Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Contains papers presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest History of Education Society.

Author: Anders Poulsen
Publisher: NIAS Press
ISBN: 8776940039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This beautifully illustrated volume offers a rare study of Isan-Thai customs and beliefs associated with pregnancy and birth and how they have changed over almost half a century. Using a psychological and socio-therapeutic framework, Anders Poulsen discusses the function of various birth rites while giving an unmatched description of all traditions specifically connected to pregnancy and birth. He includes an interesting description of the tradition of confinement by fire (yuu fai) and documents that it is still widely practiced, contrary to what has been reported. He also puts forward a theory of why some traditions maintain their importance while others fade away. The findings of this study are supported by the transcription in Isan (and translated in to English) of the ritual texts that are used in these rites.

Author: Christopher S. Queen
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791428436
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive coverage of socially and politically engaged Buddhism in Asia, presenting the historical development and institutional forms of engaged Buddhism in the light of traditional Buddhist conceptions of morality, interdependence, and liberation.

Author: Thapanī Nākhō̜nthap
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A collection of essays on Thai culture by Phy Anuman Rajadhon.

Author: Pattana Kitiarsa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134074441
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book addresses the growing academic concerns of the market-religion convergences in Asia. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from Asia, Europe, Australia and North America, it discusses multiple issues regarding religious commodifications and their consequences across Asia’s diverse religious traditions. Covering key issues in the anthropology and sociology of contemporary Asian religion, it draws theoretical implications for the study of religions in the light of the shift of religious institutions from traditional religious beliefs to material prosperity. The fact that religions compete with each other in a ‘market of faiths’ is also at the core of the analysis. The contributions show how ordinary people and religious institutions in Asia adjusted to, and negotiated with, the penetrative forces of a global market economy into the region’s changing religio-cultural landscapes. An excellent contribution to the growing demands of ethnographically and theoretically updated interpretations of Asian religions, Religious Commodifications in Asia will be of interest to scholars of Asian religion and new religious movements.

Author: Matthew Phillips
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317704088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Thailand’s position during the Cold War was ambiguous: the country’s political leadership was very keen to maintain the country’s independence on the world stage, yet at the same time was anxious to establish the country’s credentials as staunchly anti-communist. However, as this book argues, Thailand, though never formally a client state of the United States, was very closely embedded in the Western camp through the commitment of Thailand’s cosmopolitan urban communities to developing a modern, consumerist lifestyle. Considering popular culture, including film, literature, fashion, tourism and attitudes towards Buddhism, the book shows how an ideology of consumerism and integration into a "free world" culture centred in the United States gradually took hold and became firmly established, and how this popular culture and ideology was fundamental in determining Thailand’s international political alignment.

Author: Justin Thomas McDaniel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153775
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Focusing on representations of a famous ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to today, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of these transformative figures. He follows embodiments of the ghost and monk in a variety of genres and media, including biography, drama, ritual, art, liturgy, film, television, and the Internet. Sourcing nuns, monks, laypeople, and royalty, McDaniel shows how relations with these figures have been instrumental in crafting histories and modernities, particularly local conceptions of being "Buddhist," and the formation and transmission of such identities across different venues and technologies.

Author: Marie-Sybille de Vienne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000567621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Based on two decades of fieldwork, including over a hundred interviews with various political and economic actors at different social levels, as well as documentary and media analysis, this volume presents an account of the Buddhist monarchy in Thailand, offering a sociology of elites, an analysis of the economic influence of the Crown and an examination of the magic and ritual dimension of kingship. An exploration of the role and status of the Palace over the last century, whether as a guarantor of democracy, a symbol of stability, a source of power or an object of popular discontent, Thailand’s Buddhist Kingship in the 20th and 21st Centuries will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in material religion, politics and Southeast Asian studies.

Author: Charles Keyes
Publisher: Silkworm Books
ISBN: 1631023322
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
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/Pheu Thai Party in the 2000s. In the intervening century, rural northeasterners have become more educated and prosperous, and they have gained a sophisticated understanding of the world and of their position in it as Thai citizens. Although northeasterners have often been thwarted in their efforts to press government agencies to redress their grievances, they have rejected radical revolutionary efforts to transform the Thai political system. Instead, they have looked to parliamentary democracy as the system in which they can make their voices heard. As the country engages with the processes of democracy, the Pheu Thai Party and the Red Shirt movement appear to have established the people of northeastern Thailand as an authentic voice in the nation’s political landscape. Highlights • Traces the evolution of a marginalized peasantry into a significant political force in Thai society • Examines the disjunction between the urban middle-class negative perspectives on the northeastern Thai rural population and real characteristics of that population • Highlights the different views of political authority and legitimacy in Thailand that have contributed to the twenty-first century crisis in the Thai political order What Others Are Saying “Finding Their Voice by anthropologist Charles Keyes is a culmination of decades of careful ethnography consistently combined with an astute political analysis and sense of history. Reminiscent of Eugen Weber’s classic, “Peasants into Frenchmen,” Keyes’s book shows that the people of Isan have become the makers and undoers of governments and are more firmly wedded to the modern notion of parliamentary democracy than are the refined urban elites. This book has as much to say about the polarized politics of Thailand as it does about the rich culture and history of Isan.” —Philip Hirsch, University of Sydney

Author: Lawrence Chua
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824887735
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.