Irving Chan Johnson. The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 223p.

The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border Irving Chan Johnson Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 223p."One's identity . . . is never static" (p. ix). Irving Chan Johnson's The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah goes deep into anthropological "thick description" to highlight how "messy" collective identities along the northeastern Malaysia-Thai border are. Focusing on ideas of fluidity and movement Johnson identifies the border as a space for exchanges-commercial, cultural, political-rather than as an imprisoning parameter. It is on these foundations that The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah addresses the question of Thai ethnics' marginality in Kelantan through the lens of "interactive experiences that encounters across the boundaries bring about" (p. xiv).The book unfolds thematically, as Johnson identifies five analytical categories, each investigated in a substantial chapter. These are themselves subdivided in multiple snapshots illustrating the life of Ban Bor On and its villagers. This is the product of 18 months of fieldwork, but it is also much more than that. Johnson has been visiting Ban Bor On since 1979, as this is his own mother's birth-place. The author thus straddles between being an anthropologist (outsider) and doing research "among friends [and] relations" (insider) (p. ix). Johnson's insider's knowledge, writing style, and approach make Ban Bor On and its actors come to life from the book's pages, but as "the voices of Kelantan's Thai villagers ring out loud and clear" (p. xiii), the reader is often left wanting to hear more from the anthropologist's own voice.Most problematic is Johnson's overly positive assessment of inter-ethnic relations in Kelantan and Malaysia more generally (e.g. pp. 109-118). To illustrate a specific example, I might refer to the sustained characterization of Kelantan as a place where Muslim-Buddhist relations are friendly and cordial, versus the Thai South-omnipresent throughout the narrative as Kelantan's counterpart across the border-which emerges as a hotbed of Muslim extremism and violence that terrorizes the local Buddhist population as much as Kelantan's Thais. Whilst the realities of the Malaysian northern province are highly nuanced, as its Thai population's marginality is illustrated through multiple lenses, the Thai South is consistently painted in broad brushes.After an Introduction that sets the stage of Thai marginality in its historical and post-colonial context, Chapter 1 begins the exploration of Ban Bor On from its inception. Titled "Places," this chapter addresses local narratives of origin and migration, as Johnson reports "everyday histories . . . [that] referred to traditional and contemporary patterns of movement and non-movement that had been shaped by a changing border and a shifting cartography" (p. 27). This chapter thus takes "roads" as the conduit of identity expression: it is on the road that the Thais (and their dogs and pigs) encounter the Malays; it is thanks to British-built roads that the Thais can travel back and forth into Siam/Thailand to maintain ancestral networks and advance commercial enterprises; it is the local roads that shape temples' "sacred geography" (p. 42) demarcating where monks should be seeking alms and hosting ordination parades.Chapter 2, "Gaps," addresses heads-on the most compelling of problems; how can Kelantan Thais shape their identity as independent from Thailand's own (p. 55)? Despite the fact that the chapter seems to lose its thread at different points-or maybe the development of the argument is not too clearly signposted, a recurrent problem throughout the book-Johnson clearly illustrates how this subsection of the population struggles to define itself. During the British period they were labeled as "Siamese" despite their being from Kelantan (p. 62); in the 1950s ethnic parameters became more subjective, with each villager being assessed individually based on their name (to the point that a new-born Thai girl was classified as Punjabi: "Valerie Mei-Ling must have sounded Punjabi to the Malay clerk at the registrar of births office" [p. …