primary, 776 secondary and 16 higher madrasas in 1954 and to a total of 22,000 madrasas and pesantren by 1965 and these figures kept increasing in the 1970s. The separate Islamic educational network has come increasingly into its own, especially since the 1970s through the tertiary level IAIN (State Islamic Institutes), when substantial oil money went toward it, and this network established the basis for a new wave of nationwide Islamisation. The Ministry became the main stronghold of Muslim influence within the bureaucracy and a counter to Javanist domination of the Ministries of Information and of Education and Culture.
Given the importance of law within Islam the establishment of the Ministry had immense practical implications for local religious life. Islamic courts came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religion rather than the Justice Department. In issues of family law, notably divorce and inheritance, a legal basis for religious authority was established. From the mid-1950s to 1974 there was intermittent and severe controversy over marriage legislation, especially concerning polygamy and non-Muslim marriages. Muslim reaction to the government's proposed civil legislation of 1974 provoked such extreme reaction the bill was withdrawn. For Muslims frustration has often focussed on the codification of customary (adat) law undertaken by the Dutch. The Ministry channeled funds and created institutions in a way that strengthened Islamic organisations. At the same time it also implicitly limited the potential for Muslim activists to challenge the basis of the state, as its very establishment implied Muslim endorsement of the state. NU control of the Ministry, which was firm by 1954, led it endorsed the state which underpinned it. Other Muslims protested because they wanted to challenge the basis of the state more fundamentally.
Dominance of Islam within the Ministry of Religion is reflected in its definitions of religion and its role in promoting Islamic senses of what can be religious. When the Ministry was established in 1946 it was acknowledged that Protestants and Catholics deserved places, as even in the strictest Islamic terms Christianity is legitimate, a religion of the Book. Other religions were initially lumped under the rubric of "ethnic" and those of Asian origin had to struggle for recognition, their status remaining problematic in some respects to the present. Each had to reorganise to match essentially Semitic senses of what constitutes religion--they are legitimate now to the degree that they emphasise belief in one God, a clear system of law, a holy scripture and a prophet. To date the official list of acceptable religions is that promulgated in Sukarno's Presidential decree of 1965: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The only exception is Confucianism, which has been relegated to the status of Judaism, being viewed essentially as an ethnic faith rather than an international religion.
This restricted sense of the term does not allow animism, folk spirit cults, new religions or independent mystical practices as "religion". Even the Balinese had to struggle actively before gaining official recognition in the 1950s. Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian communities were forced to conform to monotheistic conceptions of divinity. The recasting of Buddhist idiom gave an advantage to Mahayana groups, as Theravada Buddhists faced particular difficulty before they agreed finally that the Adi Buddha, roughly referring to the innate Buddha nature in everything, could be identitifed as "God". In the process of gaining recognition scriptural factions within each community gained strength at the expense of traditional syncretists. Whether in scholarly debate, public discussion or government legislation, the accepted Indonesian definition of religion now accords with the Islamic model of what can constitute one.
Perhaps more critically, Islam conditions government views of its responsibility in the religious arena. The Indonesian government sees itself as having the responsibility to ensure that its citizens follow an acceptable religious faith as an obligation of citizenship. In the Five Year Plan for 1969-1974 (in Chapter IX on "Religion") it is stated that:
...the Government of the Republic of Indonesia has the responsibility of giving guidance and assistance to facilitate the development of each religion according to its own teachings, and to maintain supervision such that each citizen maintains their religious practice according to their beliefs...
This sense of responsibility distinguishes Indonesian views of religious freedom from those held by western liberal regimes. In secular western states professions of belief in God play a passive role, mainly meriting rhetorical invocation. Indonesia may not be an Islamic state, but it nevertheless takes from Islam its sense that authorities should intervene to guide the spiritual lives of citizens. Under the New Order the first principal of the Pancasila, that the nation is founded on belief in the one God, is read as a programme for action and all citizens have generally been required to list an accepted religious affiliation on their identity cards. This view of religious freedom, obviously in marked contrast to that which pertains in the west, is essentially consistent with the Muslim view of the responsibility of the state vis-a-vis religion.
Government regulation of mystical movements extend colonial policies. Traditional courts were transformed through colonialism into an element within the new state, but policies aimed mainly to contain Islam. This alliance, with what were coincidentally the syncretic, mystical and Indic segments of the population, continued an opposition between Islamic and court powers of the pre-colonial era. That opposition is consistent again with the tension between Islam and the New Order. However the Dutch were also sensitive to the dangers of millenarian and mystical movements and surveillance has been continued since independence through Pakem, an agency of the Department of Justice since 1954. Offices in major cities supervise meetings and keep records. Even routine sessions of a spiritual nature in individuals homes and the practices of traditional healers (dukun) require license and registration. The Ministry of Religion also researched folk practices, indicating until 1978 that mysticism lay within its authority. It aimed to guide adherents toward orthodoxy by clarifying that mysticism originated from Islam.
In the New Order lobbying centred on winning legitimacy independent of religion. In opting for designation as "kepercayaan" in 1970 the movements staked a claim to legitimacy within the provisions of the 1945 Constitution. That had been readopted by Sukarno in 1959 and remains sacred, together with the Pancasila as the essence of national political philosophy, under Suharto. During the hasty sessions in which the provisional l945 Constitution was drafted discussion of paragraph 29 of part XI (religion) was extended. The paragraph reads,
The nation is based on faith in God (Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa); The nation guarantees each citizen the freedom to choose their own religion and to pray according to his own religion or faith (kepercayaan).
For independent minded mystics the key was inclusion of the term "faith" (kepercayaan) as they read it as legitimising practices outside religion so long as those were also directed toward the one God. Golkar, the government functional grouping, indirectly sponsored a congress in Yogyakarta in late 1970 in which mystics argued that they had been wrongly deprived of their rights, that their status was in principle already supposed to be equal to that of the religions. In 1973 the independent movements were recognised as legitimate options within the terms of the 1945 Constitution, making it legal for citizens to list a mystical movement instead of a religion on their identity cards. In practice local authorities viewed it as subversive to broadcast this legislation and when the census took place in 1980 no record of mystical affiliation was registered.
Then the Marriage Law of 1974 resulted in broader guidelines, easing the requirement for Javanese to adhere to Islamic ritual. Though the government attempt to establish civil marriage was withdrawn, some mystical groups conducted their own marriage ceremonies after 1974. In early 1978, responsibility for kebatinan was shifted from the Ministry of Religion to that of Education and Culture, weakening the legal claim of Islam to jurisdiction over it. Legislative changes had limited effects and in many areas it has been considered provocative to publicise the new laws. The laws have provoked Islamic polemics and confusion in practice. Subud, the most internationally known Javanese movement, withdrew from the umbrella organisation in early 1978 after its East Javanese SKK officers appeared to pressure adherents to identify themselves only as such, rather than by religious affiliation.
The establishment of a Directorat in the Ministry of Education and Culture theoretically ended subordination of kebatinan to religion. It began an inventory of movements, published significant documentation and initiated contact with non-Javanese movements. Recently changes within the Directorat coincide with what appears to have been a shift in government thinking about the relationship between kebatinan and religion. During the 1970s activists argued that identification with kebatinan was sufficient to fulfill requirement that citizens pursue belief in God. Recently interpretation became more narrow, affiliation with mystical movements is separated from the question of religious membership, which is still essential. The pendulum has swung back toward the position of the late 1960s. Most Javanists continue to hold that their mystical practice is interior and separate from religious identification. Pressure for members of movements to also maintain religious identification is again increasing.

Elsewhere in the Islamic zone, as in Sulu and Mindanao, changes have been especially coloured by social dislocation. In the largely Catholic Philippines the church has been basically conservative and closely tied to elite dominated governments. Notwithstanding currents of liberation theology from Latin America and the critical stance of some Church leaders, such as Cardinal Sin against Marcos, the general tenor of the church has been conservative. This stance is rooted both in the social origins of its leadership and the staunch anti-communism, which since the Huk movement of the 1950s has remained an active social issue. From the vantage point of the Manila government its policies in the south were strategies for development and national integration, associated with the migration of northern Christian settlers and businesses into what seemed a relatively underdeveloped south; for Muslim locals these programs represented imposition of intense colonialism in the guise of nationalism.
It is impossible to separate changing religious practices, in this context of intermittent bloodletting, from the socio-economic and political strains of relations between poor Muslim southerners and relatively rich northern patronage powers. Marcos policies provoked the founding of the Philippine Muslim Nationalist League (PMNL) in 1967. That became the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), with a military arm which grew rapidly through the 1970s. Misuari, the most public and astute leader of the movement, eventually sought support from Libya and blended Islamic nationalism with Marxist populism. Religious connections also became a bridge, along with ethnicity, complicating relationships between Manila and Kuala Lumpur. The Tausug, living in both Sulu and Sabah, established a working relationship across the border. Between 1973 and l978 important steps were taken to regularise trade between Sulu and Sabah and to adjust the national legal system to account for local Muslim law. These steps took some of the fire from separatism, but it has remained a running sores, among the many inheritances of the Marcos era which now also plague the Acquino government.

In the Malaysian context Islamisation has been intensified through its role as a vehicle of Malay cohesion. Governments have contributed by proclaiming Muslim holidays, upholding Islamic values in education and economics and by encouraging internal conversion (dakwah) movements. The relationship between Islamic and national law in Malaysia remains complex, partly due to variations between states. In the sultanates colonial policies allowed distinct religious rights to remain with sultans and in the modern states local authorities still retain significant powers in this area. Tun Mustapha, for example, made especially notable appeals to Islam when he was chief Minister in Sabah, working against Christian influences and promoting conversion to Islam.
Since 1960 the government has administered collection of the zakat, the religious tithe. States administer the collection of 10% of the paddy and at the same time villages levy their own zakat. In urban areas people pay an extra tax instead. In 1968 roughly US$3.5 million was collected and funds have gone for religious buildings and education, in direct subsidies to the poor, even to some business oriented programmes. Elsewhere national governments have no direct involvement in collecting religious taxes. In Indonesia it is only through private organisations, such as the Muhammadiyah, that zakat is collected and disbursed at a local level. The haj has also been facilitated by the combination of government offices and, since the war, air travel. By the 1980s over 70,000 Indonesian pilgrims went to Mecca annually; Malaysian pilgrims increased from about 5,000 to 15,000 between 1965 and l980 and in the same year over 7,500 pilgrims went from elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Christian missions and churches have remained active through most of Southeast Asia, representing an avenue of continuity for western influence through education and health work. In areas like Timur, Irian Jaya or among the Karen, as noted already, Christian institutions have constituted independent networks which may threaten, or at least appear to undermine state control. In this respect churches may parallel the function of Muslim networks in Mindanao and Sulu. In Indonesia and Malaysia governments have been pressed to respond to Muslim sensitivity by actively restricting Christian missions, especially in areas like Aceh, where there have been popular protests against even locally rooted Christian church construction. In the late 1970s the Indonesian government pressed overseas missions to replace foreign missionaries with local people.
Even in the secular and materialistic city state of Singapore the government has actively concerned itself with both promoting and regulating religious life. By the late 1970s Confucianism was promoted as an ethos convergent with government interest in social stability; in the 1980s this encouragement was underlined as a way of promoting extended family support for the elderly--to reduce welfare demands on the state. By the end of the 1980s the government was concerned with the rise of fundamentalisms and contingent discord. A white paper on the "Maintenance of Religious Harmony" was tabled in Parliament in December 1989 and noted incidents of social conflict in the late 1980s involving aggressive Protestant and Muslim fundamentalists. Muslims reacted indignantly when Protestants used the term "Allah" for "God", a translation which had already been banned by the Malaysian government. Dravidian and Aryan Hindus complained of each other and that Christians were too aggressive. At the same time Sikhs and Hindus brought the tensions of South Asia into Singapore.
Resonances of religious difference continue to underlie or converge with politics and tensions have been most explicitly religious within the nations of the archipelago. The Muslim south and Catholic north have been at odds throughout the history of the modern Philippines. In Malaysia religion converges with race--intensity of requirement that Malays practice Islam implicitly reflects tensions between Chinese and Malay groups. Indonesian politics have certainly been shaped significantly by the underlying division between syncretic traditional and modern orthodox Islam. In the 1950s the communists drew support mainly from syncretic Javanese and opposition was strongest among the Muslim youth who helped the army eliminate it in the l960s. Though less prominent, similar tensions have been clear through the mainland states as well. Religious issues wove into the politics of the thirty year long Vietnamese revolution. Catholics from the north sometimes worked together with syncretic southern cults during the 1950s and 1960s in opposition to the socialist revolution. In Burma (Myanmar), Buddhist Burmese speakers from the lowlands have been resisted by Christian Karens ever since independence. In Thailand the Malay speaking Muslim minority of the south has not easily endorsed or been integrated into a state which makes so much of the conjunction of Thai ethnicity, Indic styled royalty and Theravada Buddhism.

Reformulations in popular practice

On the whole colonial rule did not integrate tribal minorities into states any more than earlier indigenous lowland states had. On the peripheries or margins of centralising colonial states modern forces took effect mainly through channels such as missionising. From the late nineteenth century Protestant missionaries brought communities like the Karen in Burma and the Batak of Sumatra into contact with both Christianity and, not incidentally, modern education. In the postwar era the independent states, dominated by speakers of Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Javanese, have spearheaded vigorous new polices of cultural integration. These threaten, ironically often more than earlier western systems did, to lead to the disappearance of the hundreds of tribal or ethnic minority groups which have inhabited the less trafficked zones of the region. The residual autonomy of tribal communities in remote parts of the Shan plateau and Mindanao, the Mentawi islands, and interior Borneo or New Guinea have all been brought into direct and increasingly routinised contact with new institutions of government, foreign capitalised businesses, national education and modern health care.
Thus we may observe that if colonialism defined our current maps of the region, the independent states have been left to effect the policies which aim to culturally integrate the peoples living within those boundaries. Similarly in rice growing village society, still the foundation for the dominant populations of the region, there has been a penetration of state control in the postwar era far surpassing colonial interventions. Through most of the region village heads and councils had functioned to represent local communities, by their mediation muting the intervention of outside forces in the village sphere. Now village heads are increasingly the bottom rung of bureacracies and their responsiveness to local demands has weakened along with the claims of residents to land and the related strength of contacts with local spirit realms.
Notwithstanding these interventions traditional and explicitly religious activities remain rich and varied. Many tribal and village cultures remain vigorous and their commitment to rituals still goes with respect for the spirits of sacred sites. Spiritually linked healing practices remain widespread, as are possession cults and magical undercurrents. Ordinary people everywhere still use amulets and folk medicines; rituals at sacred springs help people find lovers; and students still visit the graves of grandparents to contact spirits, if now to aid success in modern examinations. In village societies the maintenance of traditional beliefs is associated with continuing agricultural and life cycle rituals.
Continuities within ritual life can be remarkable: even in Bali, long innundated by tourism, ritual practices still mirror those of the prewar era. In the Philippines fiestas celebrate not only holy days and national holidays but also harvests and life-cycle events. Patron saints, as elsewhere in the Catholic world, occupy a position similar to that of guardian spirits in other parts of Southeast Asia. Even among Southeast Asia's widespread Chinese migrant population the cohesion of spirit medium cults remains. In Java village life continues to centre on communal rituals despite the fact that they have become expensive. Financial stresses have not stopped villagers in Kalimantan (Borneo), Bali or Burma from competing to outdo each other in funeral or initiation ceremonies and often these lead hosts into severe debt. While orthodox Muslims in Indonesia or Malaysia are less likely to overextend in this fashion, the same impulse is displaced among them into excesses of giving in conjunction with Hari Raya, at the end the fast month of Ramadan.
The syncretic traditional religions, notably local versions of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, blended with these undercurrents of local culture and still remain the largest formal communities of believers. But, according to Gourou for example, the central social focus in every village of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam was never the Buddhist temple, but the dinh. As the site for major agricultural rituals and other communal celebrations it is the building in which ritual meetings aim to establish or maintain harmony with deities, the patron spirits of the village. For the populace in general ancestral spirits have appeared unquestionably real and though Buddhist monks were usually also present, they were not often central to village life. The resilience of such village beliefs was evident in the 1970s when, even after several decades of communist rule, "...village elders were found to be restoring the old ritual processions to the dinh, the village communal house, whose mystique--and the politics associated with it--had supposedly been transformed and transposed with the downfall of colonialism."
In the archipelago periodic conflict in Mindanao relates to government efforts to subordinate the Moros within the Catholic and Manila dominated state. In Malaysia the so-called "Emergency", a war between Chinese, British and Malays, extended through the 1950s and drove guerrilla fighters into the forest areas of the Semang, forcing some to cross the border into Thailand and others into resettled villages. Indonesian confrontation with Malaysia in the early 1960s similarly drew armies to the boundary of Sarawak and Kalimantan. Previously Indonesian military action against the Dutch, in what became Irian Jaya, had already established a military channel for integrating Irian into the state. Christian missions and Churches became intensely active there only in the 1950s, in the last decade of Dutch control, and since its defacto encorporation into Indonesia in 1962 they have remained the major alternative network to the government in Irian Jaya. Subsequently the protracted war against Fretlin in East Timur, beginning in 1975, has had a similar complexion, aiming to subsume ethnic identities into the nation and facing resistence which has sometimes drawn on Catholic networks. The resettlement of Visayans in Mindanao or of Javanese in Sumatra, Irian Jaya, Sulawesi and Kalimantan, like the rapid expansion of forestry, has also worked to destroy the shifting lifestyles which underpinned the earlier rich diversity of local cultures.
Traditional ceremonial, political or economic exchange between hill and valley peoples had built in mechanisms to moderate inequities and maintain distance; modernising governments work to encorporate local chiefships or village councils into national administrations. As in the colonial era conversion to Christianity sometimes appeared an attractive counter option. Even in Thailand, where extension of Theravada into the hills is underway, some hill groups have become Christian instead. Missionary work directed at Biblical translation has facilitated conversion of predominantly oral traditions into writing, providing a route to literacy which is especially relevant for minorities interested in maintaining their language while accessing modern education. This competed with nationalist policies which have usually emphasised literacy through schooling in the language of the dominant ethnic group. Among the Karens, many of whom were converted by Baptists or Buddhists during the past century, natural (Y'wa), ethnic cultural (Mu Kaw Li) and ancestral (bgha), spirit forces continue to interact even among the large number who became Christian. Since 1962 the Ne Win government has actively pursued a policy of assimilation, but militant Karen nationalism remains in residual form along the Burmese-Thai border. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which adopted Chinese policies with regard to ethnic minorities, promotion of literacy was channelled through indigenous tribal languages.
Warfare and its attendent disruptive modes of central intervention has shaped the experience of most tribal areas of the mainland through much of the past four decades. The Vietminh defeated the French in the hills at Dien Bien Phu only through alliance with hill peoples who they had depended on throughout their struggle. This alliance laid the basis for an unusual degree of autonomous tribal power in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Annamite chain, bordering Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos, has for decades been a key channel supplying guerrilla armies: first for Vietnamese against the French and then Americans, then for the Khmer resistance to the Vietnamese. In the Shan plateau the mainly Christian Karens, separate communist groups and opium warlords have been fighting intermittently since 1948. Similarly until the early 1970s at least Sihanouk self consciously considered Theravada Buddhism as the prime instrument of national integration for Cambodia. In Thailand's Northeast, North and South there have been periodic communist or ethnic guerrilla movements and since the war the Thai government has felt that the security of its borders depended on assimilating the minorities into lowland Theravada culture.
Thus in 1963 the Dhammajarig (travelling Dhamma) program began self consciously to promote the extension of Buddhism to the hill tribes with an assimilationist objective. By 1967 one hundred monks were sent and instructed to explain their practices whenever local people inquired. Observers of lowland villages uniformly note that the village wat remains the prime socially integrating institution of rural Thai society. Some have argued that the bounds of the village in central Thailand are defined by participation in specific wat communities. Everywhere participation involves both explicitly religious rites, associated with agricultural cycles, and normative Buddhist celebrations. Village monks are commonly youth who involve themselves increasingly in labour projects as well as with spiritual or secular teaching. While they may now help build roads or advise local military officers, the respect villagers and officials alike demonstrate is still both strong and rooted in religious sensibilities. Villagers view monks as a separate class despite the fact that most men have, if briefly, been ordained themselves.
Throughout the village societies of the lowland Theravada Buddhist Lao, Burmese, Khmer and Thai regions villagers maintain animistic as well as Buddhist beliefs. Students like Spiro have seen animism and Buddhism as though they are separate systems interacting, but most now concur with Tambiah, who presented them as sub-complexes within one system. Rites oriented toward summoning and ensuring the presence of the "vital essence" of life, leipya in Burmese, khwan in Tai, pralu'n in Khmer represent ongoing animistic conceptions. Respect for village guardian spirits and interest in the sacred power of places and amulets or ritual objects combine with indigenous systems of astrology, tattoos and sexual magic and those with systems of merit making, monastic schooling and the doctrine of karma. These are most elaborated in the nat cults of Burma, but everywhere through the region practices of spirit possession and healing, linked to beliefs in life essence, remain powerful at the village level.
In Kampuchea and Laos the sangha lost ground, but has not disappeared, under communist governments. The proportion of monks relative to the overall male population has halved in Thailand between the 1920s and 1970s, but remains high, at about 1:34. In Burma and Thailand the number of village youth ordaining for the annual rain retreat is still high, though opening of secular education has competed with the sangha as a vehicle of social mobility and thus fewer choose the monkhood as a long term vocation. In Burma it was claimed that the sangha had declined from some 100,000 in royal times to 70,000 in 1941 and then, even more rapidly, to 45,000 in 1958. In the Philippines, where the Catholic priesthood has a very different relationship to the general population, there were less than 4000 priests in the 1960s. Nevertheless there too the role of religious specialists at the local level has been changing and they have been more directly used as agents of change, whether on behalf of the government or through their own perception of themselves as agents of change in the social, as well as specifically religious, spheres.
This sort of shift in the role of religious specialists was noted in the Indonesian context by Geertz, who observed that in the 1950s the politicisation of rural life through parties led the rural kyai, Javanese Islamic teachers, to become brokers for modern politics and ideas as well as continuing to function as teachers within the religious schools, the pesantren, which housed them. At the same time the penghulu, in charge of mosques, and hakim, religious judges, have become even more directly part of national structures through their integration, via the Ministry of Religion, into the national bureaucratic network. In Indonesia at the local level the prewar Muhammadiyah has remained a powerful organisation through its school system. It has been joined since the 1970's by a series of newer dakwah movements. Religious impulses of all sorts were strengthened in Indonesia through the coup of 1965 as they had been earlier through the revolution. A combination of political pressure and personal trauma led many Javanese to fill the mosques for Friday noon prayers. Many people since the 1970s have undoubtedly found renewed commitment to a more purely Islamic faith in the process.
Islamic efforts to purify Javanese Islam of syncretic beliefs and coincident insistence that all Muslims must rigorously obey the injunctions of their faith had the unintended effect of pushing committed Javanists to define themselves in non-Islamic terms. In the late 1960s several hundred thousand converts joined Christian Churches. Hindu, Buddhist, and mystical movements were also injected with a new vitality. Hinduism, Hindu Dharma in Indonesia, was exclusively Balinese until 1965, when scattered villages, especially in the mountainous regions of East and Central Java, chose to identify themselves as Hindu. Whether opting for Hinduism or Buddhism, villagers in Java have often done so out of conviction that, among the alternatives presented, the Indic religions are closest to the reality of their ongoing traditional practices. At the same time new requirements have challenged most local religious communities to redefine themselves in scriptural terms in order to gain recognition from the new national bureauracy.
This challenge forced Balinese Hindus to redefine their practices during the 1950s. A new generation of postwar Balinese began to establish direct contact with Indian Hindus in order to gain recognition from the Ministry of Religion. Geertz observed, on the basis of his studies in the late 1950s, that this reformation of Balinese religion resulted in the formalisation of teachings on a more literal basis, the invention of new rituals and the construction of sometimes bizarre new temples. At the same time the continuing strength of earlier ceremonial religion is exemplified in Bali, where temple ritual cycles have been maintained. Associated dramatic performances and artistic activities have as often been strengthened as weakened by tourism, as foreign audiences supplement income for hamlets which channel new money into old rituals. The most spectacular demonstration, exceeding even the drama of royal cremation, was the Ekadasa Rudra ceremony at the mother temple of Bali at Besaki. This two month long ceremony was initiated in 1963, as March 8th of that year was the end of the Saka year 1884, and marked a one hundred year cycle from the previous ceremony. As that ritual cycle was interrupted by the erruption of Mount Agung it was only "completed" through cleansing rituals in 1979. The successful second attempt showed the markings of New Order society as well as a powerful depth of local commitment to enact a traditional magical ceremony.
Changes have been necessary within all of the other Asian based religions in Indonesia. Several of the small, previously exclusively urban, modern Buddhist movements have became mass movements. Modern Indonesian Buddhism has roots within both the local Chinese communities and in priyayi circles, as some of them came to identify with it through the Theosophical Society in the prewar period. Even within the reformed Hindu and Buddhist spheres there have been rebels. Some Javanists hold contemporary versions of the Indic which hark back to syncretic Majapahit, to mysticism rather than scriptural modernism. In the 1970s the Surakarta based Sadhar Mapan advanced Javanist Hindu yogic rather than Balinese ritual practice, as contained in the mainstream Parisada Hindu Dharma, and Kasogatan, a small tantric styled group, also looked to the Majapahit text Sanghyang Kamahayanikan rather than to the purism of many modern Buddhists.
"Religion" had meant the nexus of ritual magic and mystical theory which everywhere wedded private and communal practices with performance and textual traditions. In opting for the new versions of Hinduism or Buddhism villagers were often expressing their sense that even modernist versions of those nevertheless conform to their actual tradition of practice more than modernist versions of Islam did. From village perspectives or for traditionally minded Javanese or Balinese, religious identification was never such an exclusive matter. In any event all of the dominant national organisations of the world religions in Indonesia are now modernist in tone and exclusive in structure, emphasising ritual, text, and doctrine to the exclusion of mysticism and traditional magical praxis.

Magical, millenarian and mystical practices

Just as modernising governments have established powerful channels to integrate, dominate and reform the cultures of geographically remote peoples, so they have intruded with increasing directness on the magical practices of villagers even within the centrally positioned lowland societies. The postwar communications revolution has reconfigured cultural relations both horizontally, through space as it were, and vertically, cutting downward across social classes. Most new national governments have actively suppressed the most obviously magical and millenarian elements of local religion, in effect favouring formalised orthodoxies--not surprisingly as those usually imply hierarchies which can be manipulated by centralising powers. Whether they have been socialist or capitalist in orientation recent governments have all endorsed older imperial views of folk practices as reflections of "pre-scientific superstition" which impede "modern progress".
In socialist Vietnam there has been willingness to compromise with Buddhism, allowing it a central committee. Support has even extending to the establishment of a High Level School of Vietnamese Buddhist studies. The government is nonetheless actively hostile to anything representing popular millenarianism, which it sees as representing a throwback to definitely outdated superstitions. Folk rituals combined spiritualist seances with Buddhism. An element of animism, through the contacts with spirits implied, made local traditions similar to many others throughout the village cultures of the region. About ten percent of the population in Southern Vietnam were Catholic in the early 1960s, an estimated 35-40% were considered strong believers in Mahayana Buddhism, the remained were gauged nominal, meaning that they adhered to a mixture of animism, Taoism and Confucianism.
Alongside traditional religious practices there have been substantial new sectarian movements everywhere in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam the Hoa Hao sect, founded in 1939, claimed a membership of 450,000 in 1964 in the Province of Ang Giang alone and two million overall. It has been essentially a local form of Buddhism, but with emphasis on traditional folk practices rather than the more scriptural style of the Thien (Zen) revivalist monks, who began to gain strength from the 1930s onward. Teachings included not only a strong element of millenarianism but also emphasis on moral reform. In 1966 the Cao Dai, founded in 1925, was estimated to have between one and two million members. It recognised the revelations received by the prophets of all the major world religions, somewhat in the fashion of Ba'hai, presenting them all as vehicles of God's purpose in the world in the past. In it presence of belief in the one God stands above notions of karma and reincarnation, as is also the case in many Javanese movements. Sect activities were most notable during the 1950s through their political implications, but the indications are that the syncretic sects remained healthy under socialism. Recent visitors have reported not only that attendance at Sunday mass in the cathedrals of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been spectacular, but also that sect temples in the delta are in excellent repair.
In Burma large numbers of the Chin followed a syncretic movement which, like other millenarian movements since the late nineteenth century, adopted aspects of Christianity. The Pau Chin Hau, can be interpreted as a movement which adopted elements of Christianity as an indigenous democratisation movement which countered both traditional chiefly authority and the intensification of Burmese control. The growth of new styles of and the extension of contexts for insight (vipassana) meditation is of more consequence in Burma. This movement had roots early in the century, but after 1950 was formally encouraged, particularly by state sponsorship of meditation centres. These were recognised in varying grades and then registered and granted subsidies. From an early stage these centres catered to foreign students of Buddhism. Since the 1950s small groups of foreign students have always been present and in this sector Burma has never been completely closed. Within that sphere Mahasi Sayadaw occupies a special place, due especially to the patronage provided to him during the 1950s by the U Nu government.
In Thailand the most internationally known exponent of modern Buddhist mediation has been Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, who has presided over the forest hermitage of Suan Mokh in the South. While doctrinally orthodox and borrowing from Zen he presents a view of Buddhism grounded in "this worldly" action. His view is that Buddhism is relevant not only cosmologically, as though only in some future life, but also in terms of its relation to continually evolving living situations. He emphasised, as core doctrine of Buddhism in fact always have, that the states of samsara, the worldly condition of attachment, and nirvana, the bliss of release, are interiorised conditions in the here and now. Setting himself early on against the notion that Buddhism was fatalistic, he stressed in relation to the teachings of all world religions that they focussed ultimately on the practical realisation of principles. In a political context his teachings can be styled a form of Buddhist socialism, one which rejected both communist and capitalist materialisms. He has been able to speak to many of young educated Buddhists who aim to reconcile traditional faith with modern civic action.
Popular stereotypes of Buddhist monks as intensive meditators have long been dismissed. Though the forest tradition of intensive insight meditation practice has an ancient history with lineages into the present, the vast majority of Theravada monks in Thailand neither teach nor even practice meditation. Nevertheless there several significant schools of vipassana practice have emerged from the sangha, extending to lay followers who may undertake ten day retreats on a regular basis. Several teachers have gained overseas followings. In the early twentieth century the meditation master Achaan Mun, who spent most of his career in the Northeast of Thailand, revived the longstanding tradition of forest monastic disciplines. His disciples are scattered throughout the country, having founded their own schools of meditation and catering to both monks and laity. His most noted follower, Achaan Chaa of Wat Pah Pong in Ubon Province, attracted continuous patronage from Bangkok and has sent disciples to establish forest meditation centres in England and Australia.
Whether through modern forms of meditation or in other ways, through education and community action, increasing numbers of monks are actively concerned with trying to reconcile their practices with modern life. Many who aspire to move upward socially, also nevertheless show serious commitment to meditation. The overall effect of modernising meditative practices is a new strength of emphasis on the possibility of contributing postively through social action by being more tuned and egoless. Whatever the traditional conjunction, it appears increasingly that in contemporary Buddhism there is a positive evaluation of ameliorative social action. The gap between monk and laity, at least with respect to spiritual practices, is also being reformed and in certain respects closed. The meditation movements, both within and beyond the sangha, represent an active repositioning and continuation of commitment to spiritual realisation.
In Malaysia, where the formal status of Islam as the religion of "Malays" militates powerfully against syncretic cults of the type allowable in Theravada or Javanese environments, local healers and urbanites nevertheless participate in magical practices or in marginal "new" religious movements. Just as the dakwah movements represent a reinvigoration of Malay identity through strengthening of a pure Islamic commitment, among local Chinese and Indians there have been many followers not only of charismatic Christianity but also of the Indian saint Satya Sai Baba and of the Baitiangong. The latter, founded by Zhao Chongming after a vision in 1976, attempted to unite spirit medium cults in middle class Kuala Lumpur. These movements indicate, just as do the urban followers of vipassana meditation in Rangoon and Bangkok or the adherents of faith healers in Manila, that magic, millenarianism and mysticism remain popular among western educated middle class Southeast Asians as well as in villages, where it is easier to see such beliefs as a residue of earlier tradition.

Within Indonesia the relationship between politics, religion, and mysticism has been transformed since independence, in the process altering both the context and internal structures of local variants of mysticism. Sukarno's voice had joined others in warnings against black magic, which was a recurrent focus of public debate throughout the 1960s. Since the mid-1960s recognised movements have had to firmly abjure interest in political power, giving official legitimacy only to movements which were at least ostensibly a-political. In the classical context mysticism, culture, and politics were inextricably interwoven in theory and practice and such a separation was inconceivable. The modern context of religious plurality, Islamic strength, and outwardly secular government all worked to pressure Javanists, those who tended to be the most mystical in their spirituality, into formal organisations. Within this context such organisations have to be defined as purely mystical, in the classical sense of union mysticism, and this separates mysticism from the magical and millennial elements to which it was bound by tradition. The term "kejawen" now most often refers specifically to the traditional styles within which spirit relations, magic powers, and millennial expectations were fundamental. This style remaines powerful, even though it is restricted in organisational expression, as a substratum of popular outlook and cultic movement. At the same time new forms of mysticism have risen out of Javanist orientations.
Repression of millennial movements has been continual, constituting an ongoing theme of religious politics in the postwar period. In 1967 the Mbah Suro movement was suppressed after it spread rumours of radical change from its centre near Ngawi; in 1968 the Java wide Manunggal movement was outlawed after a public trial. Tens of thousands of members, some of them highly placed military and civilian officials paid homage to their guru, Romo Semana, in a style the government felt evoked Indic courts. Defenders argued that their behavior merely reflected ordinary expression of respect for an elder. This incident demonstrated the extent to which power oriented and magical spirituality, tied closely to normal social patterns, had become problematic in a context of commitment to modernising and centralising state power.
When the Suharto government announced that it had uncovered an attempted coup in September 1976 it became clear quickly that it centred an until then unknown mystic named Sawito. He had visited power points and, at Gunung Tidar at the centre of Java, claimed to have been given the authority, previously held by Semar, the guardian of Java. Subsequently he gathered a remarkable collection of signatures to attach to a document criticising the moral fibre of Suharto. Former Vice-President Hatta and all the prominent religious leaders whose signatures appeared on the document quickly denied having known what was in it, but the document was nonetheless taken seriously. From the western standpoint Sawito's threat seemed trivial, but the magnitude of Suharto's response demonstrated his sense of vulnerability in those Javanist terms. This special fear, in the face of mystical claims that he lacked the wahyu, the divine sanction on which power is supposed to rest, itself indicated the continuing wider relevance of the underlying complex of beliefs the challenge related to.
Kebatinan movements have been noted since independence in Indonesia. Generally emphasising experiential realisation of the Absolute, they are mainly Javanese in origin and composition and see their practices as rooted in an ageless indigenous wisdom which predates Indian influences. In this context mysticism refers, as everywhere in its classical meaning, to the inner, spiritual and esoteric dimension within all religion and also more especially to beliefs, practices and movements which are defined by their focus on individual realisation. There are hundreds of identifiable movements in the country. Subagya listed 288 in 1973; an inventory in 1980 registered 160; but there can be no definitive listing. Many groups are so small, local, ephemeral and informal that they never merit note, though even some of those may be quite significant. The tarekats, the Sufi movements, are also mystical, but their affiliation with Islam is intrinsic and they are thus not generally bracketed with the independent movements. Several dozen movements have Java wide or genuinely Indonesian membership. These include Pangestu, Subud, Sapta Darma, Ilmu Sejati, Sumarah and Hardopusoro. A few of those claim memberships over one hundred thousand but most have at best several thousand core members, referring to those who are centrally motivated by their practice.
Kebatinan groups existed within the Dutch colonial framework but were necessarily secretive in that context. They came into public view during the revolutionary fighting of the late 1940s. Then, parallelling the organising process of the 1950s through all sectors of society, major movements adopted formal patterns with elected officers, minutes and conferences. This process was in part spontaneous, in part a response to the new demand for records of membership and meetings on the part of government agencies. In the early 1950s a number of movements argued that they deserved recognition as separate religions, suggesting that in the context of national independence it would be an anomaly if only "imported" religions received government approval. Sapta Darma, maintained that argument into the 1970s, but most accepted early on that they were unlikely to get recognition as religions because the violent response that would have brought from Muslims precluded it.
In the traditional setting mystical consciousness and social power were cosmologically bound together. The Indic notion of the devaraja and the Islamic ideals of the state as guardian of religion both implied that the ruler had a special relation to the sacred. Insofar as mystics claimed direct contact with divinity they therefore walked a delicate line to avoid appearance of separate claim to secular authority. Under the Dutch such movements attracted surveillance as potential focal points of rural unrest and in the period since independence the political sensitivity of and pressures on religious life have increased. Increasingly autonomous and exclusive definition of each element in the religious scene naturally extended into intensified competition, both to participate in the newly established power structures of the state and to determine how the national identity would relate to religious convictions.
Popular association of kebatinan with occultism, no less than analytical association of mystical gnosis with instrumental effects, both represent confusion of forms for essence. All of the major national movements disassociate themselves from kejawen occultism, emphasising direct consciousness of God rather than culturally rooted symbols and spirits. This shift of emphasis from powers to consciousness is not simply a response to the politicised context of Javanese mysticism. The same polarity is rooted within early Indic culture and also represents a penetration of Semitic forms of monotheism, which stress distinction between magic and divine revelation, into the Javanist world. Although Javanist tradition still prioritises a Tantric styled identification of consciousness and powers, it also already contained a Buddhist styled emphasis on the void as a powerful counter to that, the extension of monotheism resonated with that preexisting strand of local spirituality. Tantric patterns continue implicitly to have strength in village practices, the danhyang cults, and in movements such as Sadhar Mapan and Manunggal. But the Buddhist tradition and mystical separation of consciousness from any visible effects is profoundly rooted in a tradition extending back over a millennium, one which has dovetailed with modern pressures to produce more exclusive emphasis on consciousness.
The movements are not equivalent to Sufism, which is integrally tied to a "world religion", but rather to culturally based traditions such as Taoism or Shinto. Sufism and Zen place emphasis on lineages connecting living masters to Mohammed and the Buddha. In Javanism such lineage is denied not just as a counter to Islamic claims that it is derivative, but also as an assertion that religious knowledge comes direct from God, in short assertion that kebatinan is mystical in the fundamental sense of the term. Throughout the 1970s public tension frequently focussed on the manoeuvring, partly inspired by the Suharto government, to confer greater legitimacy to the mystical movements. Islamic reaction has been intense and each step toward independent legitimacy has been geared, as much as possible, to avoid stirring reaction. Related debates, such as those surrounding the effort to bring in secular marriage laws in 1973 and 1974, have touched the same sensitive area of religious conflict. In 1973 it became legal to belong to mystical movements without also claiming membership in a "world religion"; in 1978 these movements were given a new basis of legitimacy when they were released from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religion and given their own Directorate within the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Members use Javanese in daily life and group meetings, but Indonesian is used for organisational matters. Traditional cults focused on charismatic guru, modern movements have semi-rationalised structures. Leaders are distinguished from spiritual teachers and if the patronage model remains strong in practice theory no longer places it at the heart of organisation. Organisations adopt the administrative hierarchy common to all national organisations, but growing care in the keeping of membership lists is often mainly to facilitate relations with supervising bodies. Major sects are relatively open in structure and streamlined in practice, esoteric tendencies decline hand in hand with the decreasing emphasis on instrumental magic, ancestral spirits, and occult powers. Healing plays a major role in sects such as Subud and Sapto Darmo, but is balanced by emphasis on "God's responsiblity" for effecting cures. Monotheistic emphasis is reflected in often puritanical distaste for the possession cults characteristic of most local traditions. Similarly, people in most movements speak of meditation as sujud (surrender) or panembah (prayer) rather than semadi. The Indic resonance of the latter renders it suspect to Islam, which sees semadi as implying entry into a "Godless void", because it usually comes without a notion of personalised divinity.
The strongest evidence of an essentially Islamic framing of discourse about religion lies in the very extent of public debate about and between "Islam and kebatinan". The relationship has been problematised from the earliest days of the Republic in formal contexts of legal clarification, in the press and down to the village level in relations between branches of mystical movements and local authorities. Umbrella organisations emerged in the 1950s when the leading national spokesperson for them was Wongsonegoro. He headed the Congress of Indonesian Mystics (BKKI), which petitioned Sukarno to request status equal to religions in 1957. In Malang in 1960 a subsequent congress stressed that kebatinan and religion differed only in emphasis--mysticism focussing on perfecting the individual spirit while the latter emphasised prayer to God. In 1961 a seminar considered the relationship between kebatinan and Sukarno's political philosophy; in 1962 another stressed the relationship between spiritual practice, national struggle and world peace. The BKKI aimed to clarify that kebatinan represented an indigenous spiritual tradition of high standing, not a jumble of superstition and magic. Participants felt a special relationship to the national identity, arguing that the foundation of the nation's belief in God lay in the strength of kebatinan within it. In 1958 the BKKI affirmed that the "essential characteristic of the Indonesian national identity lies in emphasis on life of the spirit".
There is strong pressure behind the growth of a literalist monotheism. The first principle of the Pancasila is an underscoring of the profession of faith in one God, though omitting reference to Muhammad, in Islamic terms. Islam may not have established itself as the religion of Indonesia, but there is no doubt that its sense of religion defines, shapes and constrains discourse about religion and spiritual life. This pressure is conveyed through the government bureaucracy and has influenced private practices as well as public expression of religious life. The flavour of rear-guard action, rationalisation and justification of practices, pressures even mystics toward literal Islamic terms of discourse. At the same time, as a separate vector of change, there is growing emphasis on a restricted range of dimensions. Indonesian Muslims define the religious dimension increasingly in terms of its socio-cultural dimensions. From the perspective of the mystics it appears that orthodoxy itself looses sight of the fact that religion and spirituality are not only mediated and expressed through human symbols and actions but also exist as a sphere in itself.

In reflecting generally on the range of magical, mystical and millenarian movements through the Southeast Asian region we can note strong common patterns. Differences relate partly to varying dominant "world religions" and national governmental policies, as those appear as moderating forces shaping local expression. Everywhere an explicit ideology of scientific modernism colours dominant formal perspectives on folk magic. Conversely, whether in Filipino faith healing practices in Luzon or in the thinking of the Cao Dai in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, local sects attempt to "domesticate" science both through encorporating reference to it in magic and by attempting to validate practices by pseudo-scientific criteria. In any event folk magical healing, related to shamanism, remains present, however substantially reformed and defensive.
Like magical healing, millenarian currents also remain powerful as a framework for folk perception and practice. An underlying conviction in the cosmological meaning of earthly events, implicitly always including politics, continues to lead people thoughout the region to frame social process within their spiritual senses of what constitutes humanity, implying ultimately that life leads toward resolution and balance within nature and that that may be expressed socially through radical shifts in power. These impulses are expressed through national political philosophies as "neo-traditionalism", as noted above in observing the convergences which relate marxist and millenarian formations in both Vietnam and Java. The same forces have also operated separately, as a distinct pattern evident through the region, in the form of purely local expressions centring on charismatic teachers who have eschatological visions of social process.
While the magical and millenarian strands of postwar religious practice are most rooted in and pervasive through the villages of the region, newly formed mystical sects and meditation practices cross the urban-rural divide and have often been urban based. Within them the reformed contemporary elites have essentially rescued aspects of their traditional esoteric spirituality, but by disentangling consciousness raising practices, as we may reframe meditation, from the magic and hierarchies of older orthodox Buddhism or Islam, within which such practices had earlier been embedded. Vipassana practitioners following the Burmese master Mahasi Sayadaw or the Thai Achaan Cha; Javanese members of Pangestu, Subud or Sumarah; Tagalog disciples of faith healers; and Vietnamese followers of Cao Dai have practiced meditation or entered trances through channels which are new ways of exploring essentially the same spiritual domains older local traditions had accessed, but in those contexts through the mediation of religious specialists such as village shaman, Catholic priests, Islamic ulama or Buddhist monks.

Purist revivalism and secular modernism

The breakdown of communal structures through the rapidity of socio-economic change has brought a variety of responses. Nevertheless the majority of Southeast Asians still pursue folk customs or syncretic traditional religions. Those derive from practices which were fully formed in earlier periods of history, including the variations of orthodoxy and mysticism already alluded to. Distinctive new currents, such as secularism and fundamentalism, may appear as stark counterpoints to each other, but they equally embody the specifically modern situation. Earlier scriptural modernism was a feature of prewar religious reform and paralleled nationalism in the political arena, it arose essentially as a correlate of the print media.
Now new fundamentalisms, like contemporary a-religious secularism, are more especially a reflection of electronic mass media. Fundamentalist revivalism, popular purist movements of regeneration and internal conversion, may be especially apparent in the Islamic sphere but similar movements appear in all other local communities. The groundswell of revivalist religion undercuts assumption that industrialisation and the pressures of urban life would decrease the social role of religion. Just as the intensity of fundamentalism in the United States or Iran has confounded expectations, so in Southeast Asia one of the clearest responses to the pressures of modern life has been intensified literal faith. These belief patterns are not, as some secularists imagine, explicable mainly as a residue of earlier traditional faith. They are facilitated by the effectiveness of electronic media and are a specifically modern phenomenon. Earlier forms of reformism were "modernist" rather than a-religiously secular or fundamentalist.
Extending outward from urban areas, and reflecting the outlook of those educated in western styles, we can still identify many variants of the scriptural modernism which have prewar origins. Rationalising reformists have emerged separately from within each local Southeast Asian community, they have certainly not been only reflections of the activity of missions from beyond the region, as indigenous modernism arose beyond the sphere of direct colonial impact as a process of independent innovation. Generally they have argued at once for adjustment to modernity and for a return in more critical and rational terms to the original canons of their religion. In the process they attempt to disentangle scripture from myth and faith from magic, claiming a rationalism almost in the terms of modern science.
In Thailand the continuing linkage between the sangha and royalty has meant that modernist forms of religious consciousness were pioneered through dominant religious and political institutions rather than as a counter to them. Mongkut, King of Siam in the mid nineteenth century, had been a monk for two decades prior to assuming the throne. Through contacts he pursued with missionaries he undertook studies of Latin, English, mathematics and astronomy and he became critical of monks, including those who had trained him, who he felt engaged in chanting without understanding the scriptures. The emphasis on comprehension of texts he initiated through the Dhammayutikaya movement, first founded in 1833, aimed to reduce the related "confusion" of orthodoxy with popular magic and the related reformist sects which resulted have become especially important in all of the mainland sanghas.
In Thailand, Laos and Cambodia the traditionalist group is known as the Mahanikaya, or "Great Order", and the reformists belong to the Dhammayuttikaya. In Burma the traditionalists generally belong to the Sudhamma, the "Good Dhamma" order while the reformists belong to the Shwegyin, also founded in the nineteenth century. The modernist groups are more committed to emphasis on study of Pali texts and practice of meditation and are more strict with regard to prohibitions on the handling of money. Only a small minority of monks belong to the reformist orders, but they have strong royal patronage and greater influence than numbers alone suggest they would.
Where Western imperialism had divided religious and secular power religious from each other, politics and religious reformism nevertheless went hand in hand. Because the link between politics and established religion had been cut by imperialism in Burma, with the elimination of the traditional state, the sangha was weakened due to the absence of royal patronage. As a consequence lay movements, such as the Young Men's Buddhist Association, became the most visible foci of anti-colonial resistance. Religious issues nevertheless remained prominent within political nationalism, as suggested by the fact that its first notable victory early in the century came when agitation gave abbots the right to insist that even the British had to take shoes off upon entering temple compounds. The prominence of lay practices of vipassana, insight meditation, through teachings such as those of U Ba Kin and Mahasi Sayadaw, reminds us of the internal and non political aspects of modernising religion. Religious styles self consciously adapt to changing urban lifestyles and modern education, without always being a response to political issues and objectives.
Archipelago Malay Islamic modernism has had roots in Cairo, where Al-Azhar University housed Mohammad Abduh's influential effort to reconcile religious doctrine with scientific thought, making it a focus of Islamic intellectual life worldwide. Nationalism went hand in hand with renewal of religion and since independence Malay ethnicity has been identified increasingly with Islam, adding force to purism and influencing the complexion of religious practices on the ground. In one sense this recent trend is simply a continuation of the longstanding process of "masuk Melayu", that is of "becoming Malay". Whether in Indonesia, as especially in Kalimantan, or in Malaysia, as minority groups come increasingly into contact with urban currents they often adopt Malay-Indonesian language and Islam simultaneously. The modern context extends a longstanding process, but now usually with more direct movement to purist forms of Islam. In Indonesia the Muhammadiyah movement, founded in Yogyakarta in l9ll, established a network of schools with a curriculum including mathematics, science, and social studies. Most Javanese, even in cities, have experienced Islam as part of a synthesis including deeply rooted Indian thought and animistic spirit beliefs. Muhammadiyah, like other modernisms, stressed revamping of Islam to expunge what it saw as outdated elements, setting itself against the syncretism present within the pesantren pattern of tradition.

Contemporary purism is not simply a continuation of prewar scriptural modernism, it takes a sharper form. In Malaysia the dakwah movements do some external missionising but can be generally characterised as movements of internal conversion. Notable groups within this ambit include Darul Arqam, a small group centring on a commune near Kuala Lumpur; Jemaat Tabligh, an international movement originating in India; and, most importantly, ABIM, a nation wide local movement. Like Muhammadiyah in Indonesia or the Dhammayut sect in Thailand, the Darul Arqam has power beyond its numbers due to tight organisation and the high profile of its school and clinic. In both it draws strongly from traditional practices. The Jemaat Tabligh came to the peninsula in the 1950s and exists throughout the country, but with little formal organisation. ABIM, the Muslim Youth League of Malaysia, was founded in 1971 and now has a membership over 35,000. It sponsors rallies and is well organised throughout the school and university system. It has been strongly connected with international revivalism in Iran and the Arab Middle East, raising consciousness of those areas locally. It attracted a young and well educated membership under the leadership of Anwar Ibrahim and continues to emphasise internal purification of practices.
Generally in Malaysia during the 1970s and 1980s explicit and publicly indicated adherence to Islamic practices has been strongly on the upswing within the Malay community. The conflation of Malay ethnic and Muslim religious identity has been longstanding, but it is only recently that this has become a focus of constant invocation. Muslim holidays have become more definitively national in scope. Civil servants dress more conservatively, moving away from the British conventions many had adopted in the colonial era. Religious issues have converged with ethnic conflict to a remarkable and uncomfortable degree. As Malays have moved increasingly into urban environments, largely facilitated by patronage through the bureaucracy but also by movement toward factory labour and away from the farms, they have confronted Chinese domination of the economy and conflict with western values more directly. These contexts have sharpened, rather than decreased, movement toward local values in a more purist form. Local movements have also been powerfully influenced by the post oil boom increase in the self confidence throughout the Islamic world. In part this is related to a world wide Islamic movement to reject the philosophical baggage which appears to go hand in hand with westernisation. The new strength of economies throughout the Islamic world provided an underpinning for this revival.
Indonesian dakwah movements have been increasing in strength since the early 1970s. The government has promoted renewal and reemphasis on Islam, almost in spite of itself. Though significant elements of the national leadership might be privately otherwise inclined, contributions from Suharto's discretionary funds to the pesantren have been consistently high from the late 1970s onward. The Ministry of Religion, still preponderantly Muslim in composition and orientation, carries out missionary activities, produces publications, and coordinates legal and educational offices which encourage purism. Government ironically goes farther in this respect than even many of those it is presumably catering to would want. Now the policy in all government buildings is to have a prayer room to cater to Muslims, the consequence is social pressure for those present to appear to be using these new facilities. Muhammadiyah continues to be active through its many schools and hospitals and, while relatively moderate by the standards of many groups, contributes to continuing Islamisation. The Dewan Da'wah Islamiyah Indonesia has been under the leadership of Muhammed Natsir, former Masyumi leader and onetime Prime Minister.
The previously apparently conservative Nahdatul Ulama has been reinvigorated since the 1970s. A dynamic new generation of activists, including Abdurrahman Wahid and Nurcholish Madjid, both thoroughly cosmopolitan products of highly charged modern pesantren education, present it with a radically new image. The pesantren networks have been revitalised and the tarekats, which were linked strongly to them earlier on, have recently regained a new legitimacy, perhaps coming as the lingering predispositions of Protestant Christian imperialists fade. It appears as though the modernist disdain for mysticism of the prewar era, one which drove those so inclined to distance themselves from Islam by associating with independent and explicitly syncretic movements, has shifted. Since the late 1970s radical movements have increased the political sensitivity of Islam. One indication of the government's attitude is that Libya and Iran are listed, along with Israel and China, among the countries citizens may not enter with an Indonesian passport.
While from many points of view the government has, in the past two decades, made powerful gestures to neutralise Islamic fundamentalism, within the Islamic community dissatisfactions have remained strong. Many have certainly felt that the New Order's willingness to accommodate mysticism (kepercayaan) by legitimising it in 1973, threatened the position of Islam within the country. There have only been a few public demonstrations, but the incidents which have come to the surface have attracted a great deal of publicity. The "Kommando Jihad" movement was banned in the late 1970s through association with movements to overthrow the government. In 1978 the Gerakan Pemuda Islam (Islamic Youth Movement) was banned. Libyans were associated with movements in Aceh, in 1981 another group was accused of having support from the Ayatollah Khomeini, a Bandung group commandeered a plane in 1980 and in 1985 the bombing of Borobudur was blamed on Muslim extremists.

Reformism and fundamentalism have appeared in every religious community. Vietnamese Buddhism had been a syncretic blend of spirit beliefs and Confucianism but was reshaped during the 1920s and 1930s. In the most dynamic phase of the postwar period for Buddhists there, a Vietnamese Buddhist Reunification Congress took place in the week of the New Year of 1964 at Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon. The congress aimed to unite the South's Mahayana and Theravada followers through a new modern structure, but only perhaps a million joined the resulting United Buddhist Association. Six regional groups of monks and two million estimated Theravada followers (mainly from provinces along the Cambodian border) remained unconnected to the federation.
Migrant Chinese Buddhism was so emphatically syncretic in Indonesia that it was officially called "Tridharma", meaning "the three teachings" and referring to a blending of the philosophies of Lao-tzu, Confucius and the Buddha. Local temples, klenteng, have generally invoked all three while emphasising one and at the same time almost always housing spirit medium practices related to folk ancestral cults. While increasing numbers of Indonesian Chinese have converted to Christianity, many have remained within the ambit of their own traditions. A few opted for modernised versions of Confucianism, which had a brief and tentative flowering but which is now discouraged in Indonesia, as it is viewed as an "ethnic" rather than "world" religion. More often local Chinese communities have effectively converted to new forms of Buddhism, some even to Japanese offshoots of Nichiren or to an Indonesian version of the Taiwanese based Unity Sect.
Southeast Asian "Hindus" have also experienced significant reformation. Just as folk practice of Balinese Hinduism is now complemented by a nationally administered orthodoxy, reflecting postwar contacts with India, elsewhere Hinduism has taken new forms which reflect the Hindu renaissance of the Indian homeland. Spillovers from the religious tensions of the South Asian subcontinent, such as those between Tamils, Sikhs and Hindus, have already been noted, as even in Singapore local communities extend the religious politics of new fundamental versions of their faiths. Movements such as the Arya Samaj, which allow non Indians to convert to Hinduism, have been active in Malaysia. Just as South African experience shaped Gandhi, Malaya was the home of one particularly noted modern Indian teacher. Swami Sivananda, many of whose disciples have a world-wide following, worked initially as a medical doctor in the peninsula early in this century. Revivals of Vedantic philosophy such as his now complement Tamil trance rituals such as Thaipusam.
To indicate the full extent of scripturalism and fundamentalism, we can note that as a style of religious commitment it is identifiable even within some ostensibly mystical religious communities. In Indonesia modernism is usually associated with Muslim organisations, but some Javanese movements are equally defined by revealed texts. Even their practices, as in the large and well established Pangestu movement for instance, can be more intellectual than meditative, thus resembling Protestant, Muhammadiyah or Dhammayut groups more than they do stereotypes of mysticism. If our purpose is to identify major strands of religious sensibility at the local level within Southeast Asia, it is certainly important to note that traditionalism, magic, millenarianism, mysticism, scripturalism and fundamentalism crosscut and exist as types of religiosity within all of the varied world religions and ethnic communities of the region.

Even in contexts of radical modernisation, traditional practices are often reformulated rather than dropped, as is evident in the vicinity of Kuala Lumpur through the way spirit possession works among factory women from village origins. Though modernity does appear to lead to a streamlining of beliefs it clearly does not always lead to secularisation. However if we are considering religious and cultural change in the broadest sense we must be consistent with the suggestion in the outset that "religion" refers fundamentally to any mediating system which connects people to what they can imagine as "really real". In those terms it is important to touch, however briefly, on aspects of world view and conviction which fall beyond the spheres conventionally designated as "religious".
Implicitly this survey has already done so, through suggestion of some of the ways in which the national revolutions and the construction of new cultures resonates with traditional spiritual and religious senses of social life. In dealing with variants of local practice, with new Southeast Asian ways of knowing what is real, it is equally important to note the power and extent of a-religious secularism, even if ironically framing that here as a variant "faith community".
The extension of basic literacy to the general population through modern schools must be considered one of the great achievements of the postwar states. The temple schooling of Thailand and Burma had effected levels of literacy well above those of premodern Europe and it has already been noted both that religious schools remain influential throughout the region and that religious subjects remain prominent in the curriculum of state schools, excepting the socialist states of Indochina. Conversely it can even be argued that religious senses of knowledge suffuse the theoretically secular schools. Secular schools present knowledge virtually as a "substance" which is communicated through mantric styled rote repetition. Sometimes it is seen virtually as passed by osmosis from teacher to pupil and the pattern of learning thus echoes the patronage model of discipleship which characterised earlier transmissions of craft skills or sacred lore.
At the same time it can be argued that, just as capitalism may be the most revolutionary force in transforming local societies, in the cultural sphere secularism is the most aggressive of the new faiths. Middle class urbanites are increasingly cosmopolitan through the nature of their lifestyles, working in white collar jobs, extensive travel and education in increasingly secular systems both at home and abroad. These new middle classes, people situated to control new economic activities, the apparatus of states and local adaptations of modern communications, naturally have power and prominence well beyond their statistical strength. As they are also often on the cultural vanguard, farthest removed from the mystical and magical inheritance of their traditional religions, the forces of genuine secularism are undoubtably increasing in significance.
However even modern art forms which appear quite secular on first glance can be read as the new social rituals of everyday life in urban contexts. Ludruk teaches urban publics in the postwar era in the same way earlier wayang carries (it is far from dead) a spiritual message to villagers. Traces of the earlier arts remain present within even such radical steps into new urbanism. So Peacock's study of the ludruk theatre, a proletarian drama still popular in Java, presented it as a "rite of modernisation". In both thematic content and dramatic form the theatre invoked formulaic visions of material progress, now for urbanites. But the modes of presentation nevertheless replicated traditional dramatic codes, even in the nature of the concentration displayed by actors as they virtually unconsciously drew on bodily modes of learning and dance forms which resonated unselfconsciously with the traditional court derived arts.
Radical though the changes of the postwar period have been, spiritual values and issues remain pervasively important. It is instructive, for example, that in the secular state of Vietnam self conscious appeal to spirituality remains. Vietnamese communist literary critics commented in 1970 on the American Susan Sontag's critique of the Tale of Kieu, the classic of the early 1800s. They observed without reservation that she was deeply socialised into the individualistic consciousness of the modern west and thus unable to grasp the "limitless richness" of the Vietnamese soul and with that the value and emphasis within its culture on communal sharing. Spiritual values can thus appear to remain prominent even within cultures which adhere to what most westerners identify as a materialistic ideology.

Trajectories of changing access to the real

Through the cycles of history Sinic, Indic, Islamic, and European forces have been super-imposed on Southeast Asia. Each worked in some sense to claim it, to recast society within borrowed models. Local cultural memories nevertheless preserve senses of primal identity and at the moment struggle to assert that through modern forms. Nationalist culture began to take root at the turn of the century, just as the colonial framework defined the boundaries of the contemporary state. Now metropolitan super-cultures radiate from the new national centres, promoting new languages and the growth of a supra-ethnic identity spread through the bureaucracy, schools, literature, electronic media, and, not least, the military. National revolutions have not been just a matter of achieving political and economic independence, they also involve assertion of identity in autonomous rather than derivative terms. Following the revolutions, the forces of modernity appeared to define national governments through models borrowed from the west and the dominant elites, whether secular or religious comprised the most westernised Southeast Asians. Tension between trajectories of growing global integration and resurgent primal identity combine to generate the extraordinary pressures under which contemporary Southeast Asians still labour.
Everywhere clearer demarcation of religious communities has paralleled the modern establishment of national boundaries mediated initially by colonialism. Syncretic styles of religion had not focussed on boundaries, but on courts, schools or monasteries. Those had existed in a hierarchical world conceived as requiring progress through layers of knowledge, guided by apprenticeships analogous to those in other domains of traditional learning, to a mystically conceived centre. Scripturalism redefined individual experience as literal and social identification as exclusive, thus tensions increased, intersecting also in new ways with political process. Buddhists felt their conviction as an element of revolution in Burma and many Muslims held that their revolutions should lead to an Islamic state. Paradoxically the strength of adherence to exclusivism undermined its realisation in a context crosscut by social and religious pluralism.
There has been a clear trajectory within the religious sphere in postwar Southeast Asia and it has been a major area of domestic concern. The dominant trajectory has been that of increasing scripturalism, increasing force to outlooks associated with the west but reflected locally in a wide range of unique adaptations. Colonial students of Theravada or of Islam often suggested that the Thai or Javanese were not "really" Buddhist or Muslim. Their view derived from a textual sense of religion and in the face of animistic practices they could only see claims to membership in world religions as a facade. The traditional syncretism of Southeast Asians did not mean that they did not belong within the sphere of the world religions they associated with, it meant that the religions themselves were syncretic. The nature of tensions between communities was transformed through the growth of the scripturalist community. Scripturalism has meant that religion has been defined in increasingly concrete terms. Scriptures, rituals, and doctrines are definable; the mystical is not. Modern structures have meant that definition and distinction have been of increasing importance. This has highlighted differences and increased tensions by sharpening the lines of contrast.
In the traditional context it seemed possible to be what modern syncretist leaders like U Nu or Sukarno said they were--in the latter's case at once mystic, Muslim, and Marxist. Now some can accept those possibilities but many cannot. Within the traditional religious world there was a very clear sense of a layered cosmos, a hierarchical structure in nature and within human consciousness. Traditionally all of Indianised states were defined cosmologically and by their centres; now states are defined geographically by their borders. The same shift has taken place within religions as modernity has flattened even local senses of religious space. Religious communities tend now to be closed and with clear boundaries, not open-ended and fluid, boundaries have arisen in precisely the same way that political boundaries have and as a result of the same forces.
New meditation movements and styles of mystical, millenarian and syncretic spiritual practice have appeared throughout the region, counterpointing the equally vigorous emergence of secular modernism. At the same time the spirit realms, once central to local maintenance of balanced relations with ancestral culture and the physical environment, now appear to be receeding along with the forests as a modern developmental world view advances. Finally we must note the emergence of secular practices within the urban middle classes and among industrial workers and itinerant traders. For the first time there is a vigorously growing sphere of agnosticism. Changes are not confined to shifts of membership from one religion to another, or from being religious to becoming agnostic or atheistic. Those shifts are significant and allegiances have been fluid in the region. But at the same time notable internal transformations have occurred within every community of belief. Though the nexus between cultural and spiritual life has been weakened this has led more often to restructured belief than to secular disbelief.
In the development of tourist industries there is also an ironic rebound affecting local cultures. Even the urban and internationally oriented Southeast Asians are themselves increasingly positioned as tourists in relation to village communities who retain what are now packaged, for tourist purposes, as "indigenous" and authentic culture. In areas particularly geared to tourism, such as Bali or Toraja in Indonesia, production of art is usually separated in new ways from the ritual context it previously sat within. This has an affect also, however inadvertently nevertheless profound, on those engaged in the artistic productions at issue. They begin to imagine themselves as, even to become, the almost museumised specimens which the commodification of culture, though packaging of tourism as a national industry, aims to turn them into.
Within some sectors of the modernising elites of the region there is strong and often repeated voice to the view that continuing adherence to beliefs in the supernatural is a prime inhibitor of development. This belief, common throughout the third world as a borrowing from the scientism of the developed world, applies to thinking with respect to modernising medical systems, which are one of the strongest vehicles contesting traditional healing related beliefs and practices. There is, apart from the self confidence evident in specific radical and especially religious and mystical circles, little confidence that western systems of knowledge can be challenged on their own grounds. But much of this is strictly rhetoric. This is to say that in public life within modern institutions educated people often play the roles they believe they are expected to according to the logic "modernity" appears to represent. Tambiah argues that the commitment to Buddhism, for example, has not declined, though its expression in social organisations, such as numbers in the monkhood, may have dropped as a proportion of the male population. It is most likely that the extent and depth of religiosity has not changed so much as the way it is socially articulated and publicly expressed.
Modernist styles of commitment have implications for personal experience. Traditional practices emphasise the intuitive aspects of religion; modern styles prioritise the intellectual. The Dhammayutikaya and the Muhammadiyah movements demythologise Buddhism and Islam respectively, echoing themes in contemporary Christian theology. Each modernism disentangles what it presents as the essence of religion from the ritual, mythic participatory, and intuitively apprehended aspects which used to be fundamental. Traditional education in Theravada wat or Islamic madrasah was defined by attunement through sacred language. The significance of chanting in those contexts lay not in whether words were understood but in the act itself, emphasis was on experience as such, not on understanding of or abstraction about it. Within modernism emphasis falls on written words everybody has equal access to and the defining features of belief are outside and apart from inner experience--emphasis on rational apprehension is a natural corollary. As community is defined increasingly through literally seen and logically understand forms, there has also been a shift of emphasis from the heart to the head, from the intuition to the intellect within individual experience. Using Geertz's terminology, we can note that people are now more likely to have faith in religion rather than accepting it implicitly as a system everyone belongs to.
The intensity of Southeast Asian experiences of the spiritual remains despite the challenges of materially directed ideologies from above and social stresses from below. The most significant changes have been occurring not in outward allegiances, but more subtly in the ways cultural symbols now mediate access to what Southeast Asians in this era are able to know or believe as real. The most obvious axis of change in this respect has been in the nature of adherence to beliefs, in the growing tendency to hold religious convictions as though they are ideological systems. In earlier periods most peoples of the region breathed their religion, experiencing it as an integral and multidimensional part of an inevitable social atmosphere. Within the now more obviously pluralistic world, religious experiences in the region assume increasingly distinct conceptual and institutional forms. In this era of internationalisation and cultural encounter no specific culture or religion, indeed no system of symbols, appears able to comfortably claim the exclusive grip it used to.

Bibliographic essay

The information explosion of the postwar era is reflected in scholarship on Southeast Asian religions. This is thus strictly a preliminary guide to monographs in English which focus on religious changes in postwar Southeast Asia, and the concentration is on works which connect religion to general processes of cultural change. Only especially critical ethnographies have been included, though almost every ethnography contains important sources of insight into practices of and changes in religion. Many important contributions to the subject are contained in collections which appear here only as such.

For the Southeast Asian region as a whole the study by Kenneth Landon, Southeast Asia: Crossroad of Religions, Chicago, 1949, remains important both as an introduction and for the insight it provides into the state of religion at the close of the war. The most helpful recent general work of synthesis is Fred von der Mehden's book on Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia, Syracuse, 19S6. Two important collections, one edited by Alton Becker and Aram Yengo.yan, The Imagination of Reality, New Jersey, 1979, and another by Mark Hobart and Robert Taylor, Context, Meaning and Power in Southeast Asia, Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1986, contain excellent insights. Relevant related shifts in communications systems, especially in media and drama, are covered in the survey by James Brandon, Theatre in Southeast Asia, Cambridge, Mass., 1967.

Charles Keyes' study. The Golden Peninsula, New York, 1977, is a superb survey treating social and religious changes on the mainland, including Vietnam, and Robert Lester's introductory survey, Theraxxida Buddhism in Southeast Asia, Ann Arbor, 1973, is a reliable starting point for exploration of the Buddhist countries. A more technical collection, edited by Manning Nash, Anthropological Studies in Theravada Buddhism, New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1966, contains essays which map the field as it has been explored by postwar students of Theravada, and the journalist Jerrold Schecter's work. The Neio Face of the Buddha, New York, 1967, is grounded enough to trust and useful for the scope of its coverage of postwar changes in Asian Buddhism.

There are excellent studies of the interplay between religion and politics in the Theravada countries. Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution, The Hague, 1965; Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma, ed. J.P. Ferguson. Ithaca, 1975: Donald Smith. Religion and Politics in Burma, Princeton, 1965; and Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror, World Renouiicer, Cambridge, UK, 1977, are each landmark works with very wide relevance. Similar themes are touched on in the essays in Bardwell Smith's edited collection. Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand. Laos, and Burma, Chambersburg, 1978, and in a symposium on religion and society in Thailand in the Journal of Asian Studies 36, 2 (1977), including essays by Kirsch, Reynolds, Keyes and Tobias. A more recent study by Peter Jackson, Buddhism, Legitimation, and Conflict, Singapore: ISEAS, 1989, includes particularly instructive material on urban sects in Thailand.

Notable ethnographies deal with the interface between normative Buddhism and folk magic in the postwar era. These include Manning Nash, The Golden Road to Modernity, Chicago, 1965; Molford Spiro, Buddhism and Society, London, 1971, and Burmese Superiiatiiralism. Englewood Cliffs, 1967; Stanley Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in Northeast Thailand, Cambridge, UK, 1971; and Bas Terweil, Monks and Magic, London, 1975. Louis Golomb's fine and ranging study. An Anthropology of Curing in Multiethnic Thailand, Urbana and Chicago, 1985, and Ruth-Inge Heinze's more narrow one, Timm Kliwan, Singapore, 1982, deal more exclusively with folk religion on its own terms. Apart from studies of village practice, there are a number of sources for insight into forest meditation practices. The most prominent is by Stanley Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, Cambridge, UK, 1984. Excerpts from the teachings of these teachers are well presented by Jack Komfield in Living Buddhist Masters, Santa Cruz, 1977, and pertinent commentary on the same movements can be found in Donald Swearer, Thai Buddhism: Two Responses to Modernity', Contributions to Asian Studies, V.4 (1973).

Studies of Islam in Southeast Asia have only recently begun to achieve the depth the subject deserves. Ahmad Ibrahim, Sharon Siddique, and Yasmin Hussain have collected many of the most important postwar essays or excerpts on the subject in their Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia, Singapore, 1985. Michael Hookers edited collection, Islam in South-East Asia, Leiden, 1983, is solid and the essays in it by Roy Ellen, on the ethnography of Islam, and Deliar Noer, on politics, are especially pertinent to exploration of postwar religious change. Taufik Abdullah and Sharon Siddique present a more patchy but still useful selection of essays in Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, Singapore, 1986. Like the latter, the collection edited by Raphael Israeli and Anthony Johns, Islam in Asia: Southeast and East Asia, II, Boulder, 1984, is uneven, but includes useful works.

Because Indonesia has been relatively open to Western scholars, a huge range of studies deals with social and religious change there. Rita Kipp and Susan Rogers have edited a collection of excellent recent studies, Indonesian Religions in Transition, Tucson, 1987, and an earlier book edited by Claire Holt, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, Ithaca, 1972, remains critical reading for any student of religion, society and politics in Indonesia. Three less uniform collections, each also containing much that is useful, are Gloria Davis, ed.. What is Modern Indonesian Culture?, Athens: Ohio University Center lor International Studies, Southeast Asia Program, 1979; James Fox. od., Indonesia: The Making of a Culture, Canberra: Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1980; and Paul Alexander, od.. Creating Indonesian Cultures, Sydney, 1989. There are a number of highly useful survey articles on cultural change and religion in Indonesia. The most notable include Mildred Ceertz, 'Indonesian Cultures and Communities', in Ruth McVey, ed., Indonesia, blew Haven, 1963; Gavin Jones, 'Religion and Education in Indonesia', Indonesia, 22 (1976); and Julia Howell, 'Indonesia: Searching for Consensus', in Carlos Caldarola, ed.. Religion and Societies: Asia and the Middle East, The Hague, 1982.

The political face of Islam up to the 1970s is treated at length by B. J. Boland in The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia, The Hague, 1982, and recent currents are covered by Ruth McVey's essay, 'Faith as the Outsider: Islam in Indonesian Politics', in J. P. Piscntori, ed., Islam in the Political Process, Cambridge, UK, 1983. Deliar Noer's monograph on the Administration of Islam in Indonesia, Ithaca: Cornell University Modem Indonesia Project, 1978, and Daniel Lev's exploration of Islamic Courts in Indonesia, Berkeley, 1972, deal with the most important institutional changes in Islamic life. The most valuable study of militant Islam in Indonesia in the immediate postwar period is C. van Dijk, Rebellion Under the Banner of Islam, The Hague, 1981. Clifford Geertz provides the most probing suggestions about internal changes within the Muslim community in Islam Observed, Chicago, 1971. James Peacock, Muslim Puritans, Berkeley, 1978; Douglas Miles, Cutlass and Crescent Moon, Sydney, 1976; Mitsuo Nakamura, The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree, Yogyakarta, 1983, and Mark Woodward, Islam in Jaw, Tuscon, 1989, each bring grounded local perspectives which open insights into important aspects of change.

The most outstanding treatments of Javanese religion are Clifford Geertz's classic. The Religion of Jaw, Chicago, 1976, and Koentjaraningrat's Javanese Culture, Kuala Lumpur, 1985. Robert Jay's monograph. Religion and Politics in Rural Central Jaw, New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1963, broke ground in connecting village religion to national politics. Studies by Niels Mulder, Mysticism and Everyday Life in Contemporary Jaw, Singapore, 1978, and Harun Hadiwijono, Man in the Present Jawnese Mysticism, Baam, 1967, concentrate on syncretic mysticism in Java. Robert Hefner's book, Hindu Jawnese, Princeton, 1985, provides a historically and ethnographically grounded exploration of Tengger society and its interaction with Islam. Frank Cooley's Indonesia: Church and Society, New York, 1968, outlines the postwar position of Christian churches and.Paul Webb, Palms and the Cross, Townsville: Southeast Asian Studies Centre, James Cook University, 1986, has explored the changing position of Christians in the lesser Sunda islands.

John McAlister and Paul Mus, in The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, New York, 1970, treated the intersection between spirituality and politics in Vietnam; Gerald Hickey's Village in Vietnam, New Haven, 1964, includes a solid account of village ritual and the local chapter of the Cao Dai sect; and Jayne Werner's monograph on Peasant Politics and Religious Sectarianism: Peasant and Priest in the Cao Dai in Viet Nam, New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1981, concentrates on the organizational face of the same sect. Martin Stuart-Fox and Rod Buckneii, in the 'Politicization of the Buddhist Sangha in Laos', JSEAS, 13, 1 (19S2), and George Condominias, in 'Phiban Cults in Rural Laos', in G. W. Skinner and A. T. Kirsch, eds. Change and Persistence in Thai Society, Ithaca, 1975, provide insight into Lao practices. Ben Kieman's essay, 'Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 20, 4 (1988), chronicles the particularly disastrous experience of one of Southeast Asia's many pressed minorities.

Important aspects of religious change elsewhere are treated by Clive Kessler, Islam and Politics in a Malay State, Ithaca, 1978; Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, Albany, 1987; Susan Ackerman and Raymond Lee, Hcai*cir in Transition: Norn Muslim Religious Innovation and Ethnic Identity in Malaysia, Honolulu, 19S8; Alfred McCoy, 'Baylan: Animist Religion and Philippine Peasant Ideology', in D. Wyatt and A. Woodside, eds. Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought, New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Program, 1982; Peter Gowing, Muslim Filipinos, Quezon City, 1979; Richard Lieban, Ccbuano Sorcery, Berkeley, 1967; Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, Cambridge, 1980; John Blofeld, Mahayana Buddhism in Southeast Asia, Singapore, 1971; Tham Seong Chee, 'Religion and Modernization: a Study of Changing Rituals among Singapore's Chinese, Malays, and Indians', East Asian Cultural Studies, 23, 1-4 (1984); and Cheu Hock Tong, The Nine Emperor Gods, Singapore, 1988.

New: 24 October, 2021 | Now: 24 October, 2021

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/religious.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.

People/paulstange/religious.html

< People

Contents