Southeast Asia Collection Blog

Tai lands and Thailand : community and state in Southeast Asia / edited by Andrew Walker. Honolulu : Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with University Of Hawai’i Press, c2009.

This edited volume, featuring essays by Andrew Walker, Craig J. Reynolds, and Holly High, among other notable scholars, offers a new approach to the study of “community” in the Tai world. Much has been written on the political and social organization of the Tai (i.e. the Tai-speaking peoples of Thailand, Laos, the Shan States, southern China, and northern Vietnam). The common thread that runs through the bulk of this scholarship is the notion that Tai communities in the past were autonomous, practically world’s unto themselves, and almost exclusively subsistence-oriented. The present volume challenges this widely-held assumption. The author’s argue that the pre-modern Tai community was more fluid, its inhabitants more mobile, and more engaged with happenings well beyond the boundaries of their immediate environs. The book also challenges the notion that their economies were mainly subsistence-oriented, a claim left-wing scholars have consistently made. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the essays presented here challenge the conventional belief that the traditional life ways of the Tai community and communal sense of belonging are fast eroding in the face of rapid social and economic change in Southeast Asia. To be sure, these powerful social and economic forces have wrought substantial change. But the Tai communities, the author’s argue, have retained much of their former identity.