A Small, Distant War
Souchou Yao
- Published: 2016
- Pages: 208 pp.
- Maps and illustrations
- Series: NIAS Monographs
- Series number: 133
Available from NIAS Press worldwide
ISBN Hardback: 978 87 7694 190 1, £60 (June 2016)
ISBN Paperback: 978 87 7694 191 8, £19.99 ()
About the book
- Examines the Malayan Emergency afresh.
- Brings into focus issues not normally covered in other accounts.
- Explores the moral costs of modern counter-insurgency.
- One of the first conflicts of the Cold War, the Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and communist insurgents in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. Souchou Yao tells its story in a series of penetrating and illuminating essays that range across a vast canvas. Throughout the book runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women in colonial Malaya. Here, the effect of counterinsurgency measures are captured by the anthropologist’s art of ethnography and cultural analysis. Among the vignettes are an ethnographic encounter with a woman ex-guerrilla, and the author’s remembrance of his insurgent-cousin killed in a police ambush. As such, this fascinating study examines the Emergency afresh, and in the process brings into focus issues not normally covered in other accounts: nostalgia and failed revolution, socialist fantasy and ethnic relations, and the moral costs of modern counterinsurgency.
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About the author
Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer, and former senior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on the state and Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. His books include Confucian Capitalism (2001) and the bestselling Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2007).
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