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Changing Lives in Laos
Changes in the character of the political regime in Laos after 2000, a massive influx of foreign investment, and disruptions to rural life arising from improved communications and new forms of mobility within and across the borders have produced a major transformation. Alongside these changes, a group of young scholars carried out studies that document the rise of a new social, cultural and economic order. The contributions to this volume draw on original fieldwork materials and unpublished sources, and provide fresh analyses of topics ranging from the structures of power to the politics of territoriality and new forms of sociability in emerging urban spaces.
Laos
The authors provide a full, frank, and engaging survey of Laos today, assessing its history, prospects, and hopes.
Interactions with a Violent Past
The Second and Third Indochina Wars are the subject of important ongoing scholarship, but there has been little research on the lasting impact of wartime violence on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.
Post-war Laos
More than a quarter of century after the end of the war in 1975, the Lao leadership is still in search for a compelling nationalist narration. Its politics of culture and representation appear to be caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Meanwhile, originating from the periphery where ethnic minorities had hitherto been symbolically, politically and administratively confined, the participation of some of their members in the Indochina Wars (1945-75) exposed these individuals to socialization and politicization processes.This rigorously researched and cogently argued book is a fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic material, showing the politics o...
Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia
Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders. The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, co...
The Price of Belonging
By addressing what it means to belong beyond the collective safety net and an emotionally buttressed sense of embeddedness, The Price of Belonging exposes the adverse sides of belonging characterised by obligations, commitments, sacrifices, hidden threats and pressures.
Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements
Books on Southeast Asian nationalist movements make very little - if any - mention of women in their ranks. Biographical studies of politically active women in Southeast Asia are also rare. Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements makes a strong case for the significance of women's involvement in nationalist movements and for the diverse impact of those movements on the lives of individual women activists. Some of the 12 women whose political activities are discussed in this volume are well known, while others are not. Some of them participated in armed struggles, while others pursued peaceful ways of achieving national independence. The authors show women negotiating their own subject...
Southeast Asian Culture and Heritage in a Globalising World
Southeast Asia has in recent years become a crossroads of cultures with high levels of ethnic pluralism, not only between countries, sub-regions and urban areas, but also at the local levels of community and neighbourhood. Illustrated by a series of international case studies, this book demonstrates how the forces of 'post-colonialism' in their various manifestations are accelerating social change and creating new and 'imagined' communities, some of which are potentially disruptive and which may well threaten the longer term sustainability of the region. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book brings together geographers, historians, anthropologists, architects, education specialists, planners and sociologists to make connections and new insights and to provide a truly comprehensive view of heritage, culture and identity in this dynamic region.
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.
The Mekong
A “remarkable” history of the great river of Southeast Asia (Jill Ker Conway, author of The Road from Coorain). The Mekong River runs over nearly three thousand miles, beginning in the mountains of Tibet and flowing through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam before emptying into the China Sea. Its waters are the lifeblood of Southeast Asia, and first begot civilization on the fertile banks of its delta region at Oc Eo nearly two millennia ago. This is the story of the peoples and cultures of the great river, from these obscure beginnings to the emergence of today’s independent nations. Drawing on research gathered over forty years, Milton Osborne traces the Mekong’s ...
