ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the important contribution which American anthropologists made to the study of social, cultural and economic change in South-East Asia during the period when the colonial powers were withdrawing from the region. American anthropology concentrated mainly on the lowland, cognatic or bilateral, wet rice-cultivating peasant societies in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines. The anthropology was organized in a small number of wellfunded multidisciplinary programmes based at such universities as Chicago, Cornell, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the immediate post-war period a series of important studies was instigated and organized by Lauriston Sharp at Cornell, including field research on ricegrowing villages in Central, North and North-East Thailand, the Chinese community in Bangkok, Thai society in historical perspective, modern politics, and minority upland groups in Northern Thailand.
