Thailand is exceptional among modern states in Asia in that it has built and retained a national culture around a traditional monarchical institution. Moreover, this culture has also been based on a dominant religious tradition, that of Theravada Buddhism. The process of creating the modern nation-state of Thailand out of the traditional Buddhist kingdom of Siam began in the nineteenth century when the rulers of Siam, confronted with increasing pressure from the colonial powers of Britain and France, were able to preserve their country's independence by instituting revolutionary changes that established the authority of a centralized bureaucracy throughout the country. The new state asserted its authority not only over Siamese who lived in the core area of the old kingdom but also over large numbers of Lao, Yuan or Northern Thai, Khmer, Malays, tribal peoples, and other groups, all of which had previously enjoyed relative autonomy, and over the sizable immigrant Chinese population, which was assuming an increasingly significant role in the economy. Because the rulers of the Siamese state strove to incorporate these diverse peoples into a Thai national community, how this community should be defined and what type of state structure should be linked with it have been dominant questions in modern Thai history. Significant tensions have arisen from the efforts by members of the Thai elite to make the monarchical traditions of the Bangkok dynasty, Buddhism, and the central Thai language basic to Thai national culture. Other tensions have arisen as monarchy, military, bureaucracy, the Buddhist sangha, business interests, and elected political representatives assert or maintain an authoritative position in the state structure. This book examines these tensions with reference to the major changes that have taken place in Thai society, economy, polity, and culture in the twentieth century, especially since World War II.

This book explores social memory in the context of cultural crises of modernity in Thailand and Laos. It explicates the ways in which social memory constructed by the people enters modernity, and how this in turn causes fundamental ruptures with their past, as well as the various ways cultural crises are experienced in their lives. The essays in this book consider how in these crises the people constitute their cultural, social, or individual identities, particularly focusing on the theoretical issues of identifications and their relevance to distinct historical processes in Thailand and Laos. Both countries, particularly in the two decades since the 1970s, have been undergoing radical social and economic changes. Whilst Thailand has travelled down the road to industrialization, neighbouring Laos experienced a communist revolution in 1975 and only since the late 1980s has attempted to follow a reformist path to development. Increasingly influenced by globalised economic and social institutions, both countries have come to face crises that have made people insecure in the present and anxious about the future.

Series Information:
Anthropology of Asia

Thailand is exceptional among modern states in Asia in that it has built and retained a national culture around a traditional monarchical institution. Moreover, this culture has also been based on a dominant religious tradition, that of Theravada Buddhism. The process of creating the modern nation-state of Thailand out of the traditional Buddhist kingdom of Siam began in the nineteenth century when the rulers of Siam, confronted with increasing pressure from the colonial powers of Britain and France, were able to preserve their country's independence by instituting revolutionary changes that established the authority of a centralized bureaucracy throughout the country. The new state asserted its authority not only over Siamese who lived in the core area of the old kingdom but also over large numbers of Lao, Yuan or Northern Thai, Khmer, Malays, tribal peoples, and other groups, all of which had previously enjoyed relative autonomy, and over the sizable immigrant Chinese population, which was assuming an increasingly significant role in the economy. Because the rulers of the Siamese state strove to incorporate these diverse peoples into a Thai national community, how this community should be defined and what type of state structure should be linked with it have been dominant questions in modern Thai history. Significant tensions have arisen from the efforts by members of the Thai elite to make the monarchical traditions of the Bangkok dynasty, Buddhism, and the central Thai language basic to Thai national culture. Other tensions have arisen as monarchy, military, bureaucracy, the Buddhist sangha, business interests, and elected political representatives assert or maintain an authoritative position in the state structure. This book examines these tensions with reference to the major changes that have taken place in Thai society, economy, polity, and culture in the twentieth century, especially since World War II.

The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium, and natural resources, such as copper. At the edges of three empires (the Qing empire in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and, eventually, French Colonial Vietnam), the Black Flags and their rivals sustained networks of power and dominance through the framework of political regimes. This lively history demonstrates the plasticity of borderlines, the limits of imposed boundaries, and the flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam. Imperial Bandits contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries.

In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam's remote northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had been created in the Hmong language by the Far East Broadcasting Company specifically for war refugees in Laos. The Vietnamese Hmong related the content to their traditional expectation of salvation by a Hmong messiah-king who would lead them out of subjugation, and they appropriated the evangelical message for themselves. Today, the New Way (Kev Cai Tshiab) has some three hundred thousand followers in Vietnam. Tam T. T. Ngo reveals the complex politics of religion and ethnic relations in contemporary Vietnam and illuminates the dynamic interplay between local and global forces, socialist and postsocialist state building, cold war and post-cold war antagonisms, Hmong transnationalism, and U.S.-led evangelical expansionism.

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand-or Siam, as it was formerly known-has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress-or lack thereof-toward Western-style liberal democracy at the center of Thailand's narrative, but that view underestimates the importance of the colonial context. In particular, a long-standing relationship with China and the existence of a large and important Chinese diaspora within Thailand have shaped development at every stage. As the emerging nation struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were neither a colonial force against whom Thainess was identified, nor had they been able to fully assimilate into Thai society. Wasana Wongsurawat demonstrates that the Kingdom of Thailand's transformation into a modern nation-state required the creation of a national identity that justified not only the hegemonic rule of monarchy but also the involvement of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class upon whom it depended. Her revisionist view traces the evolution of this codependent relationship through the twentieth century, as Thailand struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, found itself an ally of Japan in World War II, and reconsidered its relationship with China in the postwar era.

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established as an underground publication, journalists are hired for their ability at dakwah, or Islamic propagation. At Tempo, a news magazine banned during the Soeharto regime and considered progressive, many see their work as a manifestation of worship, but the publication itself is not considered Islamic. At Harakah, reporters support an Islamic political party, while at Republika they practice a "journalism of the Prophet" and see Islam as a market niche. Other news organizations, too, such as Malaysiakini, employ Muslim journalists. Steele, a longtime scholar of the region, explores how these publications observe universal principles of journalism through an Islamic idiom.

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but aware of the social and economic possibilities in this gray zone between two oppressive regimes. For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have settled in the city-Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka-and conflate this diverse population with the state actions of the People's Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network. In this first English-language study of the Sino-Burmese, Mapping Chinese Rangoon examines the concepts of ethnicity, territory, and nation in an area where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence.