New Mandala

The National Library of Australia has begun subscribing to Khwamsangop: Siang khong pongkan khwamsangop pasason, a Lao national newspaper, issued by the Ministry of National Security for the past 11 years. It reports on law enforcement agency investigations and prosecutions of crime and security matters. Stories cover provincial and district news, as well as VIP [...]

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The Myanmar government’s attempts to restrict reporting, by both local and international media, have shown no signs of abating in the lead-up to the 2010 election.
Last month, it continued with the arrest of more journalists. It seems the arrests were not directly related to their line of work — they were members of a civil [...]

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An anonymous reader has sent New Mandala a fascinating manuscript:
This manuscript was found in records concerning US foreign correspondents in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The manuscript may be a memoir, as there was a case alluded to within the same set of records, the news of which the Imperial German government was [...]

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I have recently finished reading Volume 3 of a wonderful Thai studies trilogy.
Volume 1 Nation, was published in 1994. It is a forensic account of the construction of one of the core symbols of modern Thailand’s nationhood.
It was a long wait until Volume 2, King, emerged in 2006. But the wait was worth it. The author risked all [...]

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Enough about elephant farts ….  Here are some more items of Thai ephemera. They are images from lam tat booklets, taken from the reference works of Anake Nawigamune.
Lam tat (ลำตัด) is a Thai folk performance. It came to Siam from Malaysia during the reign of Rama V (1853 – 1910). Performances are sharp, witty, aggressive, and overtly sexual. [...]

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Earlier this week, Professor Duncan McCargo was announced as the winner of the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award for Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand.  In August this book was reviewed on New Mandala.  For those intrigued by the other contenders for this award, the list of short-listed titles [...]

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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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The National libray of Australia recently received the first issue of Voice of Taksin (เสียงทักษิณ ). The magazine has 70 pages with some colour  pictures. Published fortnightly, it is sold for 40 baht. Voice of Taksin features opinion pieces that reflect the political position of Thaksin’s followers.
[This post is provided by the National Library of Australia as part of [...]

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The new edition of the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs is a special edition on Burma.  It includes research articles by Stephen Hull, Inge Brees, and Susan Banki.  The articles in this special edition will be of interest to anyone concerned about Burma’s refugees, and, in particular, the varied ways that conflict, politics, humanitarianism, and [...]

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Here’s a new book in which I have a chapter. My chapter deals with contract farming in northern Thailand, based on the fieldwork I have been doing in Ban Tiam.  Details about the book are available here.
The book is a bit pricey so contact your library and recommend that they order it.

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