New Mandala

Last week I wrote, somewhat sceptically, about a CNN report that high petrol prices in northern Thailand were encouraging a return to buffalos for ploughing. I was interested to hear what people thought about this in Baan Tiam, the northern Thai village were I have been doing research for several years.
On the face of it [...]

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Following Andrew’s recent post on the reported revival of buffalos in northern Thailand, this piece on pigs in Laos caught my attention.  The relevant report comes from “your portal on pig production”, pigprogress.net.  It discusses an International Centre for Tropical Agriculture project that seeks to introduce more forage legumes to supplement the diets of pigs in rural [...]

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Last night SBS television news in Australia featured a story on buffalos in Thailand. According to CNN’s Dan Rivers, farmers in northern Thailand are turning to buffalos to plough their fields instead of tractors. He interviewed a local farmer, Jile Songkasri, who said that high fuel prices and the bad economy had encouraged him to dust off his old plough [...]

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I have just seen what I presume is the first full review of Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The politics of environmental knowledge in Northern Thailand.  This new book, regular readers will recall, was written by New Mandala co-founder, Andrew Walker, and his partner in critical environmental debate, Tim Forsyth, from the London School of Economics.  The reviewer, in [...]

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Garlic growers in Mae Hong Son were encamped outside the city and blocked two roads in their protest to urge the government to buy garlic at a guaranteed price on Wednesday. The protesters gathered at city hall and moved to block a second road in Mae Sarieng district. Garlic farmers have encamped the Mae Hong [...]

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Salawin: Banthuk maenam lae chiwit nai krasae kanplianplaeng (Salween: record of river and life in the current of change) (2008) Montri Chanthawong (ed.) (9789740934). This comprehensive volume offers substantial coverage of issues in the Salween valley of Mae Hong Son province. Fisheries, farming, forestry, hydropower and history are discussed in great detail. The text is [...]

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It was the first time Meisun sae Chao, a descendant of a Chinese soldier in the Kuomintang army, had felt true happiness.
The woman, who was born and lives on the mountain of Doi Mae Salong, had just become a Thai under the government’s naturalisation scheme.
Sharing the happiness in a ceremony to take an oath of [...]

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Yesterday we received an interesting comment prompted by an old New Mandala post about the Young family and their lives among the Lahu of northern Thailand and Burma. 
It got me thinking.
Students of mainland Southeast Asia cannot ignore the long history of well-documented Christian missionary activity in the region.
And it is a genuinely long history.  Trawling through an annotated bibliography [...]

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New Mandala readers in Canberra may be interested in my seminar on Wednesday:
“Now the companies have come”: local values and contract farming in northern Thailand
Andrew Walker
Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program
Anthropology Seminar
9.30 am Wednesday 14th May
Seminar Room A
Coombs Building
The Australian National University
Over the past five years the farmers of Baan Tiam, a small lowland village in [...]

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