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Culture And Power In Traditional Siamese Government
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Book Synopsis Culture and Power in Traditional Siamese Government by : Neil A. Englehart
Download or read book Culture and Power in Traditional Siamese Government written by Neil A. Englehart and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad reevaluation of Siam's political culture as it existed prior to King Chulalongkorn's administrative reforms in the nineteenth century. Englehart offers evidence to show that traditional Siamese government functioned more effectively and rationally than most scholars have acknowledged.
Book Synopsis Truth on Trial in Thailand by : David Streckfuss
Download or read book Truth on Trial in Thailand written by David Streckfuss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the basics of the defamation law as it applies to private-sphere defamation and looks at the peculiar permutations created by the use of public-sphere defamation laws in Thailand, particularly in terms of creating and protecting a nationalist identity.
Book Synopsis Siamese Melting Pot by : Edward Van Roy
Download or read book Siamese Melting Pot written by Edward Van Roy and published by Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic minorities historically comprised a solid majority of Bangkok's population. They played a dominant role in the city's exuberant economic and social development. In the shadow of Siam's prideful, flamboyant Thai ruling class, the city's diverse minorities flourished quietly. The Thai-Portuguese; the Mon; the Lao; the Cham, Persian, Indian, Malay, and Indonesian Muslims; and the Taechiu, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainanese, and Cantonese Chinese speech groups were particularly important. Others, such as the Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai Yuan, Sikhs, and Westerners, were smaller in numbers but no less significant in their influence on the city's growth and prosperity. In tracing the social, political, and spatial dynamics of Bangkok's ethnic pluralism through the two-and-a-half centuries of the city's history, this book calls attention to a long-neglected mainspring of Thai urban development. While the book's primary focus is on the first five reigns of the Chakri dynasty (1782-1910), the account extends backward and forward to reveal the continuing impact of Bangkok's ethnic minorities on Thai culture change, within the broader context of Thai development studies. It provides an exciting perspective and unique resource for anyone interested in exploring Bangkok's evolving cultural milieu or Thailand's modern history.
Book Synopsis Culture and Customs of Thailand by : Arne Kislenko
Download or read book Culture and Customs of Thailand written by Arne Kislenko and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-05-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thailand is rapidly industrializing, dramatically improving the living standards of its people, and gradually developing a more democratic society. Despite such profound changes, traditional Thai culture has not only survived, but has also, in many respects, prospered. Although famous for its food, and despite its increasing popularity as a tourist destination, Thailand remains relatively unknown to most Westerners. Culture and Customs of Thailand presents the traditional culture and customs against the backdrop of modern times. Thailand has always been an important Southeast Asian country. With a long-reigning monarchy, it is the only country in the region that has never been colonized by a Western power or suffered bloody revolutions and wars. It was the first Asian country to establish diplomatic relations with the United States, and has remained a constant ally. Thailand has emerged as a considerable economic force as the world's largest rice and rubber producer and remains a regional political power. Against this historical framework, Kislenko deftly introduces the traditional and modern strands of the dominant Buddhist faith and other religions, such as animism. Coverage includes literature, the arts, architecture-including the Thai Wat-food and dress, gender and marriage, festivals and fun, and social customs. Kislenko also balances the portrait with discussions of threats from globalization, AIDS and sex tourism, the drug trade, and corruption in business and government. Evocative photos, a country map, a timeline, and a chronology complete the coverage. This reference is the best source for students and general readers to gain substantial, sweeping insight into the Thais and their land of smiles.
Book Synopsis The Political Development of Modern Thailand by : Federico Ferrara
Download or read book The Political Development of Modern Thailand written by Federico Ferrara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive, empirical research, The Political Development of Modern Thailand analyses the country's political history from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Long known for political instability, Thailand was thrust into a deep state of crisis by a royalist military coup staged in 2006. Since then, conservative royalists have overthrown more elected governments after violent street protests, while equally disruptive demonstrations staged by supporters of electoral democracy were crushed by military force. Federico Ferrara traces the roots of the crisis to unresolved struggles regarding the content of Thailand's national identity, dating back to the abolition of absolute monarchy in 1932. He explains the conflict's re-intensification with reference to a growing chasm between the hierarchical worldview of Thailand's hegemonic 'royal nationalism' and the aspirations that millions of ordinary people have come to harbour as a result of modernisation.
Book Synopsis The United Nations at Work in Asia by : Roy D. Morey
Download or read book The United Nations at Work in Asia written by Roy D. Morey and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundwork for the Asian economic miracle was established in the last 25 or so years--the time period covered in this book. China and Vietnam started substituting pragmatism for communist ideology and Thailand started on a path toward greater democracy. The timing was perfect for an American United Nations representative to arrive in the two communist countries because, for the first time, both placed a premium on improving relations with the U.S. and both were moving toward a market economy. This book acquaints the reader with evolving political, economic and social conditions in these countries and the role played by UN organizations. A chapter on the South Pacific details the challenges of providing useful development assistance in small isolated countries. The book also reveals a hidden side of the United Nations, the role played by more than 30 UN agencies, funds and programs in providing development and humanitarian assistance. The past two or three decades were a period of great upheaval in Asia. Enormous events and developments involving the United Nations are analyzed in the book. These include the Tiananmen Square crisis in China; 300,000 Cambodian refugees camped along the Thai border; escaping the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge; efforts to rid the Golden Triangle of opium production; the sensitive diplomacy required in fostering cooperation among North Korea, South Korea, China and Mongolia; and a firsthand account of negotiating the international agreement creating the Mekong River Commission.
Book Synopsis Confronting Christianity by : Sven Trakulhun
Download or read book Confronting Christianity written by Sven Trakulhun and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Christianity explores the history of religious encounters between Christian missionaries and Thai Buddhists during the nineteenth century, a period of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia that fundamentally transformed Siamese society and religious institutions. From about 1830 onwards, discussions on religion became a central arena of conflict between rival regimes of knowledge in Thailand, confronting traditional Buddhist views on nature and man’s existence with the ideals and practices of science and rationalism coming from the West. Protestant missionaries, mostly from the United States, became important brokers of knowledge, as one of their strengths was the ability to offer religion in tandem with modern science and technology. Historian Sven Trakulhun explains why the intrusion of evangelical Christianity strengthened the position of Theravāda Buddhism rather than undermining people’s belief in traditional forms of worship. Based on a wide range of Thai and Western primary sources, the volume describes how Christian missionaries unwittingly contributed to the making of what scholars of Buddhism have later rendered as “Buddhist modernism.” In response to Christian assaults on the traditional cosmology, Buddhist reformers fashioned an orthodox version of Buddhism that acknowledged the findings of modern science and at the same time deemed even more rational than Christianity. This new orthodoxy became a major source of moral authority for Thai kings and an important ideology for pushing their claims for religious leadership in the Theravāda Buddhist world. Trakulhun offers a thorough study of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism and places the history of Siamese Theravāda Buddhism within the broad context of global intellectual history.
Download or read book Cultures at War written by Tony Day and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University
Book Synopsis Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization by : Mahmood Monshipouri
Download or read book Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization written by Mahmood Monshipouri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both human rights and globalization are powerful ideas and processes, capable of transforming the world in profound ways. Notwithstanding their universal claims, however, the processes are constructed, and they draw their power from the specific cultural and political contexts in which they are constructed. Far from bringing about a harmonious cosmopolitan order, they have stimulated conflict and opposition. In the context of globalization, as the idea of human rights has become universal, its meaning has become one more terrain of struggle among groups with their own interests and goals. Part I of this volume looks at political and cultural struggles to control the human rights regime -- that is, the power to construct the universal claims that will prevail in a territory -- with respect to property, the state, the environment, and women. Part II examines the dynamics and counterdynamics of transnational networks in their interactions with local actors in Iran, China, and Hong Kong. Part III looks at the prospects for fruitful human rights dialogiue between competing universalisms that by definition are intolerant of conradiction and averse to compromise.
Book Synopsis Subversive Archaism by : Michael Herzfeld
Download or read book Subversive Archaism written by Michael Herzfeld and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Subversive Archaism, Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.
Book Synopsis The East Asian Negotiator by : Lee Cheng Tan
Download or read book The East Asian Negotiator written by Lee Cheng Tan and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many (East) Asians are becoming more confident in their own culture and ways of doing things, at the same time, they are open to the melding of east-west ways. Because of this form of cultural hybridization, it is useful to include the authors' multidisciplinary area studies training which decodes some of the cultural symbols and contextual language used in Asian negotiations. They do so keenly with globalization's impact in mind. Due to globalization, western styles of negotiations have constantly engaged closely with negotiations styles in Asia (including East Asia) and the cross-pollination of ideas between the two have resulted in hybridized negotiations styles in the contemporary setting.Distilled practitioner knowledge will be combined with literature review and theoretical readings to share with readers the intricacies as well as theoretician's conceptualizations of East Asian negotiation styles. The book is written from the sub-discipline of cross-cultural negotiating styles, adopting some sociological/anthropological perspectives, anecdotes and concepts to discuss this subject matter.This volume hopes to fill in the gap between theoretical and applied knowledge through the use of theoretical concepts that readers from the West and other English-language textbook readers are familiar with, while supplementing the concepts with practitioner-oriented case studies drawn from actual experiences. This prevents the publication from becoming a theory-heavy text.
Book Synopsis State of Authority by : Gerry Van Klinken
Download or read book State of Authority written by Gerry Van Klinken and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major realignment is taking place in the way we understand the state in Indonesia. New studies on local politics, ethnicity, the democratic transition, corruption, Islam, popular culture, and other areas hint at novel concepts of the state, though often without fully articulating them. This book captures several dimensions of this shift. One reason for the new thinking is a fresh wind that has altered state studies generally. People are posing new kinds of questions about the state and developing new methodologies to answer them. Another reason for this shift is that Indonesia itself has changed, probably more than most people recognize. It looks more democratic, but also more chaotic and corrupt, than it did during the militaristic New Order of 1966–1998. State of Authority offers a range of detailed case studies based on fieldwork in many different settings around the archipelago. The studies bring to life figures of authority who have sought to carve out positions of power for themselves using legal and illegal means. These figures include village heads, informal slum leaders, district heads, parliamentarians, and others. These individuals negotiate in settings where the state is evident and where it is discussed: coffee houses, hotel lounges, fishing waters, and street-side stalls. These case studies, and the broader trend in scholarship of which they are a part, allow for a new theorization of the state in Indonesia that more adequately addresses the complexity of political life in this vast archipelago nation. State of Authority demonstrates that the state of Indonesia is not monolithic, but is constituted from the ground up by a host of local negotiations and symbolic practices.
Book Synopsis A Kingdom in Crisis by : Andrew MacGregor Marshall
Download or read book A Kingdom in Crisis written by Andrew MacGregor Marshall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perhaps the best introduction yet to the roots of Thailand's present political impasse. A brilliant book.' Simon Long, The Economist Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. And many Thais fear that the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analysed – until now. Breaking Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, Andrew MacGregor Marshall is one of the only journalists covering contemporary Thailand to tell the whole story. Marshall provides a comprehensive explanation that for the first time makes sense of the crisis, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand.
Download or read book Fluid Iron written by Tony Day and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2002-08-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fluid Iron is the first extended treatment of state formation in Southeast Asia from early to contemporary times and the first book-length analysis of Western historical and ethnographic writing on the region. It includes critical assessments of the work of Clifford Geertz, O.W. Wolters, Benedict Anderson, and other major scholars who have written on early, colonial, and modern Southeast Asian history and culture. Making use of the ideas of Weber, Marx, Foucault, and postmodern and postcolonial theory, Tony Day argues that culture must be restored to the study of Southeast Asian history so that the state and historical developments in the region can be returned to their own "alternative" historical contexts and trajectories. He employs a wide range of contemporary scholarship, as well as Southeast Asian literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and temples to explore the kinds of concepts and practices--kinship networks, cosmologies, gender identities, bureaucracies, rituals, violence and aesthetics--that have been used for centuries to build states.Highly readable and accessibly written, Fluid Iron demonstrates that Southeast Asian state building has taken place in a part of the world that has always been a crossroads of cultural and transcultural change. Day urges Southeast Asians to learn more about the history of their own state formations so they can safeguard not only human freedom, but also the "incongruity" of their unique region in the years ahead.
Book Synopsis A History of Thailand by : Chris Baker
Download or read book A History of Thailand written by Chris Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since it was first published in 2005, A History of Thailand has been hailed as an authoritative, lively and readable account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. From the early settlements in the Chao Phraya basin to today, Baker and Phongpaichit trace how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed by colonialism, the expansion of the rice frontier and the immigration of traders and labourers from southern China. This book examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation‐state at the end of the nineteenth century, and how urban nationalists, ambitious generals, communist rebels and business politicians competed to take control through the twentieth century. It tracks Thailand's economic changes, globalisation and the evolution of mass society, and draws on popular culture to dramatize social trends. This edition contains a new chapter on Thailand's turbulent politics since 2006 and incorporates new sources and research throughout.
Book Synopsis Fighting for Virtue by : Duncan McCargo
Download or read book Fighting for Virtue written by Duncan McCargo and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems—and what happened next. Across the last decade of Rama IX's rule, Duncan McCargo examines the world of Thai judges: how they were recruited, trained, and promoted, and how they were socialized into a conservative world view that emphasized the proximity between the judiciary and the monarchy. McCargo delves into three pivotal freedom of expression cases that illuminate Thai legal and cultural understandings of sedition and treason, before examining the ways in which accusations of disloyalty made against controversial former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra came to occupy a central place in the political life of a deeply polarized nation. The author navigates the highly contentious role of the Constitutional Court as a key player in overseeing and regulating Thailand's political order before concluding with reflections on the significance of the Bhumibol era of "judicialization" in Thailand. In the end, posits McCargo, under a new king, who appears far less reluctant to assert his own power and authority, the Thai courts may now assume somewhat less significance as a tool of the monarchical network.
Book Synopsis Phan Chau Trinh and His Political Writings by : Phan Chau Trinh
Download or read book Phan Chau Trinh and His Political Writings written by Phan Chau Trinh and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phan Chau Trinh (1872-1926) was the earliest proponent of democracy and popular rights in Vietnam. Throughout his life, he favored a moderate approach to political change and advised the country's leaders to seek gradual progress for Vietnam within the French colonial system. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not favor anti-French military alliances or insurgent military resistance, arguing that "to depend on foreign help is foolish and to resort to violence is self-destructive." As a result of his exposure to Chinese reformist literature, Phan Chau Trinh assigned top priority to promoting democracy and human rights and to improving Vietnamese people's lives. He believed that true independence could only be achieved by changing the Vietnamese political culture, and he articulated penetrating criticism of the corruption and superficiality of Vietnam's officials. His emphasis on changing the fundamental values governing the ruling class's behavior, as well as his skepticism regarding anticolonial resistance, set Phan Chau Trinh apart from his contemporaries and mark him as a true revolutionary. Vinh Sinh's masterly introduction to Phan Chau Trinh's essays illuminate both this turbulent era and the courageous intelligence of the author.
