50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Irresponsible elitist Ethnocentrism disguised as Academic., January 10, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (Paperback)
I've been involved in and taught cultural anthropology for 27 years. I don't normally underline very much in a book, but after combing through this one I found I had made some 174 major underlinings, mostly critical. I also made 137 major separate notes in the margins and at the end of chapters, alas, also mostly critical. For those of you who do not wish to read the whole of this review, let me advise you to use this book only as a classic example of how not to do anthropological research and how not to write it, and to a certain extent, how not to publish it (the backing falls apart in less than two readings and you are ultimately treated to piles of pages).
It is difficult to summarize in such a short space all the concerns I have for the serious or critical reader of this volume. Rest assured, I have no axe to grind, know none of the authors or folks associated, and have only been to Thailand once, but having invested the better part of three days reviewing this as a possible text for one of my courses, Gawd, this book is an awful waste of time. It is a little like a romance novel that seems to keep promising the academic ecstasy of greater things if you just keep reading, like solutions to the "problems" the authors keep formulating or imagining. But there is no ecstasy and nothing happens and there is no elaborated point that is not covered in the Preface and chapter one. For all of its criticism of the Thai life system, not one solution is ever postulated, not one piece of advice for the Thai government, not one applicable idea. A few vague references from the authors suggest agricultural reform and other governmental "reorganizations" would somehow keep these pathetic poverty-stricken Thai farming people from selling their daughters into the ever present malevolent, (but dang it) lucrative, prostitution profession, and the subsequent loyalty requirement that the girls send at least some of the money home to keep the farm up and their folks `comfortable'. What happens to these women as they grow older is not explored well at all. To paraphrase, "I wonder how you keep them down on the farm after they've seen gaye Bankok?" It is as though underneath it all, the authors really don't want to allow the Thai people to have their own way of life, thank you.
In its own way, the book has bitten off more than it can chew. It tries to describe and contrast the differences between the contexts in which Thai folks struggle to make an agricultural living (never really described), the relative worth of the individual (male or female) in this process, family loyalty, the way Thais look at beauty, sensuality, sex, proper behavior, and world view in general, and the way "westerners", meaning folks as diverse and evil as German males and American males and perhaps Japanese males look at the same. No small task! But the book decries the life and condition of the Thai sex workers (mostly female) and how they got to Patpong and the Soi Cowboy. The male sex workers are not considered to be equally pathetic and as a result are all but entirely ignored.
The description of fieldwork, interviews, and results are absolutely minimal for the book as a whole, and forms all or parts of only three chapters. In reading Bishop's transcribed interviews, one wants to read more, to have more interviews, enough so that we can make better comparisons, to make our own judgements. The others could have been put in an appendix. But, alas, we get told what to think about these things, as short as the interviews are, and come away feeling suspicious about the authors' conclusions.
Considering the extent of the Japanese market, the German market, and the over rated but apparent "American" market for the services of the sex workers of Thailand, virtually nothing is said about the context of why German or Japanese men are attracted to Thai sex services. In "exploring" an American female's perception of American male's concepts of sexual attraction (Chapter 5, Imagining Sexual Others), Robinson (& Bishop?) impose too much of a connection forced from a naïve interpretation of the widespread classic "King and I" as the cause of it all, meaning, much of the American male's attraction to Thai women. There are heaps of literature on what attracts males to females and vice versa in a culture bound sort of way, and more on the concept of femininity. How Thai culture presents the concept of femininity, even if it is for sale, is strangely little explored. The authors tend to "over portray" the stark contrast between the ideals of otherwise "sweet little innocent girls" versus the raw, savage, foreign male sexual appetite. They barely touch on the relationships between prostitutes and their Thai male customers. See below.
Their cited references are many, but this book reviews extensively their faults rather than any of their positives, as though they were competing authors, not contributing authors. Several chapters are devoted to nothing but book and article reviews, including poetry and songs. So much are they involved in this, that they even review fictional accounts as though they were real and pass judgements upon them. They imply that Internet chat room jargon and "first-hand accounts" of men's Thai sex worker experiences, also on web sites, count as some sort of field work. Again it tells you about the authors' need to set up straw men and knock them down to prove their own preconceived point.
You get the impression they are trying to settle old scores in print. Their first genuine compliment to another author is on page 242 out of 252 pages of text, to one Wendy Chapkis.
Chapter 7, The Unspeakable, is probably one of the better sections, and touches on what can and cannot be talked about in Thai society, and thus how that contributes to ignoring the sex worker's way of life and raison d'etre, the crux of the entire book.
When it comes to attitude, this book is agony. Ms Robinson's feminist ethnocentrism first appears blatantly on page 11, though she attempts transparently to mask it or excuse it, and so the ethnocentrism continues on through the whole of her portion of the text. She falls victim to the technique that if you say something often enough, you then begin to believe it to be true, even if the original did not start out as truth. If Robinson is an anthropologist (See p. 15 ...Bishop is by training a cultural anthropologist.... Robinson holds degrees in the humanities.... But by p. 227 Robinson alludes to herself as an anthropologist. Okay, you can become one by experience after a fashion, like Mark Twain, but she still seems not to know what ethnocentrism is, or chooses not to see it in her writing. At least Mark Twain knew it well - read The Innocence Abroad), anthropologists are theoretically not supposed to write with so much ethnocentrism. Yet every section Lillian Robinson authors seems filled to the brim with heavy western value judgements that tell more about the author than the point she is trying to make.
In many parts of anthropology, context is everything. Carefully hidden in several areas of the book are references to the traditional Thai view of the necessity of prostitution and the frequency with which Thai males use these services. Before Robinson & Bishop can insinuate that foreign males are the driving force for this market, they should more openly recognize the overwhelming market dominance of Thai male use of prostitution. With this in mind, the CIA, FBI, military, politicians, press, and good ole' benign advertisers routinely practice this sort of "disinformation", in rather sophisticated ways on occasion, with the purpose of bending a targets perception towards a desired goal, and this book emulates those techniques, but under the guise of "academic research". It scares me to think that any analytical folks could draw any conclusions from this opus ad nauseum.
It is a book that seems to have been put together by coupling emailed sections over a year or two and no one ever bothered to sit down with a whole copy and read it straight through. It seems surprising that it got by reviewers, let alone publisher Routledge's editors. The writing style and vocabulary is sometimes academic haute cuisine and uses about a dozen words that most academics don't understand let alone use in their own writing. Words like "elide", "synechdote", "emended", etc., are hardly intended for most student audiences.
This anthropologist did learn a lot from the book, but unfortunately those items learned had nothing to do with why the book was written in the first place. I missed a lot in Thailand 25 years ago! The synechdoche elides the whole of this seraglio-filled book and prevents much discursive discussion. Darn.
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25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Been there, read that, avoid this., September 16, 1998
By A Customer
Much has changed in Thailand since the early 1990s when the problems of prostitution and HIV/AIDS made international headlines and prompted a rash of books analysing social conditions there -- the pro-democracy movement, Black May and the ousting of the military dictators. Under civilian democracy, most Thais no longer react to social problems as bad publicity, but as serious wounds in their national character which need to be healed. So it was with great anticipation that I read Robinson's and Bishop's new book. Unfortunately, all of that anticipation was in vain.
What the two authors try to pass off as insightful social analysis and viewing prostitution in the context of global economics, has already been covered before, with greater skill and depth, by other authors and, more importantly, by researchers and social critics in Thailand itself. In fact, the most obvious failing of this work is its refusal to give a voice to the Thais who have fought these problems first hand over the years, or even give a voice to the women victimized themselves by the sex industry. There is no discussion of solutions, or acknowledgement that the Thai sex industry is a small percentage of its former size and the dreaded AIDS crisis has been halted dead in its tracks -- all the result of the efforts and sacrifice of Thais, not of a couple of foreign academics who drop into a country for a few weeks then write a "tsk-tsk" report on troubling social conditions there.
Apart from the economic and social analysis found in the book, (much of which sounds suspiciously like word-for-word translations of reports and journals written by Thai authors on these topics), a substantial amount of material is drawn from international press reporting, which many engaged in social work in Thailand feel is part of the problem. Two articles frequently cited by Bishop and Robinson as "proof" -- "reports" by Time and the New York Times from several years ago -- were revealed to be fradulent long ago, a fact which seems to have been ignored by the two authors. Many other sources used in the book are either out-dated or so questionable in nature few serious researchers would have used them in the first place.
Perhaps Bishop and Robinson thought this would be a quick and easy way to make some money. Whatever their motivation, the result is a book which presents nothing new, muddles facts and questionable sources to fortify their conclusions, and gives us a pair of American mounting their "high horses" to damn social problems in a foreign country which we are far from solving in our own.
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