Research Projects

Researcher(s)

Research Project(s)

Sasges, Gerard

Governing Southeast Asian Natures: Sources, Approaches, Methods

Hard at Work

Pholsena, Vatthana

The Afterlife of the Cold War in Central Laos and Northeast Thailand

Daquila, Teofilo C.

International Student Mobility: A Comparative Study Between Australia And Singapore

Internationalising Higher Education in the Asia Pacific: Case Study of Australia, Japan and Singapore

Mohamed Effendy

Preserving Intangible Cultures: Documenting and recording the history and culture of Malay martial arts groups in Singapore (2018-2020)

A History of Silat Seni Gayong PASAK of Singapore. Silat Seni Gayong Singapura (2016-2017)

Johnson, Irving C.

Creative Project: Painting the walls of Uttamayanmuni Buddhist temple, Singapore

Exploring The Social Life of Balinese Masks

The People With Two Kings

Local Histories of Kelantan's Thai Temples

Kammen, Douglas

Violence and History in East Timor

Mrázek, Jan

One East to Another: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

Primeval Forest, Homeland, Catastrophe: Travels in Malaya and “Modern Ethnology” with Pavel Šebesta / Paul Schebesta

On this Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry

Czechs on Ships: Liners, Containers and the Sea

From Bohemia to the Malay Archipelago: Travels in Imagination and in Reality

Indigenous Classical Music In Contemporary Indonesia And Thailand: Toward A Comparative Regional Perspective

Miksic, John N

Buddhist Murals of 11th through 13th Centuries in Bagan, Myanmar

Population, Trade And Settlement In Early Southeast Asia

Archaeological Excavations In Phnom Kulen, Cambodia

Khmer Potters Emerge from the Shadows

Archaeological Research on the Dieng Plateau, Java

Archaeological Excavation at Cheung Ek, Cambodia

Internationalising Higher Education in the Asia Pacific: Case Study of Australia, Japan and Singapore

Teofilo C. Daquila

With his many years of overseas experiences as international student, educator and scholar, Teofilo C. Daquila has conducted his research on the internationalisation of higher education (IHE), as it has become an important policy issue and research topic. Firstly, he aims to determine the extent of internationalisation of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region particularly in Australia, Singapore and Japan in terms of its four indicators such as: (i) expansion, (ii) liberalisation / deepening, (iii) broadening / diversification, and (iv) facilitation. Secondly, he intends to identify and discuss the various determinants and impacts of IHE using a multi- and inter-disciplinary framework of analysis, ie. historical, political, geographical, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Finally, he intends to use three leading universities in the world as case studies to determine their internationalisation strategies and the extent of their competitiveness. These are the University of Melbourne (UoM) for Australia, the National University (NUS) of Singapore for Singapore, and Kyoto University (KU) for Japan. Daquila uses four indicators of competitiveness: governance and structure, internationalisation strategies (through expansion, broadening/diversification, deepening and facilitation), demand conditions, and factor conditions. Results of this study were published in the following journal and presented in the following conferences/seminars:

“Internationalising Higher Education in Singapore: Government Policies and the NUS Experience”, Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol.17, no.5 (2013): 629-647. (United States).

Australia – “Internationalising Higher Education in Australia & The Competitiveness of the University of Melbourne”, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia, 22 March 2017.

Japan – “Internationalising Higher Education in Japan & the Competitiveness of Kyoto University”, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies & The Office of Internationalisation Strategy, Kyoto University, Japan, May 2017.

Singapore – “Internationalising Higher Education: Perspectives from Kyoto University, University of Melbourne & the National University of Singapore “, NUS: Dept of Southeast Asian Studies, 1 Nov 2017.

Japan – “Student Mobility in Asia & the Pacific: Expansion, Broadening & Deepening” Presented at University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific UMAP International Forum 2018, Osaka University of Commerce, Osaka Japan. Sep 2018.

Japan - “Internationalising Higher Education in Japan, Australia and Singapore”, Fully-sponsored presentation at the Roundtable Discussion on International Education, Toyo University, Japan, 27 Sep 2018.

The People with Two Kings

Irving C. Johnson

Looming large over Kelantan’s countryside are colorful statues of immense size. The northern Malaysian state, which has for a long time been described by many as a Malay cultural heartland as well as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism, boasts some of the largest Buddhist creations in Asia. “The People with Two Kings” focus on the builders of these magnificent religious monuments. It explores how Thai Buddhists living in Kelantan showcase their identity as culturally Thai and yet patriotically Malaysian. They achieve this through everyday practices that often involve complex patterns of travel and cross-cultural interaction. In order to build the statues that have now placed Kelantan on the Malaysian tourist map, Kelantanese Thai minority have been forced to rethink their traditional associations with other ethnic groups in the state such as the Malays and Chinese. It has also meant a retelling of local history. Living so close to the Thai border has brought Kelantan’s Thai population under the watchful gaze of the Thai government even though the Kelantanese Thais are Malaysians and proudly swear allegiance to the state’s Malay Muslim sultan. Thus, this small community is faced with the complex question of what it means to be Thai living in a contemporary Malaysian state.

Dr Irving C Johnson’s ethnographic project “The People with Two Kings” is an account of identity, space and history in the little known Buddhist communities of Kelantan, Malaysia. Long associated with Islam and traditional Malay culture, scholars of Kelantanese society have often overlooked the presence of the state’s nearly ten thousand Thais. Erroneously labeled Siamese by some, Kelantan’s Thai Buddhist population live in primarily ethnically homogenous villages. Having abandoned wet rice cultivation since the seventies, many Thais now practice intensive vegetable and tobacco cultivation. Kelantan’s low levels of socio-economic development have meant that many younger Thais have been forced to move outside the state to seek waged employment. Many have migrated to the urban belts of Johor Bahru, Kuala Lumpur and Penang. The large economic rewards to be gained from cash cropping and urban employment coupled with a vibrant national economy is clearly displayed in the village landscape. Gated concrete mansions have replaced many older wooden houses, and the internet and wireless broadband have found its way into distant villages. Dirt tracks have been transformed into paved roads and villagers have become part of moving landscapes marked by cars, bicycles, motorcycles, budget airfares and media images. Yet despite the influx of modernity into these villages, vestiges of history remain, in particular through the mobile culture of village life.

Living so close to Thailand (the Thai border towns of Sungai Golok and Tak Bai being only a short drive from some villages) has meant that Kelantan’s Thai population has been strongly influenced by people and events that take place across the border. In 1909, British and Siamese officials demarcated Kelantan’s northernmost frontier from an independent Siam. Nevertheless, the new divide did little to prevent cross-border movements. Kelantan’s Thai villagers have historically traveled between Malaysia and Thailand on a regular basis. Before the British and subsequent Malaysian administration’s construction of road and rail networks, Kelantanese Thai traveled shorter distances – often moving between villages. Today, new forms of mobility have forced Kelantanese Thais to rethink the meaning of travel and its impact on their lives. In his project, Dr Johnson addresses the relationship between traditional forms of mobility and contemporary cross border flows and the effect this has had on the way Kelantanese Thai speak about and perform their identity.

The mobilities inherent in travel circuits that define the space of Kelantan’s borderland villages often blur the meanings of identity for the people who engage with these movements. One result of this has been the constant attempts by representatives of certain cultural bodies to effectively “standardize” Kelantanese Thai culture (art, architecture, language, bodily stance, etc) so that it mirrors Thailand’s self definitions of what Thai culture is. But these practices are often part of larger national processes that emanate from faraway metropolitan centers. Besides the physical movement of people, Kelantanese Thai villages are saturated with media images emanating from both Thailand and Malaysia. Dr Johnson’s work documents the impact of these grandiose nationalism projects on the lives of the Malaysian Buddhist villagers. He shows how the stereotypes associated with national projects of cultural and political citizenship are interpreted in a myriad of ways by the people. Through their engagement with these projects of cultural standardization, Kelantanese Thais reaffirm their multilayered identities as Thai, Buddhist, Kelantanese and Malaysian. By living in one Kelantanese Thai village for 16 months and participating in the lives of the people, Dr Johnson displays the creative genius of people often considered marginal and powerless. He achieves this through tracing the trajectory of their lives and in listening to the way they talk about it. Cultural creativity, Dr Johnson argues, is intimately woven in the everyday practices of the people and in the way they speak about the world they live in and of the past they remember. These practices are defined by space and the historical and contemporary movements that crisscross them.

One East to Another: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

Jan Mrázek

Scholarship on European representations of (Southeast) Asia in the colonial period largely deals with western European colonial powers and their particular imagination, political relationships, orientalisms, and racisms. It is on this limited, empire-centric perspective that generalizations about “Europe”, “the West”, and “Western” views of “the East”, are usually based. This project complicates this picture by focusing on the experiences and writings of individuals who travelled to/in colonial Southeast Asia from “eastern Europe”—Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Serbs, etc. Their complex, ambiguous identities were particularly creatively performed or fabulated on their travels. They came from the “semi-barbarous,” borderlands between the West (or “Europe”) and the East, where world-divisions and hierarchies were variously mimicked, appropriated, undermined or ridiculed, and where manifold identities were lived and dreamed in the margins, or under the rule, of great empires, West and East, which aimed to divide the region among themselves, rather like Western European colonial powers did in Southeast Asia. The travellers came from (often stateless) nations that did not have Asian colonies, were at times (semi-)colonized, and were orientalised in Western perspectives. On their travels, as they observed and entered colonial society with its racialized hierarchies, their self-images, as well as their perceptions of Europe and Asia, or East and West, crystalized or were shattered in new, intense ways. They saw and described the similarly complex, multi-ethnic and changing world of colonial Southeast Asia in the mirror of the complexities, contradictions, conflicts and dreams of their own societies and life experience. The international workshop Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia was organized in March 2021 under the title (The project is supported by an MOE research grant.)

From Bohemia to the Malay Archipelago: Travels in Imagination and in Reality

Jan Mrázek

A number of Czechs travelled to and wrote about the Malay Archipelago in the colonial period, and more make the trip now or read about and imagine the tropics. What does tropical jungle, the ocean, dark-skinned women and British and Dutch colonists mean in Bohemia, a small landlocked country which never had a colony, from which one had to travel through other countries such as France and Italy to see the sea and seagoing ships, and which politically and culturally was in some ways in the position of a colony in relation to its more powerful European neighbours? What dreams, desires, perceptions and truths do these images embody? How can one write about the Czech case without fitting it into pre-existent colonial and postcolonial schemes of power, meaning, and interpretation, such as labelling images and narratives, which have their own truth and power, as colonial, anti-colonial, Czech, European, Orientalist, same or different?

The research project by the FASS’s own Bohemian, Assoc Prof Jan Mrázek, aims to answer questions regarding Czech images and experiences of the Malay Archipelago from within their imaginative world and to explore them through the thickness of images, thoughts, and dreams of distant lands, foreignness, otherness, as well as their opposites, the self, the home, the everyday actuality. It aims to explore how the specific historical experience of Bohemia lead to particular ways of relating to and imagining the Malay Archipelago; and to show how a reflection on a little-known, “marginal” European literature, imagery, and experience of the tropics can nuance our understanding of trans-continental travel and “European” perceptions of Asia, colonialism, and racism.

The primary historical focus is the latter part of the colonial era (approximately 1870s-1940s) although continuities with earlier and especially later times will be also explored. The project will combine archival and library research with travel to places visited by Czech travellers and a voyage on a cargo ship from Europe to Singapore.

Buddhist Murals of 11th through 13th Centuries in Bagan, Myanmar

John N. Miksic

The site of Bagan lies in north-western Myanmar, in the dry zone which formed the centre of Burmese civilization. The kings of Bagan ruled over much of Myanmar between the 11th and 13th centuries. Bagan enjoyed wide-ranging contacts with many countries including China, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia.

The art of Bagan has been called one of "three great manifestations of Hindu-Buddhist art in Southeast Asia", along with Java and ancient Angkor (Chihara, 1996: 167). This high status was achieved mainly in the field of architecture; Bagan's buildings have special features, whereas its sculpture is usually judged to be conventional and of only average merit. The focus on the architecture of Bagan, while well warranted, has resulted in the neglect of the site's most important treasures: thousands of square metres of mural paintings. Bagan's murals form by far the largest collection of ancient Southeast Asian painting in existence. Their artistic merit of many is very high. From a historical standpoint they form a very important source of potential knowledge regarding the relationship between Buddhism, the rise and fall of the kingdom, and Southeast Asian Buddhism during a transitional period which led to the implantation of Theravada Buddhism as the majority religion on the entire Southeast Asian mainland. Despite the enormous interest of these paintings, both aesthetically and intellectually, no detailed studies of them have ever been published.
There are no complete visual records of Bagan's murals. As a result, a critical source of data is in constant danger of being lost, either because of natural disasters such as earthquakes, or human agency. A project to digitize the murals of the 300 - 400 temples is urgently needed so that a major portion of Myanmar's past can be safeguarded against the ravages of time, and made more accessible to scholars.

A/P Miksic began the preliminary stages of a digitization project in 2000 with a PhD candidate from Myanmar under my supervision, Mr Win Than Tun. He completed his PhD and returned to Myanmar. Since then I have been working with a graduate of the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, Dr. Goh Geok Yian, who received her doctorate from the Department of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa on ancient Bagan's history in 2008 and now is a lecturer at NTU. She has received a start-up grant from NTU which we are using to pursue the digitization of these murals and to develop an interactive website which will make them available to all scholars and interested students.

Population, Trade And Settlement In Early Southeast Asia

John N. Miksic

This project targeted archaeological excavation and analysis of artefacts from proto-historic sites in Southeast Asia that formed links in networks of ancient exchange and communication networks. Early historic (ca. 11th-16th centuries AD in Maluku; 1st to 6th centuries AD in Cambodia and Myanmar; 11th century in Jambi, Sumatra) settlement, exchange, communication and influence within Southeast Asia are under-researched topics.

The analysis conducted through this project constitutes an important component of multi-disciplinary long-term research conducted by A/P John Miksic and his collaborators. These include the University of Hawaii Sago Project in Maluku in 1990, the Creativity and Culture Program of the Rockefeller Foundation grant to the Center for Khmer Studies, Siem Reap, Cambodia; and the Osteoarchaeology Research Group, NUS. Preliminary survey and testing was conducted as part of D. Kyle Latinis’ Ph.D. dissertation work with the National University of Singapore. Fieldwork for the project was conducted in Maluku, Singapore, Cambodia, and Myanmar.

The project supported fieldwork to acquire samples, which were analyzed using archaeological tests of age and artefact composition vital to satisfying professional standards for archaeological reporting and interpretation. Because of the scarcity of interdisciplinarians working in Southeast Asian archaeology however, they have rarely been applied in this region.

Objectives of this project included:

Acquisition of vital new information regarding the evolution of Southeast Asian civilization and the role of maritime trade in that process
Breaking new ground in the study of the physical remains of early Southeast Asian people.
Exploitation of interdisciplinary methodology through the application of archaeological laboratory methods (radiocarbon dating, energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence compositional analyses, scanning electron microscopy, and thin section petrography) to archaeological materials from Maluku, Cambodia, and Myanmar.
Expansion of newly-formed connections between the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, NUS, and Cambodian institutions including the Center for Khmer Studies and the Royal University of Fine Arts.
Training of students in advanced laboratory techniques
Collaborative arrangements were made with the Physics Department’s Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence laboratory. The Osteoarchaeology Research Group (ORG) at NUS obtained rights to study two 2,000-year-old skeletons discovered at Angkor, Cambodia, by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient. APSARA, the Khmer institution which supervises the development of the Angkor region, was fully involved in the project. At NUS, the ORG consists of approximately 10 specialists from the Faculty of Medicine and 2 from the FASS. The radiocarbon analysis and petrographic sampling required the use of labs outside of Singapore which specialize in scientific analyses of archaeological material.

Future research projects connected with these overall goals include analysis of ceramics and other artifacts found at the “palace site” in Bagan in January, and excavations in Jambi, Sumatra, and Sanur, Bali, in 2014.

Khmer Potters Emerge from the Shadows

John N. Miksic

One of Cambodia’s earliest capitals was Roluos, 30 km southeast of Angkor Wat. In January 2007 a joint team from NUS including Assoc Prof John N Miksic and Mr. Chhay Rachan of the APSARA Authority which takes care of Angkor and the Royal University of Fine Arts excavated an ancient centre of Khmer ceramic production at Thnal Mrech, on the Phnom Kulen plateau. Carbon dates proved that the site was used in the early 11th century. In January 2008 the same team excavated another site, this time near Bakong, one of the first temples to be built in the Angkor area. The area was being landscaped to build a new administrative complex for the government, so work had to be done quickly. Surface exploration in December 2007 discovered a large number of kilns (39). In January 2008, rescue excavations were performed at two of the more promising sites. Both yielded ceramics and remains of kiln structures. A carbon date indicates that the kilns were operating around AD 900. Historically this period is significant because the center of activity was in the process of moving from Roluos to Angkor. The excavations show that Roluos was one of the earliest, and possibly the very first, site in the Angkor region to produce high-fired ceramics (a technically advanced stage of technology). A conference paper on this project was presented in Leiden, Netherlands, on September 3, 2008, to the 12th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists (EurASEAA). In 2012 A/P Miksic co-directed a project at Torp Chhey, another early Khmer kiln site east of Phnom Kulen, with Dr. Ea Darith of the Apsara Authority. This excavation uncovered the largest kiln yet found in Cambodia, and possibly in Southeast Asia. In June 2013 Prof. Miksic collaborated with Mr. Phon Kaseka and the Royal Academy of Cambodia on the excavation of a group of kilns at Cheung Ek, near Phnom Penh. This site yielded a date in the 5th or 6th century, making it one of the oldest kilns anywhere in Southeast Asia. Research on Khmer ceramic sites is continuing in the endeavour to explore the development of this form of technology in Cambodia.