Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos

ISBN-13: 9780700711758 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 324 str.

Charles F. Keyes;Shigeharu Tanabe

Opis

This text examines how Thailand has been experiencing a crisis of cultural identity since the 1970s, a crisis rooted in the fundamental questioning of the hierarchical socio-political order that emerged in the 1970s and the failure of the authorities to reimpose that order.

This book explores social memory in the context of cultural crises of modernity in Thailand and Laos. It explicates the ways in which social memory constructed by the people enters modernity, and how this in turn causes fundamental ruptures with their past, as well as the various ways cultural crises are experienced in their lives. The essays in this book consider how in these crises the people constitute their cultural, social, or individual identities, particularly focusing on the theoretical issues of identifications and their relevance to distinct historical processes in Thailand and Laos.
Both countries, particularly in the two decades since the 1970s, have been undergoing radical social and economic changes. Whilst Thailand has travelled down the road to industrialization, neighbouring Laos experienced a communist revolution in 1975 and only since the late 1980s has attempted to follow a reformist path to development. Increasingly influenced by globalised economic and social institutions, both countries have come to face crises that have made people insecure in the present and anxious about the future.

Recenzje

'This volume offers a fine collection of essays on the complex and ever-evolving issue of social memory.' - Asian Journal of Social Science

Spis treści

Part I. Ritual, Spirit mediumship, and the Politics of the Past Part II. Cultural Crisis and the Re-framing of Thai-ness Part III. On the Margins of the Thai World Reflections by Masato Fukushima, International University of Japan

O autorze

Charles F. Keyes, Shigeharu Tanabe