The relationship of cultural practices and institutions to politics and religion is the overarching theme of the present issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. More specifically, the six research articles gathered here form three discrete thematic units: the first deals with politics as performance and with performance as politics; the second with education and youth literature as instruments of national imagining; and the last one with the relationship of legal texts to religious heterodoxy. In the opening article, Astrid Noren-Nilsson examines the dissemination in contemporary Cambodia of the narrative of the sixteenth-century king, Sdech Kan, in support of the incumbent prime minister's political and personal power. Tellingly, Sdech Kan not only embodies the 'man of merit' whose virtues are intimately connected to traditional notions of authority and moral order in Buddhist Southeast Asia, but is also believed to have achieved power by toppling an unjust king — an obvious parallel to Prime Minister Hun Sen's defenestration of Prince Norodom Ranariddh from the governing coalition in 1997. The narrative of Sdech Kan is performed by Hun Sen primarily in the form of elaborate public speeches that deploy tropes and imagery rooted in collective memory. 'The reinvention of Sdech Kan,' writes Noren-Nilsson, 'advances an idea of the curbing of royal power as integral to national reconciliation and prosperity'; at the same time, the figure of Sdech Kan 'provides Hun Sen with a new vision to guide the present era ... [for] the leader who dares to challenge the hereditary leader achieves the democratic revolution and embodies the nation's aspirations'.
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