ABSTRACT
Thailand - the country, the nation - has considerable prominence in the world to-day. Contemporary global currents of movement of people take millions ofvisitors annually to Thailand as tourists and business people, and Thai people are increasingly present in the societies of North America, Western Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the more well-to-do countries ofEast Asia and elsewhere, as economic migrants, entrepreneurs, 'guest workers', students and so on. It is a late twentieth century diaspora of considerable scale, in the weaker sense of voluntary dispersal with continuing contact with the homeland, rather than the collective and forced movement of a permanent and often tragic kind historically associated with diaspora. It is too soon to have much idea of what separate and distinct cultural traditions and memories these expatriate or settled communities may be developing inside their various new host countries, which are themselves increasingly conscious of their ethnic plurality.
