Fluid iron : state formation in Southeast Asia Machine generated contents note:1.Studying the State in Southeast Asia: Definitions Problems Approaches 2.Ties That (Un)Bind 3.Cosmologies Truth Regimes and Invulnerability 4.Bureaucracy Reason and Ritual 5.Violence and Beauty Conclusion: Alternative States Incongruous Region. Fluid Iron is the first extended treatment of state formation in Southeast Asia from early to contemporary times and the first book length analysis of Western historical and ethnographic writing on the region. It includes critical assessments of the work of Clifford Geertz O.W. Wolters Benedict Anderson and other major scholars who have written on early colonial and modern Southeast Asian history and culture. Making use of the ideas of Weber Marx Foucault and postmodern and postcolonial theory Tony Day argues that culture must be restored to the study of Southeast Asian history so that the state and historical developments in the region can be returned to their own alternative historical contexts and trajectories. He employs a wide range of contemporary scholarship as well as Southeast Asian literary and historical texts inscriptions and temples to explore the kinds of concepts and practices kinship networks cosmologies gender identities bureaucracies rituals violence and aesthetics that have been used for centuries to build states