Confucius Institute in the Sino-Thai relations: A display of China's soft power

The establishment of Confucius Institutes (CIs) is a great endeavor by the Chinese government to spread Chinese language and culture in neighboring countries. It is commonly regarded by foreign countries as part of China's soft power initiative. With the implementation of BRI, it becomes a platform to promote systematic connections with countries along the route. Based on the examination of CIs’ programmes run in Thailand, this article finds that CIs made extensive efforts in these respects and garnered the support of the Thai government, Thai royal family and local business. In this sense, CIs also serve as a soft power for the Thai government and royalty to cement their Sino-Thai relationship. Within the local community, there are varying voices. While some supported the Chinese language and cultural programme, others have expressed some dissatisfaction over the role of the CIs in the community.     

Chinese migration and settlement in a Thai village

This paper uses data from a 1-year field study of demographic history and behavior in a Thai village (Baan Naku) in the Central Plains, to illustrate the considerable impact Chinese migrants had on even rural, remote villages. The 1976 field study of Baan Naku used participant/observation, cultural informants, in depth interviews, case histories, and reconstruction of family genealogies. Nearly 1/3 of previous and present inhabitants of the village were wholly or partly Chinese. For some Chinese immigrants residence in Baan Naku was a stepping stone on the way to greater success; for others it was a final destination after previous failures. The author illustrates this with 2 case histories. The most remarkable aspect of Chinese migration to Thailand is the apparent degree to which Chinese migrants and their descendants have been assimilated in to Thai culture; however, significant differences remain. While Thai villages often refer to Chinese-Thai neighbors derogatorily, they generally admire Thai-Chinese offspring. To a limited extent, some characteristics of the extended family structure have survived among Naku villagers of Chinese descent; for example, the Thai-Chinese keep in better contact among each other than the purely Thai villagers. Many Thai-Chinese villagers believed that marriages occurred at significantly younger ages in their Chinese homeland than in Thailand. In fact, in 1929-1931, the singulate mean age for marriage for South China was 17.78. Comparable data from Baan Naku shows that mean age of marriage for surviving women in the 70 years and over cohort was 23.7. Chinese-Thai villagers differed from Thai villagers in 2 ways: 1) they had greater financial acumen and 2) they controlled their children more strictly, especially with regard to marriage. Because of brideprice payment requirements, Thai-Chinese villagers delayed marriage during the economic difficulties of World War II. Thus, despite rapid assimilation into Thai culture, differences remain between the Chinese and Thais.     

That time I punched a boy in the forehead: sibling stories ahead of research

In the past month, I have been building relationships with community members at a prairie-based research site in Canada by telling a story about my own sibling advocacy. Namely, the story about that time I punched a boy in the forehead when I was a kid. I observe that this story helps build trust between me and the families invested in a new research project. This is a current issue because recent research on the utility of sibling stories suggests that these narrative accounts, diverse as they may be, are foundational to knowledge creation about disability. Yet these stories are under threat of pathologization when they are understood through a clinical lens, rather than a critical disability studies lens. I conclude by suggesting that sibling stories ought to be claimed as pivotal to critical understandings of disability experiences.     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Doing research in a ‘conflict zone’: history writing and archival (im) possibilities in Jammu and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that in conflict zones like Jammu and Kashmir, the embodied stories of Kashmiris punctuate the past, often silenced by dominant Indian narratives. Narratives about certain key political events in the region's past co-exist with other forms of memory. Kashmiris weave these stories to make sense of the present, build connections to the past, and stake claims for the future. They build and nourish an archive based on lived experience, keeping a record of past wrongs. Novels, anecdotes and underground literature form part of this embodied archive, and provide a resource for recovering stories that remain silent in institutional archives which serve the interests of power. These interests are visible through restrictions on access to institutional archives, and demonstrate the effects of power and the overall politics of archives.     

“Grandpa was fatally administered by the Bulgarians1”: Family narratives,national identity,and state history

Grandparents’ World War Two (WWII) stories are emotionally powerful, intimate accounts of firsthand experience that can shape grandchildren's ideas of state history, nation, and identity. This effect, I argue, manifests most intensively in critical times when national history and identity are threatened. Such was the case when former Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev relayed a controversial version of Macedonian national history and identity in a TV interview. In reaction, many Macedonian citizens shared fragments of their grandparents’ WWII stories. This study analyzes several more detailed versions of these grandparents’ narratives in order to ascertain the formative power of family WWII stories over one's personal sense of national identity. To do so, it will examine the positioning practices of the present-day narrators, the grandchildren of WWII participants, focusing on the manners in which they interactively reproduce their own sense of national identity vis-a-vis-these stories.     

Cross-border journeys and minority monks: the making of Buddhist places in southwest China

This article investigates the practice and social meanings of cross-border journeys of Dai minority monks, in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China. These journeys play a vital part in Theravada revivalism in this border region. In the early 1990s, the Dai monks left Xishuangbanna to pursue their Buddhist studies in Thailand, thereby experiencing Thai culture and society. I will show not only that transnational networks among the Tai peoples in the upper Mekong region have played a crucial role in this religious movement, but also that the transnational Theravada networks enable and are partly constituted by the cross-border journeys of Dai exiles and minority monks, which strengthen and enhance the Dai ability to persist, revive, and maintain their locality and cultural identity. It is these cultural practices which contribute to and formulate the making of Dai places within the power contexts of state displacement, regional trade and development in Southwest China.     

Making Tastes for Everything: Omnivorousness and Cultural Abundance

This paper offers some speculative discussion about the current state of the “omnivore” debate, instigated by Richard A. Peterson. It argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption through the identification of two “stories of abundance” in the cultural realm. The first relates to accounts of the changing and expanding cultural industries, whilst the second considers the rich variety of widely available culture enabled by various technologies of distribution. Taking these stories into account, the paper argues that sociological analyses of cultural hierarchy might lag behind those that are mundane and everyday to both cultural producers and consumers and that an orientation to culture that ranges across established hierarchies is increasingly unremarkable. Such a change is related to the structural and discursive means through which culture is circulated. The paper concludes that cultural analysts need to modify their theoretical models and their methodological approaches to better reflect a variegated field of culture and a more fluid cultural hierarchy. In the tradition of both Peterson and Bourdieu, contemporary analyses of patterns of cultural consumption and taste need to take fuller account of the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and valued if they are to maintain their explanatory power.     

Religion as a means of cultural reproduction: popular rituals in a Yunnan Chinese village in northern Thailand

This article discusses how popular rituals are used to achieve cultural reproduction in Banmai, a Yunnan Chinese village in northern Thailand where I conducted empirical fieldwork between 2002 and 2007. Most Banmai villagers were local militias originally associated with the Chinese Nationalist Party in western Yunnan Province. They went into exile on the Burmese side of the Golden Triangle in or shortly after 1949 when the People's Liberation Army swept through this region, and they ultimately settled in northern Thailand's hill regions in early 1960s. As the self-proclaimed preservers of authentic Chinese culture, Banmai villagers vigorously instituted many traditional practices, following the imagined Confucian orthodoxy, to build a reified community that represents an idealized Chinese spiritual world. Through their participation in popular rituals, we see clearly how villagers have been able to attain the cultural unification that has played a crucial role in meeting their spiritual needs at various levels: the individual, the family, the kin group, and the community.     

School-Choice Stories: The Role of Culture

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith.     

Narrative Therapy and Elders with Memory Loss

Elders with memory loss often experience anxiety and depression as they feel their identities slip out of their own control. The paper argues that narrative therapy can help people with dementia revise their stories and reclaim their identities as their personal histories become less accessible to them. The paper presents case examples in which unique outcomes emerged when elders with memory loss resisted the cultural imperative to perceive their lives in sequential order and instead emphasized character traits and thematic patterns in their stories. The paper recommends ways to adapt narrative therapy so elders can create a meaningful sense of self despite dementia.     

Media labeling versus the US disability community identity: a study of shifting cultural language

This study examines disability terminology to explore how the news media frame cultural representations of the disability community. More specifically, the paper examines the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act on journalist's language choices about disability topics. A content analysis of news stories using disability terms in The Washington Post and The New York Times during the past decade was conducted. The paper illustrates that disability community identity continues to be formed, transformed and maintained through news media presentations of disability terminology. The paper argues that the US Disability Rights Movement had some success during the 1990s in putting forth language that advances its aims, though the study also suggests that some journalists continue to use terms that perpetuate limiting, narrow stereotypes about people with disabilities.     

Unveiling the mantra. The salience of network-based community belonging in understanding the structural and agentic conditions of the migration-development nexus

There is more and more evidence that migration and development cannot be considered as two dimensions, whose nexus emerges naturally as a mantra with reciprocal advantages both in developing and in developed countries. This article investigates the theoretical framework of a migration-development nexus as a double time-dependent process of social change, at the same time embedded both in the long durée of the reproduction/innovation of social practices and in the short durée of an agent's personal reflectivity. I argue that the wide scenario of this interplay is the place for the cultural, symbolic, and moral dimensions of a migrant's membership of a network-based community, which acts as a cultural compass in determining migrants' attitudes towards the development of their home country. Strong community membership can be associated with real engagement in the development issues of members left behind (as part of the collective self), only if we assume that membership and belonging are not necessarily shaped by kinship or ethnic considerations, but vary according to the structural features of migrants' social networks – for example the way in which migrants define networks as their own communities, the results of past community memories, and how they imagine their future community on the basis of current experience and perception. The paper discusses these issues in the light of the structure-agent debate in social sciences and migration studies.     

Rehearsing Gender and Sexuality in Modern Thailand

Abstract

In this paper I draw on a series of interviews with gay-identified Thai men, and with male bar workers and their clients in order to chart the traditions, discourses, and institutional contexts contributing to the construction of gender and sexual identity in Thailand. I argue against the uncritical application of Western paradigms to the study of Thai sexuality and present a view of gender and sexuality that is “fluid and pragmatic.” I consider difficulties associated with sexual choice and levels of acceptance and toleration, and look at examples of how sex work has been socially constructed. Finally, I discuss the attachment of Thai male bar workers to the “gay” community.     

The shifting ‘stages’ of performance: a study of ‘Chavang Kut’ festival in Manipur

Chavang Kut, a post-harvesting festival in Manipur, represents an important cultural expression of the Chin-Kuki-Mizo group of people. The article looks at the participation of the Thadou community in the celebration by tracing their performative historiography. In the past, the celebration was primarily important in the religio-cultural sense. The rhythmic movements of the dances in the festival were inspired by animals, agricultural techniques and showed their relationship with ecology. Today, the celebration witnesses the shifting of stages and is revamped to suit new contexts and interpretations. The traditional dances which forms the core of the festival is now performed in the out-of-village settings and are staged in a secular public sphere. While used by the state as a political project to bring unity amongst the different communities of Manipur, recent socio-political occasions showed how it is used as a site of contestations against the state.     

ADOPTION:

In this article, we focus on how understandings of the past influence the process of integrating older special needs children into family life. We present the stories of two families who adopted older special needs children as they reconstructed the past, experinced the present, and projected the future. We draw upon social, pragmatic, and postmodern theories of the past to guide our interpretations and understandings of these families' adoption experiences. The dominant ideology of family influenced their story construction, and it was against this conception that their stories were evaluated. We followed the Litners and the Becks as they used the past to create stories that enabled and disabled their family life in the present and in the future. From the Litners' and the Becks' stories, we learned that when families are too limited by a cultural conception of an ideal adoptive family, their ability to use the past to create stories to help them live in the present and to project a shared future becomes restricted.
Our adoption failed because we understimated the past and overstimated our ability to create stories with happy endings. (Mrs. Beck)     

Placeholders and Changemakers: Women Farmland Owners Navigating Gendered Expectations

Gendered expectations are central to the continuation of agricultural land tenure systems that concentrate land and power in the control of men. These expectations about how land should be used and by whom are communicated through cultural narratives and maintained through social interactions. Through analysis of qualitative data collected through in‐depth interviews with women farmland owners in Iowa, this article identifies a pivotal person without whom the success of these stories is in jeopardy: the “placeholder.” In this article, I identify how cultural narratives place two gendered expectations on women in the placeholder position: (1) that women landowners maintain farmland through the continuance of its use and preexisting land agreements with tenants or co‐owners, and (2) that women landowners defer their authority as landowners to men. Further, I identify the “changemaker” as an emerging character within cultural narratives—one who refuses to fit the expectations of placeholder and whose behavior may or may not be accepted by the community. Finally, I find that alternative social networks provide enabling environments for changemakers as sites of potential narrative revisions or shifts.     

Changing Space,Making Race: Distance,Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Ant n, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government's approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.     

Identities beyond ethnic-based subordination or conflict in the Southeast Asian borderlands: a case study of Lao villagers in northeast Cambodia

This paper explores everyday expressions of identity by Lao villagers living in northeast Cambodia near the border with Laos, and uses this to reflect on trends in studies of identity in the remote borderlands of Southeast Asia. I argue that while ethnicity is certainly crucial, discipline-specific emphases – ethnic-based subordination or conflict for social studies and political studies, respectively – result in less attention to other important dynamics shaping identity. Furthermore, I suggest that low-profile case studies not strongly linked to ethnic-based subordination or conflict – such as the Lao in Cambodia – require study for a more comprehensive view of identity in the borderlands. The case study from northeast Cambodia identifies four key dynamics shaping identity: inter-state relations, ethno-national identities, cross-border livelihoods and social status. I show how minimal inter-state tensions and varied personal connections to Laos were important in facilitating villagers’ involvement in lucrative illegal cross-border logging in Laos, but the latter were never used to justify this practice. Instead in this everyday setting, villagers emphasised their sense of marginalisation within Cambodia and thus demonstrate their regular prioritisation of status.