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The Legend of the Golden Boat
The Legend of the Golden Boat provides a new approach to the study of Southeast Asia’s northern borderlands. Based on extensive travel in the upper Mekong hinterland, it is a fascinating account of the lives of the transport operators, traders, entrepreneurs, and government officials. This ethnographic study is set against an intriguing background of war, revolution, and reform, providing one of the most detailed histories of the upper Mekong borderlands ever written. Contemporary developments in the upper Mekong region are often interpreted in terms of the emergence of a trans-border Economic Quadrangle, characterized by liberalization, integration, and cooperation. This book seeks to go beyond this promotional rhetoric and explore the ambiguities and contradictions in the Quadrangle’s development.
Human and Global Security
Discusses four principal security threats - state violence, environmental degradation, population displacement, and globalization - and shows that any meaningful interpretation must include both a narrow legal definition and a broader global perspective.
The Ordination of a Tree
Thai Buddhist monks wrap orange clerical robes around trees to protect forests. "Ordaining" a tree is a provocative ritual that has become the symbol of a small but influential monastic movement aimed at reversing environmental degradation and the unsustainable economic development and consumerism that fuel it. This book examines the evolution of this movement from the late 1980s to the present, exploring the tree ordination and other rituals used to resist destructive national projects. Susan M. Darlington explores monks' motivations, showing how they interpret their lived religion as the basis of their actions, and provides an in-depth portrait of activist monk Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun. The obstacles monks face, including damage to their reputations, arrest, and even assassination, reveal the difficulty of enacting social justice. Even the tree ordination itself must now withstand its appropriation for state projects. Despite this, monks have gone from individual action to a loosely allied movement that now works with nongovernmental organizations. This is a fascinating, firsthand account of engaged Buddhism.
Action Dharma
These essays chart the emergence of a new chapter in an ancient faith - the rise of social service and political activism in Buddhist Asia and the West. Engaged Buddhists have sought new ways to comfort society's oppressed communities.
Multi-Stakeholder Platforms for Integrated Water Management
As they provide a negotiating space for a diversity of interests, Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) are an increasingly popular mode of involving civil society in resource management decisions. This book focuses on water management to take a positive, if critical, look at this phenomenon. Illustrated by a wide geographical range of case studies from both developed and developing worlds, it recognizes that MSPs will neither automatically break down divides nor bring actors to the table on an equal footing, and argues that MSPs may in some cases do more harm than good. The volume then examines how MSPs can make a difference and how they might successfully co-opt the public, private and civil-society sectors. The book highlights the particular difficulties of MSPs when dealing with integrated water management programmes, explaining how MSPs are most successful at a less complex and more local level. It finally questions whether MSPs are - or can be - sustainable, and puts forward suggestions for improving their durability.
Nature Across Cultures
Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures consists of about 25 essays dealing with the environmental knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Thai, and Andean views of nature and the environment, among others, the book includes essays on Environmentalism and Images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Worldviews and Ecology, Rethinking the Western/non-Western Divide, and Landscape, Nature, and Culture. The essays address the connections between nature and culture and relate the environmental practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both environmental history and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Interreligious Studies
The first comprehensive textbook designed for undergraduate and graduate students in Interreligious Studies.
Money and Power in Provincial Thailand
Most studies of Southeast Asian economic change focus on the phenomenal growth experienced by a few large cities, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Big business has been viewed as the economic engine fueling the region's growth and prosperity. Studies of the rural areas have concerned themselves with the social and environmental impact of metropolitan growth--villages emptied by migration to the big cities, cultures crushed by tourist development, and agribusiness and lush landscapes destroyed by the devastation of natural resources. The literature reveals that few analysts have examined the middle distance between metropolis and countryside. The contributors ...
Advances in Historical Ecology
Ecology is an attempt to understand the reciprocal relationship between living and nonliving elements of the earth. For years, however, the discipline either neglected the human element entirely or presumed its effect on natural ecosystems to be invariably negative. Among social scientists, notably in geography and anthropology, efforts to address this human-environment interaction have been criticized as deterministic and mechanistic. Bridging the divide between social and natural sciences, the contributors to this book use a more holistic perspective to explore the relationships between humans and their environment. Exploring short- and long-term local and global change, eighteen specialis...
