The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along Malaysian-Thai Border Irving Chan Johnson Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 223p.One's identity . . . is never static (p. ix). Irving Chan Johnson's The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah goes deep into anthropological thick description to highlight how messy collective identities along northeastern Malaysia-Thai border are. Focusing on ideas of fluidity and movement Johnson identifies border as a space for exchanges-commercial, cultural, political-rather than as an imprisoning parameter. It is on these foundations that The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah addresses question of Thai ethnics' marginality in Kelantan through lens of interactive experiences that encounters across boundaries bring about (p. xiv).The book unfolds thematically, as Johnson identifies five analytical categories, each investigated in a substantial chapter. These are themselves subdivided in multiple snapshots illustrating life of Ban Bor On and its villagers. This is product of 18 months of fieldwork, but it is also much more than that. Johnson has been visiting Ban Bor On since 1979, as this is his own mother's birth-place. The author thus straddles between being an anthropologist (outsider) and doing research among friends [and] (insider) (p. ix). Johnson's insider's knowledge, writing style, and approach make Ban Bor On and its actors come to life from book's pages, but as the voices of Kelantan's Thai villagers ring out loud and clear (p. xiii), reader is often left wanting to hear more from anthropologist's own voice.Most problematic is Johnson's overly positive assessment of inter-ethnic relations in Kelantan and Malaysia more generally (e.g. pp. 109-118). To illustrate a specific example, I might refer to sustained characterization of Kelantan as a place where Muslim-Buddhist relations are friendly and cordial, versus Thai South-omnipresent throughout narrative as Kelantan's counterpart across border-which emerges as a hotbed of Muslim extremism and violence that terrorizes local Buddhist population as much as Kelantan's Thais. Whilst realities of Malaysian northern province are highly nuanced, as its Thai population's marginality is illustrated through multiple lenses, Thai South is consistently painted in broad brushes.After an Introduction that sets stage of Thai marginality in its historical and post-colonial context, Chapter 1 begins exploration of Ban Bor On from its inception. Titled Places, this chapter addresses local narratives of origin and migration, as Johnson reports everyday histories . . . [that] referred to traditional and contemporary patterns of movement and non-movement that had been shaped by a changing border and a shifting cartography (p. 27). This chapter thus takes as conduit of identity expression: it is on road that Thais (and their dogs and pigs) encounter Malays; it is thanks to British-built roads that Thais can travel back and forth into Siam/Thailand to maintain ancestral networks and advance commercial enterprises; it is local roads that shape temples' sacred geography (p. 42) demarcating where monks should be seeking alms and hosting ordination parades.Chapter 2, Gaps, addresses heads-on most compelling of problems; how can Kelantan Thais shape their identity as independent from Thailand's own (p. 55)? Despite fact that chapter seems to lose its thread at different points-or maybe development of argument is not too clearly signposted, a recurrent problem throughout book-Johnson clearly illustrates how this subsection of population struggles to define itself. During British period they were labeled as Siamese despite their being from Kelantan (p. 62); in 1950s ethnic parameters became more subjective, with each villager being assessed individually based on their name (to point that a new-born Thai girl was classified as Punjabi: Valerie Mei-Ling must have sounded Punjabi to Malay clerk at registrar of births office [p. …