The 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 changes that these evolving aspects of life have upon Southeast Asia's peoples and cultures.

Book Synopsis

The Peoples of Southeast Asia Today offers an anthropological treatment of the ethnography and ethnology of Southeast Asia, covering both the mainland and the insular regions. Based on the proposition that Southeast Asia is a true culture area, the book offers background information on geography, languages, prehistory and history, with a particular emphasis on the role of colonialism and the development of ethnic pluralism. It then turns to classic anthropological topics of interest including modes of adaptation, ways of life, and religion, all illustrated with relevant, current case studies. Students will find well-supported discussions of subjects ranging from the development of agriculture and language dispersals, to fantasy and reality in hunter-gatherer studies, to disputed interpretations of Thai Buddhism and Javanese Islam, to ongoing government efforts to manage religion, create proper citizens, resettle and assimilate indigenous populations, end shifting cultivation and promote modernization.

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.--Jean Michaud, Université Laval

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.-- "Choice Reviews" (10/1/2011 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

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