ABSTRACT
This book explores social memory in the context of cultural crises of modernity in Thailand and Laos. It explicates the ways in which social memory constructed by the people enters modernity, and how this in turn causes fundamental ruptures with their past, as well as the various ways cultural crises are experienced in their lives. The essays in this book consider how in these crises the people constitute their cultural, social, or individual identities, particularly focusing on the theoretical issues of identifications and their relevance to distinct historical processes in Thailand and Laos.
Both countries, particularly in the two decades since the 1970s, have been undergoing radical social and economic changes. Whilst Thailand has travelled down the road to industrialization, neighbouring Laos experienced a communist revolution in 1975 and only since the late 1980s has attempted to follow a reformist path to development. Increasingly influenced by globalised economic and social institutions, both countries have come to face crises that have made people insecure in the present and anxious about the future.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|70 pages
Embodied Memories in Cultural Crisis
chapter 2|27 pages
Crises of the Modern in Northern Thailand
part II|72 pages
Nationalist Monuments
chapter 4|24 pages
National Heroine or Local Spirit?
part III|45 pages
Commoditisation and Consumer Identities
chapter 7|17 pages
Exhibition of Power
part IV|55 pages
Remembering, Social Memory, and History
chapter 9|12 pages
Social Memory as it Emerges
chapter 10|41 pages
Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past
part V|15 pages
Reflections