Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam Over Forty Years

Benedict R. O'G. Anderson is the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University. His works include Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Violence and the State in Suharto's Indonesia, and The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. Tamara Loos is Associate Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand and Bones around My Neck: The Life and Exile of a Prince Provocateur, both from Cornell.

Combining bold ideas, unflinching critique, and irresistible narratives that weave together statistics, qualitative examples, and suggestive anecdotes, each of these essays demonstrates in quintessential Andersonian fashion the full power of the essay form for serious scholarly writing. Though originally published between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, they continue to resonate and, more importantly, remind one of the increasingly rare thrill that can be had reading academic writing.... Putting the Kingdom's cultural heritage under critical spotlight, as he does in [the] later pieces, Anderson hits where it hurts, perhaps moreso than with any political critique.- Samoson Lim (Asian Studies Review)