This book explores newly emerging communities and the new practices, knowledge, and power relations that can no longer be explained adequately by the conventional conception of community. In the early 1980s, Benedict Anderson coined the term "imagined communities" to examine the creation and global spread of the nation-state as a collective fiction constructed in the homogeneous and empty time of modernity. Set against this conceptual background, the present volume focuses on the processes of "imaging communities" to explore how people imagine and create their own sense of knowledge,...

This multiauthor volume provides fresh ways of looking at community movements and social actors in Thailand and beyond. The chapters cover a range of movements, from personal and social development based on Buddhist principles to community movements centered on other religious, spiritual, and traditional practices. Community movements differ markedly from the classic social movements of the early twentieth century and the subsequent ?new social movements.? Anthropologist Shigeharu Tanabe and Thai and Japanese colleagues explain that a key feature of these community movements is ?assemblage...