Laos's emergence as a modern nation-state in the 20th century owed much to a complex interplay of internal and external forces. Arguing that the historiography of Laos needs to be understood in this wider context, this study considers how the Lao have written their own nationalist and revolutionary history "on the inside," while others-the French, Vietnamese, and Thais-have attempted to write the history of Laos "from the outside" for their own political ends. As nationalist historiography, like the formation of the nation-state, does not emerge within a nationalist vacuum but rather is created and contested from inside and out, this incisive volume's approach has applications and implications far beyond Laos.

Extrait de la couverture : "Of the numerous available studies on forest management in Asia, only a few mention the role of women or pay attention to gender relations. Even projects are largely designed in terms of households or communities where men are the decision-makers and the owners or managers of forests. This important volume views gender relations as a crucial factor in the management of land and forests, and maintains that the continuing invisibility of women in these areas only compounds poverty, shortages, and the increased workloads of forest-based women. Based on fieldwork conducted in several forest societies in China, Thailand, India and Malaysia, the contributors explore the changes in gender relations within indigenous communities, from matrilineal and/or gender egalitarian systems to ones where male domination is the norm."

This unusual and intriguing study of nationhood explores the 19th-century confrontation of ideas that transformed the kingdom of Siam into the modern conception of a nation. Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

Esays on various ethic groups in mainland Southeast Asia including the Mon, Karen, Yao, Hmong, and various Tai groups.

When British diplomats McLeod and Richardson set out on their missions to the Tai states in December 1836, their aim was trade and friendship. Captain William Couperus McLeod and Dr. David Richardson, both of the East India Company Madras Army, traveled from Moulmein on elephants, horses, and in the caravans of traders, to the present-day regions of the Shan States in Burma, northern Thailand, and Sipsong Panna in China. As the first Europeans to officially visit the region, they experienced some extraordinary social and cultural encounters. McLeod and Richardson had been in action in the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824-6) and had experience of other missions in Burma and Siam. They were fluent in Burmese and had a basic knowledge of Tai. They wrote superbly of their journeys and diplomatic exchanges. Their journals are published here in full, with detailed notes, for the first time. The richness of their narratives, their records of scientific, social, and cultural detail, their engaging insights, and some prejudices, make this engrossing reading for the enthusiast of travel and adventure literature. More than this, it is an essential new resource for scholars of many kinds-historians, anthropologists, geographers, and botanists, to name a few. Grabowsky and Turton provide an analytical commentary on the journals, and on the conditions and contexts of their writing and subsequent use. The authors set the information in the journals in the context of indigenous Tai language sources. They also present completely new research on the British settlement in the Tenasserim Provinces of peninsular Burma, along with the biographies of McLeod and Richardson, who appear, for the first time, as three-dimensional individuals. This volume is a state-of-the-art example of how to make archival material like these journals, which are among the finest of the period, accessible to a broad audience. Volker Grabowsky is professor of South East Asian history at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitut Munster. Andrew Turton is reader in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.