The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border.

• Author: Pawakapan, Niti
• Position: Book review

The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border. By Irving Chan Johnson. Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 2012. Soflcover: 223pp.

Located in the north-east of Peninsular Malaysia, Kelantan is well known to anthropologists. The state is where Malay, Thai and Chinese cultures meet, and where Muslims and Buddhists live side by side. Accordingly, it is a location of unique anthropological value (at least since the early 1970s, the locals have become aware that there is a profession called "anthropology"). (1) Yet The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border is more than just another anthropological work on Kelantan: it is also what the author professes to be "an exercise in reflexivity" because he was "among friends, relations, and strangers". It is a place where his mother, a Kelantanese-Thai, grew up and, one that Johnson visited numerous times (p. ix). And as an academic, Johnson is well-equipped to help us understand the Malaysian state: he speaks several languages, including English, Standard and Kelantan Malay, Central, Southern and Kelantanese-Thai, and has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University.

The book begins with the history of Kelantan, a marginal place located on the Thailand-Malaysia border, where, for hundreds of years, traders, smugglers, thieves, officials and religious teachers have crossed each other's path. Ban Bor On, where Johnson conducted his research, is "one of Kelantan's largest Thai villages". Its history was inextricably linked to the province of Narathiwat in southern Thailand long before the border was imposed by the British, and the "Long periods of Thai and Malay interaction have resulted in lexical convergences in both directions, with the Kelantanese Malay vocabulary incorporating a number of Thai words and the Kelnatanese Thai lexicon including many Malay loan words" (pp. 12-13). Although many villagers are market gardeners, they seem quite mobile. Cross border travel is common, but crossing into Thailand to patronize the local sex industry, especially for younger men, can be risky or even deadly (p. 72).

Over the decades, Ban Bor On's residents have experienced many changes, some of which were introduced by tourists, Buddhist monks and government officials from Thailand. This is not simply the story of a Thai village located in the Malay world: it is about what ordinary people encounter in their...