Nicola Tannenbaum

The Thai village economy in the past

Authors Preface to the TranslationTranslators NoteThe Thai Village Economy in the PastPreface1.From the Primordial Village Community to the Village under the SakdinaSystem 2.The Subsistence Village Economy under the Sakdina System, 1455-1855 3.From the Subsistence Village Economy to the Commercial Economy in theCentral Region, 1855-1932 4.The Persistence of the Subsistence Village Economy in the North, South, andIsan, 1855-19325.ConclusionNotesAppendix 1: Question Guide for Interviewing VillagersAppendix 2: Details of IntervieweesAfterword: Chatthip and the Thai Village

Haeng and Takho: Power in Shan cosmology*

The author discusses the nature of power in Shan society arguing that power and protection mutually imply each other and that power is morally and ethically neutral. She supports this argument with examples showing the protective and morally neutral nature of power. Within this general framework she goes on to show that religious specialists conceive power as having an ethical component not normally present. In conclusion, she describes the relationships among ideas of power, protection, Buddhism, and briefly, gender.

Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand . By Katherine A. Bowie. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xx, 393 pp.

In the 1970s, the Thai state organized the Village Scout movement to counter communist insurgency. The movement was soon used to thwart growing demands for democratic reform, recruiting five million members to become the largest mass organization in Thai history, and, mobilized by the military-controlled media, helped topple a civilian government and restore military rule. This book bridges both the macro and micro levels of analysis to place the dynamics of a national political movement within a richly detailed account of its working at the village level.

57.00 (cloth);

Villages seem natural units with an internal coherence that binds their members together. This perception in anthropology comes from the earlier functional theoretical orientation that produced classic ethnographies of villages. We thus regard household clusters as villages or hamlets. The question of what these clusters may mean to the people who inhabit them remains unexamined, however. In mainland Southeast Asia there is a wide range of possibilities in the meaning of clusters of households. In some, markers seem to provide some reality to the concept of village as a unit: fences; gates; and additional nonhousehold structures such as temples and spirit altars. Periodically there may be rituals demarcating the community as a whole, closing it off to outsiders. When these exist it seems reasonable to talk about the village as a unit. What does MvillageH mean with other clusters of households where none of these markers may exist? In order to understand what we label as villages, we need to first look at households and relations among households that constitute these clusters. The theoretical range is from households that are separate units, existing by themselves with no relations to other households or larger collections of people, to places where households have little independent reality and the village or other groupings are the major organizational forms. In mainland Southeast Asia neither extreme exists; villages have some ethnographic reality and usually people prefer to live in clusters of households for protection or enjoyment of social interactions. There are isolated households, but those I know of are families in the slow process of moving, with stops to farm and renew stores along the way. This essay explores the ways lowland Tai2 groups use rituals to mark the autonomy of households and incorporate them into villages and larger regional groups. After describing the ritual features associated with Tai households, villages, and supra-village groups, the political-religious organization for three Tai groups is examined for an explanation of what village might mean.