Space and Time in Thai-Lao Relations

Space and Time in Thai-Lao Relations

Author: Thanachate Wisaijorn

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1000593258

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Wisaijorn explores how the concepts of space and temporality in traditional geopolitics have influenced the understanding of the Thai-Lao border since Laos became independent in 1954. Arguing that a state-centric conceptualisation of the Thailand-Laos border falls into both a territorial and temporal trap, Wisaijorn contests that privileging a theoretical border silences the voices of people on the ground. In doing so, he expands the concept of a temporal trap with the addition of a temporal dimension – analysing how the state claims a monopoly not only on a geography, but also a history. Rooted in orientalism, colonialism and the expediencies of the Cold War, the border operates in the interest of elites and ignores the lived reality of peoples on the ground. By bringing these voices back into the discussion, Wisaijorn presents a more complex framework, which reveals a human dimension missing not only from this particular case, but more broadly from the conceptions of borders within International Relations theory. A fascinating case study for scholars with an interest in mainland Southeast Asia, which also makes a valuable theoretical contribution to International relations discourse.


Riverine Border Practices

Riverine Border Practices

Author: Thanachate Wisaijorn

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9811628661

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This book focuses on the ways in which unofficial modes of border crossings are practised by the Thai Ban, along the Mekong Thai-Lao border. In doing so, the book assesses how these border crossings can be theorised as a contribution to existing literature on borderland studies. With that, the book discusses the importance of the notion of the Third Space and its effects on the pluralities of border-crossings in the borderland by weaving together spatial negotiations, temporal negotiations, and negotiations of political subjectivity. To illustrate the importance and complexity of the notion of the Third Space, the borderland of Khong Chiam-Sanasomboun, an area composed of quasi-state checkpoints as well as mobile checkpoints, is used as a case study. The author employs an ethnographic approach using the four methods of participant observations, interviews, interpreting visual presentations, and essay readings to examine the everyday practices of the Thai Ban people in crossing the border between the riverine villages in the two nation-states of Thailand and Lao PDR. With this, the findings in the fieldwork reveal that people engaged in everyday border-crossings in the riverine area do not simply embrace or reject the existence of Thai-Lao territory. Most of the time, the stance of Thai Ban people is the mixture of subversion, rejection, and acceptance of the boundary resulting in the sedentary assumption in the form of Thai-Lao territory co-existing with people’s everyday mobility.


Global International Relations in Southeast Asia

Global International Relations in Southeast Asia

Author: Chanintira na Thalang

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1040103286

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This edited volume explores the contours of Global International Relations (IR) in terms of teaching and research in Southeast Asia and China with the purpose of revealing existing and “hidden” pre- theories, conceptual frameworks, and theoretical contributions to Global IR rooted in local histories, contemporary experiences, and indigenous thought. The exploration is conducted within a context where scholars across regions are progressively taking strides to reshape IR, which has long gravitated towards Western experiences, thought, and knowledge, into a more inclusive discipline. Otherwise known as the Global IR project, these efforts aim not only to amplify marginalized voices and experiences but also introduce new conceptual and theoretical tools derived from a diverse range of experiences. While some of these insights provide new understandings, others offer useful implications that transcend national and regional boundaries, fostering crossregional discussions about the diverse realities within our world. An essential read for scholars and students of IR with an interest in Global IR, IR theory in general, and the development of IR in parts of Southeast Asia.


Mien Relations

Mien Relations

Author: Hjorleifur Jonsson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1501731351

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Thailand's hill tribes have been the object of anthropological research, cultural tourism, and government intervention for a century, in large part because these groups are held to have preserved distinctive ethnic traditions despite their contacts with "modern" culture. Hjorleifur Jonsson rejects the conventional notion that the worlds of traditional peoples are being transformed or undone by the forces of modernity. Among the Mien people of northern Thailand he finds a complex highlander identity that has been shaped by a thousand years of interaction in a multiethnic contact zone. In Mien Relations, Jonsson suggests that as early as the thirteenth century, the growing influence of Chinese and Thai state authority had led to a peculiarly urban understanding of the hinterlands—the forests and the mountains—as an area beyond state control and the rhetoric of civilization. Mountain peoples became understood as a distinct social type, an idea elaborated by government classification systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their "discovery" by Western anthropologists is, he suggests, merely one more episode influencing Mien identity. Jonsson questions traditional ethnography's focus on fieldwork and personal observation—and its concomitant blindness to political manipulation and to historical formation. Throughout Mien Relations, he revisits long-neglected connections between China and Southeast Asia, combines ancient history and contemporary ethnography, engages with the serious politics of representation without abandoning the quest to write ethnographically about particular communities, and keeps state control in view without assuming its success or coherence.


Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia

Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia

Author: SinWen Lau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1351551558

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This volume examines the dynamic, mutually constitutive, relationship between religion and mobility in the contemporary era of Asian globalisation in which an increasing number of people have been displaced, forcefully or voluntarily, by an expanding global market economy and lasting regional political strife. Seven case studies provide up-to-date ethnographic perspectives on the translocal/transnational dimension of religion and the religious/spiritual aspect of movement. The chapters draw on research into Buddhism, Islam, Chinese qigong, Christianity and communal ritual as these religious beliefs and practices move in and across Singapore, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the upper Mekong region, the Thai-Burma border, the Middle East and France. With these diverse and rich ethnographic cases on translocal/transnational Asian religious practices and subjectivities, the book transcends the conventional nation-state centered framework to look into how mobile religious agents are redefining boundaries of local, regional, national identities and recreating translocal, transnational and interregional connectivity. In so doing, it illustrates the importance of promoting a dynamic understanding of Asia not just as a geopolitical entity but as an ongoing social and religious formation in late modernity. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.


Conceptual Transfer as an Areal Factor

Conceptual Transfer as an Areal Factor

Author: Stefanie Siebenhütter

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-11-18

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1501506641

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By analyzing conceptual transfer this volume offers new insight in areal linguistics. Mainland Southeast Asia unifies great linguistic richness consisting of numerous languages and countless varieties of genetically diverse language families. Nevertheless, the area is known as a prime example for linguistic convergence. Exemplified by spatial reference in Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese, this study reveals conceptual borrowing due to language contact as an areal defining feature. The results from the field-based data analysis may help answer what extent cultural impact can be used as evidence for the existence of linguistic areas. A speaker’s cultural background might have a stronger impact on the choice of spatial language encoding than expected. Method and structure of argumentation can provide a model for similar questions addressing the existence of linguistic areas as well as to other cognitive dimensions within the Southeast Asian area under consideration. Therefore, the study can be seen as a significant contribution to analyze possibly existing conceptual areas empirically and exemplarily. Additionally, the investigation can serve as an important complement to empirical assumptions of conceptual transfer.


The Asian Future

The Asian Future

Author: Pracha Hutanuwatr

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 2005-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781842773451

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Brings together the ideas and experiences of some of Asia's outstanding politicians, intellectuals and social activists. Through in-depth interviews, provides an overview and critique of the present system and describes a vision of a new Asian society.


Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia

Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia

Author: P. Kitiarsa

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-07-31

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1137326174

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Leading scholars working on Buddhism and politics in South and Southeast Asia add to current discussions regarding 'Engaged Buddhism' and the recent work on protests. The writers have mostly established themselves in their fields, offering a diverse approach and country-by-country coverage.


Creating Laos

Creating Laos

Author: Søren Ivarsson

Publisher: NIAS Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 8776940233

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This book examines the process through which Laos came into existence under French colonial rule through to the end of World War II. Here, Laos's position at the intersection of two conflicting spatial layouts of "Thailand" and "Indochina" made its national form a particularly contested process. Rather than analyze this process in terms of administrative and political structures, the book discusses how a specific idea about a separate "Lao space" and its culture was formed.