New Mandala

Lillehammer, Albertville, Lake Placid. Major sports events have a way of putting obscure places on the map. This was the hope harbored by Laos’s Communist leaders when they offered Vientiane, the capital, as the host of the Southeast Asian Games this December.
But so far the greatest legacy of the games is a record deficit that [...]

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New Mandala readers will be interested in the following announcement for the 2nd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.  The first of these conferences was held in 2008 in Guwahati, northeast India.  It was a very worthwhile conference and I imagine that the Chiang Mai iteration will be similarly good.
The details are:
Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation [...]

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We rarely post job advertisements on New Mandala but given the very specific nature of this position, and our niche in mainland Southeast Asian Studies, I thought it best to make an exception.  I expect that for the right candidate this would be an amazing opportunity.
The advertisement sets out all of the details:
The University of [...]

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It would be remiss of New Mandala not to join the many others who have congratulated Amy Chanthaphavong on her selection as Miss Asian America. She is the first Lao to wear this crown.

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Yesterday I blogged about agricultural productivity in Thailand. I included a chart which compared rice yields in Thailand with yields in China, Japan and Korea. Some readers have pointed out, both in comments on the post and by email, that the comparison between Thailand and Japan/Korea may not be particularly informative given quite different technical, social, ecological [...]

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Recently there has been some interesting discussion starting on New Mandala about strategies for development in Laos. In discussing calls for “alternative options for meeting Laos’ development needs” by those campaigning against the Don Sahong dam, I asked what those development options may be. A useful response was provided by Keith Barney in his discussion of the [...]

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The field research for this book was conducted in 2001-2003. A few years earlier the Lao government stopped issuing export permits for wood resin, although wood resin from Cambodia was still being exported to Thailand via Laos. The argument of the Lao government at the time was that wood resin harvesting was damaging the forests, [...]

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[This post is an introductory comment to Doug Miles' detailed review of Hjorleifur Jonsson's Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand. The full review is available here.]
“Now where did I leave my jolly pith helmet?”
I commend this book for initiating a shift of paradigm in research concerning the Yao of southern China and the [...]

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Ian Baird, executive director of Global Association for People and the Environment and recently chosen for inclusion in the 2008-2009 Princeton Premier Registry, has launched a letter campaign against the Don Sahong Dam in southern Laos. The text of the letter is below. Those interested in signing can contact Ian at ianbaird@shaw.ca.
It’s hard not sympathise with a [...]

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Thanks to a reader, here is another of our occasional updates on the rattus rattus situation in mainland southeast Asia. IRIN News reports that owls are being recruited to the fight against rats in northern Laos. As in other parts  of the region, bamboo flowering is blamed for high rat numbers:
Experts attribute the unusually large [...]

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