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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.
Living with the Vinaya
Around the first century BCE, Buddhist monks formed monasteries and established relationships with kings and lay people. The rules monks live by, the Vinaya, are a pivotal source of meaning for them and their dealings with society and form the basis of multiple monasticisms across geographical regions and throughout history. The ways in which the Vinaya is understood and practiced, therefore, must take into account the kind of monasticism that emerges from it. In Living with the Vinaya, Ryosuke Kuramoto examines the process of creating monasticism in contemporary Myanmar by focusing on how monks acquire, possess, and consume material goods. To live as a monk means to obtain resources from so...
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.
Truth on Trial in Thailand
Since 2005, Thailand has been in crisis, with unprecedented political instability and the worst political violence seen in the country in decades. In the aftermath of a military coup in 2006, Thailand’s press freedom ranking plunged, while arrests for lèse-majesté have skyrocketed to levels unknown in the modern world. Truth on Trial in Thailand traces the 110-year trajectory of defamation-based laws in Thailand. The most prominent of these is lèse-majesté, but defamation aspects also appear in laws on sedition and treason, the press and cinema, anti-communism, contempt of court, insulting of religion, as well as libel. This book makes the case that despite the appearance of growing de...
Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path
This ambitious work traces a social history of semicolonialism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. It takes as its central concern the intertwining of two antagonistic forces: elite constructions of modernity shaped globally, and an alternate line of peasant resistance and development. Nantong county and the northern portion of the commercially advanced Yangzi Delta form its focal points. Lying in the hinterland of and connected in myriad ways with the treaty port of Shanghai, which in the late nineteenth century became the center of imperialist activity in China, the northern delta is an ideal locale for examining how the acquisition, transmission, and contestation of pow...
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.
