Community Movements in Southeast Asia

Derived from the terms community and social movement, Shigeharu Tanabe’s concept of community movements is the process by which people create alternative communities, practices, and worlds that resist the influence and imposition of hegemonic political structures. Community movements enable us to capture the reality of power relations as they arise from and involve small-scale, face-to-face interactions rather than the assumed existence of social institutions such as the nation-state.

Illustrating this alternative means of constructing social identities and relations, this book contains vivid ethnographic descriptions of community movements across Southeast Asia, including the Buddhist Utopian movement, the creation of community radio, Hmong ex-communists, the creation of agricultural networks in Thailand, the Dhamma School movement, the Muslim and ethnic minority Kayah community in Myanmar, the construction of the Rope Bridge in a village in Laos, and the global land rights movement in Cambodia. Collectively, these movements provide the reader with a glimpse of other possibilities for the world as it exists now.

Ryoko Nishii is Professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Her recent works include Ethnography of Affect (2013, in Japanese) and the co-edited book Affectus: Touching the Outside of Life (2020, in Japanese). Shigeharu Tanabe is Professor Emeritus at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan and currently teaches anthropology and Japanese studies at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Recent works include Anthropology of Spirits: Politics of Communities in Northern Thailand (2013, in Japanese) and Communities of Potential: Social Assemblages in Thailand and Beyond (2016).