Insular Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 24 (February 1965):
283–291. A general introduction to Southeast Asian reli-
gions with reference to their social context is provided in my
book The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Main-
land Southeast Asia (New York, 1977).The volume Early South East Asia: Essays in Archaeology, History,
and Historical Geography, edited by R. B. Smith and William
Watson (Oxford, 1979), contains information on prehistoric
and protohistoric religion; the work also has a good bibliog-
raphy. H. G. Quaritch Wales’s Prehistory and Religion in
Southeast Asia (London, 1957), although dated and relying
too heavily on diffusionist theory, still remains the only work
to attempt a synthesis of prehistoric evidence. Per So⁄rensen
reports on the find he interprets as evidence of prehistoric
shamanism in “‘The Shaman’s Grave,’” in Felicitation Vol-
umes of Southeast-Asian Studies Presented to Prince
Dhaninivat, vol. 2 (Bangkok, 1965), pp. 303–318. The
model of the “cadastral cult” was advanced by Paul Mus in
India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenuous Cults in
Champa, translated by I. W. Mabbett and edited by I. W.
Mabbett and D. P. Chandler (Cheltenham, Australia, 1975).
O. W. Wolters, in History, Culture, and Region in Southeast
Asian Perspectives (Brookfield, Vt., 1982), proposes the no-
tion that “men of prowess” was a general type in prehistoric
and protohistoric Southeast Asia. His interpretation is based,
in part, on A. Thomas Kirsch’s argument developed in a
comparison of Southeast Asian tribal ethnography in Feasting
and Social Oscillation: A Working Paper on Religion and Soci-
ety in Upland Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973). Kirsch, in
turn, has elaborated on the idea of oscillation between “dem-
ocratic” and “autocratic” chiefdoms first advanced by Ed-
mund Leach in Political Systems of Highland Burma (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1954).
Vietnamese scholars have shown considerable interest in recent
years in tracing the Southeast Asian origins of Vietnamese
civilization. Much of their work is discussed by Keith Weller
Taylor in The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., 1983). The
process of “indianization” and the relationship between this
process and what H. G. Quaritch Wales called “local genius”
in the shaping of Southeast Asian religious traditions has
been most intensively explored by George Coedès in The In-
dianized States of Southeast Asia, edited by Walter F. Vella
and translated by Susan Brown Cowing (Canberra, 1968);
H. G. Quaritch Wales in The Making of Greater India, 3d
rev. ed. (London, 1974) and The Universe Around Them:
Cosmology and Cosmic Renewal in Indianized Southeast Asia
(London, 1977); O. W. Wolters in “Khmer ‘Hinduism’ in
the Seventh Century,” in Early South East Asia: Essays in Ar-
chaeology, History and Historical Geography and in History,
Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (both cited
above); Hermann Kulke in The Devaraja Cult, translated by
I. W. Mabbett (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978); and I. W. Mabbett in
“Devaraja,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10 (September,
1969): 202–223; “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: Re-
flections on Prehistoric Sources,” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 8 (March 1977): 1–14; “The ‘Indianization’ of
Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Historical Sources,” Jour-
nal of Southeast Asian Studies 8 (September 1977): 143–161;
and “Varn:as in Angkor and the Indian Caste System,” Jour-
nal of Asian Studies 36 (May 1977): 429–442. O. W.
Wolters, in History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian
Perspectives, discusses the man:d:ala model, a model also dis-
cussed at somelength under the rubric of the “galactic polity”
by Stanley J. Tambiah in World Conqueror and World Re-
nouncer (Cambridge, 1976).
A. Thomas Kirsch in “Complexity in the Thai Religious System:
An Interpretation,” Journal of Asian Studies 36 (February
1977): 241–266; Melford E. Spiro in Burmese Supernatural-
ism, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, 1978); and Stanley J. Tambiah in
Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand
(Cambridge, 1970) discuss the relationship between pre-
Buddhist and Buddhist beliefs in Thai and Burmese religion.
Similar attention to pre-Sinitic religious beliefs in Vietnam-
ese religion is given by Leopold Cadière in Croyances et pra-
tiques religieuses des Viêtnamiens, 3 vols. (Saigon and Paris,
1955–1958). See also Pierre Huard and Maurice Durand’s
Connaissance du Viêtnam (Paris and Hanoi, 1954).
Kirk Endicott’s Batek Negrito Religion (Oxford, 1979) describes
the religion of the last remaining major population of hunt-
ing-and-gathering people on the mainland. Karl Gustav Izi-
kowitz’s Lamet: Hill Peasants in French Indochina (Göteborg,
1951), Peter Kunstadter’s The LuaD (Lawa) of Northern Thai-
land: Aspects of Social Structure, Agriculture and Religion
(Princeton, 1965), and H. E. Kauffmann’s “Some Social and
Religious Institutions of the Lawa of Northwestern Thai-
land,” Journal of the Siam Society 60 (1972): 237–306 and
65 (1977): 181–226, discuss aspects of religious life among
Austroasiatic-speaking tribal peoples. Among the more de-
tailed accounts of the religions of Hmong (Meo) and Mien
(Yao) peoples are Jacques Lemoine’s Yao Ceremonial Paint-
ings (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1982); Guy Morechand’s
“Principaux traits du chamanisme Méo Blanc en Indochine,”
Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 54 (1968):
58–294; and Nusit Chindarsi’s The Religion of the Hmong
Ñua (Bangkok, 1976). Theodore Stern in “Ariya and the
Golden Book: A Millenarian Buddhist Sect among the
Karen,” Journal of Asian Studies 27 (February 1968): 297–
328, and William Smalley’s “The Gospel and Cultures of
Laos,” Practical Anthropology 3 (1956): 47–57, treat some as-
pects of religious change among tribal peoples.
New Sources
Benjamin, Geoffrey, and Cynthia Chou, eds. Tribal Communities
in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural and Social Perspec-
tives. Singapore, 2002.
Do, Thien. Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern
Region. London, 2003.
Kipp, Rita Smith, and Susan Rodgers, eds. Indonesian Religions in
Transition. Tucson, 1987.
Lemoine, Jacques and Chiao Chien, eds. The Yao of South China:
Recent International Studies. Paris, 1991.
Morrison, Kathleen D., and Laura L. Junker, eds. Forager-Traders
in South and Southeast Asia: Long-term Histories. New York,
2002.
Swearer, Donald K. The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia. Albany,
1995.
Tarling, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia.
Cambridge, 1992.
Wijeyewardene, Gehan. Ethnic Groups across National Boundaries
in Mainland Southeast Asia. Singapore, 1990.
CHARLES F. KEYES (1987)
Revised Bibliography8646 SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND CULTURES