Cultural Crisis And Social Memory: Modernity And Identity In Thailand And Laos (anthropology Of Asia)

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. Cover Cultural Crisis and Social Memory Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction I Embodied Memories in Cultural Crisis: Spirit Possession and Ritual 1 The Person in Transformation: Body, Mind and Cultural Appropriation 2 Crises of the Modern in Northern Thailand: Ritual, Tradition, and the New Value of Pastness 3 Hmong Confucian Ethics and Constructions of the Past II Nationalist Monuments: Competing Social Memories 4 National Heroine or Local Spirit? The Struggle over Memory in the Case of Thao Suranari of Nakhon Ratchasima 5 Monuments and Memory: Phaya Sihanatraja and the Founding of Maehongson 6 Immobile Memories: Statues in Thailand and Laos III Commoditisation and Consumer Identities 7 Exhibition of Power: Factory Women's Use of the Housewarming Ceremony in a Northern Thai Village 8 The Postmodernisation of Thainess IV Remembering, Social Memory, and History 9 Social Memory as it Emerges: A Consideration of the Death of a Young Convert on the West Coast in Southern Thailand 10 Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past: The Ambivalent Memories of the October 1976 Massacre in Bangkok V Reflections 11 Social Memory Reconsidered Index This volume seeks to contribute to the study of the ways in which the remembrance of the past is situated in wider contexts that are influenced by the politics of the present. The main examples come from the practices and politics found in the rapidly transforming social and cultural realities of Thailand and Laos Covers Social Memory - a hot topic in anthropology Comparative analysis of two Southeast Asian countries, Thailand and Laos Contributes to globalization debate, linking it to questions of identity Edited By Shigeharu Tanabe And Charles F. Keyes. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.