Reviews 283 lucrative liquor business, and others, Rory Mackenzie, New Buddhist are instructive and fascinating. They Movements in : Towards are also depressing. Everywhere politics an Understanding of Wat Phra and political affiliations intrude. Lurk- Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke. London ing just below the surface, or sometimes and New York, Routledge, 2007, 253 visible upon it, are corruption and po- pp., notes, index and bibliography. litical favours, and even violence and criminality. Indeed the book is more The topic of this book, comparing about the darker side of politics and two new but quite different Buddhist business than about economics. Far movements, is highly relevant to un- from opening and liberating markets, derstanding what has been happen- the crisis enhanced the active participa- ing amongst primarily middle-class, tion of business in politics, reaching its urban-based Thai Buddhists over the apogee in the Thaksin era. Positive also, past three decades. Rory Mackenzie’s as already mentioned, is the opening key findings, that both the Santi Asoke chapter, which will certainly be mined and move- for its wealth of data. Negative is the ments reflect “a disenchantment with book’s lack of any overall perspective traditional expressions of mainstream on the performance of Thai domestic Thai and a desire for Bud- capital, and the lack of any economic dhist solutions for contemporary living” analysis in most of the chapters. (p. xi), mirror the views of many more All in all, though, this is a book to thoughtful Thai Buddhists and also read and to reflect upon, and to make catch the tenor of much public discourse us wonder yet again at the extraordinary about Buddhism in Thailand, in both the power of Sino-Thai business groups to Thai- and English-language press, over survive and adapt to changing circum- the past twenty years or more. However, stances. given the continuing importance of Buddhism to notions of Thai identity, Malcolm Falkus and the prominence of debates about the appropriate and proper forms of Buddhist religious practice in Thailand today, I was disappointed that this book did not offer more. The original fieldwork for this book seems to have been quite limited, and the report of field research at Wat Phra Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke reads more like a day-by-day diary – “I did this, then I did that” – than a systematic analysis of new empirical information.

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The author draws on a diverse range of ple, I was initially nonplussed by refer- theoretical and analytical frameworks. ence to a book on the 1992 Thai political For example, in considering the Wat crisis by an author I had never heard of, Phra Dhammakaya movement, Macken- listed both in the text and bibliography zie draws on work by Glock and Stark, as “K. Thefravit”. I assumed this was Bryan Wilson, Roy Wallis, and Lance a European or North American com- Cousins – all in half a dozen pages. mentator. However, after some reflec- However, these frameworks are merely tion I realized that the citation includes listed in sequence one after the other, a spelling error (repeated even in the without any consideration of the extent bibliography) and Mackenzie is in fact to which they are consistent, or perhaps referring to a book by the Thai academic contradictory. This creates a scatter-gun Khien Theeravit! In both the text and effect and a lack of intellectual focus. the bibliography, the author follows the The author seems more concerned to Western system and lists Thai authors quote every possible authority rather by surname, rather than adopting the than to sift the information at hand and accepted academic standard of listing come to a considered conclusion about Thai authors by first name. which particular form of analysis pro- For me the most interesting part of vides the most fitting and intellectually the book is a small anecdote on pages insightful approach. 36 and 37 about an Englishman who The transcription of Thai is idiosyn- apparently went by two names, Wil- cratic, erratic, and unrelated to any of the liam Purfurst and Richard Randall. This academically accepted systems for rom- Englishman was ordained as a Buddhist anising Thai. On many occasions it took monk at Wat Paknam in 1954 by Luang me some time to decipher what Thai Phor Sot, the abbot who established the term the author intended, distracting dhammakaya meditation system that in me from the arguments the author tries later decades became the foundation to make. Amongst the many examples of the Wat Phra Dhammakaya move- are te am (for thiam, “false, artificial”), ment. Purfurst (aka Randall), who took laa te (for latthi, “belief, cult”), pom bi the Pali name Kapilavaddho, later had … (for phom pai …, “I went to …”), a falling-out with Luang Phot Sot and monetee (for mulanithi, “foundation”), returned to England in 1956, where, lukanuwat (for lokanuwat, “globaliza- according to Mackenzie, he became an tion”), patepattam (for patibat tham, important force in the development of “to engage in Buddhist practice”), and Theravada Buddhism in Britain. mi gin neua (for mai kin neua, “not eat- Those interested in contemporary ing meat”). Considerably more can be Thai Buddhism will find this book most added to this list. useful as a summary of what has been The editing is the sloppiest I have written on the topic in English over the come across in many a year. For exam- past couple of decades, rather than as

Journal of the Siam Society 2008 Vol. 96 Reviews 285 a source of new insights. The author Duncan McCargo, ed., Rethinking quotes the Bangkok Post so often that Thailand’s Southern Violence. Singapore, this newspaper seems to be his primary National University of Singapore Press, source of information. Not even The Na- 2007, 225 pp. tion gets much of a look-in, let alone the Thai-language press, which the author One of the challenges in publishing ignores completely. The book is prima- academic studies on violent contempo- rily an extended, poorly edited literature rary conflicts is how well what one has review that compiles secondary sources written stands the test of time, since in a mostly uncritical format. It would by its very dynamic nature a situation seem that very little if any work has of violent conflict can rapidly change. been done in transforming this text from Moreover, violent conflict presents its original format, a PhD dissertation some extreme methodological problems submitted to the International Christian for academic inquiry: accessing the con- College in Glasgow, into a monograph. flict zone for sufficient periods required The publisher, Routledge, certainly to gather usable data; being able to sift needs to pull its socks up and make sure through the misinformation circulat- that raw, error-strewn texts such as this ing in the propaganda war; conditions are subjected to at least a modicum of of martial law; and even the ability to professionally competent editing. obtain information from those involved in the conflict, who, out of an under- Peter Jackson standable desire to protect themselves, may not be willing to offer information, or else the information they offer may out of necessity be highly partisan or deliberately designed to misinform. The case of the conflict in southern Thailand, currently Southeast ’s most violent, is a particularly acute example of this challenge. To the prob- lems stated above can be added the dif- ficulties that researchers face coming to terms with the cultural and linguistic differences of the local population, and even the existence of Thailand’s draco- nian lèse majesté law, which prevents any critical discussion of matters relat- ing to the monarchy, which undeniably has taken a close interest in the situation in the south. Perhaps it is for all of these

Journal of the Siam Society 2008 Vol. 96