Review of Wanni W. Anderson, Mapping Thai Muslims: Community Dynamics and Change on the Andaman Coast

Abstract

Anthropologists who continue to revisit areas where they have conducted fieldwork sometimes produce ethnographic memoirs about the changes that they have seen evolve over time in a community. If decades have gone by, they can write about people they once knew as children and provide a longue duree, or longitudinal analysis. This book is one such type of memoir, although it is written with a number of scholarly goals in mind and with numerous (if very short) references to a range of perspectives about globalization and Islam. The author’s stated goal is to present a non-monolithic portrait of Muslims in Thailand by focusing on the lesser-known Thai Muslims of the southern Andaman coast. Overall, this short book highlights how the Thai Muslim community in this region has responded to new occupational opportunities associated with tourism and increased economic interconnectedness, how a more globalized Islamic consciousness has affected their beliefs and practices, and how they view the ongoing violence that has engulfed the Muslim area on the other side of the country. Set on the island of Nipa, across the water from Krabi town in southwestern Thailand, the area was first visited by the author in 1979. She returned in 1981 to investigate Muslim children’s play culture in order to compare with her earlier work on Buddhist children’s play culture in central Thailand (e.g., p. 5). She returned for a longer stay in 1982 as a member of one of Harvard University’s research teams on cross-cultural studies of adolescents in a changing world. She also investigated local villagers’ notions of ethnic and religious consciousness. Subsequent revisits in 1984, Cont Islam (2013) 7:245–247 DOI 10.1007/s11562-011-0170-y