Book Description

Written for both general readers and specialists, this book explores how modern, urban Southeast Asians view and manage their social life. By comparing the ways they live with their religious representations, with intimate and more distant others, and with their rapidly changing environment, the author demonstrates the marked similarities in the perception of individual and society in three civilisations along the inner littoral of Southeast Asia, irrespective of the great religious diversity that appears to characterise the region.For more than thirty years Dr Niels Mulder has been actively engaged with life in Java, Thailand, and the Philippines. As an independent anthropologist, he now focuses on the factors that fuel the cultural dynamics of contemporary Southeast Asia. His books include Inside Indonesian Society: Cultural Change in Java; Inside Thai Society: Religion, Everyday Life, Change; Inside Philippine Society: Interpretations of Everyday Life; and Thai Images: The Culture of the Public World