Dressing Thai

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 112-128
Author(s):  
Kanjana Hubik Thepboriruk

Abstract Public attire and policies governing it have been a reoccurring feature of Siamese/Thai nation building since the nineteenth century. Clothing has been political instruments for rulers and regime in raising the global status of Siam and Siamese Kings, transforming the Kingdom of Siam into the Nation of Thailand, reviving the popularity of the monarchy, promoting national unity, and provoking political opponents. Their collective efforts during the past one and half century gradually normalised the policing of Thai bodies and increased the state control of public attire in service of the Nation. Today, despite such attire no longer being criminalised, the possible negative political, social, economic, and legal consequences of non-conformity continue to drive Thais to accept the State’s ‘invitation’ to use their bodies in promoting its agenda.

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christofer Berglund

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n= 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.


2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard T. Antoun

In the Middle East over the past half-century, three religious processes have grown together. One, the growth of fundamentalism, has received worldwide attention both by academics and journalists. The others, the bureaucratization of religion and the state co-optation of religion, of equal duration but no less importance, have received much less attention. The bureaucratization of religion focuses on the hierarchicalization of religious specialists and state co-optation of religion focuses on their neutralization as political opponents. Few commentators link the three processes. In Jordan, fundamentalism, the bureaucratization of religion (BOR), and state co-optation of religion (SCR) have become entwined sometimes in mutually supportive and sometimes in antagonistic relations. The following case study will describe and analyze the implications of this mutual entanglement for the relations of state and civil society and for the human beings simultaneously bureaucratized and “fundamentalized.”


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Brown

Archaeology is a powerful tool for the provision of a cultural identity to a population. This same power often makes it also the target of manipulation by a state in the process of nation-building. This paper will study the darker political nature of archaeology by examining the effects of state-control over archaeological resources and research, in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The aim of this paper is to highlight the dangers posed to the public world- view of a nation in which the only accepted interpretation of the classical past is that of the Party.


1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thongchai Winichakul

Historical studies in Thailand have been closely related to the formation of the nation since the late nineteenth century, and until recently the pattern of the past in this elitist craft changed but little. It presented a royal/national chronicle, a historiography modern in character but based upon traditional perceptions of the past and traditional materials. It was a collection of stories by and for the national elite celebrating their successful mission of building and protecting the country despite great difficulties, and promising a prosperous future. The plot and meaning of this melodramatic past have become a paradigm of historical discourse, making history an ideological weapon and a source of legitimation of the state.


Author(s):  
Stephen Skowronek ◽  
John A. Dearborn ◽  
Desmond King

The Deep State versus the unitary executive has been a spectacle too vivid to ignore. It should impress us all with the unsettled place of administration in contemporary American government. One might have thought that a matter of such vital importance to the effective operation of the state would have been resolved long ago. But over the past half century, questions surrounding administrative power and its political control have been growing more, not less, contentious. Trump’s presidency forces a reckoning that is long overdue. In the Epilogue, we evaluate the lessons of this clash between unity and depth. The problem is not that the president can’t find evidence to hang on his frame: the problem is the solution intrinsic to the frame. The state Trump would have us embrace is every bit as menacing as the state he would have us abandon.


2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Houchin Winfield ◽  
Janice Hume

This study examines how nineteenth-century American journalism used history. Based primarily on almost 2,000 magazine article titles, the authors found a marked increase in historical referents by 1900. Primarily used for context and placement, historical references often noted the country's origins, leaders and wars, particularly the Civil War. By connecting the present to the past, journalists highlighted an American story worth remembering during a time of nation-building, increased magazine circulation, and rise of feature stories. References to past people, events and institutions reiterated a particular national history, not only to those long settled, but also to new immigrants. Journalistic textual silences were the histories of most women, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants. This study found historical continuity in contrast to Lipsitz and a repeated national institutional core as opposed to Wiebe. It reinforced other memory studies about contemporary usefulness of the past, and agrees with Higham's contention that the century's journalistic reports created the initial awareness of the nation's history.


1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 479-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise I. Shelley

The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has shifted depending on the conditions of the state. The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.


PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-178
Author(s):  
Maryam Wasif Khan

[W]hat attracted Nussooh's immediate attention was a cabinet of books. There was a large collection of volumes; but whether Persian or Urdu, all were of the same kind, equally indecent and irreligious. Looking to the beauty of the binding, the excellence of the lithography, the fineness of the paper, the elegance of the style, and the propriety of the diction, Kulleem's books made a valuable library, but their contents were mischievous and degrading; and after Nussooh had examined them one by one, he resolved to commit them also to the flames.—Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of NussoohIn the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan S. Bergh

In the past twenty to twenty-five years valuable contributions have been made to southern African agrarian history. Stanley Trapido's publications, for example, opened up stimulating perspectives on the processes and forces inherent to nineteenth-century Transvaal agrarian history. Although he was modest in his 1980 chapter, “Reflections on Land, Office, and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900,” and referred to it as “a tentative and preliminary attempt to outline some important aspects of these social relationships,” it has provided historians and others with an important instrument of analysis.However, there are still themes, regions, and periods that need attention, one of these being the central districts of the Transvaal before the industrial revolution. In this regard a little-known source which may contribute to our knowledge of the pre-industrial history of the Transvaal, and which will be published this year as an annotated source publication, should be taken note of. This is the 1871 Commission on African labor in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). Despite the valuable information contained in its documents on agrarian history and various aspects of race relations, especially with regard to the central districts of the Transvaal, it has been neglected by historians in the past. Of the few historians who refer to the 1871 Commission, most have merely utilised the report of the commission and have probably missed the important testimonies, correspondence, and minutes. Very few have managed to locate these documents, which are concealed among the supplementary documents of the State Secretary for 1871 in the Transvaal Archives.


1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Pastore

In the last three decades, the economic history of Paraguay has been subject to an intense reexamination. It has been claimed that the state in Paraguay led a ‘spectacular industrialisation effort’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and that this effort was prematurely truncated by war. One author, for example, has stated thatFrom 1852 on, free circulation on the river Paraná permitted a rapid increase of exports, mostly under state control. The resources thus freed were devoted to the development of the modern manufacture of industrial goods and plant: iron and steel, engineering, shipbuilding, brickmaking, etc. A railway and a telegraph were installed without incurring an external debt. The experiment was nevertheless spoiled by the war with the ‘Triple Alliance’ (1864–1870), which opposed Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to Paraguay, and resulted in the demographic and economic collapse of the country.


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