[Tlc] TLC/AAS Meeting Minutes SanFran 2006

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Dear All,

See below the meeting minutes of the Thai/Lao/Cambodia Group
of the AAS. 

THAILAND/LAOS/CAMBODIA GROUP OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ASIAN STUDIES
Annual Business Meeting
San Francisco, CA 
7:15-9:00 Pacific Suite H, 4th Floor 
Marriot
Saturday, April 8, 2006

MEETING AGENDA

1) The meeting started at 7:20 with a talk called "A History
of Auspiciousness from Thai Handbooks" presented by Historian
Dr. Craig J. Reynolds (Australian National University). This
talk was the first in the TLC "discipline series." This year's
focus was "History." 

Abstract: 
"A History of Auspiciousness from Thai Handbooks"
For a project that began as a hobby, I've collected a
mind-boggling assortment of handbooks, what might be called
manual knowledge. Many of these handbooks concern
auspiciousness -- when to plant a crop, how to improve the
spiritual self, how to select a good fighting cock from a
brood, how to read moles and freckles. For a historian to
understand these handbooks it is necessary to relax the rules
of accountability, so to speak. I hope to show how the
historian's interests in handbooks overlap and enhance the
study of religion, anthropology, politics, and economics.

This talk started a lively discussion about the nature of the
term "auspicious," the parameters of what can be termed a
"manual," whether or not Buddhist epistemology and the use of
manuals in Thailand have a causal relationship, and the
connection between the rise of printing technology and manual
knowledge.

2) Call for panel ideas for a T/L/C sponsored
panel. Some suggestions included: The Thai Military (Jerapa
Ananta Schaub), Buddhist Nuns (Justin McDaniel), Roundtable
Discussing the book "The King Never Smiles" (Larry Ashmun),
Image and Ritual in Buddhist Funerals (Pattaratorn
Chirapravati).  

If you are interested in contributing to a panel on one of
these topics then please contact Jerapa
(jerapa.ananta at miis.edu), Justin (justin.mcdaniel at ucr.edu),
Larry (lashmun at library.wisc.edu), or Pat (pchirapravati at csus,edu) 

3) To continue our "Discipline" series talks, there was a call
for ideas for next year's "discipline theme." Suggestions
included: the disciplines of Art History, Anthropology,
Ehtnomusicology. 

We welcome additional suggestions and suggestions of senior
scholars who could offer a talk about their Discipline and its
Approaches to T/L/C Studies. After receiving suggestions, the
executive will vote to decide the discipline and speaker in
August (2006).    

4) Website (tlc.ucr.edu), listserv
(tlc at lists.ucr.edu), and Khosana update.  

•	On April 3rd, I sent out a little over 200 packages to
subscribers to Khosana. These packages contained issues 43 and
44 of Khosana on CD-Rom. Issues 43 and 44 consisted of the
collected papers of the Lao Studies and Thai Studies
conferences that took place at NIU last spring. I want to
thank John Hartman and Arlene Nehrer for all their help in
sending me these papers. I also want to thank Arlene for
sending me the mailing labels for the 197 subscribers to Khosana. 

•	This package completes the pre-paid subscriptions to
Khosana. We are now financially clear from any obligations. 

•	Financially we are in great shape because this last mailing
was much less expensive than initially thought. Since I
pressed the CD-Roms and addressed the packages myself, used
bulk mail discounts, and used the California Teacher’s
discount for envelops and labels we spent only 416.26. We
still have a little under 800 left in the TLC/AAS account. We
are still waiting for 105 dollars from Oxford University for
subscription charges.

•	We had 405 USD in the Ingrid Muan Graduate Student
Fellowship account. 200 USD was given to Arnika Fuhrmann, a
PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. She gave a paper
at the AAS entitled "Ghostly Desires: The Aesthetics and
Politics of Femininity and Loss in New Thai Cinema." We
congratulate her as the first recepient of the Ingrid Muan
Graduate Student Fellowship. We encourage graduate students
who give a paper at the AAS General Meeting on a TLC topic to
apply for travel funding from this fellowship.

We raised 243 USD at this year's meetings through donations.
Therefore, the fund now stands at 448 USD. If you would like
to donate to the Ingrid Muan Graduate Student Traveling
Fellowship please send a check made out to Deborah Wong/Justin
McDaniel TLC, 2617 Humanities, Department of Religious
Studies, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521. We can
provide receipts for any donation. 

•	Khosana has now been replaced with the new TLC.UCR.EDU
website. Last year I applied for and won a 2100 dollar grant
to help set up a website. That money is almost exhausted. I
should be able to maintain that site for free (UCR is running
the site and listserv for free). However, if we want to expand
the site into a place for book reviews, short research
reports, fast news updates, etc., we may need some funding for
a graduate student assistant. I will continue to add new
material and am open to all suggestions, criticisms, etc.

•	Many of you may have checked this site. Highlights include a
good list of Khmer and Thai films for teaching, a long member
list (although would like more information in the form of
short bios. for each member), good links to Thai
museums, Thai and Cambodian academic institutions, summer
fellowships, Lao, Thai, Cambodian news outlets, etc.

•	Listserv is now working, so if want to post opinions,
annoucements, etc. to the group please do. It is a monitored
site. The monitors are Henry Delcore (California State
University, Fresno) and Justin McDaniel (University of
California, Riverside).

•	I want to thank Tamara Loos, Michel Lorrillard, Bualy
Papaphanh, Henk Delcore, Mike Montesano, Arthid
Sheravanichkul, Larry Ashmun, Greg Green, John Hartman, and
many others who have been helpful in sending content for the
TLC site.

•	We still need lots of help, especially with— music,
photography, recent political events, public health, military,
economics.  We also welcome reports of new publications, new
research initiatives, new grants and fellowships, etc.

•	The TLC would like to thank Rattana Yeang, Undergraduate in
History and Southeast Asian Studies at UCR for all of his help
in building and adding content to the TLC site.   

4) Member news--we have lots of new members!

Some new members include:
Grant Evans Australian scholar who has been teaching
Anthropology at Hong Kong University for the past 15-16 years.
He also has done some work on China , Hong Kong and Vietnam ,
and general anthropology. Currently he is near the end of a
book which may be described as a documentary history of Lao
royalty, tentatively titled: The Last Century of Lao Royalty.
Also, there is a Lao and a Thai translation of his Short
History of Laos is in the works.

Patrice Ladwig
PhD candidate University of Cambridge writing a dissertation:
Gifts, ethics and the state: Buddhism in postsocialist Laos "
(preliminary title) Duration: 2002-2006. He has studied Social
Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Muenster (
Germany ), Edinburgh, EHESS (Paris) and is now a PhD-candidate
at the University of Cambridge . The thesis aims to explore
theories of exchange in a Theravada-Buddhist context
(offerings, donations, the gift of the self in
initiation-ceremonies etc.), but also refers to other traces
of the gift in a specific Lao context relating e.g. to
transnational donations from Lao living in exile,
kathin-ceremonies reflecting the relation between Thailand and
Laos and the relation of power and giving in a 'postsocialist'
urban setting.

Catherin Dalpino
I have been teaching at Georgetown (and occasionally at George
Washington University) since 1997, when I left the State
Department. (I was a Clinton appointee, and served as Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Democracy.) I was also concurrently a
Scholar at the Brookings Institution from 1997 to 2003.
Southeast Asia specialists in the Washington academic
community are relatively rare, and so we all cover a broad
part of the waterfront. My specialty is political development,
but I also teach Southeast Asian security and SEA
international relations. With my new duties as Director of
Georgetown's Thai Studiesprogram I teach an inter-disciplinary
introduction to Thailand and am designing a few more
specialized courses. I'm also co-founder and co-editor of the
Georgetown Southeast Asia Survey, an annual look at
developments in Southeast Asia and their significance for US
policy.

Volker Grabowsky
Volker Grabowsky is Professor of South East Asian history at
the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. He has
specialised on the history and culture of the Tai peoples in
northern Thailand and Laos. From 1996 to 1999 he taught
traditional Lao literature as a DAAD lecturer at the National
University of Laos, Vientiane. Together with his former
colleagues from Department of Lao Language and Literature
(NUOL) he edited three volumes on 19th century Lao literature
(Kap Müang Phuan, San Lüpphasun and Phün Wiang). During
recent years he has published several studies in the history
and historiography of Chiang Khaeng/Mueang Sing. 

Kathleen Gillogly
Kathleen Gillogly recently presented a paper on "The Drug War
in Lisu Households: Social Transformations with the End of the
Opium Economy" at the April 2005 Society for Applied
Anthropology meetings. She will be editing papers from that
session for a book on The Political Ecology of International
Drug Interdiction. She recently finished writing her
dissertation on transformations in Lisu kinship structures
under development in northern Thailand and is currently
teaching as an adjunct at Chicago State University and
Columbia College Chicago.

Sarah Calhoun
Sarah Calhoun is a graduate student at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and is currently working on a project
involving an exploration of the words which are used to
describe religion in Thai, and the interaction between 
fiction, religion, and the developement of self-identity. 
More broadly, she works with Theravada Buddhist literature (in
various languages, including Pali and Thai), mainly in
Thailand and Sri Lanka.

5) Nominations and Elections:

*Continuing Executive Committee Members (2005-2007): Henry
Delcore (California State University at Fresno), Tamara Loos
(Cornell University), John Marston (El Colegio de México). 

*This year three executive committee members were elected:
Chhany Sak-Humphry (University of Hawaii), Cavarlee Cary (UC
Berkeley), Susan Kepner (UC Berkeley). 

*Gregory Green was re-elected to another term in the executive
committee.

*Justin McDaniel was re-elected as chair.
 
7) There were announcements about:

Khmer language programs at
the University of Hawaii by Chhany Sak-Humphry. Please contact
Professor Chhany Sak-Humphrey at sak at hawaii.edu for more
information of Khmer Language Programs at the University of
Hawaii.

The Center for Khmer Studies (Philippe Peycam), please visit
the site www.khmerstudies.org, for more information about
research fellowship opportunities in Cambodia.

Charles Keyes announced the publication of Craig Reynolds's
new book "Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast
Asian Pasts" in the "Critical Studies in Southeast Studies
Series" from the University of Washington Press.

John Hartman announced the International Lao Studies
Conference. Second International Lao Studies Conference. The
2nd International Lao Studies Conference for May 3-6, 2007 at
Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. As details develop
we will send more information.




______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
909-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu