Josalyn M Ferguson
Biographic Data
| ID | 634787 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Josalyn M Ferguson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Josalyn M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ferguson |
| SIGNATURE | FERGUSON J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7682-161X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From Cold War to Cold Brew: Crop Replacement Strategies, Bean Logistics, and Ethnicized Coffee Commerce in Northern Thailand
Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics and Property, by Minh-Ha T. Pham
Turbaned Northern Thai-ness: Selective transnationalism, situational ethnicity and local cultural intimacy among Chiang Mai Punjabis
Chiang Mai is home to approximately 400 diasporic Punjabis, some of whom are sixth-generation residents of Thailand. While their transnational orientation, distinct sartorial choices and cultural practices might present them as outsiders to essential Thainess, Northern Thai Punjabis transgress the national image of Thainess and subjectively consider themselves to be Northern (Lanna) Thais. At the same time, these Thai citizens avail themselves of…
Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar
At the time of writing this review, eighteen months have passed since General Min Aung Hlaing's coup d’état of the Myanmar government. In the interim, there has been a subsequent and massive civil disobedience movement and later mobilization of People's Defense Forces to counter the military coup, as well as large-scale detainment, torture, repression, and war. The brutal crackdown and ongoing battles present the largest swath of violence through…
Gender and Aviation
Aviation technologies and operations networks are integral to globalization. Ethnographic investigation of global apparatuses offers important insights and challenges for the anthropology of gender. However, social science discourse about aviation work itself, for industrial and legal reasons, has historically been dominated by management and applied research approaches. With reference to commercial passenger aviation, there is often a taken‐for‐…
Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred
Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolutionary Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite …
Accessories Make the Elephant: Buddhist Thais Worship Ganesha, Indian-style
Hindu gods have been worshipped alongside the Lord Buddha and traditional spirits by Thai Theravada Buddhists for hundreds of years. During the past two decades there has been a spectacular boom in new forms of worship of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of success and remover of obstacles. At these ostensibly religious events and festivals, Thai followers wear Indian clothing and consume Indian foods. Processions incorporate Indian music ensembl…
Spitfires Sprouting in the Burmese Spring: The Real-life Quest for Historic Fantasy Aircraft in Contemporary Myanmar
In 2013, a group of British aviation archaeologists began excavating in Myanmar in search of some 140 mint-condition crated Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfire Mk XIV aircraft. According to their story, at the end of the Second World War, Allied forces in Burma were left with these unassembled aircraft. Without the funds to send them home, but unwilling to let the planes fall into enemy hands, they buried the crated planes in Mingaladon, Meiktila and …
Air Male: Exploring Flight Attendant Masculinities in North America and Thailand
Flight attendant work, although now referred to with gender-neutral terminology, continues to be archetypically feminine. Male flight attendants are often assumed to be gay, which frequently includes an emasculated, hyper-sexualised dimension to the stereotyped minority within the female-dominated occupation. The ways in which straight men navigate this occupation and its gendered/hypersexualised connotations problematises both the notions of a g…
Gender, Nationalism, and Ethnicity
The social categories of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism constitute major tropes in contemporary anthropology for three reasons: (1) they are fundamental to people's sense of self and how they relate to their cultures and communities; (2) they can constitute forms of social stratification and one's gender, ethnicity, and nationality frequently coincide with economic and political (dis)advantage; and (3) as historically and culturally constitut…
Ethno-nationalism and Participation in Myanmar: Views from Shan State and Beyond
While the spate of political changes often credited to the actions of President Thein Sein, together with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's political ascent from house arrest to the halls of parliament, have commanded the lion's share of the international media's limelight on Myanmar, more serious attention needs to be paid to non-Burman ethnic nationalities, which are estimated to comprise just over one-third of the country's population of approximately 55…
Flight school for the spirit of Myanmar: Aerial nationalism and Burmese-Japanese cinematic collaboration in the 1930s
In 1935, two Burmese filmmakers traveled to Tokyo with the intention of acquiring the latest sound recording equipment and training in sound-on-film production. In addition to these stated goals, in Japan they co-produced the feature film Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume, ‘Japanese Darling.’ The film depicts daring young Burmese aviators and a budding romance with a Japanese woman. The active harnessing of the symbolic capital of aviation – the ideol…
Nativity Seen in the Anthropocene: Contemporary Fieldwork and Subjective Challenges
Ongoing political changes, diasporic mobilities and new communication modalities present anthropologists with novel challenges for conducting ethnographic field work. As both configurations of and expectations for varied forms of social identity change, so too has the notion of the native, what Arjun Appadurai once called the technical preserve of anthropologists. Through reflection on contemporary field work experiences in Kazakhstan, the Philip…
Buddhist bomb diversion and an American airman reincarnate: World War folklore, airmindedness, and spiritual air defense in Shan State, Myanmar
The Second World War indelibly transformed the political landscape of Southeast Asia. Few people in Myanmar's Shan State today have any direct memories of the Japanese occupation and Allied bombing campaigns in the area. Therefore, folklore offers an important connection to the historical events and cultural geographies of war. Based on ethnography among Shan villagers carried out in 2015, this article discusses folklore regarding two specific ae…
The sacred elephant in the room: Ganesha cults in Chiang Mai, Thailand
In recent years, Thai society has been portrayed as increasingly fractured along class, political and cultural lines. Meanwhile, a variety of religious cults have gathered devotees by promoting their practices as a means to ameliorate precarity or secure the future. Ganesha, the Hindu god of new beginnings and remover of obstacles, while long incorporated into and worshipped within Thai Buddhism, has recently increased in popularity. Through the …
Social identity and geographic origin of Maya burials at Actun Uayazba Kab, Roaring Creek Valley, Belize
Discreet to excrete in the concrete jungle: Women bike messengers and their inventive urban strategies in three US cities
In spite of the radical changes brought in by new communication technologies, bicycle messengers are still integral to many urban economies throughout the world. While all messengers creatively navigate through dense, hostile traffic on the streets, women face additional challenges in this male-dominated occupation. They not only confront gendered expectations, difficulties, and harassment from co-workers and the public, but also experience strug…
I Was Cool When My Country Wasn't: Mao" and "Deng" Making Transnational Music in the Golden Triangle
While popular culture flows in Myanmar have begun to attract greater critical attention, the significance of ethnic minority performance and representation in these productions is largely unexamined. This article discusses the political and economic networks behind the stardom of the ethnic Shan singer Sai Sai Mao. Many of his songs are copy thachin , or Burmese cover renditions of international songs, including several popularized by the Taiwane…
Energy, Governance and Security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma): A Critical Approach to Environmental Politics in the South
Who's Counting: Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar
Partially rooted in British colonial ethnology and administration, the ethnic categories of the 2014 Myanmar census have attracted controversy, particularly from representatives of non-Burman political organizations. The categories themselves, as well as the bureaucratic exercise of the census, have a complex genealogy which offers considerable insight into understanding the contemporary situation. Drawing from Hirschman s theory that the study o…
Sexual Systems of Highland Burma/Thailand: Sex and Gender Perceptions of and from Shan Male Sex Workers in Northern Thailand
The author examines the context and experiences of Shan migrants from Burma regarding men who work in male host clubs in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. While Shan commercial sex workers in Thailand often have cultural understandings of gender and sexual categories in the Shan and Burmese context, their direct experience in performing sexuality takes place in Thailand, and is economically mediated. This study seeks to answer two questions. First, …
The scramble for the W aste L ands: Tracking colonial legacies, counterinsurgency and international investment through the lens of land laws in B urma/ M yanmar
This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the W aste Land in Burma/ M yanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing c…
Terminally Haunted: Aviation Ghosts, Hybrid Buddhist Practices, and Disaster Aversion Strategies Amongst Airport Workers in Myanmar and Thailand
Much of what is written about airports is from the perspective of a visionary architect, or from the experience of the cosmopolitan traveller. Airport workers, aside from their intimate knowledge of the airport space, know something about terminals that their designers and itinerant occupants do not: how they are haunted. In Yangon, Myanmar and Bangkok, Thailand, airport workers exchange occupational ghost lore regarding sightings, motives and hi…
Into the Current = Yayzan Lan: Burma’s Political Prisoners
Burmese Super Trouper: How Burmese Poets and Musicians Turn Global Popular Music intoCopy Thachin
Copy thachin, or Burmese cover songs of international hits, dominates the popular music scene in contemporary Burma/Myanmar. These songs in Burmese often retain melodic and stylistic patterns with international popular hits, but have lyrics rewritten by Burmese poets with varying degrees of fidelity to their original meaning. As I will argue, because of its explicit transience, copy thachin constitutes a mimetic transcription device whereby Burme…
The scramble for the W aste L ands: Tracking colonial legacies, counterinsurgency and international investment through the lens of land laws in B urma/ M yanmar
This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the W aste Land in Burma/ M yanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing c…
Who's Counting: Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar
Partially rooted in British colonial ethnology and administration, the ethnic categories of the 2014 Myanmar census have attracted controversy, particularly from representatives of non-Burman political organizations. The categories themselves, as well as the bureaucratic exercise of the census, have a complex genealogy which offers considerable insight into understanding the contemporary situation. Drawing from Hirschman s theory that the study o…
Terminally Haunted: Aviation Ghosts, Hybrid Buddhist Practices, and Disaster Aversion Strategies Amongst Airport Workers in Myanmar and Thailand
Much of what is written about airports is from the perspective of a visionary architect, or from the experience of the cosmopolitan traveller. Airport workers, aside from their intimate knowledge of the airport space, know something about terminals that their designers and itinerant occupants do not: how they are haunted. In Yangon, Myanmar and Bangkok, Thailand, airport workers exchange occupational ghost lore regarding sightings, motives and hi…
Another country is the past: Western cowboys, Lanna nostalgia, and bluegrass aesthetics as performed by professional musicians in Northern Thailand
Within the popular music scene of Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, a handful of restaurants feature live bluegrass bands, with musicians often dressed in U.S. western-style cowboy attire. By intermingling English-language songs with Lanna (Northern Thai) popular songs performed in the style of Appalachian bluegrass music, they use their illusion of the cowboy myth to point to notions of an authentic Lanna past. However, in their borrowing of this i…
Air Male: Exploring Flight Attendant Masculinities in North America and Thailand
Flight attendant work, although now referred to with gender-neutral terminology, continues to be archetypically feminine. Male flight attendants are often assumed to be gay, which frequently includes an emasculated, hyper-sexualised dimension to the stereotyped minority within the female-dominated occupation. The ways in which straight men navigate this occupation and its gendered/hypersexualised connotations problematises both the notions of a g…
The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City
The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City Ara Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
Sexual Systems of Highland Burma/Thailand: Sex and Gender Perceptions of and from Shan Male Sex Workers in Northern Thailand
The author examines the context and experiences of Shan migrants from Burma regarding men who work in male host clubs in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. While Shan commercial sex workers in Thailand often have cultural understandings of gender and sexual categories in the Shan and Burmese context, their direct experience in performing sexuality takes place in Thailand, and is economically mediated. This study seeks to answer two questions. First, …
Nativity Seen in the Anthropocene: Contemporary Fieldwork and Subjective Challenges
Ongoing political changes, diasporic mobilities and new communication modalities present anthropologists with novel challenges for conducting ethnographic field work. As both configurations of and expectations for varied forms of social identity change, so too has the notion of the native, what Arjun Appadurai once called the technical preserve of anthropologists. Through reflection on contemporary field work experiences in Kazakhstan, the Philip…
Buddhist bomb diversion and an American airman reincarnate: World War folklore, airmindedness, and spiritual air defense in Shan State, Myanmar
The Second World War indelibly transformed the political landscape of Southeast Asia. Few people in Myanmar's Shan State today have any direct memories of the Japanese occupation and Allied bombing campaigns in the area. Therefore, folklore offers an important connection to the historical events and cultural geographies of war. Based on ethnography among Shan villagers carried out in 2015, this article discusses folklore regarding two specific ae…
Discreet to excrete in the concrete jungle: Women bike messengers and their inventive urban strategies in three US cities
In spite of the radical changes brought in by new communication technologies, bicycle messengers are still integral to many urban economies throughout the world. While all messengers creatively navigate through dense, hostile traffic on the streets, women face additional challenges in this male-dominated occupation. They not only confront gendered expectations, difficulties, and harassment from co-workers and the public, but also experience strug…
Accessories Make the Elephant: Buddhist Thais Worship Ganesha, Indian-style
Hindu gods have been worshipped alongside the Lord Buddha and traditional spirits by Thai Theravada Buddhists for hundreds of years. During the past two decades there has been a spectacular boom in new forms of worship of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of success and remover of obstacles. At these ostensibly religious events and festivals, Thai followers wear Indian clothing and consume Indian foods. Processions incorporate Indian music ensembl…
Flight school for the spirit of Myanmar: Aerial nationalism and Burmese-Japanese cinematic collaboration in the 1930s
In 1935, two Burmese filmmakers traveled to Tokyo with the intention of acquiring the latest sound recording equipment and training in sound-on-film production. In addition to these stated goals, in Japan they co-produced the feature film Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume, ‘Japanese Darling.’ The film depicts daring young Burmese aviators and a budding romance with a Japanese woman. The active harnessing of the symbolic capital of aviation – the ideol…
The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City
The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City Ara Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
Bronislaw's Laptop Dance: How Cyborg Pirates Plundered the Gated Community in the Ether
Just Dropping By
Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics and Transnational Marketing by Margaret E. Dorsey
Buddhist Orthodoxy or Ritual Excess in a Shan Novice Ordination
Based on an ethnography of a Shan Buddhist novice ordination in a community of former Shan insurgents and their affiliates, this article discusses the ways in which social conditions push the signification of the ritual beyond the expectations of its orthodox intent. As I argue, it is in the ritual's juxtaposition of sober merit-making with rock music revelry that creates a kind of syncopation which gives the event greater force and social meanin…
From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western by Patrick McGee
Malden, MA : Blackwell , 2007 . The Western, as a film genre, has often been considered to be purely politically conservative. In his book, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western, Patrick McGee urges us to reconsider this stance. Revisiting multiple and diverse exemplars of the Western, the author argues that the Western can, and often does, expose the contradictions of capital, even though it inevitably returns to reinforce them as well…
Another country is the past: Western cowboys, Lanna nostalgia, and bluegrass aesthetics as performed by professional musicians in Northern Thailand
Within the popular music scene of Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, a handful of restaurants feature live bluegrass bands, with musicians often dressed in U.S. western-style cowboy attire. By intermingling English-language songs with Lanna (Northern Thai) popular songs performed in the style of Appalachian bluegrass music, they use their illusion of the cowboy myth to point to notions of an authentic Lanna past. However, in their borrowing of this i…
From Contested Histories to Ethnic Tourism
From Contested Histories to Ethnic Tourism - 1 - Cinematic Representations of Shans and Shanland on the Burmese Silver Screen
Into the Current = Yayzan Lan: Burma’s Political Prisoners
Burmese Super Trouper: How Burmese Poets and Musicians Turn Global Popular Music intoCopy Thachin
Copy thachin, or Burmese cover songs of international hits, dominates the popular music scene in contemporary Burma/Myanmar. These songs in Burmese often retain melodic and stylistic patterns with international popular hits, but have lyrics rewritten by Burmese poets with varying degrees of fidelity to their original meaning. As I will argue, because of its explicit transience, copy thachin constitutes a mimetic transcription device whereby Burme…
Sexual Systems of Highland Burma/Thailand: Sex and Gender Perceptions of and from Shan Male Sex Workers in Northern Thailand
The author examines the context and experiences of Shan migrants from Burma regarding men who work in male host clubs in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. While Shan commercial sex workers in Thailand often have cultural understandings of gender and sexual categories in the Shan and Burmese context, their direct experience in performing sexuality takes place in Thailand, and is economically mediated. This study seeks to answer two questions. First, …
The scramble for the W aste L ands: Tracking colonial legacies, counterinsurgency and international investment through the lens of land laws in B urma/ M yanmar
This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the W aste Land in Burma/ M yanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing c…
Terminally Haunted: Aviation Ghosts, Hybrid Buddhist Practices, and Disaster Aversion Strategies Amongst Airport Workers in Myanmar and Thailand
Much of what is written about airports is from the perspective of a visionary architect, or from the experience of the cosmopolitan traveller. Airport workers, aside from their intimate knowledge of the airport space, know something about terminals that their designers and itinerant occupants do not: how they are haunted. In Yangon, Myanmar and Bangkok, Thailand, airport workers exchange occupational ghost lore regarding sightings, motives and hi…
Energy, Governance and Security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma): A Critical Approach to Environmental Politics in the South
Who's Counting: Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar
Partially rooted in British colonial ethnology and administration, the ethnic categories of the 2014 Myanmar census have attracted controversy, particularly from representatives of non-Burman political organizations. The categories themselves, as well as the bureaucratic exercise of the census, have a complex genealogy which offers considerable insight into understanding the contemporary situation. Drawing from Hirschman s theory that the study o…
Social identity and geographic origin of Maya burials at Actun Uayazba Kab, Roaring Creek Valley, Belize
Discreet to excrete in the concrete jungle: Women bike messengers and their inventive urban strategies in three US cities
In spite of the radical changes brought in by new communication technologies, bicycle messengers are still integral to many urban economies throughout the world. While all messengers creatively navigate through dense, hostile traffic on the streets, women face additional challenges in this male-dominated occupation. They not only confront gendered expectations, difficulties, and harassment from co-workers and the public, but also experience strug…
I Was Cool When My Country Wasn't: Mao" and "Deng" Making Transnational Music in the Golden Triangle
While popular culture flows in Myanmar have begun to attract greater critical attention, the significance of ethnic minority performance and representation in these productions is largely unexamined. This article discusses the political and economic networks behind the stardom of the ethnic Shan singer Sai Sai Mao. Many of his songs are copy thachin , or Burmese cover renditions of international songs, including several popularized by the Taiwane…
Gender, Nationalism, and Ethnicity
The social categories of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism constitute major tropes in contemporary anthropology for three reasons: (1) they are fundamental to people's sense of self and how they relate to their cultures and communities; (2) they can constitute forms of social stratification and one's gender, ethnicity, and nationality frequently coincide with economic and political (dis)advantage; and (3) as historically and culturally constitut…
Ethno-nationalism and Participation in Myanmar: Views from Shan State and Beyond
While the spate of political changes often credited to the actions of President Thein Sein, together with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's political ascent from house arrest to the halls of parliament, have commanded the lion's share of the international media's limelight on Myanmar, more serious attention needs to be paid to non-Burman ethnic nationalities, which are estimated to comprise just over one-third of the country's population of approximately 55…
Flight school for the spirit of Myanmar: Aerial nationalism and Burmese-Japanese cinematic collaboration in the 1930s
In 1935, two Burmese filmmakers traveled to Tokyo with the intention of acquiring the latest sound recording equipment and training in sound-on-film production. In addition to these stated goals, in Japan they co-produced the feature film Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume, ‘Japanese Darling.’ The film depicts daring young Burmese aviators and a budding romance with a Japanese woman. The active harnessing of the symbolic capital of aviation – the ideol…
Nativity Seen in the Anthropocene: Contemporary Fieldwork and Subjective Challenges
Ongoing political changes, diasporic mobilities and new communication modalities present anthropologists with novel challenges for conducting ethnographic field work. As both configurations of and expectations for varied forms of social identity change, so too has the notion of the native, what Arjun Appadurai once called the technical preserve of anthropologists. Through reflection on contemporary field work experiences in Kazakhstan, the Philip…
Buddhist bomb diversion and an American airman reincarnate: World War folklore, airmindedness, and spiritual air defense in Shan State, Myanmar
The Second World War indelibly transformed the political landscape of Southeast Asia. Few people in Myanmar's Shan State today have any direct memories of the Japanese occupation and Allied bombing campaigns in the area. Therefore, folklore offers an important connection to the historical events and cultural geographies of war. Based on ethnography among Shan villagers carried out in 2015, this article discusses folklore regarding two specific ae…
The sacred elephant in the room: Ganesha cults in Chiang Mai, Thailand
In recent years, Thai society has been portrayed as increasingly fractured along class, political and cultural lines. Meanwhile, a variety of religious cults have gathered devotees by promoting their practices as a means to ameliorate precarity or secure the future. Ganesha, the Hindu god of new beginnings and remover of obstacles, while long incorporated into and worshipped within Thai Buddhism, has recently increased in popularity. Through the …
Spitfires Sprouting in the Burmese Spring: The Real-life Quest for Historic Fantasy Aircraft in Contemporary Myanmar
In 2013, a group of British aviation archaeologists began excavating in Myanmar in search of some 140 mint-condition crated Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfire Mk XIV aircraft. According to their story, at the end of the Second World War, Allied forces in Burma were left with these unassembled aircraft. Without the funds to send them home, but unwilling to let the planes fall into enemy hands, they buried the crated planes in Mingaladon, Meiktila and …
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · History (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (14 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works)