Mrazek, Jan & Pitelka, Morgan, eds. What’s the Use of Arts? – Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context. University of Hawai’I Press, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2008.

Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television broadcasts of Javanese puppet theater, from Indian wedding-chamber paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese emperor’s palace, from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger to the political functions of classical Khmer images – the authors challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new ways of thinking about culture.

The chapters consider art objects as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances, political and religious events and imagination, and individual people’s lives; how they move from one context to another and change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are collected, traded, and looted, or when their images appear in art history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single, universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple, divergent, and case-specific answers to the question “What is the use of art?” and argue for the need to study art as it is used and experienced. This series of case studies from Asia helps broaden and decolonize our understanding of what art is and asserts the need to go beyond established ways of thinking about art in English-language scholarship.

An engaging and wide-ranging collection, What’s the Use of Art? will appeal not only to Asia art historians, historians, and anthropologists, but also to collectors and readers with an interest in museum studies and material culture studies.

Kitiarsa, Pattana, ed. Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods. Ed. London and New York : Routledge, 2008.

This book examines the key issues arising from the convergences and divergences of religion and market forces in Asia. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from Asia, Europe, Australia and North America, it explores religious commodifications and their consequences across Asia’s diverse religious traditions. The book covers important themes in the anthropology and sociology of contemporary Asian religion. It draws theoretical implications for the study of religions in the light of the shift of religious institutions from traditional religious beliefs to material prosperity. The fact that religions compete with each other in a ‘market of faiths’ is also at the core of the analysis. The contributions demonstrate how ordinary people and religious institutions in Asia adjusted to, and negotiated with, the penetrative forces of global market economy into the region’s changing religio-cultural landscapes. An excellent contribution to the growing demands of ethnographically and theoretically updated interpretations of Asian religions, this book will be of interest to scholars of Asian religion and new religious movements.

Ileto, R C. Magindanao, 1860-1888: The Career of Datu Utto of Buayan. 2nd Ed. Manila: Anvil Publishing House, 2007.

The man around whom this study is built is Sultan Anwarud-din Utto, known in Spanish records and by his people as Datu Utto, a Magindanao prince who first appears in Spanish accounts in the year 1860. To understand him requires an examination of Magindanao society, whose political, economic and social structures, values, and sentiments find expression in a nineteenth-century situation dominated by this man. Furthermore, we must consider not only the times in which he lived, but also a span of the Magindanao past from as early as the sixteenth century. By placing Utto in the context of Magindanao history and society, he is seen to exhibit the attributes of an exemplary datu. The conflict of which he was a part ceases to be merely an isolated rebellion against Spain. It takes on a wider significance as part of a complex situation involving tensions between various segments of the Magindanao world, between personal loyalties and Islam, and includes within its scope the external world with which Magindanao was linked.

Daquila, T C. The Transformation of Southeast Asian Economies. 2nd Ed.New York: Nova Science Publishers. 2006.

The book analyses the growth, development and crisis experiences of the Southeast Asian economies, in particular, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The proposition is developed that the robust economic performance of the Southeast Asian economies during the past four decades has been attributed to the various factors, developments and independent national policies which have been pursued by the individual member countries rather than to any regional economic framework. The book covers eleven topics which are suitable for a one-semester course on the economics of Southeast Asia. Also, it has a narrower area coverage as it focuses only on the five Southeast Asian economies mentioned earlier. The sectoral treatment of the impact of the 1997/98 crisis and the analytical treatment of policy responses to the crisis differentiate this book from other publications on the same topic. Finally, the book provides an analysis of national developments, policies and factors which have contributed to the transformation of the respective Southeast Asian economies.