Presenting the results of seventeen months of field research, conducted entirely in the Thai language, this book describes and compares the patterns of culture and social exchange of two groups of Thai officials: district-level bureaucrats and physicians in a provincial hospital.

Presenting the results of seventeen months of field research, conducted entirely in the Thai language, this study describes and compares the patterns of social exchange of two groups of Thai officials: district-level bureaucrats and physicians in a provincial hospital. Dr. Haas uses a unique combination of anthropological field data and survey research. He is the first to thoroughly describe the effects of the government's counterinsurgency efforts on the behavior of local officials and on their relations with villagers and provincial merchants; his chapters on physicians contain one of the few published discussions of the meaning of professionalism in non-Western societies, as well as the only field study available of an Asian medical institution.