Charles F. Keyes

Introduction tourism and re-created ethnicity

Abstract This collection of papers by sociologists and anthropologists focuses on the effect of tourism on the maintenance, transformation, and re-creation of ethnic boundaries. Tourism is seen as a special form of ethnic relations, particularly that form of tourism in which the cultural exoticism of the host population is the principal attraction for the tourist. This type of tourism leads to the formation of three main roles: tourist, touree, and middleman. The authors address different aspects of the marketing of ethnicity, such as the role of the state in the development of ethnic tourism; the modification and recreation of ethnic attributes and consciousness as the result of tourism; the transformation of art forms through the tourist trade; the role of the tourist agent; and the formation of ethnic stereotypes in tourist interactions.

Buddhism and National Integration in Thailand

Buddhism in Thailand has been both subjected to integrative policies advanced by the Thai government and manipulated as an instrument for promoting national integration. As a result of reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth century, several different traditions of Therevada Buddhism were united into a national religious system. In recent years, the Thai government has attempted to involve the Buddhist Sangha in efforts to promote economic development among the Thai peasantry and assimilation of tribal peoples into Thai society. While the policies designed to integrate Buddhism within Thailand were successful, the efforts to use Thai Buddhism as instrument of national policy could prove deleterious rather than advantageous to the attainment of national goals.

Presidential Address: “The Peoples of Asia”—Science and Politics in the Classification of Ethnic Groups in Thailand, China, and Vietnam

On a visit to a northern province in the 1950s, Ho Chi Minh, who had spent many years during the war with the French living with upland peoples in northern Vietnam, asked local authorities how many ethnic groups were found within the province. Professor Đang Nghiem Van, the doyen of ethnologists in Vietnam, has written that President Ho received the following response: The “scientific” project of ethnic classification undertaken for political purposes in Vietnam beginning in 1958 was comparable directly (and not unrelated) to a similar project undertaken in China in the 1950s.

Millennialism, Theravāda Buddhism, and Thai Society

Theoretical Considerations In this paper I am concerned with the explanation of a type of religious phenomenon I shall refer to as millennialism. I would, at the outset, underline the religious character of this phenomenon, since millennialism (also known under a variety of other names) is often viewed as a projection of psychological, economic, or political crisis experiences. I do not view religion merely as a projective system; rather I hold with Clifford Geertz that it is a “cultural system” which serves as both a “model of” and a “model for” reality. That is to say, I see religion serving both as a set of symbols that makes human experience ultimately meaningful, and as a set of symbols that provides an ultimate basis for human action.

Asian visions of authority : religion and the modern states of East and Southeast Asia

Emerging from a conference on Communities in Question: Religion and Authority in East and Southeast Asia, held in Hua Hin, Thailand, May 1989, this volume examines some of the tensions and conflicts between states and religious communities over the scope of religious views of the communities, the

Buddhist Politics and Their Revolutionary Origins in Thailand

Thailand is often viewed as an Asian country which has experienced no fundamental revolutionary change because the two major institutions on which the Thai nation is predicated—the monarchy and the Buddhist monkhood or Sangha—have deep roots in the past. Despite the continuity of these institutions, this article argues that Thai politics, which have been shaped in the past two decades by the influence of a number of activist Buddhist movements, can only be understood if it is recognized that the Thai political order has undergone major revolutionary transformations which stem from a reformation of Buddhism begun in the mid-nineteenth century. This reformation led, this article argues, to a fundamental shift in the practical interpretation of the Buddhist theory of action which, in turn, has led to an increasing number of people viewing themselves as being sufficiently freed from the constraints of previous karma to effect significant changes in their lives and those of the world in which they live.

Economic Action and Buddhist Morality in a Thai Village

Although the Thai-Lao peasants living in rain-fed agricultural communities in northeastern Thailand have experienced some improvements in their socioeconomic situation as a consequence of the growth of the Thai economy since the mid-1950s, these peasants still constitute the poorest sector of the population of Thailand. Moreover, the socioeconomic position of the rural northeastern Thai populace has actually declined relative to that of the urban populace and that of the rural populace living in central Thailand. The economic disadvantageous position of Thai-Lao peasants is linked with a sense of being an ethnoregional minority within a polity that has been highly centralized since reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the social action of Thai-Lao peasants with reference to the political-economic constraints on their world can be understood, as long-term research in one community reveals, as having been impelled by rational calculation aimed at improving the well being of peasant families. The ways in which peasants have assessed in practice the justice of these constraints as well as the ways in which they have assessed the limits to entrepreneurship must be seen, however, as being rooted in moral premises that Thai-Lao villagers have appropriated from Theravada Buddhism as known to them in their popular culture.

Being Protestant Christians in Southeast Asian Worlds

The five cases of Protestant Christian practice in Indonesia and Thailand presented in this symposium are used to develop a sociology of Protestantism in Southeast Asia. A review is first undertaken of the history of Protestant missionary activity in Southeast Asia. Protestantism, it is observed, insists on the ultimate authority of the Bible. This authority has not been accepted by Southeast Asians until they have access to the Christian message in their own languages and they are motivated to adopt Christian practices as a means to confront deep crises in their lives. The establishment of Protestant Christianity has entailed the interpreting of the Christian message with reference to the non-Christian contexts in which Protestants in Southeast Asia live.