New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

In her recent monograph, Thailand’s International Meditation Centers: Tourism and the Global Commodification of Religious Practices (Routledge, 2015), Brooke Schedneck examines Buddhist meditation centers in Thailand and draws our attention to the way in which these institutions have creatively (though not always intentionally) altered Buddhist meditation and the meditation retreat format so as to make them accessible to the large number of non-Thai meditators who come to these centers. While at first sight the topic of meditation centers in Thailand might appear fairly narrow and easy to delimit, Schedneck shows that to understand both the histories of these centers and the ways in which they currently operate, one must locate these institutions in the broader contexts of Southeast Asian history, European intellectual and colonial history, and Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. After covering the rise of mass meditation movements (a process that can be traced in part to developments in late nineteenth-cen