Suchergebnisse

Introduction --Settlement history, headmanship, and the lord of the water, lord of the land --Kinship, marriage, and domestic social organisation --Village organisation and the sociology of production and consumption --The economy of Palokhi: subsistence in a regional context --Agricultural rituals: the ceremonial cycle in Palokhi --Conclusion: cultural reproduction and the maintenance of identity --Appendixes.The 'Au' Ma Xae ritual --Labour expended on agricultural activities and co--operative labour exchanges in Palokhi (21 January 1981 -- 31 December 1981) --A note on work and wage work in Palokhi --Swidden cultivation in Palokhi --Crops grown in Palokhi Swiddens --Wet-rice cultivation in Palokhi --The agistment of buffaloes and cattle in Palokhi --Examples of household budgets in Palokhi --The origin of the Karen: an "official" history.

This publication of Remaining Karen is intended as a tribute to Ananda Raja and his consummate skills as an ethnographer. It is also a tribute to his long-term engagement in the study of the Karen. Remaining Karen was Ananda Raja's first focused study of the Sgaw Karen of Palokhi in northern Thailand, which he submitted in 1986 for this PhD in the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. It is a work of superlative ethnography set in an historical and regional context and as such retains its value to the present.

Since 1989 'rites of cursing', derived from Northern Thai folk-religious practices, have become common in public protests and demonstrations in Thailand. This essay argues that the employment of these practices and associated beliefs as aspects of civil society and contemporary nation-state making in the Thai context can only be understood in terms of the internal logic of sorcery and embedded conceptions of morality.

Fully-formed nationalisms do not emerge from nothing. Nor are they inextinguishable expressions of pre-modern forms of identity and political aspirations. The argument in this paper is that if they are fully formed, they have to emerge from ethno-nationalism. (...) The argument is made in relation to the Karen nationalist movement in Burma. Karen nationalism emerged out of ethno-nationalism that was fostered by Christian missionary interest and ethnological attempts to set out a Karen ethno-history. Missionary writings offered Christian-educated Karen, in colonial times, the basis for a "narration of nation" and for viewing themselves not merely as an ethnic group but a "nation". This paper sets out the ceaseless unfolding of this "narration of nation" that began in the nineteenth century and now tragically occurs in refugee camps in Thailand because of drastically altered politico-military conditions in Burma since the late 1980s. These narrations can only be understood in terms of their discursive history and how this history has been shaped. These narrations are are examined with a view to addressing some key theoretical issues contained in more recent studies of nationalism and nation-state-making as modern phenomena and how ethno-nationalism is transformed into nationalism. (Pac Rev/DÜI)

AbstractThis paper questions the utility of traditional depictions of Southeast Asia as a region in terms of cultural criteria. These depictions, are essentialized characterizations and to the extent that they are directed at identifying Southeast Asia as a region, they reflect comparatist errors. It is argued that the central issue is not how Southeast Asia can or cannot be depicted as a region but, rather, conceptualizing regions and regionness as human constructs. Such an approach requires a focus on interactions instead of identity. From this perspective, regions may be seen as interpenetrated systems, both in a global sense and in sub-regional terms. Interpenetration is seen in terms of interactions of varying intensity and density centering on structures of interest which may be competitive or complementary and where the role of brokers and broker institutions are pivotal. Accordingly, from a long-term human historical perspective, endogenous experiences of region and regionness may well be regarded as variable phenomena depending on the structures of interest and the part played by brokers and broker institutions in any given historical period.