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Dead in the Water
An urgent call for reassessment of policies supporting very large infrastructure projects in developing countries. This case study examines the planning, implementation, and unexpected outcomes--for both the local people and the environment--of one of the largest dams in Southeast Asia, which the World Bank promoted as a new model of sustainable development.
The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong
For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? This provocative new book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao bor...
Fields of Desire
In this important new book, High argues that poverty reduction policies are formulated and implemented in fields of desire. Drawing on psychoanalytic understandings of desire, she shows that such programs circulate around the question of what is lacking. Far from rational responses to measures of need, then, the politics of poverty are unconscious, culturally expressed, mutually contradictory, and sometimes contrary to self-interest. Based on long-term fieldwork in a Lao village that has been the subject of multiple poverty reduction and development programs, High's account looks at implementation on the ground. While these efforts were laudable in their aims of reducing poverty, they often failed to achieve their objectives. Local people received them with suspicion and disillusionment. Nevertheless, poverty reduction policies continued to be renewed by planners and even desired locally. High relates this to the force of aspirations among rural Lao, ambivalent understandings of power and the "post-rebellious" moment in contemporary Laos.
Forging Islamic Power and Place
Forging Islamic Power and Place charts the nineteenth-century rise of a vast network of Islamic scholars stretching across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia. Following the political and military collapse of the tiny Sultanate of Patani in what is now southern Thailand and northern Malaysia, a displaced community of scholars led by Shaykh Dā’ūd bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Faṭānī regrouped in Mecca. In the years that followed, al-Faṭānī composed more than forty works that came to form the basis for a new, text-based type of Islamic practice. Via a network of scholars, students, and scribes, al-Faṭānī’s writings made their way back to Southeast Asia, becoming the core tex...
The Way of the Gods
Polytheisms may well be the world’s most undervalued cultural resource. From the dawn of history until quite recently, the default religious orientation on the planet was to recognize an open-ended plurality of unique divinities that manifest in every realm of natural and social life. By hosting a plurality of Gods, polytheistic civilizations exhibit maximum diversity in maximum solidarity – each one is a multiverse. Polytheism has been at the heart of the most ancient and resilient civilizations on Earth. Yet polytheist traditions have been stigmatized and persecuted for centuries, countless of them have been eradicated and prejudice against them and the very idea of a multiplicity of Gods continue to distort how they are perceived both by outsiders and in many cases even among their participants. This book offers an overview of continuous and revived polytheistic traditions from around the world together with critical discussions of the issues affecting them and their reception, offering a basis for further study and comparison.
Living with Herds
Domestic animals have lived with humans for thousands of years and remain essential to the everyday lives of people throughout the world. In this book, Natasha Fijn examines the process of animal domestication in a study that blends biological and social anthropology, ethology and ethnography. She examines the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. After living with Mongolian herding families, Dr Fijn has observed through firsthand experience both sides of the human-animal relationship. Examining their reciprocal social behavior and communication with one another, she demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders' lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process.
Familial Properties
Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property. Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced ...
Safeguarding Against Statelessness at Birth
This book covers the essential aspects of prevention of childhood statelessness focusing on norms governing the subject through the rights to acquire a nationality and to birth registration, two vital safeguards to prevent statelessness among children. Its unique feature lies in its exposition of the international legal norms focusing on prevention of childhood statelessness and systematic analyses of domestic legal frameworks on nationality and birth registration of the 10 ASEAN Member States. This book is designed for a wide range of readers comprising academics, advocates, students, policy makers, and other stakeholders working on statelessness affecting children, especially in Southeast Asia.
The Uprooted
For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted métis children—those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers—from their homes. In many cases, and for a wide range of reasons—death, divorce, the end of a romance, a return to France, or because the birth was the result of rape—the father had left the child in the mother's care. Although the program succeeded in rescuing homeless children from life on the streets, for those in their mothers' care it was disastrous. Citing an 1889 French law and claiming that raising children in the Southeast Asian cultural milieu was tantamount to abandonment, colonial officials sought permanent, "...
Ghosts of the New City
Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth a...
