1st Edition
Indigenous Heritage and Identity of the Last Elephant Catchers in Northeast Thailand
By Alisa Santikarn
Copyright 2025
258 Pages
by
Routledge
258 Pages
by
Routledge
In 2019, when Mew Salangam passed away at 91, newspapers across Thailand described him as belonging to the last generation of elephant doctors. Mew was a member of the Kui Ajiang community in Thailand, an Indigenous group living in the Northeast known for catching elephants. Sometime beginning in the 1950s, this practice gradually came to an end. Indigenous Heritage and Identity of the Last... Read more
Acknowledgements, A Note on Transliteration and Thai Naming Conventions, List of Abbreviations, List of Illustrations, Preface, 1. Introduction, 2. Heritage, Authority, and the Anthropocene, 3. Formation of Attitudes Towards Indigenous and Ethnic Minority Communities in Thailand—from the Colonial Period to the Cold War, 4. Constructing the Authorised Environmental Discourse: Territorialisation and Indigeneity in Thailand, 5. Thailand's Authorised Heritage Discourse: Identity, Nationalism and 'Good Culture', 6. The Kui in Thailand: Identity, (In)Visibility, and (Mis)Recognition, 7. The Last Elephant Catchers: Cultural Endangerment and the Loss of Knowledge, 8. New Spaces for the Enactment of Kui Culture: Heritagisation and (Re)Invented Traditions, 9. Conclusion, Bibliography, Glossary, Bibliography.
Biography
Alisa Santikarn (University of Vienna) is a University Assistant (Post-Doc) for the Global Conservation: Histories and Theories (GloCo) project funded by the European Research Council. She holds a PhD in Archaeology (Heritage Studies) from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.
