Peoples of Southeast Asia Today - by Robert L Winzeler (Paperback)

About the Book

This textbook explores Southeast Asia's modern peoples and their cultural ways and patterns of adaptation. It introduces the region's geography, languages, prehistory, and history, then delves into religion, ethnic complexity, food production, development, and tourism, and the...

Book Synopsis

This textbook explores Southeast Asia's modern peoples and their cultural ways and patterns of adaptation. It introduces the region's geography, languages, prehistory, and history, then delves into religion, ethnic complexity, food production, development, and tourism, and the changes that these evolving aspects of life have upon Southeast Asia's peoples and cultures.

Review Quotes

Robert Winzeler has written a balanced, intelligent, and refreshing book on the anthropology of Southeast Asia. The sensitivity shown on minority issues and non-urban populations is laudable.

Southeast Asia is a remarkably diverse region: geographically, of mountains and lowlands, coasts and interior; ecologically, of hunters/gatherers, swidden cultivators, agriculturalists, and city dwellers; religiously, of multiple indigenous practices coexisting with the world's largest formal religions--Buddhism, Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant), Islam, and Hinduism. Winzeler (emer., anthropology, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) captures all of this in his remarkably inclusive book, a rare and very useful attempt to encompass the complete region, both the northern mainland and the southern islands. He succeeds by simultaneously sketching the region and the anthropological efforts to understand it, alternating broad-brush generalization with focused case example. This is a book, then, that is valuable as a resource both on the region and on how people have tried to understand it. Although the book as a whole is an essential reference, the three chapters that outline the range of religious beliefs and practices (including the difficult subject of conversion) deserve particular note for their insight and balance. Winzeler also provides a thoughtful review, pro and con, of tourism.

About the Author

Robert L. Winzeler is professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno.