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An innovative new social history of Thailand told through the lens of changing ideals of manners, civility and behaviour.
This volume traces the threads that tie together an understanding of Thailand as a dynamic and rapidly changing society, through an examination of the work of one major scholar of the country, Andrew Turton. Turton's anthropological studies of Thailand cover a wide spectrum from politics and economy to ritual and culture, and have been crucial in shaping evolving understandings of Thai society. In this collection, ten leading specialists on Thailand from a variety of disciplines critically consider aspects of Turton's work in relation to the changing nature of different aspects of Thai society. The book tracks the links between past and present scholarship, examines the contextuality of scholarship in its times, and sheds light on the current situation in Thailand.
James Low was an officer of the English East India Company's Madras Army, stationed at Penang. Low's mission to Southern Siam in 1824 was supposed to enlist Siamese support for the British invasion of Burma. His mission was a failure, but the report he produced, published here in full for the first time, provides a fascinating picture of the Andaman Sea coast of Thailand, from Phuket to the Malaysian border, now a great tourist region.
During the nineteenth century there was a huge increase in the level and types of gambling in Thailand. Taxes on gambling became a major source of state revenue, with the government establishing state-run lotteries and casinos in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, over the same period, a strong anti-gambling discourse emerged within the Thai elite, which sought to regulate gambling through a series of increasingly restrictive and punitive laws. By the mid-twentieth century, most forms of gambling had been made illegal, a situation that persists until today. This historical study, based on a wide variety of Thai- and English-language archival sources including government reports, legal cases and newspapers, places the criminalization of gambling in Thailand in the broader context of the country’s socio-economic transformation and the modernization of the Thai state. Particular attention is paid to how state institutions, such as the police and judiciary, and different sections of Thai society shaped and subverted the law to advance their own interests. Finally, the book compares the Thai government’s policies on gambling with those on opium use and prostitution, placing the latter in the context of an international clampdown on vice in the early twentieth century.
An exploration of subversive, ribald variations of the most important story in Theravada Buddhism.
This volume examines the dynamic, mutually constitutive, relationship between religion and mobility in the contemporary era of Asian globalisation in which an increasing number of people have been displaced, forcefully or voluntarily, by an expanding global market economy and lasting regional political strife. Seven case studies provide up-to-date ethnographic perspectives on the translocal/transnational dimension of religion and the religious/spiritual aspect of movement. The chapters draw on research into Buddhism, Islam, Chinese qigong, Christianity and communal ritual as these religious beliefs and practices move in and across Singapore, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the upper Mekong region, the Thai-Burma border, the Middle East and France. With these diverse and rich ethnographic cases on translocal/transnational Asian religious practices and subjectivities, the book transcends the conventional nation-state centered framework to look into how mobile religious agents are redefining boundaries of local, regional, national identities and recreating translocal, transnational and interregional connectivity. In so doing, it illustrates the importance of promoting a dynamic understanding of Asia not just as a geopolitical entity but as an ongoing social and religious formation in late modernity. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.
Thailand has been systematically transformed into a classic neocolonial object of Western desire - an easily penetrated erotic zone that caters to the appetites of Western interlopers. In the first comprehensive critical study of Western literature about Thailand, Imagining Siam provides a thorough analysis - using Edward Said's concepts - of English language travelogues and travel literature. It offers a broad view, covering literary attempts to describe Siam in the 13th century, through the formative phase of Western engagement in the 16th century and the various competing European imperialisms in the 19th century, to today's era of mass tourism and the global reach of economically and culturally powerful 'First World' populations. Imagining Siam will appeal to those interested in Thailand, critiques of travel writing, and the Anna Leonowens' legacy (Anna of Anna and the King of Siam).