Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Community Movements in Southeast Asia
Derived from the terms community and social movement, Shigeharu Tanabe?s concept of community movements is the process by which people create alternative communities, practices, and worlds that resist the influence and imposition of hegemonic political structures. Community movements enable us to capture the reality of power relations as they arise from and involve small-scale, face-to-face interactions rather than the assumed existence of social institutions such as the nation-state. Illustrating this alternative means of constructing social identities and relations, this book contains vivid ethnographic descriptions of community movements across Southeast Asia, including the Buddhist Utopian movement, the creation of community radio, Hmong ex-communists, the creation of agricultural networks in Thailand, the Dhamma School movement, the Muslim and ethnic minority Kayah community in Myanmar, the construction of the Rope Bridge in a village in Laos, and the global land rights movement in Cambodia. Collectively, these movements provide the reader with a glimpse of other possibilities for the world as it exists now.
Worshipping the Great Moderniser
An examination of social imaginary surrounding Thai kingship and Thainess that yield an intriguing amalgam of ideas concerning popular religion, Buddhist kingship, nationalism, and material culture. It explores the contemporary appeal of King Chulalongkorn and considers what this ruler's unprecedented popularity says about Thai society.
Communities of Potential
This multiauthor volume provides fresh ways of looking at community movements and social actors in Thailand and beyond. The chapters cover a range of movements, from personal and social development based on Buddhist principles to community movements centered on other religious, spiritual, and traditional practices. Community movements differ markedly from the classic social movements of the early twentieth century and the subsequent "new social movements." Anthropologist Shigeharu Tanabe and Thai and Japanese colleagues explain that a key feature of these community movements is "assemblage"-- individuals or groups coming together in networks that enable them to realize their potential. Building on theoretical foundations developed by social scientists Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and others, this book is an important reference on the workings of community movements in Southeast Asia.
Deities and Divas
In central Thailand, a flamboyantly turbaned gay medium for the Hindu god of the underworld posts Facebook selfies of himself hugging and kissing a young man. In Myanmar’s largest city Yangon, a one-time member of a gay NGO dons an elaborate wedding dress to be ritually married to a possessing female spirit; he believes she will offer more support for his gay lifestyle than the path of LGBTQ activism. The only son of a Chinese trading family in Bangkok finds acceptance for his homosexuality and crossdressing when he becomes the medium for a revered female Chinese deity. And in northern Thailand, female mediums smoke, drink, flaunt butch masculine poses and flirt with female followers when ...
Civility and Savagery
This is a book about social differentiation and distinction in one of the ethnically and politically most complex regions of the world, dealing with crucial issues in currently renewed debates on cultural pluralism, nationalism, irredentism and ethnic dispersal. The themes are given a regional and historical focus by treating peoples within the Tai
The King and the Making of Modern Thailand
The making of modern Thailand is grounded in specific political institutions, Brahmanical tropes, and sacred Buddhist traditions stylized with Hindu rituals. Over and above these mysterious practices and ancient customs, modern Thailand is a product of the late Great Rama IX Bhumibol Adulyadej. Most Thai people have only known one King. Born in Europe and educated during World War II, Bhumibol was the son of a Harvard medical doctor who had a penchant for jazz music and fast cars. When he returned to Thailand in 1951 to assume his royal duties, he could hardly speak Thai but his French and German were remarkable. Bhumibol had inherited an impoverished country with nothing but a symbolic role...
Capitalism Magic Thailand
By studying intersections among new cults of wealth, ritually empowered amulets and professional spirit mediumship—which have emerged together in Thailand’s dynamic religious field in recent decades—Capitalism Magic Thailand explores the conditions under which global modernity produces new varieties of enchantment. Bruno Latour’s account of modernity as a condition fractured between rationalizing ideology and hybridizing practice is expanded to explain the apparent paradox of new forms of magical ritual emerging alongside religious fundamentalism across a wide range of Asian societies. In Thailand, novel and increasingly popular varieties of ritual now form a symbolic complex in whic...
Making Fields of Merit
"This anthropological study addresses religion and gender relations through the lens of the lives, actions and role in Thai society of an order of Buddhist nuns (mae chii). It presents a unique ethnography of these Thai Buddhist nuns, examines what it implies to be a female ascetic in contemporary Thailand and analyses how the ordained state for women fits into the wider gender patterns found in Thai society. The study also deals with the nuns' agency in creating religious space and authority for women. In addition, it raises questions about how the position of Thai Buddhist nuns outside the Buddhist sanhga affects their religious legitimacy and describes recent moves to restore a Theravada order of female monks." -- BACK COVER.
Tracks and Traces
This volume traces the threads that tie together an understanding of Thailand as a dynamic and rapidly changing society, through an examination of the work of one major scholar of the country, Andrew Turton. Turton's anthropological studies of Thailand cover a wide spectrum from politics and economy to ritual and culture, and have been crucial in shaping evolving understandings of Thai society. In this collection, ten leading specialists on Thailand from a variety of disciplines critically consider aspects of Turton's work in relation to the changing nature of different aspects of Thai society. The book tracks the links between past and present scholarship, examines the contextuality of scholarship in its times, and sheds light on the current situation in Thailand.
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...
