Understanding Southeast Asian nationalisms

Change of imperial masters at a critical juncture (Spanish to American in the Philippines, 1898 Japanese to European in the rest of Southeast Asia, 1945) made possible the revolutionary assertion of the new antiimperial identity in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma. As in France in 1789, the revolutions sacralised the new identities which had been charted on the map by the old empires. To greater or lesser extent, the alchemy was effected through revolution, making the multiethnic imperial identity transform into a passionately felt new community. This provided a huge impetus for the new states in building on the heroic myths of revolution for their state nationalisms. 

Benedict Anderson (1991 43-5) showed how the development of print in Europe stimulated national consciousness through creating unified fields of exchange , a new fixity which could be made to appear 

Thai and Burmese began to be printed in their indigenous scripts in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely again through the mediation of Christian missionaries. When newspapers followed in the twentieth century they had the standardising effect on nationalism 

Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, established and often enforced clear boundaries. For Islam the minimal boundaries with the older Southeast Asian belief pattern were the abandonment of pork 

Islam was free from internal boundaries of this kind in Southeast Asia, since the Shafi i school of Sunni Islam was accepted everywhere. Externally, the contest with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century produced a politicised Islam in Aceh, Demak and Banten in particular, which engendered a counter-identity among the peoples who successfully fought to resist Islamisation by force. This helped create a non-Islamic identity for the Bataks of Sumatra and the Balinese in the sixteenth century, and for the Toraja of Sulawesi in the seventeenth, while the Dayak of Borneo and other non-Muslim peoples had a more porous boundary with coastal Malayo-Muslim culture. 

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