The rural, Lao-speaking people of northeastern Thailand constitute over a third of the entire population of Thailand. Over the last century, this ethnically separate community has evolved from a traditional peasantry into “cosmopolitan” villagers who are actively shaping Thai politics. Eminent anthropologist Charles Keyes traces this evolution in detail, beginning with the failure of a Buddhist millenarian uprising in 1901–2 and concluding with the successful election of the Thai Rak Thai/...

Intended for students as well as scholars of religion and violence, Belief and Bloodshed discusses how the relationship between religion and violence is not unique to a post-9/11 world-it has existed throughout all of recorded history and culture. The book makes clear the complex interactions between religion, violence, and politics to show that religion as always innocent or always evil is misguided, and that rationalizations by religion for political power and violence are not n...

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 theore...

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 ...

This book can be summarized as collection of random thoughts, odd observations, &...Questionable Wisdom. Enjoy. If you dare. Or if you buy it. Then you can enjoy it without the dare, you know, if you want. Also, there are stick figures & drawings of stuff. Plus the words rhinoplasty & poop get used within. So, there's that.

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 a...

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 ...

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 considere...

Brain Mystery Light and Dark examines scientific models of how the brain becomes conscious and argues that the spiritual dimension of life is compatible with the main scientific theories. Keyes shows us that the belief in the unity of mind and brain does not necessarily undermine aesthetic, religious, and ethical beliefs.

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...

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...

Drawing on ethnographic research, Living Sharia examines the role of sharia in the sociopolitical processes of contemporary Malaysia. The book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims. Timothy Daniels explores how the way people think about sharia is often entangled with notions about race, gender equality, nationhood, liberal pluralism, citizen...