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Description: Founders' cults throughout Southeast Asia are based on the contract between the original founder or founders of a settlement and the spirit owner or owners of territory cleared for human use. The establishment and enactment of these cults reflect relationships with founding ancestors and with neighboring polities. Founders' cults are implicated in defining both ethnic identity and interethnic relations. Changes in the cults involve the representation of identity in multicultural modern nation-states through the enactment of traditional local custom in response to European colonialism, world religions (Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity), national integration, and the penetration of global capitalism. Through comparative inquiry and ethnographic case studies, ten anthropologists examine founders' cults in mainland and insular Southeast Asia. Three integrative essays frame the volume: F.K. Lehman's typological introduction sets the stage by characterizing the founders' cult that serves as the governing idea for Southeast Asian ethnic and political orders, from hierarchical and so-called egalitarian political forms in the mainland highlands to <i>dhammarājika</i> and <i>devarājika</i> kingship in premodern lowland states. In two essays Richard A. O'Connor considers the broader Southeast Asian context and situates the volume's ethnographic case studies within it. The case studies are presented in the order of increasing emphasis on the changing role of founders' cults in the context of contemporary nation-states: Akha (Thailand, Cornelia Ann Kammerer), Toraja (Indonesia, Elizabeth Coville), Tobaku (Indonesia, Lorraine V. Aragon), Karen (Thailand, Yoko Hayami), Gumai (Indonesia, Minako Sakai), Thai-Lao (Thailand, Yukio Hayashi), Shan (Thailand, Nicola Tannenbaum), and Mien as well as Hmong (Thailand, Hjörleifur Jønsson). This volume analyzes founders' cults as political rituals in the uplands and lowlands of mainland and insular Southeast Asia, treated both as a region and as the locus of particular social, religious, and political histories.
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