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

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.