Indigenous Museum

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Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities: Politics, Disciplines, and Public History

2024-02-16 , Guo Wu

Based on fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, this book critically examines the building of modern Chinese discourse on a unified yet diverse Chinese nation on various sites of knowledge production. It argues that Chinese ideology on minority nationalities is rooted in modern China's quest for national integration and political authority. However, it also highlights the fact that the complex process of conceptualizing, investigating, classifying, curating, and writing minority history has been fraught with disputes and contradictions. As such, the book offers a timely contribution to the current debate in the fields of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism, minority policy, and anthropological practice.

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The postcard Century

2000 , Tom Phillips , Thames and Hudson , HaNaPa Production

Like many artists I have aways collected, or rather amassed, postcards. For quite a lot of my career I have used them as source material for painting. Those I did not use grew into piles and found their way into boxes and drawers, waiting a turn that would never come. About twenty years ago I looked at this accumulation and played with the idea of making a diary with a postcard representing every day of the century. A quick look through the first box or two convinced me of the folly of this since, as I should have guessed, most cards are sent in the holiday months which would have made November or February quite a struggle. The majority of those who attend postcard fairs are collectors of topographical cards, usually of their own locality. Others search out a particular subject. These can be broad categories like Advertising or fields so narrow as to make it unlikely that any new acquisition could be made. One collector might ask for postcards featuring corkscrews, another goats. Once his obsession has become know to the traders he only has to be seen approaching to be told whether they have a newly acquired card, put asise for him, featuring Teddy Bears or Wurlitzers or Snowmen. If not he is hailed with words along the lines of 'Nothing for you today, Ron'.

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siam in mind

2023-03-14 , david k. wyatt

This slim volume takes the reader on a fascinating stroll through Thailand’s intellectual history -- the thoughts of the people of Siam, and the products of their thought, through history. It is a series of informal sketches, gleaned over years of historical research and stored away for rumination and reflection by one of the foremost historians of Thailand. Wyatt muses about these pieces of history, revealing some of the creative thinking that has been going on in the minds of ordinary and nameless people as well as great and well-known thinkers in Siam for the past thirteen hundred years. A variety of new thought -- political, religious, and artistic -- has arisen in all sorts of contexts: warfare, trade, administration, and farming, to name a few. Collected here is a valuable historical sampling of these new ideas from the many different regions of what we think of today as Thailand.

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Very Thai

2023-01-04 , Philip Cornwel-Smith

This pioneering insight into Thai pop and streetlife has been totally revised to reflect the dramatic changes in Thailand. Widely praised as one of the best books on Thailand, Very Thai delves beyond the traditional Thai icons to reveal the casual, everyday expressions of Thainess that so delight and puzzle, from floral truck bolts and taxi altars to buffalo cart furniture and drinks in a bags. New in 2nd Edition Four extra chapters cover the huge shifts in Thailand since the launch of the 1st edition in 2004. The impacts on Thai pop from the Internet, political upheavals and the rise of Asian soft power. The new genre of ‘Vernacular Thai Design’. Changes in contemporary Thainess from the rise of ‘Thai Thai’ retro culture. Afterword by Pracha Suveeranont, a Thai expert in visual culture, about the role of ‘Very Thai’ within Thailand.

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Thai postcard century

2001 , Tom Phillips , HaNaPa

This book is about postcard of Thailand, It may come as a surprise to any Western reader that one can assenble a hundred year's worth of Thai postcards. as this book can only start to indicate the postcard in Thailand has had as long and as vigorous a career as in most countriesof the world. In the West a whole world of deltiology has grown up, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Very Bangkok in the city of the senses

2020 , Philip cornwel-Smith , Very Thai , Foreword by Lawrence Osborne

Inspiration for the cover comes from a western version of a six-sided mirror: the kaleidoscope. Each time you shake or turn a kaleidoscope tube, the translucent shapes inside form a fresh pattern, only illuminated from within rather than reflected out. Bangkok is both city of inward enlightenment, and of outward dazzle, bit not straightforward reflection. That's why I've sought to provide a reflective guid. This is a book about cities, in which Bangkok is the subject. Thailand became majority urban the same year, 2012, that the world did, so cities are a hot topic. so many people have an interest in understanding how cities work, whether for architecture or design, busuness or touristm, service or security. Most cities are planned to functional need from 'object' data, or are subject to ideology. Yet Bangkok feels like a mostly happy accidenct. It seems oblivious to Western aesthetics or systems you can measure - yet it became a world city anyway.

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