The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border by Irving Chan Johnson (review)

Located in the north-east of Peninsular Malaysia, Kelantan is well known to anthropologists. The state is where Malay, Thai and Chinese cultures meet, and where Muslims and Buddhists live side by side. Accordingly, it is a location of unique anthropological value (at least since the early 1970s, the locals have become aware that there is a profession called “anthropology”).¹ Yet The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border is more than just another anthropological work on Kelantan: it is also what the author professes to be “an exercise in reflexivity” because he was “among friends, relations, and strangers”. It is a place where his mother, a Kelantanese-Thai, grew up and, one that Johnson visited numerous times (p. ix). And as an academic, Johnson is well-equipped to help us understand the Malaysian state: he speaks several languages, including English, Standard and Kelantan Malay, Central, Southern and Kelantanese-Thai, and has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University.

The book begins with the history of Kelantan, a marginal place located on the Thailand-Malaysia border, where, for hundreds of years, traders, smugglers, thieves, officials and religious teachers have crossed each other’s path. Ban Bor On, where Johnson conducted his research, is “one of Kelantan’s largest Thai villages”. Its history was inextricably linked to the province of Narathiwat in southern Thailand long before the border was imposed by the British, and the “Long periods of Thai and Malay interaction have resulted in lexical convergences in both directions, with the Kelantanese Malay vocabulary incorporating a number of Thai words and the Kelnatanese Thai lexicon including many Malay loan words” (pp. 12–13). Although many villagers are market gardeners, they seem quite mobile. Cross border travel is common, but crossing into Thailand to patronize the local sex industry, especially for younger men, can be risky or even deadly (p. 72).

Over the decades, Ban Bor On’s residents have experienced many changes, some of which were introduced by tourists, Buddhist monks and government officials from Thailand. This is not simply the story of a Thai village located in the Malay world: it is about what ordinary people encounter in their daily lives and how they choose to live those lives. It is about how different ethnic groups coexist. And it is also about the rise of Thailand’s religious-cultural influence.

In the 1970s, contacts between Thai villagers in Kelantan and people from Thailand were minimal. For the former, Central Thai was a different language and, Thai cuisine foreign. Even in Sungai Golok, the nearest border trading town in Thailand, Kelantanese-Thais felt “much more like foreigners than in Kelantan” (Golomb 1978, p. 25). Many villagers even equated the “bars, dancing parlours, and houses of prostitution” in that town as “urban commercial sin”, which they did not wish to be associated with (Winzeler 1985, p. 91). Thirty years later, as Johnson points out, Thailand is no longer perceived as a very different country and Central Thai culture is no longer alien. Kelantanese-Thai villages have become tourist destinations for Thais, where the locals sell “cold drinks, rice salad (khao jam), spicy green papaya salad, and fresh coconut juice” (p. 89). Others, including “academics, monks, journalists, and elite members of Bangkok’s standard Thai-speaking bureaucracy” also travel to Kelantan in search of another Thai identity outside of Thailand (p. 79). When Kelantan’s chief monk died in 2005, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, daughter of King Bhumipol, contributed five sets of monk’s robes as part of Thai royal sponsorship of the funeral. In the past, such a ritual would have been a purely Kelantan affair (p. 134). Monks from Thailand have also been active spreading Buddhist teachings to the locals. Thammathut² monks established a Pali school in a local temple “sometime between 1973 and 1974” (p. 150) and...