Thailand. The Buddha on Mecca's verandah: Encounters, mobilities, and histories along the Malaysian–Thai border . By Irving Chan Johnson. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. Pp. 223. Orthography and Terminology, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The Buddha on Mecca's verandah: Encounters, mobilities, and histories along the Malaysian-Thai border By IRVING CHAN JOHNSON Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. Pp. 223. Orthography and Terminology, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000763 Reflecting on his identity, the Portuguese poet Mario de Sa-Carneiro once said, 'I am neither I nor the other one I am something in between.' Sa-Carneiro's statement speaks to the very nature of identity. Identity is ambiguous, fluid, and yet markedly present in everyday encounters and negotiations. As such, identifications are not static nor do they exist a priori; rather, they are dependent upon socio-historical experiences. A person's identity is robustly plural, yet there has been an academic penchant to reduce people's identities into singular affiliations, to root them in a fixed position and not in Sa-Carneiro's in-between. This book avoids the mistake of fixed identities and decisively locates itself within the murky and contradictory tendencies of personhood. Irving Johnson provides a detailed account of the religious, social, and political identifications of people who inhabit a Malaysian village with the pseudonym of Ban Bor On. While the book pays heed to roads, landmarks, and material culture, the book's focus is on the people, not the village, and this allows for the tracking of subjects and subjectivities between villages and across the borders of Malaysia to Thailand. One of this book's most valuable contributions is its thick description of Thainess (khwam pen thai). Most academic works that discuss Thainess relegate its significance to the orbit of the nation-state, which offers an incomplete picture. Johnson notes in the preface the transnational and ethnic dimensions to Thainess, 'It revolved around the question of what it means to be Thai living in an Islamic state in today's Malaysia. This constant attempt to essentialise what was blurry and indeterminate drew me into the ethnographic project' (pp. xvi, xvii). Kelantan was once under Siamese suzerainty as a mueang (vassal polity) in the eighteenth century, but became a British Residency in 1903 and later part of Malaysia. In addition to its rich Buddhist heritage, since the nineteenth century Kelantan has been known as the centre for Islamic learning in Southeast Asia, earning it the title of Mecca's verandah. What makes for an unusually coterminous religious space was the construction of a fifty-foot high Walking Buddha in a Ban Bor On monastery in 1996. Unlike attacks such as the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, the Walking Buddha on Mecca's verandah did not provoke any conflicts. The book shows how a mixture of cosmopolitanism and marginality creates a fertile ground for local agency and new forms of identification. Kelantanese Thai Buddhists have a distinctive language that incorporates both Thai and Malay words; they smuggle in Thai rice from across the border, watch Thai television, and are fiercely patriotic of their Malaysian heritage. The chapters are thematically divided and provide the larger brush strokes to the book's treatment of the region, its inhabitants, and Thainess. In the first chapter, Johnson examines the centralising force of roads and the ways in which they both connect Ban Bor On to the rest of Malaysia and also provide the means for Ban Bor On's inhabitants to travel beyond the village and the country. …