The Center for Southeast Asian Studies Presents:

Dr. Boike Rehbein, Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany

Title: "Inequality in Southeast Asia with a Focus on Thailand"

Dr. Rehbein is a professor of Society and Transformation in Asia and Africa in the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany. He specializes in inequality, social theory, and globalization.  A prolific author, he has published more than 25 books in these fields. He will be participating in COTS 2019 at UW-Madison, and we are fortunate to have him speak at NIU as part of his trip.

His talk at NIU will explore Thailand’s unique social structure—unique because Thailand is a country of the global South but has never come under colonial rule, while emulating Western modernization. The result is a double structure, one part consisting of a precapitalist structure (baan muang) and the other comprising a hierarchy of social classes. In contrast to other societies, people manage to move between the two parts. The first section of the lecture will explore Thai social structure and the habitus that result from its incorporation in detail. The second section will compare the Thai scenario with neighboring countries that are also based on a baan muang structure but have been transformed by colonialism.