A must read for feminist activists, scholars, and policymakers. As this book amply demonstrates, women s movements around the world have much to learn from each other. The Challenge of Local Feminisms is the best place to start ... an inspiration and a challenge for us all. —Bella AbzugCochair, Women's Environment and Development Organization

Isabelo’s Archive reenacts El Folk-Lore Filipino (1889), Isabelo de los Reyes’s eccentric but groundbreaking attempt to build an “archive” of popular knowledge in the Philippines. Inspired by Isabelo’s ghostly project, this collection mixes essays, vignettes, extracts, and notes on Philippine history and culture... Blending the literary and the academic, wondrously diverse in its range, it has many gems to offer the reader.

"Mother Figured" is a wide-ranging study of apparitions and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While most analyses have read Marian revival as antimodern, de la Cruz demonstrates that its origins actually lie "within "secular modernity. She takes inspiration from one of Mary s titles that has grown in popularity in modern times Mary the Mediatrix to show how modern print and technological media enable and support the circulation of miraculous narratives and images. While thoroughly grounded in local tradition, the resurgence of Marianism in the Philippines is a subject of global relevance. De la Cruz portrays Filipino Catholics not as mere followers of the faith from the margins or from below but as guardians of orthodoxy and aggressive purveyors of their own sort of Christian universalism. In this sense, the book offers a timely analysis of the social and political implications of contemporary Christianity s shift to the Global South."

Women in Asia are on the move. The migration of women from village to city has increased dramatically in the past decade, and many of these new migrants are young single women seeking jobs. In several Asian countries, women migrants now outnumber men by a substantial margin. Along with the physical movement from rural to urban areas come new roles

This collection of critical theorizing reflects the lived experiences of racialized Asian-Canadian contributors. Grounded in theory and history, these essays illuminate pathways to better understand Asian-ness in contemporary Canada. These academics provide fresh perspectives on Asian Canadian exclusion, examine new spaces for critical resistance, and navigate the challenges of identity formation across racial, cultural, and national boundaries.

In this first ever book-length study of maternal representations in Cebuano literature, Hope Sabanpan-Yu reveals the confluence of indigenous and foreign cultures and convincingly connects the theory of split-level maternity to the debate on motherhood in the Philippines. Yu traces the history of motherhood and examines the maternal stereotypes including the important roles played by patriarchal and societal structures.

What would happen when the Christian message is introduced to various groups of people? How would their contexts and worldviews influence their responses to the message? To this age-old missiological question, the study takes the readers to a narrowed and concerted question, "What is the effect of Pentecostal messages on animistic people," or in other words, "What are results when the (Holy) Spirit meets the spirits of the tribal people?" Julie Ma chose the Kankanaey tribe in the northern Philippines to prove that the Pentecostal type of Christian has invited a very positive response from the Kankana-eys. She approaches the matter from historical, anthropological and theological perspectives. This may challenge the readers to look more closely at the phenomenal Pentecostal movement, especially with their potential for mission. She also urges her fellow Pentecostals to be more appreciative of their heritage and to fully appropriate it to reach "the end of the earth."

In this paper, an attempt is made to examine and compare the legal status of women in the Republic of China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, with special focus on laws which discriminate against women. In view of differences in the cultural background of these four countries - Confucianism in China, Islam in Malaysia, Catholicism and the Spanish influence in the in the Philippines and Buddhism in Thailand - it is likely that laws in these countries also differ. This paper also tries to relate the legal status of women in these countries to other apsect of their status, in particular, the social, economic and political aspects.