From Lawa to Mon, from Saa' to Thai: Historical and anthropological aspects of Southeast Asian social spaces

by Georges Condominas

English (translation)
Original French

114 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[André · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my PhD project about languages of Burma. The first article about Lawa wasn't all that useful for me, the second part was. What Condominas' description lacked were placement of the situations in space and time; it lacked references to dates and places so I often had no clue if he was describing the situation of only one Tai people or the entire Tai-sphere, if it was the situation hundreds of years ago or if it was still the case in 1976 when he wrote the article. Also, as in many anthropological and ethnographic texts, the writing style was more prosaic and anecdotal than descriptive. Also, some information are now outdated (the Nanchao kingdom was not a Tai state, for instance). I have no idea why the author chose to transcribe all the Tai terminology using Vietnamese orthography, though.
But it wasn't all that bad, I learned a lot about a (the?) Tai creation myth, about feudal societies and about the history and the reason of the Tai population's spreading. The Shan in Burma were however only mentioned briefly. All in all, three stars.