Download or read book The Lisu written by Michele Zack and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings the ironic worldview of the Lisu to life through vivid, often amusing accounts of individuals, communities, regions, and practices. One of the smallest and last groups of stateless people, and the most egalitarian of all Southeast Asian highland minorities, the Lisu have not only survived extremes at the crossroads of civil wars, the drug trade, and state-sponsored oppression but adapted to modern politics and technology without losing their identity. The Lisu weaves a lively narrative that condenses humanity’s transition from border-free tribal groupings into today’s nation-states and global market economy. Journalist and historian Michele Zack first encountered the Lisu in the 1980s and conducted research and fieldwork among them in the 1990s. In 2014 she again traveled extensively in tribal areas of Thailand, Myanmar, and China, when she documented the transformative changes of globalization. Some Lisu have adopted successful new urban occupations in business and politics, while most continue to live as agriculturists “far from the ruler.” The cohesiveness of Lisu culture has always been mysterious—they reject hierarchical political organization and traditionally had no writing system—yet their culture provides a particular skillset that has helped them navigate the terrain of the different religious and political systems they have recently joined. They’ve made the transition from living in lawless, self-governing highland peripheries to becoming residents and citizens of nation-states in a single generation. Ambitious and written with journalist’s eye for detail and storytelling, The Lisu introduces the unique and fascinating culture of this small Southeast Asian minority. Their path to national and global citizenship illustrates the trade-offs all modern people have made, and their egalitarian culture provides insight into current political choices in a world turning toward authoritarianism.

Download or read book The Crown and the Capitalists written by Wasana Wongsurawat and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress—or lack thereof—toward Western-style liberal democracy at the center of Thailand’s narrative, but that view underestimates the importance of the colonial context. In particular, a long-standing relationship with China and the existence of a large and important Chinese diaspora within Thailand have shaped development at every stage. As the emerging nation struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were neither a colonial force against whom Thainess was identified, nor had they been able to fully assimilate into Thai society. Wasana Wongsurawat demonstrates that the Kingdom of Thailand’s transformation into a modern nation-state required the creation of a national identity that justified not only the hegemonic rule of monarchy but also the involvement of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class upon whom it depended. Her revisionist view traces the evolution of this codependent relationship through the twentieth century, as Thailand struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, found itself an ally of Japan in World War II, and reconsidered its relationship with China in the postwar era.

Download or read book Bangkok Wakes to Rain written by Pitchaya Sudbanthad and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book A Kingdom in Crisis written by Andrew MacGregor Marshall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perhaps the best introduction yet to the roots of Thailand's present political impasse. A brilliant book.' Simon Long, The Economist Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. And many Thais fear that the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analysed – until now. Breaking Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, Andrew MacGregor Marshall is one of the only journalists covering contemporary Thailand to tell the whole story. Marshall provides a comprehensive explanation that for the first time makes sense of the crisis, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand.

Download or read book The Art of Thai Comics written by Nicolas Verstappen and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comics flourished following the publication of the first Thai comics strip in 1907. Artists borrowed elements from European and American publications, such as Punch magazine, and created uniquely Thai mash-ups. In the 1930s, one artist combined E. C. Segar's Popeye with the codes of local 'likay' theatre, while another used the neoclassical realism introduced by Italian painters appointed at the Siamese court to give eerie form to the folklore pantheon of Thai ghosts. During the Cold War era, horror tales, anti-communist propaganda and socially engaged graphic novels bore witness to the country's darker years. Then, in the 1990s, Thai comics struggled to compete with the sudden influx of unlicensed manga from Japan that led to a disregard for local efforts and its current 'forgotten' status. After a hiatus, Thai comics made a comeback in the late '90s with a quirky, alternative scene that deserves wider international recognition. Beautifully designed and bursting with stories - from 20th-century interpretations of age-old Buddhist legends to tales of modern-day millennial angst - 'The Art of Thai Comics' opens an enlightening and visually spectacular window onto the country's history, culture and creativity. In doing so, it reinstates Thai comics into the wider story of global comics art.

Download or read book Americans in Thailand written by Jim Algie and published by Didier Millet,Csi. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elegantly designed, illustrated history, Americans in Thailand relates the rich stories and significant roles of American businesses and individuals operating and living in Thailand since the first American arrived in 1818. It follows nearly 200 years of relations between the two countries, including controversy and scandal.

Download or read book A Good True Thai written by Sunisa Manning and published by Epigram Books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1970s Thailand, three young people meet each other with fateful results. Det has just lost his mother, the granddaughter of a king. He clings to his best friend Chang, a smart boy from the slums, as they go to college; while there, Det falls for Lek, a Chinese immigrant with radical ideals. Longing for glory, Det journeys into his friends’ political circles, and then into the Thai jungle to fight. During Thailand’s most famous period of political and artistic openness, these three friends must reconcile their deep feelings for one another with the realities of perilous political revolution.

Download or read book King of Bangkok written by Claudio Sopranzetti and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English translation of this best-selling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village. Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010. Based on a decade of anthropological research, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest. Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people.

Download or read book Tales of Southeast Asia s Jazz Age written by Peter Keppy and published by National University of Singapore Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luis Borromeo was the Philippines's "King of Jazz," who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia's 1920s Jazz Age. This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo's and Riboet's styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local. Leaning on cultural studies and the work on cosmopolitanism and modernity by Henry Jenkins and Joel Kahn, Peter Keppy examines pop culture at this time as a contradictory social phenomenon. He challenges notions of Southeast Asia's popular culture as lowbrow entertainment created by elites and commerce to manipulate the masses, arguing instead that audiences seized on this popular culture to channel emancipatory activities, to articulate social critique, and to propagate an inclusive nationalism without being radically anticolonial.

Download or read book Thai Cinema Uncensored written by Matthew Hunt and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first full-length study on the topic, Matthew Hunt--with access to rare and controversial films--provides a history of film censorship in Thailand. Hunt outlines its beginnings in the country, when films were censored by the police for political and ideological reasons, rather than on the basis of taste and decency, to the present when issues such as politics, religion, and sex are the main reasons films are banned. He also examines how Thai filmmakers approach culturally sensitive subjects and how their films have been censored as a result. Hunt presents interviews with ten leading directors, including conversations with Thai New Wave veterans Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang. In these interviews, the directors discuss their most controversial films, which range from mainstream studio movies to independent arthouse releases, and explain their responses to censorship.

Download or read book Bangkok Days written by Lawrence Osborne and published by North Point Press. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A PASSIONATE, AFFECTIONATE RECORD OF ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES IN THE WORLD'S HOTTEST METROPOLIS Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons—a sex change operation, a night with two prostitutes dressed as nuns, a stay in a luxury hotel. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry. Broke (but no longer in pain), he finds that he can live in Bangkok on a few dollars a day. And so the restless exile stays. Osborne's is a visceral experience of Bangkok, whether he's wandering the canals that fill the old city; dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where his waitress feeds him like a baby; or launching his own notably unsuccessful career as a gigolo. A guide without inhibitions, Osborne takes us to a feverish place where a strange blend of ancient Buddhist practice and new sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West. Bangkok Days is a love letter to the city that revived Osborne's faith in adventure and the world.

Download or read book In Plain Sight written by Tyrell Haberkorn and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a 1932 coup d’état in Thailand that ended absolute monarchy and established a constitution, the Thai state that emerged has suppressed political dissent through detention, torture, forced reeducation, disappearances, assassinations, and massacres. In Plain Sight shows how these abuses, both hidden and occurring in public view, have become institutionalized through a chronic failure to hold perpetrators accountable. Tyrell Haberkorn’s deeply researched revisionist history of modern Thailand highlights the legal, political, and social mechanisms that have produced such impunity and documents continual and courageous challenges to state domination.

Download or read book Searching for a Better Life written by Sorcha Mahony and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life in Bangkok for young people is marked by profound, interlocking changes and transitions. This book offers an ethnographic account of growing up in the city’s slums, struggling to get by in a rapidly developing and globalizing economy and trying to fulfil one’s dreams. At the same time, it reflects on the issue of agency, exploring its negative potential when exercised by young people living under severe structural constraint. It offers an antidote to neoliberal ideas around personal responsibility, and the assumed potential for individuals to break through structures of constraint in any sustained way.

Download or read book A Regional Economic History of Thailand written by Porphant Ouyyanont and published by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an economic history of Bangkok, the Central Region, the North, the South, and Northeastern Regions from the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 to the present. Most research has focused on Bangkok as the centre of change affecting other regions and has neglected other regions that had an influence on Bangkok. This book however looks at the changes not only in Bangkok, but also in the other regions, and emphasizes the ways in which Bangkok had an impact on the other regions, and how changes in the other regions affected Bangkok. It also looks, in turn, at each of the principal regions, and concentrate on the long-term economic and social changes and the various forces which promoted the changes.

Download or read book Very Bangkok written by Philip Cornwel-Smith and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bangkok arrests the visitor with a bewildering juxtaposition of old and new, high-tech and impromptu, sacred and profane. While modernizing apace and a myriad outside influences, the Thai capital draws equal vigor from its historical communities, cultural diversity and contemporary urban tribes. Author of Very Thai and Time Out Bangkok, Philip Cornwel-Smith takes an alternative look at the subcultures of his adopted town in this practical thematic handbook. With the aid of maps, listings and references, the visitor can engage with Bangkok's contradictory character according to their mood or interest. Explore the city's contrasting environments, architectural fabric, ethnic patchwork and intertwined beliefs. Encounter distinct social scenes, where the hip or hi-so, local or bohemian and see how traditional roots infuse the current Thai flowering in arts and entertainments, fashion and food lifestyle and spas. Photography by Philip Cornwel-Smith and others enhances this insiders' guide to a city like no other.

Download or read book Belittled Citizens written by Giuseppe Bolotta and published by NIAS Press. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the intersection between Thai politics, urban poverty, religion, and global humanitarianism from the perspective of “slum children” in Bangkok, this fascinating, engaging and illuminating study offers startling new insights into how ideas of “parenthood” and “infantilization” shape Thai political culture.

Download or read book Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse written by Father Joe Maier and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100% of all proceeds of the sale of this book will be donated to the Human Development Fund in Bangkok, Thailand The Reverend Joseph H. Maier, C.Ss.R., is a Redemptorist priest from the United States. He came to Thailand in 1967 as a missionary, serving in north Isan and then among the Hmong in Laos. In 1972, he established the Human Development Foundation in Bangkok's Klong Toey slum, where he has lived and worked for more than 30 years. Threatened and shot at, the unwavering priest has over the years become a no-nonsense, street-smart friend to the poor, from whom he draws constant inspiration. Father Joe, as he's called, has established more than thirty schools, five shelters for street kids, and several projects for women and children with AIDS, working with and against authority, earning enmity and praise in equal measure. In Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse, he tells the heartbreaking and heartwarming stories of the poorest of Thailand's poor, each a gem guaranteed to bring anger, tears, and joy.