In 2010, more than 87,000 international students were studying in Malaysia. The Malaysian government wants to increase the number of international students to more than 200,000 by 2020. The case of Malaysia as an emerging player in international education is particularly interesting as it is not only one of the first former colonies of a European country to achieve such high international attractiveness, but also one of the first Muslim-majority countries to become a hub of international education. This article analyses both the supply and demand side of this remarkable trend. The historical and political circumstances for the institutional buildup of Malaysian higher education are discussed, followed by an analysis of the religious, linguistic, and developmental background of the international students coming to Malaysia. Lastly, factors affecting other prominent destinations of international student migration, such as the implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are taken into account.

Water in many different forms and contexts is of central significance in Southeast Asia, and these differences are reflected in the vast range of spirits and deities. Despite wide variation, the most obvious distinction is between spirits associated with fresh and salt water. Those linked to water associated with fertility are typically regarded as female and sympathetic to human requests for assistance. By contrast, the spirits who inhabit turbulent river waters and patrol the shorelines may be male, female, or only vaguely gendered. Although they can be capricious and sometimes cruel, they are nonetheless amenable to individual or communal supplication. The same ambiguity is exemplified by the sea spirits, who extend rewards to those they favour but inflict harsh punishments when their anger is aroused. Yet regardless of their nature or the place with which they were associated, the ‘power base’ of indigenous spirits was always locally concentrated. The limitations in their reach help explain the appeal of cosmologies that extended across a much larger area, and even across the entire globe. The accompanying conceptualization of new and benevolent beings is especially evident in the maritime environment. Here human activity is male-dominated, and the male divinities and saints associated with supra-local belief systems might appear to be the natural guardians of mariners. Even so, culturally entrenched ideas of connections between water and maternal care facilitated the adoption of female deities as protectors of ocean-going voyagers.

This contribution is about a female transnational student from Turkey, Hafize, studying for four years at an Islamic Malaysian university. She was interviewed during the research project “Transnational Student Mobility in Higher Education in Asia”, a multi-sited ethnographic project containing six sub-studies aiming to illuminate student voices and the impact of cultural processes on student-inhabited transnational spaces, identity negotiations, and networks. Through a bottom-up perspective, and with life story as the principal method, the project illustrates processes of social change and relations between the individual and society. Questions are posed about, inter alia, the motivations and reasons that may be identified in the educational stories. Hafize's narrative is discussed as a relational and contextual story, in which family relations and the significance of education, gender, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic and political situations intersect. Education is given different meanings: instrumental and reflexive as well as emotional aspects. Turning points and the concept of capital, especially social and emotional capital, are addressed. Hafize's family of eight siblings is deeply involved in serial reciprocity, a tightly bonded network supporting all the children in their efforts to study. Hafize's story is substantially gendered and ‘ethnified’ – a reflexive emotional identity project, in which education and religion are given high priority. In Turkey secularist legislation was an obstacle. The studies abroad provided possibilities for self-development but tempered with some limitations.

This article explores how the Orang Suku Laut, an indigenous Malay roving fishing community, perceives the water world in Southeast Asia. Their rites of childbirth, naming and the enculturation of their young present invaluable ethnographic data that challenge us to develop new ways to conceptualise ‘water spaces’ as well as to widen our academic inquiry into the less understood ways of spatial imaginings.

This article assesses indigenous perceptions of water through a comparison of the water management strategies at three ancient sites located in different ecological zones of Myanmar. Two of our examples are in the high-rainfall regions of Lower Myanmar: Thagara in the Dawei River valley flanked by mountains on the east and west, and Kyaikkatha on delta lands at the egress of the Sittaung River. We contrast these adaptations with the micro-exploitation of the scarce water resources at Bagan (also spelled Pagan) in the arid zone of Upper Myanmar. In the southern wet regions, despite the different geographical setting of Thagara and Kyaikkatha, the focus was on drainage and control. Multiple ramparts and moats were used to conserve the scarce water in the dry months between December and April and control the heavy floods of the rainy months between May to November. At Bagan, sited directly on the broad Ayeyarwady River, water management of inland streams and seasonal lakes maximised the gentle slope of the plain while also coping with intermittent flash floods in the rainy months. The sites of Thagara, Kyaikkatha, and Bagan demanded specific adaptations but are alike in the absence of extensive transformation of the landscape. This balance of manmade and natural elements provides common ground despite their variable size and urbanised extent, ecological setting, and occupational sequence to highlight the shared significance of water management in their long-term urban success.

Over the past two decades, Singapore has steadily become a popular destination for migrants. While the reasons for migrating to Singapore are many and contextual, labour and education have been the primary driving factors for attracting migrants from around the world to Singapore. Although a popular migrants’ destination, education and migration policies in Singapore are often gendered, and are negotiated along and across other axes of identification and differentiation such as ethnicity and ideas of ‘modernity’. This article analyses gendered educational migration from Malaysia to Singapore focusing particularly on how educational migration leads to female self-transformation. Specifically, I argue that social actors negotiate educational migration within their gendered family constellations. The article first contextualises the empirical material by illustrating socio-historical processes in Singapore and Malaysia. In the next sections, I discuss my ethnographic methods and examine a brief history of the state of research in gender and educational migration. In conclusion, I offer a significant contribution to the growing and important body of scholarship on gender and transnational families by illustrating how gender is negotiated in migration using the case of a single Chinese woman's migration journey to becoming a ‘modern woman’.

This article addresses transnational higher education strategies both to and from Singapore. It does so by focusing on outbound educational mobility from Singapore to the UK and inbound educational mobility from Vietnam to Singapore. Since the turn of the century, Singapore has pursued the agenda of developing itself as a regional hub for higher education, aspiring to be a Global Schoolhouse. Yet, while the number of international students grows in local universities, Singapore's academically brightest do not necessarily take advantage of higher educational opportunities within the shores of the city-state, with many traveling to universities overseas through a form of sponsored mobility. Using two case studies, I trace two logics of commodification and consecration as observed through the processes whereby individuals and institutions devise transnational higher education strategies into and out of Singapore. The first case study draws on interviews conducted with Singaporean undergraduates at Oxbridge while the second case focuses on Vietnamese students at two Singaporean universities. Together, the analysis from these cases uncovers the value for these Southeast Asian students in studying abroad and distinguishes between different types of routes that exist: one where students choose their own educational plans and another where students are chosen for a prestigious educational and occupational pathway. With increasing participation in mass higher education taking place across the region, the article outlines, through the site of Singapore, strategies of transnationalism employed by both individuals and institutions as a means of social differentiation.

Water symbolisms permeate Ifugao religion, rituals, and oral tradition. Water plays a part in death, rebirth, and cleansing in Ifugao cosmology. As such, Ifugaos consider water as sacred. However, water is also central in Ifugao economy and politics. As a culture that highly values intensive wet-rice production in a mountain environment, managing access to water is necessary to maintain stability. Ifugao practices follow what Richard O'Connor described as the “agro-cultural complex” in which agricultural practices, social systems, and political, historical, and, cultural changes are understood as interlocking processes (O'Connor 1995). In this paper, we focus on the relationship between Ifugao water and agricultural rituals with the synchronizing and sequencing of agricultural activities. Using the concept of self-organization, we argue that water and agricultural rituals in Ifugao are not only meant to reinforce community cohesion, they also synchronize the farming activities crucial to a terraced ecology. Utilizing the practice of puntunaan (a ritual plot or parcel in the centre of an agricultural district) and the institution of tomona (the ritual leader of an agricultural district) as a case study, we observed that disruptions in the water and rice rituals stimulated great change in Ifugao sociopolitical organization.

This article discusses eleven Southeast Asian students’ transnational mobility in order to obtain higher education at an Islamic university in Jakarta. A life story approach has been used and semi-structured and interviewee-oriented interviews have been carried out in the field, as well as on the internet. The focus is not only on the students’ individual experiences, such as educational background, strategies in mobility, prevailing life conditions, educational objectives, and future plans, but also on why they chose international Islamic studies in Jakarta and how they evaluate the education offered there. Gender constitutes an overall empirical and analytical aspect of this article, taking into account the prevailing gender order, or norm, in the students’ homelands and families, as well as gender regimes, or relations, in the educational and social environment in Jakarta. These students have mixed backgrounds regarding nationality, class, parents’ education, gendered and religious norms, and previous contacts outside of their homelands. All, however, accumulate social capital in the transnational social fields or networks – physical and digital – that they take part in during their time in Jakarta and after they finalised their studies. All the students plan for further studies or a working career, and a majority of the students intend to return – or have already returned – to their home country, while a few prefer a third country. They can be defined as so-called temporarily uprooted locals, with an even spread on a scale from localism to cosmopolitanism in their individual identity formation.

This article explores the relevance of water in the cultural traditions of indigenous Lumad peoples of Mindanao island in the southern Philippines. Historically, Lumad identities and networks (whether political, social, or economic) were conceptualised according to the rivers on which people dwelt. Important ties stretched from the coast to the interior (i.e., between upriver and downriver communities), with water providing the path of least resistance in rough terrain. This stands in contrast to the present-day cultural and political divide between the uplands and lowlands, which are now dominated by mainstream ‘Filipino’ settlers, referred to locally as dumagat or ‘sea-people’. Given that Lumad ties to the land are profoundly visualised according to rivers, the salt-water origins of dumagats locate these interlopers at, or more often, beyond the moral boundaries of the Lumad universe. Meanwhile, in Lumad oral traditions, the movements of people across one generation to the next are traced according to river systems they have occupied, with proximity to water often equated with degree of civilization and cultural purity. Despite the passage of time, and decreased linear proximity from the original rivers, these primal riverine origins remain significant in the present day, as Lumads continue to socially prioritise the genealogies and networks of traditional political authority that are upstreamed from these oral traditions. Focusing on field data from the Higaunon ethnic group of northern Mindanao, this article analyses five examples of water being employed as a hermeneutic for how Lumads locate themselves in relation to other ethnic groups, the state, modern Filipino society, and their own cultural traditions.

Studies of Siam's diplomatic relations from the mid-nineteenth century have been focussed on its troubled relations with Western colonial powers, often within a bilateral framework. While highlighting issues such as territorial losses and treaty revisions, scholarly interest tends to have overlooked Siam's relations with its neighbouring countries. Based on archival records at the National Archives of Thailand, this article aims to fill this gap by examining diplomatic exchanges between the Siamese and Vietnamese courts that took place between 1879 and 1882. In April 1879, a royal mission from the Vietnamese court bearing gifts and a royal letter from Tự Đức to Chulalongkorn arrived in Bangkok. It was allegedly the first formal mission from the Vietnamese court in almost half a century after the two countries had come into conflict in the 1830s. By examining how Siam and Vietnam sought to maintain and manipulate ‘traditional’ interstate relations in the face of treaty arrangements that France enforced upon Vietnam, this article reveals complex issues involved in the process of negotiations, such as the questions of maintaining the equality between the two monarchies and of the ‘translation’ of the concepts of sovereignty between Thai and Sino-Vietnamese languages, and suggests the necessity to pay more attention to historical and broader regional contexts in Asia.

This article is an attempt to stand back and re-imagine the landscape of the Red River over the last two millennia. The only static components of the Red River valley and delta are its mountains and geological deposits, everything else has changed over time. By marrying historical records with recent scientific findings on the Red River, this article outlines aspects of these changes; including changes to the climate and landscape, the possibility of shifting river courses, the movement of historical trade routes, and the rise of Thang Long–Hanoi.

The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resources contained therein. The role different types of energy infrastructure play in the state-level disputes have received little attention, however. This essay addresses this oversight. In it, I foreground the complex ways not yet built infrastructure affect Sino-Vietnamese relations as well as our theoretical understanding of “the state”, especially with regard to Vietnam. Not yet built infrastructure refers to more than the assemblage of things that will be built in the future to power the economy, such as oil rigs, natural gas pipelines, and refineries. The concept also includes the ideological positions that presuppose the materialization of blueprint plans in physical form, i.e., the broader goals such infrastructure is meant to achieve. Towards this end, the article focuses on how state actors and their proxies conceptualize the likely impacts not yet built infrastructure will have upon their respective interests once construction is completed. The case study highlights how the need for energy security strengthens national security at some moments, weakens it at others, and both at still others.

This article uses primarily British colonial documents and Singapore sources to examine the history of proposals for the construction of a shipping canal through Thailand's Kra Isthmus from the 1850s. It provides historical background for continuing interest in constructing a Kra canal with the most recent speculative discussions involving Chinese interests. Since the 1850s the idea of a canal was revived on numerous occasions with several detailed surveys conducted over this time to assess the feasibility of a shipping canal via the Kra Isthmus. This research examines how speculation and actual proposals were handled by the British colonial authorities and how this related to the British policy of using Siam/Thailand as a buffer state separating their colonies and those of their European rival France. In colonial Singapore canal proposals created great angst and to some extent this has continued to be the case to the present day. The article suggests that while British colonial policy was always against, or at least not in favour of, the construction of a canal, other factors are equally important for explaining why canal proposals never proceeded beyond planning and surveys.

Recent revisionist approaches to early pre-1500 eastern Indian Ocean history draw from and cross-reference epigraphic, archaeological, art historical, literary, cultural, textual, shipwreck, and a variety of other primary and secondary sources as these document the evolution of Southeast Asia from roughly 300 to 1500, before significant European regional presence became a factor. This study's focus is the transitional importance of c. 1000–1500 Indian Ocean international maritime trade and transit from the South Asian shorelines of the Bay of Bengal to the South China and Java Seas, which is conceived to have temporarily produced an inclusive eastern Indian Ocean zone of contact. In this then ‘borderless’ region there were a variety of meaningful contacts and material, cultural, and knowledge transfers that resulted in synthesis of Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian cultures and populations made possible by enhanced international maritime trade connections before European presence became a factor, a period often dated from the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese in 1511.

The peoples who inhabit the states that lie in the direct paths of typhoons in the Western North Pacific share a common history of repeated dislocation, destruction, and death that delimits a zone of comparative enquiry and historiographical interest. The track left by typhoons across ocean and land perfectly outline the dimensions of a more transnational historical region encompassing the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the island states of Micronesia. The peoples of these lands are bound together by a common experience of risk. Wind and water together offer a radical alternative historiography to state-centred master narratives that are revealed by pursuing issues and questions that transcend the spatial and temporal boundaries of any one state or region.