Lauriston Sharp

Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities in Southeast Asia

In 1961 our Association President, Norman Brown, discussed with us the problem of the content of cultural continuity in India. He pointed out that in spite of many variations in time and local differentiations in space, the highly developed civilization of India from the third millennium B.C. to the present offers to the student a picture of a continuing entity, a kind of moving picture in which the successive events of a plot seem to be informed and given a special character and vitality by some pervasive element running through the story, an element which might be sought, it was concluded, in the particular perdurable values basic to many Indian behavior patterns.

Bang Chan: Social History of a Rural Community in Thailand.

Bang Chan traces the changing cultural characteristics of a small Siamese village during the century and a quarter from its founding as a wilderness settlement outside Bangkok to its absorption into the urban spread of the Thai capital. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book sums up the major findings of a pioneering interdisciplinary research project that began in 1948. Changes in Bang Chans social organization, technology, economy, governance, education, and religion are portrayed in the context of local and national developments.