[Tlc] new publications in English on Thailand and Laos

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Notice: two of our members had books published in April, 2006:
Vatthana Pholsena (Post-War Laos, Cornell Univ. Press) and
Craig Reynolds (Seditious Histories, University of Washington
Press).

Please see information about these two important books below:

POST-WAR LAOS
The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity
Vatthana Pholsena

$22.95s paper
2006, 270 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8014-7320-9  Quantity

$55.00x cloth
Available in , 270 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8014-4503-5  Quantity

Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that
brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the
Lao People's Democratic Republic are still searching for a
compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in
Postwar Laos—a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and
pathbreaking book—Laotian nationalism is caught between the
rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using
fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival
material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of
identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of
historical narrative in contemporary Laos.

Pholsena pays particular attention to the country’s ethnic
minorities, who had been marginalized—politically,
administratively, and symbolically—by the French colonial
government, which ruled for fifty years, and by its Royal Lao
successor. Many members of these minorities fought for the Lao
People’s Liberation Army in the country’s civil war
(1960–1975), though, and were thus exposed to the processes of
modern politics. The first book to examine the impact of such
forces on Laos’s ethnic minorities and their perception of
Laotian nationalism, Postwar Laos also refines established
theories of nationalism. Pholsena addresses a weakness common
to all: the tendency to deny agency to individuals, who may in
fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the
nation in a variety of ways that change according to time and
circumstance.

Postwar Laos offers a new perspective on the history of
Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the formation of national
identity that will be welcomed by historians, political
scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, and cultural
anthropologists alike.

Reviews
“Post-war Laos is a thorough and original study of the
difficult making of a multiethnic nation. Combining a
historical approach and a multi-sited ethnography, it provides
unique insights into the ideology of ethnicity in Laos. This
book is clearly a major contribution to the understanding of
one of the less known countries in Asia.”—Yves Goudineau,
Professor and Scientific Director, École Française
d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

“Post-war Laos makes not only an important contribution to the
study of Lao identity, society, and history, but also more
broadly to the vexed problem of multiple identities among the
people of Southeast Asia.”—Martin Stuart-Fox, Professor
Emeritus, University of Queensland
About the Author
Vatthana Pholsena is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian
Studies at the National University of Singapore. 

	
Seditious Histories
Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts

Craig J. Reynolds

This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig
Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and
Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been
treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including
Siam's semicolonialism in the late nineteenth century, the
concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and
dynastic succession, the relationship of manual knowledge to
ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more
familiar topics under Reynolds's microscope, treated with new
material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and
religious history.

Craig J. Reynolds is a reader in the Faculty of Asian Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of
Thai Radical Discourses and National Identity and Its
Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989.

Series: Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies

Quotes:

    "This absorbing collection of essays reflects the range
and depth of Craig Reynolds's long engagement with Thailand
and Southeast Asia. Reynolds is a masterful historian, a
lucid, provocative thinker, and a stylish writer. Seditious
Histories has been over thirty years in the making. It's a
reader's feast." - David Chandler, Monash University

    "The essays that Reynolds has brought together in this
volume constitute one of the most outstanding works in the
study of Thai history and in the historiography of the region
more generally." - Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington

    "A must for Thai specialists and for historians of the
region. Reynolds combines a density of historical research and
breadth of knowledge in each essay to make a cumulatively rich
contribution to our understanding of Thailand and Southeast
Asia." - Tamara Loos, Cornell University 

Table of Contents:

    Prologue
    Acknowledgments
    Sources

    Studying Southeast Asia
    1. A New Look at Old Southeast Asia
    2. Paradigms of the Premodern State

    Seditious Histories of Siam
    3. Mr. Kulap and Purloined Documents
    4. A Seditious Poem and Its History
    5. Feudalism as a Trope for the Past
    6. Engendering Thai Historical Writing

    Cultural Studies
    7. Religious Historical Writing in Early Bangkok
    8. Buddhist Cosmography in Thai Intellectual History
    9. A Thai-Buddhist Defense of Polygamy
    10. A Thai Manual Knowledge: Theory and Practice

    The Dialectics of Globalization
    11. National Identity and Cultural Nationalism

    Epilogue
    Bibliography
    Index

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