[Tlc] T-Southern Thailand

[justinm at ucr.edu]

See below an interesting talk and brown bag series at Cornell. The abstract for the first talk on Thailand is below.
Thanks,
justin

Comparative Muslim Societies
Brown-bag lunch seminars
Spring 2009


Friday February 20		Ed Zehner (Visiting Fellow, Southeast Asia Program), “Muslims in 
Thailand: State of the Field,” noon, G-08 Uris Hall

Monday, March 9	Marc Aymes (Society for the Humanities), “Ottoman Fake,” noon, G-08 Uris Hall

Monday, April  13	Jianping Wang (Visiting Scholar, Asian Studies), "Muslims in China: Struggle for Freedom of Rights", 12:00 p.m., G-08 Uris Hall


Muslims in Thailand: 
The Little We Know, Some Things We Don’t, A Few Surmises, 
and At Least a Couple of Things “We” Got Wrong (In No Particular Order). 
By Edwin Zehner
Visiting Fellow, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University
Lecture series of the Comparative Muslim Societies Committee
Cornell University, Spring 2009

ABSTRACT
Despite decades of scholarly and popular concern about Buddhist-Muslim relations in Thailand, surprisingly little is known about Thailand’s diverse Muslim communities. Media attention has focused primarily on cycles of violence in the south, increasingly portrayed as yet another instance of “radical Islam.” Yet at least half of Thailand’s Muslims live on the center and north, their communities are ethnically and confessionally diverse, and they are divided in their opinions on a wide variety of issues, including the justifiability of the southern violence. More important, remarkably little ethnographic and sociological work has been done on any of Thailand’s Muslim communities, especially the ones outside the south. As a step toward filling that gap, this lecture will draw on the work of Tamara Loos (Subject Siam), Ray Scupin (“Thai Muslims in Bangkok”), Kopkua Suwannathat-Pian (Thai-Malay Relations)¬, William Smalley (Language Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand), Imtiyaz Yusuf (“Many Faces of Islam”),  and the recent work of Michael Montesano and Patrick Jory (Thai South and Malay North), among others, to outline the state of scholarly knowledge on Muslim communities and institutions in Thailand, indicate some areas and topics worth investigating further, and suggest some of the problems created by conventional media portrayals and assumptions about Muslims in the south and elsewhere.


______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu