New Mandala

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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Web censorship regimes in mainland Southeast Asia are a regular topic of discussion here at New Mandala. Of course, anybody who spends time in Burma gets used to the government’s relatively consistent effort to block potentially subversive online material.  And, jokes aside, since the coup of 2006 Thailand has also beefed up resources to clamp [...]

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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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Stir-fried or grilled, Vietnamese can’t seem to get enough of Cambodian rat meat, and the global influenza outbreak as well as recent heavy rains have proven a boon for both consumers and exporters.
- Extracted from Ek Madra, “Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam”, Reuters India, 18 May 2009.
Long-time readers will know that [...]

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Talking ranges from communicating mundane facts to building meaningful relations with other human beings. Communicating personally with others generally requires the establishment of a shared language but it seems to me that something more is needed, such as a shared ‘conversational context’. What I mean by this is a language-use which is underpinned by a [...]

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At http://www.cesd-thai.info you can now download newspaper articles as well as pictures related to ethnic groups in Southeast Asia. The website also contains references to academic articles, an e-museum as well as conference and workshops announcements.
This database is the result of a 4-year collaboration between the Center of Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), a research group [...]

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Writers and commentators on the sex trade of Southeast Asia sometimes like to refer to the complicity of culture in driving the sex trade. Examples of female self-sacrifice for the good of the family can be found and a case made that not all sex tourism is entirely forced but can instead lie in a [...]

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There should be a legal corridor to assure better operation of the blogs…We’ll manage them by randomly checking—we don’t need to control all the blogs…When we create a legal corridor, determining what is legal and what is a violation of Vietnamese law, the blog community will detect such things on its own and will let [...]

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Here is a new publication on ethnic minorities in Vietnam:
Minorities At Large: Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam Beyond the State Frame
Special Issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies
Volume 3, Number 3, October 2008
Edited by Philip Taylor
Representing a new approach to ethnic minorities in Vietnam, these essays challenge the prevailing “carceral” conception of Vietnam’s minorities as territorially [...]

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During the American War, countless Vietnamese fought and died for their nation, and many of the martyrs’ remains have been lost in Laos for the past 40 years. Now, a new generation of soldiers is bringing them back home.
- Extracted from Tran Bien, Tran Hoai and Ho Linh, “Soldiers bring martyr remains back home”, Vietnam [...]

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