Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide an ideal context in which to examine the production and reproduction of identities and modernities in the contemporary world because they tend to concentrate within themselves ideas, people, and resources drawn from various sites in the world system. In this article, I examine the practice of memory among NGO activists, village leaders, and farmers in Nan Province, northern Thailand. Assessing the impact of NGOs on the cultural constitution of Thai modernity, I trace contending representations of the rural past to different social concerns with identity and interests that have emerged in the era of planned development and increasing global interconnectedness. [Thailand, NGOs, development, globalization, memory, modernity] American Ethnologist 30(l):61-H4.

Aim/PurposeThe effective adoption of an ICT across every segment of the student population may occur where the design, implementation and supports recognize and adjust for variations in adoption practices across the student population and the situatedness of the promoted ICT adoption. The goal of this study was to demonstrate methods to explicate variations in perceptions and meanings associated with the adoption of a technology; facilitate the segmentation of the population based upon these variations and sociodemographic variables; constitute agents' practice, within a respective segment, based upon their behaviors and beliefs; and compare these agents' adoption of a specific technological practice relative to their adoption of the critical practice of effectively selecting and using technologies.Background Students emerge into a world infused with ICT where the critical technological practice of effectively selecting and using ICT affects students' participation in a network society and information economy. Education policies and practices, regarding technology use for instruction and learning, often assume student populations are homogenous in their perceptions and practices concerning a given technology and do not account for how situatedness influences students' perceptions and experience with technology. Universities and faculty, while promoting an ICT, may unintentionally reproduce inequity when not attentive to the ways in which students, as socially situated actors, acquire or fail to acquire the practice of effectively adopting technological innovations.

Since the early 1990s, tree ordinations have become an important practice for some Thai environmental activists who seek greater legitimacy for local management and use of natural resources.  This paper, explores the political and cultural effects of tree ordinations by applying the concepts of “cultural objectification” and “cultural generification. It argues that recent uses of tree ordinations depend on a process of cultural objectification, facilitating the generification of the ritual and its various components as an example of the larger category of “local wisdom.” Significant forms of power difference are implicated in the process. Middle class NGO activists largely controlled the practice and representation of the ritual and its symbols, and tended to objectify and simplify the values and practices of rural people. The tree ordinations of 1996-1997, dedicated to King Rama IX, had the further effect of symbolically bolstering the hierarchical structure of the Thai state and Thai society as a whole – a structure in which local leaders and middle class NGO activists exercise power as arbiters of “good” and “bad” culture among rural people. These are the ambiguous implications to which the title of this article refers: a process of objectification and generification and its place in the reproduction of a hierarchical political and cultural order, together with some decidedly positive outcomes of tree ordinations for the conservation and control of natural resources by rural people.Key words: Thailand, environmental activism, social hierarchy, power, cultural objectification.

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Urban development and planning are increasingly centered on matters of sustainability, balancing economic development with ecosystem services and biological diversity within urban environments. In addition to these institutional and structural factors, the decision-making process within individual households must be understood to address rising concerns about water use. Therefore, individual characteristics and preferences that influence the use of water also warrant examination. In response to a survey of occupants of single-family residences in the Fresno Clovis Metropolitan Area of California, contextual interviews and focus group interviews with a homeowner sub-sample, we find evidence of an interplay of social-structural, institutional, and cultural factors involved in influencing individual water use behaviors and landscape decision-making. The complexity of residential behaviors and decision-making poses some potential issues with regards to the interactions between individual households and institutional actors in matters of water usage and landscaping, as residents surveyed indicate relatively little confidence in institutions and groups to make wise water policy decisions. We conclude that the promotion and implementation of sustainable water use practices will require not only environmental education for the citizenry, but also a tailoring of information for environmental educational initiatives that address the particularities of individual neighborhoods and communities.