Word: thailand
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...publication of Very Thai, a unique guide to Thai pop and folk culture, coincides with the country's biggest debate about national identity in more than half a century. In the World War II era, the military Phibunsongkhram regime rallied under the slogan "Thailand for the Thais." Today, the country seems mesmerized again by nationalism. Schools and colleges have been ordered by the Ministry of Education to display the flag more prominently and play the national anthem at a higher volume. "Thai-ness" is once again a useful political concept: in early February, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's populist nationalism...
...This adopt-or-perish attitude helps explain how Thais have survived three decades of breakneck development. "In one dizzying spasm," writes Cornwel-Smith, "Thailand is experiencing the forces that took a century to transform the West." How does a nation modernize this fast without eroding the traditions that define it? In Thailand, "traditional" is now often a pejorative term, meaning low-class or old-fashioned. Many of the temple's social functions have been replaced by the mall, where, the author notes, "the principal rite is the right to shop." What matters most is looking dern. Yes, that's Thai...
...looking dern and being it are entirely different things. Clues to Thailand's recent rural past are everywhere?witness motorcycle-taxi drivers in Bangkok sewing fishing nets as they wait for their next fare. This is still very much a society in transition, a place where the National Buddhism Office in 2003 felt obliged to warn monks not to use mobile phones in public. Very Thai is a compendium of fast-disappearing folklore: fortune-tellers who divine omens from rat-bitten clothes; apothecaries who make herbal aphrodisiacs so strong that they "could make a monk leap over the temple wall...
...million visitors?one for every four Thais?one definition of "Thai-ness" is simply "whatever tourists want." Cornwel-Smith rightly condemns plans to demolish old Bangkok neighborhoods to create "Paris-style open vistas" to accommodate both tourists and convenience-store chains. Very Thai? Hardly. But however tourist-oriented Thailand has become, Cornwel-Smith's exhaustive research suggests that perhaps foreigners don't know the country as well as they assume. Despite its freewheeling reputation, Thailand surpasses even Japan in its adherence to stifling social hierarchies?note the national obsession with uniforms. It is also, considering Bangkok's sexual notoriety...
...That's why international experts are now nervously scrutinizing the poultry flocks of Cambodia where birds and ducks are routinely raised in close proximity to human living quarters and sold live at unhygienic wet markets. In neighboring countries Thailand and Vietnam, such conditions led to the stubborn spread of bird flu, first among poultry, then in a handful of human beings. So far, Cambodia hasn't reported any major outbreaks, but Dr. Guan Yi, an avian-flu expert at the University of Hong Kong, fears it may already be entrenched there. "This virus is not just endemic in Vietnam...