Author: Kelvin E. Y. Low

Sensory Anthropology
Culture and Experience in Asia

From constructions of rasa (taste) in pre-colonial India and Indonesia, children and sensory discipline within the monastic orders of the Edo period of Japan, to sound expressives among the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia, the sensory soteriology of Tibetan Buddhism, and sensory  warscapes of WWII, this book analyses how sensory cultures in Asia frame social order and disorder. Illustrated with a wide range of fascinating examples, it explores key anthropological themes, such as culture and language, food and foodways, morality, transnationalism and violence, and provides granular analyses on sensory relations, sensory pairings, and intersensoriality. By offering rich ethnographic perspectives on inter- and intra-regional sense relations, the book engages with a variety of sensory models, and moves beyond narrower sensory regimes bounded by group, nation or temporality. A pioneering exploration of the senses in and out of Asia, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in social and cultural anthropology.

Volume Editors: Shray Mehta and Ravi Kumar

THE NEW REPUBLIC: Populism, Power and the Trajectories of Indian Democracy

This edited volume interrogates the dynamics of populism in India which is going through an interregnum. It builds the argument that the 2019 general elections are a break in the democratic history of the Indian state. Because of this, for the first time a social movement has managed to capture the state in India. This volume interrogates the nature of how this has come to be with special attention to dynamics of identity, class and power in India's post-colonial liberal democracy. Through conversations with prominent scholars and activists it builds an intellectual history of how the BJP has come to be in a hegemonic position and explores its relations to the neoliberal economy, party politics and social movements in the previous decades. Using this, it interrogates questions of identity and violence and speculates on the possible future trajectories of Indian democracy.

Volume Editors: Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Kelvin E.Y. Low, Noorman Abdullah, and Anna-Katharina Hornidge

Coastal Urbanities
Mobilities, Meanings, Manoeuvrings

This volume explores how the city and the sea converse and converge in creating new forms of everyday urbanity in archipelagic and island Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from case studies spanning Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and New Caledonia, the volume rethinks the place of the sea in coastal cities, through a mobility-inspired understanding of urbanity itself. How might conceptualisations of contemporary coastal urbanisms be approached from the sea, in ways that complicate singularly terrestrial, fixed framings of the city? What connections, contradictions, and dissonances can be found between sea change and urban change? While addressing these questions, the authors re-centre more marginal voices of those who dwell and work in islanded metropoles, offering new insights on the futures and contested nature(s) of littoral urban transformation.

Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, Demographic and Family Transition in Southeast Asia, Springer 2022

This open access book presents the trends and patterns of demographic and family changes from all eleven countries in the region for the past 50 years. The rich data are coupled with historical, cultural and policy background to facilitate an understanding of the changes that families in Southeast Asia have been going through.

The book is structured into two parts. Part A includes three segments preceded by a briefing on Southeast Asia. The first segment focuses on marital and partnership status in the region, particularly marriage rates, age at marriage, incidence of singlehood, cohabitation, and divorce. The second segment focuses on fertility indicators such as fertility rates (total, age-specific, adolescent), age at childbearing, and childlessness. The third presents information on household structures in the region by examining household sizes, and incidence of one-person households, single-parent families, as well as extended and composite households. Part B presents indicators of children and youth’s well-being.

Canay Özden-Schilling, The Current Economy, Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics, Stanford University Press, 2021