New Mandala

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.Â
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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A few weeks ago, as part of my songkran sortie in northern Thailand, I visited one of the more remote villages in Chiang Mai province to look at a local agricultural project. While I was there I heard that a new temple had been established nearby by some monks keen to spread the work about [...]

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One of common themes in new year rituals in northern Thailand is the expulsion of the misfortune and bad luck that has accumulated over the previous year. One of the ways this is done in Baan Tiam, in Chiang Mai province, is by burning khi saay (ขี้สาย) - cotton threads soaked in fragrant olive oil. Cotton thread is commonly [...]

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Visiting Baan Tiam in Chiang Mai province last week I noticed that many of the garlic storage sheds were full of dried garlic. I was a little surprised. Since I first visited Baan Tiam in 2002 garlic had declined in popularity. There were three main reasons: a decline in yield thought to be a result [...]

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Last year I reported that a new dry season crop had been taken up in Baan Tiam (the village in Chiang Mai province where I have been working for several years). The new dry season crop was the old wet season favourite - rice.  At the time (February 2007) I wrote:
Visiting a couple of weeks [...]

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